The Mackenzies and Their Plantation of Lewis

chapter 4 The Mackenzies and Their Plantation of Lewis

Introduction

The Macleods of Lewis had, by 1609, seen off three invasions and attempts at plantation by the Fife Adventurers. This had been accomplished only at a great cost to their own number. They continued to be subjected to periodic attacks or ‘raids’ from the levies of the British state.1 Such offensives were now to be orchestrated, however, not by merchants and nobles from distant Fife and the Lowland burghs but by the much closer and equally ruthless Clan Mackenzie. The Mackenzies bought out the rights of the remaining Fife Adventurers, Sir George Hay and Sir James Spens in 1609–1610. This chapter will examine some of the ways in which the Mackenzie plantation differed from the other attempts at settling the lordship of Lewis. The first section will look at the beginnings of the Mackenzie intervention and examine how the Mackenzies sought to con- trol newly acquired Sìol Torcaill lands and the wider area, acting in concert with central authorities. Following sections will look at how the Mackenzies went about consolidating their grip on the area before considering how they then sought to develop the economic potential of their acquisition.

Civility, Plantation, Royal Policy and Clan Mackenzie

The Mackenzies differed from the ‘civil’ Scots-speaking gentlemen of the Lowlands: they spoke Gaelic like the ‘barbarous’ inhabitants in their newly acquired lands and, like their predecessors, the Macleods, organised them- selves along clan or family lines, thus having a ‘tribal’ structure rather than the civic model of societal organisation advocated by Jacobean theorists.2 On a

1 The participants of these ‘raids’ were levied from the ranks of local clans but also included men from the Scottish burghs. The burghs either had to send armed men or else negotiate an exemption by making a cash payment. Marwick (ed.), Extracts from the Records of the Burgh of Glasgow, a.d. 1573–1642, 282–283. rcrbs, ii, 299. Stuart (ed.), Extracts from the Council Register of the Burgh of Aberdeen, vol. ii, 1570–1625, 296.nls, Adv ms 33.1.1, vol. 2, no. 61. 2 For civility in historical discourse see, Lynch & Goodare, eds., The Reign of James vi, 14–15, 208. MacGregor, ‘Civilising Gaelic Scotland: the Scottish Isles and the Stewart Empire,’ 33–34. For the concept of English civility and Ireland see S.G. Ellis, ‘‘Reduceing their wildness…unto Civility’: England and the ‘Celtic Fringe,’ 1415–1625’ in B. Smith (ed.), Ireland and the English

The Mackenzies And Their Plantation Of Lewis 177 sliding scale of civility, while the barbarism of the Macleods seemed clear, the position of the Mackenzies (like the Clan Campbell) may have seemed a little more ambiguous to southern observers. Moreover, an account of the Scottish nobility produced in the later 1590s noted that while the clan chief, Coinneach Òg Mackenzie of Kintail, was clearly a Gaelic-speaking Highlander he was, nevertheless, very ‘politique,’ well-connected and politically astute. He could not simply be dismissed as ‘barbarous’ in the manner many of his neighbours were.3 The clan may have been Gaelic-speaking but all their surviving writings, since the sixteenth century were in Scots and English.4 Members of the Mackenzie clan, such as Alasdair Mackenzie of Achilty, the first Mackenzie chamberlain of Lewis, c. 1611–1638, while Anglophone on the basis of their written output and agents of Jacobean ‘civility’, were prolific in their composition of oral Gaelic poetry.5 Although relatively little of this verse survives, the accomplished and polished nature of the poems that remain is

world in the late middle ages: essays in honour of Robin Frame (Basingstoke, 2009), 176–192, at 185–190. A.H. Williamson, ‘Scotland and the Rise of Civic Culture, 1150–1650,’ in History Compass, 2 (2005), 91–123, at 112. R.A. Mason, ‘Civil society and the Celts: Hector Boece, George Buchanan and the Scottish past,’ in, E.J. Cowan & R.J. Finlay (eds.), Scottish History, the power of the past (Edinburgh, 2002), 95–119. 3 This source, a description written for English consumption by John Colvile around 1600, dismissed Macdonald of Clanranald, and Macdonald of Islay and Kintyre together with Macleod of Lewis (in contrast to Mackenzie) as being ‘barbar’ or barbarian. One of Mackenzie’s most important allies at this time was the influential Alexander Seton, Lord Fyvie (later Earl of Dunfermline and chancellor of Scotland), who had sold Pluscardine to Mackenzie in 1595 and whose daughter, Margaret Seton, would later marry Cailean, Mackenzie’s heir. The importance of this connection was recognised by Mackenzie’s contemporaries in the Highlands. Laing (ed.), The Original Letters of Mr John Colvile, 1582–1603, 351–352. M. Lee jun., ‘Seton, Alexander, first earl of Dunfermline (1556–1622)’, odnb, entry no. 25113. MacCoinnich, ‘Tùs gu Iarlachd’, 224. Highland Papers, ii, 271–272. 4 A. MacCoinnich, ‘Where was Gaelic written in late medieval and early modern Scotland?’ 319–321. 5 Upwards of twenty five Gaelic poems, whose composers are known, survive by or relating to the Mackenzie clan from the seventeenth century. This was partially due to the efforts of Donnchadh MacRath, 1689–93, who transcribed a number of poems of this nature in the Fernaig Manuscript(s) and also due to the survival of such poems in the oral tradition through into the nineteenth century when many of them were first transcribed. This number could be revised upwards if the output of MacRath himself, a number of poems by unknown poets, and the ‘rannscéal’ type of couplets or quatrains embedded in various English language histories related to the clan were added. This is indicative of a much larger, lost, corpus of Gaelic oral verse from the seventeenth century. C. Ó Baoill & D. MacAulay, Scottish vernacular verse to 1730. A checklist (Revised edition, Aberdeen University, Department of Celtic, 2001).