MacPherson Ancient Tartan

The Macpherson claim to lead Clan Chattan went before the Lord Lyon in 1672, was overturned partly on a technical point about heraldic supporters, and has never entirely gone away.

Son of the parson

Mac a’ Phearsain means son of the parson, and the clan does not pretend otherwise. Its progenitor is given as Muireach, or Murdo, Cattanach, lay parson of Kingussie in Badenoch, at a period when the Celtic church still allowed clergy to marry. Three of his descendants founded the branches from which the whole name is reckoned — Kenneth of Cluny, Iain of Pitmain and Gillies of Invereshie — and the clan has been known in Gaelic ever since as the clan of the three brothers. The parson is a traditional figure, not a charter witness, but the claim is unusually candid for a Highland origin story: it puts a churchman, not a king, at the head of the line.

Badenoch

The family came out of Lochaber into Badenoch in the fourteenth century and made Cluny its centre. Badenoch is a strategic corridor, not a backwater, and the Macphersons held a position there sometimes semi-independent of the confederation. The arms recorded for Cluny in 1672 include a dagger stained with blood, said to commemorate the clan’s part in breaking Comyn power in the district on Bruce’s behalf. That is what the seventeenth-century heralds were told, not an independent record.

The Chattan question

Macpherson was a principal member of Clan Chattan, the confederation of Badenoch and Strathnairn families whose leadership the Mackintoshes also claimed. The quarrel is documented, not legendary, and was open by 1591, when Macpherson took a separate bond of manrent with the Earl of Huntly rather than accept Mackintosh superiority. In 1672 Duncan Macpherson of Cluny matriculated arms describing himself as the only true representer of the ancient and honourable family of Clan Chattan. The Mackintosh chief brought a reduction against the matriculation and won it, part of the argument turning on Cluny’s having added supporters to his arms, and Mackintosh was upheld as chief of Chattan.

It is worth being clear about what that settled: a heraldic question in a Scottish court in the 1670s. It produced no medieval document showing who had led the confederation in the fourteenth century, because none exists, and the descent of the captaincy was still being adjudicated in the Lyon Court as late as 1942, when the Mackintosh chiefship and the Chattan captaincy were formally separated. Anyone who tells you the matter is simple has chosen a side.

Nine years on Ben Alder

Ewen Macpherson of Cluny is the best-documented figure in the clan’s history, and his 1745 is a lesson in how little choice a chief had. In August that year he accepted a government commission in Lord Loudon’s regiment, which required an oath to George II. Later that month Jacobite raiders took him at Cluny; a fortnight later he emerged a Jacobite colonel with some three hundred men. He joined the attack on Cumberland’s cavalry at Clifton Moor in December 1745 and was not at Culloden. In June 1746 Cluny was plundered and burnt, and his father died among the ruins.

What followed is the part that made his name. He hid in Badenoch for nine years with a price on his head, sheltering Prince Charles Edward at Cluny’s Cage on Ben Alder in September 1746 — a shelter built into the hillside, big enough for six or seven, arranged so the cooking smoke did not show. He reached France in May 1755 and died at Dunkirk on 30 January 1764. An Act of Parliament in 1784 restored his son Duncan to the forfeited estate. The clan museum at Newtonmore, opened in 1952, holds material saved from Cluny, including the Black Chanter, which lore ties to the combat on the North Inch of Perth in 1396; the chanter is real, the 1396 attachment is not evidenced.

More than one Macpherson sett, and who may wear them

This is one of the harder names to choose cloth for, because it carries several genuinely different setts: a red pattern, generally offered as the dress sett, a hunting pattern, and one associated with Cluny itself. Those are distinct designs with distinct thread orders, so two garments both correctly labelled Macpherson can look almost unrelated. Sitting on top of that is a separate variable: Modern, Ancient, Weathered and Muted are dye registers applied to whichever thread order you began with, and nothing in the pattern changes.

There is a chief — James Brodie Macpherson of Cluny, reckoned the twenty-eighth — so the name has a living authority. Anyone of the name in its spellings, and those descended from the Cluny, Pitmain and Invereshie branches, may wear the family setts, as may members of the associated Chattan families who count themselves Macpherson. The chief’s arms are his own; the crest badge is worn in a strap and buckle, which is how a clansman shows he wears the chief’s crest rather than claiming it.

Sources: Wikipedia, Clan Macpherson; Wikipedia, Ewen MacPherson of Cluny; Wikipedia, Clan Chattan (the 1591 bond and the 1672 reduction); Clan Chattan Association, Clan Macpherson.