Stone of Destiny

by Ian Hamilton

  We lifted it from the car and lowered it into a packing case, and then we turned to leave and go back into the darkness again. As I went out, I took one last look at the Stone lying in the box like a common piece of masonry. It had grown to be part of my life, like a mother, or a lover, or a dear friend. Now I was to turn my back on it. My job was done and others were to take over where I had left off. I did not see the Stone again until we were on the way to Arbroath to lay it on the high altar of the ruined abbey there.

  All the way back to Glasgow I said little. Alan drove me to my lonely little room at the top of a tenement in Park Quadrant. Johnny had been there before us, as the car seat was lying under my bed. Alan pressed me to go with him to bring in the New Year with his family, but I wanted solitude and would not go. We said goodbye, and he went off to face his father. I’ve always thought the world of Alan.

  In a short time Johnny came in. When he saw me and heard of our success, he was jubilant and could not sit still for joy. I was strangely remote from him. He too wanted me to go to a party, but I could not face a crowd, and he departed reluctantly, knowing there was nothing he could do for me. I had lost contact with people.

  I lay on my bed and smoked a cigarette, as I had lain on my bed so often before and planned and dreamed. All that was finished. We had succeeded.

  Yet success was not enough. Success in the midst of strife, and achievement after struggle, are both unalloyed happiness; but final success is a finish, and no one likes to finish. It was a death.

  For nine glorious days in the balance of decision and the cleanness of action I had carried responsibility. I had lived, not to eat or drink or strive after selfish ends, but to achieve. I had achieved, and now life had receded from me. I had handed over my charge to others. For nine days I had been the most privileged young man in the world. I had not only been able to make decisions, I had also been able to carry them through to their conclusion. Now the decisions to be taken were no longer mine, and anyone could carry them through. All was commonplace. I did not think it was worth wasting energy to live.

  I fell asleep. Towards midnight I woke up, and got up and took off my clothes and went back to bed. On a neighbour’s wireless Big Ben beat in the New Year.

  I awakened next morning sick at heart. Scotland was on the move again, yet there seemed to be no place for me. I had shot my bolt. I felt that at 25 I had fulfilled all my ambitions. The world held nothing more that I wanted.

  If only the police would come, I thought. I was ravenous for more excitement.

  Suddenly there was a knocking at my door. Joy came surging over me from the fear of it.

  ‘Who’s there?’ I called.

  ‘It’s the police,’ came the quiet reply.

  ‘Come in,’ I cried. ‘And welcome! I’ve been waiting for you.’

  I was alive again.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  That is the end of my personal story of the recovery of the Stone of Destiny. My part finished with the Stone lying in hiding in Scotland. It is true that I took part in all the discussions that followed, and homologated all the decisions that were made, but these were political decisions and I am no politician. I regard the rest as anticlimax. A spectacular demonstration for my country, like sending flowers to a forlorn love, had been my intent, and I had done that. As far as I am concerned, the story ended at that factory. Yet, being party to the events which followed, I record them here.

  These events are simple enough to narrate. The detective who called on me on New Year’s Day was a Skianach, and he was soon satisfied that I was innocent, or so he said. I have always had my suspicion that that man of the old blood was not so easily deceived. Perhaps . . . perhaps . . . There were many people of divided loyalties over that affair, and not for the first time in Scotland either. In any event my alibi was checked out with my father, and I seemed to be free of suspicion. The following weekend, I took the train to Birmingham and returned driving the Anglia, with Kay’s smaller piece of the Stone.

  Then followed a period of inactivity on our part. The problem of what to do with the Stone went unresolved. In retrospect it would have been better if we had been caught with it somewhere in Scotland, and then the problem would have been the government’s, not ours. We were the victims of our own success. Public pressure mounted for its return. Not its return to England, but its return to some public place. I give one example of many. Sir John Cameron, the Dean of the Faculty of Advocates, called publicly for us to produce it and then work openly for its retention in Scotland. We were in a quandary.

