Disturbing the Stone of Destiny
“The Throne, 1,000 years of British Coronations” by Ian Lloyd has been extensively reviewed - it’s a Sunday Times bestseller. But the long line of Scottish monarchs before the Union of the Crowns in 1603 - the one from which the current royal family draws their title - do not feature. They have been airbrushed from “British” history - not just by this author but more broadly. The lifting of the Stone is an opportunity to remember them
Scotland’s part in the coronation of King Charles will be to provide the Stone of Destiny, the ancient relic which will be taken sometime soon down to Westminster to be slotted into King Edward’s Chair, a 700-year-old wooden throne.
The Stone is a trophy of war, taken by Edward l in 1296, in a move he thought would end Scotland’s existence as an independent nation. In 1297, William Wallace demanded it back. Wallace was eventually defeated and executed in 1306, and in 1307 Robert l was crowned King of Scots.
Robert’s defiant coronation took place without the totem - instead, the brave Isabella MacDuff, a member of the clan which is the ancestral keeper of the Stone, defied her husband and risked her life to crown the King. She was brutally punished for this act.
Robert l restored Scotland to its independent status despite the absence of the Stone itself. No Scottish monarch was crowned on it, until Jamie Saxt was declared James l of Britain in 1603.
To mark Charles’ coronation, I plan to publish my grandfather Robert Kemp’s play “King of Scots”, about the coronation of Robert l, as an ebook and I have been enjoying reading it as I prepare the text. It is a stirring tale starring the Stone, which even appears on stage, carried on in a stretcher to accompany Edward l.
When we talk about “the taking of the Stone of Destiny” we tend to mean not the original theft, but the group of four young people who took it back to Scotland from Westminster Abbey in 1950. Their leading light Ian Hamilton died recently. I met him once, many years ago, at the bar of Babbity Bowster’s in Glasgow, where he was introduced as a friend of my grandfather’s. Robert Kemp died aged 59 and I don’t remember him, so it was amazing to come across a contemporary - and it also seemed surprising that Ian, who must have been nearly 70, was wearing a leather jacket and left on a motorbike.
The reclamation took place at a time of rising demands for Home Rule for Scotland. The Scottish Convention of 1949 demanding an Assembly was signed by 2 million people - a remarkable number given Scotland’s population of 5 million. But it was ignored. Against this backdrop the seizing of the Stone was greeted with joy. For the next three months, police scoured the countryside for it until the group left it at the altar of Arbroath Abbey. They were never charged.
Ian Hamilton famously said that he was: “a Scot. Not a Scottish Nationalist…a simple Scot and I want my country to take its place in Europe and in the world. We Scots are European, not English, not British. In the muddled way of youth I set out to make these views public not by speech or writing but by action.”
It was just a few months after the Stone was removed, on Christmas Day 1950, that Kemp’s play ‘King of Scots’ was staged in the nave of Dunfermline Abbey as part of the 1951 Edinburgh Festival. The Bruce, bishops and other nobles speak mostly in English. Bystanders Alison. Elspeth and a balladeer called Harper comment on the action in Scots.
Kemp noted: “I have written the play in verse chiefly to help the actor in his battle against the acoustics of the Abbey. The form chosen is a rather free five-footed line rhyming with its neighbour.”
The emotional heart of the play is Robert l’s coronation in 1306. Bishop Wishart tells the crowd:
“The venerable Abbey of Scone, where our Kings were wont to receive their consecration, has, by Edward’s malice, been pulled to the ground. The spot, nevertheless, remains sacred to all true Scots. The Stone he has also reft from us, and the young Earl of Fife, who by ancient right must place the crown upon the King’s head, he keeps at his court in London.”
As they are about to proceed, the scene is interrupted by the arrival of “a young and graceful woman”, the Countess of Buchan, Isabella MacDuff. She says:
“Sir, I was bred—
Forget not!—daughter of Fife, before I wed
The Comyn, Earl of Buchan! ‘Therefore I hold
No King of Scots may reign unless the gold
Emblem of sovereignty be truly laid
By one of our old family on his head,
And so, my lords, my brother being young
And in duress, I come to crown the King!”
BRUCE. Brave lady, who can make this rite complete!
