Clan Mackintosh

History

Clan tradition traces the Mackintoshes to Shaw, a son of the medieval Earls of Fife, said to have been given the title 'toiseach', or leader, in the twelfth century — the likely source of the Gaelic name Mac an Tòisich, 'son of the leader'. This founding story cannot be documented and should be read as tradition rather than settled history. What can be shown from record is a Mackintosh styled 'Seneschalle de Badenach' in 1234, placing the family in Badenoch by the thirteenth century.

Clan genealogies hold that the clan's fortunes changed in 1291, when Angus, 6th of Mackintosh, married Eva, daughter and heiress of Dougal Dall, chief of the Clan Chattan confederation in Lochaber. The marriage brought the Mackintoshes the lands of Glenloy and Loch Arkaig, and made their chief also captain of Clan Chattan, a loose federation of Highland kindreds — among them the Macphersons, Davidsons, MacGillivrays, MacBeans and Farquharsons — bound together for mutual protection. The dual leadership held for roughly six and a half centuries before the two chiefships were formally separated.

Holding Glenloy and Loch Arkaig put the Mackintoshes in direct and lasting conflict with Clan Cameron, whose own claim to the same ground produced one of the Highlands' longest-running feuds, running from the fourteenth century into the seventeenth. Clan Chattan's constituent families did not always agree among themselves either: at the Battle of Invernahavon, fought against a Cameron raiding party in the second half of the fourteenth century, a dispute between the Macphersons and Davidsons over which had the right to fight on the flank of honour nearly cost Clan Chattan the battle before the Macphersons rejoined the fight.

The clan's best-known episode comes from the 1745 Jacobite rising. Angus Mackintosh, the chief, held a commission in the British army and did not join the Jacobites, but his wife, Anne Mackintosh — remembered as 'Colonel Anne' — raised and led Clan Chattan's fighting men for the Prince's cause. Charles Edward Stuart was staying under her roof at Moy Hall in February 1746 when word reached her that Lord Loudon was marching troops out from Inverness to take him. She had only a handful of men to hand, nowhere near enough for a fight, so they made noise instead: muskets fired into the darkness, the war cries of several clans shouted at once, as if a whole army lay in wait. It worked. Loudon's much larger force turned back for Inverness without learning how few men had actually faced them, in an episode still remembered as the Rout of Moy, and the Prince got away. Clan Chattan fought for the Jacobites again two months later at Culloden, where the rising was finally crushed.

The Mackintosh chiefship and the separate chiefship of Clan Chattan were divided by a ruling of the Lord Lyon in 1938, after a chief died without a male heir. Moy Hall, rebuilt in the 1950s after its predecessor was lost, remains the family seat, and the Clan Chattan Association continues to bring the confederation's member families together.