#holyroodhouse — Public Fediverse posts

An unlikely home for a King of France: the thread about the Palace of Holyroodhouse

This thread was originally written and published in September 2022.

Given that the Palace of Holyroodhouse was getting more attention than it is used to in the week that this thread was first written, it seemed like a good idea to take a brief delve into its history of royal residents and one who is highly remarkable but far less well remembered than others.

The Palace of Holyroodhouse, lithograph after J. D. Harding, c. 1850. CC-by-3.0 University of Edinburgh Walter Scott Image Collection

The palace is well known to be the official residence of the British Monarch in Scotland, but that’s a role that it has only held for just over 100 years, with King George V conferring the status upon it in 1922. It’s also well known that it long served as a royal residence for the Scottish monarchy going back to medieval times, with this situation ending in 1603 when King James VI left it, Edinburgh and Scotland for London and the English throne. James was the palace’s longest term royal resident, being principally based there from his coming of age in 1579 until he left 24 years later. He had promised to return to Edinburgh every 3 years, but did not keep his word and would not return until 1617 (and then after that, never again). There is therefore a period of four centuries to be accounted for between James’ departure and George’s designation.

The young King James VI, painting by Adrian van Son from the collection in Pittencrieff House in Fife

After James, Royal visits were infrequent. Charles I stayed here when he came to Edinburgh in 1633 for his showpiece Scottish coronation, the façade being remodelled in his honour. He returned to the palace in the turbulent year of 1641, and in 1646, conferred it to one of his principal Scottish supporters; James Hamilton, 1st Duke of Hamilton. The hereditary role of Keeper of the palace is one that the Dukes of Hamilton hold hold to this day. It was badly damaged in 1650 by the occupying troops of Oliver Cromwell after their defeat of the Scottish Army at Dunbar. The picture below shows the palace at it was in 1649 following the remodelling for Charles.

The west range of the palace drawn around 1649 by James Gordon of Rothiemay, prior to reconstruction in the 1670s.

After the Restoration in 1660, repairs were made to the palace to allow it to be occupied by Charles II as required and to be a meeting place for his Scottish Privy Council. It was reconstructed between 1670-79 by and it is rumoured that funds and materials for this project were diverted towards the construction of Royston House. The King however did not intend to reside there himself, rather it was to be a seat of his power by proxy in the country, the seat of not just the Privy Council but also the residence of the Lord High Commissioner for Scotland. In 1679, this was James, Duke of Albany, the future King James VII (II of England). His daughter Anne, the future Queen Anne, was also resident with him. When James ascended to the throne in 1685, he set up a Jesuit college in the grounds. The following year he had the Protestant congregation that was worshipping in the Holyrood Abbey Kirk evicted and converted that building to a ceremonial Chapel Royal for his newly created Order of the Thistle. Both of these acts provoked outrage amongst the Edinburgh mob and in 1688 they would destroy the college and desecrate the chapel and its tombs following William of Orange’s taking of the throne.

Engraving after John Elphinstone esq. of the Palace and Abbey from the southeast around 1740. The roof of the Abbey Kirk would collapse in 1786 under its own weight. © Royal Collections Trust, RCIN 702898

Following the abolition of the separate Scottish Privy Council on the Act of Union in 1707, the primary function of the palace as a centre of government ceased to be and it was increasingly turned over to grace-and-favour use by the Scottish nobility. This was interrupted briefly by a royal visit in 1745 when a certain man with claim to being a future King Charles III paid an uninvited visit – Charles Edward Stuart, better known as Bonnie Prince Charlie.

An imagined scene of Charles Edward Stuart holding court at Holyroodhouse during the occupation of 1745. A highly romanticised 1880 illustration by William Brassey Hole © Edinburgh City Libraries

Jacobite excitement aside, for the next 100 or so years, British monarchs were uninterested in what was an increasingly decrepit old building in a bad neighbourhood in town; hemmed in on 2 sides by the increasingly undesirable tenements of the Canongate, on another by an irrigated meadow for the settling of sewage as fertiliser and all around by brewing on an industrial scale. It was not until 1822 that a reigning British monarch would visit, the first since Charles I in 1641; King George IV lodged in the far more comfortable surroundings of Dalkeith Palace, but was given a tour of the ancient seat of Royalty and held a reception there. The Palace would not begin to be rehabilitated until the reign of Queen Victoria, its resident nobility being slowly turfed out and it was gradually repaired, restored and improved. But no monarch or senior royal has made Holyrood a permanent home since James VI left over 420 years ago…

