EIGHT
Vision of a Renaissance man
Building work on Rosslyn Chapel began 139 years after the Order of the Knights Templar was officially destroyed, so it is only a popular fiction which claims that it was they who built it, or, indeed, that they had anything to do with it. Of course, this is not to say that descendants of the survivors of the 1307 purge, or those who sought to maintain the movement in secrecy, might not have had a hand in it, but at no point in his history of the St Clairs of Rosslyn does Father Hay make even passing reference to the Templars. This might be explained by his having been a devout Catholic, and therefore contemptuous of the Order, but given the importance of historical clarity to him, I think it unlikely.
Realistically, Rosslyn’s association with an ancient order of ritual-obsessed fighting monks has been the invention of contemporary fantasists in search of some kind of alternative Arthurian dream. Given the extraordinary array of images that were created in his chapel, it can be assumed that Prince William St Clair was himself such a fantasist, but to suggest that he was in league with the Templars is ludicrous. During his lifetime, the Templars existed only in legend, along the lines of King Arthur and Knights of the Round Table or Robin Hood. Rosslyn Chapel certainly contains genuine Templar symbolism, but what would anyone expect from the inventive imagination of its erudite patron, a man steeped in the folklore of northern Europe and beyond?
With all the focus on Rosslyn it is easy to think that it was the only church under construction at the time, and that the reasons for its inception must be similarly unique. On the contrary, the building of such places of worship was commonplace among the nobility during the fifteenth century. The Collegiate Church of the Holy Trinity, for example, was founded by Royal Charter in 1462 at Leith Wynd by Queen Mary, the widow of James II.
Some of the allegorical carvings were similar to those at Rosslyn, but, if anything, more flamboyant. When the queen died in 1463, three years after her husband, the construction work was discontinued, but it was still described as being, with the exception of Holyrood Abbey, the ‘finest example of decorated English Gothic architecture in the City, with many of the peculiarities of the age’.1 Following the Reformation, it passed into the possession of the City of Edinburgh. When the North British Railway Company acquired the site in the valley under Calton Hill in the nineteenth century the building was dismantled.
In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries it was fashionable for wealthy nobles and landowners to endow a church for the maintenance of divine service on a scale of completeness and ceremonial dignity impossible in an ordinary parish church. Over thirty-seven collegiate churches of a size not that dissimilar to Rosslyn were commissioned during the reigns of James II, III and IV and, despite the ravages of the Reformation, survive to this day. Perhaps their benefactors believed that such extravagances would guarantee them a favourable reception in the afterlife. You have also to remember that there was also a lot of one-upmanship going on. In 1429, for example, Sir John Forrester endowed a church at Corstorphine, to the west of Edinburgh; Sir Walter Halyburton followed his lead at Dirleton in 1444, and two years later, Sir David Murray at Tullibardine in Perthshire, and Sir Andrew Gray at Fowlis, did likewise, as did Sir William Creychtoun at Crichton, in 1449.2
In the case of William St Clair, we know that his castles were lavishly hung with tapestries and richly furnished, and that he travelled in great state with many attendants. He was therefore a rich and hugely successful man with money to spare; a veritable Scottish Renaissance prince in the making. What do such men do when they reach the pinnacle of their achievement? They build something for which they will be remembered.
In Scotland, the endowment of a cathedral, or at least a chapel, was the next best thing to building yourself a palace, and palaces were not such a good idea as monarchs, especially of that period, tended to become jealous, and, what was worse, acquisitive. No matter how you chose to assert your own self-importance, it needed to be on an impressive scale, and, if not big, then at least exquisite. The more masons and designers you could afford to import from continental Europe in order to achieve this, the better. Moreover, in the case of Prince William St Clair, an appropriate and ideally suitable site was already available, that of the first castle of Rosslyn, abandoned in the previous century. This lay on the high ground to the north-west of his current domicile. Two factors would have contributed towards his decision to use this site. First of all, the foundations, and no doubt remnants of the original structure, would have remained intact. Secondly, some of his Crusader ancestors had already been interred there.
In Theatrum Scotiae, published in the seventeenth century, John Slezer, Captain of the Artillery Company and Surveyor of Their Majesties Stores and Magazines in the Kingdom of Scotland, writes that three princes of Orkney and no less than nine barons of Rosslyn were interred in the chapel. What this confirms is that the foundations of the chapel are a great deal older than the chapel itself, and that its vaults do belong to a previous building, and a substantial one at that.
