Blackness Castle

Blackness Castle stands on a rocky spit on the south shore of the Firth of Forth, beside the village of Blackness and about four miles east-north-east of Linlithgow. The name belongs to a black point of land. Ships were loading and unloading in Blackness Bay as early as 1200, when the bay served the royal burgh and castle of Linlithgow. The anchorage may have supplied Edward I of England during his attack on Stirling Castle in 1304.

Whether any castle then guarded the port is not known. Saint Ninian's Chapel, on the low hill immediately south of the later fortress, is on record from the fourteenth century. A lectern doocot, probably of the seventeenth century, still shows one wall on that hill.

The castle that stands now was built in the 1440s, probably on an earlier fort, by Sir George Crichton. He is George Crichton, 1st Earl of Caithness. He was born about 1409, the elder son of Stephen Crichton of Cairns, who died in 1434, and he gathered an estate in south-west Scotland and in Lothian. He was sometimes called of Blackness, which became his principal place, and sometimes of Cairns.

He succeeded his father as sheriff of Linlithgowshire and was knighted before 1438. In 1441 he went as ambassador to Brittany to negotiate the marriage of Isabella, sister of James II of Scotland. He was Lord High Admiral of Scotland from 1448. He was also sheriff of Stirling and keeper of Stirling Castle after the Livingstons fell, and by the end of 1452 he was justiciar south of the Forth.

He was governor of Stirling Castle when James II of Scotland murdered William, eighth Earl of Douglas, there in 1452. The killing opened a civil war. In June 1452 he was created Earl of Caithness.

His cousin William Crichton was chancellor of Scotland from 1439. One account carries that chancellorship to 1453. The Crichtons stood close to the crown and were among the strongest families in the kingdom. The king they served was James II of Scotland, born at Holyrood on 16 October 1430, the younger of twin sons of James I and Joan Beaufort.

The elder twin, Alexander, died before 22 April 1431. James carried a large red birthmark over one side of his face, which a contemporary chronicle called the fire mark. He became king on 21 February 1437 after his father was assassinated at the Blackfriars in Perth. The plot was the work of his uncle, Walter, Earl of Atholl.

Queen Joan escaped to Edinburgh, took custody of her son, and saw Atholl beheaded on 26 March. James II of Scotland was crowned that same day at Holyrood Abbey by Michael Ochiltree, Bishop of Dunblane, with the celebrations held inside Edinburgh Castle for his safety. He began to rule in person in 1449 after a minority dominated by successive Earls of Douglas. Little is recorded of his early childhood.

He was living at Doune Castle in 1431. In 1434 his father ordered Edinburgh Castle repaired so that the boy could be housed there. Michael Ramsay, keeper of Lochmaben Castle, was his guardian in infancy and was removed in 1431. John Spens of Glendouglas, an adherent of the Earl of Atholl and a former comptroller, took that place, and the king trusted him.

After the assassination the queen expelled Spens from the household. His lands had been given to her loyalists by the end of 1437, and he may have been executed for his part in the plot. The contemporary writer Walter Bower accused Atholl of trying to seize the throne in fulfilment of a prophecy. Atholl surrendered to the queen's ally, William, Earl of Angus, and was taken to Edinburgh for execution.

His fellow conspirators were tortured and killed.

Blackness was built in the middle of a feud between the Crichtons and the Black Douglases. That feud had already cost George Crichton his tower at Barnton, in Edinburgh, destroyed in 1444. The castle is first mentioned in 1449. By then it was both his residence and a prison of state.

The first building had a curtain wall and a north tower, with a central tower standing free in the courtyard. A hall range may have stood to the south. A rock-cut ditch covered the landward side, and the gate was in the east wall.

Around 1425 George married a daughter of Sir William Douglas of Strathbrock, and their son was James Crichton. About 1450 he married again, Janet, daughter of Sir William Borthwick of that Ilk. She was the widow of Sir James Douglas of Dalkeith and of Sir Colin Campbell of Glenorchy. In 1454 their daughter Janet married Robert Maxwell, second Lord Maxwell.

George began to entail his property so that his son James would not inherit the estates or the earldom.

The accounts of how the crown took the castle do not agree. One says that George handed over the Crichton lands, including Blackness, to James II of Scotland in 1453, and that the dispossessed heir James Crichton seized the castle and held it briefly until the king besieged it and took it back the same year. Another says that in 1454, after the death of his cousin William, George was compelled to name the king his heir and to assign him everything he owned, Blackness included. James then seized the castle and imprisoned his own father in it.

The king came with his artillery and his queen, and the son surrendered. A further account says the son imprisoned his father, the king rescued George, and a compromise left James the ancestral estate of Cairns together with some land in Perthshire, while the rest of the property and the earldom were to pass to the crown at George's death. That death is placed in August 1454, and also in August 1454 or 1455. From then the castle was a royal fortress.

