Changing Perceptions

CharlesMcKean is Professor of Scottish Architectural History at the University of Dundee. His book provides an alternative to the traditional view on the development of Scottish castellated architecture. Chapter 1 ' Changing Perceptions' explains this.

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Changing Perceptions

Continue my ride along the curvature of this beautiful bay [Largo] and meet with the cheerful and frequent succession of towns, chateaux, and well-managed farms.Thomas Pennant, 1772

I sent several drawings of your chateau and the means of enlarging it.

Robert Mylne to Lord Breadalbane regarding Balloch (Taymouth), 23 November 1789

I am most anxious to introduce the creator of the magnificent chateau of Murthly to them.

P.B. Ainslie to James Gillespie Graham, Burntisland, June 1830

Until very recently, the case for Renaissance architecture in Scotland was simply put - there was almost none. Instead, the buildings of the period c. 1500 to c. 1684 were defined by what followed, namely what appeared to be the inevitable triumph of classicism in the late seventeenth century. That was the time when Scottish country gentlemen, blinking like moles in the sunlight, were supposed to have emerged from their strongholds into a countryside enjoying its first real taste of peace. Architectural development in Scotland during the Renaissance centuries was dismissed as anachronistic and unworthy of serious attention.

This conclusion probably derived from the fact that once the Middle Ages were over, Scotland elected to follow a divergent path from the continent. In the fifteenth century, Scots nobles had expressed power and status in a manner not dissimilar to the rest of Europe through the construction of crenellated towers. Although the precise form and material was unique to Scotland, these country houses were essentially recognisable within a European context. But between c. 1500 and c. 1684, Scots nobles parted cultural company with their peers in France and Italy when they refused to adopt classicism as the Renaissance expression of power.

Bedevilled by how to explain why that happened, scholars constructed a rationale based upon five cultural propositions. First, that all Scots country houses built during the Renaissance remained tower houses; second, that these tower houses were designed primarily for defence ; third, the reason they showed so little classical influence was their remoteness from mainstream Europe; fourth, that Scots were ignorant of architectural movements on the continent and lastly, that it required the arrival of an architect with knowledge of the classical language to design unfortified houses for the first generation of Scottish lairds to realise that the tower house was an anachronism, and to persuade them to abandon corbel and crowstep in favour of cornice and pediment. So, from an architectural divergence from Europe, much broader conclusions were drawn about the country's Renaissance culture, and about the outlook of its nobility. Scots aristocrats were, it seemed, prevented from enjoying the leisurely architecture of the Loire chateaux or the villas of Palladio by poor communications, a political culture of feuding that required a continuation of castellated building, and an ignorant and introverted building industry.

Each of those retrospective preconceptions is dubious. Contemporaries almost never called these country seats 'tower houses' - and spoke of them as 'castles' almost as rarely (save where the term was desired by a grandee as an added signal of nobility). The word 'tower' was generally restricted to the vertically planned country house of the Middle Ages like, say, Kinnaird in Perthshire. The proposition of isolation from Europe also goes contrary to the facts. Indeed, Scots nobles who had not spent considerable time on the continent felt the need to justify themselves to their peers. Far from there being evidence of Scottish ignorance of contemporary cultural ideas, the truth was rather to the contrary. As for feuding, and the necessity for building for defence, suffice it to say that there was probably less need for defensive structures in Scotland than in most European countries, and when considered against the criteria of Renaissance military fortifications, Scottish country houses were woefully inadequate. That is why the use of the word 'chateau' for the mock-military Scottish Renaissance country seat by the intelligent, well-travelled people quoted at the head of this chapter is so significant. They wished to indicate something nobler than a house, more martial than the classical country seat, possibly something more exotically European than British - certain that it was not a defensible castle. These houses were almost unclassifiable within the normal terminology used for British country house architecture during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Although also meaning 'castle', 'chateau' is used in this book according to the Renaissance French meaning of 'the dwelling of the owner of a great property, a large and beautiful pleasure house in the countryside', and its use for this purpose was not unknown in Scotland. The word 'chateau' avoided both the militaristic implications of the term 'castle', and the patronising domesticity of the phrase 'laird's house', which discounts the displays of chivalric nobility that were, perhaps, the most important aspect of the design. It is simply a different way of expressing the impression such houses made upon visitors at the time - the English traveller, Sir William Brereton, for example, when he passed to Linlithgow in 1636: 'by the way I observed gentlemen's (here called lairds) houses built all castle-wise' [my italics] 'All castle-wise' is taken to imply in imitation of castles rather than in the substance of them.

