Several years ago, Society member Don Maxwell, of Germany, began searching for information on the Maxwell Castle which once stood in Dumfries, Scotland. His quest took him to historians throughout Scotland, but he was unable to find a visual depiction of the castle. While Don's search did not turn up a picture, it set in motion events which may lead to one being produced in the near future. He found that there may be sufficient descriptive material for an historical artist to develop a drawing, or a set of drawings, giving an accurate view of how the castle and grounds looked more than four centuries ago.
History books describe Maxwell Castle as a "fine house" which was built in 1545, destroyed by the English in 1570, and rebuilt in 1572 as a still more palatial structure. The fortified town house with its five acre grounds was the source of the name of Castle Street in downtown Dumfries, but it was in ruins by the late 17th Century, and its site has been occupied by Greyfriars Church since the late 1860s.
At its Annual General Meeting in June 2000, Clan Maxwell adopted the project of seeking to produce an accurate depiction of the castle, setting aside $750 for additional research to take the effort to the point of selecting an artist to produce the drawings. With successful research, the Society will be positioned to authorize and fund the actual drawings. Those can then be offered for publication in historical documents and can also be used by the Society to create lithographs, etched glassware, or other such items which might appeal to members and others interested in Scottish history. There was also discussion at the Annual General Meeting about the Society possibly having a castle drawing engraved on a plaque to be placed on the castle's site in Dumfries. If that ultimate goal is met, the castle's site and significance can again be seen by residents and visitors in that city which holds so much Maxwell history.
Here is an update by Donald Maxwell, one year into the project (Fall 2001) . . .
Unfortunately, we still
have not found a useful drawing of the Maxwell Castle or enough
narrative information to commission a credible reconstruction
drawing. Researchers at Dumfries’ Ewart Library have
provided a report telling more about the castle, but the project
begs considerably more research.
In January 2001, I spent two days researching in Dumfries at the Archives Centre, Ewart Library, with the city engineer who handles queries on 15th-16th century properties, and then at the National Library of Scotland’s Map Centre in Edinburgh. Each contributed a bit more to the puzzle. And a fellow Dumfries and Galloway Antiquarian most graciously dug through obscure histories of Dumfries and Galloway for us, writing a report of several pages.
The Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of
Scotland gave me all they had two years ago in their National
Monuments Record of Scotland. They continually add to their
database from uncataloged, aged documents in their storage, but
they informed me in January that they have nothing new on
Maxwell’s Castle. And the Scottish History Department of the
National Library of Scotland researched the Scottish Burgh Survey
by the Department of Archaeology, University of Glasgow, for us;
however, the Dumfries section contained only references we
already had from other sources.
Some historians have confused Maxwell’s Castle with the
burghal and Royal Castle of Dumfries, calling them both
“Dumfries Castle,” though they stood at different
locations in different centuries.
Dumfries Castle, sometimes called the King’s Castle in
Dumfries, was a mile south of the town center at Castledykes from
before 1214 until it was destroyed in 1357. An interesting
sidelight is that the Scottish quisling Edward Balliol, in 1334,
conveyed by charter to King Edward II of England the town,
castle, and county of Dumfries. The Royal authority at that time
was the Sheriff of Dumfriesshire, Sir Eustice de Maxwell, holder
of the Barony of Caerlaverock. A letter from the King to Sir
Eustice in 1335 began: “The King to his beloved and faithful
Eustice de Maxwell, our sheriff of Dumfries, in Scotland,
Greeting. Since we have intrusted you with the keeping of our
aforesaid county and the pertinents thereof, . . . .”
Maxwell’s Castle, which would not have been called Dumfries
Castle because it was privately owned, stood from 1540 until 1724
on the site of today’s Greyfriars Church at the head of High
Street, and it gave Castle Street its name. It was a battlemented
manor house built apparently by the 4th Lord Maxwell on lands
acquired by the family in 1481. They would become Lords Herries
of Terregles soon after 1547.
An English officer noted around 1565 that the castle would not
have been “strong aganis (sic) any bat- tery.” And if
today some Scots sense you are getting a bit too proud of your
castle, you will hear, “Ah, but it was just a manor
house.” Our rejoinder, of course, is: “And so were 75%
of the other homes in the Low- lands which we call
‘castles’ without qualification.” We just do not
happen to have military officers’ assessments of them on
hand. Even Caerlaverock gave up after only 48 hours of English
battery in 1300. In any case, this assessment was about the first
edition of Maxwell’s Castle, which was thrown down in 1570.
Verbal quibbling with situational purists aside in good humor, we
know that the immediately rebuilt castle was enlarged,
strengthened, and walled. We do not have that English
officer’s military assessment of the second edition, but the
rebuilt castle was strong enough to give sufficient pause King
James VI’s army when it arrived in 1588 to arrest the 7th
Lord Maxwell, Earl of Morton, that Maxwell had time to escape.
The castle was thought to be as rich in appointment and detail as
the elegant MacLellan’s Castle, and the Countess of
Buccleuch called it “the Great House or Palace of
Dumfries.” Home to two Earls, it also served as prison and
justiciary for the Warden of the West March, would have been a
center of Maxwell con- spiracy with the Spanish Court for
invasion of England through Scotland, and Lord Maxwell led his
army of 2000 men from here to meet Johnstone at Dryfe Sands
amidst the longest-running and most destructive clan or family
feud in all of Britain.
One of the most useful articles on Maxwell’s Castle assigns
it a footprint of four to five acres. I have concluded that that
land area comprised the walled-in area around the castle,
stables, justiciary, and other outbuildings. But, after reviewing
property records and maps of the time with the city engineer in
Dumfries, we measured the castle’s likely property to have
been exactly thirty acres, with gardens and grazing back to the
Nith River and eastward to include the site occupied by
today’s Dumfries Academy.
When I began this study, I thought we had about a 25 percent
chance of finding a contemporary drawing of Maxwell’s
Castle. That was probably optimistic. We have one drawing from
memory by an individual who had seen a drawing some years earlier
at Drumlanrigh Castle, but we have no way of know- ing the
accuracy of his memory, how much creative license he took, or
whether he exaggerated points of personal interest — the
kinds of questions that lead us to keep his drawing at arm’s
length and consider a strategy for finding the original painting
which he copied from memory’s eye.
Possible
drawing of Maxwell Castle
If I could find a Scottish researcher willing to spend days,
likely weeks, pouring through the boxes of uncataloged documents
in the basement of Drumlanrigh Castle, and were successful in
begging the Duke of Buccleuch’s permission and indulgence in
this, the researcher might find useful descriptions of the castle
if not a contemporary drawing. Such a project will require some
crafting to be practical.
Obviously, there is much that we do not know about the Maxwell
Castle, but there is also much that we do know. We have
undertaken a difficult but worthwhile task in attempting to
recapture — for our own Society, for the people of Dumfries,
for history — a vision of the structure which hosted many
significant events in the life of our family and the entire
Border region.
At this point, there is still considerable work to be done before
we can commission a credible recon- struction drawing of what the
rebuilt Maxwell’s Castle probably looked like around 1600.
But we continue the effort, hoping we can usefully supplement the
outstanding coverage Alastair Maxwell-Irving gave the castle in
his recent book, Border Towers of Scotland: Their History and
Architecture (reviewed in the July 2000 newsletter).
— Donald J.
Maxwell, Germany
