Dalkeith Palace

Dalkeith Palace, also called Dalkeith House, stands on slightly higher ground above a bend of the River North Esk, just north of the town of Dalkeith in Midlothian. The South Esk flows through the same policies, and the two rivers meet in the north of the parks to form the River Esk. The house looks across wooded low ground toward the Pentland Hills. The rock is Carboniferous, with glacial and riverine deposits over it.

The place is a short distance south-east of Edinburgh, given as about three miles, or five kilometres. High walls, about nine feet, curve along the south and east sides of the estate. The present classical house was the seat of the Dukes of Buccleuch from the seventeenth century until the early twentieth, and it is owned by the Buccleuch Living Heritage Trust. It is built of sandstone, formerly harled, and it is listed in Category A.

The name of the town is recorded in the twelfth century. A charter of David I, who reigned from 1124 to 1153, granted lands that included Dolchet, a form of Dalkeith, within the estate of Ruchale, to the monks of Newbattle. The Cistercian abbey at Newbattle, adjoining the town, was founded in 1140. The first recorded reference to Dalkeith is placed in 1143.

William de Graham, whose family held Dalkeith, witnessed the foundation charter of Holyrood Abbey in 1128. That witness is taken as a sign that a settlement may already have stood here. For a long time the written references are to the castle rather than to the town. By the late fourteenth century the Chapel of St Nicholas had been built.

It was raised to a collegiate church and had become the parish church by 1467. By the end of the fourteenth century the place was called a villa, or town, though it was still little more than a village. In 1401 James Douglas, first lord of Dalkeith, received the right of a free burgh of barony and the right to hold a market. In 1540 Dalkeith became a burgh of regality.

The town grew as one street, later the High Street, running south-west from the castle gates.

What stood on the palace site before 1701 is told in more than one way. One account places Dalkeith Castle in the twelfth century, in the hands of the Clan Graham, the lords of Dalkeith, on an easily defended bend of the North Esk. Another places the origin of the castle in the fourteenth century, as a Douglas fortification. The Graham line is given a precise end.

With the death of John de Graham in 1341 or 1342, the castle and the barony passed to the Clan Douglas through his sister Marjory, who was married to Sir William Douglas. A separate account of the same years says that Sir William Douglas, known as the Knight of Liddesdale or the Flower of Chivalry, obtained the privileges of the barony of Dalkeith in 1341 and the barony of Aberdour in Fife in 1342. After Liddesdale was murdered by his cousin William Douglas, first Earl of Douglas, both baronies passed to his nephew James. That James was confirmed when the Earl of Douglas ratified his title before 1370.

In 1386 the lands of Dalkeith and Aberdour were combined as a single barony, with the principal seat at Dalkeith Castle and a second house at Aberdour Castle.

James Douglas, 1st Lord Dalkeith, was born after 1372 and died before 22 May 1441. He was the son of Sir James Douglas and Agnes Dunbar. His line is traced to Andrew Douglas of Hermiston, who died before 1277, and then to William Douglas of Hermiston, a signatory of the Ragman Roll in 1296. Around 1387 he married Elizabeth Stewart, a daughter of King Robert III.

They had five children before she died: William, James, Henry, Janet, who married John Hamilton of Cadzow, and Margaret. His second wife was Janet Borthwick, daughter of Sir William Borthwick, and with her he had a son also named William. Nearer the centre of the town, James Douglas, 1st Lord Dalkeith, endowed the collegiate church in 1406, and Douglas earls, lords, and knights were buried there. A later local account gives a different creation: it says that James, second Earl of Douglas, was made first lord of Dalkeith in 1369 by David II.

Those two identifications and those two dates do not describe the same life. The lord who married Elizabeth Stewart was born after 1372, so the 1369 creation, if it belongs to him, cannot sit easily with that birth.

The Douglases of Dalkeith are said to have kept the castle until James Douglas, first Earl of Morton, who enlarged the early castle in the later fifteenth century and then made arrangements to sell it to Charles I. That compression of two centuries is not the only chronology. James Douglas of Dalkeith became Earl of Morton in the middle of the fifteenth century. The fourth earl, also James Douglas, is credited with rebuilding the castle into a magnificent palace known as the Lions Den, of which some remnants are said to remain.

A study of the fabric completed in 2024 treats the castle as probably a fourteenth-century Douglas fortification, expanded by the fourth Earl of Morton in the sixteenth century. From June 1574 the same Regent Morton, who had been captured when the English took the place in 1548, extended the castle. The fifteenth-century enlargement, the sixteenth-century rebuilding called the Lions Den, and the works from 1574 can be read as successive campaigns, or as overlapping names for the same earls. The records do not reduce them to one date.

The castle’s closeness to the crown brought royal visits. Margaret Tudor, the bride of King James IV, stayed at Dalkeith Castle as the guest of the Earl of Morton before her formal entry to Edinburgh in 1503. The meeting of James IV with his future bride is also placed at this castle. King James V is said to have taken refuge here from Edinburgh during the plague.

In the sixteenth century the house was often a resting place for royalty.

David Beaton, also called Beton or Bethune, was born about 1494 and died on 29 May 1546. He was Archbishop of St Andrews and the last Scottish cardinal before the Reformation. He was the fifth son of fourteen children of John Beaton of Balfour in Fife, who died in 1514, and Christian Rosyth. His older brother John was heir to the barony of Balfour.

David ordered an engraved plate for his parents’ monument at Markinch in 1541. He was educated at the universities of St Andrews and Glasgow, and in his sixteenth year he was sent to Paris. In 1519 he studied civil and canon law at Orléans. In 1520 his uncle James Beaton, then Archbishop of Glasgow, named him rector and prebendary at Cambuslang.

After the uncle became Archbishop of St Andrews in 1522, David received the commendatorship of Arbroath. He returned to Scotland with John Stewart, Duke of Albany, in 1521, went to England as a diplomat in 1522, and was with Albany again in 1524. In 1525 he sat in the Parliament of Scotland as commendator of Arbroath. In 1528 the king named him Lord Privy Seal.

