Of Royal Descent

In his printed poems Strachan gives his name as Georgius Strachanus Merniensis Scotus – George Strachan of the Mearns, Scot. This scant information is supplemented by the family coat of arms on the cover of his album amicorum and by the comments written inside by his friends, professors and fellow students. From these it can be shown that Strachan was born c. 1572, the youngest of three sons of Sir Alexander Strachan of Thornton (d. c. 1600) and Isobel Keith (c. 1543–August 1595). Sir Alexander was the 12th Strachan of Thornton. George's mother was the daughter of William Keith, 4th Earl Marischal, and through his lineage Strachan and his siblings were direct descendants of King James I of Scotland (Balfour 1904: 46–7). Throughout his life Strachan placed great importance on his social status and, no matter how impecunious were the straits in which he found himself, he always expected to be treated with the respect due to a gentleman of noble descent. All parts of his extended family were nobility and gentry, holding lands which stretched from Strathdon in the north-east of Scotland to Dundee in the east. Dunottar Castle, the seat of the Earl Marischal, George's grandfather, is less than fifteen miles from the Strachans’ family home, Thornton Castle. The Thornton estate lies in the rich farmlands of the Howe of the Mearns between the small towns of Laurencekirk and Fettercairn (Balfour 1904: 122).

In the late sixteenth century Scottish nobility and gentry were divided by religious confession. In 1591, when George was still a young man, there were sixteen ‘Papists and discontented Erles and Lordes’ and only eight ‘Protestants and [those] well affected to the course of England’ of similar status. Those nobility and gentry of inferior rank to earls and lords showed an opposite balance, with records for 1592 stating: ‘Protestants 28, Papists 13, neutral, suspect or doubtful 6, minors 9’ (Rogers 1873: 62–3). Strachan of Thornton was strongly Catholic. George's maternal grandfather, the Earl Marischal, was one of twelve peers chosen by Queen Mary in 1560, while still queen of France, to act in her absence as a governing council for Scotland following the death of her mother, Mary of Guise. George's eldest brother, Robert, was his father's heir and stood to inherit all of the family lands.