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00:00Palaces, the most spectacular and lavish homes on earth.
00:09Luxuriously designed for the royals who wanted the biggest and the best.
00:18Behind the golden gates of these royal megastructures are incredible stories waiting to be discovered.
00:25Infamous monarchs from history and the artists, designers and engineers who turned their grand visions into a reality.
00:35These are the most opulent, flamboyant and innovative royal residences around the world.
00:44In this episode, Edinburgh Castle, a symbol of Scottish might that's been bitterly fought over for more than a thousand years.
00:54Some of the most famous names in British history, from Mary Queen of Scots to Oliver Cromwell, have walked its battlements.
01:03The castle contains feats of engineering that have made it one of the most impressive fortresses in the world.
01:11Edinburgh, UK. Home to this spectacular castle that has been besieged over 20 times.
01:20It dominates not just the city, but Scotland itself.
01:26It has been a royal palace, a prison and a military fortress.
01:33The ancient stones of Edinburgh Castle tell a remarkable story of intrigue, conquest and royal rivalry.
01:41Archaeologist Peter Yeoman spent 30 years of his illustrious career unearthing the secrets of the world.
01:48Edinburgh Castle.
02:13Surprisingly, we knew very little about the archaeology of the castle.
02:18There was an early documentary date from the 600s, referring to the castle as Deneen.
02:25Before that, we knew absolutely nothing. There was no evidence whatsoever.
02:29I was able to find remains of prehistoric houses and an incredible depth of archaeology across parts of the site.
02:38And those prehistoric houses, the earliest of those dated back to the Bronze Age in 900 BC.
02:44So, you can put on my gravestone, he doubled the age of Edinburgh Castle.
02:49Edinburgh Castle has changed so much throughout the millennia that at least two previous incarnations of the structure have come and gone.
03:01Parts of the current castle have stood since the 12th century, a medieval fortress built to protect the Scottish crown.
03:10But by the early 16th century, a palace inspired by the great courts of Europe was added by King James IV.
03:20So, the palace that was being developed in Edinburgh Castle by James IV in the late 15th and early 16th century was very much being developed on a model which would be recognised by leading Europeans from anywhere else in Europe.
03:39There was a certain pattern to it.
03:47On the four sides of a large courtyard, now known as Crown Square, James IV built a palace which became the residential quarters of the king, a large chapel, servants quarters and finally a great hall which was completed in 1511.
04:09So, a great hall like this one is very different from the military purposes of a castle.
04:16This would be the ceremonial sort of heart of a royal residence, just as people were defined by what they wore in this period.
04:24You could show your nobility, you could show your status.
04:27In a building, the sort of grandeur and the stature of a room like this would show the purposes.
04:33So, it could be used for feasting, it could be used for entertaining foreign dignitaries, it could be used for celebrating baptisms or weddings.
04:41This is a real renaissance statement of royal power, hospitality, majesty, politics, everything that you need in a royal court.
04:50King James IV was married to English King Henry VIII's sister, Margaret.
04:57And in commissioning the great hall, he may well have been competing with his brother-in-law's version at Hampton Court Palace.
05:05Both monarchs were looking to the past to assert their authority.
05:12Henry VIII builds a great hall about the same time and it looks like a medieval great hall because you're harking back, you're looking to the future, you're projecting your image as a mighty king but you're looking back at your ancestry as well because that's the basis of your power.
05:30And all these buildings arrayed around Crown Square, evolving at a time in the 1400s and the 1500s, some of which we still have spectacularly today, are a result of that.
05:47The structure holding up the roof of the great hall is a classic early 16th century example of art combined with engineering.
05:56They wanted to have an uninterrupted, open, beautiful space for this hall and so they had to think carefully about how they were going to actually achieve this long span with the roof without putting obstructions into this space.
06:12So if you just put a single piece of timber across that width of that hole, it would have been really bulky, probably would have been sagging a bit and wouldn't have been aesthetically a very interesting thing to look at.
06:25So to use less material, to make it more structurally efficient and also to make it look great, they used this kind of exciting medieval technique, the hammer beam truss.
06:36Hammer beam roofs were used in medieval England, but they were very rare in Scotland. This is one of only two. These were dramatic timber structures designed to bridge over very large spaces.
06:49So what you can do is you start off from the walls and you create these triangular brackets and that's the kind of the first piece of structure you have.
06:58Then on that reduced span, you can start to put arches in and trusses in and put a much more delicate kind of arrangement of beams and columns to create what you see there today.