Many of the chateaux that so delighted eighteenth-century naturalist and topographical author Thomas Pennant's eye were greatly altered, reduced to ruins, or vanished within a century of his visit. The rain that washed away their mortar washed away their domesticity, leaving ruins with overemphatic battlements, gunloops and turrets. They were now confirmed as 'castles' and it was as such that the architects David MacGibbon and Thomas Ross categorised them in their exhaustive, five-volumed illustrated survey of the Castellated and Domestic Architecture of Scotland over a hundred years ago. It was the first time that Scottish architecture had been examined so thoroughly within its own terms and the effort they expended was prodigious. While earning their living from

an architectural practice in Edinburgh, they travelled to every remote neuk of the country by boat, train and horse, to measure, draw, sketch and to watercolour most pre-1700 castles, country houses, sundials, monuments, views, churches and town houses. So exhaustive were they that it is rare to discover a castellated house of the right period that they overlooked. Sometimes, undoubtedly hard pressed for time, they recorded a wrong orientation, or a tower in the wrong place. Their hasty reconnaissance of the Palace of Pitsligo, Buchan, for example, concluded erroneously that it was but a tower surrounded by labourers' dwellings.

Perhaps their train was due.

To make sense of what they had seen, measured and carefully researched, MacGibbon and Ross divided Scottish castle construction into four periods'- with sub-sections according to the shape of the building's plan. They were struck by the similarity in form between the tower house and the early medieval English and Norman keep and assumed that the keep was the standard unit of the Scottish country house. Subsequent developments could be analysed as variations of this basic module: the keep extended into L-plan, U-plan and T-plan and the courtyard. These terms are still used a hundred years later. Since MacGibbon and Ross believed the buildings they were studying were mostly castles in which defensiveness had been the primary consideration, it was scarcely surprising that they looked to somewhere like the Norman keep of Rochester Castle as an appropriate comparator for the Scottish tower house; and failed to include most contemporary houses that were not castellated.

In that, they were simply victims of their time. The predominant Victorian perception of pre-1707 Scotland was of a country isolated from the mainstream European Renaissance, turned in on itself and continuing anachronistically to build castles when mansions, country houses and villas were being constructed elsewhere. That perception remained current well towards the end of the twentieth century. The only distinctive architecture generally acknowledged to be of an international quality was the brief flowering of romance in early seventeenth-century north-eastern Scotland in houses like Craigievar. Even then, in its lack of display of the tenets of classicism this sole Scottish contribution to the renaissance was portrayed as engagingly odd or - even worse - an expression of a 'Scottish vernacular'. Vernacular implies the lack of an a priori design input, and the absence of a skilled designer. The very suggestion that the country seat in Scotland might just be vernacular, rather than designed like the bulk of country houses elsewhere, demonstrates lust how deep-seated had become the perception that the Renaissance had eluded Scotland's architecture. MacGibbon and Ross and their successors found castles because they were looking for them, and interpreted their plans and details accordingly. The principal aim of this book, however, is to examine the Renaissance country seat in its political and cultural context without such a distorting perspective. Many Renaissance sources illuminating this period in Scotland's history and published a hundred years ago would have supported such an unflattering interpretation of the country's architecture - particularly the influential and much quoted volumes of extracts from contemporary documents, The Domestic Annals of Scotland. Compiled by that prolific author, architectural enthusiast, antiquarian and early conservationist Robert Chambers, these three volumes of misery heaped upon misery presented a view of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Scotland that was almost barbaric. Chambers was frank about his prejudice. Mid-sixteenth century Scotland was a very poor, rude country - a threnody to which he returned again and again, like the chorus of a lamentable Border ballad. 'It is forced upon us that the Scots were, at this very time, a fearfully rude and ignorant people . . . ruder than the England of that day.' He perceived the country as 'bloody and turbulent' and puzzled over the thoughts of the 'polite' French poet Sallust on coming into contact with the royal circle around James VI in 1587, given the 'rude state of the people generally'. Like MacGibbon and Ross, he had a preconception about the country, and there was no shortage of material that he could select to justify it.

And select he did. The Annals have a preponderance of material on witchcraft and their trials, upon bloodfeud or rebellion, on plagues, freaks and incredible natural phenomena. This, he claimed, was part of a faithful recording of all 'symptoms of advancing civilisation' or 'anything that illustrates the progress of the arts as worthy of notice. That was far from true. He omitted almost all of Scottish poetry, painting, architecture, literature and, indeed, material on changing social and living patterns such as inventories. In the context of repeated attempts to explain the tragic fate of 'Marie Stuart' in terms of the defeat of European culture and civilisation by the forces of Scottish primitivism, it cannot be surprising that a notion of Scotland as a brutish country during the Renaissance should have taken root. Furthermore, this perception passed from historical hypothesis into architectural practice in a neat example of life imitating art when country houses undergoing alteration were rendered considerably more 'ancient' than they had been originally. In the late eighteenth century Sir John Dalrymple joked about how, when he had appointed 'Bob Adams' to refashion his ancient seat of Oxenfoord, Midlothian, Adam had 'really made it much older than it was' for the project was really about ratcheting up the romanticism. The nineteenth century cult of rubblemania, however, was entirely serious. Once majesty and money were deemed to consist in the display of powerful stonework, houses were stripped of the harling that had concealed their joints, strength and the minutiae of their construction. Many of the buildings in this book remained harled long enough to be photographed as such, but when, for example, Robert Lorimer 'restored' Earlshall, Fife, in the 1890s, he removed its coat of harling to make it less domestic in character and more martial. He likewise removed the plaster from the vaulted Great Hall at Lennoxlove, presumably in conformity to the philosophy that bare stonework added nobility and honour to a 'baronial hall'. Indeed, a contemporary wrote of Blair, Ayrshire (not a Lorimer scheme), 'It is a pity that the vaulted ceiling has been plastered; the original bare stonework would be so attractive If Scottish architecture was to be classified as primitivism as a work of art, it was hardly surprising that a belief should grow that 'civilised' qualities only entered the Scottish country seat after James VI had moved down to London - presumably to acquire some polish.

