The Queen and Scotland – A Platinum Jubilee Tribute

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The present Queen therefore knew it intimately from early childhood. She made her first visit to the annual Braemar Highland Games, held on the first Saturday of September at a permanent ground nine miles from the castle, at the age of seven in the company of her grandfather. During her reign she has missed them only twice, because of the funeral of
Prince William of Gloucester in 1972 and that of Earl Mountbatten in 1979.

When Victoria first visited the games in 1848 she was less than impressed, dismissing them as ‘a poor affair’. But by the following year she had so changed her mind that she agreed to become their patron. To this day they remain a fixed annual point on the royal calendar, though cancelled in 1997 as a mark of respect following the death of Diana, Princess of Wales.

That the Queen should so enjoy the summer life of a Highland laird is hardly surprising given the antecedents of her mother. Although Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother was born in London to a thoroughly English mother, her father was heir to Glamis Castle, one of the most historic and oldest-inhabited stately homes in Scotland, and to the earldom of Strathmore, a title held by a family which traces connections to Robert the Bruce, 14th-century hero of Scotland’s long struggle for independence.

For the Queen, a summer at Balmoral was the perfect antidote to official duties in London. Although she can no longer begin her holiday with a cruise through the Western Isles on the Royal Yacht Britannia, and although Prime Ministers and red boxes of official documents pursue her even to the depths of Aberdeenshire, she finds peace and space in plenty.

She could ride, walk and picnic without the intrusion of crowds; although mountaineers and serious walkers enjoy access to some of the remoter parts of the estate, it is big enough for the Queen and her family never to see them. Yet tourists were occasionally surprised when a vaguely familiar-looking woman in a Hermès headscarf stopped and chatted to them about the weather.

The Queen’s Scottish holidays were well planned, for they embraced that time of year when high summer begins to shade into autumn, the moorland dresses in purple as the heather blooms, and the sharp northern light dances on tumbling streams turned whisky-coloured by the peat. She was usually gone before the first snows dust the Cairngorm summits.

But the Queen’s Scotland was not merely holiday. Her annual official week at Holyroodhouse was a busy round of engagements, meetings, garden parties, and investitures in the small but magnificently ornate chapel of the Order of the Thistle in St Giles’ Cathedral. Her visits to Edinburgh were occasionally enlivened by a State Visit from a neighbouring royal, such as King Harald and Queen Sonja of Norway, a country with which Scotland shares the most ancient historic connections.

Always when in Edinburgh, the Queen went to church at Canongate Kirk in the Royal Mile – not to the Church of England, of which she is Supreme Governor, but the Church of Scotland, which regards the most humble parishioner as equal to the sovereign.

Scotland’s constitutional position within the United Kingdom changed significantly with the return to Edinburgh of a Scottish Parliament for the first time since 1707, and an invitation to the Queen to conduct its first State Opening caused immediate controversy.

Traditionalists wanted her in the full robes of the Order of the Thistle, Scotland’s highest order of chivalry corresponding to the Garter in England, leading a day of unbridled ceremonial. Some Scottish Nationalists, maintaining their country’s long-standing egalitarian reputation, did not want her there at all. They made their protest on the day by each wearing a white rose, a symbol not only of republicanism, but of the Jacobites.

As always, a compromise was reached. The Queen performed the opening, with the ancient crown of Scotland before her, in an elegant day dress and coat by a young Scottish designer. The British national anthem was played only once all day, as she rode in procession out of Holyroodhouse to the ceremony.