NINETEEN
Rosslyn’s post-Reformation survival
Francis Robert St Clair-Erskine, 4th Earl of Rosslyn, was a man of diverse talent. In 1878, Queen Victoria appointed him her Ambassador Extraordinary to Madrid for the marriage ceremony of King Alfonso XII to Princess Maria de las Mercedes, daughter of the Duc de Montpensier. Sustained by the immense income from his Fife coalmines, agricultural land and other interests, he became a renowned breeder and trainer of horses. In 1884, in an echo of the St Clair’s ancestral connections with Scotland’s north-east coast, his daughter Millicent married the 4th Duke of Sutherland and became mistress of the magnificent Dunrobin Castle at Golspie, in Sutherland.
It was an age of indulgence for the British upper classes, their wealth and circumstances enabling them to fill their leisure time with cultural pursuits of an amateur nature. Queen Victoria herself painted in watercolours and published her diaries. Lord Rosslyn was hailed as a poet of no small talent and ranked among her favourites. When, in 1887, three years before his death, he wrote a Jubilee Lyric entitled ‘Love that Lasts Forever’, it was privately published by royal command. It can only be assumed that this was of a more serious note than the one he wrote that is quoted by his son, the 5th earl, in his memoirs: ‘I kissed her till she died of pain,/ and then I kissed her back to life again.’1
Alas, it appears that the noble lord was no more successful a businessman than he was a writer of ditties. In common with other race-going, landowning peers, notably the 5th Earl of Lonsdale, he lost a small fortune when he invested in cattle ranching in the American Midwest.2 Despite this loss, at this stage, there was still plenty of money left. Indeed, he even went so far as to write to the ranching pioneer Moreton Frewin, whose scheme it had been, absolving him of blame.
An imposing red sandstone monument to the memory of the 4th earl, and his wife Blanche, stands, surmounted by a cross, on the lawn in front of the chapel’s west-end baptistery door. It was carved by W Birnie Rhind, the Edinburgh-based sculptor, an appropriate choice given that it was he who created many of the figures on the Scott Monument and on the façade of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery. At the time of the 4th earl’s death, despite the occasional poor investment, which in theory he could well afford, the bulk of the Rosslyn family fortune remained intact. By most standards, the Rosslyns could have been described as rich. That situation was about to undergo a drastic reversal.
Perhaps the 5th earl himself said it all with the title and content of his memoirs, My Gamble with Life, published in 1928, but whatever one might think of his profligacy, it is hard not to warm to his honesty and he was most certainly a survivor. All started well with his birth at Dysart House in 1864. At school in England, and throughout his teenage years, he was marked out as a precocious character, not always winning the approval of his father, but sons rarely do. At his wedding in London to Violet de Grey Vyner in 1890, the year of his father’s death, the rites were performed by Rosslyn’s chaplain, the Revd Thompson, and at the reception afterwards the Prince of Wales, later Edward VII, proposed the health of bride and groom.
The prince and the 5th earl became great friends, bonded through their love of racing, gambling and ladies of the stage. But living in the fast lane and keeping up with royalty comes at a cost. Lord Rosslyn was rarely rational with money, even when he no longer had any, and one of the greatest disasters to befall him was when he bet £15,000, a princely sum at the time, on his horse Buccaneer to win the Manchester Cup. Buccaneer lost. Six years after having come into a fortune, the 5th Earl of Rosslyn was declared bankrupt.
Selling Dysart House and its contents along with Ravenscraig Castle, he went to live at Home Farm at Balbeggie, in Fife, but that still did not cover his debts and he was soon estranged from his wife. When he finally sold the balance of his family’s Fife coalmines in 1923, it saved him from penury, but the emotional cost was significant. ‘It was for these coal-fields that we exchanged our rights to be kings of Orkney and Scotland,’ he lamented miserably. Not one to give up easily, however, he became a stage actor, travelled the world as a journalist, and launched his own newspaper, Scottish Life. He married again, twice, and died in 1939, whereupon the earldom passed to his grandson, the father of the present, 7th, earl.