And this, in turn, has led to an intense fascination not only with the interiors of the chapel, but with what lies beneath them; and not just the vaults containing the remains of Rosslyn’s previous owners, but whatever else might have been secreted away there over the centuries. On the basis of a claim that the ground plan is a one-third scale replica of the Third Temple, built in Jerusalem by King Herod, it would come as a surprise to discover that the subterranean accommodation was anything other than substantial.
Rosslyn Chapel is 40 feet, 8 inches in height. Its breadth is 34 feet, 8 inches, and its length, 68 feet. There are thirty-two different styles of arch within. The date scheduled for the completion of Prince William’s structure is uncertain, given that it was to have been part of a far greater project of cathedral proportions – possibly the choir of a far larger nave – but we do know that when Prince William died in 1484 he was, as was to be expected, buried in the vault, despite the work being incomplete. We also know that an earlier church, approximately 60 feet long, at one time stood in the cemetery lying below, between today’s chapel and castle. However, with the knowledge that there was yet another family chapel located within the more modern castle – possibly for use when under siege – it can only be assumed that by then this other chapel would have become redundant.
By this stage, of course, the St Clairs had occupied the site of the present castle for approximately 140 years, adding bits on to it with each generation. It was the 2nd Prince Henry who built the great 50-foot-long dungeon, and created parkland for red and fallow deer. In the next generation, Father Hay explains, for thirty-four years before Prince William turned his attention to building a chapel he was surrounded by great numbers of workmen. They had been kept busy fortifying his castle: shoring up the rock of its foundation, strengthening its walls, and creating a drawbridge.
What emerges, therefore, is a picture of a man of substance who, taking stock of his family’s obligations, was determined to protect his interests, be they at Kirkwall on Orkney, his territories in Caithness, or at Rosslyn, to confront the overland approach routes from England. Prince William’s titles, observed the historian David Hume of Godscroft, writing in the seventeenth century, ‘might weary a Spaniard’.3 Prince of Orkney, Duke of Oldenburgh, Earl of Caithness and Strathearne, Lord St Clair, Lord Niddesdale, Lord Admiral of the Scots Seas, Lord Chief Justice of Scotland, Lord Warden of the Three Marches, Baron of Rosslyn, Pentland and Pentlands Moor, Baron of Cardain, Baron of Newburgh, Baron of Roxburgh, Knight of the Cockle – the cockle shell being the symbol of pilgrims to the Holy Land – Knight of the Garter, Chevalier of the Ordre de la Toison d’Or, High Chancellor, Chamberlain and Lieutenant of Scotland, there was within the realm of Scotland no loftier being next to the king himself.
Added to which, Prince William’s life span itself encompassed the reigns of three Stewart monarchs: James I, James II and James III, all of whom knew they could trust him. His loyalty to the Royal House of Stewart was proven, and he became an indispensable wise old head, to whom they could each, in turn, look for advice. Alas, had he not died four years earlier, he might have been able to successfully mediate in the nobility-led debacle in 1488 which overthrew James III and placed his fifteen-year-old son, James IV, on the throne. While the politics of the age, and the St Clairs’ complicated family relationships, have no direct bearing on the actual physical erection of Prince William’s chapel, they do help to explain some of the reasons why progress in building it was so slow.
James Stewart, the future James IV of Scotland, was born as the work on Rosslyn Chapel was well under way, and must have witnessed at least some of the construction work at first hand. His second cousin, Lady Margaret Douglas, a granddaughter of King Robert III, was Prince William St Clair’s first wife. The first wife of James’s uncle, the Duke of Albany, was Prince William’s daughter Catherine St Clair, although this was far from being to the St Clairs’ advantage since Albany made a career of conspiring against his brother and was eventually exiled for treason. Unsurprisingly, he and Catherine later divorced, but despite the relationship between the Crown and Prince William St Clair being severely tested at times, it remained surprisingly solid. Undoubtedly, this was because all three of the Stewart monarchs, I to III, knew they could rely upon him.
