Posted by Maris on 4th Sep 2023
Montgomery Clan – rich history dating back to the early days of the Scottish clans
Overview of Montgomery Clan
Clan Montgomery, originally from Wales, arrived in Scotland as vassals of the FitzAlans in the 12th century. The first mention of Montgomery land was in Renfrewshire.
Clan Montgomery also controlled the Isle of Arran, and Lord Montgomery III was appointed baillie of Bute and Cunningham. This appointment, however, sparked a dispute with the Cunningham clan that lasted over 200 years. A marriage between the two clans eventually resolved the feud.
The Montgomery clan’s motto is “Garde bien” (Watch well), and the clan crest is a female figure holding a sword and the head of a barbarian.
MONTGOMERY FAMILY’S SCOTTISH HISTORY
Valour worthy of a knight
The initial holders of the great name Montgomery were a prominent family of Norman nobles, who are thought to have received their name from a Roman commander named Gomericus who commanded territory in Gaul, now present-day France.
Gomericus had given his name to the territories in Calvados, Normandy, and the ancestors of today’s Montgomerys had occupied the castle of Saint Foy de Montgomery, in Lisieux, for generations.
The Montgomerys would flourish in following decades in England, Wales, and Scotland, controlling enormous areas of property and receiving a glittering array of honors and titles, thanks to their Normandy heritage.
Roger de Mundegumrie, whose mother was a distant relative of William, Duke of Normandy, accompanied him on his conquest of England in 1066 and was present at the horrific battle of Hastings.
Not alone did this battle-hardened hero receive the territories of Chichester and Arundel, but also the earldom of Arundel.
Not content to rest on his well-deserved laurels, he also led the Norman invasion of Wales, taking Baldwin Castle.
His influence on Wales was so profound that both a Welsh town and county bore his name.
During the reign of Scotland’s David I, who had spent a time of his life at the English Court, from 1124 to 1153, a number of Anglo-Normans were encouraged to settle in Scotland.
Among them was Robert Montgomery, who acquired estate in Eaglesham, Renfrewshire.
More lands and honors would be bestowed upon the Montgomerys over the ages as they played a major role in their new nation’s usually stormy affairs.
It should be noted that the spelling of the name changes between ‘Montgomery’ and ‘Montgomerie,’ however for clarity, the more prevalent version of ‘Montgomery’ is used in this brief historical tale of the family’s colorful lives and times.
Sir John Montgomery, 7th Baron of Eaglesham, was one of the heroes of the fight of Otterburn in Northumberland on August 19, 1388, and was one of the first Montgomerys to appear on Scotland’s roll of battle honours.
The Scots had previously been involved in a skirmish outside the walls of Newcastle when the Scottish commander, James, the 2nd Earl of Douglas, snatched the silk pennant from the lance of his adversary Henry Percy, heir to the 1st Earl of Northumberland and better known to posterity as Henry Hotspur.
Douglas led his troops back towards Scotland, but Hotspur, enraged by the insult to his honor, vowed that his prized banner would never be permitted to cross the border again.
He pursued Douglas, and the two forces battled at Otterburn, where the young earl was killed.
As the Scots army wavered, demoralized by their commander’s fate, the renowned Banner of the Bloody Heart of the Douglases was raised, rallying the Scots to triumph.
The capture of Hotspur by Sir John Montgomery after they had engaged in severe hand-to-hand combat, with an exhausted and blood-splattered Montgomery emerging victorious, proved critical to the triumph.
The epic duel is described in The Ballad of Chevy Chase as the two knights’swiped swords’ and blood gushed from their wounds.
According to the chivalric chivalry of the time, high-ranking prisoners like Hotspur were ransomed for large quantities of money, and the ransom Montgomery obtained for his beaten rival enabled him to build Polnoon Castle at Eaglesham.
He later obtained the baronies of Eglinton and Ardrossan in Ayrshire by a marriage to the heiress of Sir Hugh Eglinton.
Montgomery’s associations with the conservation village of Eaglesham, located on the southern suburbs of Glasgow, are remembered through street names and a local hotel.
