Clan Stewart

Stewart is a job title that hardened into a name. It comes from the Old English stiweard, a compound of stig, meaning house or hall, and weard, a guardian or keeper; the word is attested from the eleventh century, and Old French estuard and Old Norse stivardr were both borrowed from it. In Gaelic the name is Stiubhart. Stuart is the French form of the same word, and the spellings Steward and Steuart still turn up in the record.

The work was real and it was daily. In medieval households the steward supervised both the lord's estate and his domestic arrangements, and by the thirteenth century a great house commonly kept two of them, one to run the estate and a majordomo to run the routine indoors. A steward earned three to four pounds a year. He kept his lord's castles while the lord was away, and he checked the taxes owed by the tenants on his lord's manors. After the Norman Conquest the English word served as the equivalent of the French seneschal.

At the top of the scale a steward was not a servant at all but an official appointed by a ruling monarch to represent him, and sometimes to govern in his name: the office the Dutch called stadhouder and the Germans Statthalter. The Lord High Steward of England held genuine power from the twelfth to the fourteenth century. Only in Scotland did the office hand the men who held it a surname, and then a crown.

The family's traceable ancestry begins with Alan fitz Flaad, a Breton knight who had been hereditary steward of the Bishop of Dol in the Duchy of Brittany and who went to England not long after the Norman Conquest. Henry I of England awarded him lands in Shropshire, and the FitzAlans established themselves quickly as a prominent Anglo-Norman house. One of Alan's sons, William, founded the line that became earls of Arundel. His brother Walter fitz Alan went to Scotland.

He went because of a civil war. When the English conflict known as the Anarchy broke out between the Empress Matilda and King Stephen, Walter took Matilda's side, and so did her uncle David I of Scotland. After Matilda was pushed out of England into Anjou, Walter followed David north. David granted him lands in Renfrewshire and East Lothian and the title of lord high steward for life; the next king, Malcolm IV, made the office hereditary. Through the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the family was based at Dundonald in South Ayrshire.

Walter built. On the King's Inch, a river islet in the Clyde that David I gave him when he was made first hereditary Steward, he raised the first castle at Renfrew, and around 1160 he raised the first house on the site of Blackhall Manor in Paisley. In 1164 he was one of the commanders of the royal army that defeated Somerled of the Isles at the Battle of Renfrew. By the time of his grandson, Walter Stewart, the office had become the family name.

Neither house was a passing possession. In the thirteenth century the family built a new residence at the north end of the old High Street of Renfrew, beside the road down to the Clyde ferry, and Blackhall stayed with the Stewarts, later the Shaw-Stewarts, who gave it to the Burgh of Paisley in 1940.

Alexander Stewart, 4th High Steward of Scotland, known also as Alexander of Dundonald Castle, commanded the Scottish army at the Battle of Largs in 1263 against the Norse invasion. The family's reach was widening westward at the same time: in 1262 Alexander III granted Lochranza Castle, on its rocky promontory at the north end of Arran, together with its lands, to Walter Stewart, Earl of Menteith.

The Wars of Independence put the Stewards on both sides and then firmly on one. James Stewart, 5th High Steward, swore fealty to Edward I of England, then sided with Robert the Bruce and William Wallace. Their own strongholds were in the fighting: Rothesay was held by the English until Bruce took it in 1311, and Renfrew was captured and granted away by Edward I to Henry de Lacy, Earl of Lincoln, in 1301.

Then came the marriage that decided everything. Walter Stewart, 6th High Steward (1293-1326), played an important part at the Battle of Bannockburn, gaining further favour, and married Marjorie, daughter of Robert the Bruce. Their son Robert was heir to the House of Bruce, to the Lordship of Cunningham and to the Bruce lands of Bourtreehill, and when his uncle David II died childless in 1371 he inherited the throne of Scotland outright. The steward's family had become the royal family.

Robert II took the crown in 1371 and marked it in stone. The tower house standing on the hill above Dundonald today is the third castle on that site, built by him probably to commemorate his accession, and it served as a royal residence for him and for his son Robert III. In the same year Renfrew, the family's first castle of all, became a royal residence, because its owner was now the king.

