Clan Sinclair

In French charters the name is written de Sancto Claro and in Latin Sanctus Clarus (Holy Light) and it points not to a person but to a place: Saint-Clair, near the Epte and within reach of Paris, named for the hermit St Clare martyred nearby. Richard of Saint-Clair and Brittel of Saint-Clair are both entered in the Domesday Book, and William of Saint-Clair travelled north with Margaret, daughter of Edward the Exile, in 1068, the year she came to the court she would eventually share with Malcolm III. The barony of Roslin is said to have been his reward, granted in free heritage.

That construction, a Frenchman carrying the name of his village as if it were a title, was the standard machinery of the Norman settlement. The early Norman nobility in England distinguished themselves by fixing de before the name of a village or estate in France, producing what the heralds later called a territorial surname: a direct consequence of feudal landownership, where the man and the ground he held were named as one thing. By the 14th century most English and most Scottish people carried surnames of some kind, and the Saint-Clairs were already a century ahead of that curve because they had needed a name to hold land with.

The paper trail in Scotland begins with Henry of Saint-Clair, who took a charter for the lands of Herdmanston in Haddingtonshire in 1160, and hardens with William St Clair, sheriff of Edinburgh, granted the barony of Roslin in 1280, the ancestor from whom the Earls of Caithness, chiefs of the name, descend. The spelling collapsed inward as Scots tongues worked on it: Saint-Clair to Sinclair, with Santoclair, Sainclair and Synklar written down along the way, and St Clair surviving as a parallel form still pronounced exactly as Sinclair is. In Gaelic the clan is Clann na Ceàrda, and the chief Mac na Ceardadh.

The Wars of Scottish Independence caught the family on both sides of the ledger. Sir William Sinclair of Rosslyn was taken at the Battle of Dunbar in 1296 and died a prisoner, probably in the Tower of London; his son Henry was captured too, sent to St Briavels Castle, and in the same year swore fealty to Edward I. The family's early sympathies lay with John Balliol's claim to the throne. What changed the account was 1303, when Scots under Henry Sinclair of Rosslyn and the Comyns beat an English force at the Battle of Roslin, in the glen below the family's own promontory.

By 1307 Henry Sinclair was fighting alongside Robert the Bruce at Loudoun Hill, and at Bannockburn in 1314 the Sinclairs were in the Bruce's line. After the battle Bruce gave William Sinclair his sword. Three years later, at Donibristle in 1317, it was a churchman of the name (William Sinclair, Bishop of Dunkeld) who rallied the Scots army in Fife and beat off an English invading force. The Sinclairs had come to Scotland as incomers with a French place-name; within a generation of Bannockburn they were being handed the king's own weapon.

The debt was paid in Spain. In 1330 Sir William Sinclair, heir to Henry, and by tradition his brother John, rode with Sir James Douglas on the journey to carry Robert Bruce's heart to the Holy Land, and were killed with him at the Battle of Teba fighting the Moors in Granada. Their bones, it is said, came home to lie in Rosslyn Chapel. The keep at Roslin Castle was probably that crusading William's work. At Neville's Cross in 1346 Sir John Sinclair of Herdmanston was taken prisoner, the Herdmanston line having by then run parallel to the Roslin one for nearly two hundred years.

In 1379 Sir Henry Sinclair, Admiral of Scotland, claimed the Earldom of Orkney through his mother and received it not from a Scottish king but from Haakon VI of Norway. It made the head of the family a vassal of two crowns at once, and it took him out of Scottish politics entirely: Henry I Sinclair, Earl of Orkney, Baron of Roslin and Lord of Shetland, conquered the Faroe Islands in 1391 and governed a maritime earldom that answered to the Norwegian crown. Soon after the grant he built Kirkwall Castle, the King's Castle, at the corner of Broad Street in the middle of the Orkney capital.

He is the Sinclair the myths cling to. In 1784 Johann Reinhold Forster first identified him with Zichmni, the prince who sails with the Zeno brothers in a 16th-century Venetian narrative, and from that identification grew the claim that Henry reached Massachusetts and Nova Scotia in 1398. No writer of his own century or the one after mentions any such voyage, and the American landfall is a modern invention rather than a lost fact. What the near-contemporary account does say is plainer and harder: that he died in battle against the English around the year 1400.

His son Henry II Sinclair was captured by the English at Homildon Hill in 1402 and quickly released, then in 1406 escorted the young Prince James to France, a voyage that ended with the ship taken at sea and both escort and prince shut in the Tower of London. Henry got out in 1407, by escape or by ransom. According to Roland Saint-Clair, writing in the late 19th century, this Henry is the first man recorded in the public records as Lord Sinclair, though James Balfour Paul's Scots Peerage gives that distinction to his son.