Apart from the classifications by MacGibbon and Ross, the only -systematic inventory and analysis of details of the Scottish country house was undertaken from an archaeological perspective, with a preconception firmly focused upon its defensive capability. There has been no attempt to consider it in terms of the four categories suggested by Italian Renaissance architect and theorist Sebastiano Serlio: farm or manor place, fortresses and villas derived from chateaux, small pavilions and 'villas '-,which represent the revival of the Roman "villa suburbana". All such categories were to be found in Scotland. Little illumination, moreover, is to be derived from the patterns of English or Irish architecture during the period, since the cultural and technological impulses were so very different. In any case, even early Renaissance architecture in England was considered backward until well after the Second World War, as James Lees-Milne admitted:

It is nowadays usual for knowing connoisseurs to depreciate architecture of the Tudor era as graceless, vulgar and barbaric . . . We . . . are offended by what we consider the Tudors' wilful disregard of the rules of taste and their reliance upon pictorial effect as the end-all of architectural endeavour. That is where we were unjust and wrong . . . .

What was occurring in Scotland was likewise individual and likewise misinterpreted.

At least Lees-Milne had plenty of raw material - namely surviving Tudor country houses - with which to redress the balance. Unfortunately, apparently uniquely in Europe, Scotland forswore most of its legacy of Renaissance houses during the eighteenth century. The few that survive reasonably intact architecturally are generally those of families who, through indifference (their principal seat had moved elsewhere), piety or penury, took the unfashionable decision neither to transform nor demolish. The interiors of these properties, however, were likely to have been refurbished with eighteenth- or nineteenth-century material.

The paucity of authentic Scottish Renaissance interiors led to some fine myth-making. The interior of the Provand's Lordship, a 1471 prebendary manse beside Glasgow Cathedral was 'restored' in 1927 to demonstrate how the house might have been when it was occupied in the late seventeenth century- by William Bryson - and was furnished with choice items from Sir William Burrell's great collection. Visitors were presented with a gloomy, stark interior. largely hare-walled and bare-ceilinged, with an occasional bed, tapestry and desultory kist chest and one or two items of uncomfortable-looking furniture. the chairs deprived of the elaborate cushions that inventories imply were usual. The harling that had covered the rubble exterior until at least 1901 was removed It was a tableau of Renaissance Scotland as a place to be tholed (endured). The Renaissance interior presented at Provand's Lordship was a world away from the patterned floors, silks,

damasks, piles of furniture. monogrammed cushions, house-clocks, harpsichords, 'little organs', paintings, vividly coloured or plastered ceilings,

painted exteriors, the gilt weathervanes and the finials revealed by inventories. One would scarcely imagine its occupier savouring the cosmopolitan fare of capers, olives and anchovies accompanying ptarmigan, followed by chocolate (the paper-brown type rather than the reddish variety) enjoyed by the Campbells of Cawdor. This restoration did Scotland a cultural mischief.

Nigel Tranter's five-volumed The fortified House in Scotland, almost as extensive a survey as that of MacGibbon and Ross seventy years earlier, accepted that most of the buildings described were houses (albeit fortified) rather than castles. Once they were accepted as houses, a new distinction began to be drawn: pre-Reformation castles and post-Reformation houses - by implication showing the Reformation as a civilising force. It was the third time people had managed to prove that the Scots always needed some such external agent to reform their ways. First, it was peacefulness settling in the countryside in the later seventeenth century after the Civil War. Then civilising ideas -wafted back up north once the king was settled in London after 1603. Now it was the Reformation in 1560 that had managed to transform pre-Reformation castles into peaceable post-Reformation country seats.

In fact, 1560 has no relevance to the developing architecture of the country seat in Scotland, as you shall see; save for the release of monastic land and the subsequent opportunity for a new class of person to build a smaller country seat. It occurred midway through the Marian period - the time when Scotland was under the influence of Mary of Guise and her daughter Mary Queen of Scots . This important period in Scotland's cultural evolution has been overlooked through overemphasis upon religion and the absorbingly evil political fortunes of those two

monarchs (if the queen regent may be called such). The principal influence that the date 1560 might have had upon country house design was restricted to the gradual disappearance of the private chapel.