Rothesay on Bute was the other favourite. Built by the Stewart family on an unusual circular plan, with four round towers in its curtain wall inside a broad moat once connected to the sea, it survived Norse attack and a siege by John of Islay, Earl of Ross and last Lord of the Isles, in 1462. Robert III died there in 1406. Robert II granted the hereditary keepership to his son John, ancestor of the Earls and Marquesses of Bute, and in 1401 Robert III made his eldest son David Duke of Rothesay; the title has gone to the heir to the Scottish throne ever since.

Junior lines were putting down roots at the same time. Bonkyll Castle in Berwickshire became the seat of the Stewarts of Bonkyl: John Stewart of Bonkyl married Margaret de Abernethy, heiress of the Lordship of Abernethy, in 1328, and Robert I created him Earl of Angus the following year. From the Bonkyl Stewarts came, in a further junior branch, the Stewarts of Darnley, the paternal family of King James VI and I.

Nine Stewart and Stuart monarchs ruled Scotland alone between 1371 and 1603, and the male royal line ran unbroken until the reign of Mary, Queen of Scots. In 1503 James IV married Margaret Tudor, linking the two reigning royal houses of the island; the birth of their son, later James V, brought the House of Stewart into the line of descent of the House of Tudor and so into the succession to the English throne. Falkland, acquired by the family in the fourteenth century, and Linlithgow were principal residences, and Stirling, on its crag above the lowest crossing of the Forth, was the chief royal seat, with the Renaissance range of James V and the Great Hall as its showpieces.

Robert II had many sons, and the third of them, Robert Stewart, 1st Duke of Albany, was Regent of Scotland during part of the reigns of his father, his brother and his nephew James I. Doune Castle, rebuilt in its present form in the late fourteenth century, was his: a stronghold grand enough to reflect near-royal power. Falkland Palace was his as well. In 1406 he besieged Innerwick Castle, a Stewart stronghold on the edge of a precipitous glen above the Thornton Burn five miles from Dunbar, to expel the forces of the Earl of Northumberland; timber beams were bought for the assault, perhaps to build a siege engine.

When James I came of age he curbed the power of his Albany cousins. Murdoch Stewart, 2nd Duke of Albany, was beheaded along with two of his sons, and Doune passed to the crown in 1425, serving afterwards as a royal hunting lodge before becoming the seat of the Earls of Moray. The line itself did not end. Sir Walter Stewart, Keeper of Dumbarton Castle, a younger son of Murdoch, is the ancestor of the Earls Castle Stewart of County Tyrone, a title created in the Peerage of Ireland in 1800, and the senior living member of the royal Stewart family descended in a legitimate male line from Robert II is Andrew Richard Charles Stuart, 9th Earl Castle Stewart.

Two more Stewart houses grew from the same stock. In 1457 Strathaven Castle in Lanarkshire, on its rocky mound above the Powmillon Burn and slighted after James II's suppression of the Douglases, was granted to Sir Andrew Stewart, an illegitimate grandson of Murdoch; as Lord Avondale he rebuilt on the site. And about 1490 William Stewart, grandson of the only son of the Duke of Albany to escape the persecution of James I, was appointed bailie of the crown lands of Balquhidder, founding the Stewart presence there.

The Stewarts of Darnley built Crookston Castle around 1400, set inside twelfth-century earthworks. Sir Alan Stewart had bought the lands in 1330 and they passed to Sir John Stewart of Darnley in 1361. Crookston came to be regarded as the principal house of the Stewart earls of Lennox, and its main block, with a tower at each corner in an irregular X-plan otherwise seen only at Hermitage, survives as the only medieval castle left in Glasgow.

Sir John Stewart of Darnley, a fourth cousin of King James I of Scotland, made the family's French fortune. He was ennobled for his part at the Battle of Bauge in 1421, and in 1423 Charles VII granted him the seigneurie of Aubigny-sur-Nere in the old province of Berry, along with Concressault. The chateau at Aubigny is still known to the French as the Chateau des Stuarts, a courtyard castle whose round towers under steep slate roofs form its core, and the family kept a second house fourteen miles to the south-east, the Chateau de la Verrerie at Oizon. It was following that ennoblement and that grant that the Darnley Stewarts' surname was gallicised to Stuart.

