Dunbar Castle

Dunbar Castle occupies a craggy rock at the entrance to the harbour of Dunbar, in East Lothian, on the south shore of the Firth of Forth. The surviving masonry is medieval, and it is in extremely poor condition. Loose stone lies on the rock and on the shore beneath it. The east side of the promontory forms the western side of the harbour, and a quay has been built against it.

A survey in March 2014 found the castle closed, with a dangerous building notice in force, and the castle and its immediate surroundings still closed to the public, though the ruin is visible from the public path. The castle and the fort on the same ground were scheduled on 22 February 1936. What remains is a fragment of a fortress that was long treated as one of the keys of the kingdom, because the rock covered the most convenient landing place on the Scottish east coast beyond Berwick.

The headland was fortified long before the medieval castle. Excavations in 1987, 1988, 1989, 1990, and 1991, made before a swimming pool was built at Castle Park, showed that the castle stands on a headland already defended in the early medieval period and earlier, in the Roman or pre-Roman Iron Age. The earliest defences found were three ditches drawn across the headland later occupied by the early sixteenth-century artillery blockhouse. The inner ditch perhaps enclosed 0.17 hectares, and the outer possibly as much as 0.3 hectares.

No trace of these ditches shows on the surface. Apart from the blockhouse, the massive ditch that isolates it, and the medieval castle on the seaward stack to the north-east, the early works are invisible. The excavators thought the early fort probably did not include the castle stack, but that possibility cannot be excluded. There is no stratigraphic evidence that the three ditches were contemporary, or that they belong to a single period.

Each ditch cut earlier features. Those preceding the middle ditch were sealed by a deposit from which a single radiocarbon date of AD 85 to 380 was obtained. Three dates spanning AD 125 to 495 came from burnt deposits in an overlying yard, so the middle ditch, and the demolished rampart that must have gone with it, were built in the Roman Iron Age. The inner and outer ditches may belong to an earlier period.

Further Roman Iron Age enclosure is shown by foundation trenches for several successive timber fences cut into the fills of the inner and middle ditches before the area was buried under the yard. Another foundation trench for a fence or palisade, on much the same line, was cut through the yard deposits. These defences were then buried under soil, and a series of early medieval buildings was set on that soil, possibly in the mid to late sixth century, with occupation continuing in the early seventh century. No defensive line across the promontory was found for that phase inside the excavated area.

In the next phase a rampart was built, probably replacing a palisade on the same line, to cut off about 0.47 hectares. The rampart is thought to have been of turf on a stone foundation. It is itself undated. The excavators suggested that the mid to late seventh century was a likely date for its construction, and that it may have been short-lived.

A probable entrance through the palisade, facing south, may have been repeated in the rampart. An interim account of the Anglian evidence reads the sequence differently at this point. After a promontory fort, an unenclosed settlement of roundhouses was occupied in the second or third century. In the sixth century a Grubenhaus was built, and then post-in-trench structures were enclosed by a palisade and later by a stone-founded rampart.

Radiocarbon dates and a bronze buckle plate suggest that those defences had gone out of use by the mid-seventh century. Both readings come from the same excavations. One places the likely building of the turf rampart in the mid to late seventh century. The other has the palisade and the stone-founded rampart out of use by the middle of that century.

Very few objects were recovered from the Roman Iron Age occupation, apart from a piece of gold wire. Finds from the phases associated with the early ditches and the yard include a fragment of a rotary quern, a stone ball, three possible loomweights, a bone needle, two bone pins, and the gold wire. From the early medieval deposits came copper-alloy pins, a fragment of worked shale, evidence of lead smelting, a few fragments of bone combs, a gilded Anglo-Saxon belt buckle, loomweights, several bone pins, several coins, several spindle whorls, a glass bangle fragment, and an iron buckle. The interim account also lists a gold and garnet pectoral cross fragment, together with the bronze buckle plate and the coins.

Ten radiocarbon dates were obtained from a range of contexts, and none relates directly to any of the defences. The dating of the early ditches to the Roman Iron Age rests on the combination of those dates with the stratigraphy. At least two periods of fortification can be identified in the early medieval period, but any chronology for their use is speculative around a handful of written references. The headland of the early fort was scheduled in 1994, after the excavations.

The published account of the dig appeared in 2000.

The original Brythonic name, dyn barr, is taken to mean the fort of the point, and the Votadini, or Gododdin, are thought to have been the first people to defend the site. A local account gives the name as din-bar and the meaning as summit fort, and traces the origins of Dunbar back more than two thousand years to a prehistoric fort on the headland north of the present town. By the seventh century the place was a central defensive position of the kings of Bernicia, the Anglian kingdom that took over from the British kingdom of Bryneich. In the early Middle Ages the castle was held by an ealdorman owing homage either to the kings at Bamburgh or, later, to the kings of York.

In 678 Saint Wilfrid was imprisoned at Dunbar after Ecgfrith of Northumbria expelled him from the see of York.

Later stone buildings stood on the promontory before a sack of Dunbar in the mid-ninth century. During those periods occupation seems to have been bounded by a ditch. The date at which that ditch was dug is unknown, and no rampart was found on its inner lip. The ditch was recut after it silted up.