Its keeper was often the sheriff of Linlithgow. In 1455 James II of Scotland defeated the Douglas family, seized its lands and forced the survivors into exile. In the years that remained to him he used the Wars of the Roses to attack England more than once, and he sought territory from France and from the Kalmar Union. He called frequent parliaments, and those parliaments criticised his judicial policy.

On 3 August 1460 he was killed by an exploding bombard while he besieged Roxburgh Castle. He was succeeded by his son, James III. He has been described as a king who, on the whole, succeeded in strengthening the Scottish monarchy.

In 1465 the crown granted the castle to the burgesses of Linlithgow and allowed them to take its stone and lime for a harbour. The crown afterwards resumed control and put in a succession of royal keepers, mostly sheriffs of Linlithgow. They were paid from a share of the customs of the port, from the fishing and the salt works, and from the royal rabbit warrens and the brewery. The priest of Saint Ninian's Chapel managed the warrens and the brewery from day to day.

James IV stayed in the castle in 1491 and heard mass. He came again on 11 July 1506, after visiting the Isle of May in the ship Lion and another vessel, and four players of shawms welcomed him. One account calls them four minstrels playing shawms. In November 1512 the Great Michael and the Margaret lay at Blackness.

One account says James came aboard the Michael on Saint Andrew's day and gave audience to the French ambassador, Charles de Tocque, sieur de la Mothe, and that the Auld Alliance of Scotland and France was confirmed there. Another says he came ashore only for a short time while the Great Michael was on sea trials in the Forth. In 1517 the keeper, Patrick Hamilton of Kincavill, was paid extra because the keeping of prisoners put him to great charges. The prison was already a main use of the place.

The men held there included Archibald Douglas, 6th Earl of Angus. He was born about 1489 and died on 22 January 1557. His father, George, Master of Angus, was killed at Flodden, and Archibald succeeded his grandfather as earl. In 1509 he married Margaret Hepburn, daughter of Patrick Hepburn, first Earl of Bothwell.

After her death, and after Flodden, he married on 6 August 1514 the dowager queen Margaret Tudor, widow of James IV, mother of the infant James V, and elder sister of Henry VIII. The marriage angered the nobles who favoured France. Civil war followed, and Margaret lost the regency to John Stewart, Duke of Albany. Angus withdrew to Forfarshire.

Albany besieged the queen at Stirling and took the royal children. Angus joined Margaret after her flight to Morpeth, then made his peace with Albany in 1516 when she left for London. He met her again at Berwick in June 1517. While she was away he lived with a daughter of the laird of Traquair, had a daughter, Lady Janet Douglas, and occupied Margaret's estate at Newark.

Margaret sought a divorce through Albany and refused him her political support. Albany's return in 1521 drove Angus out. He was charged with high treason in December and in March 1522 was sent, practically a prisoner, to France. He escaped to London in 1524.

He came back to Scotland in November 1524 with promises from Henry VIII. Margaret fired on him when he forced his way into Edinburgh on the twenty-third, and he retreated to Tantallon. In February 1525 his party entered Edinburgh, called a parliament, and made him a lord of the articles and one of the council of regency. He bore the king's crown at the opening.

With Archbishop Beaton he held the chief power. In 1526 he was warden of the marches. On 10 October 1525 he had contracted a three-year peace with England at Berwick. He could not return there on 13 January 1526 to exchange the papers, because opponents at Linlithgow detained him, so he sent commissioners, among them Adam Otterburn.

The terms promised abstinence from war, safe conducts, redress for robbery, the return of criminals, and sea trade on the footing of the treaty made by Edward IV and James III in 1464. He was held at Blackness among the prisoners of rank. Men of that standing, Cardinal Beaton among them, were kept in the central tower and were allowed their own servants. The year of the earl's imprisonment is not fixed in these accounts.

The man who turned the old castle into an artillery fort was James Hamilton of Finnart. He was born about 1495 and was beheaded on 16 August 1540. He was the illegitimate son of James Hamilton, first Earl of Arran, and of Marion Boyd of Bonshaw. He was legitimated in 1512, while still a minor, but he was still called the Bastard of Arran.

He was a second cousin of James V. The lands of Finnart were granted to him in 1507, and he was knighted in 1511. As a child he was in the king's household. In 1513 he was accepted as his father's heir if no legitimate son were born.

In the winter of 1517 to 1518 he carried letters between Francis I and Scotland about the murder of Antoine d'Arces, sieur de la Bastie. In 1520 he helped provoke the fight called Clear the Causeway against the Earl of Angus in Edinburgh's High Street, and he and his father escaped by stealing horses and crossing the marshes of the Nor Loch. In September 1526, after the battle of Linlithgow Bridge, he killed John Stewart, third Earl of Lennox, who had already surrendered. On 22 October 1526 he was made keeper and captain of Linlithgow Palace, in a ceremony of stones and earth, and the doors were shut behind him.

