The Secrets of Glamis Castle

I have a problem with Glamis Castle because every time I think I have found its story, another one appears behind it.

There is a secret room whose location has supposedly been guarded for generations, a hidden family member who may never have existed, a woman executed after being accused of plotting against a king, a ghost in the chapel and a fifteenth-century nobleman who became so determined to continue playing cards that, according to legend, he invited the Devil to join him.

Being Scottish, I feel we may have overachieved here.

Glamis Castle in Angus has been associated with the Lyon family since 1372, when Robert II granted the Thanage of Glamis to Sir John Lyon. The castle we recognise today began developing from the fifteenth century and was altered substantially over the centuries that followed. Mary, Queen of Scots stayed there in 1562, James V took possession of it after the forfeiture of the Glamis estates, Cromwell’s troops occupied it in the seventeenth century, and much later it became closely associated with Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, who spent much of her childhood there. Princess Margaret was born at Glamis in 1930.

That would be more than enough history for most buildings. Glamis, however, has never behaved like one story because its legends overlap and borrow from one another. A secret chamber becomes a hidden prisoner. The hidden prisoner becomes the Monster of Glamis. A real woman executed in 1537 becomes the Grey Lady, while a real fifteenth-century nobleman acquires an eternal card game with the Devil.

Somewhere along the way, people stopped asking whether Glamis had a secret and started asking what the secret was.

The best place to begin is with the room.

THE SECRET CHAMBER CAME FIRST

Long before anybody was talking about a hidden monster, Walter Scott was talking about a secret room.

Scott stayed at Glamis when he was a young man and later described the experience in his Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft, published in 1830. He remembered the enormous thickness of the walls, the old furniture and armour, and the uncomfortable feeling of being led to a distant bedroom while door after door closed behind the person showing him there. By his own account, he began to feel considerably too far from the living and rather too close to the dead.

I cannot fault him.

More importantly, Scott recorded a tradition that Glamis contained a secret chamber whose entrance was known to only three people at any one time: the Earl of Strathmore, his heir and one other person whom they trusted with the knowledge.

That is extremely useful because Scott tells us what the Glamis mystery looked like before later generations decorated it. There was a secret room and says nothing about a person living inside it.

The prisoner came later.

SOMEBODY HAD TO BE INSIDE IT

By the middle of the nineteenth century, stories were circulating that the hidden chamber did not contain papers, valuables or the sort of dull family clutter that would probably be found if somebody opened most mysterious cupboards.

It contained a person.

The earliest known versions of this story appear to date from around the 1840s. By the time the tale was recorded more fully, the hidden occupant was being described as a member of the Bowes-Lyon family and, more dramatically, as the rightful heir to the estate.

The story became known as the Monster of Glamis, which is an appalling name for what the legend claims was a human being.

According to the best-known version, a boy had been born into the family with severe physical differences. Because he was the eldest son and therefore stood to inherit, his existence created a problem. The family supposedly announced his death while secretly keeping him alive somewhere inside Glamis, where trusted servants cared for him and occasionally allowed him outside when there was little chance of anyone seeing him.

Victorian versions became increasingly imaginative. There were stories of a strange figure appearing on the battlements, servants stumbling into hidden passages, workers being paid to leave the country after discovering too much, and a prisoner who had spent his entire life concealed from the world.

The more people repeated the story, the more detailed the unseen man became. There is, however, one uncomfortable piece of real family history underneath it.

A CHILD WAS BORN IN 1821

Peerage records show that Lord Glamis and Charlotte Grimstead married in 1820 and that their first child was a son who was recorded as having been born and died on 21 October 1821.

That child existed, yet there is no evidence that he secretly survived. The gap between those two facts is where the entire Monster story lives.

Later generations looked at the record of a baby who was born and died on the same day and asked whether the death had been invented. Once the idea of a concealed heir became attached to the existing secret-room tradition, almost every unexplained part of Glamis could be made to support it.

Locked door? Monster.

Unusual window? Monster.

Member of the family refusing to discuss the castle secret? Definitely Monster.

By the twentieth century, writers were publishing elaborate descriptions of what the hidden man had looked like, despite those descriptions appearing long after the person in question would have died. Some described him in language that is genuinely unpleasant to read now.

This is the part of the story that makes me uncomfortable. If a child was born with a disability in 1821 and died shortly afterwards, generations of strangers turned him into a creature hiding behind a wall.

The legend does not need to be true to tell us something fairly grim about the society that created it.

THEN THE GUESTS GOT INVOLVED

The secret chamber became such an obsession that visitors to Glamis apparently decided to find it themselves.

Sir Horace Rumbold, a British diplomat who visited the castle in the nineteenth century, later recorded a story about an attempt made around 1850 while the Earl was away. The Countess and her guests reasoned that if the hidden room had a window, they ought to be able to identify it by comparing the windows outside with the rooms inside.

Their solution was wonderfully straightforward; they opened windows throughout the castle and hung sheets, towels or handkerchiefs from them. They then went outside to see whether any window remained unaccounted for.

