My considered opinion (after being in the genealogy racket for 30+ years) is that it takes 5 generations for a criminal past to become instead a point of pride.
I think it was my 5x great grandfather in the paternal line that fled Scotland one jump ahead of the law and changed his name from MacGregor.
The MacGregors were basically the Mafia of Scotland, who earned a living stealing cattle, collecting cattle-theft protection money, and kidnapping the occasional heiress (for which Rob Roy's son was hanged, IIRC).
They also claim descent from the Stuarts ('s Roigheal mo Dhream - Royal is My Race - is the MacGregors' motto) so I guess we're descended from royalty, just by a very mucky sort of byway. Most people are. If you go back far enough, actually if you CAN go back far enough, everybody is descended from the only folks who kept records.
Wow. And the best I could come up with was an ancestor who was a defrocked Catholic priest in Sicily.