On the Trail of the Stone of Destiny
First written in April 2023, I am resending this post in honour of Perth Museum opening with the Stone in a new setting
Perth Museum has just reopened featuring the Stone - but is it real or a fake? Here is a light-hearted investigation into this that I wrote last year. I have a lot more subscribers now than I did then so I thought I would send it round again - apologies if you are one of my loyal long-term readers and have already read it.
The Stone of Destiny was taken to London this week. The mystery of whether the object that was taken by Edward l in 1296 was the real Stone or a fake has gripped me since I wrote about it, and my grandfather’s play King of Scots, in which it has a walk-on part.
After many hours in the National Library under a growing tower of books, I feel I need to go and listen to the music of the story myself. An invitation to a party in Pitlochry makes a good starting point for my journey. It’s a Broons-style ceilidh - foot-stomping dances to old tunes played on a wee record player. The venue is a cabin in the woods with a view of the Tummel - some of the younger members of the group peel off for a cold-water swim and return to warm up with a vigorous Canadian Barn Dance.
Chatting to other guests in the kitchen, over haggis pies and tea, I keep returning to the Stone, when asked what I am working on. A friendly woman from Norfolk looks at me blankly. “The what?” “I think the English call it the Coronation Stone”. She shakes her head, “never heard of it”. Most Scots know of it, I think, but perhaps I am wrong.
The much-storied ancient Stone which will be used to inaugurate King Charles lll was supposedly brought to Ireland first by an Egyptian Princess Scota, from whom the Scots get their name, and some said it even had a Biblical origin, being used as Jacob’s Pillow. (Interestingly, in the last year or so scientists in Ireland have discovered Middle Eastern DNA in a trove of ancient bones, although previous scholars tended to rubbish the Egyptian connection.)
Legend has it that Scotland’s Stone came across the water with King Fergus, the first King of Dalriada. In fact the Stone we have is a block of red Perthshire sandstone about 256 mm thick - not really a great stone by medieval standards. The seals of the Scottish Kings before 1296 actually show them seated on what appears to be a larger Stone, encased in a simple box, with their feet on the ground. (Although when John Balliol was crowned in 1292, he was shown seated on a wooden throne with his feet on something - what could that be?)
Pat Gerber in her book about searching for the Stone of Destiny writes that the official Stone is too small to have been chosen for a kingly seat in ancient outdoor inaugurations.
“Eleven inches is the height of a decent-sized Victorian chamber pot. Any monarch sitting on a stone of such meagre dimensions would have looked utterly ridiculous - even the knees of a relatively small man would have been up around his ears. Try it. Would you crown a king who was supposed to look historic and dignified upon such a thing?”
Establishment historians tend to agree that the Stone is a tad unimpressive by the standard of the day. Warwick Rodwell suggests that it was cut to size when it arrived in London, to make it a more suitable shape to put into a throne. But why seize a mystical object and then cut it in half?
By this point in my exposition, my new friend’s eyes are starting to glaze over and it is time for a Dashing White Sergeant. After dragging two reluctant young Londoners onto the dance floor - they really enjoyed it once involved, honestly - I find myself discussing with another guest how the Stone will travel to London. He argues that it has already gone - that it was taken under military escort weeks ago, at dead of night in case of trouble from independence supporters.
We agree that it is not the Stone itself, but what it symbolises that is important. The Stone’s place in the Coronation Chair has nothing to do with the Treaty of Union. To Edward, it was a symbol of the subjugation of Scotland and the end of its existence as an independent country.
When Edward invaded Scotland on March 12, 1296, he massacred most of the civilian population of Berwick - probably 17,000 people - and then, with the bodies still lying in the streets, he ordered the Scottish nobles to come and sign a pledge of allegiance - the Ragman Rolls. Two thousand Scottish nobles’ signatures feature on this Roll - some may have been forged, however. (1)
Striking north, Edward took town after town. The bold Abbot Henry of Aberbrothock (Arbroath) preached subversion to his congregation, telling them that there were ‘but women and only one man in Scotland’ - meaning Edward l. On July 10, King John surrendered at Stracathro. Everybody knew where Edward was headed next - Scone Abbey to get the Stone of Destiny.