Aged twenty-two, he was charged with the safekeeping of King James I’s twelve-year-old daughter, the Princess Margaret, when she was sent off to marry the thirteen-year-old dauphin, later Louis XI of France, in 1436. Such was the impression he made on this occasion that Charles VII of France created him a Knight of the Cockle, a precursor to the French chivalric Order of St Michael. On top of this he was also created a Chevalier of the Ordre de la Toison d’Or, or Golden Fleece, a citation founded six years earlier by Duke Philip III of Burgundy.
There could hardly have been a more stimulating time for a young man to visit France. Five years earlier, Joan of Arc had been burnt at the stake for heresy and sorcery by an ecclesiastical court of the Inquisition, but despite, or perhaps because of, her betrayal by those she had fought for, the English ascendancy over France’s northern territories had come to an end. Charles VII, crowned King of France seven years earlier, had grown up under the care of his future mother-in-law, Yolande of Aragon, who, as consort to Louis II of Anjou, laid claim to Sicily, Naples, Jerusalem and Cyprus. The power and reach of the French Court were therefore fabulous: although France was still embroiled in the Hundred Years War with England, Philip of Burgundy, with whom England had previously had an alliance, had recently signed the Treaty of Arras with Charles, returning Paris to the French Crown. The territories which the young Prince William St Clair was in a position to explore stretched as far south as southern Spain. Furthermore, although Princess Margaret Stewart was to die at the tender age of twenty-one, the marriage was immensely astute politically for Scotland, being at the same time a snub to England.
On their journey, St Clair and the princess were accompanied by one hundred gentlemen, twenty clad in cloth of gold with ‘chains of gold, and black velvet foot-mantles; twenty in red velvet with chains of gold, and black velvet foot-mantles; twenty in white and black velvet, signifying his [Prince William’s] arms which is a ragged cross in a silver field; twenty clothes with gold and blue coloured velvet, which signified the arms of Orkney, which is a ship of gold with a double treasure, and flower de luces going round about it in a blue field; and twenty diversely coloured, signifying the divers arms he had’.4
As a bachelor Prince William had no ties or responsibilities, other than to hand over the young Princess Margaret to the French Court. His mission accomplished, he would therefore have had the freedom to explore. He would probably have seen the high Gothic interiors of Notre Dame in Paris, and Chartres Cathedral, rebuilt following a fire two centuries before. He would most likely have taken the opportunity to explore King Charles’s southern territories, and with the astonishing ease with which distances were covered on horseback, would almost certainly have wished to visit Teba, in southern Spain, where, in the previous century, his ancestors had so poignantly been killed in battle against the Moors, whose descendants were still dominant in Al-Andalus. The name Al-Andalus was the name given to the territory by its Muslim conquerors, and the Revd Michael Fass, priest in charge of Rosslyn Chapel today, is convinced that this is where Prince William found the inspiration for his future creation, ‘echoing that ethereal architecture of the Iberian peninsula which he had seen’.5
Prince William and his first wife, Lady Margaret Douglas, were married around 1440, on his return from France aged twenty-six, and began their wedded life in great style. ‘In his house he was royally served in gold and silver vessels, in most princely manner, for the Lord Dirleton was his master-household, the Lord Borthwick was his cup bearer, and the Lord Fleming, his carver’, Father Hay tells us. He adds that Margaret had serving her ‘75 gentlewomen, whereof 53 were daughters to noblemen, all clothed in velvets and silks, with their chains of gold, and other pertinents; together with 200 riding gentlemen, who accompanied her in all her journeys. She had carried before her when she went to Edinburgh, if it was dark, 80 lighted torches. Her lodgings were at the foot of the Blackfriars Wynd, so that in a word, none matched her in all the country, save the Queen’s Majesty.’
In 1455, James II exchanged the earldom of Caithness for the St Clair earldom of Nithsdale, which Prince William had inherited from his mother. Following the king’s marriage to Princess Margaret of Denmark in 1469, William was also obliged to hand over his earldom of Orkney in return for Ravenscraig Castle in Fife. The Orkney Islands, part of Queen Margaret’s dowry, were formally annexed to the Scottish Crown by Act of Parliament in 1471. King James was also to receive the Shetland Islands, but these came later. Even without their islands fiefdom however, the St Clairs remained all powerful in Scotland, and it would have been considered strange had the future James IV not attended Prince William’s funeral at Rosslyn Chapel, even as an eleven-year-old.