The Lennox line stayed close to the crown on both sides of the Border. Crookston was besieged and taken on 3 April 1544 by the Earl of Arran and Cardinal Beaton while the then Earl of Lennox was defending Glasgow Castle. Henry VIII granted Whorlton Castle in the North York Moors to Matthew Stewart, 4th Earl of Lennox, whose son was Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley. The French branch ran on until Charles Stewart, 3rd Duke of Richmond and 6th Duke of Lennox, died in 1672 as the last male of the Stewarts of Aubigny, when La Verrerie escheated to the French crown under the terms of Charles VII's original grant.

Apart from the royal house itself, three main branches of the family settled in the Scottish Highlands during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries: the Stewarts of Appin, of Atholl and of Balquhidder. The Appin line descends from Sir John Stewart of Bonkyll, son of Alexander Stewart, 4th High Steward. Sir John's younger son James was killed at the Battle of Halidon Hill in 1333, and his grandson married the heiress of the Lord of Lorne, chief of Clan MacDougall, becoming the first Stewart Lord of Lorne. The Appin Stewarts held to the royalist cause in the civil wars of the seventeenth century and to the deposed Stuart monarchs in the risings of 1715 and 1745.

Their seat was Castle Stalker, a four-storey tower house on a tidal islet in Loch Laich, an inlet off Loch Linnhe near Port Appin, reachable from the shore only at low tide. It began as a small fort built around 1320 by Clan MacDougall, and its name comes from the Gaelic Stalcaire, hunter or falconer; King James VI, a relative of its Stewart holders, visited it. The castle passed to Clan Campbell around 1620. In 1908 Charles Stewart of Achara bought it and began conservation work, and Stewart Allward later spent about ten years restoring it fully, leaving one of the best preserved medieval tower houses in western Scotland.

The Atholl Stewarts descend from a son of Alexander Stewart, Earl of Buchan and Lord of Badenoch, known to Scottish tradition as the Wolf of Badenoch, who died at Huntingtower in 1394. James Stewart built a strong castle at Garth and settled there at the end of the fourteenth century. Queen Joanna, widow of James I, married the Black Knight of Lorne, descended from the fourth High Steward, and their son John Stewart of Balveny was granted the Earldom of Atholl by his half-brother James II; he commanded the royal forces that opposed the rebellion of the Lord of the Isles, and when the crown divided the Douglas estates among its supporters he was granted Balvenie in Moray. The fifth Stewart Earl died without male issue and the earldom went with his daughter to William Murray, 2nd Earl of Tullibardine.

The Stewarts stayed in Atholl regardless of who held the earldom. Many claimed descent from the Wolf of Badenoch, transferred their allegiance to the Murray earls, and were known as Athollmen, a name still carried by the Atholl Highlanders, the only legal private army in Europe. General David Stewart of Garth, an Athollman and an officer of the Black Watch, wrote Sketches of the Highlanders and Highland Regiments, the book that popularised his homeland in Victorian England. James Stewart of Sticks and Ballechin, who died in 1523, was ancestor to a further cluster of Atholl Stewart families, and Grandtully Castle, a Z-plan tower house of 1560, belonged to the Stewarts and later the Drummond-Stewart baronets from the fourteenth century.

Mary Stuart was born at Linlithgow Palace on 8 December 1542, the only surviving child of James V of Scotland and Marie of Guise, and was crowned Queen of Scots at the Chapel Royal of Stirling on 9 September 1543 at nine months old, the regalia held above her head. In August 1548, in her sixth year, she was sent to the French court and grew up at the Valois palaces of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, Fontainebleau and the Louvre. She married the dauphin Francois at Notre-Dame de Paris on 24 April 1558 and became Queen Consort of France in July 1559 on the death of her father-in-law Henri II, queen over the largest combined territory of any monarch in western Europe except Habsburg Spain. It was in France, to preserve the correct pronunciation of her name, that she formalised the French spelling of it: Stuart.

She landed at Leith in August 1561, eighteen years old, and took up the personal rule of her own kingdom with the political education of a queen raised at the most polished court in Europe; she spoke Scots, French, Latin, Italian and Spanish. For the next six years her court at the Palace of Holyroodhouse was the cultural centre of Scotland: the makar Alexander Scott wrote for it, Pierre de Ronsard sent her sonnets from Paris, and the masques, music and portraiture of her reign defined the high Renaissance moment of the Scottish court.

