Clan Cochrane

History

The Cochrane surname is territorial, taken from an estate the family once held near Paisley in Renfrewshire; the name turns up in early charters spelled variously as Cochrane, Coueran and Couran. Documented family history begins in the mid-to-late thirteenth century, and among the earliest individuals named is William de Coughran, who swore fealty to Edward I of England in 1296. A more colourful family story pushes the line back further, to a Norse forebear said to have put down roots in the district generations before that, though no record backs this up, and genealogists generally favour the plainer explanation that the family simply took its name from the Renfrewshire land it held.

The Cochranes remained a Renfrewshire family of local standing for several centuries before their fortunes changed sharply in the seventeenth century. Sir William Cochrane, knighted under Charles I, backed the Royalist cause during the Wars of the Three Kingdoms and was fined heavily for it under Cromwell's government in 1654. He had bought the Ayrshire estate of Dundonald in 1638, and in 1647 was made Baron Cochrane of Dundonald. After the Restoration his loyalty was rewarded again: in 1669 he was created Earl of Dundonald, and that earldom has been the chiefly title of Clan Cochrane ever since.

The family's prominence continued, not always smoothly, into the next generations of Earls, several drawn into the political upheavals of the later Stuart period before settling their allegiance behind the 1688-89 revolution. The Cochranes sold most of the Dundonald estate in 1726 but kept the castle itself, by then already ruinous, as a link to the title it had given them.

The clan's best-known figure is Thomas Cochrane, 10th Earl of Dundonald, a Royal Navy officer whose daring raids against French shipping in the Napoleonic Wars made his name before a wrongful fraud conviction cost him his commission and his seat in Parliament. Undeterred, he spent much of the 1820s at sea again, this time commanding first Chile's navy, then Brazil's and finally Greece's, as each fought free of imperial rule, a run of exploits that earned him the nickname "the Sea Wolf". Pardoned and reinstated as a Royal Navy admiral in 1832, his exploits later helped inspire well-known fictional naval captains of twentieth-century fiction.

In the twentieth century the family's direct ownership of Dundonald Castle ended when the 13th Earl gave the ruin to the state in 1953; it is now cared for by Historic Environment Scotland as a visitor attraction. The chiefly seat moved west to Lochnell in Argyll, a house built in the 1700s that had earlier belonged to the Campbells of Lochnell. The 14th Earl altered the proportions of the clan tartan in 1974, and his son, the present 15th Earl, restored the original sett and registered it in 1984, later adding a hunting tartan in 2008 and reviving an older azure tartan first recorded to the 12th Earl.

Today the Earl of Dundonald is recognised as chief of Clan Cochrane, represented internationally through bodies such as the Clan Cochrane Society. Cochranes and their variant-spelled kin are found across Scotland, Ireland and the wider Scottish diaspora, and the family's path from Renfrewshire landowners to an Ayrshire earldom and, eventually, an Argyll seat traces one of the more eventful stories among Scotland's lowland clans.