Stone of Destiny (28 page)

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
black 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.

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 into 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.

Lifetimes change people, but they have never changed my love for my country nor my pride in what we did so long ago. I am now an old man but I am immensely proud that the young man who resolved to go to Westminster was me. Bill Craig, Johnny Josselyn and Gavin Vernon are dead. Only Kay, Alan and I remain, three old strangers to one another for we met for a short time and for one purpose alone, and never met again. Did we achieve our purpose to awaken our country? For a short time we did, but old habits persisted. In 1955 the majority of the total electorate voted Tory. They voted for the strongest unionist party of all. Yet today that party is one of the tiny minorities pressing for more powers for the Holyrood settlement. In 1950 no one would have believed that such a change was possible. We didn’t bring about that change. It was done by the slow movement of history. History is on the side of the small nations. Look about you and you will see that truth.

We four were no part of the devolutionary settlement. We are not even a footnote to history although some people say we are. What we truly were was a representative group of our own generation. That generation included Winnie Ewing, a university colleague and personal friend, and many others. We belong to a
generation that saw the need for change and who set about making it. We were only 60 years before our time. All of us in our different ways played our small parts but we were the products of history, not its creator.

Yet I ask you to remember us with some kindness. The Deans of Westminster have long since done so. At times I correspond with them on affectionate terms. There are so many items worthy of memory within the great Abbey Church of Westminster that they of all people can understand why we called on them at dead of night. I don’t keep copies of my own books, but in the back flap of my wife’s volume from which I typed up these pages I see several letters from several Deans, all in affectionate terms. In 2007 a film was made of this book. We were permitted to night-shoot in the Abbey. The filming did not take long, and for the greater part of two nights my wife and I were left alone in its magnificence. It was brightly lit for filming with two great helium-filled airships high in the roof, casting millions of candle-power on the floor 100 feet below. However, no amount of lighting could evoke a memory of these four young people of long ago or of me, who was one of them. It has all gone. I am a different person. I cannot enter into that young man’s mind and body. Even this book evokes no memories, except the labour of writing it. It is better so. The filming occasion was great enough without memories. Thank you, John Hall, Dean of Westminster. Thank you to you and your Chapter.