William Sinclair, 3rd Earl of Orkney, 1st Earl of Caithness and 11th Baron of Roslin, was High Chancellor of Scotland from 1454 to 1458. In 1470 he surrendered the Orkney earldom to the Scottish Crown in exchange for Caithness, closing the Norwegian chapter. James III made the exchange good in 1471 with Ravenscraig Castle at Kirkcaldy, along with lands annexed from Norway, a castle begun around 1460 with two D-plan towers, outer walls 4.25 metres thick and a linking battlement built as a gun platform, among the first works in Britain designed for artillery rather than merely against it.

Then he took the family apart. Rather than let one heir hold everything, he disinherited his eldest son by his first marriage, William, remembered as "the Waster", leaving him only the title of Lord Sinclair. Caithness went in 1476 to the second son of his second marriage, another William, and from him the chiefs of Clan Sinclair descend. Roslin and Midlothian went to Sir Oliver Sinclair, eldest son of that second marriage. One estate became three families, and the chiefship moved from the Midlothian glen the name had grown in to the far north.

The consequences ran for centuries in three directions. The Caithness earls turned the far north into a Sinclair country of tower houses. The Roslin line kept the chapel, the castle and, eventually, a claim on Scottish Freemasonry. The Lords Sinclair drifted into a peerage story of their own: Henry Sinclair, 4th Lord, confirmed by Act of Parliament in 1488, though Roland Saint-Clair and Bernard Burke both read that Act as recognising a barony already vested in Henry II rather than creating anything new, and numbered the Lords differently as a result.

Ravenscraig outlasted them all. Its promontory in the Firth of Forth, cliff-guarded on three sides and cut off on the fourth by a rock-hewn ditch, held the Sinclairs and then their St Clair-Erskine successors until 1896, and the family built Dysart House beside it in 1755–56. Walter Scott made it the Ravensheuch of his ballad Rosabelle, whose heroine ignores every warning and takes a boat across the Forth for a ball at Roslin Castle, a poem that stitches the two ends of the 1470 partition, the Fife artillery castle and the Midlothian glen, back into one story the family itself had cut in half.

The family fortified the rocky promontory above a loop of the North Esk in the early 14th century, and the castle proper followed in the late 14th or early 15th, perhaps begun by Henry Sinclair, Earl of Orkney. The story told of it is a fire in which the Earl cared for nothing but his manuscripts, until his chaplain lowered them from a window to safety. The real destruction was English: the Earl of Hertford burned Roslin in 1544 during the Rough Wooing, and in 1591 the Laird of Roslin was forfeited and the place garrisoned by William Leslie for the Earl of Huntly.

It was hit twice more. General Monck sacked Roslin Castle in 1650 during Cromwell's invasion (sparing the chapel) and a Covenanter mob damaged it in 1688. Sir William Sinclair of Rosslyn was killed at the Battle of Dunbar in 1650 and was the last knight to be buried in full armour beneath Rosslyn Chapel. The chapel itself was left to weather until 1736, when Sir James Sinclair glazed its windows for the first time, relaid the floor with flagstones and repaired the roof, arresting three centuries of decay on the carving that has fed Templar and Masonic speculation ever since.

That same year Sir James resigned an office his family had long claimed: hereditary Grand Master Mason of Scotland. He gave it up to the Scottish lodges on their foundation, and was afterwards reappointed for life. In 1739 forty-four Scottish Freemasons' lodges met in Edinburgh to found the Grand Lodge of Scotland, and William St Clair stood as a candidate for Grand Master, winning the first election precisely because he had offered to surrender the hereditary right first. The estate passed to the Earls of Rosslyn in 1805; the 7th Earl, a Sinclair descendant, now leases the castle through the Landmark Trust.

Flodden in 1513 cost the name more than any other single day. William Sinclair, 2nd Earl of Caithness, was killed fighting for James IV, and about three hundred Sinclairs fell with him: George Sinclair of Keiss, Henry Sinclair, 4th Lord Sinclair, Sir John Sinclair of Herdmanston and the Bishop of Caithness among them, alongside the king. The 2nd Earl had built Castle Girnigoe on its Caithness promontory some time between 1476 and 1496, certainly before he rode south; it is reckoned the earliest of the Caithness seats, and it outlived him by a hundred and sixty years.

Sixteen years later the family lost a second earl in the north. John Sinclair, 3rd Earl of Caithness, died at the Battle of Summerdale in Orkney in May 1529, and William Sinclair, 5th Lord Sinclair, was taken prisoner there. Kirkwall Castle sat at the centre of that quarrel: in 1528 the 5th Lord complained that James Sinclair's men had seized it at Easter, and relatives of James Sinclair were said to have been captured in the castle and executed. At Solway Moss a Scots army commanded by Oliver Sinclair of Pitcairns was routed by the English.

