The Barony of Braemar

THE BARONY OF BRAEMAR The Baronage Press Three Pictures by Sutton Palmer a Hundred Years Ago In the highlands, in the country places, Where the old plain men have rosy faces, And the young fair maidens Quiet eyes. Where essential silence cheers and blesses, And for ever in the hill-recesses Her more lovely music Broods and dies. Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) who wrote his first novel Treasure Island in 1881 at Braemar The Old Mar Bridge looking towards Lochnagar Balmoral looking towards Braemar The Barony of Braemar MAR IS AMONG THE OLDEST NAMES in Great Britain, dating certainly from the ninth century, and perhaps from earlier. As one of the seven provinces of the Pictish kingdom of “transmarine Scotland” (known as Alban, the land north of the Firths of Forth and Clyde), it was governed by a Mormaer, later to be called an Earl, and included what was to become known as Buchan. (Originally, all the seven mormaerships included two districts.) The district of Mar itself, without Buchan, stretched from the Braes of Mar in the west to the city of Aberdeen on the east coast, and from the Braes of Angus (another of the seven provinces) in the south to the River Don in the north. The Earliest Days The principal physical features of Mar, the two great salmon rivers of Don and Dee, and the Grampian Mountains that separate them in the western half of the earldom, have throughout history been of great strategic import. The Romans noted the land’s hostility to invaders in the first and second centuries, and the unidentified site of the great battle of Mons Graupius in A.D. 84 was probably fought close by (Mons Graupius being believed by some to be Mons Grampius). Tacitus reported that the Picts and their allies lost ten thousand dead, while the Roman dead numbered 360. This may well explain why, when the Romans returned in A.D. 138, they appear to have forded the junction of the Clunie and the Dee at Braemar without opposition. Archaeological evidence shows that throughout the first millenium the population on Deeside steadily grew, and we can assume that the little village of Auchendryne (the land of thorns) at Braemar, where the Dee could be forded, expanded with it. Its importance as a key military post in the control of the mountain passes (Glenshee to the south, Lairig Ghru and Lairig an Laoigh to the north, and Glen Tilt and Glen Feshie to the west) was empha- sised in 1040 when Malcolm III Canmore, after attacking Macbeth, the mur- derer (according to Shakespeare) of his father Duncan I, pursued him from Dunsinane. Macbeth fled east and then turned north, hoping to reach the base of his principal strength at Forres on the Moray coast, but Malcolm first sped north, through the more difficult country to Braemar, collected rein- forcements there, and then turned his army eastward, down the Dee, to inter- cept his quarry and kill him at Lumphanan. - 1 - Perhaps this endeared him to Braemar, for in later years he brought here his Queen, Saint Margaret, in the summer months, and here he built the first major fortification at Kindrochit to command the converging passes and the ford of the Dee. The little hamlet of Castleton was built in the shadow of the castle and many centuries later it was united with the village of Auchendryne to form modern Braemar. Here, too, he founded the Highland Games, con- tests of physical strength, endurance and military skills, from whose contes- tants he selected the strongest and fittest for his army. These, of course, are the principal reason for Braemar’s international fame today, and they still enjoy royal patronage. There are two legacies of Queen Margaret’s visits here. First is that the Episcopal Church in Braemar is dedicated to her (and the Roman Catholic Church of Saint Andrew features her in a stained glass window). The second may be seen in the Bodleian Library in Oxford. This is her Bible, known as the “Magic Bible”, which was accidentally dropped by a servant into the Dee, and, when recovered with its golden binding, inlaid jewels and illuminated pages intact, miraculously had only four leaves slightly damp. There had been an earlier fortification, in the eighth century, built of timber by the Pictish King Hungus MacFergus, and named Doldencha. This was situated close to where Braemar Castle now stands, but there is no trace of it today. Two centuries later Kenneth II, great-grandfather of Macbeth’s victim Duncan, came to hunt, leaving his name on the small rocky rise just outside the village, Creag Choinnich, Kenneth’s Hill, and this appears to have begun the royal interest in Deeside as a much-loved recreational