It is impossible to detach architecture from the culture of its time, and the more we know about Renaissance Scotland, the less sustainable the myth of an archaic defensive architecture becomes. The myth would ask us to believe that the sublime harmonies of a glorious Robert Carver tenpart mass - let alone the madrigals, songs, instrumental pieces and clarsach works, the histories of George Buchanan, John Major or Hector Boece, and the volumes of sixteenth -century poetry - were created or enjoyed in buildings of an unnaturally antique character. A distinction of much of the music - notably of Carver's masses - is the extent to which it integrates contemporary European trends with very identifiably Scottish strains. A similar intent to 'lend Scottish public worship a distinctly Scottish accent' underlay the way the 1510 Aberdeen Breviary was compiled. If it was accepted in music, poetry and illustration that the Scots had participated in the Renaissance - while adding something of their own individuality - why should those same Scots characteristics reveal backwardness when it came to architecture?

Not least because they were highly valued throughout Europe as good fighting stock, the Scots were enmeshed in European politics and culture. Perhaps Chambers found it difficult to accept the typically Renaissance paradox that somebody could be highly cultured and savage at the same time. Francis Stewart, Earl of Bothwell, for example, a much travelled European Scot with whom Queen Anna liked to converse in French and who had built a fashionable new lodging within Crichton Castle in the 1580s upon his return from Italy, (Fig. 9.2) was widely suspected of dabbling in witchcraft if not necromancy. Three times he attempted to separate his kinsman the king, by kidnap, from the malign influence of his adviser Maitland of Thirlestane. Similarly, the Earl of Gowrie who spent seven years in Padua imbibing the Renaissance, was obsessed with the Cabbala and necromancy, and attempted to murder the king in 1600. Such ambiguities were indigestible to early nineteenth-century rational Presbyterians.

There were European humanists at the Scottish Courts and humanist teaching in Scottish abbeys like Kinloss. There was a distinct Scottish ,nation' at the universities of Orleans and elsewhere from the early fourteenth century, and some of the Scots scholars had stayed. During the mid-sixteenth century, when the French came closest to achieving their goal of making Scotland a French colony, there were substantial numbers of French in Scotland - including an entire French garrison of 100 professional soldiers in Dunbar and the majority of Mary Queen of Scots' personal household . The Treasurers' Accounts reveal the presence of German mining engineers, Dutch gunners, Spanish clockmakers (and possibly inventors) and Italian trumpeters. One of Montaigne's household was a Scot, and three of James VI's Octavians had been educated in Europe. When King James VI visited Tycho Brahe on his island of Uranienborg on his wedding trip to Denmark in 1590, he must have had a shock to find, staring at him from a prominent position on Brahe's wall, the gaunt features of his old tutor, George Buchanan, with whom Brahe had been corresponding.

The clientele for the Scottish country scat was a largely educated and well-travelled one. It was as intrigued as any other noble society in Europe by the chivalric ideals expressed through jousts and games. It pounced on alterations to status, hierarchy and precedence. Changes to precedence were so sensitive that they could cause a deadly feud. james Melvill recorded in his diary the extent to which James VI had been trauchled by such squabblings during his marriage trip when the Scottish Court was staying in the Kronberg, at Helsingfors, during the wedding trip:

The Company who were with his Majesty put him to great trouble to agree their continual janglings, strife, pride and partialities. The Earl of Marshall, by reason that he was an ancient Earl . . . thought to have the first place next unto His Majesty, so long as he was there. The Chancellour by reason of his Office, would needs have the preheminence [and so forth].

Precedence remained sufficiently thorny a matter for the king to summon all earls and lords to Holyrood in February 1601 for the purpose of sorting it out. Five years later, the king's Decreit anent ranking and placing was designed to put an end to feuds based upon status. None the less, precedence still remained sufficiently problematic that over ten years later the Earl of Montrose entered into a bond with the Earl of Eglinton confirming that a royal commission to Eglinton would not affect the precedence enjoyed by Montrose. Buildings and their emblematic skylines formed one of the principal means by which such preoccupations were expressed.

However, the Scots elite had other preoccupations that lent a distinctive flavour to their architecture. The first was a veneration for ancestors and family. Of David Home of Wedderburn it was written that his love of the House of Home was 'not the least of his virtues', and when remodelling his House of Glamis in the 1670s, the Earl of Strathmore admitted that he was 'inflam'd stronglie with a great desyre to continue the memorie of my familie.' The second preoccupation was the built expression of the first: namely a predilection to reuse and adapt ancient motifs for application to the present. This desire was as evident in royal palaces and churches as it was in the country seat. The turrets and heraldic skylines of the 'nationalist' period in north-cast Scotland were not at all old fashioned - for they were not turrets but studies in turret form. The principal decorative elements upon Scots Renaissance buildings were not those of the new language of classical architecture, but those of the earlier Scots architecture of defensiveness directed to peaceful purposes, as swords into ploughshares. The medieval gatehouses became chatelets turrets became gazebos, and the fretted silhouette of crenellations would be achieved by the alternation of chimneys and dormer windows . So the magnificent early seventeenth -century skylines celebrated ancient lineage, the nobility of warfare, and also modernity, clamped together by elaborate cornices designed in echo of ancient machicolations. As was the case throughout Europe, modesty in architectural expression could imply vulnerability, and few Scots aristocrats wished to do that.

