Clan Drummond

History

Clan tradition traces the Drummonds to a figure named Maurice, said to have been connected to the Hungarian royal line and to have travelled to Scotland in the eleventh century in the company of Edgar Ætheling, the exiled English prince, and his sister Margaret, later Queen and saint. The story holds that Maurice was rewarded with land by the Scottish crown and that the family afterwards took its name from that estate. This account rests on genealogical tradition rather than contemporary record, and readers should treat it as clan lore rather than settled history, though it has been repeated by Drummond genealogists for centuries.

The clan's documented rise begins in the medieval period. Family tradition credits Sir Malcolm Drummond with a decisive, if unglamorous, role at Bannockburn in 1314, when he is said to have laid down caltrops, four-pointed iron spikes built to lame a charging horse, to blunt an advance by English cavalry. However embellished that story may be, Robert the Bruce granted the Drummonds land in Perthshire soon after the battle, and the caltrop endures in the family's coat of arms alongside the cautious motto the clan still bears.

The family's fortunes were transformed by marriage rather than warfare. Annabella Drummond, daughter of Sir John Drummond of Stobhall, married the future Robert III and was crowned queen in 1390. Their union lasted more than three decades, unusually long for a royal marriage of the period, and Annabella was the mother of James I of Scotland. That royal connection did more than any battle to establish the Drummonds among the first rank of Scottish noble families, and successive Lords Drummond built on it, developing Drummond Castle from the 1490s as their principal seat.

In 1605 the 4th Lord Drummond was created Earl of Perth, and the family's building and gardening at Drummond Castle continued under his successors, including the elaborate terraced gardens begun in the 1630s. The castle did not escape the upheavals of the seventeenth century: it was damaged by Cromwellian forces during the Wars of the Three Kingdoms in 1653. Worse followed in the eighteenth century, when the Drummonds' Jacobite loyalties, including prominent roles in the risings of 1715 and 1745, led to the forfeiture of the family's estates and titles by the Crown in the years after Culloden.

The Drummond name also brushed against another Highland clan. During the harsh proscription of the MacGregor name in the seventeenth century, when the Privy Council outlawed that surname outright, some MacGregor families are recorded as having taken the Drummond name to escape the ban, a reminder that clan identity was sometimes a matter of survival as much as descent. That link is specific to those name changes, not a broader sept relationship, so we have left it off the surname list below.

Despite the family's political setbacks, the gardens at Drummond Castle endured, and today they rank among Scotland's outstanding examples of formal garden design, maintained as a living part of the estate and open for visitors to explore. The clan's best-documented tartan dates from a different kind of occasion entirely: it is recorded as the sett worn by Drummonds who turned out to meet King George IV in Edinburgh in 1822, a moment that did as much as any battle to fix tartan as a badge of clan identity in the modern imagination.