Scotland

Clan Wallace

On the morning of 11 September 1297, the English army of John de Warenne and Hugh Cressingham began crossing the Forth at Stirling on a wooden bridge two horsemen wide. The Scottish patriot army on the high ground above the river held its position and watched. Its commanders were William Wallace, the outlaw turned national leader, and Andrew de Moray, who would die of wounds taken that day. The Scottish question had no precedent for what they were about to do: Highland and Lowland infantry had not been thought capable of breaking trained knights in the field. By sunset that question had its answer.

Clan Wallace

In August 1305, after seven years of guerrilla war and near-misses, William Wallace was betrayed in Glasgow by Sir John Menteith, taken in chains across the Border, paraded through the south of England, and brought into Westminster Hall to be tried for treason. Edward I had personally insisted on the trial. A garland of laurel was placed on his head in mockery of an old prophecy that said a Scot would one day be crowned king in London. He refused to plead. The court convicted him in absence of his own defence. The four-mile drag from Westminster to Smithfield, and what they did to him there, was set down in the chronicle of Lanercost in language meant to deter.

Clan Bruce

In 1306 Robert the Bruce was crowned King of Scots and lost two battles within four months. Excommunicated by Rome, his wife and daughter taken, three of his four brothers executed by the English king, his sister hanging in an iron cage on the wall of Roxburgh Castle, he disappeared into hiding through the winter. The Scots cause was a fugitive in a coastal cave. By tradition he watched a spider try to swing a thread of web across a gap, fail six times, succeed on the seventh, and took it for his answer. The truth attested in chronicle is leaner: a king at the end of his options went back into the field, and won.

Clan MacDougall

In the second week of August 1306, at the head of Strath Fillan on the western edge of Breadalbane near the small ford-and-monastery settlement of Dalrigh (the King's Field, in Gaelic Dail Righ), a party of about three hundred MacDougall and Comyn clansmen under John MacDougall of Lorn (Iain Bacach, Lame John) ambushed the small fugitive party of Robert the Bruce, the newly-crowned King of Scots, in the steep narrow pass between the Lochan na Bi and the river Fillan. Bruce was eight weeks out of his coronation at Scone, had been defeated by Aymer de Valence in the open at Methven on the nineteenth of June 1306, had been driven west across the Highland watershed with a remnant of his army, and was attempting to break through to Loch Lomond and the Lennox to take shipping for the Atlantic islands. The MacDougall ambush at Dalrigh nearly ended the Scottish king-in-the-making and the Wars of Scottish Independence in their first year. In the close hand-to-hand fighting at the head of the pass, three brothers of the MacDougall house, the sons of MacKeoch, fell on Bruce in person; he killed all three with his battle-axe; in the struggle the small chiselled Celtic brooch that fastened his plaid was torn loose and dropped on the ground, and one of the MacDougall fighters retrieved it from the heather after the battle. The brooch (a chiselled silver-and-rock-crystal Celtic ring-brooch of late twelfth-century Irish workmanship, three inches across, with eight settings of river-pearl) is held to this day at Dunollie Castle outside Oban by the chiefs of the MacDougalls of Lorn under the name the Brooch of Lorne, the most-famous single inherited artefact of the Scottish clans.

Clan Douglas

In June 1329 Robert the Bruce lay dying at Cardross. He had vowed years earlier to take the cross to the Holy Land, but the Scottish wars had kept him from it; on his deathbed he asked that his heart be cut from his body, embalmed, and carried on crusade in his place. The man who took the charge was Sir James Douglas, his closest companion in arms, called Good Sir James. Douglas wore the heart in a silver casket on a chain at his neck the next year, through France and Spain and into a foreign battle on the Andalusian frontier, where what he did at the head of a Castilian charge became the founding act of the Douglas line.

Clan Hay

On the morning of the twenty-fourth of July 1411, on the rising ground above the head of the Garioch, twenty miles north-west of Aberdeen, the Lowland-Norman levies of Aberdeenshire and Angus, under Alexander Stewart, Earl of Mar, met a Highland-Hebridean army of about ten thousand under Donald, Lord of the Isles, in the most consequential battle fought in north-east Scotland in the post-Bruce century. Donald had been pressing east for the earldom of Ross. Mar's hastily levied army of three thousand had three of the great Lowland constables on the field. The High Constable of Scotland, Sir Gilbert Hay of Erroll, son of the second Lord of Erroll, in his fifty-first year, in his hereditary office and on his own ground, held the right wing of Mar's line. The action was, by every contemporary account, fought to a standstill on the strath of Harlaw at the cost of about a thousand dead a side. Donald withdrew north-west overnight; Mar held the field. The Lowland-speaking belt of Aberdeenshire and Angus would not be reabsorbed into a Gaelic west again. The Hay tradition has it that the day held because Erroll held the right.

Clan Douglas

On the twenty-fourth of November 1440, the sixteen-year-old William Douglas, sixth Earl of Douglas, head of the Black Douglas line and the most powerful subject in Scotland, was invited with his younger brother David to dine in the great hall of Edinburgh Castle in the presence of the ten-year-old King James II. The dinner was hosted by William Crichton (the Lord Chancellor) and Sir Alexander Livingston (the Custodian of the Castle and the King's tutor), the two regents who effectively ruled Scotland during the king's minority and who had been alarmed for two years at the rising power of the Douglas earl. By the tradition of the next century, told in the chronicles of John Major and Hector Boece, a black bull's head was brought in on a silver platter as the principal dish, the symbol in fifteenth-century Scotland of imminent execution. The two Douglas brothers were seized at the table, given a hasty trial in the courtyard, and beheaded on the spot. The political effect was immediate: the Black Douglas eclipse, the rise of a new (and deliberately diminished) Douglas line under the eighth Earl. The Black Dinner is the most consistently remembered episode of medieval Scottish political violence, has produced two surviving children's rhymes (one in the eastern Border tradition, one Aberdeenshire), and was deliberately referenced by George R. R. Martin as the structural model for the Red Wedding in A Storm of Swords.

