Clan Mackay

History

The Mackays are the clan of Strathnaver, the wide country along the north coast that is now part of Sutherland. The Gaelic name, Clann Mhic Aoidh, means the children of the son of Aodh. Who that Aodh was is contested. One theory, favoured by the clan historian Angus Mackay, makes the chiefs descendants of the MacHeths of Moray, driven north in the twelfth century. Others have argued for a native origin in the far north. The evidence is thin, and the clan is only firmly on record in Strathnaver from the fourteenth century.

In 1411 the chief, Angus Dubh, opposed Donald, Lord of the Isles, at Dingwall, in the campaign that led to Harlaw. Angus was beaten and taken prisoner. The two were later reconciled, and Angus married a granddaughter of Robert II from Donald's family. About twenty years later the Mackays won a battle at Drumnacoub. The exact date differs between sources, from 1429 to 1433. What followed was a long and bitter rivalry with the Earls of Sutherland, which ran through the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

The clan's best-known chief is Donald Mackay. He was knighted in 1616. In 1626 he embarked some 3,000 men at Cromarty to fight under Count Mansfeld in the Thirty Years' War. On Mansfeld's death the regiment passed into Danish service, and later into Swedish. He was made a baronet of Nova Scotia in 1627 and raised to the peerage as Lord Reay in 1628. The chiefs have held that title ever since.

The Mackays were firm opponents of the Jacobites. General Hugh Mackay commanded the government army in Scotland in 1689. Killiecrankie was a defeat for him, yet the campaign that followed went his way. He was killed at Steinkirk in 1692. Mackays turned out for the government in 1715, fought at Glen Shiel in 1719, mustered some 800 men in 1745, and in 1746 helped to intercept French gold meant for Prince Charles. A Mackay officer is credited with the capture of the Jacobite Earl of Cromartie at Dunrobin that April.

The nineteenth century was harder. Strathnaver was among the districts emptied in the Sutherland clearances of the 1810s. In 1829 the seventh Lord Reay sold the Reay estate to the Sutherland family, and the Mackay country passed out of Mackay hands. In 1875 the chiefship went to a branch long settled in the Netherlands, descended from the second Lord Reay. The present Lord Reay is of that line.