A fatal court and folly

In the second of two articles, John Goodall looks at the Jacobite history of Scone and the transformation of the Palace from 1802 into a Gothic Revival prodigy house

- John Goodall

Scone Palace, Perthshire, part II

The seat of the Earl and Countess of Mansfield and Mansfield

ON January 8, 1716, James Francis Edward Stuart, familiarly known now as the Old Pretender, arrived at Scone Palace outside Perth.

The cause of his Jacobite supporters, who wished to see him recognised as James VIII of Scotland and III of England, was already faltering as the Hanoverian forces of George I closed in. Nevertheless, he held court in the palace. It was here that the medieval kings of Scotland—as well as Charles II in 1651— had been crowned and his future coronation was confidently proclaimed. Yet the ceremony never took place. Less than a month later, on the night of February 5, the Old Pretender slipped away secretly by boat to the Continent, leaving his followers to their fate.

Scone’s association with the 1715 Jacobite Rising made it irresistibly fascinating to early 18th-century visitors. Daniel Defoe, in A Tour thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724), confessed he ‘could not be at Perth and not have a desire to see [the Palace]’, where ‘the Pretender’ had kept his ‘fatal court’ and ‘reign’d in Scotland, though not over Scotland, for a few days’. The building he judged ‘very large, the front above 200ft in breadth, and has two extraordinary fine square courts, besides others, which contain the offices... The royal apartments are spacious and large, but… all after the old fashion… Here is the longest gallery in Scotland, and the ceiling painted, but the painting exceeding old’.