07:10A hall like this was a dramatic space that was the centrepiece of the dining hall really of the castle. So it was a space that you could show off. It was a deliberately opulent space, just by its means scale.
07:25The story of Edinburgh Castle begins long before the construction of the Great Hall and the Stuart Kings and Queens of the 16th century.
07:37Many historic castles are built on mounds painstakingly made by hand.
07:44But Edinburgh Castle is built on a structure provided by nature itself. It stands on the solid heart of an ancient volcano, 350 million years old.
07:57So it's made up of basalt rock and basalt rock is a type of igneous rock. Igneous rock is basically what you get when molten material cools down.
08:09So it's actually a crystalline structure and it's quite strong.
08:15From prehistory, this formidable hill known as Castle Rock has provided refuge and security.
08:24Its natural geography is such a great defensive feature. But it's also for status. It's so highly visible in the landscape.
08:33It can be seen for miles around and you can see for miles around. And I think that's always been an important factor in the use of this site.
08:42One of the first monarchs to build a fortress on Castle Rock was the 11th century king, Malcolm III, who's been called the founding father of modern Scotland.
08:53Nothing survives of Malcolm's Castle, but historians believe they know what it would have looked like.
09:00The principal buildings would have been on the highest part of the rock and it would have been enclosed within a largely timber palisade, possibly with a stone base.
09:12And inside that you would have had buildings that were probably primarily timber.
09:19There's a tendency for us to think of timber as cheap and impermanent, but actually it's a sign that you've got access to a very, very scarce resource.
09:28And the ability to build large structures and timber is a sign of your access to that type of wealth.
09:35During Malcolm's reign in October 1066, one of the most iconic events in British history occurred.
09:43William the Conqueror's victory at the Battle of Hastings.
09:47The new Norman King of England brought with him revolutionary building techniques and designs for fortifications and castles.
09:58Malcolm's youngest son, David I of Scotland, had spent time in the English court and when he became king in 1124, he copied the Norman's construction techniques.
10:10He was a great builder of churches and abbeys and he was a very good king, very stable reign.
10:15He'd grown up partly in England as they did, he had English lands.
10:20So he knew how a modern Norman style medieval kingdom worked.
10:25At the very top of Castle Rock, King David built a fort in the Norman style, replacing an old timber structure with stone.
10:37For centuries, it was thought that every part of it had been destroyed.
10:42Then, in the 1840s, it was realized that a room being used as an ammunition store had been built for a more peaceful purpose, a chapel.
10:57Dating from around 1130.
11:02Built in a Romanesque style, it is dedicated to King David's mother, Margaret, who died in the castle in 1093 and was declared a saint in 1250.
11:17The chapel is part of the essential apparatus, the things that you need in a high status residence of the 12th century.
11:25David, remember, he's brought up largely at the court of the Norman kings of England.
11:32And so he's seen how their houses are organized.
11:35And one of the key elements in that is a chapel.
11:38Because the chapel clerks, the chaplains in the chapel, they're your secretaries.
11:44They're the people who are doing your writing.
11:45And David is introducing record keeping and the regular production of parchment as evidence for the king's business.
11:53St. Margaret's chapel was not only a status symbol.
11:58It became a sacred place where her bones and her clothing were believed to have healing powers.
12:04We have evidence from inventories and historic records relating to Edinburgh Castle that suggest that some of the relics of St Margaret were kept and used here.
12:16And indeed, St Margaret's relics became associated with childbirth and with healing and that her relics could often be used during royal births and pregnancies.
12:35By the late 13th century, Scotland and its main stronghold, Edinburgh Castle, were under the rule of the English king, Edward I.
12:45But the Scots rebelled in what became known as the Wars of Independence.
12:52Edinburgh Castle emerges regularly as one of the key, much fought over fortresses by both sides.
13:00It falls into the hands of Edward I of England in 1296, basically with a whimper.
13:06When he gets to Edinburgh, he's more or less met by a janitor with a key saying, you know, there's the castle, take it.
13:11And it's occupied then, from that point, continuously by an English garrison until 1313.
13:20For one man, Scottish King Robert I, popularly known as Robert the Bruce, the English occupation of Edinburgh Castle was a national humiliation.
13:32By 1314, Robert had recaptured most of the castles in Scotland and Edinburgh was next.
13:42It seemed impregnable until an offer of help arrived from the inside.
13:49So it was an English garrison, in some cases about 350 strong near enough.
13:58And one of the garrison members was a man called William Francis.
14:02So he seems to be a Scot, but he is in the pay of the English, he is working with the garrison.
