Clan Robertson - Myth Makers Scotland's Clans

Edinburgh Castle, November, 1715,

just a few days after the Battle of Sherriffmuir,

a bloody encounter that left 600 Jacobite rebels dead.

Charged with treason, many survivors were now prisoners in the Castle.

On his way to join them was one of the most notorious Jacobites of all time.

He was about to receive a visitor.

In disguise, and using an assumed name, a woman made her way to the guardhouse.

In one hand she carried a purse of gold

and in the other a flagon of claret. Her mission?

To affect the escape of her brother.

In an episode that reads more like farce than history,

she got the guard so drunk that her brother,

Alexander Struan Robertson,

the 13th Chief of Clan Donnachaidh, made his escape.

In this series I'm going on a personal journey to reveal

the extraordinary stories behind the great clan names of Scotland.

For centuries, clans have blended myth and reality to proclaim their greatness,

and none more so than Clan Robertson.

The Robertsons are also known as Clan Donnachaidh

and these are their ancestral lands.

A beautiful country steeped in legend and folklore

where Robertson Chiefs have traditionally taken their title from a place called Struan,

which means in Gaelic, the meeting of streams.

Alexander Robertson of Struan,

the last and perhaps the greatest of all the old Robertson Chiefs

was born here in 1670.

A legend in his own lifetime, this poet, misogynist and celebrated drinker

was the only man to have fought in the three great Jacobite Rebellions

of the 17th and 18th centuries.

He was quite an intellectual figure.

He wrote poetry, some of which was extreme religious verse,

others were totally erotic verse.

He was very partial, particularly in writing the latter poetry,

to be fairly well charged with drink at the time,

he was a notorious social or severely social drinker,

and in current day parlance he really was a Scottish head banger.

Alexander Robertson modelled himself on the chiefs of old.

As a self styled keeper of the Jacobite flame,

upholding ancient Highland values

based on honour and ancestry,

he lived in an appropriately remote setting,

a place without roads, isolated from the rest of the world.

On the hill behind me is the site of Dunalastair,

Mount Alexander, the great villa that Alexander Robertson of Struan designed and built for himself.

This was his hideaway, this was his hermitage,

a place where he could let his imagination run riot,

a place that inspired him to verse.

Expand thy gates thou blessed abode,

thy long neglected cells repair,

confess the bounteous care of God,

our streabhon breathes his native air.

Today there is nothing left of Dunalastair, the home that Alexander celebrated in verse.

In the now overgrown gardens, I met up with James Irvine Robertson,

who's written about the man who became known as the Poet Chief.

So James we've come just about as close as it's possible to get to the original site of Dunalastair,

the hermitage that meant such a lot to Alexander Robertson of Struan.

It was a place that really inspired him, was it not?

He certainly wrote poems about it, and he wrote a poem when he left it

regretting it, mourning it's loss and wrote another poem when he came back,

an exultant poem with all these birds and his beasts, and his insects

and his friends all round him again,

so I think it meant a huge amount to him, this is where his heart certainly was.

He was interested in nature but of course he was more than that,

he was a larger than life character, was he not?

Very much so, and he was also a very convivial man,

he was great company and people travelled a long way

in order to come here and enjoy his drink, and his company.

The only thing they couldn't enjoy here was women.

He actually put a sign just down the road here,

in the front of his... on the gates of his house,

forbidding women to enter.

Being him, he made it a little poem, but women never came here

so it was very much a bachelor establishment,

fuelled by lots and lots of brandy

and good conversation, and a lot of humour.

As a chief steeped in Highland tradition,

Alexander understood the importance of ancestry to the status and reputation of the clan.

To boost the prestige of the Robertsons, he embarked on a project that glorified their past.

In so doing he re-wrote the history of the clan.

I've come to Blair Castle in the heart of Robertson country

where men from the clan are among the ranks of the Atholl Highlanders.

This ceremonial army is a modern reminder of the fighting traditions that were first celebrated

in a near mythical document setting out the ancient lineage of the clan.

The earliest written account of Clan Donnachaidh is known as the Red Book.