A Norse comb was found in the top of the later fill, and that fill contained debris from mortared buildings. The enclosure may have extended to about 0.56 hectares. Kenneth MacAlpin, king of the Scots, is said to have burnt Dunbar, and he is on record as in possession of the castle. One account dates the seizure and burning to 849.

The excavated sequence places the major stone buildings before a sack in the middle of the ninth century. The same local account says that the Scots used the outer part of the fort as a graveyard, and that many cists have been found around the end of the High Street.

A separate record describes coffins dug up by Lord Lauderdale’s workmen on the outworks of the castle. The place was a circular piece of ground, enclosed by a stone wall whose foundation was still complete when the ground was levelled. The coffins and bones were numerous and of all ages, including children. They lay east and west.

The coffins were of thin broad stones set on edge for the sides and ends and laid flat for the top and bottom. Some, thought to be for people of higher rank, were of superior polish, cemented with lime, and adorned with figures: a sun on the east end, and swords and other ornaments on the lid. One body seemed to have been buried in clothes, because pieces of leather like parts of boots were found in the coffin. The inquiry took this for the common burying ground of the castle before the present church and churchyard of Dunbar.

In the tenth and early eleventh centuries Norse inroads increased. In 1005 a Patrick de Dunbar is recorded under Malcolm II, fighting Norse invaders in the north at Murthlake, a town of Marr. He was slain there alongside Kenneth, thane of the Isles, and Grim, thane of Strathearn.

The first stone castle is thought to have been built by Gospatric, Earl of Northumbria, after his exile from England. The name Gospatric, or Cospatric, comes from the Cumbric form of a Brittonic element, Gwas-Patric, a devotee or servant of Patrick. Another argument, made by Walter Scott, takes Cospatric or Gospatrick as a contraction of Comes Patricius. Gospatric died after 1073.

Through his mother Ealdgyth he was the maternal grandson of the Northumbrian ealdorman Uhtred the Bold and of Uhtred’s third wife, Ælfgifu, daughter of King Æthelred II. His father is named as Maldred, son of Crinan, a thegn, perhaps the Crínán of Dunkeld who was father of King Duncan I. Even if that identification is right, it is not certain that Maldred was born to Duncan’s mother, Bethóc, daughter of Malcolm II.

After the victory at Hastings, William of Normandy appointed Copsi, a supporter of the late Earl Tostig, as earl of Bernicia in the spring of 1067. Copsi was dead within five weeks, killed by Oswulf, grandson of Uhtred. Oswulf was killed by bandits in the autumn. Gospatric, who had a plausible claim, offered William a large sum for the earldom of Bernicia, and William accepted.

In early 1068 Gospatric was among the leaders of an uprising with Edgar Ætheling and with Edwin, Earl of Mercia, and Edwin’s brother Morcar. The rising collapsed. Gospatric lost the earldom to Robert Comine and went into exile in Scotland. He joined the invading army of Danes, Scots, and Englishmen under Edgar in the next year.

The army was defeated, but from his possession of Bamburgh he made terms with the Conqueror, who left him undisturbed until 1072. The widespread destruction in Northumbria known as the Harrying of the North belongs to this period. In 1072 William stripped him of the earldom of Northumbria and replaced him with Waltheof, Siward’s son. Gospatric fled to Scotland, went to Flanders, and on his return was granted the castle at Dunbar and lands adjacent to it, and lands in the Merse, by King Malcolm III, his cousin.

The castle account adds lands in East Lothian and Lauderdale, given as recompense for lands lost further south and in return for loyalty, and it records Malcolm III bestowing the manor of Dunbar on the expatriated earl. A local account places the gift around 1075 and calls the king Malcolm Canmore. The first stone castle is placed about 1070. The same local account says it is not known when a stone castle replaced the early fort, but that the castle was certainly of stone by the thirteenth century.

Gospatric’s male-line descendants held the earldom of Dunbar, later known as the earldom of March, in south-eastern Scotland until 1435, and the lordship and earldom of Home from 1473.

The castle remained the stronghold of the earls of Dunbar. One account dates the forfeiture of George, Earl of March, and a dismantling to prevent English occupation, to 1457, and says that James IV restored the castle later in the century. The life of George de Dunbar, called the eleventh earl of Dunbar and March, gives a different sequence. He was born about 1370 and lived after 1457.

In 1434 he and his son Patrick were twice in England. He was arrested on his return and confined in Edinburgh Castle. The Earl of Angus, Chancellor Crichton, and Sir Adam Hepburn of Hailes were sent with letters to the keeper of Dunbar Castle, who surrendered it at once to the king’s authority. Hepburn was left as constable.

A parliament at Perth on 10 January 1435 accused George, not for a treason of his own, but for holding earldoms and estates claimed to have been forfeited by his father. The next day his plea that his father had been pardoned and restored by Albany was rejected, on the ground that a forfeiture for treason could not be pardoned by a regent. He retired to England. A safe-conduct for George, Earl of Dunbar, with twenty-four horsemen, was signed at Westminster on 31 October 1435.