14:08He's got a girlfriend down below the castle in the town.
14:13The governor of the castle isn't allowing him to get out regularly to see his girlfriend.
14:19And this leads to friction between them, to put it mildly.
14:23Eager for revenge, Francis covertly made contact with the nephew of Robert the Bruce, Thomas Randolph.
14:35And he says to Thomas Randolph, I can show you a secret route into the castle.
14:40This is the route that he used to come out for his secret meetings with his girlfriend down in the town.
14:46And so Randolph, with Francis, takes a small group of men up this passage, as the ways to describe it, a secret route up the rock, out at the west end of the site.
14:58A direction from which the garrison doesn't expect to be attacked.
15:02And there's a fantastic account of the dangers and tribulations of these 30 men climbing up and trying to keep quiet.
15:10And them hearing the voices of the English lookouts, talking on the baton, saying, was that somebody making a noise coming up the rock or not?
15:18There's always that risk that they're going to be discovered.
15:20And so they're able to surprise the guards that control the gate, throw open the gates, let a larger group of Scots in, and they take the castle.
15:29And it's a tremendous achievement, turning point.
15:32It was one of the great things that gave the Scots confidence that they could actually take the English on and beat them.
15:41In 1314, now in command of Edinburgh Castle, King Robert the Bruce did something unexpected.
15:49He destroyed it.
15:51But there was method to his madness.
15:54Now, he had tried, when he first seizes the throne of Scotland in 136, he had tried to fight war the traditional way, which was you capture castles, you garrison them, you hold them yourself, and you use them to control the countryside round about them.
16:13It ties up his ability to move rapidly around the country and deal with problems.
16:18It drains his resources.
16:20He doesn't want to be tied down with garrisoning fortresses, but he knows that he can't just leave them standing empty.
16:27So what you do, you recapture the building, and then you render it useless to an invader.
16:34And everyone he takes, he destroys.
16:37And we can say quite clearly that it's a comprehensive destruction.
16:42You know, it must have been an incredible sight.
16:44There was lots of wood, and it looks like on the side of St Margaret's Chapel, evidence of burning from that period.
16:51It would have made a great fire, which would be seen from miles around.
16:56The castle of King David was razed to the ground.
17:00The only building left standing amongst the rubble was St Margaret's Chapel.
17:05And for a time in the early 14th century, the castle rock was deserted.
17:13There were sheep grazing here, animals grazing here.
17:17Although Robert the Bruce had reduced the castle to rubble, his son and successor, King David II, recognised the importance of the fortress and its location.
17:31In the mid-14th century, an army of builders began to restore Edinburgh Castle to its former glory.
17:40Construction techniques in the medieval period were very different from modern methods.
17:46There was no blueprint for the workmen to follow.
17:50There was not what we would call an architect.
17:53Things were worked out on site and changed according to need.
17:57And when something was built, it could be tested.
17:59If it didn't work, it could be taken down and built again.
18:02So there was much more trial and error, and there was much more adjustment as the work progressed.
18:07The stonemason would first construct the foundations, but foundations on medieval buildings were never very deep.
18:13And of course, if you're building on solid rock, you don't need to dig down foundations.
18:17You just make grooves and the rock fits the stone blocks into them.
18:21And then it was just sheer manpower.
18:24Medieval castles had solid walls, with two layers of stone on the outside, filled with cement and rubble on the inside.
18:34The outside stones were chiselled smooth to make them difficult for an attacker to climb.
18:40It's estimated that up to 3,000 men worked on the construction of the medieval castle.
18:46Although their work has been admired for hundreds of years, they remain largely unknown.
18:53Occasionally, in the royal financial records, you can pick up references to people like, you know, Peter the Mason, John the Carpenter.
19:03But for most of the time, we really are completely ignorant as to who the people who designed all the fine work of the castle was.
19:10When the medieval Edinburgh castle was finished, it would have inspired both fear and awe.
19:18It's very interesting, the Hollywood presentation of what these castles look like.
19:23Sometimes is probably closer to the reality than we might think.
19:29And although we see these buildings largely now just outside as bare sandstone, they originally would have been lime washed.
19:37And here in Scotland, they use what's called King's Gold, a pale, creamy, yellow lime wash.
19:45And in daylight, in sunlight, it glows. It almost becomes luminous.
19:51And so the building would have been like a beacon standing out.
19:54So you're making a statement that everybody would understand.
19:58You know, look at me. I am the king. I am the most powerful person around.
20:03This is the symbol of my authority.