She travelled her kingdom. After her return she granted the lands on which Castle Stuart now stands to her half-brother, the 1st Earl of Moray. In September 1562 she held a meeting of her Privy Council in the great banqueting hall at Darnaway in Moray, which an English observer that year called verie fayer and large builded. She married Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, in 1565, and on 19 June 1566 bore her only son at Edinburgh Castle.

From 1568 she lived in England under varying degrees of confinement, at Carlisle, Bolton, Tutbury, Sheffield and finally Fotheringhay, and she held the dignity of her queenship through every one of those years, conducting a state correspondence with her Guise relatives in France and with Philip II of Spain and embroidering the Marian Hangings now held at Oxburgh Hall. She went to her execution at Fotheringhay on the morning of 8 February 1587 in a red kirtle, the colour of martyrdom, with the composure that has carried her name down four centuries.

Her son settled the question her whole life had turned on. James VI, crowned King of Scots in 1567, succeeded Elizabeth I of England on 24 March 1603 and reigned as James I of England and Ireland, the first monarch of the united crowns. What followed was a personal union rather than a merger, three kingdoms sharing one monarch but keeping separate governments, churches and institutions.

Darnaway in Moray came in time to the Stuart family, and it remains with their descendants. The banqueting hall raised there in 1450 is the only surviving portion of the medieval castle and keeps its original hammerbeam roof, one of only two medieval halls in Scotland to do so; rebuilt around it in 1810, the house still holds a hall capable of taking a thousand people.

James Stewart, 2nd Earl of Moray, remembered in ballad as the Bonnie Earl o' Moray, was the eldest son of James Stewart, 1st Lord Doune, of Doune Castle in Perthshire, and a male-line descendant of Robert II through the Duke of Albany. He married Elizabeth, daughter and heiress of James Stewart, 1st Earl of Moray, whose own father was James V, and assumed the earldom in her right. The tower house at Castle Stuart, begun on Mary's grant, was completed by the 3rd Earl in 1625; it stands on the banks of the Moray Firth about six and a half miles north-east of Inverness. Kinfauns above the Tay passed to the Stuart Earls of Moray in 1878.

Further north, Robert Stewart, a son of James V by Euphemia Elphinstone, was granted lands in Orkney and Shetland in 1564, took possession of the Bishop's Palace at Kirkwall in 1568 and acquired the Earldom of Orkney in 1581. He built the Earl's Palace at Birsay in two phases, a great hall in the south range from the 1570s marked by a 1574 inscription over the entrance and a north range with a second hall in the 1580s: as much fortress as residence, wrapped around a central courtyard and well, with large stone towers at three of the four corners and gun-holes covering every side. Writing in 1701, the Reverend John Brand recorded its upper rooms prettily decored, their painted ceilings showing scripture histories.

His son Patrick Stewart, created Lord of Shetland in 1590 and afterwards 2nd Earl of Orkney, built Scalloway Castle in 1600: an L-plan tower of four storeys and a garret, its vaulted ground level holding kitchens, stores and a well, the hall above and bartizans corbelled out around the third storey. During his ascendancy it served as the meeting place of the thing, Shetland's parliament.

Stewart building was not confined to the north. Sir David Stewart, granted the Barony of Rosyth in 1428, built there around 1450 on a small island in the Firth of Forth reachable only at low tide, and it stayed a Stewart house until the late seventeenth century. Francis Stewart, 5th Earl of Bothwell, gave Crichton Castle its Italianate north range in the 1580s, a diamond-rusticated courtyard facade inspired by the Palazzo dei Diamanti in Ferrara. And Kilcoy Castle on the Black Isle, a Z-plan fortalice begun by the Stewart family possibly as early as 1580, has come full circle: it is owned today by relations of the original Stewart builders.

The seventeenth century put the house through fire. After the execution of Charles I in 1649 the principal members of the House of Stuart lived eleven years in exile in mainland Europe, and Charles II returned to take the three thrones in 1660. James VII and II was deposed in 1689 in favour of his Protestant daughters, and Mary II and Anne both reigned; under the Acts of Union that took effect on 1 May 1707 Anne became Queen of Great Britain, and on her death in 1714 the crown passed to the House of Hanover, itself linked to the Stuarts through the line of Elizabeth Stuart, Queen of Bohemia.

