Holyrood Palace

Holyrood Abbey was founded in 1128 on the orders of David I, its name traced either to a legendary vision of the cross seen by the king or to a relic of the True Cross owned by his mother Saint Margaret. Robert the Bruce signed the Treaty of Edinburgh-Northampton in its 'King's Chamber' in 1328, which may indicate it was already in use as a royal residence. James II was born, crowned, married and buried at the abbey. The earliest royal quarters were in the abbey guesthouse; by the later 15th century the king had his own lodgings.

James IV built a Gothic palace beside the abbey between 1501 and 1505, probably prompted by his marriage to Margaret Tudor, celebrated in the abbey in August 1503 while the work went on; it was laid out round a quadrangle with a chapel, a gallery, royal apartments and a great hall. James V added to the palace from 1528 to 1536, beginning with James V's Tower, the oldest surviving part of the building; his father's west range gave way to a Renaissance one with new state rooms and the royal library. In 1544 and 1547 the English armies of the Earl of Hertford sacked Edinburgh and badly damaged palace and abbey in the War of the Rough Wooing.

Mary of Guise repaired the damage and in May 1559 set a new altarpiece in the chapel royal; a Protestant mob destroyed the altars later that year. The abbey was neglected after the Reformation: its choir and transepts came down in 1570, the nave kept as the parish church of the Canongate.

Mary, Queen of Scots held the royal apartments in James V's Tower from her return to Scotland in 1561 until her forced abdication in 1567, and gave John Knox his audiences. She married Lord Darnley in her private chapel in July 1565, and on 9 March 1566 he and several nobles came up the private stair from his apartments below, broke in on the queen at supper and dragged her secretary David Rizzio into the outer chamber, where he was stabbed to death. She married the Earl of Bothwell here in May 1567; in the Marian civil war, on 25 July 1571, William Kirkcaldy of Grange bombarded the king's men garrisoned inside with cannon in the Black Friar Yard.

James VI took up residence in 1579 at the start of his personal rule, and Anne of Denmark was crowned in the abbey in 1590. He was at Holyrood on 26 March 1603 when Sir Robert Carey brought word that Elizabeth I had died two days earlier; with his move south the palace ceased to hold a permanent court. The west front was remodelled in 1633 for Charles I's coronation in the abbey; in November 1650 fire badly damaged the palace under Cromwell's occupying troops, and much was abandoned.

In 1670 the Privy Council resolved to rebuild almost the whole palace and paid for it: after union proposals failed in 1669 it wanted to press Edinburgh's standing as royal capital and seat of government. Sir William Bruce drew the plans with the king's master mason Robert Mylne; building began in July 1671 and by 1679 the palace stood largely in its present form. James, Duke of Albany, held a vice-regal court here from November 1679 and, as James VII, founded the Order of the Thistle in May 1687 with the abbey as its chapel; an anti-Catholic mob destroyed the chapel's interior and his Jesuit college in December 1688.

The Union of 1707 stripped the palace of its principal functions, and the Privy Council was abolished in 1708. Charles Edward Stuart kept court here for six weeks in the autumn of 1745, holding balls in the Great Gallery, and government troops billeted there damaged the royal portraits in January 1746. The Comte d'Artois, the future Charles X of France, lived at Holyrood from 1796 to 1803, sheltering from his creditors in the abbey's debtors' sanctuary. George IV's 1822 visit was the first by a reigning monarch since Charles I in 1641; he ordered Queen Mary's rooms protected from change.

Elizabeth II's coffin lay in repose in the Throne Room on 11 and 12 September 2022 before the procession to St Giles' Cathedral, the first obsequies in Scotland for a monarch since James V's burial at the abbey in January 1543. The palace remains Crown property, listed category A since 1970; conservation falls to the Scottish Government through Historic Environment Scotland, with access run by the Royal Collection Trust. The historic apartments have been open to visitors since 1854, the monarch spends one week here each summer, and the Lord High Commissioner to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland has lodged here for the Assembly since 1834.