Sutherland History
By the opening of the 10th century the
Norsemen had conquered all the offshore islands of Scotland. The Orkney earls
married into the Scottish royal house, and by the 11th century Earl Thorfinn the
Mighty ruled territories that included the Caithness peninsula and an extensive
coastal are to its south which was called Sudurland, or Southland. It extended
into Ross-shire, whose country town is called Dingwall, the name the
Scandinavians gave to their legislative assembly places. It was somewhere near
here that Thorfinn defeated his cousin King Duncan, and chased him south into
Mac Beth' s realm of Moray, where Duncan was murdered.
Early in the 13th century Sutherland was erected into a Scottish earldom, and
granted to a nobleman of Moray whose family was probably of Flemish origin,
though it had married into the royal house of Moray. A Sutherland clan evolved,
with a Chief powerful enough to protect the most northerly cathedral on the
mainland, at Dornoch. Only a very small portion of its mediaeval structure
survives in the 19th-century church which stands on the same site; and the
earldom itself fared little better. For the 14th and 15th centuries were a
period of baronial anarchy in Scotland, with the crown in eclipse under weak
kings or during the reigns of minors. The Gordons were invested with vice-regal
powers in the north, and used these to seize the Sutherland earldom. The Earl of
Huntly' s second son, Adam Gordon, obtained in 1494 a "brieve of idiocy"against
Earl John of Sutherland, although he had possessed the wit to maintain himself
in this office through troubled times for nearly forty years. Adam Gordon
married the Earl' s daughter in about 1500. He brought a further charge of
bastardy against his younger son. The death of King James IV at Flodden in 1513,
with the flower of Scotland' s nobility, made it easier for the Gordon' s to
consummate their crimes. Adam Gordon called himself Earl of Sutherland without
ever obtaining a title from the crown, murdered one of Earl John' s sons, and
terrorised the Sutherland heirs so that they did not dare to advance their
claims. In 1601 Adam Gordon' s descendant obtained a remarkable grant from James
VI which provided that the earldom should never be lost to the Gordons through
an heiress. If the line of Adam Gordon should fail, it would pass to the Gordons
of Huntly who had no claim to it by descent.
This stipulation led to a legal battle for the earldom when the Earl died in
1766, leaving an only daughter. The nearest Gordon heir claimed that he was the
true Earl according to the charter of 1601. But the House of Lords, sitting as
supreme court of appeal, was shown that there had been an heir male in 1515 when
Adam Gordon usurped the earldom, and his Sutherland descendant was there to
inquire how many centuries were required to legalise Gordon crimes. Their
lordships responded by bestowing the earldom on the late Earl' s daughter, who
carried it to her husband, a member of the fabulously wealthy English family of
Leveson-Gower, who was created 1st Duke of Sutherland.
Meanwhile the Sutherlands of Forse continue to represent the disinherited line
of the old Sutherland chiefs. They descend in the direct male line from Kenneth,
second son of the 6th Earl.
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