Lumsden

The manor of Lumsdene is first mentioned in 1098 when Edgar, King of Scots, and son of Malcolm III and Margaret, refounded Coldingham Priory in the county of Berwick, endowing it with the villages of Coldingham, Lumsdene, Renton and Swinewood. The first recorded possessors of the land, divided into Easter and Wester Lumsden, were Gillem and Cren de Lummisden who, between 1166 and 1182, attested a charter granted to the Priory of Coldingham by Waldeve, Earl of Dunbar. Gilbert de Lumisden appears as witness to charters between 1249 and 1262. The common ancestor of the Lumsdens, Adam de Lumisden of that Ilk, and his son, Roger de Lummesdene, did homage to Edward I of England in 1296, and their names appear, with the variations of spelling, on the Ragman Roll.

From Adam, the first recognised chief of the name of Lumsden, descended Gilbert, who married the heiress of Blanerne, as evidenced by a charter of 15 June 1329, and he later adopted her crest of a white-tailed eagle, or ‘earne’, devouring a salmon. This crest is still used by the Fife armigerous branch of the family. From Gilbert’s eldest son, another Gilbert, descended the families of Lumsden, or Lumsdaine of Blanerne in Berwickshire, and Airdrie, Innergellie, Stravithie, Lathallan and Rennyhill in Fife. Gilbert’s younger son, Thomas, held the lands of Drum and Conland in Fife and East and West Medlar, or Cushnie, in Aberdeenshire as confirmed by a charter in 1353. From him descend the northern Lumsdens of Cushnie-Lumsden, Tillycairn, Clova and Auchindoir. The family of Burgess-Lumsden of Pitcaple descend through a female line. The more recent Lumsden estates of Balmedie, Belhelvie, Sluie and Banchory belonged or belong to cadet branches of these families. The senior line of Lumsden did not register their arms in 1672, but two cadet houses, of Alexander Lumsden of Cushnie and Sir James Lumsden of Innergellie, did so, both registering undifferenced arms. At present there are thirteen members of the Lumsden family who bear arms, either as matriculated cadet descendants of Alexander and Sir James or on grants in their own right.

Lumsdens appear in Scottish history as soldiers, scholars and statesmen, and also included merchants, barristers, surgeons, churchmen and soldiers. Sir James Lumsden served under King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden during the Thirty Years’ War, and he and his brother, William, returned to fight for the royalists in the civil war, after the Battle of Marston Moor in 1644. The Lumsdens of Cushnie sat as barons of the north in Parliament.

Andrew Lumsden, who was grandson of Sir Andrew, primate of Scotland in the Episcopal Church in 1713, and was descended from Andrew, third son of Robert Lumsden, Baron of Cushnie, was secretary to Prince Charles Edward Stuart during the 1745 rising. Attainted after Culloden, he fled to Rome where he became secretary and later Secretary of State to James VIII, the ‘Old Pretender’, until the latter’s death in 1766, when he rejoined Prince Charles until 1768. He returned to Scotland in 1773 and was fully pardoned in 1778 by the Hanoverian government. His tartan waistcoat is preserved at Pitcaple Castle.

Another cadet of Cushnie, Sir Harry Burnett Lumsden of Belhelvie, a knight both of the Order of the Star of India and of the Bath, founded the elite Lumsden’s Guides, who served on the North-West Frontier of India. He was the first to use ‘khaki’, an Urdu word meaning ‘dust-coloured’, and was the first to use uniforms of that colour; these were later to be universally adopted by the British army. John Lumsden of Cushnie was a director of the East India Company. Harry Leith Lumsden of Auchindoir founded the village of Lumsden in Aberdeenshire in 1825. Hugh Lumsden of Clova and Auchindoir was papal chamberlain to Pope Benedict XV.

The Lumsden Castle of Tillycairn has been splendidly restored in this century by the present Baron of Cushnie, and a gathering of the house of Lumsden was held there in 1988. The House of Lumsden Association was formed in 1972, and their work to gather together those of the name throughout the world reached a pinnacle in 1985, when the claim of the present hereditary chief was established in the Court of the Lord Lyon.