CAMPBELL-L Archives

From: "Diarmid Campbell" <>
Subject: Re: Hugh Campbell, Aghalane, Co. Tyrone
Date: Sun, 20 Feb 2000 17:47:36 -0700

Margaret,

Thank you for filling me in on your relationship to both Jack and Robert.
You mention your idea that Robert Campbell's family went to Ireland due to
"The Clearances." If you will excuse me I will send the answer to you on
the main Campbell List because the 'clearances' is a subject largely
misunderstood even in Scotland. It tends to get over-simplified.

Tourist and political literature tends to blame the 'clearances' on
"ruthless landlords" and in certain specific cases (actually not that many)
this was true. But the causes behind the need to find alternative
occupations and lives for these people are not so often clarified:

The 'clearances' were largely later than the years when your family turned
up in Ireland. The population in the Highlands had grown a great deal
(particularly in the northern counties) as a result of the invention of
vaccination for smallpox in the 1750s and the introduction of the potato as
a field (rather than garden) crop in the years after that. Until the potato
blight came over from Ireland in the 1840s and caused severe famine, due to
the extent to which people had become dependent upon it, it had been a new
and strong food source where earlier people had relied largely on oats as a
staple, which has good and bad years in the Highlands, depending much upon
the weather.

Further great strain had earlier been put upon the rural areas partly as a
result of severe the agricultural depression which hit Britain as a whole
with the end of the Napoleonic Wars after the Battle of Waterloo in 1815.
The agricultural economy had been geared up to feeding a huge army and then
all the troops were sent home and the prices and market for food stuffs
collapsed. The next cause of the 'clearances' was in the 1840s due to the
famine mentioned above.

My great grandmother Campbell's "Memoir" of the 1830s describes how both the
(landlord) Campbells of Skipness and young Campbell of Barcaldine used to
come and stay with them for long periods of time because - as Barcaldine put
it "I have nothing to eat in the house except what I shoot with my own
gun." The Skipness family would rather stay with good friends than lay off
their few remaining servants due to having run out of funds from the rents
which many could no longer pay due to low prices for agricultural produce.
Both these families had to sell their large estates before many more years
passed due to lack of funds to live on. Many would not raise rents when
people were already starving or on the poverty line. The great alternative
was to take advantages of the colonies and leave, or to take advantage of
the growing industrial revolution in Glasgow or Dundee and move to the
towns, as thousands did.

Another natural force which caused people to leave the Highlands - and was
in Argyll the strongest influence - was that in the colonies land could be
had virtually for the taking and clearing, land of far better quality (less
wet and rocky) than most land in Argyll. So the great drive was for tenants
in Argyll to become landowners in North America (from Argyll in the 1730s,
particularly the Cape Fear region of North Carolina and the Argyle Patent
lands in up-state New York). But Canada would become the main draw for
emigrants following the defeat of the French in the 1760s - a feat largely
accomplished with Highland soldiers, many of whom remained in Canada and
sent back good reports.

The American Revolution ended the sending of indentured servants to those
colonies (either people seeking free passage across the Atlantic by
contracting for the ship's captain to sell their labor of seven years to a
plantation owner - under certain conditions - or as people condemned to
transportation by the courts). The Revolution meant that people convinced
of petty crimes in Britain were often stored on former and dis-masted
warships called "Prison Hulks" in the Thames River downstream from the
center of London. Eventually they became so crowded that it was decided to
create a new settlement of the seemingly 'empty' continent of Australia, and
they were sent there for what was a fairly ghastly start as a "Penal
Colony." However as time went on Australia and New Zealand also became
prime attractions for Highland settlers who wanted to have their own farms
or 'stations' as ranches were called in Australia. Governor MacQuarrie from
Argyll (whose wife was a Campbell of Airds) did an amazing job of cleaning
up the cruelty and corruption in the Australain penal colony and made it
possible for voluntary settlers to do well there.

The settling of many of the protestant Scots in Ireland was in many cases
earlier than these 18th and 19th century settlements in North America and
the Antipodes. There were a series of waves of settlers who were "planted"
in Northern Ireland from mostly Lowland Scotland, many particularly after
the defeat of the Catholic King James at the Battle of the Boyne and the so
called "Glorious Revolution" of 1688 which brought the protestant William
and Mary to the thrones of Great Britain.

Protestant Campbells in Northern Ireland are sometimes considered to have
entered that country following the abortive Monmouth's Rebellion (an earlier
attempt to unseat the Catholic James) of 1685. The Scottish end of this
Protestant Rebellion was led by the 9th Earl of Argyll but he failed and
both he and Monmouth were captured and immediately beheaded, Argyll in
Edinburgh upon the Maiden, the Scottish guillotene upon which his father,
the Marquess of Argyll, had been beheaded for his fighting for the
protestant cause in the 1660s.

Those who had risen to support the Earl of Argyll when he arrived in the
county of Argyll in 1685 were persued and in many cased imprisoned if they
did not escape.When you remember that the southern tip of Argyll (called the
Mull of Kintyre) is only 15 miles by sea from Rathlin Island in Northern
Ireland, and that in the 17th century travel was far more normal by boat
than by land - there then being no roads in the Highlands, only tracks, it
is easy to see why Campbells could have escaped to Ireland following the
defeat of the 9th Earl of Argyll in 1685. I believe that is the first
period and cause which should be investigated for the ancestry of
non-Catholic Campbells in Northern Ireland.

The Argyll estates were restored to the 9th Earl's son upon the arrival of
William and Mary three years after his father's 1685 execution - Argyll had
been helpful in bringing them over and making them welcome at court - and in
1701 he was created first Duke of Argyll. Although many family traditions
among Campbells who do not have a well researched genealogy tend to state
that they are "Descended from the Duke of Argyll", this always has to be
taken as meaning that they are of the same kindred and that their connection
to the Argyll family may in fact be much earlier - when the Argyll family
were Earls of Argyll (pre-1701) or even before that when they were Knights
of Lochawe (pre-1457). There are in fact almost no "descendants of the
Dukes of Argyll" in existence - if any - other than the present Duke and
Duchess' son and daughter.

The arms of the Earls (and later Dukes) of Argyll carved roughly upon a
stone set into the wall by the main door of Auchalane, Robert Campbell's
parent's house in Northern Ireland, does not show any genealogical
connection but one of loyalty to a chief.

I am not sure that Patrick MacCulloch in Toronto has e-mail so I would need
to send him your postal address. If you can let me have that (privately to
my own e-mail address), I will print out your e-mail to me and send it with
a covering letter to him so that he can reply directly to you.

Diarmid Campbell

----- Original Message -----
From: Margaret Brown To: <>
Sent: Sunday, February 20, 2000 2:19 AM
Subject: Hugh Campbell, Aghalane, Co. Tyrone


> Thank you for the quick response....etc.

This thread:

• Re: Hugh Campbell, Aghalane, Co. Tyrone by "Diarmid Campbell" <>