Then a Stuart prince came back. Charles Edward Stuart, born at the Palazzo Muti in Rome on 31 December 1720 and raised at the exiled court there, landed at the head of Loch nan Uamh on 25 July 1745 with seven companions, the Seven Men of Moidart, no army and no guarantee of a single Highland chief. He raised his father's royal standard above Loch Shiel at Glenfinnan on 19 August, and the western Highland regiments rallied over the next ten days, the Stewarts of Appin among them. He took Perth on 4 September, entered Edinburgh on 17 September on a white horse, and on 21 September broke a government army under Sir John Cope at Prestonpans in a charge that lasted less than fifteen minutes.

He crossed the Tweed on 8 November with about five thousand men, took Carlisle on the fifteenth, and reached Derby on 4 December, a hundred and twenty-seven miles from London and closer to the throne than any Jacobite army had come since 1688. He withdrew on the council of his Highland generals, won at Falkirk in January 1746, and was defeated at Culloden Moor outside Inverness on 16 April. Hidden through that summer by Flora MacDonald and a chain of Highland and Hebridean families, he sailed for France on 20 September 1746 from the beach he had landed on fourteen months earlier. The Glenfinnan monument, raised in 1815, stands where the standard went up.

The cause outlived the campaign as memory. Grandtully saw both risings, used by the Earl of Mar in 1715 and by Charles in 1745. At Traquair, seat of the Stuarts from 1491 for the four centuries after, the Bear Gates were installed by the fifth Earl, Charles Stuart, in 1738 and sealed in 1796, the seventh Earl vowing to keep them shut; a more romantic version, impossible but much loved, holds that they were closed after Bonnie Prince Charlie passed through in 1745 and would not open until a Stuart king came again. The royal House of Stuart ended with the death of Cardinal Henry Benedict Stuart in 1807.

What was left was a name and a pattern. The usual tartan of the Stewarts and Stuarts is the red Royal Stewart, of which the historian Henry James Lee wrote that the effect of a large body of men in it crossing a hill, against the dark heath, was as if the hill were on fire; the Highland Society of London began naming clan-specific tartans in 1815. The Court of the Lord Lyon recognises Clan Stewart, Clan Stuart of Bute and Clan Stewart of Appin, and the Earls of Galloway are now considered the principal branch, their crest and motto giving the Clan Stewart badge its Virescit vulnere virtus, courage grows strong at a wound. Clan Stewart itself has no clan chief recognised by the Lord Lyon King of Arms, which makes it an armigerous clan; Stuart of Bute is the only one of the three at present which has a recognised chief.

The name travelled. Many Stewarts from the Lowlands settled in Ulster in the seventeenth century, and the surname went with the Scottish and Ulster Scots diaspora to the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand; in 2014 Stewart was the sixty-sixth most common surname in the United Kingdom. Its bearers include Dugald Stewart (1753-1828), the Scottish philosopher; Gilbert Stuart (1755-1828), the American painter; Alice Stewart (1906-2002), British physician and epidemiologist; Rena Stewart (1923-2023), Scottish codebreaker of the Second World War and journalist; and Catherine Maxwell Stuart, 21st Lady of Traquair, who holds the house with the shut gates today.

The best known Stewart of the modern age was born at Milton in the Vale of Leven, Dumbartonshire, on 11 June 1939. John Young Stewart, second son of the proprietor of the Dumbuck Garage on the Loch Lomond road, won the Scottish and British clay-pigeon shooting championships in his teens, and made his Formula One debut on 1 January 1965. He took the World Drivers' Championship in 1969, 1971 and 1973 and retired with twenty-seven Grand Prix wins from ninety-nine starts. His greater legacy was the safety campaign he led through the Grand Prix Drivers' Association and for four decades after: medical facilities at every circuit, six-point harnesses, fireproof suits, full-face helmets. Formula One had been killing roughly one driver a year when he began; between 1982 and 1994 it killed two. Sir Jackie Stewart was knighted in 2001.