  For this quandary there was no easy solution. We had caught the imagination of the world, and the Scottish reaction can only be described as fervent, indeed almost awed, support. But support for what? Support for our actions certainly, but not support for the total disappearance for ever of the Stone. From time to time we sensed a shift in public opinion, and as the weeks went past, it seemed clear to us that public opinion wanted some end to the matter, but no end could be found to satisfy all parties. So far as I am aware, the government resolutely refused to negotiate, while at the same time dropping hints that if it were returned openly, sympathetic consideration would be given to the Stone’s retention in Scotland. While the Stone was at Westminster, the capital of the nation, so one line of argument ran, the Scots knew where it was. Better there than lost for ever. Perhaps, ran another suggestion, if we made a generous gesture, so might the other side, and some compromise could be reached.

  Well, that was one view. It was not mine. If there was to be a compromise I wanted to know what it was. I did not, do not and never will trust an Englishman in political office. Nice people as they are, they carry power as badly as a Scot carries drink. I wanted to see the colour of their public promise before I would even think of compromise. At one time I advocated sending a champed-up piece of the Stone once a week to the Dean of Westminster as a heartener. Not much; just an ounce or two. I was wrong, of course. You can’t champ up the talisman of your people. But something was needed to bring matters to a head. We attempted to do this by reiterating our aims in a further statement like our first petition. It was typed out on the same typewriter, and we travelled through to Edinburgh and nailed it to the west door of St Giles. The press loved it; the church organist who had been playing away alone inside was arrested; but the government did not budge. Further factors began to point to the necessity for us to surrender it.

  These factors can be summed up in two words, and these two words are ‘common sense’. John MacCormick was a moderate, long-headed man, who knew every breath and shift of public opinion in Scotland. At that time there was no political movement of any significance in Scotland demanding separation, and the wartime frolics of a handful of extremists, whose slogan was ‘Scotland free and neutral’, had brought the whole Scottish movement into disrepute. But there was an enormous grounds-well of support for devolution, whatever that might mean. John MacCormick, as the acknowledged leader of that movement, did not want to see it all break and come apart on this Stone which I had produced for him. He felt that that support was about to be alienated, and he came to me with these arguments.

  We were, he said, four young people who had done a great thing for our country. To the original four, there had been added some others, and sooner or later the police would find us. Prosecutions would follow, and he and the rest of the Covenant leadership would be put in the position of seeing us prosecuted for an action to which they were a party. Nothing could more surely alienate public opinion than the suggestion that we were in the dock only because behind us there were older men who held on to the Stone and would not give it up even to save us from prison. Our martyrdom, if such it could be called, would be laid at the door not of the auld enemy, but attributed instead to the pointless stubbornness of himself and Bertie Gray.

  Young men with causes are keen to be martyrs, and I was no exception. Yet there were Kay and Alan and all the others to be considered, and I began to realise that things were no longer b
lack and white, and that between them there were many different shades of grey representing different opinions. Whatever happened, I was then, and still am, a great admirer of John MacCormick. He was the founding father of the modern political movement in Scotland. He is Scotland’s forgotten patriot. I listened to him, and saw the wisdom in what he said. I confess to a reluctance, but it was a selfish reluctance, because I saw myself in the dock in a righteous cause, and whatever happened thereafter would be a fitting end to the enterprise I had dreamed of since childhood.

  Meanwhile, the police worked steadily away. We knew that arrest could not long be delayed. These were days of suppressed excitement, and for my part, fear never entered into the equation. I had done what I thought was right, and I had no hesitation in standing by what I had done, and indeed standing up for it. I was willing to pay any penalty, and I looked forward to finding a forum from which to restate my dream. A court is the best forum. We nearly reached that forum.

  In the middle of March, to the great delight and animation of the press, Detective Inspector McGrath of Scotland Yard came with an assistant to Scotland. They spent the first day interviewing peripheral suspects in Glasgow. Then they went north to Plockton, where Kay had recently taken up a teaching appointment. They questioned her alone, and with no friend to help or guide her, for five and a half hours, while the shadow of English chivalry yawned and wondered why the girl would not break down and confess.

