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Journal of the NOBLE www.noble.com.au NUMISMATICS PTY LTD Numismatic Association of Australia ground fl oor 169 macquarie street sydney [email protected] level 7 / 350 collins street melbourne [email protected] The ‘Crookston Dollar’ and the historic muse David J Rampling To make up for the rarity of strictly am indebted to a nineteenth-century accurate annals, interest in old castles historian, David Semple, who is usually sustained by the aid of documented his exhaustive researches traditional tales…and in the supply of in a monograph refuting the validity of such legendary ware Crookston Castle any connection between the coin and kept well to the front. the Crookston estates.3 Some of his R Renwick (1910) themes are incorporated into my paper4; moreover, as Semple’s concluding hope England inaugurated the silver that “the day is now past for continuing crown denomination in the reign of the false name…of the coin”5 has not Edward VI with the striking ‘king on been realised more than a century later, horseback’ design in 1551. Scotland it is perhaps salutary to re-examine the followed in 1565 under Mary and Henry myth. Darnley with a silver ryal or thirty The ryal is composed of silver shilling piece, bearing facing portraits with a fineness of eleven deniers and (Fig. 1).1 It was rapidly withdrawn and weighs one Scottish ounce (c. 30.5 g). replaced by a design featuring the arms The obverse bears the arms of Scotland of Scotland on the obverse and a palm crowned, between two thistles, with the tree, tortoise and scroll on the reverse legend: MARIA. &. HENRIC9. DEI. (Fig. 2).2 The ryal became popularly GRA. R. &. R. SCOTORV surrounding known as the ‘Crookston dollar’ these central elements. The reverse sometime in the eighteenth century, bears a crowned palm tree with a tortoise due to a presumed romantic association climbing the trunk; across the tree is a with Crookston Castle, near Glasgow. scroll on which is displayed the motto The term, ‘dollar’, was commonly used DAT GLORIA VIRES (Glory gives from the late-sixteenth century onward strength6). The date is positioned across to describe crown-sized silver coins. the lower trunk with two numerals In this paper, I trace the origin either side. The legend: EXVRGAT. and some of the ramifications of the DEVS. &. DISSIPENTR . INIMICI. EI9 ‘Crookston’ connection, in numismatic (Let God arise and let His enemies be antiquarianism, literature, and art. I scattered7) surrounds the central design. 80 JNAA 22, 2011 (2012) The ‘Crookston Dollar’ and the historic muse Figure 1. Copper electrotype cliché of obverse of Henry and Mary portraits ryal. Figure 2. Mary and Henry ryal (Crookston dollar). This remained the design for three principal features, with their weights years with annual changes of dates from and dimensions being in proportion. All 1565-7. Henry’s name was dropped display minor variations within each following his death in February 1567. denomination (Fig. 3). The majority of coins of 1567 bear the The unusual design chosen for the obverse legend: MARIA. DEI. GRA. reverse of these coins has provided SCOTORVM. REGINA. endless fascination for numismatists, The two-thirds and one-third ryals and has invoked various hypotheses follow the design of the ryals in their as to its emblematic significance.8 As JNAA 22, 2011 (2012) 81 David J Rampling Figure 3. Ryal, two-thirds and one third ryals (reverses). these conjectures bear only indirectly romantic fable that it once offered shade on my subject, I shall not review to Mary and Henry Darnley pursuing them here except to point out that the their courtship beneath its branches. climbing tortoise or ‘schell-padocke’ Charles Mackie in The Castles of Mary, as it is designated in the ordinance, Queen of Scots, (1835) recorded: “The is commonly identified with Henry site of the yew tree is still pointed Darnley. out…under whose ill-omened branches In tracing the origins and course of Mary is said to have sat with her lover, the appropriation of ‘Crookston’ to the enjoying that reciprocal felicity, which coin, there is the interweaving of several was so soon to be embittered by the threads: first, the ‘romantic’ linking of blackest malignity…”.9 Mackie went on Mary to Crookston and its yew tree, to state the then entrenched belief that secondly, the imaginative palimpsest the “impress of the tree of Crookston engaged in by numismatists of effacing is on the reverse of the large pieces of the palm with a yew, and finally, the an ounce weight coined by Queen Mary immutability of the term ‘Crookston after marriage with Henry Darnley”.10 dollar’. This