area. The Later Middle Ages The War of Independence brought problems to Mar. English armies based on Aberdeen’s seaport ravaged the country, and when in his darkest hours Robert Bruce sent his womenfolk here for safety they were caught at Kil- drummie and subsequently endured the terrible cruelty of King Edward I. Among them was Christian, the widowed Countess of Mar, sister of Robert Bruce. Thirty years later, in 1336, Edward’s grandson, King Edward III, passed through Braemar with his army on the way north to Moray, and then returned to rape, pillage and burn everything on their march. The Earl of Mar at that time was the six-year-old Thomas (the Earls of Mar in the direct line would have no surname for another hundred years). He - 2 - traced his ancestry back through eight generations to Roderick, Mormaer of Mar, who died in 1114. When in 1374 Thomas died without children his young sister Margaret inherited the earldom, her husband William, 1st Earl of Douglas (son of Sir James Douglas, the famous brother-in-arms of Robert Bruce), thereafter describing himself as Earl of Douglas and Mar. After his death she married Sir John Swinton of Swinton, but had no children other than the daughter from her first marriage, Isabel, who inherited the title. Isabel’s first marriage to Sir Malcom Drummond of Strathurd ended with his murder, while a prisoner, by Alexander Stewart, illegitimate son of Alexander Stewart, Earl of Buchan, son of Robert II. This was the first step in a conspiracy which led to him kidnapping her, imprisoning her in her own castle of Kildrummie, and forcing her to grant him her earldom in return for him marrying her, not an honour she sought. He outlived her twenty-seven years, dying without legitimate issue in 1435, but although her cousin and lawful heir, the first of the Erskine Earls of Mar, succeeded to the dignity and administered the estates, the Crown would not acknowledge him (the King being then a minor and those about him playing politics for personal advantage). The Crown Holds Mar Subsequently, some twenty years later, King James II granted the Earldom to his youngest son, Lord John Stewart, and when he died his eldest brother, then King James III, granted the Mar estates, and possibly the title also, to Thomas Cochrane, a favourite who had fomented much trouble between the King and his three brothers. (Modern historians believe he did not become the Earl and he is not numbered as an Earl of Mar.) Cochrane, having offen- ded several peers by his presumptious conduct, ended his life on the end of a rope, hanging, with six other unpopular royal favourites, from the bridge at Lauder, in the sight of the impotent King. The next Earl of Mar was the King’s eldest brother, Alexander Stewart, Duke of Albany, but he was forfeited a few months later, and then the King granted the Earldom to his youngest son, Lord John Stewart. When he died unmarried in 1503 there was a gap of nearly sixty years before the Earldom was granted again. During this time the revenues of Mar were collected by the Crown, and the rightful Earls, the Erskines, received nothing, but with the return of Mary Queen of Scots from France they had a chance to plead their case. Mary’s illegitimate half-brother, James Stewart, Earl of Moray, - 3 - held the Earldom for a few months before resigning it, and in 1565 Mary restored to John, Lord Erskine, all the lands and titles the Crown had wrong- fully taken and still retained. The Rise of the Erskines The restored Earl of Mar, the eighteenth to hold the title, turned against the Queen, committed her to her imprisonment in Lochleven Castle, and became Regent for her infant son, James VI. But, curiously, he is best remembered by genealogists for his restoration to the ancient title, for three centuries later English peers sitting in the Committee for Privileges in the House of Lords decided that the restoration was in fact the creation of a new title, and on that basis the title and lands were diverted from the rightful Earl to an unscrupu- lous cousin, to the disgust of an incredulous Scottish public and the fury of Scottish peers. (This scandal is outside the scope of this article, but it may be noted that after a period of ten years of intermittent argument, and the intervention of Queen Victoria, the Act passed in 1885 to reverse the ruling still held that while Queen Mary had restored the original Earldom she had at the same time also created a new one!) The Regent’s only son, John, the 19th Earl, was very active in the reli- gious politics of the period and completed the recovery of the Mar lands sold by the Crown.

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