| It has long been established beyond any possible doubt that the Earls of Ross were the superiors of the lands of Kintail during the identical period in which the same lands are said to have been held by Colin Fitzgerald and his descendants as direct vassals of the Crown. Ferchard Mac an t-Sagairt, Earl of Ross, received a grant of the lands of Kintail from Alexander II. for services rendered to that monarch in 1222, and he is again on record as their possessor in 1234, four years after the latest date on which the reputed charter to Colin Fitzgerald, keeping in view the witnesses whose names appear on the face of it, could possibly have been a genuine document. Dr George Mackenzie says, "was a real progenitor of the noble family of Kintail." |  |
That the Earls of Ross continued lords paramount long after the death of Colin Fitzgerald, which event is said to have taken place in 1278, will be incontestibly proved. Sir George Mackenzie, first Earl of Cromartie, says in a MS. history of the clan, that Colin "being left in Kintail, tradition records that he married the daughter of Mac Mhathoin, heritor of the half of Kintail. " This Mhathoin, is frequently identified with Coinneach Gruamach Mac Mhathoin, Cailean's predecessor as Governor of Ellandonnan Castle. The other half of Kintail belonged to O'Beolan, one of whose chiefs, Ferchair, was created Earl of Ross, and his lands were given to Cailean Fitzgerald."
Colin's jurisdiction, it is said, extended over a wide district, and he is referred to in the fragment of the Record of Icolmkill, already quoted, as he "of whom we have spoken at the battle of Largs, and who afterwards conducted himself with firmness against the Islanders, and was left a governor among them." The Fitzgerald theory has until recently, been accepted by all the leading Mackenzie families and by the clan generally. It has been adopted in all the Peerages and Baronetages, and by almost every writer on the history and genealogy of the Cabar feidh race, of this Irish origin is the charter alleged to have been granted by Alexander III. to Colin in 1266. They once for a time exchanged them with a relative for lands in Buchan, uninterruptedly possessed by the Earls of Ross, the descendants of this Ferchair, or Farquhar, for two centuries after the battle of Largs. The Caberfae (the deer’s head) was taken as his crest, and Cudich an Righ became his motto and that of his descendants.
The Earl of Cromartie and other clan historians accept the Fitzgerald origin by marriage with a daughter of Kenneth Matheson of Lochalsh, the Mathesons maintain that the first Mackenzie, or Mac Choinnich - the actual progenitor of the clan - was a son of their chief, Coinneach Gruamach, and that the Mackenzies are thus only a sept, or minor branch of the Mathesons. If the Fitzgerald origin of the Mackenzies had been true, has it come about that the original patronymic of Fitzgerald has given way to that of Mackenzie? Cailean, he says, had a son by the daughter of Kenneth Mac Mhathoin, or Matheson, whom he named Coinneach, or Kenneth, after his father-in-law Kenneth Matheson; Cailean himself was killed in Glaic Chailein by Mac Mhathoin, who envied him, and was sore displeased at Colin's succession to Matheson's ancient heritage; Colin was succeeded by his son Kenneth, and all his descendants were by the Highlanders called "Mac Choinnich," or Kenneth's son, taking the patronymic from Mac Mhathoin rather than from Cailean, whom they esteemed a stranger.
The first notice of the reputed charter to Colin Fitzgerald is in the manuscript history of the Mackenzies, by George, first Earl of Cromartie, written about the middle of the seventeenth century. During the whole of this period - for two hundred years - there is no trace of Colin Fitzgerald or any of his descendants as superiors of the lands of Kintail in terms of Alexander III.'s reputed charter of 1266, the Mackenzies holding all that time from and as direct vassals of their relatives, the Earls of Ross, who really held the position of Crown vassals. Neither Colin nor any of his reputed Fitzgerald descendants appear once on record in that capacity during the whole of these two centuries. Put forward by Sir George Mackenzie, first Earl of Cromarty, who, in his first manuscript, made Colin a son of the Earl of Kildare, but in a later edition, written in 1669, "finding that there was no Earl of Kildare until 1290, he corrects it by making him son of John Fitz-Thomas, chief of the Geraldines in Ireland, and father of John, first Earl of Kildare, who was slain in 1261."
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, Septs,