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Clan Jardine

BEWARE, I AM PRESENT


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Scottish History

of Clan Jardine


Divided loyalties

Derived from the Old French ‘jardin’, indicating a garden or an orchard, the surname of Jardine has numerous variations.

But what they all have in common is that they stem from an original ‘Jardine’ knight who came from Normandy with William the Conqueror in 1066 and fought at the battle of Hastings.

Those Normans who were granted lands in England, at the expense of the native Anglo-Saxons, later found new territories in Scotland after first being invited to settle there in the twelfth century by the Scottish monarch David I.

Before the form of Jardine became commonplace in Scotland, there were often some confusing variations, such as ‘de Orchard’ recorded in 1296.

Scotland had been thrown into crisis ten years before this date, with the death of Alexander II and the death four years later of his successor, the Maid of Norway, who died while en route to Scotland to take up the crown.

John Balliol was enthroned at Scone as King of Scots in 1292 – but fatefully for the nation the ambitious Edward I of England had been invited to arbitrate in the bitter dispute over the succession to the throne, and the hapless Balliol was Edward’s chosen man.

The Scots rose in revolt against the imperialist designs of the English king in July of 1296 but, living up to his reputation of ‘Hammer of the Scots’, he brought the entire nation under his subjugation little less than a month later, garrisoning strategic locations.

To reinforce his domination of Scotland, 1,500 earls, bishops and burgesses were required to sign a humiliating treaty of fealty, known as the Ragman Roll, because of the number of ribbons that dangled from the seals of the reluctant signatories.

It is on this document that the name of ‘Jordan de Orchard’ is found – indicating that by this period the family that would later become better known as the Jardines were judged as being in the higher ranks of Scottish society.

More than a century before this, in 1153, a Wilfredus de Jardine is recorded as having witnessed a charter at Kelso Abbey, and it is reasonable to assume that he was the progenitor, or ‘name father’, of those Jardines who were settled for centuries in the present day area of Dumfriesshire and the adjoining Borders area.

Twenty-five years later, in 1178, Humphrey de Jardin witnessed a charter at Arbroath Abbey, while a Patrick de Gardines appears on record as chaplain to the Bishop of Glasgow.

It was at Applegirth, on the River Annan, four miles northwest of the present day town of Lockerbie, in Dumfriesshire, that the Jardines had become established by the early years of the fourteenth century, later building their forbidding stronghold of Spedlins Tower.

This remained their seat until the late seventeenth century, until abandoned after the family had been repeatedly tormented by the ghost of a miller whom the Jardine chief had left to starve in the dark and fetid depths of the tower’s dungeon.

No longer in Jardine hands, the tower has since been restored from its ruins to once again dominate and grace the surrounding landscape.

Following the abandonment of Spedlins Tower, the Jardines of Applegirth built a new seat nearby – the mansion house of Jardine Hall – but, in common with the tower, it is no longer in family hands.

Honours and titles accrued to the Jardines, most notably in 1672 when Alexander Jardine of Applegirth was created a Baronet of Nova Scotia.

James VI first granted these baronetcies in 1624 to Scots of substance who were willing to invest in what was Scotland’s first attempt to establish a colony in North America. The area for proposed colonisation took in not only present-day Nova Scotia but also New Brunswick and the territory between there and the St Lawrence River.

Nearly forty Scottish magnates, initially, were granted allotments of territory and, although not physically required to take up possession of their distant new lands, a special ceremony was enacted on the Castle Hill of Edinburgh.

It was here that a small area was designated ‘Nova Scotia’ to allow them to formally take ‘possession’ of their land and be duly honoured with their baronetcy.

Nova Scotia, in effect, had been ‘incorporated’ into the Scottish kingdom, while the scheme marked the introduction of the honour of baronet to Scotland.

A combination of factors, including the terms of a peace treaty between England and France, led to the colony finally being abandoned in 1632.

The right to the baronetcy was retained, however, along with the provision that the title would pass to male heirs, and it is still held to this day by the Jardines of Applegirth.

Another Jardine baronetcy is that of the Buchanan-Jardine Baronetcy of Castle Milk, in the County of Dumfries.

A title in the Baronetage of the United Kingdom, it was created in 1885 for the Liberal politician and businessman Robert Jardine, then head of the powerful company of Jardine and Matheson, of which we will read more in the final chapter.

Representing Dumfriesshire in Parliament, he married the heiress of John Hamilton-Buchanan, Chief of Clan Buchanan, and later assumed the additional surname of Buchanan.

In the English county of Nottingham, there is the Jardine Baronetcy of Nottingham, created in 1919 for the English politician Ernest Jardine, while the Jardine Baronetcy of Godalming, in Surrey, was created in 1916 for John Jardine, Liberal MP for Roxburghshire from 1906 to 1919.

