St Andrews in Scotland is known worldwide as the home of golf as well as for its famous university where Prince William met Catherine – but it's also a town with a lot of history.
My first historical novel, The Castilians, closely follows the long and dramatic siege of St Andrews Castle in 1546-7. Since St Andrews is my home town, I had a very clear picture of the streets my characters walked and the destruction wrought by the siege, since some of it is still visible almost five hundred years later.
Pictured above are the remains of Blackfriars Chapel damaged by the castilians – which is what the men who took the castle, killed its cardinal and held it for the next fourteen months called themselves – and hence the title of my book. Blackfriars sits in the grounds of my old school and I walked by it every day without a second glance.
St Andrews is so named because bones purporting to be from the apostle Saint Andrew once rested here. The town was a centre of pilgrimage from the 1100s with pilgrims coming from as far away as Russia, whose patron saint the apostle was.
A certificate of pilgrimage to St Andrews was found in France a few years ago. This particular pilgrim had been required to undertake the journey as a penance for killing someone, as well as making recompense to the man's family.
Pilgrims travelled in groups for safety. They arrived by sea, usually further down the Fife coast and walked the last twenty or so miles to St Andrews. The townsfolk were understandably fearful of pilgrims bringing the plague so pilgrims were held in quarantine outside the city boundaries and permitted entry through a controlled pilgrim's gate.
The cathedral, once the largest in Scotland, was built in the 1100s. God was said not to have looked favourably upon this over grand edifice when the west end was blown down in a storm in 1270 and the building partly destroyed by fire in 1378.
St Andrews is a very early example of town planning built with its main streets fanning out from the cathedral, as pictured below in the Geddy Map of 1580 (with permission of the National Library of Scotland). Those streets, wide and straight, were laid out to facilitate the processions for the many holy days of the Catholic calendar. These would include carrying the reliquary containing the bones of Saint Andrew, presumably on Saint Andrew's Day 30th November and performances of the mystery plays.
When Mary of Guise, mother to Mary Queen of Scots, arrived from France her first meeting with her new husband, James V, was in St Andrews. Forty days of jousting, plays and street pageants followed which must have been hugely exciting for the folk of the town.
The siege of the castle took place only eight years later. James V was already dead and Mary Queen of Scots, aged four in 1546, was now queen. The siege was ostensibly because Cardinal Beaton, Scotland's most powerful man, had the Protestant preacher George Wishart burnt at the stake outside the castle while he, and the people of the town, watched. A few months later a group of disaffected Protestant lairds crept into the castle disguised as stone masons. They killed the cardinal and hung his naked body from the parapet so the townsfolk were in no doubt who now controlled the castle.
Inevitably the siege was not only about religious differences. Henry VIII of England was funding them as one amid many tactics to force agreement to the marriage of wee Queen Mary to his son Edward. The castilians expected Henry to send a relief force to rescue them but he did not, although he did send funds and supplies by sea.
The government troops tried to break the siege by tunnelling in but the castilians were wise to siege warfare and they mined out to meet them. The purpose of the tunnel was to set explosives and undermine the curtain wall which the troops were prevented from doing. Both sides were tunnelling through rock which is why one of the best preserved mine and counter mines to be found in Europe can still be visited in St Andrews.
Eventually Scotland's auld alliance with France was called upon. The French galleys bombarded the castle from the sea unsuccessfully however they had among them a master tactician in Leon Strozzi, Catherine de Medici's cousin. He ordered the dismantling of St Salvator's (pictured below) then wooden spire and had cannon hauled up to the top of its tower and one of the cathedral towers. The resulting bombardment quickly ended the siege.
In 1559 John Knox was preaching in St Andrews and incited the congregation to such a pitch that they destroyed all the imagery in the church, smashed the stained glass windows, toppled the saints from their pedestals and continued on to the cathedral, which they looted. Other towns followed and Scotland became a Protestant country. St Andrews, which had been Scotland's ecclesiastical centre as well as home to the country's first university, gradually fell into decline. Rubbish piled high in the streets and the town became so rundown there was even a proposal that the university be re-sited to Perth.
Both castle and cathedral soon fell into ruin and were systematically quarried for several hundred years. The good citizens of the town used the stone to build and repair houses and to replace the wooden piers at the harbour with stone.
Eventually St Andrews was re-purposed as the home of golf. Golf had been banned by James II in 1457 because he observed the young men were playing it rather than practising archery. James IV was a keen golfer and re-instated the game and his granddaughter Mary Queen of Scots played golf too.
V.E.H Masters is the award winning author of the best selling Seton Chronicles. The first book in series The Castilians tells the story of the siege of St Andrews Castle in 1546. You can find out more at her website https://vehmasters.com/where there are three short stories available for free to download.
