Clan Maxwell

The name is a place before it is a family. It was written Mackeswell in 1144, the well or spring of Maccus, Magnus in Old Norse, an Anglo-Scandinavian thane said to have lived in the reign of David I, whose pool lay in the River Tweed near Kelso in the Borders. The second element is the Old English well[a]. Scottish Gaelic renders the surname MacSuail. In Ulster the same spelling covers a different line entirely, where Maxwell was in some cases adopted as an alternate form of the Irish surname Miskell.

The Border house descends from Sir John Maxwell, Chamberlain of Scotland, who died without issue and was succeeded by his younger brother Aymer. Sir Aymer Maxwell, who died in 1265, was Justiciar of Galloway and the first of the name to hold Caerlaverock on the Solway shore. From Aymer's sons sprang the branches that filled the south-west and the Clyde (Monreith, Pollok, Calderwood, Buittle, Munches), which is why one surname ended up attached to a dozen castles between the Tweed and the Firth.

Sir Herbert Maxwell's name stands on the Ragman Rolls of 1296, among the Scots who swore fealty to Edward I of England. His son Eustace held Caerlaverock as a vassal of the English king and then abandoned that allegiance to follow Robert the Bruce to Bannockburn, a change of side that kept the castle in Maxwell hands once the English cause collapsed.

Caerlaverock is a rarity: a triangular castle, moated, first raised in the 13th century on the moss south of Dumfries. The English besieged it in 1300, an assault thought worth commemorating in a contemporary heraldic poem, and the fortress was demolished and rebuilt more than once without ever losing its three-sided plan. It remained the seat of the Maxwell chief for close to four hundred years, and it is still the image the name summons.

Eustace's descendant, another Sir Herbert, was created Lord Maxwell about 1440 and took a seat as a Lord of Parliament; the Maxwells of Monreith descend from his second son and were made baronets in 1681. In 1449 the same Herbert, Lord Maxwell, built Mearns Castle on a rocky knoll at Newton Mearns south of Glasgow under a royal warrant: a four-storey rectangular tower thirty feet by forty, its walls ten feet thick, rubble masonry below and well-cut ashlar above, a join that suggests it rose on the footings of something older.

John Maxwell, 4th Lord Maxwell, was killed at Flodden in 1513. The fifth Lord intrigued with Henry VII of England, and in 1526 brought the Maxwells out for Archibald Douglas, 6th Earl of Angus at the Battle of Melrose, where they beat the forces of Sir Walter Scott. James V had nonetheless made him Warden of the Marches by 1542, and in that same year he was taken prisoner at Solway Moss. The wardenship of the West March stayed with the family, and with it the running quarrel with the Johnstones of Annandale.

The Calderwood branch built its peel tower on a precipice above the Rotten Calder Water in East Kilbride in the early-to-mid fifteenth century, on lands that charter rolls show were broken up during the Wars of Independence and later gathered to the Maxwells. It stood until several days of storm brought it down in 1773, and survives only in a mid-eighteenth-century drawing; the estate went to the Scottish Co-operative Wholesale Society in 1904 for soft fruit, oats and dairy, and the buildings were demolished between about 1943 and 1951.

The same branch took Stanely, the ancient seat of the Danzielstons, in the early 15th century and raised an L-shaped tower on an island in a marsh at the foot of the Gleniffer Braes south of Paisley: four storeys of roughly squared local freestone, a rectangular block with a square jamb added in a second phase. The Maxwells sold it in 1629 to Lady Ross of Hawhead. Since 1837 the Paisley Water Company's reservoir has half-drowned it, and it can be seen on its narrow promontory only when the water is drained.

On the Annan, Sir John Maxwell came into Hoddom in the mid-16th century by marrying the heiress Agnes, Lady Herries, and probably built the tower house there. The following year the English under Lord Scrope attacked it and blew the tower up. Hoddom passed out of the family to Sir Richard Murray, to the Earl of Southesk in 1653, and to the Sharpes in 1690.

In 1565 John Maxwell, 4th Lord Herries, put up a watch tower on Trailtrow Hill, six miles north-west of Annan, on the high ground above the Hoddom lands he already held. One word, "Repentance", is cut above its entrance. Bishop Pococke recorded the tradition that Maxwell, who had committed great ravages against Queen Mary, built it in a spirit of penance; and the tower is a very rare survival of its kind, a mid-sixteenth-century watch station still standing on its conical, 350-foot hill.

The hill had carried a beacon since 1448, when William Douglas, 8th Earl of Douglas, wrote it into a border-defence regulation: "for cuming of ane Inglis oist in Scotland, ther sal ane baill be brynt on Trailtrow hill". The fire pan was kept alight for as long as English troops remained on Scottish ground, watching the Solway. The Maxwells held the tower until about 1627, when the sixth Lord Herries sold it along with Hoddom to Sir Richard Murray of Cockpool. Thomas Carlyle lived at the farm nearby from May 1825 to May 1826.

John Maxwell, seventh Lord, stayed Catholic through the Reformation and was named in plot after plot to restore Mary, Queen of Scots. After her execution in 1587 and the defeat of the Armada he kept writing to Philip II of Spain in search of backing for a Catholic rising, and in 1588 he held Lochmaben Castle against the crown, meaning to overthrow the Protestant monarchy. In June 1592 Francis Stewart, 5th Earl of Bothwell (said to have got in dressed as a woman) infiltrated and captured that castle from its keeper Sir John Carmichael during a rising against James VI.