Going back several centuries to the Jardines of Applegirth they, in common with many other families in a time of deeply divided interests and loyalties, opposed the great freedom fighter William Wallace after he raised the banner of revolt against the English occupation of Scotland in May of 1297.

Proving an expert in the tactics of guerrilla warfare, Wallace and his hardened band of freedom fighters inflicted stunning defeats on the English garrisons, culminating in the liberation of practically all of Scotland following the battle of Stirling Bridge, on September 11, 1297.

This was a battle at which the Jardines fought on the side of the English, as they also did at the battle of Falkirk on July 22 of 1298, when Wallace was defeated.

But, again in common with many other Scottish clans and families, the Jardines later switched allegiance to the great warrior king Robert the Bruce, fighting with honour in his ranks at the decisive victory of Bannockburn in 1314.

At the time of writing, the present Chief of Clan Jardine is Sir Alexander Maule Jardine, described as ‘12th Baronet and Chief of the Name of the Arms of Jardine and 23rd Chief of Clan Jardine’ – and it was this Chief who in the 1970s designed a special Jardine sett, or tartan.

Along with other clans such as those of Armstrong, Bell, Elliot, Graham, Irvine, Johnstone, Little and Moffat, the Jardines are officially listed with the Court of the Lord Lyon in Edinburgh as one of the clans of the Scottish Borders.

On either side of the border there were three ‘marches’ or areas of administration, the West, East and Middle Marches, and a record from the late sixteenth century lists the Jardines, along with the Bells, Carruthers, Glendinnings, Grahams, Irvines, Johnstones, Latimers, Littles, Moffats and Thomsons as occupying the West March.

Rightly described by some authorities as Scotland’s ‘first line of defence’ against invading English armies, present day Dumfriesshire and the Borders were for centuries an extremely wild and dangerous place to live.

But it was not only the English that the Border clans had to fear, but also their own neighbours.

This was in the form of reivers, who took their name from their lawless custom of reiving, or raiding, not only their neighbours’ livestock, but also that of their neighbours across the border.

The word ‘bereaved’, for example, indicating to have suffered loss, derives from the original ‘reived’, meaning to have suffered loss of property.

While the Jardines of Applegirth appear to have been comparatively law-abiding, they were also not averse from time to time to re-stocking their larders with a spot of reiving at the expense of their neighbours or from across the border.

Living on the edge

It was in an attempt to bring order to what was known as the wild ‘debateable land’ on both sides of the border, that Alexander II of Scotland had in 1237 signed the Treaty of York, which for the first time established the Scottish border with England as a line running from the Solway to the Tweed.

This was when the marches were established on either side of the border, with a governor in control of each, at least nominally.

Under this Border Law, complaints from either side of the border were dealt with on Truce Days, when the wardens of the different marches would act as arbitrators.

There was also a law known as the Hot Trod, that granted anyone who had their livestock stolen the right to pursue the thieves and recover their property within a certain time limit.

But this was not enough to curb what had become a state of near anarchy.

In 1603, James VI, after acceding to the throne of England as James I, attempted to solve the problem once and for all by abolishing Border Law and even the very name of ‘Borders’, in favour of ‘Middle Shires.’

But, five years later, matters were still so bad that a Scottish Privy Council report graphically noted how the ‘wild incests, adulteries, convocation of the lieges, shooting and wearing of hackbuts, pistols, lances, daily bloodshed, oppression, and disobedience in civil matters, neither are nor has been punished.’

What eventually brought relative peace to the Borders was the settlement in the early years of the seventeenth century of Border clans such as the Jardines in Ireland, in what was known as the Plantation of Ulster.

This was a policy under which they received land grants in Ulster at the expense of what were perceived as rebellious native Irish clans – and it is mainly their descendants who are to be found today in North America after immigrating their from Ireland in later centuries.

In 1573, James VI had confirmed Sir Alexander Jardine in his grants of land at Applegirth and Sibbaldie in Dumfriesshire, Kirkandrews in Kirkcudbright, Hartside and Wandel in Lanarkshire and Jardinfield in Berwickshire.

But this was conditional on that, when required, he would be able to muster at least 240 men to fight for the king.

Nearly fifty years earlier, in 1524, the Jardines had indeed fought for their monarch when, during the interminable Anglo-Scottish Wars, another Sir Alexander Jardine of Applegirth clashed with an advancing English army at Carlisle and took several hundred prisoners – several of whom provided rich ransoms.

But the English repaid this insult 23 years later when Sir Alexander’s son, who had succeeded his father as Chief, had his lands sacked by a 5,000-strong invasion force.

In more peaceful times, Sir William Jardine, 7th Baronet of Applegirth, was the pioneering Scottish naturalist who was born in 1800 and died in 1874.