Unfortunately the only copy was burned in a fire back in the 1600's.

Now Alexander Robertson of Struan

did his best to have the history re-written

and commissioned his great, great Uncle John to write it from memory.

Uncle John's imaginative version of Robertson history

aggrandised the clan with tall tales of heroic ancestors.

Genealogy is fundamentally important to clan historians

cos in a way what genealogy does is root you somewhere

that you want to be rooted,

and they have no compunction about making it up.

Unlike, you know, genealogy today

is the finding out where you individually came from,

this is about placing a family there and saying to the world,

we've always been here and that's our credentials to still be here.

Alexander's Red Book mythologises the past

with accounts of heroic ancestors.

Through their noble deeds the clan lay claim to its territory.

According to the Red Book the first hero Chief was Duncan or Donnachaidh in Gaelic.

Duncan not only gave his name to Clan Donnachaidh,

he also found the beautiful and mysterious Clach na Bratach.

Today this heirloom of the Chiefs, an ancient quartz crystal ball

is in the Clan Museum where I met Ron Greer.

So, Ron, this must be the famous Clach na Bratach.

It is indeed the famous Clach na Bratach.

A crystal ball, it's a pure crystal ball found,

on the eve of one of the many battles between clan Donnachaidh

and their inveterate enemies the Clan McDougall,

and legend has it that Duncan the Stout put his flag pole...

the Bratach, the Clach na Bratach means the stone of the flag pole,

so he put his clan banner pole in the ground

and when he retrieved the banner pole the following morning,

lo and behold here was the rock crystal,

the crystal ball lying there in the turf

and this was the, the wee magic stane of Clan Donnachaidh

and to have such a remarkable discovery of this magical stone

was considered a great portent of good for the clan

and 400 years the clan prospered after Duncan the Stout found this on the eve of the battle,

so quite a magical event altogether.

So you're talking about magic, but this is Christian Scotland,

is that not just a wee bit of a contradiction?

Yes, well although the Highland Society was nominally Christian

at the time, they're much older pagan traditions had still carried on,

you know, the pagan mentality hadn't died out, so the Stone and the Chief went together,

and the power of the Chief and the stone, was considered important for healing.

The Chief would hold the, the stone in his hand, he would put it into a bowl of water

and that water was used for healing sick people and indeed sick animals,

so it's the magic of the stone and the magic of the Chief,

it's all intertwined in that tradition.

When Alexander consulted the stone before the Jacobite Rebellion of 1715, the omens were bad.

A deep crack had appeared,

but centuries earlier, luck had been on the side of his ancestors

when they threw their support behind Robert the Bruce.

Tradition tells of how the clan sheltered the would-be King

in their Highland fastness, and fought off his English pursuers.

According to legend, somewhere down there in the murky depths

is the drowned battlefield of Dalchosnie

where the men of Clan Donnachaidh notched up a surprising victory against the English.

Now the English had come in pursuit of Robert the Bruce

and were stopped by the clan and for a while it looked as if victory would go to the English,

until the women of Clan Donnachaidh charged.

They filled up their stockings with heavy stones,

wielded them like clubs and smashed the heads of their enemies.

If the connection with Robert the Bruce claimed by Alexander,

is suspect or even imaginary, then their role in the fate of another King is more tangible

and gave Clan Donnachaidh the name we know them by today.

It was Christmas time, 1437 and King James I of Scotland, his Queen,

their baby son and the rest of the Royal household

was staying at the Dominican Priory here in Perth.

The sight of the Royal residence has long gone,

and is now covered by the modern city,

but it was here that King James, who had many political enemies,

indulged his passion for tennis,

an innocent pastime with fatal consequences.

James, although he was very portly by this point,

did still like his game of tennis

and he used to get very annoyed because the balls kept rolling down into the cellar

so he ordered it to be blocked up.

By blocking up the cellar,

which in turn was connected to a system of underground drains,

the King unwittingly signed his own death warrant when unwelcome visitors came to call.

Late one evening a group of assassins broke into the Royal Apartments.

