In place of his father Donald, Alasdair MacDonald and his mother the Countess of Ross went to Inverness and were immediately imprisoned. Others, their cousin Alasdair MacDonald of Garmoran among them, were executed. When he was released, Alasdair of the Isles immediately raised a rebellion in 1429 and burned Inverness. In the end the battle went against the Rosses, Alastair himself being slain, with seventeen gentlemen of his clan and a great number of others. The defeat proved a real disaster, from which the clan never really recovered.
In 1427 James I summoned the powerful of the Highlands to a parliament in Inverness. In 1427 the Earl of Ross could bring into the field 2,000 men; in 1715 the strength of the clan was reckoned at no more than 360, and by 1745 it had only increased to 500. At the beginning of the eighteenth century the line of Balnagown came to an end. David Ross, the Chief, finding himself the last of his line, sold the estate to General Charles Ross, brother of Lord Ross of Hawkhead near Glasgow, in whose family it has since descended. The Hawkhead family, however, were in no way related to the Rosses of the North, their ancestor having come from Yorkshire in the twelfth century, and settled in the county of Renfrew.
The Spaidseareachd lana Ros, composed in 1427- There seems to be no record of the time or circumstances in which the chiefs of the clan now bearing that name originally settled in the district. They may, therefor, have been originally of Celtic blood, or they may, like so many others of the Highland chiefs, have been settlers introduced from the south in the time of Malcolm Canmore and his son. In this latter case they would originally be known under the appellation of De Ros, from the name of their territory, and the appellation would, in the course of time, as in other cases, come to be their family name. The race was also known in the Highlands as the Clan Gille Andras, or Tribe of the Follower of St. Andrew, the tradition being that one of the early chiefs had been devoted to the service of the Patron Saint of Scotland.
Thomas II. (First Earl of Derby) (b. 1435? d. 1504), his son,16 who had been one of Henry VI.'s esquires in 1454, took, a first, an ambiguous attitude in regard to the rival parties of York and Lancaster. He was, nevertheless, made chief justice of Chester and Fflint on the accession of Edward IV. in 1461. In 1471, we find him besieging Hornby Castle on behalf of the Lancastrians, and yet, after Warwick's defeat and death, Edward made him steward of his household and a privy councillor. He joined in the king's French expedition of 1475, and held a high command in Gloucester's invasion of Scotland seven years later. After Edward's death, Stanley remained loyal to his son, Edward V. When Richard, Duke of Gloucester, who was plotting to supplant his nephew (Edward V.) on the throne, saw that Lord Stanley would be one of the chief obstacles in his way, he caused him to be arrested on a charge of treason; but, as soon as he had succeeded in ascending the throne, he decided that his best policy would be, if possible, to purchase Lord Stanley's allegiance, which he endeavoured to accomplish by making him Constable of England for life and conferring upon him the Order of the Garter. It is well known that this scheme failed, and that Lord Stanley took no part in the Battle of Bosworth, though he had 5,000 men under his command on the field. After it, he placed the dead Richard's crown on the victor's head,18 and proclaimed him king as Henry VII. The new king, who was Stanley's stepson, created him Earl of Derby, and constituted him one of the lords commissioners for executing the office of lord high steward at his coronation. In 1486, he was made Constable of England for life. and received a number of lucrative positions.
In 1487, he was one of the godfathers of Prince Arthur, Henry VII.'s eldest son. He took a prominent part in arranging the treaty of Etaples, between England and France, in 1492. It is said that he used his wealth nobly, both in relieving the burdens of his people and in promoting public works, such as the bridges at Garstang and Warrington, for their welfare. He was the builder of Latham House, which became famous through its defence by the seventh earl's noble consort one hundred and fifty years later. There is no record of his having visited the island. Pageants were staged at the Great Conduit (Middlesex) during the coronation procession of Queen Margaret in 1445, the wedding procession of Prince Arthur and Katharine of Aragon in 1501, the procession of the emperor Charles V in 1522, the wedding procession of Anne Boleyn in 1533, and Queen Mary's coronation procession in 1553. Dover borough was chartered by Edward I. Afterwards came Edmund of Woodstock, second son of Edward I.; then his three children, the last of whom was the wife of the Black Prince and mother of Richard II., and commonly known as the fair maid of Kent. Over Dymchurch at Dover, Richard II., after suffering disasters at sea, landed at Dover in 1392; and, with the dukes of York and Gloucester, sailed from it, in 1398, to make peace with the Duke of Burgundy. On the coast and confronts Calais- the nearest port of England to France. A series of great Norman lords thence became Earls of Kent. The first was Odo de Bayeux. At Downpatrick, in the twelfth century, De Courcy having espoused the claims of Prince Arthur, Duke of Brittany, assumed, in common with other English barons who had obtained extensive settlements in Ireland, an independent state, and renounced his allegiance to King John, who summoned him to appear and do homage. Downpatrick Cathedral was destroyed by fire during the wars of Edward Bruce against the English, in the early part of the Fourteenth century; was restored in 1412 and again burned by Lord Deputy De Grey in 1538.
