Stone of Destiny

by Ian Hamilton

  I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year, Give me a light that I may tread out into the unknown, and the man said to me, Go out into the darkness and put your hand into the hand of God, for it is better than a light, and safer than a known way.

  These are memorable words for a grim occasion. It was only ten years since he spoke them. You do not play games with the symbols of your country, whether they be man, stone or trinkets. I did the best I could.

  Chapter Twenty

  Having prepared the petition, the next problem was how to convey it to the King. A tuppenny stamp and a post box was the obvious solution. After all, it was his Royal Mail. But I was voted down on that one. While petitioning the King, we were also persuading the people, and whatever method we used had to be one which permitted the people to read the correspondence. This was no time for secret diplomacy. From now on everyone was in the game, and whatever we did was open to criticism. Give the public the chance to cheer your actions, and you also give them the right to boo. This communication demanded something more than a licked stamp and a sealed envelope. It had to be made public.

  If the press could get access to it, so would the public. The traditional way is to nail the communication to some public door, as we did with a later communication by nailing it to the door of St Giles Cathedral. The obvious door for our petition was the door to the Abbey of Scone, from where the Stone had originally been stolen by Edward of England. Unfortunately, Scone Abbey has no door; indeed there is no longer an Abbey of Scone. We were some hundreds of years too late. It had all been knocked down to provide material for building Scone Palace, the home of the Earl of Mansfield. Things were getting difficult, and since the English press were referring to the Stone as the Stone of Scone, we decided to use the door to Scone post office as the next best thing. As this could only be done in the hours of darkness, I went off to get some sleep before setting out.

  Bill wakened me two hours later. I copied out the petition in false handwriting, being careful to handle the paper only with gloves, since I wished to leave no fingerprints. The false handwriting was not a wise idea. Scotland Yard’s department of holography is probably more skilful than its department of telepathy, and I was taking a needless risk. Still, we had no typewriter immediately available, and the petition was in a hurry. It was coming on for 4 a.m. when we finally went for the car, which had had to be kept in an overnight garage because of the intense cold.

  We started it with difficulty and drove off north. As we drove, we argued. I took the view that the petition deserved a better fate than being pinned to the door of a country post office. Post offices are mundane things; village post offices are no exception. It was quite likely that it would be torn down and put in a dead letter box because it didn’t have a stamp. I wanted to deliver it somewhere else.

  Scone was still the ideal place, but not the post office. Then I remembered that the Earl of Mansfield had come out strongly in favour of our action. I can take earls or leave them, but their very title makes people think that they are something special, and to have an earl on our side, as well as all the rest of public opinion, was too good to be ignored. I wanted to use the Earl, just as we were using the King. Such a scheme, of course, had its dangers. The nobleman might set a trap for us, and hand us over to the police. Yet I was not afraid of that. I believed that honour was far too real a thing among the aristocracy for him to betray me after he had given me a safe conduct.

  In Perth, we stopped outside the post office, looked his name up in the directory and telephoned him. Although I would not give my name he came to the telephone almost immediately. I had the insolence to ask if his telephone was being tapped, although the insolence had common sense behind it. It gave him a chance to withdraw immediately, and also impressed him with the necessity for prudence. His caution would, I hoped, be a reflection of mine.

  He assured me that to the best of his knowledge his telephone was quite innocent, and I asked him if I could come to visit him. He was rather reluctant, for he was engaged with his guests, but when I told him the nature of my business his tone immediately changed.

  ‘I’m just leaving for the moors with my guests,’ he told me, ‘and I don’t think it would be wise to cancel that. Could you come and see me at six o’clock?’

  I assured him that that would suit admirably and rang off.

  I drove Bill to Perth station, for he was now leaving me to go back to Glasgow. I was sorry about that as I enjoyed his company, but as President of the Union he had to interview a new pastry cook.

  I had 10 hours to put in before I went out to Scone to visit the Earl, but the time would not be wasted. My parents were retired and lived at Ballinluig, less than 30 miles north of Perth, and it had been in my mind that I would visit them. Before I had set out for London I had left Bill a pathetic letter addressed to them. It was a note explaining why I was in the jail. He had been told to post it if things went wrong. We had burned the letter, but now I was to face them in the flesh.

  As I drove over the familiar miles I became more and more nervous. I have a profound respect for my parents, but I have interpreted their teachings in many ways that they do not understand. I thought they might be vexed and angry, and consider only the lawlessness of my actions. Oh, I had all my arguments ready, but have you ever tried arguing with an elder of the Kirk?

  These were my arguments. Up until the Union of 1707, Scots law was founded not on the supremacy of Parliament, but on the sovereignty of the people. If a law was oppressive, or against public policy, or even if it was obtuse and unworkable, it could be disobeyed and would fall into desuetude and be forgotten. In the last resort the real power in the Kingdom was not the Parliament which passed the law, but the law courts and the people who took it upon their conscience to ignore a law that they considered to be unworkable. I lived, however, in a time when the Anglo-Teutonic doctrine of the supremacy of the central government had usurped the Scottish doctrine of the supremacy of the people. My academic arguments may have been good Scots law, but they would not have been accepted at the Old Bailey. Nor, I grimly thought, would they cut any ice with my father.