He may still have been alive in 1457, when he is named, still as Earl of March, in a charter to his son Patrick de Dunbar of the lands and barony of Kilconquhar in Fife. The year 1457 in the castle account is the year in which he is last noticed alive. The dismantling to keep the English out, and the later restoration by James IV, sit beside that parliamentary forfeiture of January 1435.

Before that forfeiture, the castle’s most famous defence was made by Agnes Randolph, Countess of Dunbar and March. She was born about 1312 and died in 1369. She was called Black Agnes for her dark complexion. She was the wife of Patrick, ninth Earl of Dunbar and March, and she is buried in the vault near Mordington House.

Her father was Thomas Randolph, Earl of Moray, nephew and companion in arms of Robert the Bruce. Her mother was Isabel Stewart, daughter of John Stewart of Bonkyll. She is remembered for the defence of Dunbar against William Montagu, first Earl of Salisbury, from 13 January 1338 to 10 June the same year.

That siege fell in the Second War of Scottish Independence. One account dates the war from 1331 to 1357. Another dates it from 6 August 1332 to 3 October 1357. It began when Edward Balliol, son of the former king John Balliol, led an English-backed invasion to claim the throne against the child David II.

At Dupplin Moor, Balliol’s force defeated a much larger Scottish army, and he was crowned at Scone on 24 September 1332. Within three months David’s partisans had forced him out. He appealed to Edward III, who invaded in 1333, besieged Berwick, and won at Halidon Hill. Balliol then ceded the eight counties of south-eastern Scotland to England and did homage for the rest.

David fled to France in May 1334. Balliol’s allies fell out, and by late 1334 he had lost control of most of Scotland again. French support for David’s loyalists grew. In May 1337 Philip VI of France broke with England, and the Hundred Years’ War began.

The war in Scotland became a lesser theatre of that larger war. Edward could spare fewer troops, and the English slowly lost ground. Dunbar, on the coast of the ceded south-east, was still worth a long siege at the start of 1338.

On 13 January 1338, while Patrick was away, the English besieged the castle. Agnes was there with her servants and guards. She is said to have declared that she held her house of Scotland’s king, paid him meat and fee, and would keep her good old house while her house would keep her. Salisbury’s engines threw rocks and lead shot against the ramparts.

The bombardment failed. One of her ladies-in-waiting dusted the ramparts with a kerchief to taunt the besiegers. A local account says that a maid, dressed in finery, wiped the marks of the stones with a white handkerchief. The English then brought up a siege machine called a sow.

Agnes told Salisbury to take good care of his sow, for she would soon cast her pigs inside the fortress. A boulder that the English had already thrown was dropped from the battlements and smashed the sow. When a Scottish archer shot a soldier standing next to Salisbury, the earl said that one of his lady’s tire-pins had come, and that Agnes’s love shafts went straight to the heart.

Salisbury then tried bribery. He paid the soldier who guarded the principal entrance to leave the gate unlocked, or so nearly unlocked that the English could break in. The soldier took the money and told Agnes. When the English entered, Salisbury was in the lead, but one of his men pushed past him at the moment the portcullis dropped, and Salisbury was cut off from his force.

Agnes had meant to trap the earl. She called out a farewell to Montague, and said she had intended that he should sup with them and help defend the castle against the English. The English had taken her brother John. Montagu threatened to hang him if she did not surrender.

She answered that his death would only benefit her, because she and her sister were his heirs in his lands. She was not in line for the earldom.

After several months the garrison’s supplies ran low. Sir Alexander Ramsay of Dalhousie came from Edinburgh to the coast with forty men, took boats, and entered by the postern next to the sea. The defenders charged out and drove Salisbury’s advance guard back to the camp. On 10 June 1338, after five months, Salisbury lifted the siege.

A ballad has him say that whether he came early or late, he found Agnes at the gate. The castle account places Ramsay’s relief in June 1338 and judges that he and his men probably came in by the dark postern that opens onto a rocky inlet from the sea. North-east of the front of the castle a large natural cavern, chiefly of black stone, was supposed to have formed part of the dungeon. The postern and the cavern are separate approaches.

The towers of the castle communicated with the sea and dip low in many places.

In the centre of the fortress a stretch of wall still carries a gateway with armorial bearings, which seems to have led to the principal apartments. In the centre are the arms of George, tenth Earl of Dunbar, who succeeded his uncle in 1369. Besides the earldom of Dunbar and March he inherited the lordship of Annandale and the Isle of Man from his aunt, Black Agnes. The shield is a lion rampant within a bordure charged with eight roses, with a helmet and a crest of a bridled horse’s head.

On the right are the arms of the Bruces, and on the left those of the Isle of Man. He was the first to assume those sculptured arms, so they were placed after his succession. The plaques over the entrance were later destroyed. A drawing of them was made in 1869.

James IV restored the castle after the dismantling. Andrew Wood of Largo was the keeper. In April 1497 timber was bought for the Hannis tower, and the master mason Walter Merlioun was completing the gatehouse, or fore work. Nails were bought for the yetts of the gatehouse, a wooden portcullis, and a metal grille or yett made by Thomas Barker.