Between 1533 and 1542 he was several times James V’s ambassador to France, and he took a leading part in the negotiations for the king’s marriages, first to Madeleine of France and then to Mary of Guise. While in France he obtained hawks and wild boar for James V. In 1537 he was made coadjutor to his uncle at St Andrews, with the right of succession. In December 1537 he was made Bishop of Mirepoix in Languedoc on the recommendation of Francis I, and he was consecrated the following summer.

Francis gave him silver-gilt plate by the Parisian goldsmith Jean Hotman. In 1538 Pope Paul III appointed him a cardinal, with the title of St Stephen in the Caelian Hill. In February 1539 he succeeded his uncle as Archbishop of St Andrews. In 1544 he was made papal legate in Scotland.

Relations between James V and his uncle Henry VIII grew strained. Henry wanted the Scottish church detached from Rome. James refused to leave his kingdom for a meeting, and war broke out in 1542. Many blamed the cardinal for the war that led to the defeat at Solway Moss in November 1542.

James V died at Falkland Palace on 14 December 1542. Beaton tried to become one of the regents for the infant Mary, Queen of Scots, on the strength of an alleged will. The will was generally regarded as forged. A copy, kept by Regent Arran, is dated 14 December 1542 in the king’s bedchamber at Falkland and names a crowd of witnesses at the bedside, among them the king’s doctor Michael Durham and William Kirkcaldy of Grange.

The clerk who wrote the instrument, Henry Balfour, a canon of Dunkeld, was not a recognised notary. The second Earl of Arran, heir presumptive, was declared regent. By Arran’s order Beaton was arrested on 27 January 1543. He was imprisoned at Dalkeith and then committed to other custody.

The house that held him was still the castle, though later writers call the prison Dalkeith Palace.

In November 1543 Regent Arran besieged the Douglas family at Dalkeith with artillery. One account says the castle was besieged and taken by James, second Earl of Arran, in 1543. Another places the fall of the garrison to an English siege in 1547, and says the town was burnt by the English in 1548 and on two further occasions. Newbattle Abbey is said to have been destroyed in 1545 by Edward Seymour, called in that account Earl of Hereford.

The capture that is dated to a day belongs to the war known as the Rough Wooing. On 3 June 1548 English soldiers took the castle. James Wilford and Thomas Wyndham are named, together with the Spanish captain Pedro de Gamboa. The Earl of Angus wrote to his daughter Margaret Douglas, Countess of Lennox, that the house of Dalkeith was destroyed.

James Wilford’s own record of that day says that he and Thomas Wyndham captured the palace, burnt the town, and took prisoner James Douglas, the future Regent Morton.

James Wilford, also spelled Wilsford, was born about 1516 and died in November 1550. He was an English soldier and politician, commander at the siege of Haddington in the Rough Wooing, and member of Parliament for Barnstaple. His father was Thomas Wilsford of Hartridge in Cranbrook, Kent, who died in 1553. His mother Elizabeth, daughter of Walter Culpeper of Bedgebury, had died by 1531.

That marriage produced four sons and nine daughters. His father’s second wife, Rose Whetenhall, had five further sons and a daughter, Cecily, who married Edwin Sandys, Archbishop of York. One brother was Sir Thomas Wilsford, the soldier and politician who died in 1610. James was provost marshal at the Battle of Pinkie Cleugh on 10 September 1547 and was afterwards knighted.

Ulpian Fulwell, in The Flower of Fame of 1575, wrote that he won the hearts of all soldiers, a gentle lamb in the town among his friends and a lion in the field among his enemies. In April 1548 he was one of the captains who garrisoned the fort at Lauder, later the site of Thirlestane Castle. On 28 April Lord Grey of Wilton recommended him for command of the English and Italian mercenary force occupying Haddington. On 1 November 1548 he wrote to Protector Somerset about Haddington.

The town, he said, pities him both to see and to write it. Many were sick and a great number dead, most of the plague. Of horse, foot, and Italians there were not a thousand able to go to the walls, and the sick were more likely to increase than to mend. They watched the walls every fifth night, yet the walls were unmanned.

He was captured at Dunbar in January 1549. One account has Robert Lauder of the Bass taking him while he supervised a wagon train of provisions. The French soldier Jean de Beaugué included the event in his history of the war in Scotland. Mary of Guise called the capture a good catch, a bonne prise, in a letter to her brother the Duke of Aumale.

James Croft succeeded him in command at Haddington. A legal record says he was held by a French soldier, Captain Escho, and transferred to Thomas, Master of Erskine, a son of John Erskine, fifth Lord Erskine, keeper of Stirling Castle. By June 1549 he was imprisoned at Stirling, where an English herald visited him. The English Privy Council wrote to the Earl of Rutland to arrange an exchange.

He was called a man of special service who had notably served, and he was now vexed with much sickness. An exchange for the son of Lord Fleming was suggested. He was transferred to Janet Stewart, Lady Fleming, and released sometime in November 1549. In February and March 1550 he was granted, for life, the keeping of the bailiwick of Gravesend and Milton and the Little Park of Otford in Kent.

He died in November 1550. Miles Coverdale delivered his eulogy. He was buried at St Bartholomew’s by the Exchange in London. A brass from his monument, engraved with the Barrett and Wilford arms, is preserved at the Museum of London.

Coverdale was later buried in the same church. Wilford married Joyce Barrett. Soon after his death she married Thomas Stanley, later an under-treasurer of the Mint, who in 1553 became guardian of Wilford’s only son, Thomas. His portrait was painted, perhaps by Hans Eworth, and four copies are known.

Mary, Queen of Scots, rode from Edinburgh and stayed a few days at Dalkeith in October 1565. From June 1574 Regent Morton extended the castle he had lost as a prisoner in 1548. In July 1575 Sir John Forster, an English border warden captured at the Raid of the Redeswire, was held in the house. When King James VI reached his majority in October 1579, after celebrations in Edinburgh, Morton entertained the young king at Dalkeith Castle.

