Clan Cunningham

History

Clan Cunningham takes its name from Cunninghame, the district of northern Ayrshire between the Irvine and Garnock rivers. Family tradition credits a Norman or Flemish settler named Warnebald with the founding grant, said to have received the lands of Kilmaurs from Hugh de Morville, Lord High Constable of Scotland, around the 1140s. The name itself is debated: some read it as an Old English 'king's home', others trace it to an earlier Brittonic or Gaelic root. By the thirteenth century the family was established at Kilmaurs Place and at Kerelaw Castle further north.

The clan's fortunes grew through marriage. When Sir William Cunningham married Margaret Denniston in 1405, the match settled two properties on the family that would matter for generations: the barony of Glencairn in Dumfriesshire, and Finlaystone House on the Clyde, where the chiefs made their home for the next four centuries. Glencairn later lent its name to the family's earldom: James III created Alexander Cunningham the first Earl of Glencairn in 1488, though the honour was short-lived for him personally, as he and the king were both killed barely a fortnight later at the Battle of Sauchieburn.

Cunningham's rise brought it into direct rivalry with its Ayrshire neighbours, the Montgomeries, in a feud that ran from the fifteenth century into the seventeenth. At its root was a contest for local power, sharpened when a Montgomery was appointed bailie of Cunninghame over Cunningham objections. Cunninghams are said to have burned Montgomery's Eglinton Castle in 1528, after Montgomeries had earlier put the Cunninghams' own Kerelaw Castle to the torch. The bloodiest moment came in 1586, when the fourth Earl of Eglinton was ambushed and killed near Stewarton, an act blamed on the Cunninghams. Peace came slowly, helped along by royal pressure from James VI and, eventually, by marriage between the two families.

The fifth Earl of Glencairn, Alexander Cunningham, became one of the most committed Protestant lords of the Scottish Reformation and a close ally of John Knox. Knox is said to have held the west of Scotland's first reformed communion service at Finlaystone in 1556, gathering his congregation under a yew tree in the grounds said still to survive today. The earl's zeal extended to the physical destruction of Catholic furnishings, including at the Chapel Royal in Holyrood.

The earldom continued for several more generations, but the direct line failed in 1796, when the fifteenth Earl of Glencairn died without an heir. Finlaystone passed out of Cunningham hands to a cousin's family, and with no settled heir to the earldom, the chiefship of the clan itself fell vacant, a gap that would last more than two hundred years.

That gap closed in December 2013, when the Lord Lyon recognised Sir John Christopher Foggo Montgomery Cunninghame of Corsehill, head of a long-established Ayrshire branch of the family, as Chief of the Name and Arms of Cunningham. Today the clan is represented internationally through societies such as Clan Cunningham International and the Clan Cunningham Global Society, which keep its history and genealogy alive.