The Stone of Scone I now may do without,
For in you meets the present with the past
To justify this day, and I am blest! . .
But yet I must remember, for your sake,
The rancour and black spite this deed will wake
Against you, even in your husband’s heart,
Much more in Edward’s.”
COUNTESS. That will be my part
In my country’s battle! You are not to spare
Such thoughts for me, for every risk and care
From this day forth will rain upon your royal,
Your consecrated head; unending toil
And peril to the utterance will be
The air you breathe! You’re not to think of me,
Only of Scotland!
After the ceremony, Robert l and his men head for the hills. The Queen, Bruce’s daughter Princess Marjorie and the Countess, who seek shelter with Bruce’s brother, are all captured.
ALISON. Aye, Edward noo may craw!
But what’s their fate? He canna slay the Queen!
HARPER, But for her father, he micht weel hae dunce!
She will bide prisoner in some southern hold,
Wi the Princess, but Lady Buchan, wha was bold
To croun our King, will feel the weicht o’s rage—
He has decreed she maun be hung in a cage”
Isabella is suspended in an open wire cage on the windblown exterior of a castle. The spotlight returns to find her in conversation with her jailer asking about the fate of Robert l, before she finally perishes. In real life she survived for four years of this torture before being taken to a convent, probably to die, but there is no record of her after that.
The play starts at the Court in London where the nobles discuss the recent murder of William Wallace in 1305, the year before Robert became King. “Wallace’s guilt was plain to see. His execution was a rite of state,” says one. A Scottish sympathiser argues that Wallace forcefully rejected the charge of treason on the grounds that he was a foe not a subject and owed no allegiance to the English King.
Edward enters, and gloats about the way he killed Wallace:
“Scotland, declaring against our rule at first by argument
And then by arms, is to our sovereignty bent
And lies now in the caitiff Wallace broken—
His end to all like traitors be a beacon!
Him on a gibbet, as ye saw, I strung
And, while half strangled but alive he hung,
Dis-manned then disembowelled. His entrails next
I in a brazier burned before his vexed
And starting eyes, that by his own foul stench
’He might be stifled. Then, a final wrench,
And from his trunk the pulsing heart was torn!
‘That so will end all rebels, these deeds warn!
And now a spike on London Bridge impales.”
The Stone of Destiny is brought on and Edward taunts Robert with his possession of it. The Scots believe, he claims, that: “If there be no stone, the very soul of Scotland is undone. And they are right”. He has created, he says,
“Two English shires, one north, one south of Forth. We are their King. Their Estates and men of worth must come to Westminster”.
Edward confesses he has considered throwing the Stone in the sea because of the myth that where the stone is, there the seeds of the King of Scots shall reign. But he doesn’t “fear the famous seed as much as might appear from such an uncertain act”. His nobles laugh sycophantically - and the audience too is amused, by the knowledge that 300 years later, Robert’s descendants will be reunited with the stone. Instead, Edward concludes:
“I'll fix it in the Coronation Chair
So that all English kings whom we crown there
In their first moment shall on Scotland sit!”
[He tells the bearers who have brought the stone in on a stretcher to]
‘Take up the Stone, and store
It in the Abbey! Scotland is no more,
‘The knuckle end of England fills its place!”
Later, Bruce receives a warning in the form of a pair of spurs from the Scottish sympathiser at court and flees north. He is set upon by his rival John Comyn in Dumfries Abbey. Bruce fights back and kills Comyn. Then he rides to Glasgow where he receives a pardon for this act from Bishop Wishart.
Before the coronation, a cleric arrives hotfoot to excommunicate Bruce. Bishop Lamberton opens the letter “not as one shocked but as one who had expected some such missive”. The cleric gets short shrift from the Bishops who regard Pope Clement as Edward’s pawn.
LAMBERTON. It is more fitting that the words we say
Should not insult the Pope, whom we revere
And will obey, so long as it appear
‘To us he speaks for our common Lord, But when
He is no more than a mere partisan,
His censures and commands we will reject.
In a classic bit of what we would now call “whataboutery” Bishop Lamberton then asks:
“What excommunication has your master spoken
For Berwick, or for Wallace, all the long
Record of Edward’s rape and brutal wrong?”