  Two days later they came for Alan and Gavin and me. It was no surprise, and I am glad to have experienced the early morning knock that is so dreaded in any country where the police have more power than is good for them, and us. At first I refused to go, as was my right. I handed the detective the standard work on the constitution, and told him to read it, much to his discomfiture. However, when I heard that Alan and Gavin were already in the police station, I went voluntarily. I enjoyed the interview with McGrath, made no admissions and fenced with him politely. Behind me stood a ring of Glasgow policemen designed to intimidate me. McGrath was not the world’s finest interviewer, and when I scored the odd point off him and heard from the Glasgow police behind me a cough which sounded oddly like a chuckle, it did much for my morale. It is an experience I would not have missed. Then they let us go.

  This deepened all our problems. Hidden in a cellar the Stone was as valueless to us as it was to the Dean and Chapter of Westminster. We could see no solution, and to this day, I still cannot see what could have been done. We had to produce the Stone before public opinion turned against us. This was a stark necessity. It appeared to us that by rounding off the incident in this way it could not but advance the political aspect of our cause. And so far as my own childhood dream of giving Scotland back her soul was concerned, I had done as much as I could. It was for the people themselves to go on now.

  It was for these reasons that we put the ball back at the feet of the authorities. They could do two things. They could please the people of Scotland by leaving the Stone in Scotland, or they could please the English establishment by unceremoniously bundling it back over the Border. Unfortunately for everyone, Scots as well as English, they were incapable of the grand gesture. They chose the latter course. They swooped on the Stone in a panic. They locked it overnight in a police cell as though it had been common loot, and they sneaked it back over the Border at dead of night while a great roar of protest went up in Scotland.

  As the place to return it, we chose the ruins of the great Abbey of Arbroath, where in 1320 the Arbroath Declaration had been signed by the lords, commons and clergy of Scotland. In it they had reaffirmed our right to be free to live our own lives in our own way.

  On the morning of 11 April 1951, I left Glasgow with Bill Craig. At Stirling Bridge we thumbed a lift from a car driven by Councillor Gray, which contained the Stone of Destiny, now carefully repaired. At midday we carried it down the grass-floored nave of the abbey and left it at the high altar. It was a crucifixion.

  When we turned away and stood for a minute at the gate, and looked down the long nave flanked by the blood-red sandstone of the walls to the altar where the Stone lay under the blue and white of a Saltire, I heard the voice of Scotland speak as clearly as it spoke in 1320:

  For so long as one hundred of us remain alive we will yield in no least way to the domination of the English. We fight not for glory nor for wealth nor for honours, but only and alone for freedom, which no good man surrenders but with his life.

  I never saw the Stone again.

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  And to this day I have never seen the Stone again. I never look back.

  We were not prosecuted. A few weeks later the Home Secretary announced that it would not be in the public interest to prosecute us. He was right. Scottish public opinion was so outraged by the way the Stone had been rushed incontinently back to England that the ordinary people of this country might have risen in public disorder at our prosecution. The excuse is given that they could not have proved ownership of the Stone so a prosecution would have failed. What nonsense! In theft it is possession, not ownership that has to be proved. Most cars that are stolen are owned by a hire purchase company, not by the motorist who has had it taken from him. They were afraid of Scottish public opinion. The fiction of proving ownership is a face-saving excuse. In the course of his address to the House of Commons the Home Secretary referred to us as ‘thieves and vulgar vandals’. Not one Scottish MP rose to our defence. No one cried out in our support. As some wag put it at the time, a shiver ran along the back benches looking for a spine to run up.

  That was how I spent a Christmas long, long ago. Many Christmases have come and gone since then. I sit here at another Christmastime nearly 60 years later. I sit in our little house in Argyll with my wife in the room below me. I am a retired QC. I recall these battles of long ago. The people I write of are nearly all gone. Only Kay, Alan and I remain, and we haven’t met even by accident for more than 50 years. It hasn’t been easy recalling these things. They still seem to be of interest to many people but not to me. Perhaps one or two things remain to be cleared up.

