How Kinship Powered 17th-Century Scottish Insurrections

To grasp why every serious rebellion in 17th-century Scotland unfolded like an unruly family quarrel, you must first meet cinnidh—the Gaelic idea that the clan is literally an enlarged household. A chief was not simply a military captain; he was a father to hundreds of “children of the name,” bound by shared ancestry (real or invented) and by manrent, a sworn promise that each arm bearing the clan badge would strike as one. That bond could override parliament, Kirk, even crown.

When the Marquis of Montrose campaigned for Charles I in 1644–45 he recruited a mere 450 Irish professionals; the rest of his 10,000-strong host flowed in clan tributaries: MacDonalds and Camerons avenging Campbell encroachment, Gordons reclaiming lost status, Farquharsons riding because their cousins did. Montrose’s genius wasn’t pay or supply lines—it was tapping dormant feuds and kin loyalties, then pointing them toward the royal banner. The result was a lightning strike of six victories in nine months that stunned the Covenanter regime.

Kinship also explained Montrose’s downfall. When he threatened the lands of the neutral Clan Chattan federation, the Mackenzies and Macphersons switched allegiance overnight; desertions gutted his army at Philiphaugh. Clan mothers who baked bannocks one week melted into his enemies’ baggage train the next—proving that blood ties could be severed if an uprising trampled closer kin.

Feud as Foreign Policy: Campbell vs. Maclean, Gordon vs. Huntly

The 1670s brought nominal peace between crown and Kirk—but Highland politics brewed its own wars. When Archibald Campbell, 9th Earl of Argyle, pressed old mortgage claims against the Macleans of Duart, he did so as feudal creditor and clan patriarch. The young Sir Allan Maclean refused payment; Argyle responded with 2,000 Campbell swords and a Court of Session writ in his pocket. The Macleans answered by inviting 1,000 MacDonalds and MacLeods into Mull. Each side’s legal language masked a kin-based mobilization that the central government could neither prevent nor fully control.

Across the Grampians, George Gordon, 2nd Marquis of Huntly, kept alive another blood feud—Catholic Gordon against Protestant Covenanting clans. Huntly’s son led 600 clansmen to join Montrose; later Gordons garrisoned Aberdeenshire for Charles II long after the king had fled the realm. When the Restoration arrived in 1660, Huntly’s heirs expected vast rewards; when Argyle’s partisans hampered that settlement, the Gordons blackened Campbell memory for a century. Feud thus functioned as Scotland’s unofficial foreign policy: whether siding with king or covenant, each move was measured against ancestral grudges.

The “Highland Host” and Glencairn’s Rising: Kin Networks Meet State Warfare

February 1653: with Cromwellian garrisons thinly spread, William Cunningham, 9th Earl of Glencairn, unfurled the royal standard in the central Highlands. He held no regular commission—just letters and kin contacts. Cunning use of clan marriages let him knit a rebel army from Stewarts of Atholl, Robertsons, MacGregors, even cautious Campbells of Glenorchy. The Protectorate spent two expensive years unravelling that web, discovering that a clan on paper was never in one place; break it in Breadalbane and it re-forms in Lochaber.

Twenty-five years later, the government in Edinburgh tried to turn that dynamic against the western Covenanters. They summoned the “Highland Host” of 1678: 8,000 Macleans, MacDonalds, Keiths and others quartered for eight months on Ayrshire and Lanarkshire farms. The idea was simple: unleash kin-based raiders on Lowland dissenters and loyalty would frighten back into line. Yet the Host carted home more dairystools than conversions, and it taught Lowlanders a hard lesson—only equivalent kin solidarity could resist such pressure. The Covenanting network soon adopted its own quasi-clan structure of field conventicles guarded by armed “brothers.”

From Bonnie Dundee to the ’15: The Last Flicker of the Kinship Machine

When Viscount Dundee clattered out of Edinburgh in March 1689, he had barely fifty troopers but a fat notebook of clan pledges earned at baptisms, funerals and whisky-soaked ceilidhs. By midsummer he rallied 2,000 men on the braes of Lochaber—MacDonalds of Keppoch, Camerons of Lochiel, MacLeans craving vengeance for losses to Argyle. His appeal was quintessential: “Let each man ride for the honour of his own name, and King James shall profit by it.” At Killiecrankie that July, a single downhill charge of cousin-packed regiments smashed the government line; kinship, not drill, delivered the victory—though Dundee’s death the same hour robbed it of strategic use.

Afterwards, the state learned. Acts of 1695 and 1716 curtailed chiefs’ legal authority and disarmed retainers on pain of treason. Yet the old impulse flickered again in the 1715 Jacobite Rising: the MacDonalds mustered for Seumas a’ Chéile (“James the husband”), while the Campbells flocked to the Hanoverian Argyle whose very surname compelled them. The encounter at Sheriffmuir was therefore less a civil war than a massive cousinly reckoning—proof that even in the age of muskets and parliament, the medieval idea of shared blood still decided Scotland’s battle lines.

Kinship did not make every Scot rebel, but no Scottish rebellion succeeded without kinship. In the clan world a chief could mobilise fighting men faster than any privy council, sustain them longer than any exchequer, and motivate them with something deeper than coin: the notion that when a single member bled, the whole lineage was wounded. The 18th century—roads, standing armies, Clearances—would finally sever that artery. Yet walk a Highland glen at dusk and you may feel its pulse: the echo of iron-shod boots following not a king’s command but the hidden map of ancestry.

Adapted From: Browne, J. (1886). A general history of the Highlands, including the Highlands clans, Highland regiments, and Highlanders. Edinburgh: A. Fullarton & Co.