John the Quarrier excavated a new well. James IV visited in April 1497 and gave the masons drinksilver in May. On 20 August 1497 he met Sir William Tyler, the governor of Berwick, at Dunbar to discuss a truce. Building lime was brought from Cousland and received by Thomas Foret.

The hinges, or crukis, for the iron yett were made in the forge at Edinburgh Castle. The carpenter Patrick Falconer measured the roof or ceiling of the king’s chamber at Edinburgh Castle so that a similar roof could be made at Dunbar. In August 1497 two Dunbar carpenters, William Young and Thomas Makachane, began to roof the Hannis tower. In September it was finished by Andrew the slater.

Slates and rafters were brought in Will Merrymowth’s boat. In 1501 new iron window grills, or yetts, were provided. James IV used master masons who had also worked on the royal buildings at Holyrood. After Berwick finally became English in 1483, Dunbar’s importance as a coastal fortress grew.

Andrew Forman was made keeper of Dunbar Castle in September 1503. He was born about 1465 and died on 11 March 1521. He became bishop of Moray in 1501, archbishop of Bourges in 1513, and archbishop of St Andrews in 1514, and he was commendator of several monasteries. He was probably the son of Nicholas Forman of Hutton in Berwickshire and of Jonet Blackadder.

He graduated as a licentiate of arts at St Andrews in 1483 and had entered the service of James IV by 1489. His main work was as the king’s emissary in Rome, Paris, and London. In July 1497 he and William Elphinstone, bishop of Aberdeen, brokered a seven-year truce with Henry VII at Aytoun. In 1501 he was one of the commissioners for the marriage treaty of James IV and Margaret Tudor, daughter of Henry VII.

The king had received Perkin Warbeck at Stirling in November 1495, and Forman was designated to attend him. Forman watched Warbeck’s departure from Ayr in July 1497. Ferquhard Mackintosh, an heir to the lordship of the Isles, was held in Dunbar Castle for more than ten years.

During the minority of James V the castle came under John Stewart, second Duke of Albany. He was born in France on 8 July 1482 and died on 2 June 1536. He was the son of Alexander Stewart, Duke of Albany, himself a son of James II, and of Anne de la Tour d’Auvergne. He grew up in France.

From 1504 he was the closest adult heir to the Scottish throne. He acted as regent intermittently between 1514 and 1524, and one account gives the regency as 1515 to 1524. He was called to the regency when the infant king’s mother, Margaret Tudor, married Archibald Douglas, sixth Earl of Angus, in 1514. Albany arrived at Dumbarton on 26 May 1515 with eight ships, including the James and the Margaret, which James IV had lent to Louis XII.

He was inaugurated with the sceptre and the sword of honour. He besieged Margaret at Stirling with as many as 7,000 men and artillery, including the cannon Mons Meg. She surrendered on 6 August 1515, and he took possession of the royal children. Between 1517 and 1520 he was in France and governed through lieutenants, among them Antoine d’Arces, sieur de la Bastie.

On 26 August 1517 he and Charles, Duke of Alençon, signed the Treaty of Rouen, renewing the alliance with France and promising a French royal bride for James V. The poet and diplomat Gavin Douglas, bishop of Dunkeld, assisted in those negotiations. Albany’s regency was ended in 1524 when Margaret and James Hamilton, first Earl of Arran, had the twelve-year-old king’s minority proclaimed at an end. Albany left Scotland from Dumbarton.

A garrison of one hundred French soldiers at Dunbar was paid by Francis I of France, who sent their wages to the quartermaster Maurice de Nogent. During this period the artillery bulwark to the west was built. It may have been designed by Antoine d’Arces, who was placed in charge of the castle in December 1514. An English soldier, Baron Dacre, visited and was impressed by the new bulwark.

In June 1527 a servant of the duke, William Stewart, came to Scotland with gifts of horses and swords for the young James V and hired masons to amend and repair the fortification. Albany also organised repairs in June 1527.

Albany’s main architectural work in Scotland was this fortification and extension of Dunbar, his principal residence, in the form of a great artillery blockhouse, perhaps the first such structure in the British Isles. The plan appears to follow the basic form of a contemporary Italian angle bastion. The work earned a reputation for being impregnable. It was built between 1515 and 1523, and it may have been largely complete earlier than the end of that span.

The English coastal forts begun for Henry VIII in 1539 come more than ten years later. The blockhouse stands to the south-west of the structure built or repaired for James IV, on a neighbouring promontory, and it was joined to the castle by a traverse wall across a tidal chasm. The wall contained a roofed passage. The blockhouse was apparently unroofed.

It had four large ground-level casemates with segmental vaults, deeply recessed into the rampart and open to the rear. Seven gunholes survive: six in the casemates, two casemates having two gunholes each, and a seventh through the rampart. The throats are large enough for substantial pieces of artillery, and these are the earliest datable examples of this form of gunhole in Scotland. Gunholes of the same form existed in France at this date.