  As I passed through Guay and Kindallachan on the way to meet him, I was afraid. I had lost my watch, and it had been a present from him. I had ruined my overcoat, which he had made. I had broken innumerable laws, and now I was trying to make him an accessory to my crimes. Above all, I had ruined my career, a career that he had made great financial sacrifices to further. When I reached Ballinluig, and skidded round the corner at the garage, I felt like the criminal I was.

  I drove up the lane at the side of the house. My mother was amazed and delighted to see me, because I had not been home since the summer. I greeted her uneasily and went into the house. She followed me in, taking off her apron as she came. I sat down on a chair and felt dreadfully ill at ease. The family surroundings inflamed my guilty conscience, and I could scarcely look anywhere with comfort.

  My father had heard my voice, and he came into the room a moment later. His thin spare face was ruddy with health, and his eyes lit up as he came straight across to me and shook my hand. I answered his questions in monosyllables.

  ‘Yes. I am well . . . No. I’m not making a long stay.’ I shrank from plunging into the explanation, and the conversation wandered off at a tangent. The weather had been bad, but everyone was well; my father’s bees seemed to be surviving the winter, but the ground was too hard for digging.

  ‘How did you come up?’ he asked.

  ‘By car,’ I said. I saw the surprise in their faces. I had long since sold the expensive motorbike he had given me. It had gone to eke out my standard of not-too-quiet living. I could see that I could procrastinate no longer.

  ‘What time is it?’ I asked, looking at my bare wrist, for I had taken off the Stuarts’ watch before I came in.

  They looked at me queerly, since the clock on the mantelpiece stared me in the face.

  ‘I’ve lost my watch,’ I said, and added, ‘in West
minster Abbey.’

  My mother started and looked to see if I was joking. My lost watch was the most publicised clue to the whole episode. Its photograph was in all the newspapers. So everyone joked about losing their watch in Westminster Abbey. She saw I was not joking.

  ‘Was it you?’ she asked. ‘Was it you who took the Stone? We thought you would have a hand in it.’

  I turned to my father. A broad grin was spreading over his face. ‘Well done,’ he said. ‘Well done. I haven’t been so proud of anything for a long time.’

  In face of the expected anger and tears, I had found instead the blessing of parental pride. Here was not anger but joy. The ways of one generation differ from another, yet he understood everything I had done. I had always respected my father, and now in turn I had won his respect. That was the hour of my greatest triumph.

  I told them nothing of the story, and they asked for nothing. The story was responsibility, and I wanted to spare them that. All they wanted to know was if the Stone was in the Serpentine, which the police were then dredging. I assured them that it was not, and we laughed happily at the frolics of Scotland Yard.

  The time I had to spend with them was very short, and yet my mother managed to feed me several meals in the interval, as she said I looked thin and white. I told her it was only lack of sleep. As I ate, my father asked me if he could help us in any way. I knew that he was keen to hide the Stone – what Scot was not? – but that was a risk I could not take. I did not want him to be the custodian of the Stone while his son was on trial for removing it. That was no job for a father.

  There was, however, one job he could do for me. It might yet make the difference between success and failure, but I hesitated to ask him. He could lie to the police and give me an alibi. Sooner or later they would come to me and ask me how I had spent Christmas, and the simplest way to lull their suspicions was to say that I had been home.

  ‘What will you do when the police come?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said.

  Now my father loved the truth. Quite apart from the rigorous and stern Calvinist religion that he practised, he loved the truth beyond anything I ever knew. I used to think that he loved it even more than his wife and family. I have tried to copy him over the years, with what success I know not, but truth was regarded by us all as a virtue in itself. It is one of the very few virtues that can stand without being propped up by another. I forget which of us mentioned my need for an alibi, but he undertook to give me one for Christmas. It was the only Christmas present I’ve ever valued. Staunch old Presbyterians of my father’s school find it easier to do anything for a cause than to lie for it, yet that was all that was in his power to do and he did it without hesitation, and without any indication of the sacrifice he was making. It was his sacrifice and his service. To this day I do not think he did it for his son. He did it for his country.

  Together we went into the details. We fixed my time of arrival and departure, and agreed that I had hitchhiked home. No bus conductor or railway porter could inadvertently contradict that. Anxiously my mother and father memorised the details so that our three versions of the story might tally.

  I took my leave with my father’s blessing. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘We’ll stand by you whatever happens.’