Scene Outside Holyrood Palace, the Arrival of George IV, watercolour sketch by Sir John James Stuart. CC-by-NC National Galleries Scotland

Or have they? When I say “no monarch or senior royal” I mean of the British royal family, because you may be surprised to learn that the palace’s 2nd longest royal resident was none other than Charles Philippe, Comte d’Artois, younger brother of King Louis XVI and later King Charles X of France! This future monarch would spend 7 years at Holyrood from 1796 to 1803 with his mistress, Louise de Polastron, following his flight from the French Revolution. When he arrived in Edinburgh, reputedly half the city turned out to welcome him, despite his wish for a low-key reception. He would find Holyrood’s legal status as a debtor’s sanctuary particularly suited to his lifestyle choices.

Charles X as Count of Artois in 1798. Portrait by Henri-Pierre Danloux

Nearly thirty years later, he would return to Holyrood as the recently deposed King Charles X following the Second French Revolution, arriving in 1830 and staying this time for two years. He lived with his young grandson, Henri d’Artois, Count of Chambord and Duke of Bordeaux, who had very briefly spend a few days on the French throne as the last Bourbon king. Charles’ son Louis-Antoine, Duke of Angoulême and his wife Marie-Thérèse (who, as daughter of Louis XVI of France and Marie Antoinette was also Charles’ niece) also fled the wrath of the French republic and made their home in town, staying at 21 Regent Terrace (now 22), overlooking the palace. Marie-Caroline de Bourbon-Sicile, Duchess de Berry and sister-in-law of Louis-Antoine, lived a few doors down at number 11 (now 12) at this time.

22 Regent Terrace. CC-by-SA 4.0 SylviaStanley

While Edinburgh provided a safe retreat for the French royals, they reputedly found the Scots “tiresome and odd.” They kept themselves distant from their host city, snubbed offers from its institutions and despaired at the prevalence of Sabbatarianism. In turn were an object of fascination for the locals and the Scottish nobility were “astonished” by their “gastronomic powers“. City caricaturist John Kay captured Charles in 1796, walking hand in arm with Lord Adam Gordon, Commander-in-Chief of the Army in Scotland and Governor of Edinburgh Castle.

Charles as Comte d’Artois (right) and Lord Adam Gordon. Caricature by John Kay, 1796. © National Portrait Gallery, NPG D15136

Charles and his family left Edinburgh for Austria on September 18th 1832, his departure being a public spectacle, as the young Henri in particular was a favourite in the city. The Scotsman reported that “white gloves, white ribbons and white favours of various kinds were worn by a large proportion of the people assembled.” Many white flags can be seen in the illustration below also, these were not a symbol of surrender, but the flag of the Bourbon restoration. The departure was from the Trinity Chain Pier on the 9AM steamer , the SS United Kingdom, from Newhaven to Hamburg, which is what can be seen in the background of the painting.

The departure of Charles X to Austria with his grandson Henri, 18 September 1832. It is probably the Duke and Duchess of Angoulême stepping out of the carriage. Painting by Charles Achille d’Hardiviller

Charles was now gone for good, but did leave one lasting mark upon the city from his residency. Disliking the attention he attracted from locals wherever we went, he had William Playfair include a convenient gated path through Regent Gardens to allow him to walk unmolested to hear Mass at St. Mary’s Chapel (now St. Mary’s Metropolitan Cathedral) at Picardy Place. Whether that story is apocryphal or not, there are indeed gates at both the north and south end of the western boundary of Regent Gardens and pleasant paths laid out between the two.

Regent Gardens and the western gates, marked on the 1849 OS Town Plan of Edinburgh. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland

Note to readers: unfortunately in April 2026, a third-party plug-in more than exceeded its authority and broke many of the image links on this site. No images were lost but I will have to restore them page-by-page, which may take some time. In the meantime please bear with me while I go about rectifying this issue.

