TWENTY-TWO
The impact of tourism
Oral tradition has it that as many as seventeen of the St Clair barons of Rosslyn are interred beneath the floor of Rosslyn Chapel, all of them encased in their suits of armour. In The Lay of the Last Minstrel, Sir Walter Scott claims that there are twenty. John Slezer’sTheatrum Scotiae, published in the seventeenth century, refers to three princes of Orkney, and nine St Clair barons, a total of twelve. My personal confirmation of this, although not the exact number of knights concerned, came during a visit to Edinburgh University several years ago.
I was on an entirely different mission, researching an article on industrial land surveying, when I was called over to examine some print-outs from a seismic survey which had taken place at the chapel on the previous day. Clearly showing up blue against the thin black outlines on the paper were several objects situated deep within the foundations. The importance of this initiative, which is described in Andrew Sinclair’s The Sword and the Grail, was that it to some extent, but by no means conclusively, confirmed the theme of Sir Walter Scott’s The Lay of the Last Minstrel, published in 1805:
Seem’d all on fire that chapel proud
Where Roslin’s chiefs uncoffin’d lie
Each Baron, for a sable shroud,
Sheathed in his iron panoply.
As a friend of the St Clair family, Sir Walter would doubtless have been aware of Father Hay’s manuscript from a century earlier in which he so vividly describes the opening of the airless vaults for the interment of his stepfather, Sir James, first of the dynasty to be encased in a coffin, since his wife considered the practice of burial without one as being barbaric. As his stepfather’s casket was being installed, however, the funeral party came across the armour-suited body of Sir James’s grandfather:
His corpse [that of Sir William St Clair] seemed to be entire at the opening of the cave; but when they came to touch his body, it fell into dust. He was lying in his armour, with a red velvet cap on his head, on a flat stone; nothing was spoiled except a piece of the white furring that went around his cap, and answered to the hinder part of the head. All his predecessors were buried after the same manner, in their armour. Late Rosaline, my good father, was the first that was buried in a coffin against the sentiments of King James the Seventh, who was then in Scotland, and several other persons well versed in antiquity, to whom my mother would not hearken, thinking it beggarly to be buried after that manner.
‘It wasn’t all that unusual to be buried in your suit of armour,’ explained the author and historian AJ Stewart during our visit to the chapel in the summer of 2005. ‘It was partly to do with the preservation of the flesh. If you had been well embalmed before being clapped around in steel so that the worms couldn’t get at you, it was rather like being tinned. Besides, it was much more hygienic. If you were buried in armour, you were protected from the wrath of Heaven and the worms of Hell.’
That there were metallic objects in the vaults of Rosslyn Chapel I can certainly confirm from my brief inspection of those ground scans all that time ago, but the evidence that these were suits of armour appears to be contradicted by the 5th Earl of Rosslyn, the actor, who, in 1899, while appearing as Sir Walter Raleigh in a production of Kenilworth staged in Edinburgh and Glasgow, took time off for an investigation of his own.1 ‘In the presence of a well-known antiquary, we removed the stone lids of three or four of the vaults,’ he writes in his memoirs. ‘That they [the knights] were buried without coffins was true, but we found no traces of armour, though I did not pursue my search through the tombs.’ Which, of course, poses the question as to what happened to those suits of armour, and what exactly was I looking at on those computer print-outs?
To date, the catacombs, the vaults, or whatever the foundations of Rosslyn Chapel are concealing, remain unexplored and in my opinion, rightly so. Following the ground scans, an attempt was made to penetrate the lower vaults with core drillers. The team was led by Andrew Sinclair, who lowered an industrial endoscope through a tube, in the hope that it would reveal all. No such luck. All they found was 10 feet of rubble, and, having cut through to the upper vault roof, they found that this consisted of 3 feet of solid stone. After a week of fruitless endeavour, they gave up.
Historic Scotland, the Government organisation that safeguards Scotland’s built heritage, and seeks to promote its understanding and enjoyment, has taken the stance that any further intrusive investigation would be detrimental to the chapel’s long-term wellbeing. The trustees concur. Furthermore, since graves are involved, the legal Right of Sepulchre, which protects the burial grounds of the dead from desecration, would first have to be revoked. Let the dead rest in peace, I say.
So we may never know what, if anything, is hidden in the depths below Rosslyn’s choir and this is I think as it should be in the great scheme of things. Imagine, for example, the reaction there would be if a major excavation was to take place and nothing was found. Yet there are other compelling diversions to dwell upon. Rosslyn’s mystical attraction is not solely focussed on hidden treasure; far from it. Sir Walter Scott’s melancholy verses from The Lay of the Last Minstrel continue to resonate:
O Listen, listen ladies gay!