The survivors built. George Sinclair, 4th Earl of Caithness, raised the Castle of Mey between 1566 and 1572, a Z-plan tower house on the north coast looking out to the Orkney the family had given up. George Sinclair, 5th Earl, built Keiss Castle on sheer cliffs above Sinclair's Bay, another Z-plan of four floors and an attic over a vaulted basement, its central block absurdly narrow for its height and finished with tall chimneystacks. In 1568 Henry Sinclair, 6th Lord Sinclair, helped Mary, Queen of Scots, escape from Loch Leven Castle.

The Caithness temper travelled south with the sons. In 1595 William Sinclair, son of George Sinclair of Mey, was a schoolboy at the Edinburgh High School when the pupils held it under siege; Sinclair shot and killed Bailie MacMorran, the magistrate sent to break it. At Girnigoe, meanwhile, the family were rewriting the map: in 1593 the 5th Earl asked Parliament for leave to rename the castle Castle Sinclair, and an Act of 1606 granted it, but both names were still being written down in 1700 and both are in use now. The complex hides a secret chamber in the vaulted ceiling of its kitchen.

In 1570 John Sinclair, Master of Caithness, son of the 4th Earl, burned the local cathedral to smoke out Morays who had taken refuge in the steeple. When he afterwards made peace with the Morays his father had him arrested. In 1577 George Sinclair, 4th Earl, shut his own heir in Castle Girnigoe on suspicion of rebelling against his rule and kept him there seven years. At the end of it, the account runs, the Earl fed him a diet of salted beef and gave him nothing to drink, and the Master of Caithness died insane from thirst in his father's castle.

The Caithness–Sutherland feud ran through the same walls. Girnigoe withstood a siege by the Earl of Sutherland in 1588; in 1590 George Sinclair, 5th Earl, invaded Sutherland and fought the Battle of Clynetradwell. In July 1569 Laurence, Lord Oliphant, had been besieged and attacked in the Castle of Old Wick by John Sinclair, Master of Caithness, and in 1595 the same tower on its cliff-girt peninsula was starved into submission. Old Wick came to the Sinclairs outright only in 1644. The rebel Earl of Bothwell was sheltering at Girnigoe in December 1594.

Ackergill Tower on Sinclair's Bay was the prize the family could never keep. It had come to the Keiths from the Cheynes in 1354, and the Sinclairs took it by force more than once: Mary of Guise, as Regent, granted them remission and gave the tower back to the Keiths in 1549, installing Laurence Oliphant, 4th Lord Oliphant, as keeper, whereupon the Sinclairs captured it again in 1556 and were pardoned again. They finally bought it in 1612, when the Earl Marischal sold it to the Earl of Caithness, and by 1623 it was under siege from Sir Robert Gordon.

On 26 August 1612, at Kringen near Otta in Norway, George Sinclair was killed with most of his men in an ambush. At home the family's wars were closer. In 1650 Major Sinclair fought beside James Graham, Marquess of Montrose, at Carbisdale; the survivors fled to Ardvreck Castle, where MacLeod of Assynt betrayed them, and they were executed. MacLeod was later imprisoned in the Sinclairs' own Castle of Mey.

In 1651 John Sinclair, 10th Lord Sinclair, was captured at Worcester by Cromwell's forces and held in the Tower of London and then at Windsor until Monck freed him in 1660. George Sinclair, 6th Earl of Caithness, took the other road, standing in Edinburgh in 1657 when Cromwell was proclaimed Chief Magistrate of the three nations. It was money, not politics, that finished him: heavily in debt to his fourth cousin John Campbell of Glenorchy, he signed Castle Sinclair Girnigoe over to Campbell in 1672 as payment, and died four years later without an heir.

Campbell took the lot: the castle, the widow, and in 1681 the title of Earl of Caithness. George Sinclair of Keiss fought him for the earldom, and at the Battle of Altimarlach in 1680 so many Sinclairs were killed that, the story goes, the Campbells crossed the river without wetting their feet. The Sinclairs still had friends in Edinburgh: an order of Parliament restored the earldom to them within the year, and Campbell was compensated with the earldom of Breadalbane instead. Ackergill went the same way, taken by the 2nd Earl of Breadalbane in 1676 for Sinclair debts and sold on to the Dunbars in 1699.

