Clan Erskine

History

The name Erskine comes from a barony on the south bank of the Clyde, near present-day Glasgow, recorded as Erskin as early as 1225. Henry de Erskine, its proprietor under Alexander II, is on record as a charter witness in the 1220s, which makes this one of the older documented Lowland landholding families in Scotland, well before anything resembling a clan tartan or formal chiefship existed.

The family's rise turned on trust rather than territory. Sir Robert de Erskine was made custodian of Stirling Castle by David II in the fourteenth century, a post that put the Erskines at the centre of royal affairs for generations afterward. Through his son's marriage to Janet Keith, a descendant of the old Celtic earls of Mar, the family also acquired a claim to that ancient earldom, though the crown initially insisted the title itself could only pass to a royal Stewart. Sir Robert was created Lord Erskine instead, around 1467.

For much of the sixteenth century the Erskines were the family Scotland's rulers trusted with their children. Successive Lords Erskine served as guardians to the infant James V and, after him, to Mary, Queen of Scots, raising her at Stirling in the years before she went to France. John Erskine, 6th Lord Erskine, saw the earldom of Mar returned to the family in 1565 once Mary was back in Scotland; he went on to serve as Regent of Scotland and governor of both Edinburgh and Stirling castles, and was entrusted with the guardianship of her infant son, the future James VI.

The family's reach extended into the church as well as the court. John Erskine of Dun, laird of a separate Angus branch, moved in the same reforming circles as George Wishart and John Knox, played a part in bringing the teaching of Greek to Scotland, and sat repeatedly as moderator of the General Assembly of the reformed Kirk during the Reformation period. A branch of the family based at Kellie in Fife grew out of Sir Thomas Erskine, who killed Alexander Ruthven while defending James VI during the Gowrie Conspiracy of 1600, bought Kellie Castle in 1613 and was created Earl of Kellie in 1619.

Erskine fortunes were badly shaken by the Jacobite cause. John Erskine, 6th Earl of Mar, earned the nickname "Bobbing John" by switching sides so often, and it was from Kildrummy that he organised the 1715 rising before proclaiming it at nearby Braemar on 6 September 1715; the rising ended in defeat, his estates were forfeited, and he died in exile. It took decades, and the eventual joining of the Mar and Kellie titles within the same family, for the Erskines to recover their standing, and the chiefship today is still held through that combined earldom.

Later Erskines made their names away from clan affairs entirely. Thomas Erskine, from the related Erskine Earls of Buchan, built one of the great legal careers of his generation at the bar, taking up the defence of Thomas Paine and other reformers in the 1790s before a brief spell as Lord Chancellor of Great Britain in 1806–07 — a reminder that by the eighteenth century the Erskine name had spread well beyond its Clyde-side and Stirling roots.