Now the women of the household were able to bar the door

just long enough for the King to make his escape through a hatchway

in the floor that led to the drain.

Now unfortunately because the drain had been blocked,

his pursuers trapped him there and hacked him to death.

The King's assassins fled north.

According to tradition, Alexander's ancestor the Chief Robert Riabhach hunted them down.

As a reward, Robert Riabhach was given charters to a huge territory,

and a coat of arms symbolising his role in avenging the Crown.

And in his honour, his heirs took the name Robertson,

the name the clan has been known by ever since.

The clan was now at the peak of its power and influence,

but Robert's successors squandered his legacy.

By the end of the 17th century

the Robertson's of Struan no longer controlled the lands they once occupied.

In 1689, Alexander Robertson became the 13th Chief.

At the time he was a student at St Andrews

and was acutely aware of his clan's noble ancestry.

Motivated by romantic ideals and a sense of Highland honour,

Alexander set out to restore glory to his clan.

He saw himself as representing a heroic tradition,

a Scottish tradition and a tradition of loyalty, resistance and struggle.

Alexander got the chance to prove himself in 1688

when Parliament deposed the Stuart King, James VII

because of his Catholicism and replaced him with his son-in-law,

the Protestant Dutch King William of Orange.

This triggered a civil war between the supporters of James,

the Jacobites and the Government.

Alexander was an impressionable 18-year-old student here at St Andrews University

when rebellion broke out.

Now it's perhaps ironic for a man whose later reputation was founded

on all kinds of excess, but he was at the time a student of divinity.

Now perhaps this explains his instinct for knowing

which was the side of God and the angels.

The teenage chief hurried to join the Jacobite Rebellion,

but the Rising's inspirational leader was killed at the Battle of Killiecrankie in 1689.

In the messy aftermath,

Alexander was captured and held in Edinburgh Castle, but not for long.

His charm was such

that the Duke of Argyll

who was obviously the very important on the Government side,

was charmed by Alexander.

The Duke of Hamilton was charmed by young Alexander.

They released him.

"You will be good in future, won't you?". "Of course I will."

You will be good in future and from there he just got on a ship and sailed straight to France

and joined the Court of the exiled King James.

As a patriotic exile,

Alexander continued his war against the Government,

but in the absence of actual hostilities,

he turned his mind and his pen to making verbal assaults

against King William of Orange.

Poetry was his weapon, imagination his ammunition.

Sarah Kirkton has studied Alexander's work.

I met her at the National Library in Edinburgh,

where she showed me how his body and sometimes obscene verse

compared the exiled Stuart King James

with the less than virile William of Orange.

"William, the other un-performing puny prig

"could only with his page retire and frig."

-Now this was common gossip.

-Right.

That William was more interested in the boys than the girls and that's why he didn't produce an heir.

There's another poem here which is more explicit still.

"This is an ode inscribed to King... W...

"To King William and Alexis lay with Corydon."

Alexis is a boy, Corydon is the name he gives to King William.

"So these two lie under, in the oak grove,

"getting down to business and they very definitely do."

"They were tuning their pipes and then playing them good and hard."

The satire continues with similar robust imagery,

and impugns the sexuality of William's Queen, Mary.

It seems that what Alexander is saying is that the whole regime, the whole William and Mary regime

is corrupt and rotten to the core,

because somehow it's upset the natural order of things.

Yes, the whole thing is going to hell in a hand cart.

He's lying with boys, she's lying with girls.

This is not what you expect from your ruler.

But there's, there is an obviously irony here though Sarah, because Alexander is attacking William

because he can't product an heir,

but Alexander himself doesn't produce an heir.

Yes. The whole logic of clanship

is this ancestor worship.

You worship your ancestors and their blood is in you,

therefore they are in you, so those great marshall,

virile, protective qualities you worship in your ancestors are in you,

and you reproduce and pass them on to your child,

so in not doing that,

you betray the heart of clanship and its values.

Perhaps Alexander's vitriol against William was fuelled

by a sense of personal failure in not producing his own heir.

In Alexander's eyes they had both betrayed their ancestors.