Those lonely ruins of freestanding fortified 'tower houses' or (worse) 'keeps', standing like decayed molars, high and dry after their isolation by eighteenth century landscape planners, are little help in understanding the Scottish Renaissance. They were never keeps, tower houses probably only in the Borders, not fortified, and certainly not solitary. They would have been surrounded by an inner court, and an often extensive establishment of walled yards, gardens, orchards or courtyards. Soaring above all this paraphernalia of the burgeoning rural economy would be the flamboyant, mockheraldic superstructure, whose turrets provided delightful many windowed, brilliantly lit small chambers with excellent views .The machicolations were decorative and unusable, and the

cannon-mouths were only water-spouts because Scotland was a country largely at peace by comparison with contemporary Europe. Beyond the frontier lands

with England, it had been largely at peace for centuries. Unused to the

passage of armies, the country had adopted subtler and more effective methods of deterring the rare predator, feudster or casual brigand than using artillery, moats, drawbridges and beetling defences, namely by surrounding houses with a cordon sanitaire of walled gardens and extensive yards . So the sense of outrage caused by the savage destruction of houses and property during the civil war in 1640 may partly be explained by the fact that the country was unaccustomed to such uncivilised behaviour .

Country house building was probably influenced by considerations of family loyalty and kinship. The drawings on the maps of Timothy Pont, c. 1586-1606, imply that the scale and ornamentation of houses reflected the local or regional hierarchy .The largest houses he drew in Strathearn were Kincardine (Earls of Montrose), Drummond (Lord Drummond) and Tullibardine (Earl of Atholl), and this is illustrative of the extent to which a district might be dominated by the principal local families. The extravagant constructions of early seventeenth -century north-east Scotland, for example, may be attributable to the leadership of the Earls and Marquesses of Huntly, and of the Earls Marischal. Whereas in Ayrshire 'Kyle was full of gentlemen free to act on their own initiative . . . in Cunninghame such men appear in the followings of '. There was great emphasis not just upon family, but upon how many of the family name a lord could call to his support; and relationships were often underpinned by bonds of manrent - a form of mutually beneficial bond of allegiance. Status would be demonstrated by how many gentlemen might be kept by a lord to ride with him . Buildings sharing the same features are as likely to reflect kinship patterns as the work of putative architects.

Kinship - sixteenth-century networking - was celebrated by the carved and once gilt marriage stones that adorn so many houses. They recorded an alliance to the wife's father, and probably wealth and new property to the husband (it was often her dowry that funded the new construction). The marriage stone (which always records the wife's initials, identifying for onlookers and posterity the family to which the husband was now allied) celebrates both marital bliss and social advancement - 'being planted in the stock of honour' - by the male in the partnership. A laird marrying an earl's daughter and rebuilding upon the proceeds - as did James Menzies of Weem in 1571 after his marriage to Barbara Stewart, daughter of the Earl of Atholl - would install the record proud, painted and triumphant, facing the entrance.

Such symbols were part of what was an extensive visual culture. When Mary of Guise retook Edinburgh in 1558 after its brief occupation by the Lords of the Congregation, she found that they had had the original mural decoration in St Giles' church painted out, and replaced it with 'the Lord's Prayer, the Belief and the Commandments ... patent on the kirk-walls'. It is difficult to imagine, in its largely deplastered current gloom, how St Giles was once vividly painted with improving religious texts. Mary of Guise had this propaganda swiftly blotted out. Visual mementos, paintings, banners and posters were customarily deployed for political purposes, particularly by those seeking redress. In 1593, for example, 'there came certain poor women out of the south country, with fifteen bloody shirts, to compleen to the king that their husbands, sons, and servants were cruelly murdered by the Laird of Johnston' - a ritual that was neither infrequent nor effective. Two years later the Earl of Mar had displayed in procession around the district a picture of the corpse of one Forester, a member of his entourage accidentally murdered in a large-scale lover's battle, 'on a fair canvas, painted with the number of shots and wounds, to appear the more horrible to the behalders'. The most famous example was the Dowager Countess of Moray's response to the murder of her son the 'Bonnie Earl' in February 1592: 'The Earl's mother caused draw her son's picture, as he was demained, and presented it to the king in a fine laine cloth, with lamentations, and earnest suit for justice.' By far the most extensive and astonishing residue of this visual culture is the painted decoration of the principal rooms, galleries and bedrooms of country seats. It suggests that Scottish culture was 'deeply infused with an emblematic mentality, and its material culture was deeply impregnated

with applied emblematics'. There are only slight remnants of what was probably an equally extensive culture of timber screens doors, wainscotting and cornices carved with visual messages.