He is recognised as having made a significant contribution to interest in natural history by writing a number of books on the subject, and through his editorship of the 40-volume The Naturalist’s Library; divided into four main sections, each was prepared by fellow leading naturalists and proved a best-seller throughout the Victorian era.

One footnote on Sir William is that it was not until 2007, through the BBC television series Who Do You Think You Are? that the Olympic Rowing gold medal winner Sir Matthew Pinsett discovered that he is a direct descendant of the naturalist.

Sir William Jardine was also the uncle of the brothers Frank and Alexander Jardine, recognised as pioneering Australian explorers.

Born respectively in 1841 and 1843, the brothers had already been settled on their father’s cattle station in Queensland when, in 1864, they embarked on a gruelling 1,200 mile trek from Rockhampton, in Queensland, to Somerset, also in Queensland.

Driving 250 head of cattle and 42 horses, the trip took 10 long months, during which they had to battle the hostile elements.

They arrived in Somerset with only 12 horses and 50 cattle left, and it was here that Frank Jardine settled with his wife, the Samoan Princess Sana Solia, and naming his property “Lockerbie” in fond memory of his Scottish roots.

Both brothers were subsequently elected fellows of the Royal Geographical Society, while the Jardine River, the largest in Australia’s Cape Rock Peninsula, is named in Frank Jardine’s honour, as is Queensland’s Jardine River National Park.

He died in 1919, a year before his brother, who served for many years as Queensland’s chief engineer for harbours and rivers.

One leading figure of the great eighteenth century flowering of Scottish literature, art, and scientific and philosophical inquiry known as the Scottish Enlightenment, was the Reverend John Jardine, who was born in 1716 and died in 1766.

A friend and contemporary of such Scots luminaries as the artist Allan Ramsay, philosopher David Hume and economist Adam Smith, Jardine was a co-founder of the influential Edinburgh Review.

It was his son, the antiquarian Sir Henry Jardine, who was instrumental along with others who included the novelist Sir Walter Scott, for the re-discovery after more than 160 years of the Honours of Scotland – the sacred regalia of sceptre, crown and sword.

Normally kept secure in Edinburgh Castle, they had been removed for safety to Stirling in 1651 to keep them from the clutches of the occupying forces of Oliver Cromwell.

Following the coronation of Charles II at Scone, a Parliament was held in Perth in June of 1651, and it was decided the Honours should be moved to the more secure Dunnottar Castle, on the north-east coast.

The hereditary keeper of the Honours was Sir William Keith, the Earl Marischall, but he was a prisoner in the Tower of London, and it was his son, John, who managed to successfully convey the Honours to the fortress of Dunnottar.

Held in the name of the Earl Marischall by its governor, Captain George Ogilvie of Barras, it was defended by less than 50 men.

Cromwell’s troops set up a siege of the castle, and Captain Ogilvie decided the Honours would have to be moved to a place of greater safety.

Christian Granger, wife of James Granger, the minister of the nearby Kinneff Church, managed to obtain a pass from Colonel Morgan, the captain of the besieging force, to visit Captain Ogilvie’s wife.

The sword and scabbard were hidden in bundles of flax and carried by one of the maids out of the castle, while Mrs Granger secreted the crown and sceptre under her clothes: an unsuspecting Captain Morgan even gallantly helped an understandably nervous Mrs Granger to mount her horse.

One other version of the tale is that the Honours were lowered over the cliffs by rope and taken by a young girl who had been gathering seaweed and concealed in her basket.

What is known for certain is that the Honours were hidden for a time in the manse of Kinneff at the foot of the minister’s bed.

The crown and sceptre were then hidden under a slab in front of the church’s altar, and the sword and scabbard buried under a row of pews.

Dunnottar eventually fell to the besiegers in May of 1652 and was ransacked in a futile search for the Honours.

They were retrieved from Kinneff Church at the time of the Restoration of Charles II in 1660, placed in a large oaken chest, and secreted in a room in Edinburgh Castle and the room sealed.

It was not until 1818, under the direction of Sir Walter Scott and Sir Henry Jardine that the room was unsealed and the precious Honours of Scotland put on permanent public display.

The Honours were joined in 1996 by the equally sacred Stone of Destiny, on which a long succession of Scottish kings had been enthroned, following its ceremonial return after 300 years from Westminster.

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Family History Mini Book


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The Crests

of Clan Jardine

Clan Jardine (Dumfries 1672)
Clan Jardine
Clan Jardine (Stirling)
Clan Jardine
Clan Jardine
Clan Jardine
Clan Jardine
Clan Jardine
Clan Jardine
Gardner family
Gardner family

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Divisions

of Jardine

Jardine of Castlemilk

Spellings

of Jardine

Garden
Jardin
Jardane
Jerden
Jerdone
Jarden
Jardyne
Jarding
Jardyn
Gardner
Gairdner
Gardiner
Jardines

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