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Victoria Station: the thread abut a forgotten Royal rail halt you’ve probably never heard of

This thread was originally written and published in June 2020.

This is the sort of unexpected riddle that I like. You’re out for a walk and you see an old gateway that is rather too well made for the wall it sits in and doesn’t seem to lead anywhere.

Why is this gate so wide and why does it seem to go nowhere?Why is that gate pier so substantial and so well formed for something that leads nowhere?

Beyond the unimpressive wooden gate itself, there’s just a little wedge of grass and overgrowth beyond it, before it descends straight down towards the East Coast Mainline railway.

Incongruous walls and gates

So why is this old gate here? Well, if you rake around in the books and maps you’ll find out that this isn’t just any old railway access gate, this is an old Royal railway access gate. You see, these gate piers are all that remains of Queen Victoria’s personal, private railway station for when she was visiting Edinburgh and lodging in the Palace of Holyroodhouse. We can just see the station in the below photo taken looking east from “Muschet’s Cairn” in Holyrood Park in the 1880s; to the right of the tenement there is a projection, with a distant chimney above it. This is a covered walkway and an iron archway over the gate.

“Muschat’s Cairn, entrance to Holyrood Park”. Thomas Begbie, 1887,© Edinburgh City Libraries

Through the gateway, it was just a short royal stroll down a flight of steps to a private platform for the royal train. Here it could be met by one’s personal carriage so that one could be whisked the short distance away to the back gate of the Palace of Holyroodhouse, far from the prying eyes of the Edinburgh crowd.

OS 1849 Town plan showing “The Queen’s Station”, the platform and the gates. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland

In 1850 The Scotsman reported that the Directors of the North British Railway were “in the course of erection” of a platform at Meadowbank for the Royal Train to stop at following its inaugural run over the Tweed on the Royal Border Bridge.

“The Queen, Prince Albert & the Royal Children departing in their Railway Carriage for Scotland”, 1850. CC-BY-NC National Galleries Scotland.

The newspaper described the new station was” to be tastefully ornamented for the occasion, there is to be a stair leading up to the old public road at Meadowbank, and distant only a few yards from the gate into Holyrood Park. Her Majesty’s private carriage will here be in waiting to receive her; so that, in the course of ten minutes are the arrival of the train, the Queen and the Royal Consort will, in all likelihood, be occupying the apartments that have been fitted up for their reception in Holyrood Palace.“ Fortunately for us, the London Illustrated News sent ahead an artist who was there to capture the scene and gives us the only known image of the station. Notice the crown atop the royal carriage.

London Illustrated News, 6th September 1852

For the Queen’s visit to Edinburgh in September 1852, the Scotsman went so far as to refer to the “Victoria Station at Meadowbank“. Ten horses and two royal private carriages were sent ahead from London to Edinburgh via York, arriving by the afternoon mail train for her Majesty’s personal use in travelling between Meadowbank and Holyrood. When the Queen arrived on September 1st, “The engine was beautifully decorated, having in front the words “God Save the Queen” in large gilt letters.” After the formalities were concluded with the greeting party, the Queen and Prince Albert ascended the stairs from the platform to their waiting carriages, where a guard of honour of the 7th Hussars from Piershill Barracks was waiting, their band striking up God Save the Queen.

The Royal Train behind the engine Albion for the journey to Scotland, 1850. CC-by-SA 4.0 Science Museum Group Collection, © The Board of Trustees of the Science Museum

Once the royal party were officially in residence at the Palace of Holyroodhouse, the Royal Standard was run up the flagpole and the gunners of Edinburgh castle fired a salute. This was however their second of the day; a signal hoisted earlier in the morning from the Nelson Memorial on the top of Calton Hill to a London steamer approaching Leith had been misinterpreted and an over-enthusiastic garrison had fired the royal salute. This created a minor panic amongst the dignitaries, railway officials and spectators of the city who suddenly feared that the Queen had arrived and nobody was there to greet her. One can only imagine the pandemonium until the railway telegraph office located the royal train outside Dunbar.