Clan Sinclair

Sir William Sinclair, third and last Earl of Orkney, founded the Collegiate Chapel of St Matthew at Roslin, seven miles south of Edinburgh, in 1446. The carving programme that followed ran for forty years and produced an interior of unique density: every pillar, boss, archstone and capital crowded with foliage, angels, beasts, biblical scenes and faces, including forms some have read as American maize and aloe carved decades before Columbus. The Apprentice Pillar in the south-east of the chapel carries the building's most famous folk-story, of a master mason who killed his own apprentice with a mallet on returning from Rome to find the boy had carved the pillar from a dream. Templar and Masonic associations have been read into Rosslyn for two centuries; the chapel has carried them all and remains itself.

Clan Hamilton

Patrick Hamilton, son of Sir Patrick Hamilton of Kincavel and Catherine Stewart (granddaughter of James II), was twenty-three or twenty-four years old when he was condemned for heresy at St Andrews on the twenty-eighth of February 1528, in a court convened by James Beaton, Archbishop of St Andrews. He had been to Paris and to Marburg and had read Luther; he had returned to Scotland in 1526 and had taught the new doctrines openly. The court found him guilty in the morning. He was burnt at the stake at the gate of St Salvator's College that same afternoon. The wood was wet, the wind was off the sea, the executioner had to be sent to the priory for more powder. The fire took six hours to consume him. Knox, writing his History thirty-eight years later, gave the phrase: the reek of Master Patrick Hamilton has infected as many as it blew upon. The Scottish Reformation, by the careful judgment of every later historian of it, has its first and longest fuse here.

Clan Armstrong

In the summer of 1530, James V of Scotland was eighteen years old, recently emerged from his minority and the Douglas tutelage, and intent on showing the Border country that the Scottish crown's writ ran to the West March. He sent a king's letter of safe conduct to Johnnie Armstrong of Gilnockie, the most powerful reiver chief between Solway and Liddel, inviting him to a royal hunt at Carlanrig in Teviothead. Armstrong came as for a court, in livery, with thirty-six of his best riders and silver-mounted bridles. The king ordered them seized as they dismounted. Forty-eight Armstrongs were hanged from the trees at Carlanrig that afternoon. The ballad that came out of it is one of the central pieces of the Border tradition.

Clan Elliot

On the morning of the seventh of October 1566, on a bridle-path running west of the Hermitage Castle keep above Hermitage Water in Liddesdale on the central Scottish Border, James Hepburn, fourth Earl of Bothwell, then thirty years old, the Lord Lieutenant of the Marches under Mary, Queen of Scots, met in single combat a Liddesdale reiver known by the Borders by-name Little Jock Elliot of the Park, of the Elliot of Park branch of the Elliot riding-clan family. Bothwell, riding the March in pursuit of the Elliot raid-band of the previous week, came on Little Jock Elliot on the path; the two men charged each other with horse-pistols. Bothwell fired first and hit Elliot in the thigh; Elliot, falling, fired his second pistol at point-blank range and hit Bothwell three times (in the head, the left arm, and the side). Bothwell was lifted from the saddle by his escort and carried bleeding to the Hermitage keep, where he was held in a tower-room for the next eight days, not expected to recover. Mary, Queen of Scots, on the news from Jedburgh on the fifteenth of October, rode the fifty miles from Jedburgh to Hermitage and back in a single day to attend to him, and contracted, on the return ride home in heavy rain, the near-fatal fever that nearly killed her at Jedburgh through the next ten days. The Mary-Bothwell political-and-personal entanglement that began at Hermitage in October 1566 would, by the Darnley murder of February 1567 and the Mary-Bothwell marriage of May 1567, run through to Mary's deposition in July 1567 and the eventual execution at Fotheringhay in 1587.

Clan Buchanan

From 1570 until 1578 the most distinguished Latinist in northern Europe, George Buchanan of Killearn, in his sixties, scholar of St Andrews and Bordeaux and Coimbra, formerly Principal of St Leonard's College, formerly Moderator of the General Assembly, formerly tutor to Mary Queen of Scots when she was a French princess, was the daily tutor of King James VI of Scotland in the schoolroom at Stirling Castle, where the boy-king (orphaned, abdicated for, four years old at the start of the lessons) was being raised under the regents Lennox, Mar and Morton. Buchanan beat the boy. He drilled him in Cicero, Livy, Horace and Plutarch. He drilled him in Greek. He drilled him in the De Officiis. And in 1579, when James was thirteen and the lessons were drawing to a close, Buchanan published the political treatise De Jure Regni apud Scotos, on the law of kingship among the Scots, in dialogue form, which argued that kings were created by their people and accountable to them and could be deposed by them in extremity. He dedicated the book to his pupil. James spent the rest of his life writing answers to it. The dedication was, by every careful Scottish biographer of either man, the deliberate ground-laying of an argument the boy was meant to have to live with.