The Honours of Scotland

A nation can survive a great many losses, but not the loss of its own image of itself. When that image is mislaid, it falls to no soldier and no statesman to retrieve it. It falls, more often than the chroniclers like to admit, to a man with a pen and a warrant, who climbs a stair on a winter morning to find out whether the thing his country has been told about itself for a hundred and eleven years is true.

THE SEALED ROOM

For one hundred and eleven years the door at the top of the spiral stair in Edinburgh Castle had not been opened. Behind it, in theory, lay the Crown of James V, the Sceptre granted by Pope Alexander VI in 1494, and the Sword of State sent north by Julius II in 1507: the Honours of Scotland, the regalia by which every Scottish monarch from the infant Mary at Stirling in 1543 to Charles II at Scone in 1651 had been crowned. In practice no living soul knew what the chest contained. The Treaty of Union of 1707 had stipulated that the regalia must remain in Scotland in perpetuity, and Article XXIV had then been honoured by the simple expedient of locking them in an iron-banded box, sealing the door, and saying nothing further on the subject. A century of rumour had done the rest. The regalia had been taken to the Tower of London. The regalia had been broken up and melted for the Mint. The chest had been emptied at the Restoration and refilled with stones. Each version had its partisans, and each, by 1818, had the advantage of being unfalsifiable.

Walter Scott, forty-six years old, Principal Clerk of the Court of Session, Sheriff-Depute of Selkirkshire, laird of Abbotsford, and author of Waverley, Guy Mannering, The Antiquary, Old Mortality, Rob Roy, and the Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, was by sale the most-read writer in Europe. He had, since boyhood at Sandyknowe, believed the chest still held what it had been sealed with. He had said so in print. In October 1817 he had petitioned the Prince Regent for a warrant of search, and on the 28th of that month the warrant had been granted, naming him among the Commissioners empowered to break the seal. It had taken him three months to bring himself to use it.

THE FOURTH OF FEBRUARY

The morning was cold with the dry granite cold that settles into Edinburgh between Candlemas and Lent. Scott walked up from Castle Street through a city that did not yet know what he was about. The Royal Commissioners assembled in the Governor's house: the Lord Provost, the Lord Clerk Register, the Lord Chief Commissioner Adam, the Solicitor-General, and the King's Remembrancer, in their robes. A smith from the Castle garrison waited with his irons. The party climbed the turnpike stair, and the boots on the stone sounded loud in a building that had given up its garrison noises for the morning.

Scott stopped on the second landing. He was a heavy man and lame from boyhood, and the climb caught at him; but the pause was not for the leg. He was, by his own admission later, in a state that approached dread. He had written to his friend Daniel Terry, three weeks before, that the search would either ratify the country's faith in its own continuance or expose him as the author of a public delusion. The Commissioners stood quiet on the stair below him. They had all read his books.

A SECOND OF TIME IN HISTORY

The door at the top of the stair was sealed with a great iron lock and four heavy bolts that had been driven home in 1707. The smith set his lever. The bolts gave, one by one, with the dry shriek of metal that had not been moved in four generations. The door swung. The smell that came out of the chamber was the smell of paper and old leather and the dust of a century, and beneath it nothing: no damp, no rot, no suggestion of opening or interference. In the centre of the room stood the oak chest, six feet long, banded with iron, padlocked, exactly as the Earl of Glasgow's commissioners had described it on the 26th of March 1707.

Scott went in first behind the smith. The smith struck the padlock and the lid lifted. Within the chest, beneath layers of linen cloths, was a second compartment. Here the second was the moment in which a hundred and eleven years of national doubt was to be resolved or confirmed; and here, in the hesitation of the lifted cloth, Scott would later say he understood for the first time how thin the membrane is between a country and the story it tells about itself. If the linen lifted on nothing, the Waverley novels became the consolation of an orphan nation that had nothing left to console. If it lifted on the gold, then the chest in the corner of the Castle had been, all this time, the literal centre of a country that had been told, and had half-believed, that its centre was gone. He noted, in the part of his mind that never stopped composing, that the high window threw a single bar of light across the chest. He lifted the cloth.

THE GOLD UNDER THE CUSHION

The Crown of James V lay on a velvet cushion at the top of the chest, the gold a little dulled, the pearls and amethysts and garnets catching the cold light from the window. Beside it lay the Sceptre, silver-gilt, the dolphins at its head intact. The Sword of State, the gift of Julius II, lay in two pieces in its scabbard, the blade broken at some point in the diagonal carrying of the chest in 1707 but the hilt and pommel uninjured. Every piece named in the inventory of 26th March 1707 was present in the order it had been listed.

Scott did not speak. One of the Commissioners moved as if to take up the Crown, and Scott, in a voice that those present recalled as sharp and not quite his own, said No, by God, no! and put himself between the man and the chest. He took up the Crown himself, in both hands, and held it. His son-in-law Lockhart, to whom he gave the account that evening at Castle Street, recorded that his eyes were full of tears, which on Scott was a thing the family had seen perhaps three times in twenty years.

THE ROOM LEFT OPEN

Scott engineered the rest with the patience of a man who had spent twenty years arranging the reception of stories. Within months the Honours were put on public display in the Crown Room, behind a railing, under guard, for a shilling admission that went to the Castle's poor. The door of the Crown Room was left open. A copper plate was engraved with the roll of monarchs crowned by the regalia, from the infant Mary at Stirling in 1543 to Charles II at Scone in 1651, and fixed to the wall outside the chamber. The chest was left beside the regalia, lid raised, the linen cloths folded inside it, as a kind of relic of its own emptiness.

Four years later, in August 1822, Scott produced the state visit of George IV to Edinburgh, the first reigning monarch of the House of Hanover to set foot in Scotland. The king wore tartan trews of the Royal Stuart sett. The Lord Provost wore the kilt. The Honours were carried in procession down the Royal Mile in a coach behind the king's, with Scott walking alongside. The image of Scotland that the world has carried in its head ever since, Highland, plaid, bardic, romantic, proud, was largely composed by one man at a desk in Castle Street between 1817 and 1822, and ratified by what he had taken out of a chest on a February morning.

THE LONG AFTERMATH

Scott was made a baronet for the visit, the first creation of the new reign. The fortune the Waverley novels had earned him was lost in the publishing crash of 1826, and he spent the remaining six years of his life writing to clear the debt, finishing it after his death. He died at Abbotsford on the 21st of September 1832, in the room that looked east to the Tweed, and was buried at Dryburgh Abbey beside the tomb of his ancestor Auld Wat of Harden, the Border reiver from whose loins, by his own count, half the Scotts of the Border descended.

The Honours of Scotland have remained where he placed them. They were carried in state for the funeral of Queen Elizabeth II at St Giles' on the 12th of September 2022, the first time they had left the Castle in living memory, and returned to the Crown Room the following week. The country which had spent a century uncertain whether its own regalia survived has carried it openly ever since. The keys Scott held for an afternoon in 1818 are in the National Museum of Scotland. The oak chest stands beside the Crown, lid open, the linen cloths folded inside it, dust-free now and lit by electric light, but otherwise exactly as he left it on the fourth of February.