A clan is a group of people with a shared cultural and often familial identity who typically live in and govern one region of Scotland. Clans each had their own distinct identities. Some were large and others small; some resided in the Highlands and some in the Lowlands; and some were governed by one chief whereas others had different governing bodies or practices. Typically, clan membership provided protection from other clans and governments, though this became more nuanced after the Parliaments of Scotland and England merged under the 1707 Acts of Union. Though they have taken many different forms over the centuries, clans still exist in Scotland today.

After a revolution in England that dethroned the Catholic King James II and VII in 1688, Parliament passed the Act of Settlement of 1701, which excluded Catholics from the line of succession to the English throne. James was replaced by his daughter Mary II and her Protestant husband William of Orange, but Mary’s successor, her sister Anne, died without a surviving child in 1714. The new line of succession bypassed the remaining Stuarts, who were all Catholic, and passed the crown to a distant German relation, George I of Hanover.