The day after the party, I head to Scone Abbey to see the location for myself. The Abbey itself no longer exists. The site where it was is now dominated by a massive, crenelated Victorian pile which is what you might describe as very fuck-off. In fact, its wealthy owners didn’t like having the village of Scone nearby so they knocked it down and built another one two miles away.
I tell the woman at the entrance hut that I am interested in the Abbey not the Palace, and she recommends I take the £17.50 ticket for both house and garden (how much? Big shout out to my paying subscriber - you bought that ticket!) as ‘there is lots of information’ in the house about the Abbey.
Actually, there isn’t. The Abbey was burned to the ground by a mob in the Reformation and it probably underlies the current building, but very little attention is paid to it. The Bishop’s Palace survived and there is a small model of it here, marooned in the shining sea of an enormous mahogany dining table. The more modest old Palace was somehow incorporated into this Palace - more like swamped by it.
The house is as grandiose inside as out. Much of the wall space is taken up with faded baby photographs of the owners and tedious records of their achievements. Eventually, I find a couple of plaques about the Stone - which it says is “often, though erroneously, called the Stone of Destiny”. Thomas de Balmerino, who was the Abbot of Scone in 1296 when it was taken, went on to officiate at the coronation of Robert the Bruce in 1306 - for which he was taken down to London in chains and imprisoned for years in the Tower of London by Edward. But he miraculously survived and returned as the Abbot of Scone again.
A plaque about the Abbey itself says that it was “all but destroyed” in 1298, when the English soldiers came back, two years after taking the Stone. A notary of the time recorded an official complaint:
“ ‘On 17 August 1298, Abbot Thomas of Scone protested vigorously before three bishops, two abbots, the prior of St Andrews, and the dean of Christianity of Perth and Gowrie, that the king of England's army had inflicted serious destruction in his abbey, specifically in the breaking of ceilings and roofs of the church, refectory, dormitory, cloister chambers, doors, windows and cupboards, as also in the breaking up of chests and muniment presses and the wrenching off and removal of locks, all of which destruction and damage was manifest and notorious to all.’ What the Abbot particularly complained of was the destruction and theft of his rich collection of muniments reaching back to the time of David I and Malcolm IV: documents had been damaged or destroyed, their seals torn off and carried away.” (2)
Sounds like a search, doesn’t it? What were they looking for? Historian Nick Aitchison in his book “Scotland’s Stone of Destiny” simply asserts that the soldiers trashed the Abbey because Abbot Thomas was a supporter of Scottish independence. They weren’t looking for anything, he claims. Aitchison doesn’t cite any evidence for this assertion, which is repeated by other writers. The seals the soldiers took would have contained images of the Kings seated on the Stone of Destiny (as we will continue to call it).
At some point between 1296 and 1298, Edward l seems to have abandoned plans to make a metal chair for the Stone in favour of a wooden one. Establishment historians agree that this was probably because he was short of cash - but they can’t cite any evidence for why the change was made. Is it possibly because he realised he didn’t have the actual Stone?
Without access to a notary, I register my own complaint - about mis-selling at the entrance - and retire to the cafe in the basement for a much-needed cuppa. This turns out to be the top attraction of Scone Palace, supplied as it is with fresh fruit and veg from the kitchen garden, which was reopened a few years ago. They could be missing a trick by not selling “scones of destiny”.
Cheered by a delicious rhubarb tart, I wander out into the magnificent grounds, yellow with daffodils and trees budding with blossom. There is a sad Mercat Cross, leaning to one side, that marks where the offensive village used to be. The only other evidence of it are the moss-covered stones in the adjacent graveyard. I guess dead peasants don’t make any noise.
The large square mound where Scotland’s Kings were inaugurated stands between the Palace and the former village. It was supposedly made by nobles depositing earth from their boots. There is a replica of the Stone there, mounted on two stone legs to form a sort of bench. It looks dank and disappointing - very like an “auld cludgie cover” as it is sometimes described.