Orkney was lost in the same stretch of years. When Earl Patrick Stewart's people fell out with Laurence Bruce, Sheriff of Shetland, the rebels occupied Kirkwall Castle along with the Bishop's and Earl's Palaces and St Magnus Cathedral, and it was George Sinclair, 5th Earl of Caithness, who led royal troops north against them until the castle surrendered that September. The Privy Council pulled it down in 1614–15. Its ruins stood another century and a quarter until 1742, when the Earl of Morton gave the stones to the Town Council for a new town house and jail; the site of the castle Henry Sinclair built in 1379 is a plaque on Castle Street.

John, Master of Sinclair, killed two men in duels, was exiled to Prussia and pardoned by Queen Anne, and came home to the rising of 1715, where he captured a vessel carrying 420 stand of arms bound for the Earl of Sutherland. He fought at Sheriffmuir alongside David Sinclair of Brabsterdorran, fled to Orkney and then to Europe, and was attainted by Parliament, which is why, when the tenth Lord's line ran out, he was never permitted to assume the lordship he was heir to. The title fell dormant in 1762 and stayed dormant twenty years.

By 1745 the family stood on both sides of itself. On 4 June that year Sir James Sinclair of Rosslyn was made commander of the British forces in Flanders, and on 16 April 1746 he led the Royal Scots against the Jacobites at Culloden. In Caithness, Lord MacLeod tried to raise the name for Prince Charles and got about thirty men under Sinclair of Scotscalder, whose estates were later forfeited. Perhaps five hundred Caithness Sinclairs were said to be ready to rise, blocked by Lord Sutherland and Lord Reay standing in their road; hearing of Culloden, they sneaked home again. Their chief, the Earl of Caithness, was for the government, and no Sinclair company was offered a place among the eighteen Independent Highland Companies.

The name travelled further than the rising did. On 17 June 1739 Major Malcolm Sinclair, charged with affairs of state as a servant of the Swedish crown, was assassinated at Grunberg in Silesia by agents of the Tsaritsa Anna of Russia. In 1750 Sir William Sinclair of Dunbeath founded the Baptist church at Keiss. The lordship revived in 1782 when Charles Sinclair, 13th Lord, was confirmed by the House of Lords: he descended from Matthew St Clair of the Herdmanston line, the first holder of the title without descent from the original Lords. He also owned 666 enslaved people at abolition in 1833, and drew £5,411 in government compensation.

John Sinclair was born at Thurso Castle on 10 May 1754, eldest son of George Sinclair of Ulbster, a cadet house of the Earls of Caithness. He inherited at sixteen, drained the moss-lands at Ulbster, planted the bare braes, brought in Cheviot sheep and built the Thurso harbour, and was returned as MP for Caithness at twenty-six in 1780. Pitt made him a baronet in 1786 for a pamphlet on the public revenue. In May 1790, from his house in George Street, Edinburgh, he posted every parish minister in the Church of Scotland a printed sheet of one hundred and sixty queries on the parish's geography, population, agriculture, religion, language and customs.

He paid the printing and the postage himself. Returns came in from September 1790 until 1799, and he edited them into twenty-one quarto volumes as The Statistical Account of Scotland, the first national social survey attempted anywhere. It set the pattern for the British census of 1801 and for every counting project after it, and the word statistics, in the sense used since, was his coinage. Pitt made him first President of the new Board of Agriculture in 1793; under Sinclair it commissioned the county General View surveys, hired Arthur Young as secretary, and pushed the merino introduction that founded British fine wool. He died at 133 George Street on 21 December 1835 and lies at Holyrood Abbey.

His line still holds the ground. The Ulbster baronets were made Viscounts Thurso in 1952 and remain in Caithness, part of Thurso Castle still habitable amid the ruins of the 1872 rebuilding, with Harald's Tower a mile to the north-east built in 1780 as the burial place of the Sinclairs of Thurso. Elsewhere the estates went: Dunbeath sold in 1945 after 325 years, Keiss to the Duke of Portland in 1866, Ravenscraig to a linoleum magnate in 1896 and handed to the town of Kirkcaldy as a park in 1929, the Castle of Mey out of the family in 1889 and bought derelict in 1952 by Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, who restored its old name and hung the Sinclair earls through its rooms.

Malcolm Sinclair, 20th Earl of Caithness, is chief of the name today, and the Clan Sinclair Trust holds the ruins of Castle Sinclair Girnigoe. One caution belongs on any Sinclair sept list: the lists themselves date from the 19th century, when clan societies and tartan manufacturers linked as many surnames as they could to a clan whether or not any historical connection existed. Mason was attached to Clan Sinclair by exactly that process. The chief's crest is a cock rampant, the plant badge whin, the pipe music Spaidsearachd Mhic nan Cearda, and the motto, Commit thy work to God, the one thing the Waster, the Master and the statistician all had over their door.