Stone of Destiny Read online

  Stone of Destiny

  Stone of Destiny

  Ian Hamilton

  This eBook edition published in 2011 by

  Birlinn Limited

  West Newington House

  Newington Road

  Edinburgh

  EH9 1QS

  www.birlinn.co.uk

  First published as No Stone Unturned in 1952 by Gollancz, London Subsequently published as The Taking of the Stone of Destiny in 1991 by Lochar Publishing, Moffat

  First published by Birlinn Ltd in 2008

  Copyright © Ian Hamilton 1991, 2008 Foreword copyright © Alex Salmond 2008

  The moral right of Ian Hamilton to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form without the express written permission of the publisher.

  eBook ISBN: 978-0-85790-066-1

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Foreword

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  To Jeannette:

  The safe harbour of all my joys

  Foreword

  I was not even born when Ian Hamilton reclaimed the Stone of Destiny, but I feel I know the story as if it were my own.

  The reason for that familiarity is that anyone who had any pride in being Scottish knew of Ian, his colleagues and their exploits and saw the events of Christmas Eve 1950 as the first stirrings of something big. In that sense there is a direct line between what Ian did then, and what the Scottish National Party achieved in May 2007, when we entered this nation’s government for the first time. It was Ian who – by means of a single act – started the modern process of waking this country up to its history and its potential.

  Of course Ian was not alone. The four students who stealthily waited in the chilly dark of Westminster Abbey deserve collective remembrance and collective praise. Ian, along with Alan Stewart, Gavin Vernon and Kay Matheson, took a risk with their futures in an age which was much less tolerant than ours. And in returning the Stone to Scotland they demonstrated that there was a new generation in our country which was prepared to take individual risks in order to assert our national rights.

  Ian, of course, has gone on doing that in his inimitable style ever since. The toughness of mind and character he showed more than half a century ago as a student has been his constant hallmark as a tireless exponent of Scottish independence and as a successful advocate. He has fought for countless individuals in the courts, often against overwhelming odds, whilst always standing up for his country when few others were prepared to do so. He is both an original thinker and an iconoclast, and it is typical of him that in retirement he has fearlessly embraced a new challenge and some new technologies in order to become one of Scotland’s most read internet bloggers. Ian always wanted to be – and is – at the cutting edge!

  This book – and the film which it has now inspired – will bring to a new audience the events of that long ago winter when Scotland cheered the cheek of a daring raid whilst the establishment huffed and puffed. It is a good and massively entertaining story in itself, but it also has a wider resonance. The fact that the Stone (or at least a stone!) now resides in Scotland – in Edinburgh Castle, no less – testifies to the abiding interest that Ian and his friends created, not just in the ultimate fate of that block of sandstone but in the whole question of the proper relationship between the countries of this island.

  The final return of the stone by a Tory Government in 1996 was meant to placate Scottish feeling. Devolution four years later had the same intention. But Scots are more perceptive than that. Scotland will only fully flourish when it secures independence – equality between the countries and peoples north and south of the border. That is what I have spent my life working for, just as Ian has spent his on the same pursuit. It has been an honour to work with him on that task, which I think we both know is nearer than ever to completion.

  Rt Hon. Alex Salmond MSP MP

  First Minister of Scotland

  Fold of value in the world west from Greece

  Over whom it has been our duty to keep guard

  Have we slept on our watch?

  Hugh MacDiarmid

  Lament for the Great Music

  Chapter One

  I am a Queen’s Counsel in a state of treason against Westminster. Yet for many years I was ashamed of this book. Never of our action; only of the book. It was first published when I was a stripling of 25 and knew how to put the world to rights. Striplings should not write books, or so I thought. They put things on record which cling to the author in after years. I long hung my head in shame at the brashness of the youth who wrote these pages. Worse, when I was doing other interesting things I disliked being referred to as ‘The Stone Man’. For nearly 40 years I refused to read what I had written here.

  Now I know I was wrong. Not wrong in what I wrote, but wrong to be ashamed of it. This is a youngster’s book, and I was immeasurably lucky to be that youngster. I am now a member of the establishment, not of that old, worn-out, Anglicised establishment of second-raters, but of the new one, which proudly affirms the ancient doctrine of our law that the power of government resides with the Scottish people, and not at Westminster. I look back on my visit to that other Westminster without dismay or shame, but with a great elation. I done it. Me and some others. That girl and those boys done well. I was one of them. It was a great adventure.

  I have had many other adventures since. Yet this was the first and most important one. It set the tone for my whole life. It taught me that non-conformity in thought and deed is the only vital life. The individual is more important than the mass. Any single person can change history. MPs are the least effectual of citizens. Political parties are for sheep-minds. Heresy is godliness. And so on. It was the first major event in a life in which I have loved greatly, and in which I have been both loved and hated in return. I would never have it otherwise. To inspire only respect is to fail. Respect is a form of indifference.

