THIRTEEN
The Reformation in Scotland
The end of the sixteenth century saw significant improvements to Rosslyn Castle with the second son of Sir William, Lord Chief Justice, another Sir William, adding the vaults, the great hall and clock tower, and having his architects introduce an impressive 4-foot-wide spiral staircase that led from the basement to the top floor. The aggrandisement was long overdue; it was now well over a hundred years since his great-grandfather Prince William’s restoration following the fire.
However, these were uncomfortable times for any family adhering to the Holy Roman faith, and particularly for the hereditary custodians of a celebrated ‘house and monument of idolatrie and not ane place appointit for teiching the word and ministratioun of ye sacrementis’, as the Presbytery described Rosslyn Chapel in 1589 when they discovered that the minister of Cockpen, the Revd William Knox, a nephew of the great Protestant Reformer John Knox, had participated in a baptism here.1 Under such circumstances, it is no small irony that the maiden name of John Knox’s mother was Sinclair.
A year later, George Ramsay, the minister at nearby Lasswade, was instructed to prevent the burial of Oliver St Clair’s widow in Rosslyn Chapel. Adherents to the old faith had been under siege for some time now and this was only the latest attack from the establishment Kirk. Eighteen years earlier, the year before the death of John Knox, the provost and six prebendaries of Rosslyn had resigned in disgust when the chapel’s endowments, dating from the time of Prince William St Clair, were removed ‘by force and violence into secular hands’.2 As staunch Catholics, the St Clairs still doggedly refused to succumb to the dictates of the Kirk, but the popular tide was against them.
In 1592 George Ramsay was outraged to find that the chapel’s altars remained ‘standing haill undermolishit’. When Sir William responded that he would ‘defend them as he might’, he was accused of being unsound in his religion, and summoned to appear before the Presbytery. The Lord of Rosslyn remained adamant in his defence of what he saw as his private property, but to no avail. In August of that same year he was publicly excommunicated from the pulpit in Dalkeith, the sentence being repeated at Lasswade Parish Church on the following Sunday.
The Catholic Father Hay appears critical but not wholly unsympathetic towards this Lord of Rosslyn, calling him a ‘leud man’, and inferring that it was his lax morality that encouraged the Kirk to take such a hard line against him. ‘He kept a miller’s daughter, with whom it is alleged he went to Ireland; yet I think the cause of his retreat was rather occasioned by the Presbyterians, who vexed him sadly because of his religion, being Roman Catholic.’
However, as a wealthy and by all accounts rather arrogant man, it is doubtful that Sir William would have been overdismayed at being excommunicated from the Protestant faith, which he deeply despised. On the other hand, towards the end of 1592, the Kirk was in a position to announce, not without a certain sense of smugness, that the altars at Rosslyn Chapel had been wholly demolished to the satisfaction of the ‘Acts of the General, Provincial and Presbyterial Assemblies’. This destruction of Rosslyn’s four altars dedicated to St Matthew, the Blessed Virgin, St Andrew and St Peter in the Lady Chapel must have seriously upset him, and might easily have encouraged a retreat to the Emerald Isle.
Thereafter, it seems the chapel was abandoned as a place of worship, its enemies being of the opinion that ‘perpetual dripping will wear away the stone’.3 With no glass, only wooden window shutters, perpetual dripping most certainly did begin to wear away the stone. At the same time, however, there was nothing to prevent Sir William, his sons and his grandsons from being interred in the chapel’s watertight, airless vaults, alongside their ancestors. And there was also nothing to prevent the next Sir William, great-great-great-grandson of the chapel’s founder, from further embellishing his castle.
Around the year 1610, he married Anna Spottiswoode, daughter of the Bishop of Glasgow, later Bishop of St Andrews, who, in 1635, became Lord Chancellor of Scotland. At the time, the St Clair marriage must have looked like an extremely astute political match from both sides, but events would soon overtake them all. In the meantime, it was this Sir William who built over the vaults, and they are his initials, SWS, which feature, along with the date 1622, above the castle door. The dining room ceiling he introduced featured nine panels decorated with hunting scenes; the central panel contained the arms of St Clair and was also dated 1622.
With his father-in-law’s high-profile status as Lord Chancellor, and the rumblings of the Scottish National Covenant movement gaining momentum against the dictates of Charles I, Sir William might be thought wise to have opted out of mainstream public life. Besides, his domestic affairs must have kept him well preoccupied. There was an elder son, also William, who predeceased him in France, and seven other sons, one described as ‘possessed’. Sundry other natural progeny are also hinted at by Father Hay. Thus Sir William had his hands full.
As the century progressed, Scotland found itself once again spoiling for a fight with the English. But this time it was to be a clash of a very different nature to anything there had been before; a violent confrontation between an English parliament set on deposing its king and determined to undermine Scotland’s entrenched loyalties to the royal line of Stewart. An audible gasp was heard throughout the land when Charles I was publicly beheaded at Whitehall on 30 January 1649. At the far end of Roslin Glen, at Hawthornden, the poet Drummond, a devoted Royalist, was reported as being so deeply distressed on hearing the news that it hastened his own end within the year, a demise widely attributed to a broken heart.
