Clan MacMillan

History

The Macmillan name is generally explained as Mac Mhaolain, 'son of the tonsured one', pointing to a churchman ancestor rather than a warrior one — an origin the clan's own genealogical material sets out as tradition rather than a documented pedigree. The clan's own account names Gilchrist, son of a churchman remembered as Cormac 'the Great Bishop', as the founding figure.

After the crown broke up the old mormaerdom of Moray, the family is said to have held land first at Loch Arkaig in Lochaber before being moved to crown lands on Loch Tay in the twelfth century. In the late fourteenth century they were expelled from Loch Tay for backing the Lord of the Isles, and resettled in Knapdale in Argyll, where Chief Malcolm Mòr Macmillan is said to have received land from the Lord of the Isles around 1360.

Knapdale became the clan's heartland for the next century and more. Alexander Macmillan kept Castle Sween on Loch Sween for the Lord of the Isles through the 1470s. He married into the family that had held the castle before him, and two things of his are said to survive there still: a round tower he is credited with building, and the carved stone cross nearby that bears his name, Macmillan's Cross. When the Lordship of the Isles fell in the following decades, Knapdale passed to the Campbells, and the Macmillans who remained became their tenants; a branch of the family re-established itself back in Lochaber, on Loch Arkaig-side, under the protection of Cameron of Lochiel.

In the eighteenth century John MacMillan, a minister deprived of his Presbyterian charge in 1703 over his refusal to accept the church and civil settlement of the time, went on to found what became the Reformed Presbyterian Church in 1743 — a distinct strand of Scottish church history, and not part of the clan's own chiefly line. In the twentieth century, General Sir Gordon MacMillan — a decorated soldier of both World Wars who went on to serve as Governor of Edinburgh Castle — is said to have had no idea he held the clan's chiefly line at all, until the paperwork for flying arms over the Castle raised the question and the title turned out to be his. He was duly recognised as chief and, on his death in 1986, was succeeded by his son George MacMillan of MacMillan and Knap.

Clan Macmillan International, based today at Finlaystone in Renfrewshire, grew out of a Clan Macmillan Society founded in 1892. Its museum and centre at Finlaystone, established in 1991, still bring together the clan's worldwide branches, including long-running societies in North America and France.