George Buchanan wrote that a groom from Lennox's stable later stabbed at him in the pend of Holyroodhouse and missed. At court he became principal sewer, a noble waiter at the king's table, and master of the stables. He took part in the pursuit of Protestants, including his cousin Patrick Hamilton, burned in 1528. When his father died in 1529 he became guardian of his half-brother, the child James, second Earl of Arran.

In November 1528 the English diplomat Thomas Magnus named him, with disapproval, as the man who had slain the Earl of Lennox, and blamed him and other courtiers for keeping Archibald Douglas, 6th Earl of Angus, under forfeiture. Magnus also heard that Finnart and the sheriff of Ayr, both cherished servants of James V, met Archibald Douglas of Kilspindie and George Douglas of Pittendreich at Cockburnspath to talk of restoring the earldom of Angus. That meeting was later used against him. James V made him steward of the household and master of works.

The king gave him the Draffan estate in Lanarkshire, and there he built Craignethan Castle in 1530. He probably also built Cadzow. In January 1531 he took a large townhouse in Linlithgow from his cousin James Hamilton of Kincavill. In 1536 he supplied the king with gear for hunting horses, hounds and hawks, and Lord Gray was ordered to pay him 850 Scottish merks.

In 1537 the treasurer allowed him a wardship composition against £133 6s 8d spent at Linlithgow and at Blackness. On 22 September 1539, at Stirling, he received lands, among them Strathaven and Crawfordjohn, made into the barony of Avondale, in recompense for works at Stirling Palace and Linlithgow. In October 1539 he had an advance of £4,000 Scots for Stirling, and in April 1540 £300 for Linlithgow and Blackness.

In 1534 James Hamilton of Kincavill, then keeper of Blackness, was forfeited for heresy and fled to England. Finnart, his kinsman, received custody. The fortification is dated both from 1534 to 1540 and from 1537 to 1543, and one account says James V began the conversion into a state prison and artillery fort in 1537 and that the work was finished in 1542, just before the Rough Wooing. Finnart had studied artillery in Europe.

At Blackness he thickened the curtain on the inside, to the south and east, from about five feet to more than sixteen feet in places, and he opened gunports. The south wall was raised to enclose a new south tower. The entrance was moved to the west, the side less open to the high ground, and was covered by a caponier, a vaulted gun gallery in the ditch. From it, defenders could fire into the backs of men who had already passed the gate.

One account says three such caponiers survive in Scotland, the others at Craignethan and at Stirling Castle. Another says the Blackness caponier is one of only two known from the sixteenth century in the British Isles, the other at Craignethan, and that two more may yet lie undiscovered in the outer ditch at Tantallon. The central tower was probably heightened at this time. The south, or stern, tower was built over thick-walled gun positions in the basement, kin to the blockhouse at Dunbar, with gunloops up to five feet across at the mouth.

The wide-mouthed holes and the sheer mass of the stern faced enemies coming from the land. This was not the angled trace then developing in northern Italy. It followed the strengthening that Governor Albany had used at Dunbar after Flodden, and a similar thickening at Tantallon after the siege of 1528. Finnart had served in Albany's household and may have had a leading part at Tantallon.

Finnart was arrested for treason in late July 1540. On 16 August he was tried, convicted and executed, and his head was taken off at Edinburgh. The charges reached back about twelve years. He was convicted of firing guns and missiles at the king and his company outside Linlithgow Palace and from its bell tower, and of planning, with Archibald Douglas of Kilspindie and James Douglas of Parkhead, at the chapel of Saint Leonard near Edinburgh and during the siege of Tantallon, to enter the palace by Holyrood at the window above the royal bed and kill the king.

No separate evidence of a fresh plot was set out. James V took Craignethan and put in a garrison under James and David Orrok. The reasons for the execution have been read as arbitrary cruelty, as the work of Protestant enemies, and as an old Hamilton hope that the king might die without heirs. James Learmonth of Dairsie, James Kirkcaldy of Grange and Thomas Erskine of Haltoun are named in George Buchanan's account of the arrest.

John Knox would not say whether the death was just. A story written down by Knox and by Buchanan says that Finnart afterwards appeared to James V in a dream and told him he would shortly lose both arms, then his head. The king lost both young sons in 1541 and died himself in 1542. Finnart had married Margaret Livingston of Easter Wemyss before 1529.

Their children included James Hamilton of Crawfordjohn, Agnes, who married James Somerville, sixth Lord Somerville, Grissel, who married Andrew Leslie, fifth Earl of Rothes, in 1548, and Elizabeth, who married John Maxwell of Calderwood. A Somerville family history says James V attended Agnes's wedding at Craignethan, perhaps on 8 April 1536. The historian Jamie Cameron doubted that tradition. Finnart also had at least ten illegitimate children by at least three women, Marion Stewart, Elizabeth Murray and Elizabeth Elphinstone, among them Andrew, an elder James, Alexander, a younger James born in 1520, and another Agnes.