No haughty feat of arms I tell
Soft is the note, and sad the lay
That mourns the lovely Rosabelle.
O’er Roslin all that dreary night
A wondrous blaze was seen to gleam;
’Twas broader than the watch-fire’s light,
And redder than the bright moon-beam.
It glared on Roslin’s castle rock,
It ruddied all the copse-wood glen,
’Twas seen from Dryden’s groves of oak,
And seen from caverned Hawthornden.
Who was the lovely Rosabelle, so tragically drowned in the Firth of Forth on her way to Rosslyn, for whom a fire, natural or supernatural, was said to burn above the castle? As with so much of the history of Rosslyn, there are differing interpretations of this story, none of them conclusive, and no one has been able to identify exactly who she was.
The 5th Earl of Rosslyn writes that Henry St Clair, the twelfth-century Crusader, was engaged to Rosabelle, daughter of the Earl of Strathmore, which is unlikely since the earldom of Strathmore was only created in 1677. A misprint? Or a red herring? The St Clair family tree lists this Sir Henry’s wife as Rosabelle Forteith, daughter of Malise, 1st Earl of Strathearn. In a recent ‘families and local histories’ survey of the ancestors of HRH Prince William, heir to the British throne, this good lady was listed as his twenty-five times’ great aunt. However, with so little record kept, and so much of the relevant documentation destroyed (in the Rosslyn Castle fire of 1447, and General Monck’s attack of 1650), I would suggest that it is virtually impossible to work this one out for certain.
It is therefore not at all surprising that a certain amount of confusion surrounds the links between the St Clairs and the earls of Strathearn, especially since their families entwine in at least three generations. Rosabelle, daughter of the 1st Earl of Strathearn, married Henry St Clair in the early twelfth century. Katherine, daughter of the 4th earl, married another Henry St Clair in around 1200. In the fourteenth century, Isabella, daughter of the 8th earl, married William St Clair, the union through which their son, yet another Henry, acquired the Orkney earldom.
Sir Walter’s ballad tells us that the ‘lovely Rosabelle’, was at Ravensheugh (Ravenscraig) Castle on the coast of Fife on the day that a ball was to be held at Rosslyn Castle. For a start, this has to have been Sir Walter’s invention since Ravenscraig Castle was yet to be built and only became a St Clair possession in the late fifteenth century. Continuing regardless, it seems it was a stormy afternoon and, seeing distant lights across the Firth of Forth, the lady in question was seized with a great yearning to see the handsome Lord Lindesay’s heir, who was to be a guest at the ball. Although previously warned not to travel by a seer, who prophesied ‘a wet shroud’ for the ‘ladye gay’, the lovely Rosabelle persuaded some reluctant fishermen to row her across the estuary. Alas, her barge soon encountered blackening waves and tragically all were drowned.
In the words of Sir Walter Scott, Rosabelle’s reasons for going were thus:
’Tis not because Lord Lindesay’s heir
To-night at Roslin leads the ball,
But that my ladye-mother there
Sits lonely in her castle-hall
’Tis not because the ring they ride
And Lindesay at the ring rides well,
But that my sire the wine will chide
If ’tis not filled by Rosabelle.
My personal opinion is that the lovely Rosabelle was neither Sir Henry’s fiancée nor wife, but his daughter, otherwise it is unlikely she would have been expected to be on hand to pour the wine, and her interest in Lord Lindesay’s heir would appear, would it not, a trifle inappropriate?
With regard to the chapel being ‘on fire’, it has been suggested that this is simply a recognition of the St Clair family’s Norse origins and the Viking ritual of cremation at sea. Illusions of fire and flame in the sky are commonplace throughout Scottish history, the most notable example dating from 1689, when a red glow was reported over the Perthshire landscape on the eve of the Battle of Killiecrankie. At Rosslyn, the tradition survives that whenever a member of the immediate family is about to die, the windows of Rosslyn Castle are lit up by the setting sun. This is certainly what the 5th earl claims he was told when his grandfather expired at Dysart in 1866.
Personally, I love these old Scottish legends. Whenever a Duke of Hamilton dies, a white stag is said to appear at Brodick Castle on Arran. The Haigs of Bemersyde are forewarned by a headless horseman. The sound of drums precedes the death of an Ogilvie of Airlie and, according to the late Sir Iain Moncreiffe, the death of a Lord Herries is heralded by the arrival of hedgehogs upon his ancestral lawn.