Towards the north side, two vaulted chambers, now collapsed, include a larger room with a fireplace, evidently barrack accommodation. Above the casemates a parapet, perhaps originally about two metres thick, and perhaps of a curvilinear profile like Italian examples, was reached by a broad access. The plan is polygonal, about 54 feet by 60 feet, or 16.5 by 18.3 metres. The masonry rampart, whose facing is almost entirely decayed, was up to 6.5 metres thick, graded according to the threat of battery.

Towards the south the straight faces converge, and the salient seems to have been truncated as a short straight length of wall. The shape echoes an Italian angle bastion. It is not clear whether that was by design or the result of the rock.

An older description of the ruins takes the south battery, which Francis Grose supposed to have been the citadel or keep, as a work on a detached perpendicular rock, accessible on one side, 72 feet high, and connected to the main castle by a passage of masonry 69 feet long. The interior measures 54 by 60 feet. Its shape is given as octagonal. Five of the gunports remain, called the arrow-holes.

They measure four feet at the mouth and only sixteen inches at the other end. Arched buildings extend eight feet from the outer walls and look into an open court. The later study of the blockhouse gives the same interior length and breadth, calls the plan polygonal rather than octagonal, counts seven gunholes rather than five, and describes the castle rock as standing about eighty feet above the sea rather than seventy-two. The body of the buildings measured more than 165 feet from east to west, and in places up to 210 feet from north to south.

The castle was built of a red stone like that in the quarries near Garvald. Large masses of fallen wall appear vitrified, or run together. In the north-west of the ruins an apartment about twelve feet square, nearly inaccessible, is by tradition the apartment of Mary, Queen of Scots. The castle was long said to be invulnerable, perhaps because of the sieges it survived.

By one local reckoning it could at one time accommodate a garrison of nearly two hundred foot soldiers and archers, and it guarded both the land and the sea approaches to Edinburgh.

A drawing by Antonio da Sangallo the Younger, marked as an opinion for the Duke of Albany, has been associated with Dunbar and may depict another project. The sheet, preserved in Florence, is a working sketch of a square fort protected by a ravelin, with a note that the proposal was made following Albany’s opinion. The arrangement of ravelin and caponier has been compared with the fortress of Salses in Roussillon. Albany’s interest in this kind of fortification has been linked to his time in Italy in the train of Louis XII, and to a voyage in 1501 that took him to the eastern Mediterranean and the fortress of Mytilene, where the Knights of Rhodes were engaged.

At Rhodes in 1496, under the Grand Master Pierre d’Aubusson, who like Albany was from the Auvergne, a slightly irregular pentagonal bastion called the St George Bastion was built. Whether the Dunbar blockhouse took its idea from Rhodes, from Italian designers such as Francesco di Giorgio, or from the constraints of the rock, the building remains the earliest datable artillery blockhouse of this kind in Britain. A French description of 1538 and an Italian description of Scotland of 1588 both single Dunbar out among Scottish castles. The 1588 account calls it very popular among all the others of Scotland.

James V came to the castle often in the summer of 1537, after the death of his first wife, Madeleine of Valois, and he oversaw the arrangement of his artillery. James Atkinhead, or Aikenhead, a Scottish courtier and diplomat, was installed as captain. He was a member of the household of James V and was sent to France at least three times over the king’s marriage. A marital alliance with France had been agreed in 1517 by the Treaty of Rouen.

In January 1535 James wrote to Francis I and sent Atkinhead to explain that he could not, without the consent of the Parliament of Scotland, depart from that treaty by marrying a bride who was not a princess. Francis was suggesting Mary of Bourbon rather than his daughter Madeleine. Atkinhead was told to see and consider the gentlewoman who was offered, to note her person, her manners, her deportment, and her conversation, and, if satisfied, to enquire about a dowry as if she were a daughter of Francis. If the business was concluded, she was to come to Scotland with an honest train of gentlewomen before winter.

Letters went the same day to Philippe Chabot and Anne de Montmorency. The Duke of Albany suggested instead that James might marry Christina of Denmark, the widowed duchess of Milan, and progress toward Mary of Bourbon was halted. There was also an enquiry into a marriage with Margaret Erskine, a former mistress of the king. On 28 December 1535 Atkinhead was sent again to resume the Vendôme plan and to get the best terms, including a sober number of gentlewomen in Mary’s train.

James married Madeleine of Valois at Notre-Dame in Paris on 1 January 1537. After her death he married Mary of Guise. Atkinhead was then made captain of Dunbar. In 1539 the Earl of Norfolk mentioned that a member of the Hamilton family, wife of the late captain of Dunbar, was living in Berwick-upon-Tweed.

She was a daughter of Patrick Hamilton of Kincavil. The note does not name her husband.

In 1540 Atkinhead’s garrison included foreign artillery and handgun experts: Master Wolf; Morso, or Marco, of Armorica, who was the armourer; Peter Cumbo; Tibo Rukour; John Rubino; and Peter Schoffett. In August 1541 the king’s armourer, William Smeberd, refurbished weapons at Dunbar, including halberds and Jedburgh staves. Patrick Wemyss of Pittencrieff was captain in 1542 and spent one hundred pounds Scots on repairs.