When the childless King William died, the Crown passed to Queen Anne.

She was the daughter of the exiled Stuart King

and was keen to pardon many of the rebels who'd supported her father.

After 13 years in exile, Alexander Robertson came home.

The remote setting of Dunalastair not only inspired Alexander's mind

to poetry, it was also an ideal place to entertain friends and fellow Jacobites.

Here he plied them with prodigious amounts of alcohol.

Struan drank exceptionally heavily.

Everybody who visited him agreed with that, and he would often drink one

sort of spirits, brandy for breakfast and whisky for lunch.

The story goes that he had a bed in the corner of his room

in which he was wont to spend the morning after

his breakfast imbibings, let alone that of the night before.

If drink fuelled Alexander's Jacobite fervour,

it also fuelled his hope of a Stuart succession through Queen Anne,

but none of Anne's 17 children survived

and she died without an heir.

When the Government chose the German, George of Hanover as the next monarch,

there was a wave of outrage in the Highlands,

culminating in the second major Jacobite rebellion.

The decisive battle of the rebellion

took place up in the wilds of Sheriffmuir

on the 18th of November, 1715.

Alexander Robertson of Struan was on the field that day

leading 500 men of Clan Donnachaidh,

making the Robertson's one of the biggest contingents of the Jacobite Army.

Now they took up positions on the left wing.

There were 7,000 Jacobites on the field

facing a much smaller force of just over 3,000 Government troops,

but the chance for a decisive victory for the supporters of the Stuart Kings was squandered.

Today much of the battlefield is covered by dense forestry

making it difficult to picture the conflict that took place here.

To avoid the mud and the rain,

I met battlefield archaeologist Tony Pollard at a local hostelry.

In 2004, Tony led the only archaeological excavation

to have been carried out on the battlefield site.

Now Tony, as an archaeologist you found some bits and pieces

left over from the battle. What, what have we got here?

Yes, we did some work here quite quite recently

and what we discovered for the first time is exactly where the armies were.

There's been a lot of controversy about where they'd lined up,

and for the first time we managed to do that

by doing the archaeological survey and we found quite a lot of musket balls

and, as you can see, they come, variety of sizes.

-This small one here is probably a pistol ball.

-Right.

I think probably given its size, fired from a Jacobite pistol.

It's quite heavy still, nonetheless.

They, they are, even, despite its size it would, it would not pay to be hit by it,

but as you can see some of them are somewhat larger.

-Yes.

-This, this is probably from a Jacobite musket cos it's a French calibre

and a lot of the Jacobites were using French weaponry.

-These as you can see are slightly larger and these are probably fired from Government muskets.

-Right.

And they've all got little indentations

and we don't know whether these killed men or missed them.

But they are a very visceral reminder of what happened here in 1715.

Now I understand that Alexander Robertson of Struan had a narrow escape as well, did he not?

He did indeed. The Robertson's were in the second line of the Jacobite position

and he finds himself advanced of his men so his guys,

his guys are behind him, his clan's behind him and he's out in the open exposed,

and it's not an unusual circumstance from Jacobite warfare, there are numerous stories of this,

to some degree due to impetuous officers,

so he might have been somewhat over keen,

and what happens is that a Government Dragoon on his horse comes along and captures him

and insists that Robertson hand him his purse, which he is just about to do,

but then his men realise that he's in trouble and rush back up, and grab him back and rescue him

just before he can hand over the purse and the, the Dragoon is somewhat aggrieved at this,

at being robbed of his booty, and shouts back,

"That purse is rightly mine"

and for some reason Robertson seems to have had a rather old fashioned sense of honour

and agreed with him and after the battle he finds out the guy,

I don't know how he did this, but finds his address in Carlisle and posts him the purse.

Because he did feel it was his by rights, so it's one of those strange little stories

which has probably been added to over time,

but it does give some flavour of the complicated issue here,

it's not a straightforward war and it's not a straightforward battle.

For Alexander, the dream of a Stuart restoration evaporated in the confusion of battle,

which left the Jacobites unable to press home their tactical advantage.