  They waved to me as I backed out onto the road and turned south into the heavy twilight to keep my appointment with the Earl of Mansfield. I was leaving one nobleman to meet another.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Snow was blocking the high passes to the north of Ballinluig, so I was almost the only car on the road. The local provision merchants still kept up their service to isolated farms, and I met an occasional local bus and the odd private car. It was not safe to meet oncoming traffic at any speed higher than a crawl, and overtaking was impossible. Frost crept in with the darkness and the road shone black and evil under an uneasy cloud-blocked sky. I began to realise that I was going to be late for my appointment.

  The steering of the car was giving me great trouble. The Ballinluig garage had done what they could for it, by injecting massive amounts of grease into the steering joints, but they had told me the whole thing should be scrapped. Garages love giving bad news. I crept along, peering into the yellow beam of the headlights, forcing concentration on the snaky black roads. The hills, like two friends, convoyed me on either hand, but the blackness had that grey quality which accompanies damp frost, so I could not see them. Still I knew they were there, and they comforted me.

  At Murthly, where the hills come down into a series of fat ripples, I turned from the main road and struck across country. I had carefully noted the position of the Earl’s estate on the map, and I thought that I had memorised the route. I soon found that in the dark all the roads seemed the same, and I was as hopelessly lost as I had been in the Old Kent Road two days before. Roads that appeared to lead in one direction treacherously turned in another. Those I sought directions from were again the village idiots, or strangers there themselves. What strangers were doing in the wilds of Perthshire on that bleak night I did not know. It was all very sinister.

  Yet, although I was late for my appointment, the delay did little harm. Earls can wait. The fear of meeting a man of his rank did not trouble me greatly. Scotland has never been a feudal country and lords are just commoners with titles. The country schools have produced peers as well as ploughmen and professors, and will do so again when England stops lowering our education system to a level with its own. Yet it was a new situation. I was passing from the level of action, where a man is accepted for what he does and how well he does it, to the level of diplomacy, where a man is assessed on his opinions, and on how he uses words to cloak them. I did not like the change and it was a source of worry to me.

  With these thoughts in mind I drove at last up a long road lined with beech trees, and swung carefully into the driveway of Logie House. Why he was there, and not at Scone Palace, I never found out. No policeman jumped out of the shrubbery to close the gates when I had passed. No whistles sounded. The Earl was Lord Lieutenant of the County of Perth, and Convenor of the Police Committee of Perthshire County Council, and, as such, had all the forces of law and order, both civil and military, at his command. Daniel in the lions’ den came to my mind as I drove on, but I felt instinctively that the estate was not bristling with detectives.

  I pulled up in the courtyard in front of the house. In the darkness I could see little of it except that it was huge. Several lights burned out into the night, and a hospitable feeling came over me. I felt that it was indeed almost Hogmanay and that preparations were afoot for its celebration.

  I stood beside the car and finished a cigarette. I knew that the Earl had publicly embraced the cause of self-government, yet I could not be certain that he would also condone my interpretation of what had been necessary to focus our support. Earls are earls, I thought, contradicting my earlier view, that they were but commoners with titles. Still, it was worth a try. Half the world will cross the road to lout at a lord, and I had crossed two counties to do much the same. If he would give us some public encouragement, announce that our action, while unusual, was inspired purely by love of our country, and communicate the terms of the petition to His Majesty, he would be doing us a great service. Even if he did not openly commit himself, the fact that he was seeing me was of considerable value, because he was making himself some sort of accessory after the fact of a putative crime. Accessory after the fact was not a crime in Scotland, but, by not turning me in, he could face a charge of attempting to pervert the course of justice. To hell with striped trousers and the niceties of the law! I stubbed out my cigarette in the ashtray of the car and went forward and rapped loudly on the door.

  The door was opened by someone whom I presumed to be the Countess of Mansfield. I did not introduce myself, as that would not have been true to the part I was playing, and indeed I had no intention of giving my name. I looked round the brightly lit hall, a homely enough place, if bigger than what I
was used to. Only minutes before I had been lost in the cold and darkness. Now I had stepped from the wings onto the stage. I tried to think of it the way the Countess would be thinking of it, and smiled at her. I could be all sorts of a violent tough for all she knew. I was the stranger out of the night who came and went and whose identity was as little known as that of the little folk themselves.

  ‘I have an appointment with the Earl,’ I said when the door had closed behind me.

  The lady looked at me. ‘You’re late,’ she said. It was more a query to establish my identity than a rebuke.

  ‘I was due an hour ago,’ I said. ‘The roads were bad.’

  I was led up a broad stairway and along a corridor from which doors opened on either side. The Earl was to receive me in his own room, for he had developed a heavy cold and was doctoring it in bed. The Countess showed me in and then withdrew.

  It was a homely room in which I could feel at ease, and the reception I got from the Earl did nothing to erase my first impression.

  ‘Don’t tell me your name,’ he said. ‘It’s better that I shouldn’t know it.’

  ‘That’s just as it should be,’ I agreed.

  As I sat down, the Earl continued, ‘And let me congratulate you on one of the most brilliant exploits in Scottish history.’