James VI and Anne of Denmark stayed often. In August 1592, while they were in residence, a prisoner, John Wemyss of Logie, escaped through their bedchamber, helped by the queen’s servant Margaret Vinstarr. In 1598 the royal master of works, William Schaw, prepared a nursery for the queen, and Princess Margaret was born there on Christmas Eve. Her short life is dated 1598 to 1600.

In August 1601 the infant Prince Charles was seriously ill while staying at the castle, but he recovered. During that illness Anne of Denmark wrote a controversial letter to Cardinal Borghese. William, sixth Earl of Morton, had the brewhouse, the gates, and the drawbridge repaired. James VI visited on 11 June 1617.

Andrew Simson presented a Latin poem celebrating the grounds and describing the song of the Dalkeith nightingale. A list of furnishings in 1622 details a bed in the queen’s chamber with curtains of grey and purple damask and cloth of silver.

William, seventh Earl of Morton, Treasurer of Scotland, entertained King Charles I during the king’s visit to Scotland in 1633. Charles liked the place so much that he considered buying the estate and turning it into a deer park. The parks were already being enclosed as deer parks as early as 1637, when he was keen to purchase Dalkeith in order to extend that park. By 1637 he had decided to buy the castle and estate from Lord Morton.

The castle was refortified. Among other alterations he built an additional drawbridge and extra defences. The Wars of the Three Kingdoms made the purchase difficult to complete, and the castle was eventually returned to the Earl of Morton. The sale negotiations are also placed with James Douglas, first Earl of Morton, after he had enlarged the building.

That earl belongs to the fifteenth century, and Charles I to the seventeenth, so the two attributions name different men and different moments.

In 1642 Francis Scott, second Earl of Buccleuch, bought the castle from the Earl of Morton. The chapel’s ownership is also said to have passed to the Buccleuch family in 1642, bought from the eighth Earl of Morton. During the interregnum of 1649 to 1660, General George Monck, later Duke of Albemarle, was put in command of events in Scotland. He based himself at Dalkeith, and he planned the Restoration of the monarchy from there.

He is also described as leasing the palace and the park. Troops were often quartered in the town, to the annoyance of local people who had to house them. The second Earl of Buccleuch died in 1651 and was succeeded by his two daughters. The younger, Anne, married James, Duke of Monmouth, the eldest illegitimate son of King Charles II.

Monmouth assumed the name of Scott. One account says they were created Duke and Duchess of Buccleuch in 1663, the year of the marriage, and that they became Duke and Duchess of Monmouth and Buccleuch. Another says the castle passed to Anna Scott in 1661, when she became duchess in her own right. The duke led a rebellion against his uncle and was beheaded in 1685.

The duchess then stayed in London for many years. The Buccleuch estates were managed in her absence by George, first Earl of Melville. Around 1701 she decided to move back and look after the Scottish estates. She had left the castle after her father’s death and before her marriage, and the house she returned to was the castle of her childhood.

She asked the architect James Smith to take William of Orange’s palace of Het Loo in the Netherlands as the model for a new Dalkeith Palace. James Smith (architect, died 1731) was born about 1645 at Tarbat in Ross and died in 1731. He pioneered the Palladian style in Scotland. Colen Campbell, in Vitruvius Britannicus, published between 1715 and 1725, called him the most experienced architect of that kingdom.

His father, also James Smith, was a mason who died about 1684 and became a burgess of Forres in Moray in 1659. The architect is generally identified with the James Smith of Morayshire who attended the Scots College in Rome from 1671 to 1675, at first intending to enter the Catholic priesthood, though some scholars are cautious about that identification. He had travelled, and he knew Latin. By December 1677 he was in touch with Sir William Bruce, then the leading architect in Scotland and the designer of the rebuilt Holyrood Palace.

Smith served there as a mason under the master mason Robert Mylne. By December 1679 he had married Mylne’s daughter Janet, and he was made a burgess of Edinburgh in right of his father-in-law. In 1680 he was admitted to the Incorporation of St Mary’s Chapel, the guild of masons and wrights. In 1683, on the recommendation of the Duke of Queensberry, he became Surveyor and Overseer of the Royal Works, a post Bruce had held, at a salary of 100 pounds a year.

He maintained Holyrood Palace and refurbished the former Holyrood Abbey as a chapel royal for King James VII. From 1685 to 1686 he sat in the Parliament of Scotland for Forres. The royal appointment was renewed after the Union of 1707, but he never received further pay. He surveyed some of the forts built in the Highlands after 1714 for the Board of Ordnance.

That work ended in 1719 when Andrews Jelfe was appointed architect to the Board. He wrote to John Clerk of Penicuik that he had been disgracefully turned out of His Majesty’s service in the seventy-third year of his age. In 1715 he stood unsuccessfully for Parliament for Edinburgh. In 1686 he bought the estate of Whitehill, near Musselburgh, and built a country house there.

An unsuccessful coal venture forced him to sell part of the estate in 1706, and in 1726 he assigned the rest to his son-in-law Gilbert Smith. Janet Mylne died in 1699, aged 37, after bearing him eighteen children. He remarried and had fourteen more by his second wife.

His architectural training is not known. Howard Colvin speculated that he was associated with Colen Campbell, and even that Campbell may have been his pupil, because a number of Smith’s drawings were in Campbell’s possession, and that Smith brought Italian ideas home and helped to inspire British Palladianism. With Robert Mylne he worked on Caroline Park in Edinburgh in 1685 and on Drumlanrig Castle in the 1680s. Canongate Kirk, of 1688 to 1690, is a basilica with a baroque facade.

In 1691 he designed the mausoleum of Sir George Mackenzie of Rosehaugh in Greyfriars Kirkyard, a circular building modelled on Bramante’s Tempietto, as illustrated in Palladio’s Quattro Libri. His country houses follow William Bruce: hipped roofs and pedimented fronts, plain but handsome. Hamilton Palace, of 1695, was fronted by giant Corinthian columns and a pedimented entrance, and was otherwise restrained. He also designed the nearby estate office, now the Low Parks Museum.

