Clan Hamilton · 1950
Ian Hamilton and the Stone of Scone
Just before five in the morning of the twenty-fifth of December 1950, four students of the University of Glasgow, Ian Hamilton (24), Gavin Vernon (24), Kay Matheson (22) and Alan Stuart (24), removed the Stone of Destiny, the inauguration stone of the kings of Scots taken to Westminster Abbey by Edward I in 1296, from beneath the Coronation Chair in the abbey. They broke the stone into two pieces in the lifting. They drove the larger piece north in a Ford Anglia by way of Kent, the smaller in a separate car by way of Birmingham. They had it repaired by a Glasgow stonemason, James Robert Gray, of Bath Street, and laid it on the high altar of Arbroath Abbey, where the Declaration of Arbroath had been signed in 1320, on the eleventh of April 1951. The Government of the day, on the advice of the Scottish Office, did not prosecute; the Stone was returned to Westminster, and in 1996 was formally returned to Scotland and is now in the Castle at Edinburgh. Ian Hamilton, who became a leading Scottish QC, said in his old age that he had done it because Scotland needed to know the Stone was not unliftable.
It is four minutes past five on the morning of the twenty-fifth of December 1950, on the south side of the choir at Westminster Abbey, in the candle-light from a single lantern shielded under a coat. He is twenty-four years old. He is Ian Hamilton of the firm of Pollock and McKechnie, Glasgow, second-year law student at the University of Glasgow, son of a Paisley tailor, in a navy duffel-coat over a sweater and grey flannels, with his shoes off and a torch in his pocket and a crowbar borrowed from a Mayfair garage in his right hand. There is, behind the Coronation Chair, in a stone-floored bay between two pillars, a wooden seat-frame and a slab of red Perthshire sandstone weighing four hundred and thirty-six pounds. The slab is the Lia Fáil, the Stone of Destiny, the Stone of Scone, the inauguration stone of the kings of Scots, taken from Scone Abbey by Edward Plantagenet on the eighth of August 1296. It has been under this Chair, and under thirty-two coronations of English and British monarchs, for six hundred and fifty-four years.
Behind him on the floor of the ambulatory are Gavin Vernon (silent, square-shouldered, an engineer and the strongest of them), Alan Stuart (with the second crowbar) and, at the north door of Poets' Corner standing watch, Kay Matheson, who is twenty-two and a Highland-Gaelic-speaking primary teacher of Inverasdale.
He has, with Vernon and Stuart, in the last forty minutes, slid the heavy oak Coronation Chair forward off the bay until the underside of the lower stretcher cleared the top of the slab. He has, in pulling the slab toward him, broken it. The slab has come away from its iron staples in the bay's masonry and has cracked, by his own estimate, two-thirds of the way along. The smaller piece is loose in his hands. The larger piece, the bulk of the stone, is still in the bay. The crack has gone clean. The two halves are separate. He has, for ten seconds, sat on the floor and looked at it.
He thinks: the stone is broken. The stone is in two pieces and we will have to take both.
He thinks: the stone is in two pieces and Robert at the masonry shop in Bath Street will have to mend it before the eleventh.
He thinks, for one bleak second: I have broken the Stone of Destiny.
He thinks: the watchman is on the round and will be back in the south transept in eight minutes.
He thinks: Kay is in the car at the Old Palace Yard. Vernon's car is in Lambeth. We have to get the smaller half out of the abbey now and bring the second car back for the larger.
He picks up the smaller piece, ninety pounds, in a duffel sack with rope handles. He carries it through the cloister door, across the night yard of the abbey to the wicket gate, out onto Old Palace Yard. Kay is in the Ford Anglia with the engine running and the lights off. He puts the sack in the boot. He gets in the car. They drive south down Whitehall in the dark, past the Cenotaph, across Westminster Bridge, and turn east on the south bank toward Lambeth and the Kent road. They are out of London by half past five.
He turns to Kay at the Croydon junction and tells her about the break. She is quiet for a long mile. She says, by his memoir of 1991: the stone has been broken in two and reset in iron staples for hundreds of years, Ian. They have done this before. We will have it mended.
Vernon and Stuart, with the larger piece, came back to Westminster the next morning, lifted it through the same cloister door (they had wedged the wicket gate and gone through Poets' Corner), and drove it to Birmingham, parked behind a sweet-shop, then on to Yorkshire, and to Glasgow within five days. The mason James Robert Gray of Bath Street took the two pieces in his back-shop, drilled a steel pin through the break, and bonded the two halves with a cement of his own mixing. The repair has held.
