Clan Rose

The chiefs of Clan Rose were a Norman house, taking their name from Ros near Caen and travelling to England with the early Norman kings. The name is locative, not Gaelic, and the near-identical spelling of Clan Ross of the Highlands is a coincidence rather than a kinship: the two families have no connection. What the records do show is a trio moving together. The de Ros, the de Bissets and the de Boscos all first appear in Wiltshire and Dorset after the Conquest, all three drop out of those southern records at much the same time, and all three resurface in the middle of the thirteenth century around the Moray Firth. Gaelic Scotland absorbed them and gave them a Gaelic name, Clann Ròs, but the family that became a Highland clan began as southern incomers with a French toponym.

Kilravock came to the Roses through two marriages rather than a grant. Elizabeth de Bisset's family held the lands; she married Andrew de Bosco; their daughter Marie married Hugo de Ros in about 1290, whose own ground lay at Geddes. Hugo's father had already witnessed the foundation charter of Beauly Priory, erected by Sir John Bisset of Lovat, which fixes the three Norman houses still in each other's company at the north end of Scotland a generation before the marriage that joined two of them.

In 1293 John Balliol created the Roses Barons of Kilravock, and Hugh and Marie built their household on the banks of the River Nairn. It stayed the home of the chief of Clan Rose until 2012: one family, one seat, from the reign of Balliol to the reign of Elizabeth II.

The barony came from Balliol, but when the Wars of Scottish Independence split the north the Barons of Kilravock came down for independence. In 1306, the year of Robert the Bruce's crowning, Sir William Rose took Invernairn Castle for him, a fortress at the mouth of the Roses' own river, and the family's first appearance in the record as soldiers rather than as parties to a marriage contract.

The next century was won by marriage again. Hugh Rose, fourth of Kilravock, married Janet Chisholm, daughter of the constable of Urquhart Castle. The match brought the chief extensive lands and it altered his shield: a boar's head, the Chisholm device, was added to the Rose arms and stayed there.

Under Hugh Rose, fifth of Kilravock, the family lost the documents on which all of it rested. Every writ and charter the Roses held burned when Alexander Stewart, Earl of Buchan, the Wolf of Badenoch, fired Elgin Cathedral. The next baron, John Rose, spent his tenure rebuilding a paper title from three directions at once, taking fresh charters from James I of Scotland, from the Earl of Ross and from the Chisholm. A Highland family that could not produce its writs could be dispossessed at leisure, and John Rose's answer was to hold new ones from every power that could grant them.

In about 1460 the seventh Baron of Kilravock built the Tower of Kilravock, under a licence to build granted by the Lord of the Isles. The permission dates the tower precisely to the last generation in which the Lordship could grant anything at all. The Earls of Ross were forfeited in 1474, and Hugh Rose promptly took a charter under the Great Seal of Scotland in March 1475, the Roses stepping out from under a collapsing Gaelic lordship and holding of the crown instead, without losing a foot of ground.

The tower was tested almost immediately. Clan Mackintosh seized it in 1482, though they soon surrendered it back. The 15th-century keep still stands as the core of the house, wrapped in 17th-century additions, a building that records the family's fortunes in masonry, a defensive tower from the century they had to hold ground by force and a comfortable extension from the century they held it by charter.

The family's sharpest loss of that era was a bride. Hugh Rose of Kilravock expected to marry Muriel Calder, daughter and heiress of the chief of Clan Calder at Cawdor Castle. She was carried off by the Campbells, and Cawdor has belonged to the Campbells of Cawdor ever since. The Roses kept Kilravock; the neighbouring castle, and the Calder inheritance with it, went west to Argyll.

Hugh Rose of Kilravock, the tenth laird, went down in the family's memory as the Black Baron, a name that fits neither the man nor his record: he was an unusually accomplished head of house. Mary, Queen of Scots stayed at Kilravock and afterwards wrote to him as her trusted friend. Her son James VI came to the castle in his turn and, by the family's account, treated the baron like a father. For a house of three hundred fighting men, that is remarkable access to two successive monarchs.

The Roses had supported the Scottish Reformation early. That did not make them king's men when the king began legislating on worship: they turned against the religious politics of Charles I and signed the National Covenant.

In 1645 the thirteenth Baron of Kilravock led Clan Rose against James Graham, 1st Marquis of Montrose at the Battle of Auldearn. What followed shows how narrow the family's quarrel with Charles actually was. Once the Scottish army handed the king over to Parliament, the same baron raised and led a regiment of dragoons within the Duke of Hamilton's force, whose object was to rescue him. Covenanters against the king's bishops, and cavalry for the king's person, inside three years.

