Mackintosh

The word ‘toiseach’, meaning ‘leader’ can also be translated as ‘chief’ or ‘captain’. According to the Mackintosh seanachies, the first chief was Shaw, second son of Duncan Macduff, Earl of Fife of the royal house of Dalriada. Shaw Macduff accompanied Malcolm IV on an expedition in 1160 to suppress rebellion in Morayshire. He was made constable of Inverness Castle around 1163, and granted land in the Findhorn valley. The lands of Petty were to become the heartland of the clan and the burial place of the chiefs. His son, Shaw, the second chief, succeeded him in 1179, and was confirmed in his patrimony by William the Lion. Ferquhar, the fifth chief, led his clan against the army of King Haakon of Norway at the Battle of Largs in 1263. He was killed in a duel in 1265, leaving his infant son, Angus, as heir. Angus was brought up at the court of his uncle, Alexander of Islay, the Lord of the Isles. A splendid match was arranged for him in 1291, when he married Eva, the only daughter of Dougal Dal, chief of Clan Chattan in Lochaber. Eva brought with her the lands of Glenloy and Loch Arkaig. Angus and Eva lived on Clan Chattan lands at Torcastle, later withdrawing from Lochaber taking up residence at Rothiemurchus. Thereafter the Clan Chattan, which developed into a confederation of what were later to become independent clans, was led by the Mackintosh chiefs, although their right to do so was unsuccessfully challenged by the Macphersons over the centuries. Mackintosh and Clan Chattan history is thus inextricably entwined.

The sixth chief supported Robert the Bruce during the War of Independence. Ferquhar, the ninth chief, was induced to surrender the chiefship, in his own right and for those of his successors, in favour of Malcolm, the son by a second marriage of William, the seventh chief. He was a strong leader who greatly extended the influence of the clan. His lands stretched from Petty far into Lochaber. His continuing feud with the Comyns had its origin a century before when they had warred against Robert the Bruce. In 1424, the Comyns forcibly took possession of the Mackintosh lands at Meikle Geddes and Rait. Malcolm Mackintosh retaliated by surprising some leading Comyns at Nairn and putting them to the sword. The Comyns then invaded the Mackintosh homeland of Moy and tried, unsuccessfully, to drown the Mackintoshes in their fastness on the island of Moy.

The feud was to have been ended at a feast of reconciliation in the Comyn’s castle at Rait. However, a Comyn lad was in love with a Mackintosh and disclosed to her that the bringing in of a black bull’s head to the feast was to be a signal for the hosts to massacre their guests. On the appearance of the bull’s head, it was the Comyns who were surprised by the ferocity of their forewarned guests’ assault, and as a result it was they who were slaughtered.The Mackintoshes were now well-established at Moy and dominated the south-eastern approaches to Inverness.

The Mackintoshes fought for Montrose throughout his campaigns in support of Charles I. They remained loyal to the Stuarts in 1715, and Lachlan Mackintosh led eight hundred clansmen to swell the Jacobite ranks under the command of his cousin, Brigadier William Mackintosh of Borlum. They were defeated at the Battle of Preston and many clansmen were transportated to the Americas. Angus, twenty-second chief of the Mackintoshes, was a captain in the Black Watch Regiment when Prince Charles Edward Stuart landed in Scotland in 1745. In the absence of her husband, the chief’s wife, Lady Anne, daughter of Farquharson of Invercauld, raised men for the prince. Command was given to MacGillivray of Dunmaglas. They contributed to the prince’s victory at Falkirk, following which he arrived at Moy on 16 February 1746 to be received by Lady Mackintosh. The prince’s bed is still in the modern Moy Hall. An attempt was made by a force of fifteen hundred Government troops to capture the prince at Moy, but they were deceived by five of Lady Anne’s retainers into believing that they had blundered into the midst of the entire Jacobite army, and they fled. The incident was known thereafter as ‘the Rout of Moy’, and the chief’s wife nicknamed ‘Colonel Anne’. The Mackintoshes and their Clan Chattan allies suffered badly at Culloden.

On the death of the twenty-eighth chief in 1938, the title passed to his cousin, Vice Admiral Lachlan Mackintosh of Mackintosh. In a complicated decision by the Lyon Court in 1942, the leadership of Clan Chattan passed to Mackintosh of Torcastle. The Admiral died in 1957 with the new and more convenient Moy Hall replacing the vast Victorian baronial mansion, still uncompleted. He was succeeded as Mackintosh chief by his son, Lachlan, Lord Lieutenant of Lochaber, Inverness, Badenoch and Strathspey. Following his death in 1995, Lachlan was succeeded in turn by his son, John.