At least Drummond was spared the assault upon Roslin Glen, which took place the following year after the Scottish army’s ignominious defeat at the Battle of Dunbar, a debacle at which 3,000 Scots were killed and 10,000 wounded. During Oliver Cromwell’s march on Edinburgh, first Borthwick Castle was attacked, but it only took a few cannonballs for it to surrender. The siege of Rosslyn Castle was more savage, with Cromwell’s commander General George Monck’s four pieces of artillery and one mortar gun taking up a position above the river (now the top path) and shelling the north-east and west walls. Sir John St Clair, having just become head of the family – his father having been buried in the chapel on the same day as the Battle of Dunbar – made a valiant stand, but saw his inheritance turned into rubble. Only the most recent part of the castle survived, but even this was pillaged, with the chapel turned over to stabling horses, standard practice with Cromwell’s men.
More tragic still was the breaking up of the library. During the last quarter of the sixteenth century, the St Clairs had lovingly accumulated memorials and relics of the Old Faith, rescued from the wholesale destruction of religious houses which had taken place. Of the twenty-one existing manuscripts of the Scotichronicon – the first comprehensive history of Scotland, begun in Latin in 1384 by John of Fordoun and continued up to 1449 by Walter Bower, Abbot of Inchcolm – at least five came from the library at Rosslyn Castle. These had remained safe and practically untouched until Monck’s soldiers arrived. The unfortunate Sir John was to spend the best part of his life thereafter as a prisoner at Tynemouth Castle, being allowed to return to Rosslyn only shortly before his death in 1690.
In his absence the castle was part sold and part mortgaged to cover his debts, but recovered at some later stage by his younger brother James, who through his second marriage to the widow of Captain George Hay became Father Richard Hay’s stepfather. This Sir James St Clair, by all accounts a good and worthy man, did his best to repair the damage to the estate, but concentrated his efforts largely on improving the grounds rather than the interiors. He planted woodland and a garden, improved the parapets of the bridge over the River North Esk, and introduced a gate despite the funds at his disposal being limited. Although they were not exactly impoverished, the once fabulous wealth of the St Clairs was significantly reduced.
On 11 December 1688, shortly after the Protestant William of Orange landed in England to displace the Catholic James VII and II, a mob from Edinburgh and some of the Roslin villagers took it upon themselves to storm the castle and destroy anything that they considered to be even vaguely popish or idolatrous. It was a sad state of affairs, and thereafter the castle, and its policies, fell rapidly into almost irreparable dilapidation. Father Hay was present on that sorry night and writes of the chapel being ‘defaced by the rabble . . . after the castle had been spoiled, where I lost several books of note, and amongst others, the original manuscript of Adam Abel, which I had of my Lord Tarbat, then Register.’ By his first marriage, Sir James had two sons, the eldest being another James, who was killed in Ireland in 1690 at the Battle of the Boyne. That left only his younger son, Alexander, who was succeeded in turn by his eldest son William, last of the 700-year-old direct male line of St Clair of Rosslyn. All families have their personal tragedies, and although this William fathered three sons and five daughters by his wife Cordelia, daughter of Sir George Wishart of Clifton Hall, all but his daughter Sarah predeceased him. Death so often came at an early age to families in those days, and that was why it was considered so important to marry young and to have at least a round dozen children. Such correspondence as survives for the historical record, even into the nineteenth century, in almost every case makes enquiry after the health of the recipient, especially when the survival of a dynasty was at stake. After all, the dynasty and the continued possession of land through the male line were considered to be all that really mattered. The continuation of the family name was of paramount importance. And no doubt this is why, in 1735, Sir William, 19th Baron, made over the Rosslyn estate to his kinsman, Colonel, later General, Sir James St Clair, a respected diplomat and member of parliament.
The general had no sons to inherit, but he did have brothers, and Sir William probably felt that he had no choice but to keep faith with the St Clair name. Although domiciled at Dysart House, the elegant mansion which he had instructed the Fife-based Adam family of architects to build for him, General James spent much of his life overseas. That did not prevent him, however, from showing a great interest in his inheritance. At some stage he must have been advised that there was little hope of the chapel at Rosslyn surviving into the future at all were not something done to make it wind and watertight. It was therefore authorised that the windows be glazed, the floor relaid and the controversial boundary wall be built, shielding the chapel from the glen below. In the manner of the age, Rosslyn Chapel was thereafter regarded as little more than an elaborate countryside folly.
The general had five brothers, the eldest having been the Master of St Clair who was attainted, and later pardoned, for his support of the 1715 Jacobite Uprising. There were also five sisters, and after the general’s death, his properties went first to his brother Henry, who died without issue, then, since their other brothers had predeceased them without progeny, to Grizel, their eldest sister, who had married John Patterson of Prestonhall. The Fife and Rosslyn estates then passed to their son, Colonel James Patterson, who died unmarried.
Colonel Patterson had a sister, Margaret, who was the direct ancestor of Baron St Clair Bonde, but after her brother James’s death, the Rosslyn inheritance passed to her Aunt Katherine, her mother’s younger sister. Katherine was married to Sir John Erskine of Alva, and with the succession in 1805 of their grandson, James Erskine, son of Janet Wedderburn, granddaughter of the last St Clair of Rosslyn in the direct male line, it was the beginning of an entirely new Rosslyn dynasty. A dynasty whose representatives would, one suspects, have been both amazed and deeply appalled had they even the slightest inkling of the blasphemous sensationalism which two centuries later would begin to envelope their family chapel.