SIX
Sentinel of the Lothians
Father Hay tells us that, according to the oral tradition of the St Clairs, following the Scottish victory at Roslin in February 1303, an English prisoner, ‘a man of no small estimation’, whom Sir Henry St Clair had taken prisoner and befriended, sought to counsel him concerning the vulnerability of his existing castle and suggested that he build a fortification on the rock upon which the current castle now stands.1 The temptation is to assume that this was either a repentant Sir John de Segrave, seeking to make amends for his previous interest in Sir Henry’s daughter-in-law, Lady Margaret, or Ralph de Manton.
Whoever it was, the advice was taken sufficiently seriously by Sir Henry for him to make a decision to relocate his stronghold. This inevitably raises the question of where the original castle might have stood, and although it has been suggested that it guarded the south bank of the river, or lochan, of Roslin Glen, a more obvious conclusion, endorsed by the complexity of its foundations, is that the earlier fortification occupied the present-day site of the chapel, high on the hill, where it commanded extensive views of the surrounding countryside but was open to attack on all sides.
It seems odd at first that the chosen spot for the St Clairs’ new build should have been on the lower ground, below the hilltop fastness, but it would not have been at all ill-advised were there water surrounding it. The tower of the present castle of Rosslyn, the earliest surviving piece of masonry on this site, is dated from around the year 1340, which approximately confirms the time-scale involved. The availability of a large quantity of locally quarried sandstone was an obvious bonus. Mediaeval castles needed to be impregnable, but many buildings were still fabricated of wood as, for example, was the greater part of Edinburgh Castle when its English occupants were attacked by Bruce’s lieutenant, the Earl of Moray, in 1314. Remember that this was the age of the longbow, footsoldiers carrying pikes and spears, and mounted cavalry attacks. Siege artillery, such as trebuchets and catapults, was only just being developed and proved no serious threat until well into the following century.
Effective siege weaponry, employing gunpowder and necessitating a widespread change to building in stone, only began to emerge in the mid fifteenth century with huge guns capable of hurling stones weighing as much as 350 kilograms over a distance of 2.5 miles. In 1457, James II of Scotland was presented with two massive siege guns by Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy, his uncle by marriage. The surviving cannon is known as Mons Meg, having been tested during an assault on the Belgian town of Mons, close to the French border, and it is housed in Edinburgh Castle. The unfortunate James was perhaps rather too keen on his artillery. He was killed in 1460 when another of his guns exploded during the siege of Roxburgh Castle.
In working out the layout of a building that has been repeatedly assaulted and rebuilt over the centuries, the use of imagination is essential. There are nine steps cut into the rock below the high wall of Rosslyn Castle. These adjoin the Lamp Tower, which possibly led to the terrace above. The information that has been passed down to us by Father Hay is that the approach pathway to the drawbridge was known as Minstrels Walk, commemorating a long-vanished house that once accommodated Prince William’s harpers and minstrels. And that is all we really know of the original layout.
The new castle at Rosslyn came under minor attack on many occasions. Edward III of England invaded Scotland on four separate forays between 1334 and 1337, during which time the majority of Lowland Scots decamped into the hills to get out of his way. While this was going on, William St Clair, 8th Baron of Rosslyn, had taken himself off to Lithuania on a Crusade with the Teutonic Knights, who shared a similar purpose with the Templars, only in their case it was to purge the pagans of northeastern Europe. In 1369, however, a twenty-five year truce between England and Scotland was negotiated. The lord of Rosslyn Castle at this time, Henry, 1st St Clair Prince of Orkney, who succeeded to his father’s estates in 1358, was to be found principally in the far north, in Orkney, where he was building Kirkwall Castle, and thereafter on his travels abroad.2 During his theoretical transatlantic excursion (see Chapter 7), he would have been absent for over eleven years, so it was left to his son, also Henry, to make improvements to Rosslyn Castle. However, this must have been delayed by Henry junior’s capture and imprisonment in England, for reasons which will soon become clear.
Almost his first action on being released in 1407 was to supervise the building of Rosslyn’s great dungeon. If the second Prince Henry learned anything from the murder of his pioneering father at Kirkwall in 1400, it was to secure his surroundings. He placed the five-storey-high, fifty-foot-long entrance to the main dwelling on the far side of the inner courtyard. It was these levels which gave the castle its lofty and unassailable appearance. In mediaeval Scotland, a family such as St Clair needed to awe their enemies in order to keep them at a distance.
The 2nd Prince Henry of Orkney had, in 1406, been appointed guardian of the future James I by King Robert III, who was only too aware of his approaching mortality and the avarice of his brother, the Duke of Albany. The strategy was for them to go abroad where James would be safe from the machinations of the Scottish nobility. The royal party embarked for France, but, in the words of Father Hay, ‘Prince James not being able to abide the smell of the waters, desired to be at land, where when they were come (for they landed at his request upon the coast of England), upon their journey to the King, they were taken and imprisoned’.3
The young prince having fallen so effortlessly into his clutches, Henry IV of England decided to hold on to him, ‘yet so he caused instructors to teach Prince James, where through he became so learned and expert in all things, that he had no equal’. Back in Scotland, alas, the news of his son’s capture brought on King Robert’s rapid demise. As for Henry St Clair, it was hardly his fault. The landing had been on the prince’s insistence, and Father Hay tells an intriguing tale.