Aged 45, he returned to French exile,

but he never lost faith with the cause

and continued to lambaste the Government with his poems.

But in 1725, George II came to the throne.

To make peace with the Jacobites the new King offered them a pardon.

Now in his mid 50's, this was Alexander's chance to come home.

The Hanoverian Dynasty had only come in in 1714.

As a new Dynasty they sought to try and gain greater acceptance,

so therefore they were prepared to be lenient in their treatment of the Jacobites.

Robertson of Struan was one of the Chiefs who was prepared

to take the Government at its face value.

Whatever they might have felt in their heart,

whatever they might have felt their allegiances should have been,

the reality was that the Hanoverian Government was well and truly in charge.

They had to bend with the wind.

The Government may have had the upper hand,

but Alexander could still charm the toughest characters.

The Hanoverian Government's strong man in Scotland was General Wade,

the scourge of Highland Jacobites everywhere.

It was through the person of this formidable soldier

that Alexander hoped to receive his pardon.

Wade had been sent north to subdue the clans.

His strategy involved the construction of a network of roads and bridges

to enable Government troops swift access to rebel country.

But despite his hostile mission,

Wade seems to have been well regarded by many of his former enemies.

Wade I think is one of the great heroes of Scottish Highland history.

He was a man of huge charm, a very big man,

and what was most important among the chiefs at the time,

he could drink as much claret as they could.

Alexander was due to meet Wade in person to receive his Royal Pardon,

but on the way he met a company of friends.

A party ensued at which a few drinks were taken.

The revelries lasted for a whole week.

When Alexander continued his journey and eventually met Wade,

the General, quite understandably,

asked how he could have been so careless on a matter of such importance.

The story goes that Alexander's disarmingly polite answer won the General over.

He said, "I felt my Pardon was as safe in your hands as it would have been in mine."

Alexander may have been friends with the General,

but he still harboured Jacobite loyalties

and continued to plot the return of the exiled Stuart Kings.

In 1745, the dream promised to become reality

when Prince Charles Edward Stuart landed in Scotland and started a rebellion.

This was the moment that Alexander Robertson of Struan had been waiting for all his adult life.

Although he was now in his 76th year, he raised the clan and hurried to meet the Prince.

The aged Chief followed the Jacobite Army on its victorious progress to Edinburgh

and later watched as their infamous Highland charge

routed General Copes' Government troops at the Battle of Prestonpans.

But it was all too much for Alexander.

The infirmities of age and the complications of alcohol forced him to retire.

With characteristic flamboyance

he journeyed home in the captured carriage of the enemy General himself.

Wrapped in General Copes' wolf-skin coat

and fortified with a barrel of brandy,

the carriage took Alexander as far as Tummel Bridge where the road ended.

Alexander then ordered his men to remove the wheels

so that the carriage and its occupant could be carried along the tracks

and bridle ways that led home to Dunalastair.

But any thoughts of victory were short lived.

In April 1746, news reached Alexander

that the Jacobite Army had been destroyed at Culloden.

Not long after this brutal and crushing defeat, Government troops appeared at Dunalastair.

Alexander fled, as flames engulfed his home.

Alexander was now an exile in his own lands.

Far from the company he loved,

he eked out his days in a small cottage on the edge of Rannoch Moor.

He continued to write. He also continued to drink,

but now his alcoholism dismayed the few visitors

that made it through the desolate country to meet him.

The end for Alexander came one night in April, 1749.

He was in his 80th year.

The last in the line of the old chiefs,

he'd set out to restore glory to his clan and had become a legend in his own life time.

No other Jacobite Officer was out in three Risings over a period of 56 years,

and none of them managed to fundamentally live completely at odds with the law

and the State, on their own estates for the decades that Struan managed it.

He was a phenomenal and extraordinary character.

2,000 men of Clan Donnachaidh followed Alexander's coffin

as it was carried the 15 miles here to the churchyard of Struan.

Incredibly for such a monumental character, Alexander's last resting place has been lost.

All we know is that his body lies somewhere beneath these cold sods of earth.

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