After the defeat of James, Earl of Douglas, who had renounced his allegiance to James II., At Arkinholme, in 1454, he retired into Argylshire, where he was received by the Earl of Ross, with whom, and the Lord of the Isles, he entered into an alliance. While Donald Balloch was engaged in this expedition, the Lord of the Isles, with his kinsmen and followers to the number of five or six hundred, made an incursion into Sutherland, and encamped before the castle of Skibo. What his object was has not been ascertained; but, as a measure of precaution, the Earl of Sutherland sent Neill Murray, son of Angus Murray, who was slain at Drum-na-Coub, to watch his motions. The Lord of the Isles immediately began to commit depredations, whereupon he was attacked by Murray, and compelled to retreat into Ross with the loss of one of his captains, named Donald Dubh-na-Soirn, and fifty of his men. Exasperated at this defeat, Macdonald sent another party of his islanders, along with a company of men from Ross, to Strathfleet in Sutherland to lay waste the country, and thus wipe off the disgrace of his late defeat. On hearing of this fresh invasion, the Earl of Sutherland despatched his brother Robert with a sufficient force to attack the Clandonald. They met on the sands of Strathfleet, and, after a fierce and bloody struggle, the islanders and their allies were overthrown with great slaughter. This was the last of the Clandonald into Sutherland, as all the disputes between the Lord of the Isles and the Sutherland family were afterwards accommodated by a matrimonial alliance.
Edward IV., anticipating the danger that might arise to his crown by an alliance between his rival, the exiled monarch, and the king of Scotland, determined to counteract the effects of such a connection by a stroke of policy. Aware of the disaffected disposition of some of the Scottish nobles, and northern and island chiefs, he immediately entered into a negotiation with John, Earl of Ross, and Donald Balloch, to detach them from their allegiance. On the 19th of October, 1461, the Earl of Ross, Donald Balloch, and his son John de Isle, held a council of their vassals and dependants at Astornish, at which it was agreed to send ambassadors to England to treat with Edward. On the arrival of these ambassadors a negotiation was entered into between them and the Earl of Douglas, and John Douglas of Balveny, his brother, both of whom had been obliged to leave Scotland for their treasons in the previous reign. These two brothers, who were animated by a spirit of hatred and revenge against the family of their late sovereign James II., warmly entered into the views of Edward, whose subjects they had become; and they concluded a treaty with the northern ambassadors which assumed as its basis nothing less than the entire conquest of Scotland. Among other conditions, it was stipulated that, upon payment of a specified sum of money to himself, his son, and ally, the Lord of the Isles should become for ever the vassal of England, and should assist Edward and his successors in the wars in Ireland and elsewhere. And, in the event of the entire subjugation of Scotland by the Earls of Ross and Douglas, the whole of the kingdom on the north of the Frith of Forth was to be divided equally between these Earls and Donald Balloch, and the estates which formerly belonged to Douglas between the Frith of Forth and the borders were to be restored to him. This singular treaty is dated London, 18th February, 1462.
The Earl of Angus, at that time one of the most powerful of the Scottish nobles, having, by the promise of an English dukedom from the exiled Henry, engaged to assist in restoring him to his crown and dominions, the Earl of Ross, before the plan had been organized. He first seized the castle of Inverness at the head of a small party, being admitted unawares by the governor. He then collected a considerable army, and proclaimed himself king of the Hebrides. It is related that the Earl of Ross thrice attempted to set fire to the holy pile of St. Brigid, where with his army he entered the country of Athole, denounced the authority of the king, and commanded all taxes to be paid to him; and, after committing the most dreadful excesses, he stormed the castle of Blair, dragged the Earl and Countess of Athole from the chapel . He lost many of his war-galleys, in a storm of thunder and lightning, in which the rich booty he had taken was consigned to the deep. The Earl and Countess of Athole were thereupon voluntarily released from confinement, and the Earl of Ross was afterwards assassinated in the castle of Inverness, by an Irish harper who bore him a grudge. Although at this period an account of Orkney and Shetland does not properly belong to a history of the Highlands, as these islands had long been the property of the king of Norway and had a population almost purely Teutonic, with a language, manners, and customs widely differing from those of the Highlanders proper that these islands were finally made over to Scotland in 1469, as security for the dowry of Margaret of Norway, the wife of James III.
When Alasdair of Ross died, however, his son John entered into the secret Treaty of Ardtornish with England’s Henry VIII in 1462. The arrangement was that should England defeat the Stewarts, then English-speaking lowland Scotland would be ruled by the Douglases. All the Gaelic-speaking North would be ruled by himself, with the King of England as his sovereign.
The successor of the Lord of the Isles—who was generally more like an independent sovereign than a subject of the Scottish king—not being disposed to tender the allegiance which his father had violated, the king, in the month of May, 1476, assembled a large army on the north of the Forth, and a fleet on the west coast, for the purpose of making a simultaneous attack upon him by sea and land. Seeing no hopes of making effectual resistance against such a powerful force as that sent against him, he tendered his submission to the king on certain conditions, and resigned the earldom of Ross, and the lands of Kintyre and Knapdale, into his majesty’s hands. In 1476 the treaty was discovered and John of the Isles lost his mainland possessions. By 1495 the Lordship was revoked and anarchy and violence swept into the Highlands as the Campbells, Gordons and others tore off strips of MacDonald land for themselves. The Earl of Athole, who commanded the royal army, was rewarded for this service by a grant of the lands and forest of Cluny.
After the Lord of the Isles had thus resigned the earldom of Ross into the king’s hands, that province was perpetually molested by incursions from the islanders, Gillespie, cousin of the Lord of the Isles, at the head of a large body of the islanders, invaded the higher part of Ross and committed great devastation. The inhabitants, or as many as the shortness of the time would permit, amongst whom the Clankenzie were chiefly distinguished, speedily assembled, and met the islanders on the banks of the Connan, where a sharp conflict took place. The Clankenzie fought with great valour, and pressed the enemy so hard that Gillespie Macdonald was overthrown, and the greater part of his men were slain or drowned in the river, about two miles from Braile, thence called Blar-na-Paire. The predecessor of the Laird of Brodie, who happened to be with the chief of the Mackenzies at the time, fought with great courage.