This summer I had the opportunity to make one or two detours of Jacobite interest from a holiday whose main object was to see Hadrian’s Wall. Firstly, I was able to visit Carlisle whose Tullie House Museum features, as part of its timeline of the history of Carlisle, a section on the Prince Regent’s liberation of the city in 1745 and the subsequent siege by the Hanoverian army in 1746.
The Prince’s porringer (from which he ate porridge during his brief stay) has been preserved, but I was disappointed that Francis Towneley’s Manchester Regiment, who held Carlisle Castle to cover the Prince’s retreat from England in 1746, was not mentioned; rather, the display referred briefly to the French troops who held the Castle for King James and then passed on to the Castle’s use as a prison to incarcerate loyal Highlanders after Culloden.
The Castle itself has a floor devoted to an exhibition on the Jacobites, which features a large model of the city at the time of the siege. I was able to visit the tiny, windowless dungeon in which hundreds of Highlanders were crammed as prisoners without food or water and to see the stones from which they allegedly had to lick the dampness. The room is bitterly cold and even a 60 watt lightbulb somehow failed to dispel the gloom of the place, which feels as though it was deliberately constructed to sap hope from prisoners.
The Golden Lion public house at Corbridge claims to have been constructed from stones taken from Lord Derwentwater’s house after his execution, and I was pleased to see that the Northumbrian Jacobites had put up an explanatory notice by the bar.
I spent a day in Edinburgh in August (the first time I have been there for ten years) and I was determined to see the Honours of Scotland this time. The exhibition to which the Honours are the culmination is very old-fashioned insofar as it is based around traditional museum manikins rather than an audio-visual presentation, as at the Tower of London when I was last there. Overall I was most impressed with it, although it is a shame that one cannot get as close to the Scottish Crown Jewels as one can to England’s. The Crown of Scotland is surely one of the most beautiful in Europe, and it is a shame that the sceptre, used until the Act of Union to touch every act of the Scottish Parliament into law, has not had its traditional function revived by the present Parliament; doubtless that will have to wait for the repeal of the accursed Act.
I walked to the end of the Royal Mile to see the new Parliament building; I was not aware that on that very day, the SNP was defeating Labour in the first of the summer’s Scottish by-elections. I am no lover of contemporary buildings but the Scottish Parliament really is superb in its location opposite Holyrood Palace, which might be in remote country rather than the centre of a city, owing to the picturesque crag behind the Parliament house.
In the Great Kirk, once St. Giles’ Cathedral, I came across the tomb of Bonnie Dundee; someone had placed a sprig of heather in the hands of the sleeping effigy of John Graham.
Before leaving Edinburgh I came upon the church of Old St. Paul’s, the Victorian church that stands on the site of the wool store where Alexander Rose, the last Bishop of Edinburgh to have his cathedral at St. Giles, departed in 1689 with the loyal members of the congegation to set up an Episcopal church. Although the church is now indistinguishable from a Catholic church (such is the nature of the present Scottish Episcopal Church) it remains an atmospheric monument to the courage of Scottish Jacobites.
Finally, on a brief visit to Newcastle I caught sight of this plaque commemorating King Charles I’s incarceration in the city by the Scots:
2 Comments
April 13, 2009 at 10:16 pm
The picture that you identify in the Kirk of St. Giles as the tomb of Bonnie Dundee is in fact the tomb of the Great Marquis of Montrose, James Graham who died on 21 May 1650. John Graham, or Bonnie Dundee was shot at the battle of Killiecrankie. He died at Blair Castle shortly after the battle and is buried at St Bride’s Kirk which is on a hill near the castle.
July 9, 2009 at 11:16 am
I echo your concern about no record of the Manchester Regiment. According to the diary of James Miller, from Manchester, he and other private soldiers were imprisoned in the Cathedral, with no food or water for three days. On the fourth day a well in the Cathedral was broken open “which had not been used for upwards of an hundred years” from which they were obliged to drink, or die of thirst.