  I have therefore not changed much in a book which was first published in 1952. I have added two chapters at the end to bring the story up to date, and done some revision for the sake of clarity, but the story itself remains the same. The extravagances of youth are all there. I hereby homologate and accept them. Every single word and extravagance.

  Yet in accepting them I have one qualification to make. As a youngster I was far too moderate. Away with English government, in every aspect. That is now my view. English government is for the English, and I am a Scot. Not a Scottish Nationalist. I do not need any such desperate description to define my love for my country. Indeed,
I think that nationalism can be dangerously akin to racism, and to be a racist is to defy the common humanity of all mankind. I am a simple Scot, and I want my country to take its place in Europe and in the world. We Scots are European, not English, not British. In the muddled way of youth I set out to make these views public not by speech or writing, but by action.

  Most, but not all, of the action takes place in an abbey. This might be described as the desecration of altars, something the English were quick to point out, although it was they who burned our fine Border abbeys. I am now an agnostic, and I was once a Presbyterian. Presbyterians know no altars, but I respect their veneration in others. I remind my Roman Catholic friends that Westminster Abbey is in the hands of the Anglican heresy. Roman Catholics should not therefore be offended by our actions. As for Anglicans themselves. Hmmmmm! When you use your churches to reset stolen property you’ve got it coming to you. This story is about how it came to you.

  In any writing the political opinion of the writer may show through. I have tried to avoid this. I am not political in any true sense. I learned about my country from two strange sources. First was from my father’s love for the writings of Rudyard Kipling. Second, I was a wartime schoolboy. Five words of Winston Churchill are ever with me: ‘We shall defend our island.’ I fancy I heard them said. I sense a sort of forlorn quality to them. It was against all odds. As he willed us to defend our island, so we who took the Stone willed our people to defend our country. We were idealists. We were grievously young. I have never changed.

  But the story of the Stone of Destiny should tell itself. This is it.

  Chapter Two

  The Stone of Destiny had always been in my mind as a symbol of the continued existence of the Scottish nation. How I first learned about it is a strange story. Cranks, eccentrics and like subversives might well be encouraged by this story. These are the people who can only hope to cause ripples on the smooth surface of any society, but ripples on a pool can reach a far shore. That far and unlikely shore was our four-room semi-detached house in a Paisley suburb. I was born in one of the rooms of that house, and I grew up in it.

  To that house came every day except Sunday two newspapers. One was called the Bulletin, and the other the Glasgow Herald. The Bulletin was the sister paper of the Herald, and it was directed at the sisters and wives of the Herald readership, so my mother read it. I was a child, newly able to read, and there were many pictures in it. What with looking at the pictures, and spelling out the text, I developed an interest in the Bulletin. It was edited by a secret and private Scottish patriot called J.M. Reid. He did what he could in his quiet way to keep his readers informed of Scotland, and of Scottish history. History is written by the usurpers and suppressed by them also. Even as I revise this work in December 2007 history is still not taught in our schools. I understand that there are plans to make it part of the Higher education syllabus, yet few infant and primary teachers have the knowledge to pass it on to our children at the age I learned it at my mother’s knee. To this day, therefore, little is known by the ordinary Scot about our country’s history. Its teaching is quietly discouraged. Once it was more than quietly discouraged. It was suppressed. Any time England invaded Scotland, the invaders sought out every scrap of paper that contained the records of our country and, when they were driven back, took them south, wiping their bloody noses on our parchments. Nevertheless some of these records survived, even if they were kept in London.

  To London, with their hats off, and meek words in their mouths, went some Scottish historians in the 1930s. ‘Please,’ they said, ‘could we have some of our records back?’ and, because for many years things had been quiet in Scotland, London relented. Some of the records were returned. I am not quite sure what they were. I think they were mediaeval Treasury Accounts. Whatever they were, their generous return caused a flutter of interest. We were beginning to have a history again. This is where the eccentrics and subversives come in.

  Wendy Wood was one of these eccentrics. She lived her life for Scotland, and often paraded the streets as a walking billboard, announcing her views. When the Treasury Records came back, she paraded in the Royal Mile with a sandwich board, and she was photographed. The sandwich board read ‘ENGLAND DISGORGES SOME OF THE LOOT, BUT WHERE IS THE STONE OF DESTINY?’ J.M. Reid printed that photograph in the Bulletin, and I remember the big black scrawly writing to this day. I was a small boy when I saw it and I asked my mother about it.

