Scotch Baronial

Architecture and National Identity in Scotland

Miles Glendinning, Aonghus MacKechnie

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781474283489
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: History of Architecture

As the debate about Scottish independence rages on, this book takes a timely look at how Scotland's politics have been expressed in its buildings, exploring how the architecture of Scotland – in particular the constantly-changing ideal of the 'castle' – has been of great consequence to the ongoing narrative of Scottish national identity.
Scotch Baronial provides a politically-framed examination of Scotland's kaleidoscopic 'castle architecture', tracing how it was used to serve successive political agendas both prior to and during the three 'unionist centuries' from the early 17th century to the 20th century. The book encompasses many of the country's most important historic buildings – from the palaces left behind by the 'lost' monarchy, to revivalist castles and the proud town halls of the Victorian age – examining their architectural styles and tracing their wildly fluctuating political and national connotations. It ends by bringing the story into the 21st century, exploring how contemporary 'neo-modernist' architecture in today's Scotland, as exemplified in the Holyrood parliament, relates to concepts of national identity in architecture over the previous centuries.

PART ONE

The First Castle Age

1

Pre-1603: Castellated Architecture and ‘Martial Independence’

Amid the Meid, repleit with sweit odouris,

A palice stude with many Royal Towris . . .¹

– GAVIN DOUGLAS, C. 1501

. . . ful jurisdicioune and fre impire within his realme²

– 1469 PARLIAMENTARY ACT

Truly, the Scots are an antidote to the English!³

– POPE MARTIN V (PONTIFF 1417–31), FOLLOWING THE BATTLE OF BAUGÉ, 1421

Introduction

Scotland’s First Castle Age took shape in the centuries after the Wars of Independence, as a built outcome of the overriding concern of the country’s feudal ruling elites to assert their autonomous status and power. Medieval Scotland developed a national ideology based on martial success in repelling a succession of attempted English conquests – as celebrated most extravagantly in the triumphalist national history of the Scotichronicon. The martial values which, it was claimed, had secured the country’s independence were also reflected within architecture, in the emergence of an appropriately showy, military style – the castellated architecture that was employed for almost all secular buildings and even some churches. This trenchantly militarized protonationalism intentionally contrasted with the contemporary architecture of England, while making frequent references to that of England’s main enemy – France. At first, especially under the Stewart kings, it was the monarchy that made most of the running in the development of Scottish castellated architecture. After the Reformation in 1560, the political context became more complicated, as Scotland began to find common cause with Protestant northern Europe, and power began to shift from the monarchs to the nobility. Yet the First Castle Age continued without significant interruption, and the place of the ‘castle’ within the symbolic architecture of Scottish national identity became even more secure than before.

Castles and Palaces: The Architecture of the Kingdom of Scotland

Following the end of Roman power in the former province of ‘Britannia’, south of Hadrian’s Wall, in the fifth century CE, a succession of little kingdoms gradually amalgamated into two powerful groups, each expansionist, and each a rival to the other. To the north was the territory, approximately, that we now call ‘Scotland’, while the bigger, southern element, ‘England’, annexed Wales from the 1270s. David I (reigned 1124–53) temporarily annexed part of what today is northern England, while regional Norse incursions ended in the ceding to Scotland of the Hebrides and Man in 1266; the Northern Isles would follow in 1470–72 as a dowry. In the thirteenth century, an accepted boundary and a general ‘truce’ between the two other countries appears to have been in place. This all changed with the commencement of the Wars of Independence with England from 1296, when England sought to annex Scotland, bolstered by the origin-myth of King Arthur – the supposed early ruler of the whole island – from whom their monarchy claimed entitlement and descent. What all this shows is that there was a distinctive Scottish kingdom by the beginning of the period we discuss in this book.⁴

With the failure of English strategy at the battle of Bannockburn in 1314, mainland Britain became more clearly established as a two-kingdom entity, and an elaborate Scottish counter-ideology emerged, claiming that Scotland had enjoyed (since 330 BCE) an uninterrupted monarchy, which both Romans and English had failed to conquer, and which was thus far more ancient and legitimate than that of its southern neighbour. All this was packed into Walter Bower’s 1440s Scotichronicon, which was itself an augmentation of John of Fordun’s fourteenth-century Chronica Gentis Scotorum; the story was supplemented in the next century by Hector Boece’s history. From the rhetoric of the period came a growing emphasis upon the two figures of Sir William Wallace – the ‘Guardian of Scotland’, whose death in 1305 was portrayed as a martyrdom, and King Robert I, ‘the Bruce’ (1274–1329), the victor of Bannockburn.⁵ As we will see in the following chapters, the meanings attributed to these ‘national heroes’ across the following centuries would repeatedly shift – in the same way that the architecture of Scottish national identity would mutate frequently and radically. In natural reaction to the increasingly entrenched attitudes towards England from 1296, Scotland allied itself with France, where English expansionism had been similarly unwelcome, and Scots fought alongside the French against the English during the Hundred Years War – victorious at Baugé in 1421, defeated at Verneuil in 1424. As in the case of sibling rivalry, national tension turned to mutual insult – for example, the Scots (and French) claimed that the English had tails, as God’s punishment for the treatment of St Augustine, while the English coined the verb ‘scotch’, meaning to frustrate or obstruct.⁶ Opposing interpretations developed into a mutual incomprehension and, as we will see in due course, would colour psychological, political and architectural developments over the centuries.

