Palace of Holyroodhouse

At the foot of the Royal Mile — Edinburgh's spine, running from Edinburgh Castle at its summit down to Holyroodhouse at its base — stands Scotland's official royal palace. It sits in the shadow of Arthur's Seat, the ancient volcanic plug rising 251 metres above the city, and beside the ruins of a medieval abbey whose roofless nave still stands as an accidental masterpiece of atmospheric decay. Holyroodhouse is not the most visually dramatic of the British royal palaces — that distinction belongs to Windsor, or to Edinburgh Castle on its rock above — but it is the one with the most turbulent history.

King David I of Scotland founded Holyrood Abbey in 1128 for a community of Augustinian canons. 'Holyrood' means 'Holy Cross' in Scots, a reference to the Black Rood, a fragment of the True Cross reputedly brought to Scotland by Saint Margaret. The abbey grew powerful and became a site of royal burials and ceremonies; James II was born here, and James IV built the first recognisable palace alongside the abbey in 1498. For the following century and a half, Scottish monarchs chose to live at Holyrood rather than at the more defensible but less comfortable Edinburgh Castle on its rock above the city.

The most dramatically charged event in the palace's history occurred in March 1566. Mary, Queen of Scots was dining in her private apartments with her secretary David Rizzio when her husband, Lord Darnley, led a group of armed noblemen into the room. Rizzio — suspected of excessive influence over the queen, and possibly of fathering her unborn child — was dragged from the chamber and stabbed 56 times. The site of the killing is marked in the floor today. Mary was pregnant at the time with the future James VI. The rooms where this occurred — the outer chamber, the supper room, the private staircase — remain among the most visited parts of the palace precisely because the events are so exactly located within the surviving fabric of the building.

After the Restoration, Charles II commissioned the architect Sir William Bruce to rebuild Holyroodhouse entirely, a project carried out between 1671 and 1678. Bruce's design — two ranges arranged around a central quadrangle, with a matching pair of corner towers — is considered the finest example of Scottish Baroque architecture anywhere in the country. Charles II never actually visited the finished palace, but his brother James VII, later James II of England, held court here during his time as Commissioner for Scotland between 1679 and 1682. The Great Gallery, running the full length of the north range, was hung with 89 portraits of Scottish monarchs by the Dutch artist Jacob de Wet — most of them entirely imaginary, since no genuine portraits existed of the earlier kings being depicted.

In 1745, Charles Edward Stuart — Bonnie Prince Charlie — marched into Edinburgh and held court at Holyroodhouse for five weeks while raising his Jacobite army. Contemporary accounts describe balls held in the Great Gallery, with the young prince at the centre of a briefly resurgent Jacobite Edinburgh society. The rising failed at Culloden in April 1746, and the palace reverted fully to the Crown. This brief, charged occupation remains the last time Holyroodhouse was held by anyone other than the reigning British monarch.

Today Holyroodhouse functions as the monarch's official Scottish residence. The King and the Royal Family stay here for around a week each summer, typically late June into early July, during which the palace closes to the public for the official engagements of Holyrood Week. The State Apartments — the throne room, the dining room, the morning drawing room — are presented to visitors on an included audio guide tour, and the ruined nave of the abbey, freely accessible from the forecourt, remains one of the most atmospheric architectural ruins in Edinburgh.