After the ceremony, Robert l flees to Orkney where he mentions being inspired by the perseverance of the famous spider leaping across the chasm time after time before she finally makes it. Returning to the mainland, he harries the enemy. Robert wins the battle of Bannockburn in 1314 and Scotland’s independence is restored.
In the foreword, Kemp, a deep scholar of Scots literature and history, bases his assessment of Robert l on historians.
“Dr Agnes Mure MacKenzie tells.. how the popular tradition of the hero King was contradicted by a more recent academic tradition of a somewhat treacherous figure, and how her own studies fully confirmed the truth of the popular tradition and-the falseness of the academic picture.
“Many who sit in the audience must, by the simple fact that they went to school, share the academic misconception, and lest they should think the author has ignored it, it must be explained to them that their view of Bruce derives from a biography by Sir Herbert Maxwell, in which a number of charges were made against the character of the patriot.
“First Mr Evan Macleod Barron in his The Scottish War of Independence, and later Dr Agnes Mure Mackenzie, have exposed the faulty scholarship of the earlier biographer, and the prejudice of which he was guilty. The hero of popular tradition is a hero still, worthy to take up the mantle of William Wallace.”
Kemp incorporates into his play these lines from the epic Scots poem “The Brus”, written by John Barbour, who was almost a contemporary of Robert 1, born in 1330.
Ah, freedom is a noble thing!
Freedom makes man to have liking:
Freedom all solace to man gives:
He lives at ease that freely lives!
A noble heart may have nane case,
And no thing else that may him please,
If freedom fail, for free liking
Is yearnit owre all other thing.
Nor he, that aye has livit free,
May not know weel the property,
The anger, nor the wretched doom,
That is couplit to foul thraldom.
But if he had essayit it, .
Then all by heart he should it wits
And should think freedom mair to prize
Than all the gold in world that is.
Long after Kemp’s death, the Stone was returned to Scotland by John Major’s government in 1996, amid another rising tide of demands for Home Rule. In “Stone Voices” Neil Ascherson describes this as “tartan gesture-politics”, an attempt to fob off demands for devolution. He records that as the Stone processed up the Royal Mile on a blue cushion in a converted Landrover with a military escort:
“The sheer lack of popular enthusiasm was impressive...Especially on the Left, exasperated voices wanted to know why London thought the Scots so dumb that they could be bought for an 'auld cludgie cover, or (as lan Bell translated the thought in his Scotsman column) an old cesspit lid'.
The mood, Ascherson said, was “grudging” with some preferring to nurse their ancient grievance against England to the return of the trophy.
“It was good to have our Stone back, but it was not transforming. This contrasted sharply with the protests of the then Dean of Westminster and his Chapter, when informed of the plan to return the Stone to Scotland. Their view was that the Stone was a sacred, even a sacramental object. The implication seemed to be that the effectiveness of the coronation sacrament might be compromised, even though the Stone was to be returned to London for coronations. It was a fair conclusion that it was now the English rather than the Scots, who attributed magical powers of authentication to the Stone.”
The English, he argued, during their centuries of possession of the Stone had involved it in mystical rights around the divine right of Kings. Partly for pragmatic reasons, the Scots took a different view - but it was there at the start.
“The Scottish nobility never felt easy with the idea of a king who owed his power to God and not to his peers, and in the 1320 Declaration of Arbroath (the astonishing Latin letter to the Pope which is Europe's earliest nationalist manifesto), they warned that even their beloved King Robert I, "The Bruce', was subject to contract. If he should turn aside from the task that he has begun and yield Scotland or us to the English king and people, we should cast [him] out as the enemy of us all ... and should choose another king to defend our freedom.'
Now that is an interesting thought. “Should an independent Scotland keep the monarchy?” is a much-debated topic - but how about choosing a different one? King Harry and Queen Meghan?
Some argue that King Charles, instead of taking the Stone to London, should come north to sit upon it and receive the Honours of Scotland, a more modest and ancient set of Crown jewels than the Imperial bling. That would be an opportunity to recall and connect with his family’s ancient Scottish lineage. Others feel that moving the Stone to London, perhaps with enormous pomp, will give Scotland a symbolic role in the ceremony.
Either way, disturbing the Stone releases odours that remind us of the past.