Just as the initial expressions or articulations of the nascent Scottish national identity were somewhat inchoate, the same applied in the field of architecture. Two themes that would later become all-consuming – building in stone rather than brick or timber, and a love of ‘castellated’ architecture – began gradually to emerge, in the former case perhaps as early as the ninth century,⁷ and certainly by the eleventh century, when large-scale religious complexes began to be built in Scotland by European monastic orders whose stereotyped designs demanded use of stone. Not until the thirteenth century, however, when it was prescribed that parish churches should be built of stone⁸ was there evidence of a concerted programme of stone castle-building, and early examples were more or less similar to those in other countries, especially France. Prominent cases included the triangular-plan Caerlaverock (c. 1260–70) (Figure 1.1), or Bothwell (pre-1296) (Figure 1.2), whose circular donjon-tower affirmed its builders’ connections with France, deriving apparently (via family links) from the royal castle of Coucy.⁹ These and other castles were seized by the English from the 1290s, but during the 1300s–1310s counter-attacks, they proved vulnerable to surprise capture and were dismantled by the Scots to prevent them from once again becoming occupation bases.¹⁰ England’s annexation from 1296 of Scotland’s commercial capital, Berwick, was followed by centuries of physical and economic warfare.¹¹ Consequently, many tower-houses were necessarily rebuilt in the more settled post-Reformation era, while continuing economic damage by repeated English invasions meant that construction on the scale of the thirteenth-century castles and religious houses could not be meanwhile repeated.

FIGURE 1.1Caerlaverock Castle – built c. 1260–70, reconstructed c. 1630; view from south showing part of the c. 1630 courtyard front. © Historic Environment Scotland. HES Scan: mb240506017_o1

FIGURE 1.2Bothwell Castle – aerial view of 1968. Turret bases (top left of the castle in this view) show the castle’s original thirteenth-century extent. © Historic Environment Scotland. https://canmore.org.uk/collection/1543405

The decisive step in the beginning of the First Castle Age in Scotland would prove to be the supersession of the ‘donjon’, in its turn, by the residential tower, as already seen elsewhere at castles such as Vincennes. The leading Scottish example of this new fashion was David II’s Tower (c. 1368–72) at Edinburgh Castle, dominating the town and thereby proclaiming royal authority.¹² Royal continuity was signalled there by prominent reuse of ashlars from a predecessor castle destroyed by Robert Bruce, David’s father; and in its turn, David’s Tower would later fall victim to military bombardment, in 1573 – its remnants today encapsulated within the Half-Moon Battery. At Edinburgh Castle, castellated architecture was paralleled by more explicit martial display, notably in 1454, when Philip ‘the Good’, Duke of Burgundy, gifted to his great-nephew-in-law, James II Mons Meg, one of the biggest guns the world had seen. England had nothing that could compete with it, and it was accordingly long commemorated, as a symbol rather than as a weapon: images of it were even sculpted on seventeenth-century panels now reset in the castle’s gatehouse. David’s Tower was the beginning of that most dominant and resilient Scottish building type – the castellated ‘tower-house’, an image that became so entrenched that it began to spread to other building types, as in the case of the fourteenth-century St Machar’s Cathedral in Old Aberdeen (Figure 1.3), or the Holyrood royal palace built for James V in the early sixteenth century. Such residential towers – today, better known as ‘tower-houses’ – were built by elites from the fourteenth century onwards, with a heightened burst of activity in the late fifteenth century. Even before Scotland’s Reformation in 1560, funds officially due to the papacy were being siphoned off to facilitate a new castle-building era.

FIGURE 1.3St Machar’s, Aberdeen, west front – completed 1440; photograph of 1940. © Historic Environment Scotland. https://canmore.org.uk/collection/536304

Castellation, however, was only the foremost of a range of architectural responses to political concerns. Most noticeably in the ecclesiastical field, for example, there developed a fifteenth-century Romanesque revival, referencing the idealized national past (that of the royal dynasty which ended with Alexander III’s death in 1286 and that of his granddaughter, the ‘Maid of Norway’, in 1290), as would the Florentine Renaissance and equivalent revivals elsewhere.¹³ Here there was no question of a French inspiration, as this was a time dominated elsewhere not by the Romanesque but by Gothic pointed arches and slender constructions – in France as much as in England. More specific national identity-motifs also began to emerge in these centuries, for example, in reflection of the ‘Roman’ imperial symbolism adopted by a range of consolidating European monarchies from around the mid-fifteenth century. To help reinforce the message that the monar...