In 1970 a widely acclaimed book, Falcon: The Autobiography of His Grace James IV, King of Scots,6 was published and became an instant bestseller. Its author was the acclaimed playwright AJ Stewart, who astounded historians by filling in the gaps which written testimony to the past had previously overlooked. In her subsequent, autobiographical book, Died 1513; Born 1929, which deals with reincarnation, she explains how this was achieved.7 In recent years she has been living quietly in Edinburgh, but still retains a formidable grasp of the events of 500 years ago, the period in which Rosslyn Chapel was built. On a bright afternoon in the summer of 2005, therefore, I accompanied AJ Stewart on a journey into the past to see if there was anything about Rosslyn or Prince William’s funeral that might have somehow lodged in her subconscious. In Falcon, her memoir of James IV, her attention to detail is impressive, so much so that her psychic authority of the subject is hard to challenge.
It was a Thursday, and Stuart Beattie, Rosslyn’s custodian, had confirmed that there would be no bus tours that afternoon. Even so, when we arrived we found at least thirty visitors milling around. It was a cosmopolitan group: four young Australians consulting their copy of The Da Vinci Code, a Japanese husband and wife wielding a digital camera, a Yorkshireman with a divining rod, and some loud, middle-aged Americans who fell reverentially silent in front of the Apprentice Pillar. Nobody paid any attention to us as we explored the choir and the crypt, where AJ said she felt most at home.
Memories of a great funeral and a christening did come to mind. It had been a multicoloured funeral. ‘They wore bright colours, but muted them. You didn’t want flashing sunlight on jewels. And yes, it wasn’t at all unusual to be buried in a suit of armour, especially if you had been on a crusade.’ AJ remembered the crypt as something else, perhaps the cellar of an older building, in other words a section of the original vaults. ‘That’s the one thing about crypts,’ she remarked, ‘they never change. You don’t rebuild cellars if you are rebuilding a house. You start at ground level, and that is why so many Roman foundations have survived. Right back to Thebes. Wherever you go in the world, people make use of the cellars that already exist.’
For AJ there proved to be something hauntingly familiar about the crypt at Rosslyn. ‘It doesn’t really fit with the building above, does it?’ she commented. She was right, it does not. There is something distinctly odd about this chamber. ‘I think that there must have been another room, rather similar,’ she volunteered after a pause. ‘There was another stairway leading to it, rather similar to the one here. But definitely not this one.’
A walled-up cavity caught her attention. There had once been a mediaeval safe and an iron grille, and she stretched out to touch the space above where it had been, as if to feel where the fastenings had originated. ‘It was a heavy one’, she said. ‘Kings had access to knowledge concerning hidden places, often a matter of life or death. That was why a lot of people died so that their secrets didn’t get out.’
Returning to the choir, she pointed out the niches high up on the walls, twelve on each side, where she had expected to see figures of the apostles. In the world of pre-Renaissance Catholicism, such figures were considered extremely important. They were brightly painted and made either of plaster or wood. ‘If you build a niche you have to have something in it, and if you have an empty niche in a church, the first thing you do is to make a statue.’ Such figures would have been among the first items to be destroyed during the Reformation, and since it is on record that Prince William employed numerous carpenters, it seems likely that they would have made carvings that would later have been translated into stone. This was a way of evaluating the scale and design of an image before it was finally approved and put in place.
On the exterior, to the left of the baptistery door, AJ pointed to the lepers’ squint, angled on the wall so that those who were unable to enter the church could stand outside and peer through into the interior. ‘A most precious thing,’ she observed, and crossed herself. ‘Leprosy itself came late to Scotland, imported by the Crusades,’ she continued. ‘Virtually everyone who went on a crusade came home with a skin disease. The lepers’ squint was for the unclean people who were kept outside. In mediaeval times almost any skin condition was diagnosed as leprosy. But true leprosy was not as widespread as thought. Lupus, an ulcerous inflammation of the skin, was far more common.’ Now there will be those who will dismiss AJ Stewart’s observations out of hand, probably on the grounds of her eccentric reputation or that she was stating the obvious, but it is hard to deny that she comes across as being intimately familiar with the mediaeval mind. Because of this, she is a perfect conduit to understanding both the practical and creative thinking behind the chapel’s creation.