figment of imagination was The association of the Mary ryal based on a double falsehood. First, the with Crookston Castle (Fig. 4) is based tree depicted on the coin is a palm, and on the once popular presumption that was stated as such in the ordinance of the tree depicted on the reverse of the 22nd December, 1565 for the striking of coin is a yew that grew within the castle the ryals; secondly, there is no evidence grounds, the ancestral home of the that Mary and Henry were ever together Stewarts of Darnley. This tree caught at Crookston. the popular imagination through the How, then, did these mythical 82 JNAA 22, 2011 (2012) The ‘Crookston Dollar’ and the historic muse Figure 4. Crookston Castle viewed from the east. JNAA 22, 2011 (2012) 83 David J Rampling associations evolve, and become of death: enshrined in the vernacular designation of ‘Crookston dollar’? A reference is As I did sleep under this yew to be found in The Scottish Historical tree here, I dreamt my master Library by Nicolson published in 1702. and another fought, And that my Describing the coin he noted: master slew him A Palm-Tree crown’d…Some call the Tree on the Reverse an Yew- The first major work on the Scottish Tree; and report that there grew coinage, James Anderson’s Selectus a famous one of that kind in the Diplomatum et Numismatum Scotiae Park (or Garden) of the Earl of Thesaurus, published in 1739, affirmed Lenox, which gave occasion to the that the tree represented on the coin was Impress…11 not a yew but a palm: “in quo non taxus, There appears to be no earlier sed palma”.13 Anderson presumably had publication attesting a connection access to the Act of the Privy Council between the yew tree and the coin, but of 1565 authorising the coinage of ryals, Nicolson made it clear that a tradition as this had been made freely available had arisen prior to the eighteenth in an Edinburgh publication four years century. He is silent as by what licence previously.14 the palm was transformed into a yew I am unaware of any further in the popular imagination. The myth reference to a relationship between the was repeated by at least two historians tree of Crookston and the Mary ryal during the early decades of the until 1763, when an engraving made by eighteenth century.12 Robert Paul from a sketch by Charles While acknowledging the romantic Cordiner and published by Foulis, associations of later generations, it is included the tree in the foreground of tempting to speculate that the tradition the castle and the reverse of a Mary may have originated from events ryal beneath the main scene (Fig. 5). contemporaneous with the coinage, As if to make plain a link between the namely the consecutive murders of Crookston tree and the arboreal image Mary’s secretary David Rizzio, and on the coin, the artist placed some roots subsequently, her husband, Henry emerging from the rim of the coin!15 Darnley. Yew trees have historically The following year saw the provided wood for weaponry, are publication of The Clyde, a poem by of themselves poisonous, and have John Wilson (1720-1789), containing an ancient connection to seership as these lines: portrayed in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (1597), Act 5, Scene 3, wherein By Crookston Castle waves the Romeo’s servant Balthasar has a vision still green yew, 84 JNAA 22, 2011 (2012) The ‘Crookston Dollar’ and the historic muse Figure 5. Castle and ryal linked in engraving of 1763. (The same perspective as in Fig. 4.) The first that met the royal Mary’s contemporary readership. view, In 1786, Adam de Cardonnel When, bright in charms, the perpetuated the myth in his Numismata youthful princess led Scotiae16, notwithstanding the assertions The graceful Darnley to her of Nicolson in 1702, Anderson in 1739 throne and bed: and Snelling17 in 1774 that the tree Embossed in silver, now its depicted on the coin was a palm. Having branches green quoted Anderson and the ordinance of Transcend the myrtle of the 1565, he added the footnote: Paphian queen This was the first large silver piece that was coined in Scotland. It is This reference to the Crookston yew observable, that this is almost the being “embossed in silver”, suggests only instance of the king’s name that the connection of castle and coin being placed posterior to that had by mid-eighteenth century achieved of the queen; however, to make popular acceptance, or the allusion amends as it were to the king…the would have had little meaning for a famous yew tree of Cruickstone, JNAA 22, 2011 (2012) 85 David J Rampling the inheritance of the family of better founded.

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