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The Coronation Stone of Scotland 223
LETTERS FROM FRANCIS KENNEDY RELATIVE TO
THE SIEGE OF EDINBURGH, 1745. The Editor has to thank
Mr. John Morrison for pointing out that the letter from Mr. Francis
Kennedy (S.H.R, viii. 54), which is dated 8th September, 1745, should
have been dated 8th October, 1745 ; this letter, instead of being the first of
the series, should, therefore, have been the third. The Editor regrets that
this error in dating on Mr. Francis Kennedy's part was not noticed earlier.
The occupation of Edinburgh by the Jacobites only began on I7th September,
and internal evidence also goes to show that this letter should have
followed that of 5th October.
THE CORONATION STONE OF SCOTLAND. How great
a hold on Scottish and English history, and on English as well as
Scottish imagination, the 'stone of Scone' possesses is well shown by Mr.
George Watson's paper in the transactions of the Scottish Ecclesiological
Society on ' The Coronation Stone of Scotland,' of which he has sent us an
offprint. It is an excellent statement of the whole story, supplementing at
many points W. F. Skene's classic
essay on the subject. It traces anew
the pedigree and adventures of this famous stone and the literature of
romance, prophecy, record and chronicle which time, ever prone to broider
fact with legend, has evoked.
Geology is said to favour a native Scots origin, as authorities forty years
ago agreed that the stone was of west-coast Scottish sandstone. This discredited
the legend of an Egyptian source and a
journey westward inter-
rupted by a sojourn of 2000 years or so in Spain prior to its being set up in
Ireland for an age or two, before its conveyance across the Channel to Lorn
and Scone. The legend appears at least as
early
as 1301, then
simply
bearing that Pharaoh's daughter sailed to Ireland and thence to Scotland
carrying the stone with her.
That long before this it was invested by tradition with high national
sanctions appears sufficiently from Hemingburgh's description of John
Balliol's coronation in 1292, when in accordance with the ancient ceremony
the king was set in the '
'
huge stone beside the great altar of the monasterychurch
of Scone. On Balliol's overthrow in 1296 Edward I. carried off
the stone to Westminster whence, in spite of negotiation and direct undertaking
by treaty to return it, it never returned.
Mr. Watson has faithfully assembled the medieval historical references to
it, but we suspect there must be many even of the early period
and still
more since the Union which would increase the value of the collection.
It strikes a Scotsman as very curious that such a work as Mr. Wickham
Legg's English Coronation Records should be indefinite and devoid of
information about the ' '
Stone of Destiny and that ; among all the profusion
of liturgical writings on the ceremonial of the coronation, with its more than
ample store of petty rubrics about faldstools, imperial mantles and holy oil,
the
ingenuity of court ceremonialists from the time of Charles I. till that of
Victoria should never have found room in the ' Coronation Orders '
for the
'
fact that the stone is a great historic part of the function.
Chair' is no doubt a fit enough memory of St. Edward. It is meet that
King Edward's