By his marriage to his first wife, Margaret, daughter of the 4th Earl of Douglas, created Duke of Touraine in France, and a granddaughter of Robert III, Prince William St Clair had a son christened William and, according to Father Hay, four daughters. When Margaret died c.1451, he married Marjorie Sutherland of Dunbeath, a great-great-granddaughter of Robert the Bruce, by whom he had a further six sons and seven daughters. Thereafter, according to research completed by the distinguished 21st-century historian Hugh Pesketh, he married for a third time and had further issue, but such records as survive are incomplete.8
What is confirmed, as we have already seen towards the end of Chapter 6, however, is that the eldest son, William, having acquired the moniker ‘William the Waster’, was disinherited: he was passed over for the lands of Herbertshire and baronies of Rosslyn and Pentland in favour of his eldest half-brother, Oliver, and for the earldom of Caithness in favour of William, his second half-brother. Left only with the barony of Newburgh in Aberdeenshire, it comes as no surprise to learn that William the Waster felt hard done by and, following his father’s death in 1484, took issue on the subject. To his credit, Oliver appears to have done the decent thing and, ignoring his father’s wishes, ceded much of the property back to William, including Ravenscraig, while retaining the Rosslyn estate. An Act of Parliament recognised William as Lord St Clair of Dysart and Chief of the St Clairs, but alas the Waster did not have long to enjoy his reinstatement. He died soon after from a gallstone, the size and shape of a nutmeg.
With the funds at his disposal dramatically depleted, Sir Oliver of Rosslyn, who had by then married a daughter of his Midlothian neighbour, Lord Borthwick, was unable to complete his father’s original plan for a full collegiate church, or, as some suggest he intended, a cathedral. Instead, he saw to it that the work on the chapel was finished off. With foresight, the last of the Orkney St Clairs had, prior to his death, endowed his chapel with the income from his lands of Pentland, which further depleted Sir Oliver’s financial inheritance. In addition, 100 pounds Scots – approximately £12,000 in today’s money – from the will of Oliver’s maternal grandfather was bequeathed towards its upkeep, an annual 10 pounds of which was for a priest to sing perpetually for his soul, a practice that was discontinued after the Reformation. The chapel, therefore, now had its own trust fund to draw upon, and thus to some extent relieved the family from some of the financial burden of its running costs.
Alas, the reign of James IV, King of Scots, which had begun so promisingly in 1488, could not have ended more disastrously, either for Scotland or for the St Clairs. James IV, the most brilliant of the Stewart dynasty, had breathed self-confidence into his realm. He was fifteen when he inherited a kingdom which had been destroyed by factional conflict. He began the process of pacifying the Highlands. He introduced learning to the wider population, a practice continued by the followers of John Knox in the following century, and he made his little kingdom a power in Europe.9 All was well, exceedingly well, and then, alas, he allowed himself, and worse, Scotland, to become embroiled in his bully of a brother-in-law’s feud with the King of France, with whom James had signed an alliance. In 1513, hoping to encourage Henry VIII to cease hostilities against Louis XII, James invaded England with an army numbering up to 30,000 men. For Scotland, it was a catastrophe.
It is estimated that 12,000 Scots soldiers died on that terrible day. Twelve earls, fourteen lords, the Archbishop of St Andrews, the Bishop of Caithness and the Bishop of the Isles fell with their king on Branxton Moor at the Battle of Flodden. Having previously incurred the king’s displeasure – the reasons are not on record – the 2nd Earl of Caithness, Prince William’s second son by his second marriage, was under attainder. When James saw a body of troops arriving to join him, all clad in green, he asked who they were, and, on being told that they were the men of Caithness, decided to pardon the earl. No parchment being available, the king had the instruction inscribed on a drumhead which was cut out and handed to the earl. A rider was rapidly despatched to the Countess of Caithness so that if her husband did not return from the battle, the family inheritance would be secure. It was as well that this was done. The courier was the only member of the Caithness troop to return home. For generations thereafter no St Clair or Sinclair, as the Highland and certain junior branches of the family came to spell their name, would be seen wearing the colour green.
Among the roll call of the Scottish dead that day were 600 Highland Sinclairs; William, 2nd Earl of Caithness; his cousin, Henry, 3rd Lord St Clair, William the Waster’s son; and their kinsman, Sir John of Dryden. There were only four men left of the entire Scottish peerage, and their followers had perished in equal proportion. Scotland was left in a state of apprehension and uncertainty.