Scotland’s soul and the strange saga of the Stone of Destiny

IT has borne the behinds of monarchs from Macbeth to Windsor, been snatched from Scotland as the spoils of war, and was briefly but sensationally liberated from Westminster Abbey as a jolly jape for Christmas 1950.

Twenty years ago, the Stone of Destiny was trundled home to Edinburgh as part of a faintly forlorn ploy to save the Scottish Tories. Now the people of Perth want their mitts on this chunk of old red sandstone, as part of a £20million scheme to regenerate the city as a cultural hub and a tourist magnet.

On Tuesday we learned the Perth City Development Board has been dreaming for years of securing the Stone. Board chairman John Bullough announced: ‘If full council approve this ambitious and exciting proposal, then we would hope to make a formal application to Historic and Environment Scotland and the Commissioners of the Regalia in the next few months.’

Local Nationalist MP Pete Wishart enthused: ‘At a time when we are looking at ways to increase footfall in the City of Perth, this is a fantastic proposal and I hope that we can all work together to see this plan come to fruition…’

In all the excitement, nobody seems to wonder how this proposal will be regarded by the Queen – who was not, it was understood, at all pleased when the Stone was removed to Edinburgh in 1996.

Nor has anyone pointed out that if the Stone of Scone, to give it its other name, belongs anywhere, it is properly to Scone and not the big green-welly town to its south which, despite being the capital of Scotland for some 600 years – has some embarrassing previous form when it comes to matters monarchical.

At Perth in February 1437, Scotland’s King James I was brutally murdered, by a squad of his own nobles, in the royal apartments of the Blackfriars monastery. It was a very messy, Scottish business for, having hacked him to death, his assassins had given no thought to the aftermath.

THEY were quickly rounded up by the furious Queen Joan and unpleasantly executed, after which little James II reigned in his father’s stead – but in Edinburgh, which has been the capital of Scotland ever since. By then, of course, the Stone of Scone was long gone, seized by the forces of Edward I in 1296 and carried all the way to Westminster Abbey, where the ‘Hammer of the Scots’ had it installed in the stately wooden chair on which England’s sovereigns have been crowned ever since.

Yet despite Edward’s lifelong ambition to establish himself definitively as ‘Lord Paramount’ of Scotland, to whom the country’s notional monarch would be a mere vassal, he never achieved full subjection, instead bequeathing to his son Edward II an ongoing Scottish war and a host of other problems.

In 1314, the new monarch’s hopes of completing what his father had begun were definitively dashed at Bannockburn and in 1328, under the terms of the final peace treaty at Northampton, England agreed to return the captured stone.

But at the very suggestion the London mob rioted around Westminster Abbey and, moan as the Scots did, the Stone of Destiny stayed there for centuries to come – until December 1950, when it was audaciously removed by four young Scottish Nationalist students.

To the horror of Ian Hamilton, Gavin Vernon, Kay Matheson and Alan Stuart, the slab balefully broke in two. But despite the subsequent hue and cry, the bits were smuggled back to Scotland, despite road blocks and an ongoing manhunt… So the polis went beetlin’ away up tae the north, they hunted the clyde and they hunted the Forth, But the wild folk up yonder just kidded them a’, For they didnae believe it was magic at a’… The Stone was hidden for a time in (of all places) the basement of the US consulate in Edinburgh, and then cared for by a Glasgow councillor, Baillie Robert Gray, who – being a stonemason to trade – repaired it professionally.

The romp acutely embarrassed the authorities in London, was deliciously entertaining to the mass of Scots, and is best remembered for the grotesque overreaction of the authorities. It was ‘Sacrilege at Westminster,’ screeched The Times, ‘a coarse and vulgar crime.’

The conspirators, though cornered and interrogated by detectives, ran cool, merry rings around them and no trace of the Stone could be found anywhere. Looking back on the ‘crime’ years later, Ian Hamilton mused: ‘I’m not ashamed. In fact, I’m rather proud.

‘We drove down the bleak, narrow roads to London to hurt no one. Rather to puncture England’s pride. To save no one but the ruined hopes of our country… I felt I was holding Scotland’s soul when I touched it for the first time.’

In the spring of 1951, quiet word was sent through the Church of Scotland and, on April 11, burly policemen duly found the Stone of Destiny, neatly wrapped in a saltire, in the ruins of Arbroath Abbey. Two years later, in June 1953, our new young Queen was crowned on it. Or was she? Many have long maintained that the rock recovered by the authorities in April 1951 was a fake, and that the real one is in safe keeping elsewhere.

‘There’s no question that Bertie Gray made copies,’ Alex Salmond insisted in 2008. ‘It’s like the Loch Ness monster, it’s certainly a puzzle and a mystery which is best not definitively answered.’

BAILLIE Gray did let it be known that in repairing the Stone – or fashioning the stone collected by the police – he had sealed inside a small brass tube containing a message on a piece of paper. But what it said was a secret he took to his grave in 1975 and nobody involved in the Stone’s adventure was ever prosecuted.

More to the point, would the Scots have been so daft as to let Edward I collar the true Stone of Scone in the first place? References in medieval documents suggest something more interesting than a boring slab, such as an actual carved chair. And would the monks at Scone simply have handed over something that important?

As Alex Salmond put it: ‘If you’re the abbot of Scone and the strongest and most ruthless king in Christendom is charging toward you in 1296 to steal Scotland’s most sacred object, and probably put you and half of your cohorts to death, do you do nothing and wait until he arrives – or do you hide yourself and the Stone somewhere convenient in the Perthshire hillside? I think the second myself.’

But had the original indeed been in safekeeping, would Robert the Bruce not triumphantly have produced it for his own coronation, once the English had been definitively put to flight? Perhaps it suited him and his successors to have an ongoing grievance and, when a Scot finally ascended the English throne in 1603, James VI & I left the Stone of Destiny calmly where it was.

All we can say for sure is that, whatever else it might be, the rock is not the pillow on which, according to rank superstition, the patriarch Jacob slept the night of his vision at Bethel.

But one does wonder about the renewed burbling in Perth (by SNP politicians and others) about a rock that would not attract a second glance in a builder’s yard and seems incongruous in its current setting, behind bulletproof glass in Edinburgh Castle with the Scottish regalia.

We may titter at the prosaic patois of the modern SNP – fiscal autonomy, additional powers, and all the ills of the day blamed on ‘the United Kingdom Government’ – but at least it is far preferable to the silly, be-dirked, be-bannered Bannockburn brand of nationalism which it quietly displaced decades ago.