A nurse of a child of Marion Boyd is named in the royal accounts in February 1498, when James IV was at Ayr. After the execution the silver from the chapel at Craignethan was taken to Edinburgh and engraved by John Mosman with the arms of the king's infant eldest son, James, Duke of Rothesay. The king redeemed two silver flagons from the merchant Mungo Tennant, who had lent Finnart money to haul timber to the works at Stirling. A chest of Finnart's papers was brought to Edinburgh, and crown officers destroyed many of them.

David Beaton, a relative of the widow, gave her money. The royal blacksmith William Hill was paid in August 1541 for ironwork and yetts Finnart had ordered. In January 1542 the wife of Edward Lytall was paid £487 for ironwork and timber she had supplied. The priest Sir James Nicholson finished the Stirling work which Finnart had begun in May 1538, and spent £1,459 15s 10d before Christmas 1540.

The carpenter Robert Robertson was then appointed master of work to complete the palace. William Drummond of Hawthornden later wrote of an advance of 3,000 crowns in April 1540 for rebuilding Rothesay Castle, but that payment is not in the royal accounts. Finnart was also said to have kept James V from meeting Henry VIII, and from a possible marriage to Princess Mary, and to have led the king's ships off course in August 1536 so as to hinder the French marriage. The English ambassador William Howard heard at the time that Finnart was working to marry the king to his mistress, Margaret Erskine.

Letters written in October 1536, and intercepted in England, reported that the king told John Drummond of Milnab, aboard ship, that if he so much as looked on the Earl of Angus, Finnart would droop, for the two never met but Finnart turned his back. After the execution the parson of Dysart superintended the remaining work at Blackness. The dungeon tower and the kitchen tower were roofed with turf called brume and dovet. Major building stopped in 1542 when James V died.

One account says the finished work was called formidable in 1543.

James V died at Falkland Palace on 14 December 1542. The man who then spent a few weeks in the castle was David Beaton, also called Beton or Bethune. He was born about 1494, the fifth of fourteen children of John Beaton of Balfour in Fife and Christian Rosyth, and he died on 29 May 1546. He studied at St Andrews and Glasgow, then in Paris, and in 1519 at Orléans, in civil and canon law.

His uncle James Beaton, archbishop of Glasgow and then of St Andrews, gave him Cambuslang and later the commend of Arbroath. David returned to Scotland with Albany in 1521, went to England as a diplomat in 1522, and sat in parliament as commendator of Arbroath in 1525. In 1528 he became lord privy seal. From 1533 to 1542 he was often James V's ambassador in France, negotiating the king's marriages, first to Madeleine of France and then to Mary of Guise.

He sent the king hawks and wild boar. In 1537 he was coadjutor at St Andrews. In December 1537 Francis I had him made bishop of Mirepoix, and he was consecrated the next summer. In 1538 Pope Paul III created him cardinal priest of Saint Stephen on the Caelian Hill.

In February 1539 he succeeded his uncle as archbishop of St Andrews. He lived with Marion Ogilvy, daughter of the first Lord Ogilvy of Airlie, and they had eight children.

Henry VIII pressed James V to break with the pope. James refused a meeting and refused to leave his kingdom. War followed in 1542, and many blamed the cardinal for the defeat at Solway Moss that November. On the king's death Beaton produced a will that would have put him among the regents of the infant Mary, Queen of Scots.

The will was widely treated as forged. The clerk, Henry Balfour, a canon of Dunkeld, was not a recognised notary. James Hamilton, second Earl of Arran, heir presumptive, became regent. Arran had Beaton arrested on 27 January 1543.

He was held at Dalkeith, then in the custody of Lord Seton at Seton, transferred to Blackness Castle in March 1543, and taken in April to his own castle of St Andrews. He was held for opposing closer ties with England. A papal interdict followed his arrest. While he was out of power, Arran agreed treaties at Greenwich in July 1543 by which Mary would marry Prince Edward of England.

In December 1543 Arran annulled those treaties, and Henry VIII began the war called the Rough Wooing. Beaton became papal legate in Scotland in 1544 and lord chancellor. On 3 May 1544 an English fleet came to burn Edinburgh. He and Arran made a brief stand and then left, and Beaton went to Stirling.

In December 1545 he had the preacher George Wishart arrested. Wishart was strangled and burned on 1 March 1546. On 29 May 1546 Norman Leslie, Master of Rothes, William Kirkcaldy of Grange and others got into St Andrews Castle at daybreak, stabbed the cardinal, and hung his body from a window. They killed the porter on the way in.

Peter Carmichael of Balmadie was with Leslie and Kirkcaldy, and the body was mutilated before it was hung out. The Leslies had lost ground to Beaton's growing interest in Fife. William Kirkcaldy's uncle, James Kirkcaldy of Grange, had Protestant sympathies and had been removed as treasurer in 1543 through Beaton's influence. John Leslie of Parkhill joined them, angry at Wishart's death.

Plots against the cardinal had been circulating since 1544. At his death he was lord chancellor, archbishop of St Andrews and cardinal legate. He had ordered an engraved plate in 1541 for his parents' monument at Markinch. His older brother John was heir to the barony of Balfour, and Balfour Castle stands south of Markinch.

