Glamis Castle—Home of the Duchess.

Auckland Star, Volume LVIII, Issue 44, 22 February 1927, Page 6

Glamis Castle—Home of the Duchess.

A Picturesque and Historic Stronghold in the Valley of Strathmore.

(By ROBERT S. ANGUS.)

"Hoine, v said a young matron, "when challenged by her husband for her use of the word after some years of married life, '"is "where your mother lives.' . And in that sense it may be confidently asserted that to the Duchess of York Glaniis Castle is still ''home," for it was there that the greater part of her happy youth was spent and there that she acquired that love of a country life which has survived her recent experiences among the "pleasures and palaces" and the multifarious ceremonial duties incidental to the Royal State. It is significant, at any rate, that Avhenever the Duke and Duchess can

snatch, a few days free - from public ■ engagements they find, their way to , Glamis, although even' there they are in demand for ceremonial occasions in the neighbourhood. Their fondness for the place is not surprising. Few Scottish mansion-houses have a pleasanter setting or are more lovely and interesting , in themselves. GJamis (which I. should explain is pronounced as a one-syllable word rhyming with "alms"), is situated in the broad flat. and fertile valley known .as Strathmore, or the '.'Great Glen," with the range of the Grampian mountains to the north and the round grassy Sidlaw Hills forming a screen to the south. The "Young Chevalier," when he spent a night or two in the castle during his fleeting days of illusory prosperity, declared that he had not seen the equal of it among the chateaux of the Continent/One might come across it in the valley of the Loire without any feeling of surprise, for like the great residences there it belongs to days when time, labour, and material must have been less valuable than they are now. Few Scottish families have escaped having a member with a craze for building and being saddled ■with residences of a size out of proportion to modern tastes, requirements, and purses. The Lyons were not among the number. It is fair to add that their chief builder, Patrick, the third earl of Kinghorne and first of Strathmore protested that he undertook the work "more , -to'.please myself than, out-of any

ostentation." He seems to have been a gentleman of the same turn as his contemporary Samuel Pepys, for he kept a "Book of Record," describing his "reformations." He knew what he was about, for he recognised that it would be futile to attempt the rebuilding of his dilapidated dwelling, some of it dating from the tenth or the eleventh century as a place of defence as much as of residence. "Such houses," he writes in his quaint and variable spelling "are quyt wone out of fashione, as feuds are, which is a great happiness, the cuntrie generally more civilised than it was of ancient times; and my owne opinion is when trobblesome times are, it is more safe for-a man to keep the

• fields than to inclose himself in the walls of a house, ■ so that there is no man more against these olde fashiones of tours and castles than I am." He was evidently ahead of his times in more senses than one, for he tells that his clearances of ruinous buildings "was the occasion of my undergoeing a great censure in the cuntrie, especiallie amongst my own people; and the working men who were brought in wrought with great backwardness and repining. I have been told that the cnntrie people here, when they met att church, or at bridals or burrialls, their discourse was only enveyiag against me as a puller down of what I had never built." He experienced the sorrows as well as the joys of those who act as their own architects, and his troubles during the eighteen years that the work occupied him, he records with a grim humour. He curtailed one tradesman's account thus—"lmprimis —for putting up hingings—nothing, in regard Andrew Wright should give me something for learning him to be an appolsterer." Labour troubles were no novelty in those seventeenth century days, for after commenting on the "shameless greed and unthankfulness" of the masons, he declares: "I hold it as a rule to agree with workmen so as not to have the trouble of feeding them, for in some cases if they know of no employment elsewhere they prolong the work for the benefit of having their meat bound to their mouth." Thus it would seem, "ca' canny" is no modern device. Turning over the faded pages of the "Book of Record" one feels a glow of sympathy with the writer as he toilfully restored the home of his ancestors, from which he had been practically banished to another property of the family, Huntly Castle, some twenty miles to the south in the Garse of Gowrie. "For the first ten years of my wedded life," he tells us, "I lived there and had enough to doe for the first seven of these ten to gett together as much as would conipleitly furnish that house; and we were as much strangers to Old Glainmiss as if it had not been; and for three years I could not indure allmost to come near or see it when the verie Mains or home farm was possessed by a wadsetter" (mortgagee). Thus in 1670 he and his wife went to Glands as "new beginners" and "lodged ourselves all in that storry of the old house which is on the top of the great staircase, for that storry was only glassed at that time." The work was hardly complete when, in 1689 Patrick was gathered to his fathers, but in the main it stands to this day as he left it. "Whigmaleeries and Curliewurlies." Glamis Castle, it is to be feared, would not have met with the approval of Andrew Fairservice, for it abounds in the "whigmaleeries and curliewurlies and open-steek hems," which he commended Glasgow Cathedral for lacking. Its mains feature is the great square tower, which is profusely adorned with sculptures, battlements, pinnacles and pepper-box turrets and other architectural frills. It partly encloses and partly consists of the original building which is ascribed by to the tenth or eleventh century. It is cer%inly of great antiquity and, judging from the fact that some of the walls are ten or twelve feet thick, was intendel for defence as well as residence. The tower consists of seven storeys and to reach the flat roof which commands one of the fairest and most extensive views in Scotland one has to climb a newel stairway of about 140 steps, mainly built in the thickness of the wall. From the tower project three wings containing the main rooms of the castle. The appearance and the atmosphere of the place are vividly described by Sir Walter Scott, whose bedroom is still known as such. "I was only nineteen or twenty years old," he writes, "when I happened to pass a night in this magnificent baronial castle. The hoary old pile contains much in its appearance and in the traditions connected with it impressive to the imagination. It was the scene of the murder of a Scottish king (this is doubtful)—not indeed the gracious Duncan, with whom the name naturally associates it, but Malcolm n. It contains also a curious monument of the peril of feudal times, having a secret chamber, the entrance to which is known* to only three persons at once—the Earl of Strathmore, his heir and any third person whom they may take into.their confidence. The extreme antiquity of the

