Publication Account
Date 1951
Event ID 1097286
Category Descriptive Accounts
Type Publication Account
Permalink http://canmore.org.uk/event/1097286
107. Moray House, 174 Canongate.
About the time of Charles I's accession, Mary, Dowager Countess of Home and a daughter of Lord Dudley, built an elegant residence on the S. side of the Canongate, and laid out extensive gardens and orchards in the open ground behind. There is some doubt as to the year in which she began building, as two writers give it as 1618 and a third as "before1633," while none of them cites authority for his statement. The place at any rate became the property of her elder daughter, Margaret, Countess of Moray, in 1643, and thenceforth became identified with the Moray family in whose possession it remained until 1845. Cromwell lived here in 1648 on his first visit to Edinburgh. Two years later it was again the family home, when the eldest daughter, Lady Mary Stuart, was married to Archibald, later9 th Earl of Argyll.* But after defeating Leslie at Dunbar in September, 1650, Cromwell returned to winter in Moray House, and here his levees were held. The gardens at this time were said to be "of such elegance and cultivated with so much care as to vie with those of warmer countries and perhaps even of England itself. Scarcely anyone would believe it possible to give so much beauty to a garden in this frigid clime." Half a century later, when occupied by the Earl of Seafield, the place once more became a stage for political events. The Union of the Parliaments was being hotly debated and the Articles drawn up by the Commissioners for the consideration of both Parliaments had proved far from popular, with the result that feeling ran high in Scotland; but the Duke of Queensberry, Lord High Commissioner, and his neighbour the Earl of Seafield, the Lord Chancellor, both supported the proposal strongly, and their mansions in the Canongate afforded opportunities for informal parleys and negotiations. Tradition has it that the final arrangements were agreed to and the Articles signed in the secluded garden-pavilion of Moray House, which is still extant; but in point of fact the Articles were signed at Whitehall. In 1845 the property passed into the possession of the North British Railway Company and in the following year it was sold to the Free Church of Scotland; three years later it became a Normal School after the buildings had been altered for the purpose. Once more greatly extended, they are to-day the Edinburgh Provincial Training College and Demonstration School; classrooms have arisen on the S. of the old house and of its earlier additions, and the terraced gardens and orchards are no more.
[see RCAHMS 1951 174-177 for a full architectural description]
RCAHMS 1951
*For the tradition of the confrontation of the wedding party with the captive Montrose, as he passed up the Canongate to the Tolbooth of Edinburgh, see Napier, Memoirs of the Marquis of Montrose, ii, pp. 778 f.
Cf. C. B. Boog Watson, Alexander Cowan of Moray House, etc; Chamber’s Journal, 21st Jan. 1837, p.415; Wilson, Memorials, i, pp.95, 108 and ii, p.74; Cast. And Dom. Arch., ii, pp.529 f.
