Queensberry House: The Union and the Kitchen Spit
Why is it significant?
Pause beside the Parliament's modern buildings and find the tall, severe house with a harled front, rows of plain windows and a steep roof, wedged among them like an elderly relative at a wedding.
Key Facts
| Place | Queensberry House: The Union and the Kitchen Spit |
|---|---|
| Address | 64 Canongate, Edinburgh EH8, UK |
| Geo Coordinates | 55.95190, -3.17620 |
| Part of Walk | Crowns, Kirks and Sanctuary: Edinburgh's Canongate and the Palace of Holyroodhouse |
| Generated | Generated |
Pause beside the Parliament's modern buildings and find the tall, severe house with a harled front, rows of plain windows and a steep roof, wedged among them like an elderly relative at a wedding. Queensberry House was built around 1681, and it has watched one Scottish parliament end and another begin.
In the 1680s it was bought by William Douglas, the first Duke of Queensberry. His son James, the second Duke, became the most important politician of his age as Queen Anne's commissioner, the man who steered the Treaty of Union through the Scottish Parliament in 1707. Scotland's parliament voted itself out of existence, and crowds in the High Street jeered and pelted the duke's coach.
Now the gruesome part, which is told as legend. The duke's eldest son, the Earl of Drumlanrig, was mentally ill and kept locked away. On the day the Union was passed, the story goes, the whole household rushed out to watch, leaving the earl alone with a young kitchen boy. When they came home, they found the boy roasting on the spit and the earl eating him. People called it a judgement on the duke for selling Scotland.
After the dukes left, the house slid downhill like the Canongate itself. It became a barracks, then a refuge for the destitute, then a hospital for the elderly. At the end of the twentieth century Scotland voted for a new parliament, and Queensberry House was absorbed into the Holyrood complex, which opened in 2004. The building where the old parliament's end was managed now houses offices of the new one.
There is a royal thread through all of this. The Union of 1707 joined two parliaments, but the crowns had already been united since 1603, when James VI rode south to become James I of England. One Stuart king and one Stuart queen, a century apart, and the Canongate lost first its court and then its parliament. Continue uphill on this side of the Canongate to the gabled museum with Latin mottoes carved on its front.