11 - The Britannia of Robert Sibbald

Summary

In medieval Edinburgh, the Preaching Friar's Vennel led from the High Street to the Black Friary of the Dominican Monks founded by Alexander II. Here in 1588, in what was known by then as the Blackfriars Wynd, the earl of Bothwell pursued Sir William Stewart, cornered him in a cellar, and plunged a sword into his chest. The two men came to fatal blows days after Stewart challenged Bothwell to kiss his ‘arse’ during an argument in front of James VI. Eighty years later, a Presbyterian zealot came within a hair's breadth of shooting dead the persecuting archbishop of St Andrews, James Sharpe, who kept his residence in the Blackfriars. The assassin lost his life after excruciating torture and two years’ imprisonment on Bass Rock.

How fitting that the man Edmund Gibson commissioned to revisit the Scottish chapters of Britannia should have been born in the storied Blackfriars in the tumultuous spring of 1641. Young Robert Sibbald's family retreated to their estate in Fife during the 1640s. Tucked away in Fife, Sibbald began school in Cupar in 1650 before finishing his education at Edinburgh's Royal High School and going on to Edinburgh University, graduating M.A. in 1659. However, Sibbald witnessed the violence unleashed among the peoples of Britain and Ireland by religious bigotry and ethnic prejudice. For Oliver Cromwell, Charles I's final military defeat in 1648 signalled God's judgment on their great cause and the king was duly tried and executed as a man of blood in January 1649. Incensed at the execution of their shared sovereign by the English Parliament, the Scots proclaimed Charles Stuart king and crowned him Charles II at Scone in 1651. General William Monck, like Cromwell before him at the Battle of Dunbar, led the New Model Army into Scotland to punish the Scots. Sibbald watched in September 1651 as Monck destroyed Dundee in retaliation. Perhaps as many as 1300 inhabitants paid with their lives. The Scots were invited to consent to become part of a British Commonwealth in 1652, a union that was finally confirmed in 1654.

Robert Leighton, Principal of Edinburgh, steered Sibbald away from these deadly controversies. Sibbald left behind the decisive events of the fall of the Commonwealth and restoration of the Stuart monarchy when he departed for Leiden to study medicine in March 1660.