TRINITY APSE

There’s much to be desired about the aesthetic of this close, not least because of the building works to the left side. But I quite like the poetic position of this stop. Like many of the women we have discussed on the tour so far, it is very much hidden from plain sight.

We are standing in front of Trinity Apse, what remains of a mid-fifteenth century collegiate church and hospital. It is a Category A listed building and one of the finest surviving examples of medieval Gothic architecture in Scotland.

If you look closely at the walls you will start to see numbers on the stonework. That’s because each stone was individually numbered before this building was dismantled because in 1848, the North British Railway Company wanted the land on which the original church stood, in the valley where Waverley Station now sits. The church was taken apart stone by stone, the pieces numbered, stored in a yard on Calton Hill, and promised to be rebuilt elsewhere.

The stones sat there, unprotected for years and by the time a site was finally agreed and the rebuilding began in 1872, two thirds of the original stones had vanished. Only enough remained to reconstruct the apse and part of the choir, attached to the rear of a new Victorian church on Jeffrey Street, which this close leads out onto. However, that Victorian church was itself demolished in 1964 and all that remains is the reconstructed mid-fifteenth century apse.

Now, 1848, the year when the first medieval church was dismantled is twenty-seven years before the founding of The Cockburn Association and so, they could not campaign to save the original church. But, the man whose name the association carries could and did. Lord Cockburn had written three years earlier: "The country is an asylum of railway lunatics — and anyone who puts in a word for the preservation of scenery, or relics, or sacred haunts, is set down as a beast, hostile to the poor man's rights, modern improvement, and the march of intellect.” And yet, despite his eloquent fury, the church was dismantled and platform 2 of Waverley station was built in its place.

It was partly that fury at the destruction of Edinburgh’s historic fabric and amenity that inspired a group of men to found The Cockburn Association in 1875. Lord Cockburn’s 1849 Letter to the Lord Provost on the Best Ways of Spoiling the Beauty of Edinburgh, provided the inspiration to establish the organisation and it could be argued that the association exists, in part, because of what happened to the church we are looking at.

I also want to suggest that we understand this loss and neglect more when we consider whose church this was for it was commissioned by one of Scotland’s Queens, Mary of Guelders.

Overshadowed by other Scottish Queens such as Saint Margaret, Queen of Scotland and Mary, Queen of Scots, Mary was born in the Duchy of Brabant in 1434, spent her youth at the ducal courts of Guelders and Burgundy, and came to Scotland to marry King James II in 1449. When her husband was killed in 1460 by one of his own cannons, which exploded beside him, she was twenty-six years old, a widow in a foreign country, with a son, King James III, to protect and a kingdom to govern.

She commissioned this collegiate church and hospital in the same year, as a memorial to her husband and an act of devotion in her own name.

For the next three years, until her own death in 1463, she also governed Scotland as a quasi-regent on behalf of her son, James III. The scholar, Dr Rachel Delman, has also argued that the construction of the church would have visually demonstrated Mary’s lack of want to remarry for such an arrangement would distance her from her son, the king.(1)

She chose to be buried here, in the church she had built, rather than beside her husband at Holyrood. This decision comes across very deliberate, almost a statement. At the time when women’s agency was severely constrained by the patriarchal structures of medieval society, she decided where and how she would be commemorated and chose the building that she had commissioned, connecting with the site forever, or so she thought at the time.

Now, you may not be surprised to hear that the historical narrative surrounding the site was not always fair to the legacy of Queen Mary for it often downplayed her role, arguing that the project was begun by James II and merely continued by Mary following his death. Sound familiar? Indeed, we discussed a similar story earlier at The Magdalen Chapel and although it was, in this case, husband and wife who initiated the project, it was ultimately Jonet who completed it. Although different in origins, both stories tell a similar tale of women’s roles being downplayed and assumptions being made about who builds things and who matters historically. But with Trinity College Church, the evidence is clear for the Papal Bull confirms that Mary was the foundress, in her own right.

These days the story is still being recovered. A scholar called Jill Harrison, a social art historian, founded The Trinity Network in 2018, a collaborative project dedicated to reviving the reputation of this church and securing the future of what remains. Furthermore, she initiated a project called Reviving the Trinity Stones which seeks to track the ‘lost’ stones. An exhibition about their work will be held at the Museum of Edinburgh from the start of May.

With all of this in mind, it seems overwhelmingly sad to observe one of the most sophisticated examples of Gothic architecture in Scotland, commissioned by a twenty-six-year-old widow governing a foreign land, reduced to this by a railway company and many years of neglect. In fact, all of this seems to be a powerful visual metaphor about how we have treated women’s history – forgotten and neglected.

The architectural case for this building's preservation, and the broader principle of amenity, the idea that historic buildings contribute to the character, beauty and civic value of a place, has clearly not been a strong enough argument on its own for this particular site, as its neglected state and limited accessibility demonstrate. So perhaps foregrounding the story of the queen who commissioned it, and making that story genuinely accessible to visitors, will prove more persuasive.

Head to the next stop below.

Sources

1) Delman, Rachel. ‘Always at the Gate? Unlocking Medieval Women’s Stories in Modern-day Edinburgh’, in Cowan, M., Nugent, J. and Spence, C. (eds.), Gender in Scotland, 1200–1800: Place, Faith and Politics, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 2024, p. 78.