Dalkeith Palace is dated in his own list of works to 1702–1710, and it was modelled on Het Loo.

Smith and his cousins, Gilbert and James, signed the contract for the mason work at Dalkeith in March 1702. Construction is also said to have begun in 1701, and the duchess is said to have commissioned him in 1701, when she came north after decades in London, stayed in the old castle, met him, and signed the contracts. The house needed cosmetic repair before that stay. Plastering invoices list the rooms of the castle, arranged by floor, including the great painted room and the king’s room with an adjacent study.

One room, the stone hall, appears in the invoices for the old castle and again in the invoices for the new building. It is probably the vaulted room above the kitchen, used by the steward. Work on the new palace proceeded after the 1702 contract. Smith incorporated a portion of the old tower house into the western side, and the outline of the old tower walls is still pointed out on the western facade.

The listed-building account says he incorporated the L-plan tower house to the south and the sides of the courtyards. The masonry was executed by James Smith, a second James Smith, and Gilbert Smith. Ashlar sandstone came from the quarries at Culross and Queensferry. William Morgan and Isaac Silverstyne carved the enriched mouldings of the principal rooms.

The exterior carving was either by them or by the Smiths.

In 1704 William Walker and Benjamin Robinson, the duchess’s chamberlain, went to London with a small party to choose furniture. Brass door furniture by Oakes Bickford of London is dated 1704 to 1705. The main portion of the palace was roofed by the end of 1705. The London marble-cutter Richard Neale spent sixty-four weeks at the palace with nine assistants between 1709 and 1711, carving the main stairwell and the screen of the great staircase.

Several marble chimneypieces were installed, and an intricately carved marble bas-relief of Neptune and Galatea. The heavy use of marble inside is described as the duchess’s own taste. Grinling Gibbons supplied eight or nine chimneypieces. In the duchess’s sitting room a red marble chimneypiece has a carved white marble overmantel of The Story of Neptune and Gallatea, the name spelled with a double l in that record, by Grinling Gibbons and dated 1701, surmounted by a blue glass panel with a silver monogram and a red marble border.

The marble staircase is probably the work of Richard Neale, so the Neptune relief of the stair and the Neptune overmantel of 1701 are not the same carving. The majority of construction was complete by 1711. When the final calculations were made, the duchess’s building was reckoned at 17,727 pounds sterling. Another figure for the cost of the house is 15,225 pounds.

Both sums are given for this campaign.

Finishing works included a wrought-iron screen with freestone piers around the forecourt, later removed, a great deal of planting, and a great avenue through the park. The park in later years held the Montagu Bridge over the North Esk, the Dalkeith conservatory, and a grassed amphitheatre. The plumber John Scott of Edinburgh re-plated the roof in lead in 1743. The palace is of variegated sandstone rubble with ashlar dressings, a base course, rusticated quoins, string courses, and a moulded eaves cornice on the principal front.

The main entrance is described on the south front, flanked by two Corinthian pilasters under a bracketed pediment unusual for its depth. The same entrance is described on the east front, which is called the principal elevation: a three-storey U-plan with five bays at the centre, outer wings three bays deep returned to the east, and lower piended pavilions. A heavy pediment sits on a three-bay ashlar centrepiece divided by four fluted giant Corinthian pilasters. Ashlar steps to that entrance were reinstated in 1973 by W.

Schomberg Scott, with a simple wrought-iron balustrade. A tall two-leaf panelled door has an eight-pane fanlight, a modillioned cornice, an ornately carved frieze, and dentils. Panels bearing palm garlands, a coronet, and a monogrammed shield sit above the principal-floor openings. The layout was unusual for its time because the state apartment lay on the ground floor, so the great dining room could not take its customary place at the start of that apartment.

The dining room was placed on the first floor, still used for important occasions and also serving as an anteroom to another apartment on that floor.

Inside, the earlier castle remains in vaulted ceilings and in two turnpike stairs to the south. The entrance hall has oak panelling and a black and white marble tessellated floor, with a painted frieze. A two-bay marble basket-arched arcade, with a Corinthian column and pilasters, divides it from the hall of the grand staircase. The stair well is panelled in marble.

A wide half-turn stair with landings rises to the south. Its delicate wrought-iron balustrade, with a birch handrail, is a late eighteenth-century replacement. The steps are white marble, with parquetry treads. A suite of six state rooms lies to the west: a great ante-chamber to the south, a morning room, a book room, an ante-room, the duchess’s sitting room, and a boudoir in the north-west angle.

Decoration includes marble chimneypieces, overmantels and architraves, oak panelling, carved cornices, and gilt cornices and panel mouldings. The boudoir has an elaborately garlanded white marble chimneypiece and a painted mirror overmantel under a carved monogram. The library, to the north, has bookshelves by James Blaikie of 1769 to 1770 and a marble chimneypiece by Alex Govan of 1771. The armoury has an ashlar chimneypiece with a monogrammed overmantel.

On the north elevation a bowed ashlar tripartite window, given to James Playfair in 1786, lights the principal and first floors, with a keystoned splayed arcade at the basement. The same bow is also described as added to the east elevation in 1786, and as a bow window to the library. A low window inserted in the east facade in 1786 is a fourth way of naming Playfair’s alteration. The west elevation is eleven bays.

Two arrowslits, lighting a former turnpike, survive right of the centre. Seven bays in the centre and right incorporate substantial early masonry. A small corbelled turret with a leaded roof sits in a re-entrant angle at principal-floor level. The south elevation shows an irregular plan because fragments of the earlier castle were kept.

Two tall stair windows are divided by an ashlar stack. A roughly canted bay has a roof swept unevenly down to first-floor height, with recessed dormers, and there is evidence of former kitchen services at ground level. Service wings of about 1830, two storeys and piended, form a U-plan service court. They stand on falling ground and incorporate earlier fabric.