Queen Victoria and Prince Albert are shown onto a Royal carriage by George Hudson, a London Illustrated News image

For the 1860 visit, a description is given of how the station was decorated for such visits. “The stair leading from the platform to the road was covered with an awning of white and pink calico, and the recesses on either side contained a neatly arranged assortment of flowers, evergreens and heather. The stair-case was covered with a merled carpet, with a stripe of Stuart tartan in the centre“.

As far as is known, there was only one occasion when a regular passenger train stopped here; on August 22nd 1872 a London to Edinburgh express was temporarily halted to allow some of Queen Victoria’s children to disembark. The last use of the station was for the Royal visit to Scotland in 1881. Even the Victorians realised stopping trains on the mainline into Edinburgh from London just a mile shy of the final destination for Royal purposes wasn’t the best use of the railway. The practice of also loading wagons onto the back of the royal train carrying state coaches and horses incurred further delays, as these had to be brought down the line from North Bridge Station (what would later become Waverley).

In 1882, an irate letter was written to the green ink page of the Scotsman to complain that the Town Council were now using the platform as a collection point for the “ashes and dirt” of one quarter of the city before its onwards transport by rail for disposal. The station was only “open” for 31 years – and even then it was used only once or twice a year – but those gate piers have survived 141 years longer than that. There’s a planning application out though to build on this gushet*, so catch them while you still can. (* = gushet is a Scots term for a triangular portion of land). The same stretch of wall has another (unresolved) little secret too. The ghost of a small building that I can’t quite unravel. It looks like two wall ends (green) with the back of a fireplace or window (yellow) in between.

What have we here?

If there was something here, it’s missing from the 1817 and 1849 town plans, so either is older than both or came and went in between. The boundary wall pre-dates the railway and this road was widened on a number of occasions starting with the Royal Visit of George IV in 1822. No structure is marked but this could have been a gardener’s bothy removed when the road was widened.

Kirkwood’s 1817 Town plan showing the location where there was at one time a lean-too structure built into the wall. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland

Note to readers: unfortunately in April 2026, a third-party plug-in more than exceeded its authority and broke many of the image links on this site. No images were lost but I will have to restore them page-by-page, which may take some time. In the meantime please bear with me while I go about rectifying this issue.

If you have found this site useful, informative or amusing then you can help contribute towards its running costs by supporting me on ko-fi. This includes my commitment to keeping it 100% advert and AI free for all time coming, and in helping to find further unusual stories to bring you by acquiring books and paying for research.
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#Lochend #Logan #Restalrig #StMargaret

The Royal Mile: the thread about a street with no addresses

This thread was originally written and published in September 2022.

Apropos current events (at the time of writing), I thought it might be interesting, relevant or a bit of both to delve a little into the name of a certain street and dispel a few myths or misapprehensions about it.

You can find any number of pictures of “The Royal Mile” signs on stock photo sites.

The Royal Mile of course is well known as that ancient main street of Edinburgh’s Old Town, named for the mile long route between Edinburgh Castle and the Palace of Holyroodhouse. This is a route steeped in history and long trodden by monarchs of Scotland, yes? The history books (or some of them) actually will tell you this, so it must be true, yes? Well, not really, no.

OK, the bit about it being a mile long between the castle and the palace is correct, it almost exactly is – give or take a foot, yard or metre. But that’s a statute mile not the Scots mile which some sources claim (which is ~200m longer) so that should raise a slight suspicion as to how ancient a term it really is. Feel free to measure it if you don’t believe me! You also won’t find any property with a street address of Royal Mile and you won’t find it in any old Post Office directory listing.

No. The Royal Mile is a collective term for four distinct streets, which in days of yore were in two completely separate burghs. From the top of the hill at the castle to the bottom, which is from west to east, we have the Castle Hill, Lawnmarket and High Street of Edinburgh and the Canongate which was in the Burgh of Canongate. These are shown below with their separate names on Kincaid’s street map of 1784.