Gavin Douglas was a prisoner in the castle in 1515, and the black cavern has been supposed to be the dungeon where he was held. He was born about 1474, or in 1476, at Tantallon Castle in East Lothian, the third son of Archibald, fifth Earl of Angus, and of Elizabeth Boyd. A Vatican register that calls him thirteen in 1489 points to 1476. He studied at St Andrews from 1489 to 1494, and it is supposed that he then studied at Paris.

He was a bachelor in 1492 and a master of arts in 1496. He held Monymusk, then Lynton, the modern East Linton, and Hauch, the modern Prestonkirk, and about 1501 he became provost of the collegiate church of St Giles in Edinburgh. His literary work belongs to the years before Flodden. The Palice of Honour is dated 1501.

The Eneados, his Scots translation of Virgil’s Aeneid, including the thirteenth book by Mapheus Vegius, was finished in 1513, six weeks before the battle. He is not known to have written poetry after that. After Flodden, in which the earl’s lay sons were killed, the Douglas family took a central place in the minority of James V. Gavin’s nephew Archibald became sixth Earl of Angus and married the queen dowager, Margaret Tudor, on 6 August 1514.

Margaret nominated Gavin to the archbishopric of St Andrews. The chapter’s candidate, John Hepburn, prior of St Andrews, expelled him, and Hepburn was in turn displaced by Andrew Forman, bishop of Moray, who had the pope’s nomination. In January 1515, on the death of George Brown, bishop of Dunkeld, the queen nominated Gavin to Dunkeld. John Stewart, second Earl of Atholl, forced his brother Andrew Stewart on the chapter.

The pope’s sanction for Gavin came on 18 February 1515. When Albany assumed the regency, intercepted letters and the purchase of the bishopric from Rome, contrary to statute, were used against Gavin. He was imprisoned in Edinburgh Castle, then in St Andrews Castle under Prior Hepburn, later in Dunbar Castle, and again in Edinburgh. Papal intervention released him after nearly a year.

After July 1516 he appears to have been in possession of Dunkeld. On 17 May 1517 he went with Albany to France for the negotiations that ended in the Treaty of Rouen, and he was back in Scotland towards the end of June. He died of plague in London in September 1522, in the house of his friend Lord Dacre, and was buried in the church of the Savoy.

Dunbar was drawn into the war with England known as the Rough Wooing. Henry VIII made war to force the Scottish parliament to accept a marriage between his son Edward and the infant Mary, Queen of Scots. Edward was six at the start of the war. After Henry’s death in January 1547 the war continued under the Duke of Somerset for the boy king Edward VI, and it was the last major conflict between Scotland and England before the Union of the Crowns in 1603.

In July 1545 the Earl of Angus said that Edinburgh Castle had been refortified, but that he had heard of nothing done at Dunbar. French money amounting to 1,370 pounds was sent in 1546 to fund repairs. In August 1547 the cannon called Thrawynmouth was shipped from Dunbar for the siege of St Andrews Castle. Repair works were carried out by Robert Hamilton of Briggis.

An English invasion in September 1547 won the Battle of Pinkie, near Musselburgh, and put much of southern Scotland under occupation. Haddington was occupied. French military support included engineers. Migliorino Ubaldini strengthened Edinburgh Castle and Dunbar.

William Grey, thirteenth Baron Grey de Wilton, burnt Musselburgh on 9 June 1548 and the town of Dunbar on 12 June. The castle account places the burning of the town in June 1548 without the day. On 16 June 1548, 10,000 French troops arrived at Leith. Monsieur La Chapelle was made keeper of Dunbar on 18 June 1548, and William Hamilton of Humby was captain.

Further refortification in 1548 was directed by Piero Strozzi and Migliorino Ubaldini. English observers reported that more than five hundred workmen would be employed on the castle in August 1548. Regent Arran ordered the mason John Arthur to come from Haddington to work on it.

On 24 September 1549 the English soldier Thomas Holcroft described Peter Landstedt, a lieutenant of the German mercenary Courtpennick, that is Konrad Pennick. Despite cannon fire from the castle, Landstedt got a foothold in a house in the town and used the furniture to start fires. He planned an entrenchment in front of the castle for his guns. He thought the walls near the town were very old and low, revised with earth and mounds, and of stone on the natural rock.

He thought the old high walls of the inner court could be broken by bombardment so as to destroy the first walls of the castle. These plans were not carried out. The English abandoned Haddington on 19 September 1549. Hostilities ended with the Treaty of Boulogne of 24 March 1550, and the peace included the demolition and slighting of border fortifications.

In December 1550 Regent Arran gave a payment to the devisers and drawers of a new fort at Dunbar. The French soldier and writer Jean de Beaugué described the castle as a very handsome and strong place, built on a lofty rock on the edge of the sea, very difficult of approach, and so made that few places were at once more commodious by nature and less exposed to battery and to other methods of storming. He placed it near Lauder, Dunglass, Haddington, Eyemouth, Fast Castle, and the sea road of North Berwick and the Bass.