  Mothers are difficult when it comes to stamping out a nation’s history. Mothers have a race memory. My own mother never read a history book in her life, yet she had a fund of stories, and from the time I was too old to be crooned over, the stories she told were of the old Scottish folk heroes. These stories must have been passed down to her from her own mother, and so back to the roots of time. For that simple woman, history had passed into legend, and she told me these legends. I was familiar with that sallow, smiling, thoughtful throat-slitter the Good Lord James before I could read, and Black Agnes of Dunbar seemed like some relative, not all that long dead. I can still picture her, with her black wind-blown hair and her sparkling dark eyes as she drove the English off by waving a contemptuous duster at them from her castle walls. The old Scotland lives on in many a mother’s memory. To my mother, then, I took this picture of Wendy Wood, and demanded an explanation. What was the Stone of Destiny?

  She told me the story. When my brother and I fenced with our toy swords, we fought between us as to who should be Wallace, and who should be Bruce, so I understood what she said. The story she told fitted into my mind. I knew the background. I knew of the Wars of Independence. What I found difficult to understand was where London came in.

  She told me how the Stone had been taken to London during these wars and never returned. She told me the older stories of how it had been brought to Argyll before the time of Saint Columba, and how since then every King of Scotland had been crowned sitting on it, until it was carried south during Edward I’s invasion of 1296. ‘And there have been among us 110 kings, and not one foreign born among them,’ she said, quoting unconsciously and accurately from the Declaration of Arbroath of 1320.

  ‘And why is it in London?’ the child asked.

  And before it was brought to Scotland, the story went on, ignoring the question, the Scottish peoples had carried it with them as they migrated across Europe. All migrations take place westward, she said, and the Celtic peoples thought so much of the Stone that they carried it with them as the symbol of their nationality wherever they went.

  ‘But why,’ the question continued, ‘is it in London, and not here among the Scots?’

  She swerved round the question, obviously determined that I should know the whole story, and told me that it was supposed to be Jacob’s pillow, on which he rested his head when he had the dream of the angels ascending and descending their heavenly ladder. And then she told me the ancient story from the Gaelic, in a rhyme which has remained ever with me,

  Unless the fates shall faithless prove,

  And prophets voice be vain.

  Where’er this sacred Stone is found,

  The Scottish race shall reign.

  ‘But why . . .?’ I continued.

  And then she told me that when the English had been driven out, and the battles won, and the people’s homes made secure, the English had promised to return the Stone, and had broken their promise.

  A promise is sacred to a child; and a broken promise a terrible thing, long to be remembered. I remembered that broken promise all through my childhood. Something should be done to redress that old wrong.

  I was little more than a child when war broke out in 1939. Yet it lasted long enough for me to grow into young manhood. I still had dreams of Scotland, and the dreams I dreamed were of a new Scotland, alive, full of ideas, and above all, full of self-confident young people unashamed of their birthright; not trying to be a subspecies of the English, but being themselves. I dreamed of a people once more fulfilling its old role as the po
werhouse of ideas for the world. We had done it before, and I knew we could do it again. I had many a tussle at school to assert these principles, and then one morning, after much heart-searching, I put these ideas into an attic of my mind, and went into a recruiting office and signed up. I wanted to be a fighter pilot, and it seemed to me that this was a just war. I have never regretted the decision.

  I was still a schoolboy and underage, but I was accepted for training as a pilot. Before I could be trained the war ended and my services as a pilot were no longer needed. Nevertheless, I was detained for nearly three years in the Royal Air Force, servicing aeroplanes for other people to fly. It was a bitter, lonely time, but still the dream of Scotland persisted, and when I was demobilised in 1948, the dream was still with me. I enrolled at Glasgow University, but when I tried to formulate my thoughts and convert others, I found that everyone saw Scotland only in terms of Westminster government, and what could be got from there. I wanted a Scotland which would reject Westminster utterly, but I could find no sympathisers, so I modified my ideas, and went along with the crowd. The welfare state was being created. I have never wavered in my support for the welfare state. A people who do not look after their dispossessed is a race of savages. Yet the welfare state I saw being created was a cold chill thing, run by bureaucrats, administered from London. This was nothing like what the Scots could do by themselves. I was ashamed.

  Shame was what characterised the mid twentieth-century Scot. The shame was that we were not English. We had lost our sense of community. English customs, English pronunciations, English table manners were the mark of success. You were nothing if you did not speak proper, and proper was to speak with a south of England accent, or as near to it as the inherited muscles of the Scottish lips and tongue could manage. People even tried to think as the English did, and if there is one thing a people cannot do, it is to use the thought processes of another people. Most Scots thought of themselves as a sort of second-class English.