Spynie Palace

In April 1206 Pope Innocent III gave Bishop Bricius de Douglas formal permission to settle permanently at Spynie. The cathedral church there was reckoned vulnerable to attack and too far from the market, and Bishop Andrew of Moray carried the see to Elgin on 19 July 1224. The bishop's palace stayed at Spynie.

The first castle was timber, built in the late 12th century and uncovered in excavations of 1986–94; the excavated evidence suggests a rectangular ringwork and ditch around it. Stone work first appears in the 13th century. The earliest recorded mention of the castle is a manuscript that appears to have been compiled between 1292 and 1296, apparently for English administrators under Edward I's occupation; the first writ issued at Spynie itself is dated 1343.

In June 1390 Alexander Stewart, Earl of Buchan, the Wolf of Badenoch, attacked and burned Elgin Cathedral. He appears to have taken Spynie as well, since that August King Robert III, his brother, forbade him to ‘intromit’ the castle for any reason. When Bishop Alexander Bur died in 1397 the Crown took possession and made the by-then reformed Buchan its warden; a writ of 3 May 1398 ordered him to hand castle and contents to the newly elected Bishop William without claiming expenses.

Bishop John de Winchester (1435–60), also the king's Master of Works, is thought to have moved the main gate to the east wall and given it a strong portcullis. David's Tower, begun by Bishop David Stewart (1462–76) and completed by Bishop William Tulloch (1477–82), is the largest by volume of all medieval Scottish towers. It was said that Stewart built it in answer to intimidation from the Earl of Huntly, whom he had excommunicated for failing to pay his taxes.

English prisoners taken in the Rough Wooing were held at Spynie, among them Edward Sutton, 4th Baron Dudley, captured at Hume Castle in December 1548. Bishop Patrick Hepburn (1538–73), the last Roman Catholic bishop here, installed wide-mouth gun loops and went on living there for a period after the Reformation; he fell foul of the Privy Council in 1567 for sheltering his relative Bothwell after Carberry Hill. In the pacification after Mary's abdication, Regent Morton and the Privy Council at Perth ordered on 23 February 1573 that ‘the hous of Spyne salbe randerit and deliverit’ to the Crown on fifteen days' warning.

On 29 July 1587 King James VI gave the castle and estate to Alexander Lindsay, 1st Lord Spynie, who surrendered them back to the Crown in December 1605; in 1595 Spynie was among the castles given extra fortification against a perceived Spanish threat. Bishop John Guthrie, a well-known royalist, ceased to be bishop in 1638 when the general assembly deposed all bishops, but stayed on. He refused to subscribe to the Covenant and prepared the castle for a siege, which arrived in 1640 with the Covenanter Colonel Sir Robert Monro and his 800 men. Guthrie surrendered on 16 July and the castle was disarmed; he was left under house arrest with his wife and servants, paying for a garrison of twenty-four, and was imprisoned in Aberdeen that September.

Charles I granted the castle to the Earl of Moray. After his victory over the Covenanters at Auldearn on 9 May 1645, James Graham, Marquis of Montrose, turned towards staunchly anti-royalist Elgin, and the Laird of Innes, Grant of Ballindalloch and Elgin burgesses prepared Spynie for a siege. Montrose occupied Elgin and burned the homes of leading Covenanter supporters and Spynie's farmyard buildings, but did not attempt to take the castle. Late in 1645 the Marquis of Huntly laid siege, leaving Lord Lewis Gordon in charge, and the defences held until John Middleton relieved them.

With episcopacy restored in 1662 the castle passed back to the church, already falling into decay; Parliament granted Bishop Murdo MacKenzie £1,000 for repairs, which sustained it to 1689, when the last occupant, Bishop William Hay, was expelled after refusing the oath of allegiance to King William and Queen Mary. Local people plundered the walls for building stone until the early 19th century, when the site passed to James Dunbar-Brander of Pitgaveny. By its lease to the Department of the Works in 1974 the tower's east wall carried a pronounced bulge, undermined by Covenanter attempts to blow it up. Stabilisation in the late 1970s ended in a reinstated curtain wall disguising a concrete plinth that keeps the tower standing, and the palace opened in 1994. It is in the care of Historic Environment Scotland.