He spelled his own name Betovn. Francis I gave him silver-gilt plate made by the Parisian goldsmith Jean Hotman. In July 1543 his supporters made a Secret Bond against the English marriage, and Mary and her mother moved from Linlithgow Palace to Stirling Castle. His eldest surviving son, David Beaton of Melgund, later became a Protestant and master of the household to James VI and to Anne of Denmark.

His daughter Margaret married David Lindsay, tenth Earl of Crawford.

During the Rough Wooing the strengthened castle was a main store of ammunition for the Scottish and French forces. The caponier was raised by a storey and turned into the spur that flanks the gate. One account treats that spur as largely Finnart's own forework, later heightened again. In 1543 James Stewart, Earl of Moray, an illegitimate son of James IV, rode out from Edinburgh to Blackness to be with his wife at the birth of a child.

Sir Ralph Sadler, the English ambassador, may have visited in the same year. He is said to have told Henry VIII that the place was impregnable. After the battle of Pinkie, on 15 September 1547, Richard Broke and the galley Subtle rowed up the river. After an exchange of fire he captured the Mary Willoughby, the Anthony of Newcastle and the Bosse, and burned other ships.

The Italian engineer Camillo Marini, who died in 1552, was captain of Blackness in the last years of that war. Minor repairs were made in these years.

In the crisis of the Scottish Reformation the castle was surrendered by negotiation to James Hamilton, Duke of Châtellerault, leader of the Lords of the Congregation. Two English captains, Dethick and Wood, took possession on Easter Day, 15 April 1560. After Mary was forced to abdicate in 1567, the garrison stayed loyal to her for a time. The keeper, Alexander Stewart, later changed to the side of the Regent Moray.

In 1572 Lord Claud Hamilton took the castle again for Mary and harried shipping in the Forth into the following year, though he was blockaded. On 27 January 1573 James Kirkcaldy, brother of William Kirkcaldy of Grange, who held Edinburgh Castle for the queen, arrived from France with arms and money. One account says the ship was captured the next day, that Regent Morton laid siege, and that James Kirkcaldy and the castle surrendered within a week. Another says Kirkcaldy found that Alexander Stewart had already made peace with Morton, took the castle in Stewart's absence, and had Stewart imprisoned in his own fortress.

A further account says the garrison under Lord Claud Hamilton held out from 1567 to 1573 and gave the place up only when Edinburgh Castle fell at the end of the Lang Siege.

In 1580 Malcolm Douglas of the Mains delivered the castle to Lord Robert Stewart, but Stewart complained that Douglas had taken away the great iron yett of the dungeon, its lock, the lock of the prison house, and the timber platforms on the parapets, so that the place could not be defended. Andrew Melville, provost of New College at St Andrews, was ordered to be held at Blackness before he fled Scotland in 1582. Another account places him there in 1583, for slandering James VI from the pulpit. Lord Maxwell of Caerlaverock was a prisoner in 1584 for Catholic leanings.

These men of rank were probably kept in the central tower. Lower prisoners were probably put in the pit. They included Crukit Dande Ormiston, a Border reiver, in 1561, and John Donaldson, a burgess of Stirling, in 1588, for cutting trees in the royal forest of Torwood without leave. James Cochrane kept the castle for Sir James Sandilands.

Their prisoners included the Earl of Huntly in 1592 and John Wemyss of Logie in 1594. In the seventeenth century the office of keeper became hereditary in the Livingstone family.

James Stewart of Killeith, fourth Lord Ochiltree, was warded at Blackness in 1631 or in 1633 for slander against the Lords Hamilton, Haddington, Roxburgh and Buccleuch, whom he had accused of treason. The accusation failed, and he himself was accused of treason and of trying to take the crown. He was sentenced to remain for life. Prisoners were expected to pay for their own keep.

He petitioned more than once for money, received small sums at irregular intervals, and petitioned again. He was still there when the castle fell to an English army, and he was freed. He then turned to medicine, though nothing earlier in his life points to that work, so he may have studied while he was shut in.

The army was that of Oliver Cromwell. He was born at Huntingdon on 25 April 1599 and died on 3 September 1658. He was baptised on 29 April at St John's church in Huntingdon. His father was Robert Cromwell and his mother Elizabeth, daughter of William Steward.

He was the only boy among ten children to live past infancy. The family's land went back to Morgan ap William, a brewer from Glamorgan who settled at Putney and married Katherine Cromwell, sister of Thomas Cromwell, the minister of Henry VIII. The family gained from Thomas Cromwell's part in the dissolution of the monasteries. Oliver's father, a younger son, had a house and a modest estate.

In 1654 Cromwell said he had been born a gentleman, living neither in considerable height nor in obscurity. In the 1630s he became a religious Independent, and he afterwards treated his successes as providence. Much of his life before 1640 was marked by financial and personal failure. He sat for Huntingdon in 1628 and for Cambridge in the Short Parliament and the Long Parliament in 1640.