HES said: “Peter Hill, who carried out detailed analysis of the Stone in 1998 and 2016 has put forward a strong argument for the stone showing signs of wear that are consistent with it being used as a step at an early point in its existence. It may have once formed a step, threshold or part of a floor in a building of significance, such as a palace or ecclesiastical building.”
Scotland’s Stone of Destiny is described in medieval accounts quite differently - as scooped out, seat shaped. The word “marble” is often used, but probably just meant polished. In 1301, Scottish lawyer Baldred Bisset described it as a royal seat of marble, when he pleaded Scotland’s case to be recognised internationally as an independent country to the Pope.
Bisset’s account is dismissed by Warwick Rodwell:
“[Baldred Bisset] was a Scottish lawyer who displayed intense animosity towards Edward 1. His document praised and supported the Scottish royal lineage, and aggressively denounced the English claims to the Kingdom. It therefore occasions no surprise that Bisset should have enhanced the status of the Scottish kings by referring to their sedile regiaei marmorium ‘royal seat of marble’. Politically motivated phraseology of this kind should never be taken too literally”.
“Intense animosity” would not have been surprising in the context of the times - especially if he had friends from Berwick. But Bisset’s description of the Stone is consistent with others.
The Stone has iron rings at either end. It seems that no one can say definitively when these were inserted. Rodwell argues they were likely added by the monks at Westminster Abbey. Edward l died in 1307, to be succeeded by his son Edward ll - a very different King. When Edward ll’s French wife Isabella returned from France with an army to depose her husband in 1326, she made a nonaggression pact with the Scots. Isabella then made peace with the Scots in 1328, with the Treaty of Edinburgh-Northampton. At her prompting, the teenage Edward lll tried to return the Stone to Scotland - but the monks wouldn’t give it up. Hanging onto important relics was in their DNA so they chained it to the floor - using the iron rings.
In the same tradition, Thomas de Balmerino, the Abbot of Scone, was likely to have been reluctant to give it up in 1296. Legend has it that he palmed the English soldiers off with something else that looked convincing, perhaps a Roman altar stone, maybe from Bertha, the Roman Fort which stood just across the river from the Abbey and was destroyed by flooding around 1209. So it was exciting to hear that Historic Environment Scotland, examining the object with new techniques before it goes down to London, have found faint Roman numerals on it that have never been seen before. A clue?
One of the “proofs” trotted out by HES and others of the reality of the Stone is that the Bishop of Durham was there at King John’s inauguration and he presumably would have known what the Stone looked like. Anthony Brek also moonlighted as a warlord and figures heavily in the wars of independence - he led a division of English troops that among other things, partially destroyed Dirleton Castle with a siege gun.
We have the order Edward l gave on November 20 for the inauguration of John Balliol at Scone but we don’t have any description of the event so we don’t really know what happened. (3) Apart from all the docs stolen by Edward l, most of Scotland’s official record of that time was later stolen by Cromwell. (When the material was eventually sent to be returned to Scotland it was thrown into barrels on an overloaded boat which sank.) All we have is the picture of John on a wooden throne with his feet on something - could it be the Stone? Had it become a step of destiny, perhaps part of an array of special stuff?
After wandering the green avenues of Scone, on the Tay’s broad, fertile plain, I turn north again to where the Stone might have been taken, if it was indeed hidden in 1296. As I am leaving, the lady from the entrance, whose name is Lynn, comes over to speak to me. She has heard of my complaint and wants to apologise. Not having worked inside the house for years, she thought there was more information there about the Abbey. Next year, she says, the Stone is going to be returned to Perth. There are plans to build a new visitors’ centre at Scone to tell its story and the story of Scotland’s early monarchs.
Lynn is charming, and I withdraw my complaint, thank her and head to the site of one of the rumoured hiding places. There are many - Nigel Tranter imagined that Angus Og, the Lord of the Isles, took it to the Hebrides, for example.
Independence campaigner Wendy Wood slipped a note under the iron railing at Westminster Abbey in 1968 which read:
“This is not the original Stone of Destiny. The real Stone is of black basalt marked with hieroglyphics and is inside a hill in Scotland.”
