Clan Leslie

History

Clan tradition traces the Leslies to a nobleman named Bartolf, also recorded as Bartholomew, said to have been Hungarian or Flemish by birth and to have arrived in Scotland in 1067 in the retinue of the exiled English prince Edgar Ætheling and his sister Margaret. This is family tradition rather than documented history, and none of its detail can be independently checked. Margaret went on to marry King Malcolm III and was later venerated as Saint Margaret. Bartolf is said to have been granted an estate in the Garioch district of Aberdeenshire then known as Lesselyn, and it is from this place name that the surname Leslie is thought to derive.

The clan's best-loved story explains its motto. As the queen's chamberlain, Bartolf is said to have carried Margaret on his own horse, her hand gripping his belt, while fording a swollen river in a storm. When the buckle threatened to give way, tradition has him crying 'Grip fast!' Whatever the truth of the tale, the phrase became the Leslie motto and still frames the demi-griffin on the clan crest badge today.

Whatever their precise origins, the Leslies were established landholders in the Garioch by the fourteenth century. A branch of the family held Balquhain, a tower house west of Inverurie, from 1340, and its barons became one of the clan's most enduring lines: John Leslie of Balquhain contracted masons to finish building work there in 1441, and the castle stood until it was burned by government forces during the 1746 Jacobite rising. In the mid-sixteenth century the Balquhain Leslies also acquired Fetternear, near Kemnay, formerly a residence of the bishops of Aberdeen, which stayed a principal Leslie home until fire destroyed it in 1919.

A separate line rose further still. Around 1390 a Balquhain Leslie married the heiress of Rothes, a barony in Moray, and by the late 1450s their descendant George Leslie had been created Earl of Rothes, the family's first Scottish peerage. For centuries the clan chiefship went hand in hand with that earldom, and Rothes Castle in Speyside remained a Leslie seat for generations even as the family's wider interests spread south into Fife and the Mearns.

The Leslie name also produced one of the seventeenth century's most notable soldiers of fortune. Alexander Leslie spent his early career in Swedish service, where he held Stralsund against a besieging imperial army under Albrecht von Wallenstein in 1628 and had risen to the rank of field marshal by 1636. Charles I tried to win his loyalty by making him Earl of Leven in 1641, but Leslie instead commanded the Scottish army that fought for Parliament in the English Civil Wars from 1644, and Charles I gave himself up to Leslie's forces at Newark-on-Trent in May 1646.

The earldom of Rothes continues today, held by James Leslie, 22nd Earl of Rothes. The working role of clan chief, though, currently sits with his brother, the Hon. Alexander Leslie, recognised in that role by the Standing Council of Scottish Chiefs and by COSCA.