He joined the parliamentarian army when the first English civil war began in August 1642. He sat in parliament for Huntingdon in 1628 and for Cambridge in 1640, became a cavalry commander of the New Model Army under Thomas Fairfax in 1645, and was a leading advocate of the execution of Charles I in January 1649. Victories in Ireland and in Scotland established the Commonwealth, and from December 1653 until his death he was lord protector. His son Richard succeeded him.

After the Restoration of 1660, Cromwell's body was taken from Westminster Abbey and hanged at Tyburn on 30 January 1661. His army besieged Blackness during the invasion of Scotland. One account dates the siege to 1650, another to 1651. By then guns had outgrown the sixteenth-century walls.

The bombardment came from land and from sea. The English artillery was placed on the rise to the south and probably destroyed Saint Ninian's Chapel in the process. The garrison surrendered. One account says the surrender came after twenty-four hours, and that the south front was left badly damaged.

The castle was then abandoned. Humps and bumps on the hill may be the redoubt Cromwell's men built for the 1651 bombardment.

The castle was not repaired until 1667. It was again a prison and a small garrison. The central tower was refitted, with a new stair turret, as a prison for Covenanters, men and women who refused the king's control of the church. It shared that role with the Bass Rock and with Dunnottar.

In the Killing Time of the 1670s and 1680s, under Charles II and James VII, many Covenanters were held in the main-mast tower, where iron bars and locks remain. In May 1683 the Privy Council sent Barbara Cunningham, Lady Caldwell, and her eldest daughter Jean to Blackness because an unnamed report said a minister had preached in Lady Caldwell's house in Glasgow. They were kept close, and were rarely allowed even a supervised walk on the wall or in the courtyard. After half a year Jean sickened and was released.

Her mother stayed more than three years, and was not allowed a brief visit to another daughter, Anne, who was dying of fever. More than two hundred prisoners have been identified at the castle. In 1866 the Reverend James Young called it a prison pre-eminently wretched beside other prisons. In later centuries visitors who cared about that history were shown rooms which soldiers said had held famous Presbyterians.

The south tower was rearranged, with a bakehouse in the basement and a new stair. Accounts differ on the guns of the later seventeenth century. One says that in 1693 the spur was heightened with a wall-walk and the north, or stem, tower was cut down to two storeys to carry three gun platforms over the Forth. Another says the upper floors of the stem were removed in the later 1660s for a three-gun battery, and that it was the stern which was greatly reduced in height for three guns, while the spur was raised yet again in the 1690s and remodelled for heavy guns and musketry.

The great iron yett still in the entrance belongs to that late work, and one account dates the yett itself to 1693. An iron basket grate of about 1835, made by the Shotts Iron Company in the reign of William IV, survives in one room of the stern, a sign that the rooms kept being altered. In 1691 the garrison numbered forty-one, and the castle was full of prisoners who had resisted the accession of William and Mary.

After the Union of Scotland and England in 1707 the castle ceased, in one account, to be a state prison. It was one of only four Scottish fortresses the Union kept in repair and under garrison, with Stirling, Dumbarton and Edinburgh. The main-mast and stern towers were adapted as barracks, and even the huge gunholes in the stern were blocked and turned into bread ovens. Another account says a primary use as a state prison ran from the beginning until at least 1745.

The late eighteenth-century garrison was about fifteen men. In 1795, at the start of the French Revolutionary Wars, it comprised two gunners, a sergeant, two corporals and about twelve privates, while the governor and deputy governor did not live there. Between 1759 and 1815 the castle again held prisoners of war, French captives of the Seven Years' War and of the Napoleonic Wars. Another account widens those captives to foreign sailors and soldiers taken in the wars with France, Spain and the new United States.

After 1860, under the fear of invasion by Napoleon III, coastal batteries were built around Scotland, including a reworking of the seaward defence at Fort George. In 1870 Blackness became the central ammunition depot for Scotland, to supply those batteries and, later, Rosyth naval dockyard, begun in 1903, and the fortified islands of the Forth, among them Inchcolm, fortified in 1914. The whole courtyard was roofed in concrete and steel between the main mast and the stern. The ground to the east was levelled, and land there was reclaimed.

The defensive ditch, which in the eighteenth century was said to hold water, probably only at high tide, was filled, and water tanks for the depot were set in it. A new wide gate was cut through the east curtain. A sea gate on the west opened onto a new pier. Barracks, officers' quarters and a store were built round a parade ground south of the castle.

The pier, of stone and iron, was built in 1868 by Head, Wrightson and Company, with a gate and a drawbridge, one of the last drawbridges built in Britain. It was substantially restored in 1996. The depot closed in 1912.

One record dates the taking of the castle into state care, as ownership, to 1905. Another says the War Office handed it to the Office of Works in 1912, took it back when World War I began in 1914, and finally left in 1919. World War I, also called the Great War, lasted from 28 July 1914 to the armistice of 11 November 1918. It was fought between the Allies and the Central Powers.