20:06One of the first drawings of Edinburgh was made by an English spy in the 16th century.
20:14It shows the result of David's ambition.
20:17A castle with towers.
20:20And, dominating the east side, facing the city, a huge structure named after the king himself, David's Tower.
20:29So it's the royal private apartments and reception rooms stacked one on top of another.
20:37It rises some five storeys in height above cellars on the highest part of the rock.
20:44So it would have been visible for miles around.
20:46And this is the beginning of the transformation of Edinburgh into this principal fortress of the realm,
20:55the key castle in royal hands. It begins with David II.
21:00Although David's Tower was destroyed by an English artillery bombardment in the 16th century,
21:07evidence of it still remains under one of the castle's most famous attractions,
21:12the Half Moon Battery.
21:16This is what almost two million visitors a year see.
21:19As they approach the castle, they see from the Esplanade
21:23this great curving frontal wall, and this is where we're standing on the lid of that.
21:28But one of my predecessors, a man called W.T. Aldrieff, in 1912,
21:32he worked out that there's probably bits of the tower surviving underneath here.
21:39David's Tower was built not just to house the king's reception rooms and private apartments.
21:45It was a key part of the castle's defences, and it had some surprises for the enemy.
21:52So this speaks of the brutality of medieval warfare.
21:56I'm just coming from what would have been the outside of David's Tower in the medieval period, behind me.
22:02But if somebody had attacked the castle and broken through, they'd break in this way,
22:07they'd get their battering rams, they'd come smashing through a door here,
22:11and then all of a sudden, ah!
22:14Because what's in front of us here is now covered with this, I hope, safe metal grill.
22:19It's an enormous great pit, maybe with pointed sticks in the bottom of it,
22:25and anybody breaking in through the door wouldn't know that this dirty great big hole was here.
22:30At the very bottom of David's Tower is evidence of the ancient foundations of the castle,
22:39and the skill of the medieval builders.
22:43What speaks volumes about the enormous challenge that for 3,000 years there has been on building on top of this mighty rock,
22:53which is that you've got the basalt, this immensely hard, cooled lava,
23:00from the final eruptions of the volcano that was here 350 million years ago.
23:07In fact, this volcano went up a kilometre above our heads.
23:10That's how enormous it was, and it's been ground away over the millions of years.
23:17And so what the medieval builders have done is really quite extraordinary,
23:21because when you think about the poor tools that they had, soft iron tools and so on,
23:27they have chipped away the platform that I'm standing on,
23:31to then get a vertical face, and then started to build.
23:35And there's just the first few courses that we can see of the medieval palace there,
23:42with the great vault of the Huffman Battery above us.
23:50When King David II died at Edinburgh Castle in 1371,
23:55a new Scottish royal dynasty began, the House of Stuart.
24:02Over the next 200 years, they would leave a lasting effect on the history of the British Isles,
24:08and the castle itself.
24:10In the late 1400s, Stuart King James IV extended the fortress,
24:17by building out over the perilous south side.
24:20The Castle Rock itself would have always been a very difficult site to occupy.
24:27You've got issues in terms of the height.
24:31There are sheer drops on most sides of Castle Rock.
24:34There would have been engineering issues from day one,
24:37and the vaults that hang out over the top of Castle Rock now,
24:42which the Royal Palace and the Great Hall stand on.
24:46There would have been a huge feat of engineering in the late 15th and early 16th century
24:52to construct those vaults.
24:54And I think it's really impressive that those walls, those structures, still survive today.
25:00Edinburgh Castle is built like many castles on the rocky promontory to make it difficult to attack.
25:09But of course, that means that you're working on the walls at great height,
25:13even before you've built any wall.
25:15And working at great height is always difficult.
25:19There are high winds, and you can fall off the scaffolding,
25:23and you can get seriously hurt.
25:25And it was very difficult to build scaffolding off the side of a cliff.
25:29So all of these things made it much more difficult to construct
25:33than the normal building on flat ground.
25:36By the middle of the 16th century,
25:39the Stuart royal family had ruled over Scotland for almost 200 years,
25:45with Edinburgh Castle as their bastion of power.
25:49The dynasty was secured when a new heir was born to King James V in 1542,
25:56just days before he died.
26:00Mary Stuart becomes Queen of Scots when she's six days old.
26:05in December of 1542.
26:07And she immediately becomes a bone of contention between the various powers
26:14looking at Scotland,
26:16realising that a country which is ruled over by a baby girl
26:20is ripe to be snapped up.
