The History
From a charter
to a diaspora
Eight and a half centuries of Ogilvys: sheriffs of Angus, treasurers of Scotland, builders and burners and rebuilders of castles, Jacobite officers, martyrs and emigrants. This is the long line, in order.
I — Origins
The barony of Ogilvie
Somewhere around 1163, King William the Lion granted the lands of Ogilvie, in the parish of Glamis, to Gilbert — a son of Gillebride, Earl of Angus. Gilbert did what Scottish lords of that century did: he took the name of the land, and made it a family.
The place-name itself is older than the family by a long way. It is usually read from early Brittonic elements meaning roughly high plain — a fair description of the fertile shelf of Angus that runs from Glamis toward the foot of the Grampians. The spelling wandered for centuries: Ogilvie, Ogilvy, Ogilby, Ogilbe, Ogilvey. All of them are the same ground and the same people.
What followed was not a dramatic rise but a patient one. The Ogilvys married well, held office, and accumulated land across Angus — Auchterhouse, Lintrathen, Airlie, Inverquharity, Clova, Isla. By the fourteenth century they were hereditary Sheriffs of Angus, which in practice meant they were the king’s hand in one of the most contested corners of lowland Scotland.
II — Sword and Office
Three fields, three generations
Holding the sheriffdom of Angus meant standing where the Highlands met the lowlands, and the family paid for the privilege in an almost rhythmic way — roughly once a generation, on a battlefield.
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1392 — Glasclune
Sir Walter Ogilvy, Sheriff of Angus
A raiding party of Highland caterans came down into Angus. Sir Walter took the field against them near Glasclune with a much smaller force and was killed, along with his brother and some sixty of his men. The clan remembered it as a defeat that was also a refusal to stand aside.
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1411 — Harlaw
Sir Alexander Ogilvy of Auchterhouse
At the Battle of Harlaw, the bloodiest engagement of its age in Scotland, the Sheriff of Angus fell with much of the lowland nobility fighting the Lord of the Isles. “Red Harlaw” cost the Ogilvys their head of house again.
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1446 — Arbroath
The feud with the Lindsays
A dispute over the bailiary of Arbroath Abbey turned into a pitched battle between Ogilvys and Lindsays at the abbey gates. Sir Walter Ogilvy of Carcary and some five hundred men were killed. It was one of the last great private battles fought in Scotland, and it ended the family’s long dominance of the sheriffdom.
III — Airlie
The treasurer who built a castle
Sir Walter Ogilvy of Lintrathen served as Lord High Treasurer of Scotland under James I. In 1432 he raised a castle on a spit of rock where the Melgam river runs into the Isla — water on three sides, a wall across the fourth.
Airlie was not a comfortable house. It was a statement: the Ogilvys intended to hold Angus, and they intended to hold it permanently. The line prospered. In 1491 Sir James Ogilvy was created Lord Ogilvy of Airlie in the peerage of Scotland, and in 1639 Charles I raised James, the 8th Lord, to the Earldom of Airlie.
That last honour arrived at precisely the wrong moment. Within a year the king’s wars would reach Angus, and the new earl’s loyalty would cost him his house.
IV — The Burning
The Bonnie House o’ Airlie
In 1640, with the Earl of Airlie away in the king’s service, Archibald Campbell, 8th Earl of Argyll, came into Angus with a Covenanting force and destroyed the castle of Airlie and the Ogilvy house at Forter in Glen Isla.
The event was remembered less in the records than in song. The Bonnie House o’ Airlie became one of the most widely sung of all Scots ballads — a lament for a burned house and a countess left to face an army. Its details are, as ballads go, freely arranged; its grip on the Ogilvy imagination has never loosened.
The family stayed with Montrose through the campaigns that followed, and stayed royalist through the Restoration. Forter was left a shell for three centuries before being restored in the twentieth. Airlie Castle was rebuilt, and remains with the family still.
A house can be burned.
A name is harder.
V — The Jacobite Century
Out in the ’15, out in the ’45
The Ogilvys were Jacobites, and not quietly. The family was out in the rising of 1715, and out again thirty years later when David, Lord Ogilvy — then in his early twenties — raised a regiment of some six hundred Angus men for Prince Charles Edward Stuart.
Ogilvy’s Regiment marched into England and back, fought at Falkirk, and stood on the left of the Jacobite line at Culloden in April 1746. It came off the moor in better order than most, and covered the retreat.
What followed is the part the family tells best. Lord Ogilvy escaped to Norway and then to France, was attainted for treason, and served for decades as a colonel in the French army. His young wife, Margaret Johnstone, was taken and imprisoned in Edinburgh Castle — and got out of it in borrowed clothes, walking past her guards, to join him in exile.
He was not pardoned until 1778. He came home to Angus and died there. The earldom, forfeited in the wreckage of the rising, was formally restored to the family in the following century.
VI — Faith
Saint John Ogilvie
Born in Banffshire around 1579 into an Ogilvy family of the Calvinist gentry, John Ogilvie converted to Catholicism as a student on the continent and returned to Scotland as a Jesuit priest at a time when that was a capital matter.
He was arrested in Glasgow, interrogated under torture, and executed at Glasgow Cross in 1615. He was canonised in 1976, and remains Scotland’s only canonised saint of the post-Reformation era.
VII — Branches
Beyond Angus
Not every Ogilvy line runs through Airlie. The Ogilvys of Findlater established themselves in Banffshire and the north-east and rose to the Earldoms of Findlater and Seafield — a powerful house in its own right, with its own castles and its own politics.
Others held at Inverquharity, Boyne, Deskford and Barras. The branches quarrelled, married, and occasionally fought each other. All of them answer to the same crest.
VIII — Across the Water
The name goes out
Defeat, forfeiture, agricultural improvement and the long nineteenth-century clearances of the glens did what no battle had managed: they emptied Angus of a great many Ogilvys.
They went to Ulster and to the American colonies, to Nova Scotia and Upper Canada, to New Zealand and to Australia. They went as soldiers, ministers, shipwrights, farmers and merchants, and they spelled the name however the clerk at the other end heard it. Ogilvie, Ogilby, Ogleby, Ogilvee — the line is usually still there underneath.
Cortachy Castle in Angus remains the seat of the Earl of Airlie, Chief of the Name and Arms of Ogilvy. But most Ogilvys now are American, Canadian, Australian — and finding one another is precisely what a clan society is for.