The immediate crisis began on 28 June 1914, when Gavrilo Princip killed Franz Ferdinand at Sarajevo. Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia on 28 July. Germany invaded Belgium, and the United Kingdom entered the war in early August. At sea, Germany later resumed unrestricted submarine warfare, and the United States joined the Allies in April 1917.

A depot on the Forth, feeding a naval dockyard and fortified islands, belonged to that war. The ammunition role is also said to have lasted until shortly after the war, and one summary of the depot's life runs from 1870, or even from 1860, to 1919.

Under J. Wilson Paterson, chief architect, the Office of Works repaired the castle between 1926 and 1935, and more generally through the 1920s. Paterson was at the same time restoring Inchcolm Abbey, likewise marked by wartime occupation. The work took off almost all of the nineteenth-century depot: the courtyard roof went, and the east gate was blocked.

It also removed earlier changes, including a seventeenth-century floor in the sixteenth-century hall of the stern, and it rebuilt the wall-heads of the main mast and the stern to a form they might once have had, on very thin evidence. Those rebuilt tops may not fully match the original castle. During the work an iron manacle was found in a pit prison in the stern tower, still closed round the wrist bones of a prisoner whose body had gone. A possible seventh-century cist was found near the nineteenth-century barracks.

In 1924, while a flower bed was being made on the north side of the barrack buildings, workmen found a grave. It lay about seventy yards south-west of the south-east corner of the south tower, and ten feet east of the north-west corner of the barrack block. The sides were small sea-worn stones. About fourteen inches down was the extended body of a woman of about thirty, face down, head to the north.

A flat stone, apparently the only cover left, had crushed the skull, and the burial had already been disturbed. A bronze penannular armlet lay beside her. The grave was first read as Early Iron Age, of about the first century before the common era or the first century after it. A later reading of the armlet puts it nearer the seventh century.

The hill to the south has also produced prehistoric burials, including one with an early food vessel. In 1944 or 1945 another burial was remembered on the site, though what it contained is not described. An excavation was made in 1994, but these accounts do not set out what was found. In 2012 eight trenches were cut across the access road inside the gateway, for collapsible bollards.

Little of archaeological interest lay within about a foot of the modern surface. Traffic and dumped aggregate had made a hard crust over a shallow demolition layer from a stone and brick building, between the present shop and the parapet wall, which was taken down late in the twentieth century to make parking and an easier approach. A brick floor of that building was found, and more of its footprint is likely to run under the road.

A later geophysical survey, consented in January 2018, covered the ground around the castle and the fields immediately to the south-west and south. The intended area was 6.75 hectares. Steep slopes, dense vegetation and bog left 4.65 hectares to be surveyed, by resistance, gradiometry and ground-penetrating radar. Most of the ground was short pasture.

Around the castle, rectangular anomalies match old field boundaries on the map of 1888 to 1893 and structures drawn between 1890 and 1940. Other lines are not on those maps and may be remains of the castle's own time. Numerous services were also traced. In the chapel field, geology dominates the readings.

Resistance survey suggests a rectangular enclosure south of the church, perhaps part of a churchyard or an annex, with some features inside it. Parallel lines in the southern half of the field are old ridge and furrow. Gradiometry and resistance together mark what is taken to be a former installation of the Second World War. Toward the shore and the playground the survey was limited, and the seawall and the wandering of the Black Burn dominate the results.

A block of resistance survey north of the playground shows high resistance from bedrock, a low-resistance patch read as a filled quarry or a hollow left when a clump of trees was removed, and a linear low-resistance feature read as an old path or a buried service.

The castle is aligned north to south. A curtain wall joins the north and south towers. The central tower stands separate in the courtyard, with a well outside it. The spur on the south-west is the main entrance.

A water gate on the north-west leads to the nineteenth-century pier. The nineteenth-century barracks and officers' quarters stand outside the walls. The officers' block, of hammer-dressed ashlar, has crow-stepped gables and low towers over the entrance. The soldiers' barracks are plainer.

A popular legend tells of a tunnel from the castle to the House of the Binns, about two miles south. The plan drawn by Theodore Dury around 1690 already calls the central tower the main mast and the northern tower the stem. The landward range, L-shaped, with the old great hall, is the stern.

The north tower was once three storeys and is the stem, the prow in the sea. Its upper room had a fireplace. Its lower room was a pit prison, entered only by a trapdoor, with a drain to the sea that washes in at high tide. The south tower is largely of the mid-sixteenth century and may replace an earlier hall.

On its south face the sixteenth-century masonry was built up over the battlements of the fifteenth-century curtain, so that the old pattern of low and high merlons is fossilised in the wall. Those buried crenellations, also visible on the central tower, are rare survivals. Similar merlons of the thirteenth century remain immured at Rothesay. The stern held the keeper's rooms, in a north-west wing, and a large hall on the upper floor.

