SEVENTEEN
Keeping it in the family
One of the more intelligent aspects of the Scottish peerage and honours system is that under the old Celtic tradition it is usual for succession and titles to pass to the nearest female and her progeny in the absence of an immediate male heir. The reasoning behind this is simple. Since the mother carries the child before birth, there is at least affirmation of the maternal bloodline, if not that of the father. Not that this, in a world of equal opportunities between the sexes, seeks to cast doubt upon the long-established and widely endorsed practice of male primogeniture, but it does make sense when land is up for grabs or an ancient title is in danger of extinction. It has always surprised me that this eminently sensible ruling applies only to the Scottish peerage and rarely to UK titles (such as dukedoms), unless under a special remainder. It would have provided England with a far greater sense of ancestral identity and continuity than today exists.
In 1778, when the last of the male St Clair bloodline of Rosslyn died, only a modest inheritance passed to his only surviving daughter, Sarah, who was married to Peter Wedderburn, a much respected Edinburgh lawyer. When Wedderburn was made a Judge of the Court of Session, he took the courtesy title of Lord Chesterhall. They had a son and a daughter, Alexander and Janet, and Alexander, having followed his father into the legal profession, excelled all expectation. By 1762, when he prosecuted the notorious Douglas Cause on behalf of the beautiful widowed Duchess of Hamilton and her young son, Sir Alexander Wedderburn was considered to be one of the leading advocates of his generation.
The Douglas Cause, the legal case which decided the future of another great inheritance – lands, property and titles – following the death of the first and last Duke of Douglas, rocked eighteenth-century Hanoverian society both north and south of the Border. When the Douglas estates were claimed by the late duke’s nephew, whose legitimacy was suspect – his mother, the duke’s sister, was over fifty when she gave birth to twins and it was alleged that they were adopted – he was challenged by the family of his kinsman the 7th Duke of Hamilton. To begin with, the Scottish Court of Session ruled in favour of the Hamiltons’ claim, but the decision was overturned by the House of Lords.1
Sir Alexander Wedderburn had entered politics the previous year and would become Lord Chancellor of Great Britain in the Government of William Pitt. In 1780, he was raised to the peerage as Lord Loughborough in the county of Surrey. In 1801 he took the title of 1st Earl of Rosslyn in recognition of his mother’s family. He died at his home in Windsor in 1805 following an attack of gout and was buried in St Paul’s Cathedral in London. Although married twice, the 1st earl had no children, but such was the influence he exercised in an age when hereditary status still stood for something that prior to his death he arranged for all of his titles and inherited estates to pass to his nephew Sir James St Clair-Erskine, the equally talented son of his sister, Janet, who had married Sir Henry Erskine. Janet’s mother-in-law, Katherine Erskine, was, of course, General St Clair’s youngest sister, and therefore also their cousin. Sir James St Clair-Erskine, who sat as MP for Kirkcaldy, was to crown his own career with the rank of Lord President of the Council in Sir Robert Peel’s Tory/ Whig coalition of 1834.
By any standards Alexander Wedderburn portfolio was substantial. In addition to property in England, there was Ravenscraig Castle, 3,000 acres of land in Fife, and the equally prestigious, but by this stage rather neglected, Rosslyn Estate in Midlothian, which, along with Dysart House in Fife, reverted to the Rosslyn line of the family following the deaths of his great-uncle General Sir James St Clair and his cousin Colonel James Patterson.
As the nineteenth century moved forward, both Roslin Glen and the town itself acquired a further celebrity. Already a famed beauty spot, the gorge of the River North Esk and its surrounding woodlands were championed in the writings of the bestselling novelist Sir Walter Scott, who, in the early years of the century, was a resident at nearby Lasswade. When George IV visited Edinburgh in 1822, the first reigning British monarch to set foot on Scottish soil for over 200 years, Scotland was crying out for a sense of nationhood and found it not only in the mountains, glens and clans of the Highlands, but in the poetic landscape of the Scottish Lowlands. Rosslyn Chapel may now have become one of the great tourist destinations of the twenty-first century, but the Hanoverians and Victorians of two centuries ago also flocked here in their thousands, including, as one might have expected, Queen Victoria herself.
In 1842, at the very start of her first visit to Scotland, staying with the 5th Duke of Buccleuch at Dalkeith Palace, a short carriage drive away, she insisted on visiting Rosslyn Chapel, which she had heard so much about. She was so taken with what she saw on 14 September 1842 that she expressed a desire that ‘so unique a gem be preserved for the country’. For better or worse, this opened the floodgates for Rosslyn as a tourist attraction.
