Clan Ogilvy

History

Gillechrist, Earl of Angus, held lands in the parish of Glamis that King William the Lion had granted him during the later twelfth century. It was his younger son Gillebride who gave the family its name, taking it from Ogilvy, one of the baronies that lay within that Glamis grant. Across the generations that followed, the family widened its holdings around Angus, and its members turn up with growing frequency in the surviving records of the Scottish crown.

By the early fifteenth century the Ogilvys had reached national prominence. Sir Walter Ogilvy of Lintrathen served as Lord High Treasurer of Scotland between 1425 and 1431, one of the first members of the family to hold high office at court. His descendants added Airlie to the family's Angus holdings in 1459, and in 1491 Sir James Ogilvy was raised to the peerage as Lord Ogilvy of Airlie by James IV, giving the family its first title.

The family's standing was confirmed in 1639, when its head was created Earl of Airlie by Charles I; sources differ on whether he was the seventh or eighth Lord Ogilvy of Airlie at the time. The new earldom was tested almost at once. During the Covenanting wars of the 1640s the Ogilvys refused to sign the National Covenant, and in 1640 the Earl of Argyll's forces sacked and burned Airlie Castle, an episode later remembered in the ballad "The Bonnie House o' Airlie." Five years later the family fought for the Marquis of Montrose's royalist campaign, sharing his victory at Kilsyth in August 1645 and his defeat at Philiphaugh only weeks after. Family tradition holds that a young Ogilvy captured at Philiphaugh escaped execution by changing clothes with his sister in prison; it is a good story, but tradition rather than documented fact.

With Airlie Castle in ruins, the family made Cortachy Castle, acquired in 1473, its main home, and it has remained the Ogilvys' seat ever since. The eighteenth century brought further setbacks tied to the family's Jacobite sympathies: a son of the house was attainted for his part in the 1715 rising, though later pardoned, and Cortachy was forfeited to the Crown for around thirty years after the family's involvement in the 1745 rising before it was restored to them.

More recent generations of the family have combined their Angus estate with public and royal service. David Ogilvy, 13th Earl of Airlie, who held the earldom from 1968 until his death in June 2023, chaired the merchant bank Schroders, served as Lord Chamberlain of the Royal Household, and was later President of the National Trust for Scotland. On his death the earldom, and with it the chiefship of Clan Ogilvy, passed to his eldest son, David Ogilvy, 14th Earl of Airlie, who holds the title and chiefship today.

The Ogilvy name is now carried by far more people than could ever trace a direct line to the earls, spread across Scotland and well beyond it, in its Ogilvy and Ogilvie spellings and in older variants recorded alongside them. What holds the clan together today has less to do with any single feudal holding than with that shared name, and with the Airlie family's recognised place, under Scots heraldic law, as its chiefly house.