During her regency, Mary of Guise employed an Italian military engineer, Lorenzo Pomarelli. She paid James Acheson for works at Dunbar in August 1554. The French ambassador in London, Antoine de Noailles, advised her to strengthen and repair her fortresses, Dunbar among them. In June 1559 she came to Dunbar Castle in fear of the Protestant Lords of the Congregation, who had occupied Edinburgh.

The chronicle of Lindsay of Pitscottie, edited by Aeneas James George Mackay, is the account that places her there. Mackay, born in Edinburgh on 3 November 1839 and dead on 10 June 1911, was a lawyer and professor of constitutional law and history, a founder of the Scottish History Society, and the editor of that chronicle for the Scottish Text Society in 1899. In April 1560 Guise sent money to the French captain of Dunbar, Corbeyran de Sarlabous, for two weeks’ wages for workmen. In May an Italian engineer was working on further improvements for the French garrison.

Mary of Guise died in June 1560. In July, Robert Hamilton of Briggs, keeper of Linlithgow Palace and master of the royal artillery, and Robert Montgomery inspected the works for the Lords of the Congregation. They reported that the castle was more ample by the double than it had been, and capable of holding five hundred more soldiers. The new work was at once demolished as a provision of the Treaty of Edinburgh.

That treaty, also called the Treaty of Leith, was drawn up on 5 July 1560 between the commissioners of Elizabeth I, with the assent of the Lords of the Congregation, and the French representatives of Francis II, husband of Mary, Queen of Scots. It concluded the siege of Leith. It was concluded on 6 July, just short of a month after the death of Mary of Guise. The fortifications at Leith, Inchkeith, and Dunbar were duly removed, and the French garrisons left Scotland.

Mary did not ratify the treaty. Local landowners, including the prioress of North Berwick and the prioress of Haddington, were tasked with demolishing sections of a rampire, a rampart with its ditch and counterscarp, and a great platform for artillery. One hundred English workmen, called pioneers, were sent to the castle in August. Sarlabous remained in charge and refurbished a cavern that lay within the area scheduled for demolition.

The rebel Lord Sempill found refuge in the castle in August 1560. Sixty French troops under Sarlabous stayed until September 1561.

Gordon Donaldson, born in Edinburgh on 13 April 1913 and dead on 16 March 1993, wrote the political history of the years from James V to James VII and a study of power among the men of Mary Stewart. He edited the memoirs of Sir James Melville of Halhill. He held the chair of Scottish history at Edinburgh until 1979 and was then appointed Historiographer Royal. The keepership of Dunbar in Mary’s reign moved through the same circle of captains and royal servants whose politics he spent his career tracing.

Mary made Robert Anstruther captain of Dunbar in July 1561. He took charge of the cannons and ammunition according to an inventory made by Robert Hamilton of Briggs. Soon after her return to Scotland in August 1561 she appointed her half-brother, Lord John, keeper of the castle, and she visited in September. In November 1561 John Chisholm, comptroller clerk of the royal artillery, provided six culverins.

The master of work, William MacDowall, and David Rowan, a gunner from Edinburgh Castle, surveyed the fort. Mary stayed at Dunbar with Lord John on 30 December 1562. In October 1562 Chisholm had shipped cannon and gun carriages from Dunbar north to Aberdeen and back during operations against the Earl of Huntly. Mary appointed Simon Preston of Craigmillar captain.

She visited in February 1564 and stayed for a week in November 1564. On 24 August 1565, during the rebellion called the Chaseabout Raid, she ordered repairs to the gun emplacements and the artillery, hand tools that might be needed to rebuild the ramparts during a siege, and provisions, following Preston’s recommendations. In November 1565 the castle gunners James Hector and Harry Balfour disputed their seniority. On 18 November 1566 Mary wrote to England about the succession from Dunbar.

A local account adds an earlier crisis. After the murder of her secretary Rizzio, Mary, heavily pregnant, fled to Dunbar with her husband Henry, Lord Darnley, even though Darnley had instigated the murder. She rallied her supporters at the castle and returned to Edinburgh in triumph a week later. In 1567, about ten weeks after Darnley was himself murdered, she was brought to Dunbar after being abducted by James Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell, who was keeper of the castle.

The castle account dates that bringing to 24 April 1567, and says that she came to Dunbar again before she confronted her enemies at the Battle of Carberry Hill on 15 June 1567. She later married Bothwell.

The marriage was on 15 May 1567. On 12 May she had made Bothwell duke of Orkney and marquis of Fife. Many lords who had signed a bond in his favour in April turned against the marriage. Bothwell had been accused of Darnley’s murder and acquitted, after the Earl of Lennox did not appear at the trial.

On 11 June 1567 the Confederate Lords assembled in arms in Edinburgh, proclaiming that they would deliver the queen, revenge Darnley’s murder, and preserve the prince. Mary was at Borthwick Castle with Bothwell. The lords began a siege. Bothwell escaped, and Mary, disguised as a page, rode to Dunbar to meet him.

The French ambassador Philibert du Croc described their force marching from Dunbar, with supporters joining at Haddington. Mary made a proclamation at Gladsmuir. They stayed at Seton Palace and the next day came to Prestonpans. On the morning of 15 June they left Fa’side Castle and took position on Carberry Hill.