By this stage, Lord Rosslyn had already commissioned the architect William Burn to begin repairs on the exterior. However, it would be a further twenty years before the interior of the chapel, possibly following a further nudge from Her Majesty, sprang to life again. In 1861, the 3rd Earl of Rosslyn was cajoled by his cousin by marriage, Lady Helen Wedderburn, daughter of the 7th Earl of Airlie, to reintroduce Sunday services. The architect David Bryce was summarily approached to begin the restoration work at a cost of £3,000. Flagstones were relaid in the crypt, a new altar was introduced, and the damaged carvings in the Lady Chapel were repaired. So as to offset some of the costs of the fixtures and fittings, the enterprising Lady Helen, who lived at Rosebank House on the estate, launched a subscription drive that was widely supported by the Scottish gentry far and wide.
Not everyone was happy though with the quality of the restoration work. One anonymous artist even went so far as to write to the Scotsman newspaper deploring the fact that the features which, in the eyes of his profession, rendered the chapel such an object of interest, of study and affection, were being lost forever. A similar reaction was sparked in certain quarters by the stone cleaning of Edinburgh’s New Town at the end of the following century, but in the case of the chapel it seems to have largely been directed towards the ‘uncalled for embellishments’ imposed on some of the carvings.
Regardless of such controversy, Rosslyn Chapel was rededicated by Bishop Terrot of Edinburgh on Easter Tuesday, 22 April 1862, and formally reopened to the public with Bishop Forbes of Brechin preaching the first sermon. The Revd Cole, military chaplain at Greenlaw Barracks, near Penicuik, was constituted as Lord Rosslyn’s domestic chaplain. Four years later, the 3rd earl was succeeded by his son who, in the years that followed, commissioned Andrew Kerr, a young architect, to create an apse to serve as a baptistery, with an organ loft above. A fine oak tracery displays the family crest, and in total, including Kerr’s fees, the work cost the estate a substantial £792, the equivalent today of £46,000. The 4th earl’s imposing tomb is situated in front of the baptistery entrance.
Any remainder of the original stained glass in the chapel windows had been destroyed during the Reformation, and for a long period of time there was no glass at all in the openings, the only protection being afforded by outside shutters. By the time of the 1862 restoration, however, they had been glazed with clear glass. Visiting Rosslyn Chapel today, therefore, it is important to understand that the jewel-like stained-glass windows in the Lady Chapel are of Victorian origin. In the six windows are the Twelve Apostles, their design created in 1867 for Francis, 4th Earl of Rosslyn, by Clayton & Bell of London, and dedicated to the memory of his parents.
In the east aisle are St John the Baptist with a lamb on a book, St Paul with a sword, St Mark and St Luke. The three windows of the north aisle feature images of the Annunciation and the Nativity, the Presentation in the Temple, the Baptism of Jesus, the Sermon on the Mount and the Miraculous Draught of Fishes. In the three windows of the south aisle are interpretations of the Miracle at the Marriage Feast of Cana, the Raising of Jairus’s Daughter, Christ Blessing the Little Children, The Last Supper, the Crucifixion, and the Resurrection.
The east window, dedicated to the memory of the 4th earl’s sister, Harriet, Countess of Derneburg in Hanover, shows the Resurrection of Our Lord. The west window features Our Blessed Lord in Glory. In 1887, the earl raised two further windows, one showing St George and the Dragon and dedicated to the memory of Andrew Kerr, who had supervised the building of the baptistery and since died; the second showing St Michael, inserted as a thanks offering from ‘W. and H.A. Mitchell of Rosebank’.2
In his analysis of the ‘meaning’ of the chapel, the writer Tim Wallace-Murphy asks why two Roman soldiers, St Longinus, he who held the Spear of Destiny, and St Maurice, who was beheaded in front of his troops for refusing to worship the pagan gods of Rome, should be celebrated here? He also wonders why the patron saint of England is equally given his place, and makes a comparison with the mystical redecoration at the Church of St Maria Magdalena in Rennes-le-Château, which must have taken place around the very same time. Does this confirm that there is a connection between the two places of worship? Or is it just that what features there today is what was in vogue among certain factions of Christendom at the time? You either accept that the interiors of Rosslyn Chapel and St Maria Magdalena were comprehensibly brought about through the inventive imagination of independent scholars steeped in classical Christian and pagan mythology, or you take the view that some great transcendental master plan was at work. Either way, it provides a source of endless fascination.
However, thereafter you find yourself firmly implanted in the twentieth century, the windows in the baptistery dating only from 1954. These commemorate the current earl’s uncle who died in active service during World War II, and his stepfather who died from injuries sustained during the same conflict. They were designed with a theme of the White Cliffs of Dover and St Andrew and St George. Another is dedicated to the 7th earl’s grandmother, Princess Dmitri, and depicts St Francis of Assisi surrounded by birds and animals, including a kangaroo. Again this might cause any amount of curiosity should anyone be unaware that her family came from New South Wales.