building is vouched by the immense thickness of the walls and the varied and straggling arrangement of the accommodation within doors. I was conducted to my apartment in. a distant corner of the building, and I must own that as I heard door after door shut by my conductor as he retired I began to consider myself too far from the living and somewhat too near the dead. We had passed through what is called the King's Room, a vaulted apartment garnished with stags' antlers and similar trophies of the chase, and said by tradition to be the spot of Malcolm's murder, and I had an idea of the vicinity of the castle chapel. In spite of the truth of history the whole night scene in Macbeth's Castle rushed at once upon my mind and struck my imagination more forcibly than even when I have seen its terrors represented by John Kemble and his inimitable sister." The Great Hall. Internally the feature of the castle is the great hall, a vaulted apartment of 00 feet long by 25 feet wide, with its walls of dressed stone-work (from which the layers of plaster of misguided generations have had to be removed) its stone benches in the embrasures of the windows, its ancient oak chairs carved with the family arms, and its decorations carefully chosen in keeping with its medieval atmosphere. The oak-panelled dining-room is

emblazoned with the arms of the successive holders of the title and of the families with which they inter-married. The drawing room portraits include those of James VI., Charles 1., Charles 11. (these by Lely), Graham of C'laverhouse, and other personages indicative of the Royalist sympathies which have always marked the family. The possession of a private chapel—which accommodates about 100 worshippers—is equally a sign that the family had adhered to the Episcopalian form of service. This chapel completed in 16S8 has a roof painted by the famous de Witt, who about that tiue was employed at Holyrood. The fifteen largest panels, according to a contemporary document, are drawn "conform to cutts iu a Bible here in the house, the rest of the panels in the roof to be as ho shall invent." Inigo Jones is said—but there is some controversy about this —to have contributed to the seventeenth century renovations and to have been responsible for the design of the central staircase. In the course of the various reconstructions the builders have come across many forgotten stairways, and fireplaces and a well, which is conclusive proof that the original designers had in view the possibility of the place having to stand a siege.

In the quotation from Sir Walter Scott mention has already been made of the secret chamber. Though those who alone can know are naturally silent on the point I am assured —and of such a large and rambling structure it is easy to believe—that there is such a chamber. The traditions associated with it are various and therefore cannot be all true. One of them is that it is inhabited by "Beardie," fourth Earl of Crawford, for a hasty vow that he would play dice till the Day of Judgment. As a matter of fact he "tuik the fever and died" in 1454. But whatever the truth the possession of a genuine tradition, which has prevailed for several centuries, is priceless. There is no sturdier guardian of the spirit of the place than the present Countess, under whose guidance I had the privilege of making a tour of the castle. Though an Englishwoman by birth— she would have been the present Duke of Portland but for her sex—she is enthusiastically proud of her Scottish home, and has done much to revive 1 purposely avoid the word "restore" with its tragic associations—the Castle of Glaniis as it left the hands of its builders three hundred years ago. Jμ these days when so many of the old estates and mansions are passing out of the hands of their owners, it is refreshing to find one where the best features of the feudal system still survive—a county family maintaining the old spirit of noblesse oblige with its recognition of responsibility for those who live within its domains, and a contented and prosperous tenantry which, while jealously maintaining its independence and self-res|>ect, looks to "the big hoose" for leadership, for social example, and for the preservation of the amenities of life. Amid Mich surroundings and in such an atmosphere the Duchess of York was brought up.