Evidence of demolished fabric remains. Lamp standards flank the east steps, and nineteenth-century cast-iron standards on the south-west drive are inscribed Jas Ferguss, Tayport. A flat-coped rubble buttressed retaining wall stands south-east of the house. Rainwater heads carry coronets.

The roofs are grey slate, some leaded, some swept at the eaves.

The 2024 conservation plan, prepared by Simpson & Brown and discussed in 2025 by Cristian Clarkson, asked how much of Dalkeith Castle survives inside the palace and what that castle was like. The building had been relatively little studied. Its interiors had been largely hidden since the early eighteenth century. The exterior, in a country park, is easily approached.

The plan is asymmetrical: the south entrance front is highly regular, but the west range meets the north range at an angle, which suggests reused fabric. A rib-vaulted basement room in the north range sits at the centre of very thick walls. Locked voids in that range suggest a kitchen with large flues, later blocked by James Smith. Two images record the old castle.

John Slezer’s engraving of about 1690, incorrectly labelled Glamis in his publication, shows a castle of two courts, the inner court on three sides repeating the plan of the present palace. At the north-east corner a tower of three or four storeys, with bartizans and pedimented window surrounds, stands over the existing vaulted cellar. A low range to the west would have held the historic kitchen. On the east a regular range stands where the palace now has barrel-vaulted cellars.

An unnamed and undated plan in the Buccleuch collection shows one storey. It has a turnpike where empty round rooms now stand at each level in the former stairwell, and a scale-and-platt stair in the same place as the present state stair. A projecting round tower at the north-east corner almost survived into the new building. Smith’s design drawings shade the fabric he meant to keep.

None of them is exactly the house as built. William Adam’s plans in Vitruvius Scoticus are the closest to the finished work. At first Smith hoped to raze the old palace. He ended by keeping a great deal of the castle at basement and ground level.

The north-east corner was difficult. The drawings proposed to keep the existing round tower. That was not carried out. It would have stood beside the picture closet, which has an elaborate parquet floor and a painted mirror by Jakob Bogdany.

Another option kept the original re-entrant stair and added a new branch down into the entrance hall. That was not built either.

A court case between Smith and the duchess, preserved in the Buccleuch archive, part of which is in the National Records of Scotland, shows why so much old masonry stayed. She complained that the building was poorly constructed, with cracks in the walls and chimneys that smoked. Smith blamed her for insisting that he keep the old masonry rather than build anew. Her motive is presumed to have been cost, but her letters also show a sentiment for the childhood house.

She wrote to a friend that he might think her extravagant in fitting the new house with marble, but it was to show that she did not despise her old castle. The words she used were “Dispyse my old Castle.” She lived to the age of eighty-one and made vast improvements to the house and its decoration. Daniel Defoe visited in 1720 and described waterworks, fountains, a canal designed but not completed, and fine avenues in the course of planting.

Her grandson Francis inherited in 1726 and was succeeded by his grandson Henry in 1751. Henry, the third duke, was only five when he inherited. He lived for many years at Dalkeith after the tutorship of Adam Smith. He oversaw the change of the landscape from an early formal layout to the picturesque.

He swept away the forecourt in 1769 and replaced it with the oval lawn painted by Barret in that year. Barret also painted the Hermitage in the park. The hermitage has been lost, but the picture survives at Bowhill. The third duke married Lady Elizabeth Montagu, who inherited the Montagu estates in 1790.

He himself inherited some Argyll estates from his mother and all of the Queensberry estates. Dalkeith remained the family’s principal residence until 1918. He died in 1812. His grandson Walter Francis, Walter Montagu Douglas Scott, fifth Duke of Buccleuch, succeeded in 1819.

John Adam resurfaced the building in 1762. The designed landscape is also said to have been repaired in 1762 by John Adam. The listed-building account gives the repairs of 1762 to James Adam instead. John Adam (architect) was born on 5 March 1721 at Linktown of Abbotshall, now part of Kirkcaldy, and died on 25 June 1792.

He was the eldest son of the architect William Adam and Mary Robertson, who lived from 1698 to 1761. His younger brothers Robert and James Adam also became architects. The family moved to Edinburgh in 1728 as William’s country-house practice grew. John attended Dalkeith Grammar School and did not go to university, because he was already in the family businesses.

The house was a meeting place of the Scottish Enlightenment. His name is in an inscription on the north wall of the Montrose Mausoleum at Aberuthven, from work in 1736 that his father is believed to have allowed him. During the 1740s William handed control to his eldest son. When William died in June 1748, John took over the businesses, which included quarrying and mining as well as building, and he inherited his father’s place as Master Mason to the Board of Ordnance in North Britain.

He became laird of Blair Adam in Kinross-shire, the estate his father had built up, and he formed a large library there. He took Robert into partnership. They profited from Board of Ordnance contracts after the Jacobite rising of 1745, including Fort George near Inverness, to the designs of Colonel Skinner. They also finished their father’s work, including the pavilions and interiors of Hopetoun House.

Their first major new commission, in 1754, was Dumfries House for William Dalrymple, Earl of Dumfries, probably mostly to Robert’s design. Robert oversaw the building until late summer 1754, then left on his Grand Tour, still sending designs home. John looked after the business. He was a competent, if formulaic, architect.

He won a competition for a new Royal Exchange in Edinburgh but was not appointed contractor. The contractor appointed another architect, who changed the design. The building, now the City Chambers, is still often attributed to John Adam. When Robert settled in London he was joined by James and William.

John kept the Scottish interests, invested in further quarries and in the Carron Iron Works, and supplied his brothers with capital from Blair Adam until the collapse of a stock venture by his friend Andrew Fairholme in 1764 left him short. Further losses followed the failure of Robert’s Adelphi development in 1772, and John had to mortgage Blair Adam. He designed Milton House in the Old Town, Hawkhill near Leith Links for Lord Alemoor, Kerse House near Falkirk for Sir Lawrence Dundas, all since demolished, and Moffat House for the Earl of Hopetoun. Adam Square, three houses on his own ground, was among the first terraces of town houses in Edinburgh, though it was not a true square.

