Dunfermline Palace

Dunfermline was a favourite residence of many Scottish monarchs. Documented royal residence begins in the 11th century with Malcolm III, who made it his capital, though his seat was the nearby Malcolm's Tower, a few hundred yards west of the later palace. David II and James I of Scotland were both born at Dunfermline. The palace itself is attached to Dunfermline Abbey, connected to the former monastic quarters by a gatehouse above a pend, and occupies what was originally the guest house of the abbey.

Few records survive of the conversion of monastic buildings to royal use. Timber was bought for the royal lodgings in 1429, and the existing remains largely reflect the remodelling carried out by James IV around 1500, who came to the palace and tipped the masons and craftsmen in 1507. William Schaw worked on the building in 1590, preparing it for Anne of Denmark.

James IV and Margaret Tudor stayed frequently. In November 1504, with the king away in the north of Scotland, two people in Dunfermline were suspected of having plague, and the queen left for Edinburgh with her household servants — including African women known as the 'More lasses', who went first to Inverkeithing. It proved a false alarm.

James V and Mary of Guise also used the palace, and on 14 June 1562, after dinner at Dunfermline, Mary, Queen of Scots produced a gold ring set with a heart-shaped diamond and declared she would send it to Queen Elizabeth with verses she had written herself in Italian — a gesture made while a meeting of the two queens was under discussion.

In 1589 James VI gave the palace to his bride Anne of Denmark as a wedding present, compensating the Master of Gray, who held rights to the commendatorship of Dunfermline, with 12,000 merks from a subsidy paid by Elizabeth I. Anne became 'Lady of Dunfermline' in charters of the abbey lands, and in February 1596 Alexander Seton, Lord Urquhart, was appointed her Bailie, Keeper and Constable of the palace.

Anne gave birth to three of the royal children here — Elizabeth in 1596, Charles in 1600 and Robert in 1602 — attended by her German physician Martin Schöner, with the nursery managed by Margaret Stewart, Mistress of Ochiltree. In 1600 she completed a new cruciform building known as the 'Queen's House', a tall structure with a driveway or pend running through its basement — a feature compared with the Queen's House at Greenwich, likewise built over a roadway. There was a tennis court in the old abbey cloister. During a plague scare in Edinburgh in 1602, the Privy Council was anxious that contagion should not reach the 'ordinary place of residence' of the queen and the royal children, and ferry crossings to Dunfermline were suspended except for councillors and servants with a clean bill of health.

After the Union of Crowns in 1603 the court removed to London and monarchs rarely visited, but Prince Charles, a sickly child, stayed at Dunfermline for a year under the guardianship of Alexander Seton and his wife Grissal Leslie. Marion Hepburn was in charge of rocking his cradle, and the prince, slow to learn to walk, was given an oak stool on wheels — in Scots, a 'tymber stule with rynand quheillis to gang in'. By July 1604 Dr Henry Atkins could report from Dunfermline that Charles walked the length of the great chamber several times daily without a stick, 'like a gallant soldier all alone'. He began his journey to England on 17 July 1604, crossing the Forth.

When Anne of Denmark died in 1619 the palace passed to Prince Charles, who sent £500 sterling in aid after fire devastated the town on 25 May 1624. As Charles I he returned to Scotland for his coronation in 1633 but made only a brief visit to his birthplace. The last monarch to occupy the palace was Charles II, who stayed in 1650 just before the Battle of Pitreavie. During the Cromwellian occupation that followed, the building was abandoned, and by 1708 it had been unroofed. Anne's 'Queen's House' of 1600 was demolished in 1797, leaving of the palace only the kitchen, its cellars, and the great south wall above the Firth of Forth.