When the Jacobite rising of 1715 broke out the Roses declared for the British government, and paid for it at once. Arthur Rose was killed leading a detachment of the clan in the seizure of Inverness back from the Jacobites of Clan Mackenzie. General Wade's report on the Highlands in 1724 put Rose strength at 300 men, a small following by Highland reckoning, and a reminder that the family's standing in Moray rested on charters, marriages and the tower, not on numbers it could put in the field.

The 1745 rising found the family in an impossible position, and Kilravock handled it with the manners of a house that had entertained Mary and James VI. The Baron of Kilravock received Charles Edward Stuart at the castle. At the same hour, Prince William, Duke of Cumberland was quartered in the Roses' own town house in Nairn. The Jacobite prince at the family's country seat, the government's commander in the family's burgh lodging, in the same days of the same rising.

Wade's three hundred were never all blood Roses. In the Highland system a sept was a family that followed another chief while keeping a different surname, bound by marriage, by tenancy or by a formal bond of manrent, and men who farmed Kilravock ground turned out under the Rose banner whether or not they descended from Hugo de Ros. That is one route by which a Norman name spread through Nairnshire and Strathnairn far beyond the chief's own descendants.

The alignment that survived the rising was the government one. After 1745 the chief's daughter, Anne Rose, married Sir Harry Munro, 7th Baronet, chief of Clan Munro, joining Kilravock to the other great Hanoverian house of the northern firthlands.

Hugh Henry Rose was born at Berlin on 6 April 1801, son of Sir George Henry Rose, the British minister there, of the Highland Roses of Kilravock in Strathnairn. A diplomatic childhood on the continent left him fluent in German, French, Italian and Russian, an unusual equipment for a soldier, and he was commissioned an ensign in the 19th Foot in 1820.

His early service was all on the seams between armies. He was liaison officer to Ibrahim Pasha's Egyptian army in the Syrian campaign of 1840, was severely wounded at Boghaz and held the Order of the Bath at twenty-nine, then spent years as British military attaché to the Ottoman army at Beirut and Damascus. In the Crimea he was senior British commissioner at the headquarters of the French army, where his French and his diplomatic training carried the Anglo-French command interface through the twelve-month siege of Sebastopol; senior accounts of that coordination give him most of the credit. He came out of the war a major-general with the Poona division of the Bombay army.

The central Indian command of 1858 made his name, and the honours that followed it are where the Highland family reappears. Grand Cross of the Bath in 1858, Commander-in-Chief in India from 1860, Commander-in-Chief in Ireland from 1865 to 1870, and in 1866 a peerage he chose to style from both ends of his life: Baron Strathnairn, of the Rose glen in Nairnshire and of Jhansi. He was promoted Field Marshal in 1877 and died at Versailles on 16 October 1885, aged eighty-four, and lies at Christ Church, Mayfair.

Rose is not one surname but several that arrived at the same spelling. It can be English, Scottish, French, Danish, German or Jewish in origin, and the Kilravock line, a Norman place name carried north out of Caen, is only one of those routes. The name has thrown off descendants of its own: Ruskin is Rose plus the diminutive -kin.

The German Roses ran to science across three generations: Gustav Rose (1798–1873) and his brother Heinrich Rose (1795–1864), both mineralogists, and Gustav's son Edmund Rose (1836–1914), a surgeon. In France the name belongs to Cyrille Rose (1830–1902), the clarinettist.

In England the surname is old and civic: a William Rose sat in parliament for Canterbury between 1411 and 1435. Later bearers run from Hugh James Rose (1795–1838), the theologian, to the philosopher Gillian Rose (1947–1995), the Scottish war correspondent William Kinnaird Rose (1845–1919), and Lauchlan Rose, whose lime juice put the name on bottles. It is now the 69th most common surname in the United Kingdom with 89,001 bearers, and it is the single most common surname in Luton, where 4,858 people carry it; it stands 20th in Greater London and 11th in the City of Leeds. Justin Rose, born 1980, carries it in modern golf.

Robert Burns came to Kilravock in September 1787 on his Highland tour, adding a poet to a guest list that already held a queen, a king and a Jacobite prince. By then the tower of 1460 had been the family's address for more than three centuries, and would remain so for two more.

The break came in 1984. Anna Elizabeth Guillemard Rose, 25th of Kilravock, of the twenty-fifth generation of the family to live in the castle, signed the estate over to a Christian trust. She stayed the chief, and she died at Nairn on 9 December 2012, aged 88, the last of the line to hold Kilravock as a home rather than as a title.

In June 2013 the Lord Lyon recognised David Rose, her nephew, as chief of Clan Rose and 26th Baron of Kilravock: the first chief since 1460 not to live in the castle. On 23 January 2025 the Kilravock Christian Trust completed the sale of the castle through the Galbraith Group, and that June documents from the castle's historical archive were auctioned by Lyon & Turnbull for more than £124,000. Six centuries after John Rose rode round the north assembling replacement charters for the ones the Wolf of Badenoch had burned, the family's paper went out of the house in lots.