ELEVEN
The Rosslyn inheritance
In mediaeval Scotland, immense personal power was held by those who kept close call with the monarchy. Between the eleventh and sixteenth centuries, the governance of Scotland as exercised by the Royal Court was not so much to be found in Edinburgh or Stirling, but in the Kingdom of Fife, lying on the northern shores of the Firth of Forth. For over 500 years it was the town of Dunfermline, not Edinburgh, that was recognised as Scotland’s capital. Among the monarchs who made it their principal residence and who are interred at the great abbey church there are Malcolm III and Queen Margaret, their children Edward, Edgar, Alexander I, Ethelrede, and David I; their great-grandson Malcolm IV; and their great-great-great-grandson Alexander III. The remains of Robert the Bruce, too, his heart having been extracted and despatched on a Crusade, lie beneath the pulpit.
The identifiable associations of the St Clairs with Fife date from 1153, when William the Seemly’s grandson, having returned from an ambassadorial mission to Henry II of England, was gifted the lands of Cardain, within the Constabulary of Kinghorn, as a reward. A charter from William the Lion dated around 1170 refers to ‘my forest of Carden’, which according to Professor Geoffrey Barrow of the History Department of the University of Edinburgh, 1 would have in all likelihood been an area of woodland which monarchs kept for their private hunting; it was the Stewarts’ custom to make one of their trusted supporters hereditary keeper of such a property.
The name Carden means ‘high fortified place’ and the site itself, like that of Rosslyn, high up above a ravine, suggests that this may well have been the spot of a much earlier fortification. It is entirely possible that it was on his way here to see his young bride, Yolande de Dreux, that Alexander III fell from his horse and was killed in 1286. However, ‘Cardine’ is mentioned as being among the possessions of the St Clairs of Rosslyn as late as 1456.
Now, I have a personal interest in this as in the course of my research I came across a reference to Carden in a charter of 1482 connecting ownership of the estate to my own family of Martyne, who later became prominent in St Andrews. Unfortunately, I have been unable to discover when or why it was handed over to them by the St Clairs, if indeed it was from them that it was acquired. The property, it appears, remained in the direct line of the Martyne family until the death of Andrew Martyne without issue in 1549. In 1582, the lands were granted to George Mertyne, who claimed it through his mother, one of the Duries of that Ilk. By this stage, however, the St Clairs were well ensconced in a far more prestigious Fife tenure.
Although Carden was the earliest Fife property acquired by the St Clairs, not a great deal remains today of the once awe-inspiring and all-powerful Ravenscraig Castle, the ruins of which cling to a wind-swept clifftop above a public park to the north of the industrial Fife town of Kirkcaldy. Strategically, with its cannon commanding the mouth of the Forth, it was yet another key installation in the defence of the Scottish realm, and yet another fiefdom which came under the control of the St Clair family.
The Scots had been attacked from the sea in Fife during the Wars of Independence, when Robert the Bruce was in Ireland, and it was left to William St Clair, Bishop of Dunkeld, younger brother of Henry St Clair of Rosslyn, to see them off. Father Hay says, ‘500 and more of the English fell, apart from the rest who, slipping away in confused flight, when, as they were already embarking on their ships, very many had overloaded their small craft weighed down by too heavy a number, they perished, swallowed up in the waters, or after the enemy band had been killed, who running to their ships in haste, and weighing down the one barge with their weight, sank.’ In the following century, as seafaring became more commonplace, the necessity for coastal defences became increasingly more pressing.
From the late fourteenth century onwards a string of North Sea outlook fortresses were purpose-built, from Berwick to Wick. From Eyemouth to North Berwick the waters were closely watched from the battlements of Dunbar, Fast, and Tantallon. Across the Forth, on the north Fife coast was the formidable Bishop’s Palace of St Andrews. At Stonehaven, there was Dunnottar; at Cruden Bay, Slains. Serving the St Clair interests of Caithness were the castles of Dunbeath, Girnigo and Sinclair, and Keiss. It was James II who, as part of these coastal defences, instructed the building of a fort at Ravenscraig in the spring of 1460, but not long afterwards he was killed by an exploding cannon at the siege of Roxburgh Castle. It was at the partly constructed Ravenscraig Castle, however, that his widow, Queen Mary of Gueldres, took up residence after his death.
James II’s plan had been to build two drum-shaped towers with a gun platform connecting them. The east tower is 43 feet in diameter, and the west, 38 feet, but what is odd is that the west tower is three levels higher than the east, which sat level with the gun platform. Since it was protected by the sea, a low wall enclosed the courtyard behind the towers, and an oblong tower house, possibly a kitchen or storage area, perched at the far south end, but this might have been a later addition. Ravenscraig was James II’s pride and joy and, indeed, all the signs were that he intended to keep it for his personal usage. However, his son, having completed the building work after his death, had other objectives in mind.
