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Holyroodhouse: The most romantic of all the palaces in the British Isles May 25, 2008

Posted by dodo in : Denmark, England, France, Hotels, Netherlands, Scotland , trackback

If you walk down between the soaring grey skyscrapers of old Canongate from west to east, you come in the end to the Palace of Holyroodhouse, which lies half in Edinburgh and half in the bald grey wilderness that rises to Arthur’s Seat. It is architecturally perhaps not very exciting to most people, though it is an interesting and an elegant building, but its associations with Mary, Queen of Scots, with the Young Pretender, and with Charles X in his penniless exile, make it by far the most romantic of the British royal palaces. There are several legends about its founding, and historically the most probable is the following: St Margaret, the second Queen of Malcolm Canmore and the sister of Edgar Atheling, brought with her to Scotland in 1068, a gold casket in the shape of a cross, covered by an ebony carving of the Saviour and containing a sizable piece of the True Cross. This casket, known as the Black Rood of Scotland, came eventually to her son David I, and, as one of his people’s most precious emblems, was given for safe-keeping to the monks of a new abbey that he had founded at Edinburgh in 1128. The abbey became known as Holyrood, though the casket was taken to Durham by the English two centuries later, and was lost at the Reformation. Holyrood had a guest-house often used by the kings of Scotland. James II was born, crowned, married and buried there, and James III married Margaret of Denmark in the abbey. Their son, James IV, handsome, wilful, brave, and intellectually far the most gifted Scottish king, decided to build a palace at Holyrood. It was begun in 1501, and in 1504 James brought to his new home, his queen, Margaret Tudor, daughter of Henry VII. His palace was the present north-west tower. Ten years later he lay dead at Flodden ‘ in the dark impenetrable wood of Scottish spears’. Under James V, with his two French queens, Madeleine, daughter of Francois I, and Margaret of Guise, a Renaissance facade, looking to the west and centring on a great gateway, was added. In 1542 the King died, leaving a week-old daughter, Mary, Queen of Scots.

Travel GuidebookHenry VIII planned that she should marry his son Edward, and in July 1543 a marriage treaty was signed at Greenwich. Six months later the Francophile Scottish parliament annulled the treaty and an infuriated Henry sent the future Lord Protector Somerset on the expedition called the ‘ Rough Wooing’, to sack Edinburgh ‘ and so deface it as to leave a memory for ever of the vengeance of God upon their falsehood and disloyalty’. He fired the abbey and James‘ new palace. The abbey roof resisted the flames, but three years later Somerset returned, stripped the lead from the roof and left it to decay. The nave was reroofed and used till James II’s time as the parish church of the Canongate. Mary of Guise, who had become Regent during her daughter’s minority, had the palace restored.

Her daughter, Mary, who had been sent to France, educated there, married to the Dauphin, and been Queen of France for a year, returned as a widow of eighteen to live as Queen of Scots at Holyroodhouse. She must have been very happy to be back in Scotland, wandering with her four Maries along the pleached alleys and flagged paths of the Holyrood gardens, but it was a short idyll which ended abruptly with her marriage to her cousin Lord Darnley and the murder of her secretary, David Rizzio, who clung pleading to her skirts till her husband’s accomplices cut him down. There followed the terrible drama of the explosion at Kirk 0′ Field, where Darnley’s body was found unscarred beneath a tree in the garden, and finally her marriage in the abbey to Lord Bothwell who was openly rumoured to be the murderer of her husband. Meanwhile, the future James I of England had been born in Edinburgh Castle. Three weeks after her marriage to Bothwell, his mother left Holyrood for ever for the series of ‘ strange tragedies’ predicted by John Knox which led to her defeat at Carberry Hill, her abdication, her escape from Loch Leven helped by her young adorer William Douglas, her flight to England, and her imprisonment and execution at Fotheringay. Young James VI lived on at Holyrood till he became the rheumy doting King James I of England in 1603. He came once only to Scotland after his succession, but his son, Charles, came in 1633 to be crowned in the abbey and the master mason, John Mylne, made, to celebrate the occasion, the stone sundial now in the garden, carved with the ciphers of the young king and Henrietta Maria. In 1650, while Cromwell’s soldiers were quartered there after the battle of Dunbar, fire swept the palace, almost destroying it, and it took the next nine years to rebuild it.

At the restoration, Charles II ordered a complete reconstruction of his Scottish palace. Cromwell’s west facade was replaced by a two-storey building centring on a great Doric gateway and ending in a tower to balance James IV’s. The gateway, which bears the arms of the kings of Scots and the thistle motto Nemo me impune lacessit, and rises to a stone lantern covered by a pierced crown, leads to an arcaded stone quadrangle of four storeys, ninety-four feet square. The first floor consists of an enfilade of state rooms and the second floor is given over to a suite of rooms, where the Royal Family live when they are in Edinburgh. Walking into this tall elegant courtyard, one imagines oneself in some small Marot palace in Amsterdam or in the hotel particulier of some Louis XIV soldier of fortune behind the Place des Vosges, never for a moment in a Scottish royal palace. Inside, the high tapestried walls, Delft-tiled fireplaces, and beautiful pompous ceilings by the Fleming, de Wet, add to the feeling of some small town palace in the Netherlands.

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Holyroodhouse: The most romantic of all the palaces in the British Isles

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