That visual culture embraced the buildings in totality. So, given the relative lack of ornamentation on the lower floors of a country house and the extravagance on the upper floors, the composition of the building's silhouette was probably -;,.-mbolic in intent. There are no pattern books to help decode the array of gables, turrets, chimneys and dormer windows, so in most cases, their interpretation remains conjectural. However, the symbolic significance of the crown steeples of the great parish churches of Scotland - St Michael's, Linlithgow, St Mary's, Dundee and St Mary's, Haddington; of King's College, Aberdeen; and those of the Tolbooths of Glasgow and Linlithgow - has been unlocked. These were visual representations of the imperial crown, signifying that the King of Scotland was an emperor - that is, a ruler free to rule in his own domain without interference. The imperial crown 'was the most potent available symbol not only of regional solidarity but also of the complete jurisdictional selfsufficiency - effectively the independent national sovereignty aspired to by the new monarchies of Renaissance Europe. On the north-east corner of the Palace of Stirling, there is a lion above the statue of King James V, holding an imperial crown on a cushion above the king's head. The use of the crown by the Stewarts - by James IV on his coinage, and by his son on his palaces - was directed particularly at the ancient English claims of sovereignty over Scotland.

Once James VI left for London in 1603, visual messages of independence from England enjoyed a paradoxical resurgence. They varied from the widespread use of the royal arms on the exterior, to vast plaster armorials above the principal fireplace. Frequently attached to the inscription in stone or plaster was the vainglorious motto 'Nobis haec invicta miserunt CVI proavi '- which might be translated as 'a line of 106 kings have left us this unconquered' . To judge from paintings still on display during the eighteenth century, it was also fashionable for the aristocracy to commission portraits of monarchs and fellow members of the nobility when ordering paintings of themselves and their family for their state rooms. In 1628, the Earl of Winton commissioned three such portraits from Adam the painter in addition to his own for the walls of Winton. Much more extravagant were the Campbells of Glenorchy. In 1633 Sir Colin Campbell commissioned an unnamed German artist (perhaps Adam of Koln) to paint a picture of all his predecessor lairds. He then commissioned George Jamieson not only for an extravagant family tree, but also for 16 separate portraits at 20 merks each, each rising to £100 if a gilt frame were to be included. By 1640, the Glenorchys had 24 paintings of the kings and queens of Scotland, and 34 other portraits of the lairds and ladies of Glenorchy and of fellow aristocrats. Indeed, the sheer quantity of paintings in Scottish Renaissance country houses has probably been grossly underestimated.

There were 59 paintings in the Glamis seat of Castle Lyon in 1684, and 94 in Glamis itself - excluding framed pictures. Finavon had 59, and Fetteresso well over 100. Scaled up from these examples to cover the entire country, the number of paintings in Scotland in the late seventeenth century could have been somewhere between 12,000 and 25,000.

Focus upon royal construction has unbalanced perceptions of the

evolution of the Scottish country house, and this is indicated by MacGibbon and Ross's conclusions about the penetration of Renaissance architectural ideals into the country:

There were indications in the architecture of Stirling and Falkland Palaces of the approach of the Renaissance style. But these . . . were exceptional cases, and during the following half-century, the encroachments of that style on the native art of the country were not very considerable.

The measure they used to determine the spread of Renaissance ideas in architecture was the extent that such classically inspired facade detailing had been emulated. They had little sense of any coherent architectural revolution of the country house between 1540 and 1590 - a time when construction was at its peak. But there are other measures for evaluating how far the Renaissance influenced a country: 'More impressive than any superficial imitation of antique or foreign precedent, however, was the dynamic display of virtuosity, both technical and rhetorical, within the framework of what one might call tradition.' So this book also seeks to explore whether, by using those other yardsticks, different conclusions might be reached.

The tendency to treat the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as though the architecture was relatively homogeneous - save that split at the Reformation - is a principal source of the myth. Such an approach simply cannot be sustained and a more sensitive categorisation is needed. So this book also examines whether architectural evolution matched the reigns of the monarchs. Even though broad, the classifications of English architecture into Tudor, Elizabethan and Jacobean have proved useful. Comparable period divisions might likewise prove useful for Scotland.

Unfortunately, categorising periods of architecture works best where they can be associated with recognisable forms. Pure form was in short supply in Renaissance Scotland. Principally as the result of the country's mass-stone technology and shortage of long-span timber, we developed into, and remained, a nation of adaptors. A landowner seeking to improve his house in fashionable mode in the mid-sixteenth century would no doubt find that he had inherited a sturdy building with walls between 6 and 10 feet thick. It making no sense to waste all this masonry, his impulse would be to retain the old building and extend from it, or to build something new within the inner court. The occasional, courageous decision to refashion the entire building complex into a single composite design occurred rarely before the early seventeenth century, and was largely restricted to the north-cast. So most Scottish Renaissance country houses lack the easily comprehensible shapes of Azay le Rideau or of Chambord, or the instant recognisability of Compton Wynyates, Montacute, Longleat or Blickling Hall. Instead, most appear as an agglomeration of structures of different ages and different heights, dominated by the tower house from which all else was derived.

Whereas the medieval house had indeed been 'pure form' in the shape of a rectangle or L-plan tower, smaller chambers and stairs compressed within the thickness of the walls, the Renaissance country house burst out of such constraints. Scottish architects threw off the straitjacket of pure form just when the architects of other countries were rediscovering the pleasures of its constraints. The resulting highly expressionist architecture that remained the Scottish fashion until the late seventeenth century stood in counterpoint to the growing formalities of plan and tight expression of the Italian-influenced Renaissance. That was another Scottish particularity. But from the very earliest days of the Union, as the very different cultures of Scotland and England began the process of assimilation, this national characteristic was misinterpreted. Take the Revd Thomas Morer, a minister in London who was, for a while, an army chaplain, in which capacity he visited Scotland in 1689:

'The houses of their quality are high and strong, and appear more like castles than houses, made of thick stone walls, with iron bars before their windows, suited to the necessity of those times they were built in, living in a state of war and constant animosities between their families. [my italics]. Yet they now begin to have better buildings, and to be very modish in both the fabrick and furniture of their dwellings.'