Sir John Montgomery of Ardrossan was one of the sons of the Scottish nobles who was carried as a hostage to England in 1424 in order to secure James I’s release from captivity.
James had become a pawn in a power battle between powerful nobles and his father Robert III, resulting in his being taken to the protection of the Bass Rock in the Firth of Forth.
He stayed for almost a month before being picked up by a merchant ship in March 1406 to take him to more secure shelter in France, but the ship was kidnapped by English pirates near Flamborough Head, and the eleven-year-old prince was taken into the hands of England’s Henry V.
Robert III died only a few weeks later, and the young prince became James I of Scotland.
He was not released from custody until the Treaty of London was signed in December 1423, which stipulated that he would be released only for a ransom of £40,000, payable over six years, with twenty-one sons of the Scottish nobility held as hostages until the full amount was paid.
Sir John Montgomery was one of these hostages who gave up his freedom to serve his king.
Sir Alexander Irvine, one of his sons, eventually became a trusted diplomat for the Crown and was recognized for his service by being named Lord Montgomery in 1449.
When a group of powerful nobles rebelled against James III in favor of his son and heir, the future James IV, the Montgomerys became embroiled in a brutal power struggle.
The Montgomerys sided with the young prince and fought against the monarch and his followers at the battle of Sauchieburn, near Stirling, in June 1488; after fleeing the battlefield, a defeated James III was later stabbed to death.
Hugh, the 3rd Lord Montgomery, was rewarded for his loyalty with a grant of Arran, off the coast of Ayrshire, and the custodianship of the island’s Brodick Castle.
Lord Montgomery, who had been created Earl of Eglinton around 1507, was one of the few to escape the terrible slaughter of the battle of Flodden in September 1513, which claimed the lives of 5,000 Scots, including James IV, an archbishop, two bishops, eleven earls, fifteen barons, and 300 knights.
The Scottish monarch had embarked on the journey after Queen Anne of France asked him to ‘break a lance’ on her behalf and act as her chosen knight under the conditions of the Auld Alliance between Scotland and her realm.
Crossing the border into England with a 25,000-strong army that included 7,500 clansmen and their kin, James IV encountered a 20,000-strong force led by the Earl of Surrey – but despite their numerical superiority and bravery, they were no match for Surrey’s skilled English artillery and superior military tactics.
Vendettas and feuds
The Montgomerys served the Scottish Crown and the French Crown, thanks to the Auld Alliance formed by contract between the two nations in 1295.
Later, a Scots Company distinguished themselves in the ranks of the French Army.
In 1425, in honor of the company’s valor in the deadly battle against the English at Verneuil a year before, an elite corps was formed to serve as the French monarch’s permanent bodyguard.
The units were known as the Scots Guard because they were divided into the King’s Guard and Bodyguard.
The distinguished guard comprised the sons of some of Scotland’s most illustrious families, including Montgomery, Hay, Sinclair, Hamilton, Stuart, Seton, Cunningham, and Cockburn. They served as courtiers and ambassadors as well as warriors and bodyguards.
At state events, three guard members would stand on either side of the enthroned French monarch, while guardsmen slept in the royal bedchamber.
Count Gabriel Montgomery, the leader of the Scots Guard in 1559, was 29 years old when he became embroiled in an episode that sent shockwaves throughout Europe in July of that year.
The French emperor Henry II, a devoted jouster, had organized a spectacular tournament to commemorate a peace deal with the Hapsburgs of Austria and the marriage of two of his daughters.
The spectacular tournament in Paris had drawn the crème of European monarchy and a glittering retinue of nobility – and everything had gone swimmingly until Henry insisted on entering the lists himself.
He faced the Duke of Savoy and Francis, Duke of Guise before facing his loyal Captain of the Scots Guard.
Both men successfully clashed and splintered lances against each other’s shields but prepared for another contest in violation of the joust’s customary rules.
However, a shard of wood from Montgomery’s shattered lance penetrated the king’s right eye, penetrating the brain, and he died in agony three days later – but not before exonerating Montgomery.
Montgomery resigned as captain of the Scots Guard, however, and later converted from Catholicism to Protestantism.