The road between Scone and Kirkton of Collace is very straight - it feels Roman. There was a lot of military action by the Romans round here - John Reid in his fascinating book “The Eagle and the Bear” says that legionnaires patrolled this occupied area extensively on horseback, which was the ‘Roman equivalent of an air force’. At the end of the road is a church, and a mains farm, which could be the one referred to in an anonymous letter which appeared in the Times in 1819, and was copied by several other papers, before being contradicted.
The letter said that servants from the West Mains of Dunsinane House had been carrying away stones from around Macbeth’s castle when the ground beneath them opened up, revealing a large meteoric stone.
The Scottish naturalist Seton Gordon wrote too, that he was told by the Earl of Mansfield of a local tradition that one night after a storm, a fissure appeared in the rock near Dunsinnan and revealed the Stone to a farm labourer, who could never again find the place. Gordon’s story may have been related to the original letter - which was probably a hoax - but we don’t know who was the author of the letter or anything else about it.
There is an interesting-looking footpath signpost by the church and I set off along a rarely-used track, only passable because the nettles are still small. On the edge is a pile of moss-covered stones with markings that suggest they were once part of a fluted pillar. This must be a promising area for archeologists - not much has been done since Victorian times.
It is quite boggy and at one point, I stumble and fall my length, losing my glasses in the mud and getting covered up to my elbows in it. Just as well that I don’t bump into any nervous hikers in the woods as I now look like an extra from “Creature from the Black Lagoon”.
Nearby to here is a stone circle, the Bandirran Circle. The Moncrieff family owned the Bandirran estate back in 1296, recorded on the map as Moncrefe. They were friends to the Abbot - in a private history of the House of Moncrieff, George Seton quotes the record from 1294 that:
“Sir John Moncreif, Lord of that ilk, grants half a chalder of barley, half a chalder of oats and four bolls of wheat to the Preaching Friars of Perth”.
John’s seal is on the Ragman Roll (1). His eldest son William is mentioned in Matthew of Westminster’s history of that time, along with his brother Ralph and other Scottish lords as “having entered England in the year 1296 and burned certain houses (villas).” They must have checked in to sign Edward’s list on the way to Northumberland.
Making my way up the hill, a deer fence bars the way to the Circle, so all I can see is some twisted Scots pines, dark and weird against the blue and green plain, set out below. I have missed the path, and time is getting on so I walk back down and drive the short distance to Dunsinnan.
There has been a wee smir of rain but it clears as I arrive here, the site of a huge Iron Age fort and probably where Macbeth’s castle was. The hill rises steeply out of the flat farmland and I can see for miles to the south. To the north are the Sidlaw Hills, which would have offered an escape route for hill-dwellers. This was a natural place for ancient people to congregate.
Today is a windless, mild Sunday afternoon in April and, apart from the occasional car, there is no other sign of human activity. Three sheep wander out of a copse of trees and contemplate me in a relaxed sort of way before ambling off. The gorse is in flower and the air is full of birdsong. I lie on my jacket in a clearing among the gorse bushes to think.
In his book ‘Stone Voices’, Neal Ascherson asks why, if the Scots still had the Stone, they did not produce it to crown King Robert l in 1306. HES agrees that: “it is almost inconceivable that it would not have been produced for the coronation of Robert the Bruce”. This is perhaps the strongest argument on the side of the Stone being authentic.
Meditating under a sky of French blue, I try to transport myself to that moment. It was a desperate time - William Wallace had been captured and put to death most brutally the year before. Failure must have seemed likely, perhaps probable.
We know that Robert was crowned twice. After the first ceremony had concluded on Palm Sunday, March 25, 19-year-old Isabella MacDuff arrived on horseback. She had defied her husband to ride to Scone and represent her clan, the ancestral keepers of the Stone. They had the double duties of crowning Scottish monarchs and of leading troops into battle (hence, lead on MacDuff). The ceremony was performed again the next day, in order for Isabella to lend symbolic support to the new King.