By this stage Rosslyn Chapel, although continuing as a place of worship, was starting to show visible signs of neglect. A report commissioned earlier in the century from the fashionable Fife-born architect Sir Robert Lorimer, six years after he had created the chapel of the Knights of the Thistle within St Giles’ Cathedral, Edinburgh, recommended that the exterior of the roof, which was riddled with cracks, be covered over with asphalt. But greater, more fundamental forces were at work.
Unemployment during the late 1930s was widespread throughout Lowland Scotland. Money was scarce and public finances were stretched. In the early years of World War II, a letter of complaint was sent to the minister of labour reporting that the Scottish Episcopal congregation at Rosslyn Chapel on certain Sundays had dwindled to no more than two, and, given the cost of maintenance and heating, was it therefore appropriate for it to continue? To his eternal credit, Gwilym Lloyd George, a son of the World War I leader, then Minister of Fuel, responded by saying that he doubted that he would be able to justify such an economy of fuel in this world at the possible cost of a disproportionate expenditure of it on himself in the next!3
In the mid 1950s, Rosslyn Chapel’s sacristy roof was further repaired, the carvings inside individually cleaned by hand. While the widespread and irresponsible demolition of old buildings was taking place throughout urban Britain, in rural communities ‘re-traditionalising’ was suddenly in vogue. Unfortunately, this was something new and often the techniques employed were far from successful. Over the 1960s and 1970s, several buildings in the nearby New Town of Edinburgh, soot-grimed by decades of coal burning fires, were scrubbed and stone-blasted so as to become ten shades lighter, which certainly made them look better, but caused irreparable damage to the porous stone of their fabric. At Rosslyn Chapel too a solution of ammonia and water efficiently removed the surface grime, but the silica fluoride employed to seal the surfaces simply held in the damp. Of course, with the chapel gaining popularity as a venue for weddings and christenings, nobody realised what the consequences of water retention within the stone would be at the time.
In an era where almost every stately home in the land was throwing its doors open to the public, Rosslyn Chapel attracted its fair share of curiosity, especially following a visit from Her Majesty the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh in 1966. The queen’s sister, Princess Margaret, Countess of Snowdon, came in 1988. In 1993, the Friends of Rosslyn Chapel, spurred on by Niven Sinclair, and the artist Marianne Lines, organised a memorable afternoon and evening of events in memory of Prince Henry St Clair, and his epic voyage to America.
The Prince of Wales visited the chapel in 1998 and, always an admirer of mediaeval architecture, agreed to lend his support to the Rosslyn Development Project. His association with the family was further endorsed when, in 2003, he became patron of the Clan Sinclair Trust. More recently, the King and Queen of Sweden, accompanied by Baron St Clair Bonde, looked in during a private visit to Scotland.
In 1995, it was confirmed that the humidity in the chapel had become dangerously high, and urgent steps were required to restore the permeability of the richly carved inner surfaces. The trustees reacted promptly and within two years a purpose-built, free-standing steel structure was erected to encase the building under the supervision of leading Edinburgh-based architect James Simpson. Thus, the building as a whole is more watertight, enabling the roof vaults to dry outwards, away from the interior surfaces.
A second phase of restoration, supervised by James Simpson, began in 2000. Funded by the National Heritage Lottery Fund, the Eastern Scotland European Partnership, Historic Scotland, and the Rosslyn Chapel Trust, the east boundary walls were stabilised. A new roof of Caithness slate was erected over the existing crypt roof and the priest’s cell, and two buildings of a later period beside the crypt were made functional.
In addition to this, the crypt staircase and the wooden screen at the west end were repaired, and the building totally rewired. Even more recently, it has been necessary to install a new entrance system, and to triple the size of the car park. The filming of The Da Vinci Code in September 2005, notwithstanding the funds that it generated towards the chapel’s running costs, has led to the significant improvement of visitor facilities, not least the introduction of a more accessible interpretation centre.