Clan Douglas
One of the most powerful houses in medieval Scotland.
- Origin
- Glasgow & Strathclyde, Scotland
- Motto
- Jamais arrière
- Famous bearer
- 'Good Sir James' Douglas
- Register
- Scottish clan
Ranked of all time
The 10 Most Powerful Scottish Clans of All Time
The seat of Clan Douglas
Seat vacantChief
No one leads the Clan Douglas community yet. When the movement opens, you can stand for its leadership, or help elect whoever does.
Current mission
No shared goal set yet. Once Clan Douglas has leadership, it sets the public focus: a restoration, a gathering, a real-world project that helps its own.
The Douglas clan is being rebuilt. Join the waiting list for the movement today, and you help decide who leads it and what it does.
Help rebuild the Douglas clan →Motto
Jamais arrière
“Never behind”
What does the Douglas name mean?
From Gaelic 'dubh ghlais', 'black water'. The first documented Douglas appears in 12th-century Morayshire.
The history of Clan Douglas
The first documented Douglas was William de Douglas in 12th-century Morayshire, though the name itself appears to derive from the Gaelic 'dubh ghlais', 'black water'.
In 1330 'Good Sir James Douglas' was killed in Spain attempting to carry Robert the Bruce's heart on crusade to the Holy Land. The earldom of Douglas was created in the 14th century, and from the first earl's son descended the Earls of Angus and the Queensberry branch.
James Douglas, 4th Earl of Morton, succeeded to the title in 1553. Prominent in the assassination of Rizzio and a leader against Mary Queen of Scots, he was elected Regent of Scotland in 1572 and beheaded in 1581 for his alleged part in the Darnley conspiracy.
Champions of the Douglas name
The bearers whose lives are inseparable from this surname. Each has its own page — biography, achievements, geography, connection to the family.
Notable bearers of the Douglas name
- 'Good Sir James' Douglas
- James Douglas, 4th Earl of Morton
Stories of Clan Douglas
The heart of Bruce
1329–1330In June 1329 Robert the Bruce lay dying at Cardross. He had vowed years earlier to take the cross to the Holy Land, but the Scottish wars had kept him from it; on his deathbed he asked that his heart be cut from his body, embalmed, and carried on crusade in his place. The man who took the charge was Sir James Douglas, his closest companion in arms, called Good Sir James. Douglas wore the heart in a silver casket on a chain at his neck the next year, through France and Spain and into a foreign battle on the Andalusian frontier, where what he did at the head of a Castilian charge became the founding act of the Douglas line.
Read the story →
The Black Dinner
1440On the twenty-fourth of November 1440, the sixteen-year-old William Douglas, sixth Earl of Douglas, head of the Black Douglas line and the most powerful subject in Scotland, was invited with his younger brother David to dine in the great hall of Edinburgh Castle in the presence of the ten-year-old King James II. The dinner was hosted by William Crichton (the Lord Chancellor) and Sir Alexander Livingston (the Custodian of the Castle and the King's tutor), the two regents who effectively ruled Scotland during the king's minority and who had been alarmed for two years at the rising power of the Douglas earl. By the tradition of the next century, told in the chronicles of John Major and Hector Boece, a black bull's head was brought in on a silver platter as the principal dish, the symbol in fifteenth-century Scotland of imminent execution. The two Douglas brothers were seized at the table, given a hasty trial in the courtyard, and beheaded on the spot. The political effect was immediate: the Black Douglas eclipse, the rise of a new (and deliberately diminished) Douglas line under the eighth Earl. The Black Dinner is the most consistently remembered episode of medieval Scottish political violence, has produced two surviving children's rhymes (one in the eastern Border tradition, one Aberdeenshire), and was deliberately referenced by George R. R. Martin as the structural model for the Red Wedding in A Storm of Swords.
Read the story →