Visitors from England found it impossible to accept that unconscionably tall buildings with turrets and gunloops were the equivalent of their own large-windowed, peaceable, low-slung, moated, Tudor and Elizabethan manor houses. Parapets, crenellations and gunloops would only fit into a British architecture if they were taken to be real rather than metaphorical.

Two English perspectives of Scotland began to emerge. The one, like Sir Anthony Weldon's, determined to overpraise James VI by comparing his great achievements in England to his ghastly origins, and the other a more neutral role of a curious visitor in a foreign country. Weldon's squiffy account of his visit in 1617 described a barbarous country devoid of trees, whose beasts were small ('their women only excepted, of which sort there are none greater in the whole world'), habits revolting and food inedible. He concluded: 'I do wonder that so brave a prince as King james should be borne in so stinking a town as Edinburgh in lousy Scotland.' To set against that there is John Taylor, His Majesty's 'Water Poet' from London, who recorded his splendid visit the following year, and his narrative Pennyless Pilgrimage provides a corrective. Even though he too found the houses 'like castles for oyed continuous hospitality, praised almost

Yet (arm'd with truth) I publish with my pen That there th'Almighty cloth his blessings heape, In such abundant food for beasts and men I never saw more plenty or more cheape.

We have lost so much of our built history that any attempt at categorising the Renaissance houses of Scotland has to be tentative. The lack of building records, astonishing by comparison with England or France, can make it difficult to be definite about either dates or designers. Because datestones were so easily moved, their credibility sometimes extends only to recording the date on which they were carved. However, charters sometimes reveal when a building might have been constructed. For example, between receipt of charters in 1517 and May 1541, Michael Scott had made 'an honest mansion with a tower and other policies in the Forest of Ettrick, at the place, steading and lands of Aikwood [Oakwood]'.

Over 1,000 country seats, their extensions or their ruins are attributed to the period 1500-c. 1680, and, as you shall see, this represents probably only a fraction of those that once existed. A study of their attributed dates indicates how the quantity of building work varied from period to period, and from region to region . Since Scottish builders defy classification almost wilfully, both dates and titles for each period are loose, and for guidance only. The period of Mary's influence, for example, lasted beyond her political deposition, and that of her son James a good decade after his death.

In this book, the Early Renaissance period is defined as lasting from c. 1500 to 1542, during which time a large number of country seats appear to have been constructed. It embraces the latter part of the resplendent reign of james IV until his death at Flodden in 1513, and the entire reign of his son James V. The courts of both were cultured and humanist, explicitly encouraging the arts of architecture, poetry and music. In an era of noble competitiveness and changing lifestyles, magnates were as likely to have been rebuilding as the court, but - with the exception of Sir james Hamilton of Finnart and his entourage records are scanty. The tower, albeit substantially modified, remained the principal feature of the house.

The Marian period, c. 1542-c. 1568, was one of French-influenced transformation. James V's marriage to Queen Madeleine and, after her death in 1537, to Mary of Guise in 1538 began a period of some thirty years of French-educated female influence or rule. It can best be called the Marian period, after Mary of Guise and her daughter Mary Queen of Scots. Writing retrospectively (about 1572), Bishop Lesley was concerned at the costs of conspicuous consumption:

Here is to be remembered that thair was mony new ingyms and devysis, alsweill of bigging of paleicis, abilyementis, as of banqueting and of menis behaviour first begun and used in Scotland at this time, after the fassione quhilk thay had sene in France. Albeit it semit to be varray comlie and beautifull, yit it wes moir superfluows and volupteous nor the substaunce of the realme of Scotland mycht beir furth or susteine.'

[Here it is to be remembered that there were many new inventions and devices, as well as building of palaces, attire, equipment and fittings, as of banqueting and of men's behaviour, first begun and used in Scotland at this time after the fashion which they had seen in France. Although it seemed to be very comely and beautiful, yet it was more superfluous and voluptuous than the realm of Scotland might bear or sustain.]

Lesley dated the French influence to the king's wedding, c. 1536, but architectural change only became evident in the early 1550s. The most extensive construction of the period was in Aberdeenshire. After Mary's deposition in 1567, the country was divided between the queen's (largely Catholic) supporters and the baby king's (largely Protestant) supporters. Yet the French influence lingered. Until the end of the century and beyond, nobles continued to be classified according to whether they were proFrench or pro-English. Even as late as 1612, the young Duke Charles (later Charles 1) could write to his father that the most civilised foreign nations were those that spoke French.