Castle Hill, Kincaid’s map of 1784, Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of ScotlandLawn Market, Kincaid’s map of 1784, Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of ScotlandHigh Street, Kincaid’s map of 1784, Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of ScotlandCanongate, Kincaid’s map of 1784, Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland

Stuart Harris, who wrote the book on Edinburgh street names, takes particular exception to the Royal Mile name: “to use this label for the combined length of the separate historic market streets [Edinburgh and the Canongate] it is at cost of blurring the distinction between the two“. He continues “it is not only meaningless historically, but unhappily gives an impression that this was a route created to link castle and palace, whereas the truth is that it came into being hundreds of years before the kings of Scots had anything to go with the fortress or the palace“. Harris notes that in medieval references it is given as “via Regia“, the King’s Way, but then that was given to any public highway, with the adjoining streets and closes all being in private ownership in their respective burghs. Using the “nickname” of Royal Mile, he bemoaned, was causing the erosion of the historic and distinct individual street names, “with a regrettable loss of civic dignity“.

The route is undoubtedly ancient, a track will have existed along the spine of the Castle Rock since as long as people scratched out a living on its summit as a defensible place to survive. But how old are the street names and how old is the objectionable term Royal Mile? The earliest medieval references to the High Street describe a vicus foralis or market street, because that’s what it was and why it was much wider than it is now. By the 16th century it’s the magnus vicus or great street and by the start of the 17th it’s the High Street (or Hie Gate in Scots). The below sketch reconstructs the 15th century birds’ eye view of the city on its ridge below the castle, with the prominent one-mile route from castle to Holyrood.

Edinburgh Birds Eye View Looking North, c. 1450. F. C. Mears, 1910

The name Castle Hill, now partly buried beneath the 18th and 19th c. Esplanade, dates to at least 1484. It refers to the hill you climb to reach the castle, the castle itself sits on the Castle Rock. There’s evidence to suggest that the Castle Hill predates the High Street as the main centre of populace of Edinburgh.

The Lawnmarket is nothing to do with lawns or selling fodder. Lawn is a corruption of the Scots Laund or Laun; in English – Land; it was the Landmercatt, where people from the lands outwith the burgh could trade. The main city markets were restricted to only being for the traders of the burgh. In the 1765 town plan by Edgar (below) it’s even spelled as Land Market.

Edgar’s Town Plan of Edinburgh, 1765, Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland

And the Canongate, the principle thoroughfare of the burgh of that name dates to not long after the foundation of the Holyrood Abbey in 1128, first being recorded in 1363 as the vicus canonicorum or “Canoungait“, the way of the Canons (of the Abbey). The Burgh of Canongate, whose superiority was held by the Abbey until the Scottish Reformation, post-dated the street name and was established at some time in the 15th century.

And so what of The Royal Mile? Well, it’s a term that first appears in newspapers in the late 19th century. There are a couple of references to it in articles in The Scotsman in the 1880 and 1890s, written in a manner that implies it was clearly a term already understood locally. But crucially, it’s not given as a proper noun, it’s in quotation marks as the “royal mile“, it’s being used as a descriptive nickname. It first appears in book print that I can find in 1901, in “Edinburgh in the Nineteenth Century” by W. M. Gilbert. Again, with the quote marks and no capital on mile, again it’s clearly a nickname.

W. M. Gilbert’s book.

From here on, use of the term grows. A burgh councillor, C. J. Mcarthy, gave a talk illustrated by magic lantern slides of the title to the Edinburgh Architectural Association in 1905. By 1920, it’s the title of a historical guidebook published locally, by Robert T. Skinner

Robert T. Skinner’s book.

And by the 1930s, the name and its mythical genesis is firmly embedded in the popular history books.

Newnes Pictorial Knowledge, vol. 3, 1934

So there you have it. Yes, the Royal Mile or royal mile is a well accepted and established local name for the area between the Castle and the Palace, but as is sometimes the case the accepted history is a relatively modern invention to fit the facts and is divorced from the historical reality.

Note to readers: unfortunately in April 2026, a third-party plug-in more than exceeded its authority and broke many of the image links on this site. No images were lost but I will have to restore them page-by-page, which may take some time. In the meantime please bear with me while I go about rectifying this issue.

If you have found this site useful, informative or amusing then you can help contribute towards its running costs by supporting me on ko-fi. This includes my commitment to keeping it 100% advert and AI free for all time coming, and in helping to find further unusual stories to bring you by acquiring books and paying for research.
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#Lochend #Logan #Restalrig #StMargaret