Clan Maxwell

History

Clan Maxwell traces its name to Maccuswell, a pool on the River Tweed near Kelso once held by Maccus, son of Undwyn, in the reign of David I. Herbert de Maccusweil, whose own family name points to Norman rather than Maccus's Norse origins, appears in the records of the later twelfth century and is reckoned the family's progenitor, though the Clan Maxwell Society itself is candid that no document actually ties him to Maccus's line. Whatever the truth of that opening chapter, his descendants moved south-west into Nithsdale, and by the early thirteenth century John de Maccuswell had acquired the lands of Caerlaverock on the Solway.

The Maxwells built their great triangular castle at Caerlaverock, and it remained the family's principal stronghold for four centuries. Its defences were tested early: in 1300 Edward I brought a substantial English army against it, a siege recorded in verse by a contemporary chronicler in the Roll of Caerlaverock. The castle changed hands repeatedly across the Wars of Independence and after. Its final trial came in 1640, when a Covenanting force blockaded it for weeks until the garrison gave in; the Maxwells never held it again, and Caerlaverock has stood empty since.

As wardens of a genuinely dangerous frontier, the Maxwells prospered. Sir Herbert Maxwell of Caerlaverock was raised to a Lordship of Parliament around 1445. Over the following two centuries his descendants added the stewardship of Annandale and, later, of Kirkcudbright to a wardenship of the West March that the family held, on and off, for generations. From 1513 the Maxwells commanded Threave Castle in the Stewartry as captains, becoming its hereditary keepers in 1526, another marker of how far their authority reached across the south-west. A younger son, Sir John Maxwell of Terregles, extended the family's reach further still: his marriage to Agnes, heiress of Lord Herries, brought her estates into Maxwell hands, and by 1566 he had taken the title of Lord Herries himself.

That dominance was contested, most bitterly by the Johnstones, rivals for supremacy of the West March. The feud between the two families ran for generations and culminated at the Battle of Dryfe Sands in 1593, where the Johnstones routed a much larger Maxwell force near Lockerbie and killed Lord Maxwell himself. His son eventually avenged him, shooting the Johnstone chief in the back under a flag of truce in 1608, a killing that cost him his own head and left the feud in folk memory as one of the bitterest among the Border reiving families.

In 1620 the Maxwells reached their peak of formal honour when Robert, 9th Lord Maxwell, was created Earl of Nithsdale. The family's Catholicism and loyalty to the exiled Stuarts eventually cost them that title: the 5th Earl was captured after the Jacobite rising of 1715, condemned to death, and famously escaped the Tower of London the night before his execution disguised in his wife's borrowed clothes. He lived out his life in exile and the earldom stayed forfeited, but his son was allowed to keep the family's much-reduced estates. When that son died without a male heir in 1776, headship of the family passed to a cousin, George Maxwell of Carruchan, whose own line ran out with his grandson in 1863. No chief has been recognised by the Lord Lyon since.