So beloved was Prince Henry, according to the cleric, that the year after his capture, one of his Pentland tenants, John Johnstone, set off for England intent on rescuing him. Having arrived at the prison where his landlord was incarcerated, he played the fool so cunningly that, without arousing suspicion as to who he might be, he gained entrance. Winning the confidence of the jailers, he one night managed to extricate Henry St Clair from his confinement and, accompanying him to the gate heavily disguised, the two of them escaped under cover of darkness.4
The return home, however, was not so joyous as might have been expected. The Duke of Albany, by then Governor of Scotland, accused the Lord of Rosslyn of treason for having allowed his nephew to be taken prisoner by the English. Fortunately, Albany’s widespread unpopularity worked in St Clair’s favour. When the former arrived to arrest him and to take possession of his lands, he found himself vastly outnumbered by Henry’s followers. The duke fled to Falkland Palace in Fife, where he remained indoors until an amicable settlement was negotiated which absolved St Clair of all blame.
In 1420 the succession of William, 3rd St Clair Prince of Orkney breathed new life into Rosslyn Castle with a spate of renovation work, including the creation of a bridge under the castle and further fortification of the walls. The greater part of the north-west wall remains, with buttresses to strengthen the height, but of the other portions, only massive chunks survive. In 1893, the Revd John Thompson, the priest at St Matthews, commented on the series of openings between the rounds, or curtain walls, which resemble windows reaching near to the ground. ‘Some have suggested that they were embrasures for cannon. But this is absurd on the face of it: their size and form preclude the notion, besides the fact that there was a high screen wall on the outside.’5
His contemporary, Andrew Kerr, was of the opinion that they were simply for the letting in of air and light into the lower apartments which, he observed, ‘may have occasionally been used for keeping cattle when they could not readily be got from without; and in that case the windows or openings would be used for admitting air, and communicating with the area within the screen walls for feeding purposes’. Revd Thompson, however, dismisses Kerr’s theory and says that he has not the slightest doubt that this lower apartment featuring the windows in question was the St Clair family’s original private chapel within the castle walls.
Around 1447, however, as the foundations of the new chapel were in the process of being laid, disaster struck. In Father Hay’s version, Edward St Clair of Dryden, arriving at Rosslyn with his greyhounds for a hunt, encountered a river of rats on the approach roads with, in their midst, a blind rat with a straw in its mouth. This, insists Father Hay, was an omen.
Prince William’s first wife, the Princess Margaret, ‘took great delight in little dogs and caused one of her gentlewomen to go under a bed with a lighted candle to bring forth one of them which had given birth to puppies’. Not being particularly careful, the foolish maidservant set fire to the bed, whereupon the flames spread rapidly through the apartments. William St Clair was close by on College Hill when the incident occurred. On being told what had happened, his immediate preoccupation was not so much his household or his castle, but his family’s records and charters. Happily, these were saved by his chaplain who scaled down a bell-rope carrying them and, needless to say, was generously rewarded for his bravery.
It was also providential that, with the construction of the chapel in progress, there were builders on hand to repair the damage. The long delays in the completion of the chapel can in all probability be explained by the skills of masons and carpenters being diverted elsewhere. Furthermore, it should be taken into account that the castle of Ravenscraig, recently acquired in exchange for the Orkney earldom, was also a work in progress. Prince William’s ongoing construction bills must have been enormous; added to this, towards the end of his life, with no less than eighteen children to support, his family relationships were in serious disarray.
In 1476, he had already resigned his most important accolade, the earldom of Caithness, to his second son by his second marriage, one can only assume – as will be discussed in Chapter 8 – to prevent his eldest son from his first marriage inheriting it. That in itself seems extremely odd in an age when primogeniture was the status quo, but then we are not privy to anything concerning the eldest son William the Waster’s profligacy, nor indeed to the seriousness of the offence which prompted his father to take such drastic action. Nor do we know why Oliver, the eldest son of his second marriage, was also passed over for the Caithness earldom.
In Highland and Scandinavian tradition, chiefships were often awarded on merit to the bravest and the boldest, and the younger St Clair brother, who, to confuse the situation, was also christened William, was by all accounts more of a soldier than either of his elder siblings. It was highly unusual, if not unheard of, for a father to legally transfer a great title to a younger son, even if the older son proved useless. Such an action would certainly have required the approval of the monarch. This would have been difficult enough without the added complication that William the Waster’s sister was married to King James III of Scotland’s brother. Prince William must have had very sound, albeit personal, reasons for deciding to divide up his inheritance.
By contrast, wealth and land could technically be dispersed at will, although the breaking up of great estates, and especially the dispersal of land, was simply not an option among old Scottish families where the eldest son was expected to inherit everything. It can only be assumed that Prince William felt that there was infinitely more than enough to go around. Father Hay says of him, ‘enriched by the deaths of his wives and new marriages, he became by far the most powerful man in the Kingdom after the Kings, and indeed the rest of the nobility gave precedence to him in wealth and statesmanship’. In the next generation, the necessities of providing for such a large family would inevitably disperse this wealth and power. Such pre-eminence could never have lasted.