Construction began in 1761. Lord President Robert Dundas moved in by 1768, and Adam himself lived there until 1772.

James Craig drew up plans in 1776 to remodel Dalkeith House and add wings. They were never executed. James Playfair’s bow of 1786, already noted in its several descriptions, was a minor alteration beside that unbuilt scheme. A lodge by Playfair is dated 1784, and the Town Lodge gates are his, of about 1784.

The Montagu Bridge was erected in 1790 to designs by Robert Adam, after other designs had been submitted, including one by Chambers. The same bridge is also dated 1792, and it is described as a feat of engineering of its time. It is listed in Category A. A temple was designed by Baxter in 1775.

A formal landscape is shown on General Roy’s map of 1750. Ancient woodland enclosed by the two rivers had formal planting nearer the castle: a double avenue, the Dark Walk, leading south-east, a round-point to the north leading to the South Esk, radial blocks beyond the river toward a north-east avenue, and more formal planting on the west bank of the North Esk opposite the house. A survey of 1764 picks out the same pattern. The first-edition map of 1854 shows the late eighteenth-century additions, the lodge, the Montagu Bridge, and the former walled kitchen garden west of the North Esk.

By then the strong lines of the avenues were less distinct, and the formal woodland planting had been lost. The structure today is still close to that 1854 map. The designed landscape contains 1,088 acres, or 440 hectares. In 1824 J.

C. Loudon referred to upwards of 800 acres, surrounded by a stone wall nine feet high, magnificently wooded and watered by the North Esk and the South Esk. A recent description of the country park gives about 1,000 acres. The Great Avenue east of the house extended 1,873 feet in length and 88 feet in breadth.

An avenue of ornamental trees planted in 1971, of horse chestnut, whitebeam, silver birch, and gean, leads to the Montagu Bridge. A coppiced lime avenue west of the North Esk was laid out as a vista from the house. Shelter belts enclosed grazing and protected relict oak woods. Lady’s Seat is marked in the northern half of Steel Park, above the confluence, and its site is on the 1854 map.

Some former parkland is now arable. Most remains pasture.

The Dalkeith oak wood is a site of special scientific interest. It contains both sessile and pedunculate oaks. Most of the trees are about 300 years old, seeded from older trees whose stock is traced back to the Caledonian forest. The woods still regenerate, and many trees have been kept as seed trees for the estate and beyond.

Cedars of Lebanon north of the house date from 1770. Other cedars stand on the terraces, with hollies, maples, a weeping sequoia, and other specimens. Monkey puzzles and sequoias stand west of the rivers. A photograph of 1911 shows kept lawns and ornamental trees in groups and singly.

Conifer planting has used larch and Scots pine, sometimes as a nurse crop, with beech, sycamore, alder, hawthorn, and hazel among the deciduous stands.

The stables and coach house were designed in 1740 by William Adam, with additions in 1840 by William Burn. The laundry is early nineteenth century, a single storey with an eight-windowed front. The Laundry Bridge is listed in Category B. The medieval Cow Bridge is listed in Category A and is a scheduled monument.

The King’s Gate is listed in Category B. The Dark Walk gates are eighteenth century and listed in Category B. The King’s Gate of 1848, to the west, is by William Burn and David Bryce and is listed in Category B. The North Lodge is nineteenth century and baronial.

The conservatory of 1832 is a twelve-sided building with a central chimney and Roman Doric columns on a stepped base, raised above what was once an elaborate parterre. It has lost its glazing. W. S.

Gilpin prepared a plan in 1832 and designed the formal conservatory garden. His notes proposed a parterre west of the river, opposite a natural amphitheatre between two man-made caves called the Tunnel. He did not think it worthwhile to plant the Tunnel. He suggested enlarging the parkland by removing some formal plantations, and a pinetum in the pleasure grounds where the soil was poor for flowers, the pines occasionally mingled with American plants.

Removing the stables to enlarge the pleasure grounds was under discussion, and he advised against it. The conservatory, which William Burn designed and built as the centrepiece Gilpin had suggested, is all that remains of that scheme. The pinetum was planted in the middle of the nineteenth century. A bowling green shown in 1854 has been replaced by tennis courts.

Charles McIntosh, former gardener to the king of the Belgians and author of The Book of the Garden, was head gardener at Dalkeith in the middle of the nineteenth century. He built and planted a new kitchen garden north of the house, of twelve acres, famous for enormous ranges of glasshouses and for scroll and ribbon bedding running the length of the garden. He moved a 500-foot rose trellis from the old garden, where it had been planted about 1700, and replanted the old roses along it near the new gardens, and he planted a new rose hedge of old species. The fruit houses included vineries, peach and nectarine houses, pineapple pits, and fig and tomato houses, and many fruits were grown outside.

The main garden of that time lay west of the North Esk, as the 1854 map shows: woodland walks from bridges to lawns and shrubbery east of the kitchen garden, and several ranges of glasshouses facing south over a walled garden divided into four compartments. Part of those walls remains. They were later recorded as enclosing a school. In 1850 the gardener William Thomson was brought from Wrotham Park in Hertfordshire.

The horticultural fame of the place, and the plant and shrub collections of McIntosh, Thomson, and other gardeners, has since been lost, though the historical association remains high. The flower and kitchen gardens lost their function over the years after the house ceased to be a principal residence. The park is open as a country park, with an adventure playground among the facilities added for visitors. The river terraces and the ancient mixed woods give the policies a high value for nature.

Archaeological interest in the designed landscape was left unassessed. The 2024 work on the house was a reading of standing fabric and of drawings and invoices, not a published excavation with a list of finds from the soil.

Walter Francis, the fifth duke, considered extensive rebuilding in 1831. William Burn produced unexecuted designs in a Jacobethan, or Elizabethan Revival, style. The same year is also given for additions by Burn, and for minor alterations that were carried out, including improvements to the interior. He may have blocked the principal door and built the porch.