  Many people claim that they had a father or a grandfather or a relative at Westminster with me. Old men forget and if they ask me I always say it might be so. It is the kindly way. Others claim that the Stone was hidden here, there or yonder. That also might be so. The factory I left it in was at Bonnybridge, and belonged to John Rollo. From there it was removed to a garage in, I think, Bearsden for repair. I did not know where, so if your great-uncle says that it was for a time hidden in his house it may well be true.

  The next thing that I am asked is this. Did we return the real Stone to Arbroath Abbey? I reply that you do not take the talisman of your own people to lose it again for ever by hiding it away for some indefinite purpose. The one we took was the one we returned. I tell this story.

  In 1954 I was called to the Scottish Bar and to my house in the New Town of Edinburgh there came one who claimed to be an equerry in direct contact with Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. He looked the part. No actor could have faked it. He was in direct linear descent from the equerry who came to Henry Hotspur in Henry IV Part One. The very man who, ‘but for these vile guns would himself have been a soldier.’ I told him the facts which I now set down here.

  Until electric lighting came into use in the late nineteenth century all internal illumination was by external combustion, mainly by candles, later by coal gas. External combustion of any type creates products of combustion which are deposited on surrounding surfaces. Such products can be gathered and compared. Take scrapings from the surface of the Stone and scrapings likewise from a wall of Westminster Abbey adjacent to where the Stone lay for 600 years. Put both scrapings under a comparison microscope. The products of combustion deposited on each surface will be the same. The equerry gaped at me and then gave a wild neigh of understanding and loped off. I have no doubt that the test was carried out. I have doubts if it would show up today. When the Stone was returned on loan in 1996 it was given i
nto the charge of Historic Scotland who steam cleaned it. Don’t ask me why. I asked and didn’t understand their answer.

  The careful reader will note that I have written that it was returned on loan. This is the case. Michael Forsyth was the Secretary of State for Scotland, and it was through his intercession that the Queen allowed it to be returned on loan. It was shortly before the general election in which the Conservative Party received a crushing defeat. It was said that Mr Forsyth had it returned to try to win the election. Perhaps so, but I never attribute to anyone a mean motive when there may be a generous one. There is no reason to think that he loves Scotland any less than I do. I refused to go to the ceremony when it was returned. I refused because it came back on loan. When the woman next door returns your stolen property on loan you don’t hold a celebration. You look askance at her. That Stone belongs not to any royal family but to the people of Scotland.

  Is it the ultimate Stone of legend? I neither know nor care. Bruce thought it was. He was a stickler for all the trappings of monarchy. He had himself crowned twice. Once for defiance and again a day later for tradition when the Countess of Fife turned up. Had it been a substitute for Edward Plantagenet to carry off it would have been produced when the King regained his kingdom. It wasn’t. He made the return of the present one a condition of the peace of 1328. If it was good enough for the Good King Robert it’s good enough for me. But all that is long ago and forgotten.

  The years have passed. It was all so long ago. Whether on loan or not the Stone is with the Scottish Crown Jewels in Edinburgh Castle. I do not care very much, and certainly not enough to climb up there just to see it. I did not go to London all these years ago to fetch back a hunk of stone. I went to do something for my country. I wanted to see if it was still alive because at that time it seemed dead. Nobody cared. I was not then, nor am I now, greatly concerned with how Scotland is governed. Independence will come when the people want it. I want to see my country proud and independent, but it is its existence that concerned me then and concerns me now. As I sit here, at Christmas 2007, 57 years on, I see what has been achieved. We have a domestic parliament. We have a government that seeks independence. All three opposition parties have united to press for greater powers for the devolved parliament. If you don’t know the names of these three parties look them up in a history book for independence is as inevitable as the other changes that have come about in my long lifetime.