Stirling Castle, its place in Scottish history

by Eric Stair-Kerr

The outbreak of the Great Civil War brought Stirling Castle again to the front. The Covenanting party being dominant at the time, Parliament decreed in 1640 that the fortresses should be placed in the charge of trusty natives of Scotland, although the Earl of Mar was not deprived of his heritable right to the custody of the castle.[76] In this year Archibald, Earl of Argyll, while endeavouring to force the Covenant on the Highlanders of Central Scotland, seized the Earl of Atholl in his camp in Strathtay and sent him prisoner to Stirling Castle.[77] After a brief stay in the fortress, however, the nobleman was conveyed to the capital, where an agreement was entered into by which he recovered his freedom.

In 1644 the great Marquis of Montrose began his brilliant series of military successes. Not only did the Highland clans rise, as always, for the House of Stewart, but a considerable body of Scoto-Irish troops had landed in the west to support the King’s cause. After the Covenanters’ defeat at Tippermuir the Government began to be seriously alarmed, and Sir Archibald Primrose, Clerk to the Privy Council, was ordered to write to Livingstone of Westquarter, urging him to look well after the town, castle and bridge of Stirling, in case the Irish soldiers should take their route that way.[78] The castle, however, though garrisoned and prepared, did not figure in the wars of Montrose; for the Marquis turned northwards after Tippermuir, and when he eventually descended on the Lowlands he crossed the Forth by the Fords of Frew and not by Stirling Bridge.

Although the “Great Marquis” suffered death for his devotion to the King, the cause for which he laid down his life was not lost in his native country. In 1650 Charles II., a young man of twenty, landed at the mouth of the Spey, and although England at the time was under the Protectorate, the youthful adventurer was crowned King of Scots. In the end of July he spent some nights in Stirling Castle, delighting the townsfolk with his courtly manners and reminding the old inhabitants of the splendid days that had gone. Charles was the last of a long line of monarchs to take up residence within the old walls. A few months later Holburne, the captain of the castle, was suspected of being a Royalist only by pretence, and of having held treacherous communications with some of the agents of Oliver Cromwell. The officer obeyed the summons to appear before the Parliament of Perth, and there he succeeded in clearing himself of the charge which his enemies had brought up against him.[79]

Young King Charles did not long enjoy the ancient crown of his fathers. Cromwell’s victories of Dunbar and Worcester made the continuance of the monarchy impossible, although all the Scottish strongholds did not at once surrender to the rule of the Protector. Under the governorship of Colonel William Conyngham—who as an undoubted Royalist had been placed in Holburne’s position—the garrison of Stirling Castle determined to hold the fortress for the King. This defiance brought General Monk to the gates, with over five thousand men, on August 6th, 1651. The day after his arrival he ordered his soldiers to raise earthen platforms for mounting his guns. One of these batteries was erected in the churchyard, whence for three days a fire was kept up, causing considerable damage to the castle. At the same time Colonel Conyngham’s ordnance played hard upon the graveyard platform: a cannonade that has left its traces on the church to the present day. On the fourteenth of the month, owing to a mutiny in the garrison, the governor sent out a letter to Monk desiring a treaty of surrender, although two days before, not foreseeing this contingency, he had told the besiegers that he would hold the fortress as long as he could.[80]

It was agreed that the castle should be handed over to Monk, that the prisoners in the building should be released, and that the garrison should be allowed to march out. Also that noblemen, gentlemen and inhabitants of the town, whose goods were in the castle, should have liberty to transport their property to other places.[81] Forty pieces of ordnance and twenty-six barrels of powder, along with a large number of barrels of beef and beer and many vessels of claret, fell into the hands of the besiegers. The spoils of the castle included also two coaches, the Earl of Mar’s coronet and his robes of Parliament, and some of the King’s hangings. The national records which had been preserved in the fortress were sent to the Tower of London. Some were returned to Scotland a few years later; others were lost at sea shortly after the Restoration.

Colonel Reade was left by General Monk in charge of Stirling Castle; and in his plan for the defence of Scotland, which he laid before the Protector in 1657, Monk proposed to garrison Stirling with thirteen companies of foot and a regiment of horse.[82] The Erskines’ right to the custody of the fortress was overlooked by Oliver Cromwell, but after the Restoration, in 1661, Parliament granted to John, Earl of Mar and his heirs male, the governorship of the castle with its parks and pasturage and their rents and duties.[83] Quarter of a century later King James VII., angry at Earl Charles’s opposition to his plans for the relief of Roman Catholics, deprived the nobleman of part of his hereditary right; but when William of Orange ascended the throne the keeping of the castle, with all the privileges attached to the office, was again entrusted to the family of Mar.

During the reign of Charles II. Stirling Castle was notable as a prison. All kinds of offenders—persons convicted of treason, holders of unlawful conventicles, disturbers of the public peace—were placed in ward in the fortress. One of these prisoners was Patrick Gillespie, who as a staunch supporter of Cromwell, had been made Principal of Glasgow University. On Charles’s return he craved pardon through his wife for his anti-monarchical conduct, but in September, 1660, he was confined in Stirling Castle,[84] although in March of the following year he was released from a rigorous captivity.

Sir Patrick Hume of Polwarth was another of Charles II.’s distinguished prisoners. In 1673 he had spoken “with abundance of freedom and plainness” against the Duke of Lauderdale’s policy;[85] and two years later he petitioned against and refused to pay for the support of, the garrison which was stationed in his shire in order to curb the Covenanters. Consequently, in 1675–6, he was compelled to spend some months in Stirling Castle, and a year or two later he was warded there again, though his wife was allowed to be with him.

Although Charles II. never saw Stirling after his Restoration, his brother James, the heir-presumptive, visited the castle in 1681. During the time of his sojourn in Scotland he resided chiefly at Holyroodhouse, but his interest in Linlithgow and Stirling was such that he determined to make a progress to those ancient seats in the early days of February. The weather, indeed, had been uncommonly mild, but on the 3rd of the month, when the Duke of Albany and York set forth from Holyrood, accompanied by John Churchill, afterwards the famous Duke of Marlborough, the ground was covered with a heavy coat of snow. James arrived at Stirling that evening, and passed the night, not, as would have been appropriate, in the palace of his fathers, but in Argyll’s Lodging on the Castle Hill. Next day he was conducted round the royal fortress after the great guns had fired a salute and the Earl of Mar, with the garrison under arms, had received him at the gate. The Duke examined all the important rooms in the Palace and inspected the castle walls; he expressed his admiration for the buildings and for the situation of the fortress, as well as for the extensive prospect of the windings of the river and the country through which it meandered. He remarked that he had been told a great deal about that noble seat, but that it much exceeded all that he had heard of it. “It was,” His Highness said, “inherent and natural to all the Royal Family for many years past to have a particular kindness for Strivling.” As James departed from the castle the guns again sounded a salute. Next day he travelled back to Holyrood.[86]

Coming events do not always cast their shadows before. As the heir-presumptive to the British throne walked round the castle with Mar he did not foresee that soon, as King, he would curtail the privileges which the Earl enjoyed as governor of Stirling, and that the hereditary office would be fully restored by the supporters of the man who was to tear his crown from his brow. Nor could he picture to himself his grandson, a disinherited prince, striving to recover this bulwark of the north from the servants of an alien sovereign.