The hall was subdivided when the courtyard was an ammunition store, and has since been put back. In the seventeenth century the big south window was used as a gunport. The central tower, the main mast, is five storeys, built in the fifteenth century and raised in the sixteenth. It measures about thirty-six feet by thirty-two, and the walls are about seven feet seven inches thick at the base.

Each floor is a single large room with a fireplace, a privy, and small chambers in the thickness of the wall. A narrow spiral stair once linked the floors. A larger stair tower was added at the east corner in the seventeenth century. The basement is vaulted, and the roof sits on a stone vault.

The parapet was rebuilt in the twentieth century. The course of corbels under it is original. Important prisoners, among them David Beaton and Archibald Douglas, 6th Earl of Angus, lived in this tower at a standard well above the pit, with servants of their own.

The spur is a dog-leg. Beyond the yett, an attacker had to turn, with his back to the caponier and, for part of the way, to fire from the parapet walk above. In front of the entrance there was once a rock ditch and a drawbridge. From the sea the whole mass looks like a ship that never sailed, the pointed stem in the water and the square stern beached.

From the land, and from the hill, it is a sheer block of masonry. Inside, the court and the towers are stripped to bedrock and are dark. The walk on the curtain, and especially the top of the main mast, looks out over the estuary and, downriver, to the bridges of the Forth.

Since the restoration the castle has been open as a historic monument. The rooms stand empty. A small exhibition occupies the former barracks. The shore and the mudflats to the east are a protected feeding ground for birds that winter there.

Glasswort grows on the foreshore. Its fleshy leaves were once picked as a vegetable, and the plant was also used in making soap and glass. The castle has been used for filming. Franco Zeffirelli made Hamlet there, a production dated both to 1989 and to 1990, with Mel Gibson.

Bob Carruthers filmed The Bruce there in 1996. The film Doomsday was made there in 2007, or in 2008. A television Ivanhoe used it in 1997, as did Outlander, Rise of the Clans, Mary Queen of Scots and Outlaw King.

The papers of the sixteenth-century prison were brought into print by Annie Cameron. Annie Isabella Cameron was born in Glasgow on 10 May 1897, at 16 Grafton Square, the daughter of Mary Sinclair and of James Cameron, an engineer. By 1911 the family had moved to Strathaven. She took a first-class degree in history at the University of Glasgow in 1919, trained briefly as a teacher, and returned to research.

Her doctorate, on Bishop Kennedy of St Andrews, was supervised by R. K. Hannay at Edinburgh and awarded on 17 July 1924. In 1927 she took a diploma in palaeography at the British School at Rome, and in 1928 a Carnegie fellowship let her work in the Vatican archives, where she found fifteenth-century Scottish material, above all the Scottish supplications to Rome.

That publication became her life's work. She worked at the Scottish Record Office. In 1944 she was a part-time lecturer in Scottish history at the University of Edinburgh. She was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in 1942, and late in life she received the papal Benemerenti medal for the Roman research.

In 1938 she married George Dunlop, proprietor of the Kilmarnock Standard. She died in 1973. Her books include the Scottish correspondence of Mary of Lorraine, published in 1927, which a historian of the Rough Wooing, Marcus Merriman, called a formidable gift to researchers, and the calendar of state papers relating to Scotland for 1593 to 1595, published in 1936, the years of the Earl of Huntly and of John Wemyss of Logie at Blackness. She also published the Apostolic Camera and Scottish benefices for 1418 to 1488, a life of Bishop Kennedy, and, with others, calendars of Scottish supplications to Rome.

With Robert S. Rait she published, in 1927, a study of the negotiations between Elizabeth and James VI over the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, drawn from the Warrender papers, and in 1931 she edited those papers in two volumes. She wrote on Scottish student life in the fifteenth century, and in 1951, with William Angus, on the date of the birth of James III. She published a history of the royal burgh of Ayr in 1953, the acts of the faculty of arts at St Andrews from 1413 to 1588, and, with Ian B.

Cowan in 1970, a calendar of Scottish supplications to Rome for 1428 to 1432. The American historian Robert Brentano wrote that her particular gift was to connect Scotland and its scholars with Rome and its archives. Marcus Merriman also named her, with Marguerite Wood and Gladys Dickinson, for their editions of sixteenth-century papers for the Scottish History Society.

What the first castle looked like in plan, and whether anything defensive stood here before the Crichtons, is still open. The courtyard and the tower floors have been cleared to bedrock, though cracks in the rock can still hold undisturbed deposits, as they have at other castles. The grass south and east of the walls seals the medieval ditch and the ground made up for the parade and for the depot. No full study has yet been made of the written record, though papers survive in quantity for the crown's occupation to 1707, for the garrison and prison after the Union, and for the ammunition depot.

The masonry itself remains the evidence: a fifteenth-century residence turned into a prison and a gun-fort, kept in use into the twentieth century, and then stripped back toward the form it had under James V and James Hamilton of Finnart.