The Earl returned while this operation was underway. I cannot imagine why he would be annoyed.

Different retellings give different results for the experiment. Some say a single window remained without a marker, while others claim there were several, which slightly undermines an investigation based entirely upon counting windows correctly.

The important part is not whether they found the room. By the middle of the nineteenth century, educated guests in a great Scottish castle were hanging towels out of windows in an attempt to locate a secret prisoner.

The Glamis mystery had stopped being a story people heard. People were testing it.

THE FAMILY DID VERY LITTLE TO CALM EVERYONE DOWN

The behaviour attributed to generations of the Bowes-Lyon family only encouraged the mystery.

One persistent tradition claimed that the secret was revealed to the heir when he reached adulthood. Men who had joked about the story beforehand were said to become far less amused after being told the truth, and several visitors later described members of the family as unwilling to discuss the subject.

Stories surrounding Claude Bowes-Lyon, 13th Earl of Strathmore, became particularly important. Later accounts portrayed him as burdened by whatever he had been told, while acquaintances remembered an air of sadness around him and linked it to the family mystery. How much of this was observation and how much was interpretation after people already knew the legend is impossible to establish.

Even members of later generations recalled that discussion of the mystery had been discouraged when they were children.

This behaviour doesn’t prove there was a hidden relative in a room. Families can have private matters that are neither supernatural nor especially dramatic, and once people expect secrecy, an unwillingness to answer questions becomes evidence in itself.

One visitor eventually came to a much simpler conclusion.

PERHAPS THE SECRET WAS THAT THERE WAS NO SECRET

David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford, visited Glamis in 1905 and wrote about the family’s enthusiasm for ghosts and their habit of tailoring stories to the people visiting them.

His conclusion about the famous Glamis secret was beautifully uncomplicated.

He believed there was none.

I sincerely hope he was right, because the alternative is that generations of aristocrats accidentally maintained one of Britain’s longest-running mysteries by refusing to answer questions and looking concerned whenever somebody mentioned a cupboard.

There is also evidence that concealed spaces genuinely existed within Glamis. Historic buildings of this kind were altered repeatedly, and estate records referred to at least one deliberately hidden space near the charter room. Other visitors described concealed passages and trapdoors.

A secret room, therefore, is not particularly difficult to believe. It is the leap from hidden architecture to hidden human being that causes the trouble.

THEN THERE IS JANET DOUGLAS

Unlike the Monster of Glamis, Janet Douglas unquestionably existed, and her real story is horrible enough without giving her supernatural powers.

Janet was born into the powerful Douglas family and married John Lyon, 6th Lord Glamis. Her brother Archibald Douglas, Earl of Angus, became a bitter enemy of King James V, and Janet was caught in the hostility between the King and her family.

She faced accusations over several years before being tried in Edinburgh in 1537. The surviving record of her conviction states that she was found guilty of participating in a treasonous conspiracy to kill James V by poison and of assisting her brother and his supporters. She was condemned and burned on Castle Hill in Edinburgh on 17 July 1537. National Records of Scotland preserves material relating to the proceedings, while the present-day Glamis history describes the accusations against her as false and rooted in the King's hatred of the Douglas family.

Her young son was also caught up in the case, while her second husband, Archibald Campbell of Skipnish, died attempting to escape from Edinburgh Castle after the trial.

Janet's execution has frequently been described in later ghost stories as a witch burning. That is not what the recorded verdict says.

Historical accounts have noted that the manner of her death probably helped create the later belief that she had been convicted of witchcraft, but the surviving trial record concerns treason and a plot against the King's life by poison.

Apparently being burned after a politically charged treason trial was insufficiently dramatic, so folklore gave her witchcraft as well. She had suffered enough, frankly.

JANET BECAME THE GREY LADY

The ghost traditionally identified as Janet Douglas is known as the Grey Lady of Glamis.

She is associated particularly with the castle chapel, where stories describe a female figure sitting, praying or appearing among the congregation. Glamis Castle itself continues to identify the chapel as the location traditionally haunted by the Grey Lady.

There is a lovely problem with that story. The present chapel was completed in 1688 and Janet Douglas died in 1537. The room most closely associated with her ghost therefore did not exist until more than 150 years after her death.

That does not prevent somebody from believing that a ghost might choose a newer room, obviously. I am not sufficiently familiar with spectral property law to know whether the dead are limited to rooms they personally used; however, it does tell us that the image of Janet endlessly haunting the chapel belongs to the later folklore of Glamis rather than to anything connected with her own life there.

She remains one of the most compelling figures in the castle’s history because, beneath the ghost story, there is a real woman whose destruction was tied to a political feud she had little power to escape.

Janet Douglas does not need to appear in the chapel to belong in the story of Glamis. She was already there.

AND THEN THERE IS EARL BEARDIE

We now need to discuss the cards.

The legend of Earl Beardie has been attached to Glamis for generations, although we encounter a problem before the Devil has even arrived because the identity of Beardie changes depending on which version of the story you read.