During the Early Jacobean period of James VI's minority - c. 1568-. 1590 - the building boom reached its peak, not surprisingly perhaps in view of the damage caused by the raids and campaigns of the civil wars between 1568 and 1573. Initially, during the regencies, Scottish architecture shed much of its francophile romanticism, and a different, more sober form of confidence emerged. But once james VI took control in 1585, and the country unified behind him, architecture began to assume a changed flamboyance, perhaps accounted for by influence from Denmark. The king had been accompanied on his wedding trip in 1590 to marry Princes Anna by William Schaw, the royal architect and Master of Ceremonies, who was to become Chamberlain to and a close confidant of the queen. Whereas it is only sensible to classify the architecture of c. 1590-c. 1639 as Later Jacobean (even though it extended fourteen years into the reign of Charles 1), there were two very distinct types. The Later Jacobean villa was the preferred house of a group of clever men associated with the court in Edinburgh and largely, although not entirely, restricted to a fairly small region whose focus was Edinburgh. Jacobean nationalism emerged in the shires, particularly in the north-east. Since most of the latter, so stridently Scots in character, was built after the king had departed for England in 1603, it implies that outside Court circles, Scotland, far from adapting to the implications of an absentee court, and absorbing the new fashions from England, went in the opposite direction.

Country house architecture in the aftermath of the wars of 1640-50 evolved from the architectures of the wealthy pre-war years, but the former heraldic display mutated into new forms and the preoccupation with height and skyline was addressed in a new manner . But what might be termed 'the Scottish difference' survived until it was rendered picturesque by Robert Adam a hundred years later in places like Oxenfoord.

This book first explains how some of the evidence was uncovered and assessed, examines the extent to which the Renaissance country seat was, or needed, to be defensible, and then introduces common features of the country house, its structure, components, function and its setting.

These houses were erected in a country that regarded itself as a cultured European nation participating in contemporary ideas, and an analysis of their architecture will differ radically according to whether they are evaluated within a European or a British framework. When interpreted within a British context, the Palace of Boyne, Banffshire, for example, appeared to exemplify 'the lengths to which native conservatism could go.... With its high walls of enceinte, massive circular angle towers, and strong gatehouse, Boyne might well be taken at first glance for a great thirteenth century castle of enclosure' like, say, medieval Harlech (Gwynedd) or Bodiam (Sussex). Boyne's plan did indeed echo a medieval one, but rather than being medieval, it demonstrated how both French and Scots culture continued to embed the past into the present. Considered within the European architectural culture, Boyne's adventurous plan closely resembled that of the sophisticated Chateau du Bury, by Orleans in which the designer Florimond Robertet may have been assisted by Leonardo da Vinci . Boyne's chatelet is not a strong gatehouse and its 'massive circular angle towers' are towers of lavish and largely indefensible chambers. Can Scotland be thought to have had its own architects during this period of staunch resistance against classicism? Hitherto, Scottish Renaissance houses have been dismissed as the product of enthusiastic but untutored masons, rather than the product of skilled design. Their very irrationality irritated twentieth-century rationalists, since it went against everything they had been taught that a good architect should do.

The mason is designing from the wall-head down, not planning. He is thinking of turrets descending from the wall-head, not rising from the ground. . . . In this wayward profusion and irrational importance of secondary features, romantic notions underlying the later towerhouses are most dramatically effected. . . . It is not great art; it achieves no sublimity; it forms no laws and conforms to none. Whimsical and capricious, its creators, mason-architects, depended upon personal inclination, were uncertain on occasion, and were prone to imitate. . . . The architecture of the romantic tower-house . . . is instinctive and arbitrary, the work of skilled artisans.

That was far from the perception of the times when the country houses were built. Contemporaries considered that they had an architectural culture, and that they had architects. Whether good or bad, contemporaries called their designers 'architectors' or 'architects', and expected an appropriate level of service. Quite what those new skills were (new, because the concept of architect as it now stands first emerges in the late fifteenth century and continued to be modified over the following two centuries) can be inferred from Alexander Montgomery's epitaph to Sir Robert Drummond of Carnock who was Royal Master of Works from 1579 to 1583:

All buildings brave bid DRUMMOND nou adeu; Quhais lyf furthsheu he lude thame by the lave. Quhair sall we craiv sik policle to haiv? Quha with him straiv to polish, build or plante? These giftis, grant, God lent him by the laiv.82

[All buildings brave bid Drummond now adieu, Whose life demonstrated he loved so many of them. Where now shall we seek building and estate improvement? Who with him strove to adorn, build or plant? These gifts, I grant, God lent him in quantity.]

An architect would be expected to have 'policie' - the ability to conceive of a plan or design, and be knowledgeable about building and landscaping. Above all, he could polish - that is, in Alberti's terms, 'to realise by construction whatever can be most beautifully fitted out for the noble needs of man . . . '

He was no mere administrator.

By reconsidering the buildings and their aesthetic from the position of architectural composition within a structured time frame, this book also intends to investigate whether the perspective of 'untutored masons' is useful any longer. Was Charles Rennie Mackintosh correct in his intuition that each feature of the Scottish chateau was an act of deliberate design.'