More modest estate works included a new house and offices for the duke’s chamberlain. For the fifth duke, William Burn and David Bryce built St Mary’s Church as a private chapel. The church contains one of only two water-powered organs in Scotland. David Bryce was born on 3 April 1803 at 5 South College Street in Edinburgh and died on 7 May 1876.

His father, also David Bryce, lived from 1763 to 1816, a grocer with a successful side interest in building. The son was educated at the Royal High School and joined William Burn’s office in 1825, at the age of twenty-two. By 1841 he had risen to be Burn’s partner. They formally dissolved the partnership in 1845, with disputes over the building of St Mary’s Church at Dalkeith for the Duke of Buccleuch.

Burn moved to London, and Bryce succeeded to a large and growing practice, which he kept up almost until his death. He designed important works in most of the principal towns of Scotland. In the 1830s he lived at 8 Great Stuart Street on the Moray Estate. In 1835 he was elected an associate of the Royal Scottish Academy, and in the following year an academician.

He was a fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects, of the Architectural Institute of Scotland, and of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and for several years he was grand architect to the Grand Lodge of Masons in Scotland. He was initiated in Lodge Roman Eagle, No. 160, in Edinburgh, and later affiliated to Lodge St James Operative, No. 97. He served jointly with Burn as grand architect of the Grand Lodge from 1845 to 1850, and alone from 1851 until his death. He was also exalted in Edinburgh St Andrew Chapter, No. 83, of the Royal Arch.

He died of bronchitis after a short illness, leaving works in progress that were finished under his nephew John Bryce, his partner for some years, who succeeded to the business. He died unmarried. With Janet Tod, who lived from 1797 to 1884, he had a son, David Bryce Tod, whom he recognised later and in his will. He is buried in New Calton Cemetery, just west of the main north-south path, beside his nephew.

He worked at first in Palladian and Italian Renaissance modes, then turned to Gothic and especially to Scottish Baronial, of which he became the leading exponent. At least fifty mansion houses are credited to his planning. Among public buildings, Fettes College and the Royal Infirmary in Edinburgh are counted among his best in that style. The Bank of Scotland buildings, which shape the skyline of the Old Town, show him in an Italian manner.

A north perspective of 1863 proposed a Baroque refacing with Corinthian columns and allegorical statues, wings with lanterns, a taller Florentine dome, and a golden statue of Fame. The annual report of the Royal Scottish Academy in the year of his death said there was no doubt his name would long be associated with much that was best in the baronial revival.

Several well-known guests came in the centuries after the palace was built. Charles Edward Stuart stayed two nights at Dalkeith in 1745. Charles Edward Louis John Sylvester Maria Casimir Stuart was born on 31 December 1720 and died on 30 January 1788. He was the elder son of James Francis Edward Stuart, grandson of James VII and II, and the Stuart claimant to the thrones of England, Scotland, and Ireland from 1766.

He is known as the Young Pretender, the Young Chevalier, and Bonnie Prince Charlie, and to Jacobites as Charles III. He led the Jacobite rising of 1745. He was born at the Palazzo Muti in Rome, where Pope Clement XI had given his father a residence. Historians differ on his baptism.

One account says Pope Clement presided. Another says the Bishop of Montefiascone carried it out. He was named Charles for his great-grandfather, Edward after Edward the Confessor, Louis for the king of France, Casimir after the kings of Poland, and Sylvester because he was born on Saint Sylvester’s Day. His mother was Maria Clementina Sobieska, granddaughter of John III Sobieski.

His grandfather James II and VII had ruled from 1685 to 1688 and was deposed when Parliament invited William III and Princess Mary to replace him. Charles was said to have had weak legs as a child, possibly from rickets. In 1744 he went to France for a planned invasion of England in his father’s name. Storms partly wrecked the French fleet.

After talking with leading Jacobites he resolved to go to Scotland. He landed on the west coast. Jacobite forces won at Prestonpans in September 1745 and at Falkirk Muir in January 1746. In April 1746 he was defeated at Culloden.

Later attempts, including a planned French invasion in 1759, did not restore the Stuarts. He spent the rest of his life on the continent except for one secret visit to London. He lived briefly in France and was exiled in 1748 under the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle. He later lived much of the time in Florence and Rome.

He had several mistresses before marrying Princess Louise of Stolberg-Gedern in 1772. In later life his health declined, and he was said to be an alcoholic. The escape after Culloden fixed him as a figure of heroic failure. The two nights at Dalkeith belong to the 1745 campaign.

The month of that stay is not given.

George IV slept at Dalkeith during his visit to Edinburgh in 1822, preferring the house to the Palace of Holyroodhouse, which was in a poor state. It was his first and only formal visit to Scotland, and he moved into Dalkeith House instead of Holyrood. George Augustus Frederick was born on 12 August 1762 at St James’s Palace and died on 26 June 1830. He was King of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and King of Hanover from 29 January 1820.

From 5 February 1811 he had been prince regent during the final mental illness of his father, George III. He was the eldest child of George III and Queen Charlotte. Friends called him Prinny. As the eldest son of a sovereign he was Duke of Cornwall and Duke of Rothesay from birth, and he was created Prince of Wales and Earl of Chester a few days later.

Thomas Secker, Archbishop of Canterbury, baptised him on 18 September. His godparents were his maternal uncle Adolphus Frederick IV, Duke of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, for whom the Lord Chamberlain, William Cavendish, fourth Duke of Devonshire, stood proxy; his paternal grand-uncle Prince William, Duke of Cumberland; and his grandmother Augusta, Dowager Princess of Wales. He learned French, German, and Italian as well as English. At eighteen he was given a separate establishment and threw himself into heavy drinking, mistresses, and expensive decoration.

At twenty-one, in 1783, he obtained a parliamentary grant of 60,000 pounds and an annual income of 50,000 pounds from his father. His stables alone cost 31,000 pounds a year. He set up at Carlton House. Animosity grew with his father, a political conservative alienated by the prince’s adherence to Charles James Fox.