He is often identified as Alexander Lindsay, 4th Earl of Crawford, a powerful fifteenth-century nobleman known historically as both the Tiger Earl and Earl Beardie. Other versions attach the story to Alexander Lyon, 2nd Lord Glamis.

The details move around, but the central story remains remarkably consistent.

Beardie is drinking and playing cards at Glamis when somebody reminds him that the Sabbath is approaching and that the game should end. He refuses. In some versions he announces that he will play until Doomsday, while in others he declares that he would rather play cards with the Devil than stop.

There are sentences you should probably avoid saying aloud in an old Scottish castle.

A stranger arrives and offers to continue the game, we all know who the stranger is.

The game carries on behind a closed door while disturbing noises are heard from inside, and Beardie discovers that his new opponent is not merely somebody who happened to be wandering through Angus looking for a hand of cards. Depending upon the version, the Devil takes Beardie’s soul or condemns him to continue playing until the end of time.

Later stories claim that the sounds of the game can still be heard somewhere within Glamis.

I have several questions, beginning with what they are playing, because eternity is a very long time for Snap.

THE DEVIL WAS BUSY IN SCOTTISH FOLKLORE

There is nothing in the historical record that allows us to treat Beardie’s game as an event that occurred at Glamis.

Alexander Lindsay was real, and his reputation gave storytellers plenty to work with. He was a powerful and violent participant in fifteenth-century Scottish politics, fought against forces loyal to James II and was defeated at the Battle of Brechin in 1452.

The supernatural part belongs to folklore.

Stories in which somebody ignores the Sabbath, boasts about dealing with the Devil and is immediately taken up on the offer were hardly unique to Glamis. Beardie’s changing identity is another clue that we are dealing with a legend shaped by repeated telling rather than a preserved account of one event.

I still admire the efficiency of it. Man says he will play with the Devil; the Devil appears; no lengthy summoning ritual. No candles. No ancient book.

Excellent availability.

THIS IS WHERE GLAMIS GETS INTERESTING

Almost every major Glamis legend has something real underneath it. There is a genuine medieval castle whose architecture was altered repeatedly over centuries. There are concealed spaces and unusually thick walls. Walter Scott recorded the tradition of a secret chamber before the Monster story became established.

A child was born into the Bowes-Lyon family in 1821 and officially recorded as dying that day, although there is no evidence that he survived in secret.

Victorian guests genuinely became fascinated by the mystery, and Horace Rumbold recorded the extraordinary window-and-towel experiment.

Janet Douglas was a real woman who was executed in 1537 following a treason conviction that later historians and the castle itself have regarded as unjust.

Alexander Lindsay was a real fifteenth-century nobleman known as Earl Beardie, although there is considerably less documentary support for his ongoing social engagement with Satan.

The stories did not appear from nothing - they attached themselves to gaps.

GLAMIS GAVE PEOPLE TOO MANY GAPS

That may be the real secret of the castle. People knew there were spaces they could not enter. They knew parts of the building had been altered, blocked or concealed. They knew the family had private traditions and refused to explain some of them. They knew real tragedies had taken place within the family’s history.

Once you combine those things, imagination does the rest. If somebody tells you that there is a hidden chamber inside a Scottish castle and refuses to tell you what is in it, you are unlikely to imagine spare chairs. You put something interesting in there. Perhaps there is a prisoner. Perhaps he is the rightful heir. Perhaps the family has hidden him because his existence is unbearable to them. Perhaps the strange figure somebody thinks they saw outside at night was him.

Once that story has circulated long enough, the locked room becomes evidence for the prisoner, and the prisoner becomes the explanation for the locked room.

The same thing happens to Janet Douglas. A real woman dies horribly, and centuries later her story provides an identity for a female apparition in a chapel built long after she was gone.

A real nobleman with a violent reputation becomes the obvious candidate for an eternal card game with the Devil.

History provides the names. Folklore decides what they do next.

I STILL WANT TO KNOW WHERE THE ROOM IS

After all of this, I have no difficulty believing that Glamis contains concealed spaces. I am considerably less convinced that one of them housed a secret heir for decades.

The Monster of Glamis looks much more like a nineteenth-century story growing around an older tradition of a hidden chamber, particularly because Walter Scott recorded the chamber without mentioning any inhabitant. The surviving record of the 1821 child gives us a fact around which the later rumour could gather, but nothing that demonstrates he lived beyond the day his death was recorded.

The Grey Lady has a far stronger historical person behind her, although the haunting itself remains tradition.

Earl Beardie is wonderfully hopeless from an evidential point of view and can remain exactly where he belongs: somewhere behind a wall, swearing at the Devil over a pack of cards.

Perhaps David Lindsay was right in 1905, and the great Glamis secret was that there was no secret.

I simply cannot spend this long reading about a room whose location was supposedly known to only three people, generations of guests hanging towels out of windows to find it, workmen stumbling across blocked passages and members of the family refusing to discuss the matter and then be expected to lose interest.

The sensible explanation is that Glamis is an ancient, repeatedly altered building whose architecture provided ideal conditions for stories about hidden rooms.

That is perfectly reasonable, but I still want to know where the bloody room is.