They were armed with cannon and pole-arms brought from Dunbar. Two hundred hagbutters of the royal guard were commanded by Captains Alexander Stewart and Hew Lauder. Seven or eight cannon were brought from Dunbar to the old fort by Fawside. Bothwell’s men brought three hundred pikes from the armoury at Dunbar.

The Confederate Lords, about two thousand men, approached from Musselburgh. The stand-off lasted from eleven in the morning until five in the afternoon. Du Croc tried to negotiate. Bothwell offered single combat.

William Kirkcaldy of Grange accepted, but Bothwell would not fight a man who was only a baron, and Mary announced that there would be no single combat. The day was hot, and her supporters had nothing to drink. She agreed to surrender to Kirkcaldy, who led her horse by the bridle down from the hill. The memoirs of Sir James Melville, in the edition prepared by Gordon Donaldson, carry that detail of the bridle.

Bothwell rode off to Dunbar Castle with twenty-five horsemen. William Drury, marshal of Berwick, described her clothes in the field as the fashion of the women of Edinburgh: a red petticoat, sleeves tied with points, a velvet hat, and a muffler. Another account says she was dressed only in a short shabby robe that scarcely reached below her knee. She had left a black dress sewn with grains of jet, a crimson coat and cloak, and a gold and silver embroidered hat in a chest at Fawside.

The lords took her to Edinburgh and then, breaking the oath on which she had surrendered, imprisoned her in Lochleven Castle. Bothwell got a ship, went to Shetland, and then to Norway. In September 1567 there was a siege of Dunbar to eject Bothwell’s supporters and the captain, Patrick Whitelaw, also written Quhytelaugh. The bakers and butchers of Haddington were summoned to supply the camp, and brewers were ordered to bring ale.

John Chisholm brought guns from Edinburgh Castle. In the same month the Privy Council wrote to the villages around Carberry asking for the return of the weapons taken from the field, which had been dispersed after the surrender. William Kirkcaldy of Grange was made keeper of Dunbar on 1 October.

The castle was finally slighted by order of the Parliament of Scotland in December 1567. The act, made with the advice and consent of James Stewart, Earl of Moray, the lord regent, and the three estates, recites the large expenses laid out by the king’s predecessors and by the king himself on Dunbar and on the fort of Inchkeith. It calls both places unprofitable to the realm and unable to defend it if assaulted. It says that both had become so ruinous that they would utterly decay unless sums were spent that could not be spent without great inconvenience.

It also recalls an act of parliament in the time of the king’s great-grandfather, James IV, ordering Dunbar to be demolished and cast down, which act had not been abrogated. It therefore ordains that the castle of Dunbar and the fort of Inchkeith be demolished and cast down utterly to the ground and destroyed in such a way that no foundation should be the occasion to build thereupon in time coming. The Historie of King James the Sext notes the order to demolish the king’s house of strength. Dunbar and Inchkeith were named together.

William Drury reported that Regent Moray was prevented from finishing the demolition in January 1568. The master carpenter estimated that the work would cost two thousand pounds Scots. It was said that the same sum spent on rebuilding would make Dunbar one of the strongest places in Scotland. The master carpenter who gave that estimate has been identified as probably Andrew Mansioun.

Mansioun, also written Mentioun, Manschone, or Manson, was a French artist at the court of James V. He died in 1579. He was master carpenter of the Scottish artillery for Mary, Queen of Scots, and for James VI. He carved decorative woodwork, engraved metal, made moulds for cast-iron ornaments, and worked at gun-founding.

He may have worked on the oak medallion portraits called the Stirling Heads, made about 1540 for the king’s presence chamber at Stirling with John Drummond of Milnab. He fitted the royal suite on the yacht Unicorn, engraved a brass for the tomb of David Beaton’s parents at Markinch in 1541, and carved a lion and a Latin inscription for the tomb of James V in 1542. He made a cradle for Prince James, the short-lived son of James V and Mary of Guise, and a bed for Regent Arran. He was appointed a gunner on 3 August 1543 at three pounds a month.

In March 1542 he was paid thirteen pounds, six shillings, and eight pence for engraving the king’s arms, with unicorns, thistles, and fleurs-de-lis, and the date, on cannon. The identification of him with the carpenter of 1568 is offered as a probability, not as a named entry in Drury’s report.

In September 1568 some of the stone of Dunbar was selected for reuse at the quayside of the Shore of Leith. A local account says that much of the ruin was demolished in the nineteenth century to rebuild the harbour. The newer basin, Victoria Harbour, dates from 1842. It is formed by a sea wall linking two rock outcrops, together with a quay along the shore parallel with the wall.

The older basin, of about 1710 to 1730, is a separate work, with a curved rubble pier and a shorter straight pier. The present relationship of water, rock, and wall is therefore not the medieval circuit unchanged. The blockhouse is largely inaccessible, and the passage that once joined it to the castle has collapsed. In spring and summer more than six hundred pairs of kittiwakes nest on the weathered walls.

The red fragments on the rock are what the parliament of December 1567, and the harbour works that came after, left of a fortress that had been rebuilt for guns and then ordered never to be rebuilt.