The 10 Most Powerful Scottish Clans of All Time

The royal house of Scotland and, after 1603, of both kingdoms together. The Stewarts came to the throne in 1371 with Robert II, grandson of Robert the Bruce by his daughter Marjorie, and from that day the family wore the Scottish crown without interruption until the death of Queen Anne in 1714. After James VI walked south to London in 1603 they wore the crowns of England and Ireland with it. Three hundred and forty-three years on the Scottish throne, more than a century of it on the English throne too.

The roll of Stewart monarchs is also the roll of the most consequential figures in the kingdom's history. James IV brought the Renaissance to the Scottish court and married Margaret Tudor, planting the seed of the eventual Union. Mary, Queen of Scots, granddaughter of that marriage, was queen in three kingdoms in turn: Scotland, France, and the rightful heir to England. Her son James VI took the English crown his mother had been kept from. Charles II returned in 1660 to restore the monarchy itself after the Republic.

Beyond the named monarchs the Stewart line filled every senior post of state across three and a half centuries, generated cadet branches (Lennox, Atholl, Bothwell, Buchan) whose dukes and earls held independent power, and the present House of Windsor traces its descent through them. No other Scottish family has matched the sustained reach.

The clan that freed the kingdom. Robert the Bruce, the eighth chief, was crowned at Scone in 1306 in the middle of the Wars of Independence, and over the next two decades he did what was widely thought impossible: he held the throne, ground down the English garrisons one castle at a time, and on midsummer day 1314 broke the largest army England had ever sent north on the field at Bannockburn. The Declaration of Arbroath of 1320 carries his case for Scottish independence in the most quoted lines ever written in this country.

He left a kingdom intact and a son on the throne. The Bruce royal line ran from 1306 through 1371, when David II died without an heir and the crown passed to the Stewart line through Robert's daughter Marjorie. That sixty-five-year stretch is short measured against the Stewart dynasty that followed, which is the only reason Bruce sits second rather than first.

The earlier Bruce family had been Norman incomers from Brix, granted Annandale in the 12th century and building up regional power for two hundred years before the crown came within reach. The senior chiefly line continues today as the Earl of Elgin, custodian of Broomhall in Fife. The 9th Earl was Viceroy of India; an earlier Bruce, James Bruce of Kinnaird, was the first European to reach the source of the Blue Nile in 1770.

Five hundred years of dominance in the west, and the longest-running political machine in Scottish history. The Campbells anchored at Loch Awe in the 13th century and from there built a sustained programme of land acquisition, royal service, and well-judged marriages that by the late medieval period left them the largest single power in Argyll and the Western Highlands. By 1457 they were Earls of Argyll. By 1701 they were Dukes.

The high-water marks come in clusters. The 8th Earl of Argyll, Archibald Campbell, was effectively head of government in the Covenanter Scotland of the 1640s, the most powerful political figure in the country during the civil-war decade. The 2nd Duke commanded the Hanoverian forces at Sheriffmuir in 1715. By the Victorian period the 8th Duke was a four-time cabinet minister in Gladstone's governments. The 9th Duke married Princess Louise, daughter of Queen Victoria, in 1871.

The Campbells were also master institution-builders. Inveraray Castle, the seat from the mid-18th century, is the great Georgian Gothic statement of clan power. Campbell political reach extended down through scores of cadet branches (Breadalbane, Cawdor, Loudoun, Glenorchy), each itself a major regional house. The current Duke of Argyll, 13th of the line, still holds Inveraray and the chiefship. No other Scottish clan has held its core lordship and its national political weight as continuously across so many centuries.

For a century and a half a semi-independent kingdom inside the kingdom. The MacDonalds traced their chiefly line to Somerled, the half-Norse warlord who broke Norse rule in the Hebrides in the 12th century, and from his grandson Donald the family took its name. From 1336 the senior chief styled himself Lord of the Isles, and held court at Finlaggan on Islay over a confederation of west-coast clans that conducted its own diplomacy with Ireland, England and France, struck its own treaties, and answered the Scottish crown only when it pleased.

The Lordship was a sea power: its chiefs ruled from the galleys, controlling the North Channel between Kintyre and Antrim and binding the Hebrides and Ulster into a single Gaelic maritime sphere. The cadet MacDonnells of Antrim planted themselves in the Glens of Antrim from the 14th century, became Earls of Antrim under James I, and remain the senior Catholic peers of Ulster; the gallóglaigh (gallowglass) heavy infantry of MacDonald kin served Irish kings from the 13th century through the Tudor wars.

At its peak the Lordship covered all of the Hebrides, Kintyre, Lochaber, and Ross, the seat at Finlaggan ringed by the council chambers of the kindreds. The Council of the Isles met there to legislate, judge, and elect. The crown formally suppressed the title in 1493, but the MacDonald name across the cadet branches (Sleat, Clanranald, Glengarry, Keppoch, Glencoe) kept the family the largest single name in the Highlands.

The MacDonalds also produced one of the great diaspora records. Flora MacDonald sailed Bonnie Prince Charlie to Skye in 1746; John A. Macdonald became the first Prime Minister of Canada in 1867 and the architect of Confederation; Ramsay MacDonald led Britain as its first Labour Prime Minister in 1924. Hamilton holds the deeper formal precedence in the Scottish peerage; MacDonald has the kingdom-within-a-kingdom claim, and that is what edges the position.