On August 24, 1572, hundreds of Protestant Huguenots in Paris and the surrounding countryside were hunted down and massacred by rioting Catholic mobs, which became known as the Massacre of St Bartholomew’s Day.
Montgomery fled by swimming the Seine to England, eventually returning to France as a key Protestant leader in the deadly Wars of Religion.
However, he was betrayed, caught, and executed in 1574.
Hugh, the 3rd Earl of Eglinton, was a staunch supporter of Mary, Queen of Scots, and was one of nine earls, nine bishops, 18 lairds, and others who signed a bond of allegiance.
The queen had been forced to abdicate and imprisoned in Lochleven Castle, but after her escape, her followers regrouped and met her opponents, known as the Confederate Lords, on May 13, 1568, in Langside, south of Glasgow.
Her forces, led by the Earl of Argyll, were on their way to the mighty bastion of Dumbarton Castle, perched atop a near inaccessible eminence on Dumbarton Rock on the Clyde, when they were intercepted by a numerically inferior but tactically superior force led by her half-brother, the Earl of Moray.
Before a party of Argyll’s infantry attempted to force a path through to the village of Langside, they were fired on by a trained corps of musketeers and forced to flee as Moray launched a horse charge on their disordered ranks.
The battle was terrible for Mary and spelled the end of her campaign, with over 100 of her supporters dead or kidnapped and Mary forced to retreat into what she erroneously assumed would be the protection of England’s Queen Elizabeth.
Among those apprehended and imprisoned was the Earl of Eglinton. After being charged with treason, he eventually accepted the authority of Mary’s son and successor, James VI.
A deadly war that had plagued the Montgomerys and their Ayrshire neighbors, the Cunninghams, for more than two centuries reached new heights in the spring of 1586, when the young Hugh, 4th Earl of Eglinton was slain.
His assassination, however, only helped to inflame the hate between the two families, to the point where the vendetta did not finish until 75 years later, in 1661.
In 1448, Sir Alexander Montgomery, Sir Robert Cunningham’s brother-in-law, was controversially appointed bailie of Cunningham, a wealthy sinecure that the Cunninghams had held for some years and claimed rightfully belonged to them.
The bailieship was restored to the Cunninghams ten years later, in 1458, and the enmity between the two families heated up.
In 1488, the Montgomerys destroyed the Cunningham stronghold of Kerelaw Castle, and in 1528, William Cunningham, 4th Earl of Glencairn, destroyed the Montgomery stronghold of Eglinton Castle near Irvine.
Despite several attempts to mediate a peace between the two families, the internecine violence raged on, with Montgomerys and Cunninghams slaughtered in a series of tit-for-tat massacres.
The apparent self-defense killing of a Cunningham by a Montgomery in 1584 set in motion the terrible chain of circumstances that led to the murder of the young Earl of Eglinton two years later.
The Cunninghams had made the decision to extract retribution for the death of their cousin.
Cunningham of Robertland, a young man, was chosen for the assignment and, as a result, formed a close acquaintance with the young Hugh Montgomery, who became earl after his father died in June 1585.
In April 1586, the earl accepted an offer to dine at a residence in the hostile Cunningham territory of Lainshaw at the suggestion of his friend Cunningham of Robertland.
However, when returning from dinner with only a few servants, roughly 60 armed men, including Cunningham of Robertland, ambushed and assassinated him.
The vendetta continued, with countless Montgomerys and Cunninghams killed or fleeing the nation in fear of their lives.
It wasn’t over until William Cunningham, 9th Earl of Glencairn, married Margaret Montgomery, daughter of the 6th Earl of Eglinton, in 1661.
Meanwhile, the custom of medieval tournaments was re-enacted in 1839, when the 13th Earl of Eglinton conducted a famous tournament at the family’s ancestral seat at Eglinton Castle, remembering a magnificent age of chivalry.
The Montgomery chiefs held, in addition to the earldom of Eglinton, the earldom of Winton by marriage, while the family motto is ‘Watch well’ and the crest shows a woman clutching an anchor in her right hand and the head of a savage in her left.