Soon after twenty-one he became infatuated with Maria Fitzherbert, a commoner, though granddaughter of a baronet, six years older, twice widowed, and a Roman Catholic. He commissioned John Nash to build the Royal Pavilion at Brighton and to remodel Buckingham Palace, and Jeffry Wyatville to rebuild Windsor Castle. Charm and culture earned him the title of the first gentleman of England. His way of life, and his poor relations with his parents and with his wife, Caroline of Brunswick, earned him contempt and dimmed the prestige of the monarchy.

He excluded Caroline from his coronation and asked the government to introduce the Pains and Penalties Bill in an unsuccessful attempt to divorce her. For most of the regency and the reign, Lord Liverpool was prime minister. That government presided over the final victory over Napoleon and the peace with France. After Liverpool retired, George was forced to accept Catholic emancipation despite opposing it.

His only legitimate child, Princess Charlotte, died in 1817. His childless younger brother Prince Frederick died in 1827. He was succeeded by another younger brother, William IV. The fifth duke, still young in 1822, found himself host to this king.

The duke was known as a great improver of his estates. He consulted Burn in the 1830s. The large scheme for the house was never built. Burn did carry out minor interior improvements, and he drew the conservatory.

Queen Victoria stayed in 1842. Edward VII visited in 1899 and 1903. George V visited in 1907 and 1910. Edward VII, Albert Edward, was born at 10:48 in the morning on 9 November 1841 at Buckingham Palace and died on 6 May 1910.

He was King of the United Kingdom and the British Dominions, and Emperor of India, from 22 January 1901. He was the second child and eldest son of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, nicknamed Bertie, and Prince of Wales for almost sixty years. He was christened Albert Edward at St George’s Chapel, Windsor, on 25 January 1842, Albert for his father and Edward for his maternal grandfather, Prince Edward, Duke of Kent and Strathearn. His parents set him a rigorous education from the age of seven.

He did not excel as his elder sister Victoria did. His talents were charm, sociability, and tact. Benjamin Disraeli described him as informed, intelligent, and of sweet manner. After an educational trip to Rome in the first months of 1859, he spent the summer studying at the University of Edinburgh, among others under the chemist Lyon Playfair.

In October he matriculated at Christ Church, Oxford. In 1861 he transferred to Trinity College, Cambridge, where Charles Kingsley tutored him in history and drew from him the best academic performances of his life. He married Princess Alexandra of Denmark in 1863, and they had six children. As Prince of Wales he travelled through Britain on ceremonial duties and represented Britain abroad.

His tour of North America in 1860 and of the Indian subcontinent in 1875 were popular successes. His reputation as a playboy prince soured his relationship with his mother, who largely excluded him from political influence. He inherited the throne in 1901 and proved an effective constitutional monarch. He played a part in modernising the Home Fleet and in reorganising the army after the Second Boer War of 1899 to 1902.

He revived traditional ceremonies as public displays and widened the social range of royalty. His fostering of relations with France earned him the popular name Peacemaker. His relationship with his nephew, the German emperor Wilhelm II, was poor. The Edwardian era, named for his reign, coincided with steam-turbine propulsion and the rise of socialism.

He died in the midst of a constitutional crisis that the Parliament Act 1911 later resolved by restricting the power of the House of Lords. His only surviving son, George V, succeeded him. The Dalkeith visits of 1899 and 1903 fall once before his accession and once during the reign. Both are recorded under the name Edward VII.

The Buccleuch family has not lived in the palace since 1914. It is also said that Dalkeith remained the principal residence until 1918, and that the house ceased to be the principal residence after the First World War. Pictures, furniture, and fittings were gradually removed, and the house was finally cleared in 1970. In 1920 the palace gardens and glasshouses were let as market gardens.

During the Second World War, Polish troops of the 3rd Flanders Rifle Brigade, part of the 1st Polish Armoured Division, were quartered on the third floor from 1942. Graffiti drawn by those troops was still visible on the third-floor wallpaper in 2008. In the 1970s and early 1980s the computer firm International Computers Limited used the palace as a research and development office and leased it until 1983. Another span for that office use is 1969 to 1981.

The conversion for offices is described as clumsy. Interior restoration, and the reinstatement of the entrance steps, was undertaken by W. Schomberg Scott in 1973. From 1985 the University of Wisconsin system leased the house for a study-abroad programme.

About sixty to eighty students a semester lived in the palace and took classes from faculty from the United Kingdom and the United States. The campus is also identified as the University of Wisconsin–River Falls, and the educational use is also placed more loosely in the 1980s. The university and the Buccleuch Living Heritage Trust announced in July 2020 that the lease would end in January 2021. The university left in January 2021, after travel by international students had been disrupted.

One account calls the Wisconsin years the last three decades.

The trust described the emptying of the building as a unique opportunity. It said there was a strong feeling, in Dalkeith and in the Buccleuch family, that the palace should open its doors so that the shared story of the palace, the town, and the country could be appreciated, and that it could be a hub for creative businesses suited to the character of the building. The trust had already invested in the country park, including the Fort Douglas adventure play park and Restoration Yard. In 2021 the council granted permission to change the use from a residential college to a public facility, with plans for a museum, a public library, art spaces, a cafe, and offices.

No physical alterations to the listed building were proposed. The approving view was that the uses would increase access to a significant listed building and help to provide a long-term use. The change was described as opening the doors to the public for the first time in the house’s three centuries. By January 2024 the trust had taken the palace back.

The contents left by the students were mostly utilitarian furnishings. There was no intention to return the period interiors. The stated direction was a flexible cultural programme, using the Buccleuch collection and outside partners. New uses were still being evaluated in 2025.

The 2026 calendar was described as a programme of exhibitions, tours, and special events. The building remains the setting of a designed landscape whose artistic, historical, and architectural interest is ranked outstanding, whose horticultural and scenic interest is ranked high, and whose nature conservation interest is ranked outstanding. It was added to the inventory of gardens and designed landscapes on 1 July 1987, and the designation is also dated 30 June 1987. The house, with its retaining wall and lamp standards, was listed in Category A on 22 January 1971.