The premier peerage of Scotland and, for two centuries, the family next in line to the throne. The Hamiltons rose through the 14th century out of small Lanarkshire holdings and a series of well-judged crown marriages. By 1474 James, the 1st Lord Hamilton, had married Princess Mary Stewart, sister of King James III, which placed the family's descendants directly in the royal succession. From that point until the Union of the Crowns the Hamiltons were heirs presumptive whenever the reigning Stewart line ran short of children.

They cashed that position into office and land. The 2nd Earl of Arran was Regent of Scotland during the minority of Mary, Queen of Scots, governing the kingdom from 1542 until Mary came of age. The 3rd Earl was created Duke of Châtelherault by Henri II of France, the title still carried with the line. The 1st Duke of Hamilton was created in 1643, the premier dukedom of Scotland.

The Hamilton seat at Hamilton Palace, when it stood, was the largest non-royal house in Britain, a vast Italianate complex. The Dukes filled the great state offices through the 18th and 19th centuries: Master of the Horse, Lord Lieutenant of Lanarkshire, Ambassador to Russia. Today the 16th Duke holds the title and stands first among the Scottish subject peerage. The Hamilton line wears the precedence; MacDonald held the older kingdom, which is the difference between #5 and #4.

For a century after Bannockburn the Black Douglases stood so near the throne that the crown had to break them to survive. The 1st Earl of Douglas, victor at Otterburn in 1388 ('Chevy Chase' in the ballad), built a Border power that ran from Selkirk to Galloway with the largest private fighting force in the Lowlands. By the 1440s the senior earldom was the second power in the kingdom; James II forfeited it in 1455. The Red Douglas branch, the Earls of Angus, immediately took the vacated ground, and from 1761 the Hamilton-Douglas fusion carried the senior line into the modern Dukedom of Hamilton. The Douglas Heart, the casket bearing Bruce's heart on crusade under Sir James Douglas, remains the family emblem to this day.

'Cock o' the North' was the chiefly nickname, and from the 15th century into the 19th the Gordons earned it by ruling north-east Scotland in everything but title. The 1st Earl of Huntly was granted the earldom in 1445; from Strathbogie the family extended its reach across Aberdeenshire, Banffshire, and Moray, the Gordon levies the largest private army in the Highlands for two centuries. By 1599 they were Marquesses of Huntly, by 1684 Dukes of Gordon. The 4th Duke raised the Gordon Highlanders in 1794, the regiment that bore the family name into the Napoleonic and Victorian wars. The 4th Duchess, Jane Maxwell, was the great political hostess of late-Georgian Britain. The current Marquess of Huntly is the senior peer of Scotland by creation date, having held the earldom continuously for 580 years.

Border reivers turned premier dukes. The Scotts of Buccleuch built their power in the 16th century as warden-keepers of the Middle March, the family that 'Bold Buccleuch' led on the celebrated 1596 rescue of Kinmont Willie from Carlisle Castle by raid in the night. By 1606 they were Lords; by 1663 Dukes of Buccleuch, the dukedom created on the marriage of Anne Scott, the heiress, to James, Duke of Monmouth, son of Charles II. Today the Duke of Buccleuch owns more land in the United Kingdom than any other private individual, the estates running across the Borders, Dumfriesshire, Northamptonshire and Fife. The name also produced Walter Scott, whose novels invented the modern image of Scotland and made Edinburgh the publishing capital of the early 19th century.

The Scottish family that runs the British China trade. William Keswick, great-nephew of Jardine Matheson founder William Jardine, joined the firm in Yokohama in 1855 and took the chairmanship in 1886. Six generations of Keswicks have held the chair since, an unbroken line of family stewardship over what became the largest British conglomerate east of the Suez. Through the 19th and 20th centuries Jardines effectively ran early Hong Kong, owned the railways into China, and controlled half the Asian shipping trade. Henry Keswick took the firm public in 1961 and bought back Hongkong Land and Mandarin Oriental in the 1980s; his nephew Ben Keswick chairs Jardine Matheson Holdings today, the line still operating from the same firm in its 170th year of unbroken Keswick stewardship.

Ulster Scots out of County Tyrone who became the most powerful banking family in 20th-century America. Thomas Mellon emigrated to Pittsburgh in 1818 and founded T. Mellon & Sons in 1869. His son Andrew W. Mellon ran the bank into the 20th century, founded Gulf Oil and the Aluminum Company of America (ALCOA), and served as US Secretary of the Treasury from 1921 to 1932 under Harding, Coolidge and Hoover, the longest-serving Treasury Secretary since Albert Gallatin. His brother and nephews ran the bank and the industrial holdings in parallel; Richard King Mellon funded Carnegie Mellon University and the Mellon Foundation. The Mellon dynasty was the wealthiest Scotch-Irish line America produced. The long noble peerages on the reserve bench (Atholl, Mackenzie, Sinclair) carry deeper duration; Mellon takes tenth on the strength of Andrew's three-presidency span at Treasury and the contemporary financial scale BNY Mellon still represents.