Craigmillar Castle

The lands of Craigmillar were granted to the monks of Dunfermline Abbey by King David I in the 12th century. The Prestons arrived in 1342, when David II granted the family two-thirds of the estate; in 1374 Robert II gave the remainder to Sir Simon de Preston, Sheriff of Midlothian. It was Simon's son, or perhaps his grandson Sir George, who raised the L-plan tower house — in place by 1425, when Sir John Preston sealed a charter at Craigmillar.

The courtyard wall wrapping the tower was probably the work of Sir William Preston (d. 1453), who had travelled in France and drew on continental models for it. He also brought home the arm of Saint Giles, presenting the relic to the High Kirk of Edinburgh, where the Preston Aisle is named for him. In 1479 the castle turned prison: John Stewart, Earl of Mar, brother of James III, was held at Craigmillar accused of practising witchcraft against the King, and later died in suspicious circumstances.

Craigmillar was erected into a barony in 1511, and the outer courtyard was built around that time. In September 1517, with plague loose in Edinburgh, the infant James V was moved here for safety; his French guardian De la Bastie had new locks made for the royal chamber and a stable built for the king's mule. During the Rough Wooing — Henry VIII's attempt to force a marriage between his son Edward and the young Mary, Queen of Scots — English troops under the Earl of Hertford burned Craigmillar on 8 May 1544, after sacking Edinburgh. Sir Simon Preston (d. 1569), Lord Provost of Edinburgh and a loyal supporter of Queen Mary, repaired the castle and remodelled the courtyard ranges.

Queen Mary knew the castle already, having met the English ambassador Thomas Randolph there in September 1563. On 20 November 1566 she returned to convalesce after the birth of her son, the future James VI — still in poor health following a serious illness in October and, according to Philibert du Croc, suffering from depression. Tradition puts her bed in the small former kitchen inside the tower house, though she more likely occupied the newer east range.

Before she left on 7 December, her noblemen suggested that her unpopular husband, Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, could be removed — by divorce or by other means. A pact, the "Craigmillar Bond", was signed by her Secretary of State William Maitland of Lethington and nobles including the earls of Bothwell, Argyll and Huntly, who met first in Argyll's bedchamber and then in Bothwell's room. The bond itself does not survive. Mary made her unhappiness with Darnley plain, but was probably unaware of the plot to kill him. Darnley was to have lodged at Craigmillar on his return to Edinburgh; he chose Kirk o' Field in the town instead, and was murdered there on 10 February 1567.

The castle was drawn into the civil war that followed Mary's fall. On 2 June 1571 Captain Melville and two of his soldiers, fighting for the Queen's cause, were killed in the grounds when a barrel of gunpowder exploded; in 1572 Regent Mar used Craigmillar as his base for the siege of Edinburgh Castle, then held for the exiled Queen, and stables were built for a company of light horsemen. In September 1589 James VI came to Craigmillar while waiting for his bride Anne of Denmark, delayed by contrary winds — passing the time "as a kind lover spends the time in sighing" — and it was here he decided to sail to Norway to meet her. Witchcraft clung to the place: in 1591 Agnes Sampson was accused of placing a charmed wax image in a dovecote at Craigmillar to help her friend Barbara Napier, and John Preston of Haltree sat as commissioner at witchcraft trials in 1661–62.

On Sir Robert Preston's death in 1639 Craigmillar passed to a distant cousin, David Preston of Whitehill, whose son sold it out of the family. Sir John Gilmour — a Royalist rewarded after the Restoration with the Lord Presidency of the Court of Session in 1661 — bought the castle and the neighbouring Inch estate in 1660, and remodelled the west range into a modern lodging fit for a senior judge. In the early 18th century the Gilmours moved to Inch House, and Craigmillar was ruined by 1775, when the antiquarian and poet John Pinkerton wrote an elegy on it. A proposal of 1842 to renovate it for Queen Victoria came to nothing, but Victoria visited in 1886, and its then owner Walter James Little Gilmour undertook much restoration. The castle has been in state care since 1946 and is maintained by Historic Environment Scotland.