Lochmaben had been fought over long before the Maxwells: taken from the English after a nine-day siege by Archibald Douglas in February 1383/4 and razed, rebuilt under James IV, who played cards there with Lord Dacre in August 1504, and besieged by Regent Arran in November 1545 because Lord Maxwell had let English troops garrison his castles during the Rough Wooing. Mary, Queen of Scots and Lord Darnley came to it in October 1565 at the close of the Chaseabout Raid.

The lord who inherited the Johnstone feud inherited a second quarrel with the Douglases over the Earldom of Morton, which he claimed as his own inheritance, and was jailed in Edinburgh Castle for it in 1607. He escaped, shot Sir James Johnstone in the back at a meeting held "under trust", and fled to France. Convicted of treason in his absence and sentenced to death, he returned to Scotland in 1612, was arrested, and was beheaded at Edinburgh on 21 May 1613. His brother Robert took the title and was created Earl of Nithsdale in 1620.

The Earls of Nithsdale raised an elegant classical range inside Caerlaverock's medieval walls, and then lost the place: it fell for the last time to a Covenanter siege in 1640 and was abandoned. The same war finished the family's other great charge. Threave, the Black Douglas island fortress in the River Dee that James II had stormed in 1455, became a royal castle whose keeping was granted in the 16th century as a hereditary responsibility to the Lords Maxwell; in 1640 its royalist garrison was besieged by Covenanters in the Bishops' Wars, and the castle was partially dismantled.

The fifth Earl of Nithsdale came out as a Jacobite, was taken at the Battle of Preston in 1715, sentenced to death and held in the Tower of London. His wife Winifred got him out disguised as a serving woman; the couple reached Rome, and the earl died there in 1744. The Buittle branch felt the same weather. Their motte on the River Urr, once the primary seat of the Lords of Galloway, was slighted in 1595, and by the mid-eighteenth century the Maxwells had moved to Munches House, Jacobite associations as much as fashion behind the shift. The ruin stayed with the Maxwells of Munches until 1984, when Peter Maxwell QC, a Balliol man himself, gave it to Balliol College, Oxford.

In the late 16th century Newark Castle, on the south shore of the Clyde where the firth narrows, was inherited by Sir Patrick Maxwell, a powerful friend of James VI and a man notorious for murdering two members of a rival family and for beating his wife, who left him after bearing sixteen children. Under him the late medieval tower grew into a three-storey Renaissance mansion, the old block linked by short wings to a crow-stepped north range. Once dredging opened the Clyde to Glasgow, Port Glasgow's shipyards pressed in around the walls; Ferguson Shipbuilders, the last yard on the lower Clyde, still stands just to its west.

In 1585 the Glasgow Maxwells built Haggs Castle to replace the 14th-century Laigh Castle to its west: an L-plan tower of four storeys banded with cable-moulded string courses and moulded corbels, carved over the door, and pierced with square and round gun loops. A covenanting family, they were fined for nonconformist activity and were spared payment only by the change of government at the revolution of 1688. Haggs, built as the Maxwells' main residence, was later given over as a jointure house for the lord's widow, was abandoned in 1753 when Pollok House was completed, and was bought by Glasgow Corporation in 1972 for the Museum of Childhood.

In 1757 the Maxwells of Pollok bought Crookston Castle from the 2nd Duke of Montrose, the irregular X-plan Stewart tower that is the only medieval castle left in Glasgow. Sir John Stirling-Maxwell of Pollok was a co-founder of the National Trust for Scotland. In the Borders, Traquair, claimed as the oldest continually inhabited house in Scotland, passed in 1875 to Henry Constable Maxwell, a cousin of the Stuarts, and its present laird is Catherine Maxwell Stuart, 21st Lady of Traquair, born in 1964. The name also travelled: Lilly Maxwell became the first woman to vote in Britain in 1867, Constantia Maxwell (1886–1962) was an Irish historian, and Gavin Maxwell (1914–1969) a Scottish naturalist.

James Clerk Maxwell was born at 14 India Street in Edinburgh on 13 June 1831, the only child of John Clerk Maxwell, an advocate, and Frances Cay. He was raised on the family estate of Glenlair in Kirkcudbrightshire, running its burns and Galloway hills until his father took him to the Edinburgh Academy in 1841. A country boy with a soft Galloway accent, he was carrying off the Academy's mathematical and English-verse medals within two years, and at fourteen submitted his first paper to the Royal Society of Edinburgh, on drawing ovals with pins and a length of string.

He matriculated at Edinburgh at sixteen, went on to Peterhouse and then Trinity College, Cambridge, graduated Second Wrangler in 1854 and won a Trinity fellowship. On Physical Lines of Force followed in 1861 and 1862, A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field in 1865, and from Coulomb, Ampère, Gauss and Faraday he built one mathematical structure that yielded, as a consequence, the fact that an electromagnetic disturbance crosses space at the speed of light. He returned to Glenlair in 1865 to write the Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism of 1873, the book from which Heinrich Hertz made the first artificial radio waves in 1887.

At a Royal Institution lecture on 17 May 1861 he projected an image of a tartan ribbon assembled from three photographs taken through red, green and blue filters: the first colour photograph, and the principle behind every colour image made since. He proved in 1859 that the rings of Saturn must be made of particles, and with Boltzmann founded statistical mechanics on the distribution of molecular speeds that carries his name. In 1871 he became the first Cavendish Professor of Experimental Physics at Cambridge and designed and equipped the Cavendish Laboratory. He died at Cambridge in 1879 and lies in Parton Kirkyard, near Glenlair.