Just a few weeks later, on June 19, an English army of 3,000 men arrived at Perth. Robert challenged the leader of the army, the Earl of Pembroke, to single combat. The Earl accepted the challenge but said it was too late and he wanted to fight the following day. He then ambushed Robert’s men as they made camp for the night. Robert survived - just - and took to the hills. That is known as the Battle of Methven.
Isabella, along with Robert’s second wife, Elizabeth, and his daughter Marjory, fled to Robert’s brother Neil, or Nigel, at Kildrummy Castle near Aberdeen. That September, Neil and his men held off the English forces when they attacked the castle, for long enough for the women to escape. But the three women were betrayed and captured soon after. Neil was hung, drawn and quartered at Berwick in November, and Isabella was hung suspended outdoors in an iron cage on Berwick Castle for the next four years.
It does actually seem conceivable, given that he was in a warzone, that if Abbot Thomas had hidden the Stone somewhere pretty inaccessible in 1296, he might have decided not to get it out again right then. Proclaiming publicly that Edward l had been duped with an auld cludgie cover might have seemed foolhardy. The Abbey and its inhabitants would have been destroyed.
And how can we be certain that there wasn’t a third part of the ceremony - where Robert and Thomas rode out together somewhere to have a private moment with the Stone?
Or maybe - they didn’t take it as far away as here. Perhaps it was hidden somewhere within the Abbey or its grounds - the secret could have been lost later, in the Reformation.
A low buzzing startles me out of my dwam - a blast from the present. Someone in the new houses on the edge of Collace is taking advantage of the break in the showers to strim their garden. Walking back down to the car, I reflect that we will probably never know for certain if the Stone we have is real or fake. It was taken in the fog of war, a very long time ago.
On my way home, I drop in on an old friend. Preparing for a house concert, he stops off between arranging seats and signs and sound checks to give me his opinion on the Stone of Destiny. The whole clamjamfry about it is “ludicrous”, he says. Scotland should be looking forward not back. Maybe it is time to get a new Stone.
That is an interesting idea. It could be black, throne-shaped and “covered in hieroglyphs” as Wendy Wood envisaged, and situated in some public square where anyone and everyone could sit on it. Perhaps in Arbroath, where the Declaration long ago began the tradition that in Scotland, sovereignty ultimately rests with the people.
“King of Scots and On theTrail of the Stone of Destiny” by Robert Kemp, with a foreword by Jackie Kemp will be published as an Amazon ebook next week.
Bibliography
The Ancient Stones of Scotland, W Douglas Simpson (1965)
The Coronation Chair and Stone of Scone, Warwick Rodwell (2013)
The Eagle and the Bear, A New History of Roman Scotland, John H. Reid (2023)
Edward l and the Throne of Scotland 1290-6, Stones and Simpson (1978)
The Hammer of the Scots, David Santiuste (2015)
The Heads of Religious Houses in Scotland 12th to 16th Centuries, Watt and Shead (2001)
King of Scots, Robert Kemp (1951)
The House of Moncrieff, George Seton (1890)
The Moncreiffs and the Moncreiffes. A History of the Family of Moncreiff of the Ilk and its Collateral Branches, Frederick Moncreiff and William Moncreiffe (1929)
Observations on the Coronation Stone of Scotland, Scottish Hist Review, G.W.S Barrow (1997)
Robert Bruce, G.W.S Barrow (1965)
Scotland’s Stone of Destiny, Nick Aitchison (2000)
Stone of Destiny, Ian Hamilton (2008)
The Stone of Destiny, F Wallace Connon (2008)
Stone of Destiny, Pat Gerber (1997)
Stone Voices, Neal Ascherson (2014)
“ Sir John Moncreiff of that ilk KNT (1296-1324) This man’s name appears on what is known as the Ragman Roll. The record is not conclusive of the fact…How far these records represent actual facts it is impossible to say; in order to forge such an instrument it was only necessary to fabricate or obtain possession of a man’s seal.” “The Moncreiffs,” by Frederick and William Moncreiff (1929)
Observations on the Coronation Stone of Scotland, Scottish Hist Review, G.W.S Barrow (1997)
Edward l and the Throne of Scotland 1290-6, Stones and Simpson (1978)