Dalkeith Palace

Dalkeith Castle stood above a bend in the River North Esk, an easily defensible position held from the 12th century by the Grahams, Lords of Dalkeith. When John de Graham died in 1341–42 the castle and barony passed to the Douglases through his sister Marjory, wife of Sir William Douglas. James Douglas, 1st Lord Dalkeith, endowed the collegiate church nearer the town's centre in 1406, the burial place of Douglas earls, lords and knights, and in the mid-15th century James Douglas of Dalkeith became Earl of Morton. In 1503 Margaret Tudor, bride of James IV, stayed at the castle as the Earl of Morton's guest before her formal entry into Edinburgh.

In 1543 Cardinal Beaton was imprisoned in the castle, and that November Regent Arran besieged the Douglas family here with artillery. Worse followed during the Rough Wooing: on 3 June 1548 the English soldiers James Wilford and Thomas Wyndham, with the Spanish captain Pedro de Gamboa, captured the castle. The Earl of Angus wrote to his daughter Margaret Douglas, Countess of Lennox, that the "house of Dalkeith was destroyed".

Mary, Queen of Scots rode out from Edinburgh to stay a few days in October 1565, and from June 1574 Regent Morton — who had himself been captured in the siege of 1548 — extended the castle. In July 1575 Sir John Forster, the English border warden taken at the Raid of the Redeswire, was held prisoner here.

Morton entertained the young James VI at Dalkeith in October 1579 after the king reached his majority, and James and Anne of Denmark stayed frequently thereafter. In August 1592 the prisoner John Wemyss of Logie escaped through the royal couple's bedchamber, helped by the queen's servant Margaret Vinstarr. In 1598 the royal master of work William Schaw prepared a nursery for the queen, and Princess Margaret was born at the castle on Christmas Eve. In August 1601 the infant Prince Charles fell seriously ill here but recovered.

Charles returned as king in 1633, entertained by William, 7th Earl of Morton, and liked the place enough to consider turning the estate into a deer park; by 1637 he had decided to buy it. The castle was refortified for him, with an additional drawbridge and extra defences, but amid the Wars of the Three Kingdoms Charles found the purchase difficult to complete, and Dalkeith eventually went back to the Earl of Morton.

In 1642 Morton sold Dalkeith to Francis Scott, 2nd Earl of Buccleuch, whose daughter Anne married James, Duke of Monmouth, eldest illegitimate son of Charles II, in 1663. After Monmouth was executed for treason, his widow asked the architect James Smith to model a new palace on William of Orange's Het Loo in the Netherlands. Smith signed the mason contract in March 1702 and folded part of the old tower house into the western side of the new building — the outline of its walls can still be traced in the west facade. The main block was roofed by the end of 1705; between 1709 and 1711 the London marble-cutter Richard Neale spent sixty-four weeks on site with nine assistants carving the Great Staircase, and the finished palace cost the Duchess £17,727.

Dalkeith was the Buccleuch seat until 1914 and drew a remarkable guest list: Bonnie Prince Charlie stayed two nights in 1745, George IV slept here in 1822 in preference to a dilapidated Holyroodhouse, Queen Victoria followed in 1842, and Edward VII visited in 1899 and 1903, George V in 1907 and 1910. From 1942 Polish troops of the 3rd Flanders Rifle Brigade were quartered on the third floor, where their graffiti was still visible on the wallpaper decades later. The computer firm ICL used the palace as a research office until 1983, and from 1985 the University of Wisconsin ran a study-abroad programme here, housing sixty to eighty students a semester until the lease ended in January 2021. The palace, latterly known as Dalkeith House, remains in its parkland under the Buccleuch Living Heritage Trust.