![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() The final make-up of the raiding band was only decided at the last minute when Hamilton, Kay Matheson, Gavin Vernon and Alan Stuart set out in two cars from Glasgow for London. He went on a reconnaissance mission to Westminster Abbey, which he found “rich and dignified and stately, like an Englishman’s conception of his country’s history”, and was given moral and financial support by John MacCormick, the founding father of the modern Home Rule movement. A promise was made at the Treaty of Northampton in 1328 to return the Stone, but the promise was not kept.īy November 1950 Hamilton had made up his mind that he would try to retrieve the Stone and set about recruiting accomplices. The monarchs of Scotland were crowned while sitting on the Stone from then until 1296, when Edward I, in a fierce symbolic gesture, transported the Stone to London. In 843 Kenneth MacAlpin moved the Stone to the Pictish centre of Scone for his coronation as King of Scots. The Stone, more than four hundredweight of sandstone and said to have formed the pillow on which Jacob slept, was supposed to have come to Scotland in about 500 AD with the establishment of the kingdom of Dalriada. I never have.” He pondered the matter of the Stone, which some nationalists, including Hugh MacDiarmid, had thought about stealing for several years previous. His “prime qualification” to talk in such terms, he later wrote, was “that I did not know my place. Hamilton took part in this but his ambitions went beyond reform of political institutions: he wished to reawaken the nation’s soul. It was a time of dissatisfaction regarding the constitutional situation and the Scottish Covenant, which asserted the right of Scotland to a Scottish Parliament, had been signed in 1948 by some two million Scots. Ian Hamilton, who has died aged 97, was active in several spheres including the law, politics, market gardening and publishing but of his many adventures and acts of iconoclasm none shone so brightly as that which took place on Christmas Day 1950, when he led the small band of students which removed the Stone of Destiny, also known as the Stone of Scone, from Westminster Abbey and took it back to Scotland. ![]()
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