With his marriage to Princess Margaret of Denmark in 1469, James III received the Orkney Isles as a dowry settlement. Following the formal acquisition of Orkney to the Scottish Crown two years later, he offered Ravenscraig Castle, its adjoining lands and an annual pension of 40 merks – approximately £30,000 in today’s money – to Prince William St Clair in exchange for his Orkney earldom, which he wanted for himself. Prince William accepted; since it was a royal command, he had no option and at least he got something in return. Writing in 1715, his descendant John, Master of St Clair, a fugitive Jacobite on the run, puts a rather different slant on the transaction:
I had occasion to entertain myself at Kirkwall, with the melancholy prospect of the ruins of an old castle, the seat of the old earls of Orkney, my ancestors; and of a more melancholy reflection, of so great and noble an estate as the Orkney and Shetland Isles being taken from one of them by James the Third, for faultrie, after his brother Alexander, Duke of Albany, had married a daughter of my family, and for protecting and defending the said Alexander against the King, who wished to kill him, as he had done his younger brother, the Earl of Mar; and for which, after the forfaultrie, he gratefully divorced my forfaulted ancestor’s sister; though I cannot persuade myself that he had any misalliance against a family in whose veins the blood of Robert Bruce ran as fresh as his own; for their title to the crown was by a daughter of David Bruce, son of Robert; and our alliance was by marrying a grandchild of the same Robert Bruce, and daughter to the sister of the same David, out of the family of Douglas, which at that time did not much sullie the blood, more than my ancestor’s having not long before had the honour of marrying a daughter of the King of Denmark’s, who was named Florentine, and has left in the town of Kirkwall a noble monument of the grandeur of the times, the finest church ever I saw in Scotland.2
Whether young John St Clair’s analysis, written as he fled abroad to escape the wrath of King George I two and a half centuries later, rings true or not, his ancestor Prince William and his family were not exactly paupered by the hand-over, which occurred when Prince William was well into his sixties. By the time of his death in 1484, he had already divided his lands and titles among his three eldest sons, but without the Norse earldom of Orkney, now among the titular possessions of the ruling house of Scotland, none of them were eligible to inherit the title of prince. Perhaps this was at the root of Prince William’s quarrel with his eldest son, William the Waster?
Despite this, the power base of his descendants in the East Neuk of Fife was to survive for a further 400 years. Travel through Kirkcaldy today and there is a Rosslyn Street, a Loughborough Road, after the family’s late-16th-century courtesy title, and a Caithness Street. Indeed, the family held Ravenscraig until 1898, when the gambling debts of the immensely likeable, but financially irresponsible, 5th earl of Rosslyn finally caught up with him. Ravenscraig Castle, Dysart House, and 3,000 acres in Fife were sold to Sir Michael Nairn, founder of the linoleum manufacturing industry which made the town of Kirkcaldy rich during the Victorian era. Time moves on and the popularity of linoleum went into decline when vinyl was introduced during the 1920s. Ravenscraig Castle was taken into State care in 1955, and is today managed by Historic Scotland. Nevertheless, the Fife connection of the St Clair descendants continues.
In 1715, John, the aforementioned Master of St Clair, was attainted for his support of the de jure King James VIII, the ‘Old Pretender’, and for having taken part in the first Jacobite Uprising. He was later pardoned and restored to his lands, but for no apparent reason appears not to have been reinstated in his title of Lord St Clair. Notwithstanding, the ongoing entitlement, although not taken up until recently, duly passed on his death to his younger brother, General James St Clair, who, during the same uprising, had served in Flanders as British Army Quartermaster General. In 1735, General James acquired the lands of Rosslyn from his kinsman, Sir William St Clair who, having no male heir, was last in the direct St Clair male line of Rosslyn.
Genealogy is all too fascinating a game of snakes and ladders. The St Clair entitlement thereafter was handed on to Henry, another brother, then through four generations of women, starting with their sister Grizel and passing to her daughter, Margaret Patterson of Prestonhall. In 1744, Margaret married John Thomson of Charleton in Fife, and the barony of St Clair line was carried through their daughter, another Grizel, who married Colonel John Anstruther. In 1911 their descendant, Grizel St Clair Anstruther, married Baron Knut Bonde of the Swedish Diplomatic Service, and it is their grandson Baron Knut Harald Jons St Clair Bonde of Charleton in Fife, who is today recognised as heir apparent to the lordship of St Clair.
To add to the confusion, however, in 1782, a barony of Sinclair was reinstated, and is currently held by Matthew Sinclair who descends through the twelfth century Herdmanston line of the family. Meanwhile, in 1766, the lands of Rosslyn were bequeathed to the grandson of General James’s younger sister Katherine. Katherine had married Sir John Erskine of Alva. It was Katherine’s grandson, Sir James St Clair-Erskine, 2nd Earl of Rosslyn, who in 1805 became heir in entail of Ravenscraig, Dysart and Rosslyn, thus establishing the present 7th Earl of Rosslyn’s tenure of the castle and chapel.
All of this family interplay might appear an irrelevant diversion from the mainstream story of Rosslyn Chapel, but not so. Even the more esoteric commentators upon the subject have to acknowledge that for over a thousand years it is the St Clair dynasty which has owned and been responsible for this land and the sites which sit upon it. It is their birthright, and they alone are responsible for guarding the chapel from the speculation over what it might or might not contain.