Clan MacGregor

History

The MacGregor motto means 'Royal is my race'. It rests on the old claim that the clan descends from Griogar, a son or brother of Kenneth MacAlpin, the ninth-century king. The sources do not even agree on which, and the claim is tradition rather than record. The Clan Gregor Society names Gregor of the Golden Bridles as the first certain chief, followed by Iain Camm, Iain of the One Eye, who died before 1390. The society also links the early chiefs to the hereditary abbots of Glendochart.

The clan's home was the glens on the borders of Argyll and Perthshire: Glenorchy, Glenstrae and Glenlochy. Their misfortune was to have the Campbells as neighbours. When Robert the Bruce made Loch Awe a barony he gave it to the chief of the Campbells, and a good deal of what the MacGregors held lay inside its bounds. From then on the clan lost ground generation by generation, until Glenstrae was almost all that remained. Squeezed for land, the MacGregors gained a name for raiding and poaching. Matters turned bloody in 1589. John Drummond, a royal forester, had hanged MacGregors caught poaching, and he was killed in revenge.

The crisis came in 1603. At Glen Fruin, in the country of the Colquhouns of Luss, Alasdair MacGregor of Glenstrae routed a larger force of Colquhouns, and over two hundred of them are said to have been killed. James VI responded by abolishing the name of MacGregor altogether. To bear it was made a capital offence. Alasdair was hanged in Edinburgh the following year with a number of his leading men. Accounts of how many differ, from eleven to thirty.

For most of the next 171 years the MacGregors lived under borrowed names, among them Campbell, Murray and Drummond. Charles II lifted the ban in 1661. It was brought back under William III after the clan had supported James VII. It was not finally repealed until 1774. Rob Roy MacGregor, born in 1671, spent his adult life under it and used his mother's name of Campbell. He was out with the Jacobites at Glen Shiel in 1719, died in 1734 and is buried at Balquhidder. Sir Walter Scott's novel later made him famous. MacGregors fought for the Stuarts again in 1745.

Once the name was legal again the clan needed a chief. In 1775 a petition carrying 826 MacGregor signatures named General John Murray of Lanrick. Murray was one of the borrowed names: his descent was from Duncan MacGregor of Ardchoille. The baronets of his line have been chiefs ever since. The chief's son commanded the MacGregor guard at George IV's visit to Edinburgh in 1822, the year the Clan Gregor Society was founded. It describes itself as one of the oldest clan societies in Great Britain.