Scotch-Irish-L ArchivesArchiver > Scotch-Irish > 1997-11 > 0880843722
Subject: Re: Scotch-Irish-D Digest V97 #367
Date: 29 Nov 1997 18:48:42 EDT
Thanks for the information...and our little rural library has all of
Antonia Fraser's books so I'll take that one out on Monday....when I
return this old book, "In Search of Scotland" by H.V. Morton, published
in 1930, sort of a record of Mr. Morton's walk through Scotland.
And I knew it was the Earl of Mar the minute the message left me.
10>>> The author says that after the birth of James, Queen Mary stayed
10>around long enough to introduce her son to his father, Darnley, then left
10>the child with the wife of the Earl of Arn. She was gone for quite some
10>time and the child seems to have been raised by this
10>family. At some point, a infant's body was found, wrapped in gold
10>cloth, somewhere in the walls of Edinburgh Castle. People then began to
10>look at the marked resemblance between James and the Earl of Arn. Many
10>believed the infant in the wall to be James and that James VI - I actually
10>belonged to the Earl of Arn's family. <<
10>You have muddled parts of an imaginative notion of a much later period,
10>since there is no contemporary reference to the tale. Antonia Fraser, in
10>her authoritative biography of Mary, Queen of Scots, dismisses the tale
10>with sound logic. The story was created from two threads; the discovery
10>_in 1830_ of the skeleton of an infant in the wall of a chamber of
10>Edinburgh Castle; and the alleged likeness in some mature portraits of King
10>James VI and I the 2nd Earl of Mar.
10>The Earl of Mar, partly descended from the Lennox Stewarts (as was
10>Darnley) whose likeness was claimed in the fable. The present 13th Earl of
10>Mar and Kellie has confirmed that he can find nothing in his family
10>archives to support an Erskine family tradition.
10>The infant's bones were actually wrapped in a woollen cloth (an not in
10>cloth of gold with a royal cypher). It is presumed to have been the sad
10>relic of a lady-in-waiting's peccadillo.
10>The portrait of James VI as a child by Honthorst is strikingly like that
10>of his father, Darnley, as a young man by Eworth.
10>I recommend Antonia Fraser's book.
10>Yours aye, Iain
10>in Windsor, Berkshire
10>WWW site: http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/iain_kerr
10> - originated at 29-Nov-1997, 06:01:26 GMT