On the eleventh of April 1951, in a covered van driven up to Arbroath, the repaired Stone was laid on the high altar of Arbroath Abbey, the church in which the Declaration of Arbroath had been signed in 1320, with a Lion Rampant flag draped over it and a typed note attached. The note asked the British government to return the Stone to Scotland in perpetuity. The Government of the Day, under Attlee, on the advice of the Lord Advocate Sir John Wheatley, did not prosecute the four students; the Stone was taken back to Westminster, and a quiet four-decade arrangement was reached. In November 1996 the Government of John Major formally returned the Stone to Scotland and laid it among the Honours of Scotland in Edinburgh Castle. It was taken back to Westminster only once, for the Coronation of Charles III in May 2023; it returned to Edinburgh by lorry within forty-eight hours. Ian Hamilton became one of Scotland's leading defence advocates, took silk in 1985, lived to ninety-five, and held publicly to the end of his life that the four of them had broken the stone but had not stolen it: that an inauguration stone of the Scots, by his lights, could not be stolen by Scots from London. He died in 2022. The mason James Robert Gray was paid two pounds ten shillings for the repair.
More stories of Clan Hamilton
- Patrick Hamilton at St AndrewsPatrick Hamilton, son of Sir Patrick Hamilton of Kincavel and Catherine Stewart (granddaughter of James II), was twenty-three or twenty-four years old when he was condemned for heresy at St Andrews on the twenty-eighth of February 1528, in a court convened by James Beaton, Archbishop of St Andrews. He had been to Paris and to Marburg and had read Luther; he had returned to Scotland in 1526 and had taught the new doctrines openly. The court found him guilty in the morning. He was burnt at the stake at the gate of St Salvator's College that same afternoon. The wood was wet, the wind was off the sea, the executioner had to be sent to the priory for more powder. The fire took six hours to consume him. Knox, writing his History thirty-eight years later, gave the phrase: *the reek of Master Patrick Hamilton has infected as many as it blew upon*. The Scottish Reformation, by the careful judgment of every later historian of it, has its first and longest fuse here.
- Alexander Hamilton at Redoubt 10, YorktownOn the night of the fourteenth of October 1781, Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Hamilton, twenty-six years old, aide-de-camp to General Washington and former officer of the New York Artillery, led the bayonet assault of the American light infantry on Redoubt 10, the British outer earthwork on the south-eastern flank of the besieged works at Yorktown. The French light infantry under Lieutenant Colonel de Deux-Ponts went in simultaneously against Redoubt 9 four hundred yards to the north. The orders to the American attacking column were that the muskets were to be unloaded, the bayonet alone was to do the work, and the column was to go in silently. They reached the abatis at fifteen minutes after seven and were inside the redoubt by ten minutes past. Nine American dead, twenty-five wounded. The British defenders, Captain Campbell of the Forty-Third Foot and seventy men, surrendered in ten minutes. The fall of the two redoubts placed Cornwallis's inner works under direct allied artillery enfilade. He asked for terms three days later. The British army of the South capitulated on the nineteenth. The American Revolution was, in operational terms, won at Yorktown by the assault on Redoubts 9 and 10 on the night of the fourteenth.
- Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr at WeehawkenBy the spring of 1804 Aaron Burr, Vice President of the United States, had been politically blocked at every turn by Alexander Hamilton's correspondence and was running for the governorship of New York with no chance of winning. After a public letter quoted Hamilton as having spoken of him with what was glossed as a "more despicable opinion", Burr demanded retraction. Hamilton refused. They met on the duelling-ground at Weehawken on the cliffs above the Hudson on the morning of the eleventh of July 1804. Hamilton, by his published note left with his counsel the night before, had decided to throw away his fire and discharge the pistol harmlessly. Burr, who knew nothing of this, took an aimed shot. The ball entered Hamilton's right side just above the iliac crest, fractured the second lumbar vertebra and lodged in the spine; he died at two o'clock the following afternoon at the home of his friend William Bayard on Greenwich Street, Manhattan. He was forty-seven years old. The duel ended Burr's political career and made Hamilton, in death, the founding figure of the financial system of the United States.