The House of Douglas

The Douglases take their name from Douglas Water in Lanarkshire, where the village and Douglas Castle became the family seat. A William de Douglas appears in charters between about 1175 and 1213, and the family rose to dominate the Lowlands, the Marches, Galloway, Angus and Moray.

Sir James Douglas, called “the Good”, was Robert the Bruce’s lieutenant, retook Roxburgh Castle in 1313, fought at Bannockburn in 1314, and died in 1330 at Teba in Spain while carrying Bruce’s heart towards the Holy Land. James, 2nd Earl of Douglas, was killed winning the Battle of Otterburn in 1388. The senior “Black” line held the earldom of Douglas until it was broken at Arkinholm in 1455 by the rival “Red” Douglases, Earls of Angus. James Douglas, 4th Earl of Morton, was Regent of Scotland from 1572 to 1578 and was executed in 1581.

The Douglas tartan

The Scottish Register of Tartans credits the principal Douglas sett to Wilsons of Bannockburn, and records a related Douglas Green from the same firm. The separate grey Douglas is credited to the Sobieski Stuart brothers and comes from their Vestiarium Scoticum of 1842, a work now accepted as a forgery although its patterns entered general use.

The dark Douglas sett was the regimental tartan of the Cameronians (Scottish Rifles), raised in 1881, who wore Douglas trews with a rifle-green doublet.

A note on honesty: no source gives a date for when the main Douglas sett was first recorded, so none is stated here, and there is no documentation of Douglas tartan being worn before the nineteenth century. Because the succession was never settled after the eighteenth-century “Douglas Cause”, the house has no chief today and Clan Douglas is armigerous.

Family facts

References

1. Douglas tartans — The Scottish Register of Tartans
2. History — Clan Douglas Society
3. Cameronians (Scottish Rifles)