26:24Even though she's still in nappies,
26:26people are competing to who's going to get to marry her,
26:29which royal family is she going to get married into,
26:32which is a proxy way of saying, you know,
26:34which country is going to get to absorb Scotland.
26:37And the two possibilities are England and France.
26:41The traditional enemy, England, or Scotland's traditional ally in France.
26:47Henry VIII is very keen that she should marry his own son,
26:53the future end of the sixth.
26:54There's only five years in age between them.
26:56It looks like a plausible marriage.
26:59There are some in Scotland who support it,
27:02but Queen Mary is taken to France herself before her sixth birthday,
27:08is pledged in marriage to the French Dauphin, to the Grand Prince,
27:13and actually marries him.
27:15Fifteen-year-old Mary was married to the future king,
27:19Francis II of France in 1558.
27:23But just two years later, a wave of feeling in Scotland
27:27led the country to abandon its Catholic roots
27:30and change its allegiance to Protestant Christianity.
27:34So by the summer of 1560, Scotland has moved decisively
27:39from being within France's orbit to being in England,
27:44even though their queen, Mary, is still in France
27:48and still married to the French king.
27:50But then the French king himself dies.
27:54And so she, as an 18-year-old widow,
27:58returns to Scotland to a country that she could scarcely remember.
28:03But Mary isn't just the Queen of Scots.
28:06She's also, by some arguments, the rightful Queen of England.
28:11She certainly has a very good claim to the English throne.
28:14She's directly descended from Henry VII.
28:18And if you argue, and there's a very good legal case for arguing this,
28:24that Queen Elizabeth I is illegitimate,
28:28that she should have no right to inherit the throne,
28:31then by strict order of primogeniture,
28:35Mary ought to be the Queen of England as well.
28:39In 1565, Mary was wed for a second time to her half-cousin,
28:45Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley.
28:48And in June 1566, a royal procession made its way through Edinburgh
28:54and up into the castle.
28:56Mary was heavily pregnant and had been persuaded by her advisers
29:01that the castle was the best place for the birth.
29:04From a security point of view, the castle on the rock is the safe place to be.
29:12So if there's any threat or disturbance, and bear in mind that in the 1560s,
29:18Scotland is going through a major period of internal turbulence.
29:23There's the reformation, the change in religion is taking place.
29:28You have got supporters of Catholicism versus supporters of Protestantism.
29:33Various factions who are competing for power.
29:36It's a time of relative insecurity.
29:39And you just need to be sure if the Queen is about to give birth to a child,
29:45that she is in the safest place for that birth to take place.
29:52Over the border in England,
29:54Mary's cousin, Queen Elizabeth I,
29:57watched events in Edinburgh with concern.
30:00On the 19th of June 1566,
30:05Mary gave birth to a boy and named him James.
30:10The ambassador rode very quickly to tell Elizabeth of the news
30:14that the Queen of Scotland had given birth to an heir,
30:17and to a male heir at that.
30:19And Elizabeth, you do see some of her vulnerability
30:21because she says, I'm of barren stock.
30:23And I think she knew then that she was never going to get married
30:26and she was never going to have children.
30:28Mary Queen of Scots is the most obvious candidate to succeed her.
30:37That prospect fills many of Elizabeth's subjects with horror
30:42because Mary Queen of Scots isn't just a Scots woman,
30:47she's also a Catholic.
30:49And it's that threat more than anything else
30:51that ultimately leads Mary Queen of Scots to move ahead.
30:55Mary Queen of Scots was imprisoned in 1568
30:59and finally executed in February 1587.
31:03Her English counterpart, Elizabeth I,
31:06had reluctantly signed the death warrant.
31:09We were always fascinated by two queens, one island,
31:13and it's seeing that only one could survive.
31:15And, yes, Elizabeth was the one who survived
31:18and died peacefully in her own bed,
31:20but she left the throne without an heir,
31:22and the heir became Mary's.
31:24So perhaps, in a sense, Mary won in the end.
31:27In 1603, 16 years after the death of Mary,
31:34the son she gave birth to at Edinburgh Castle,
31:37James VI of Scotland, became King James I of England.
31:42The two nations were now ruled by the same monarch.
31:46But if the people of Edinburgh thought James' birthplace
31:49would become the centre of his kingdom,
31:52they were sadly mistaken.
31:54So when James succeeded to the English throne in 1603,
31:58there was an expectation that he'd managed
32:00to sort of keep two courts going,
32:02that he'd come back salmon-like from whence he was spawned
32:05maybe every year.
32:06I think probably once he went to England,
32:08he realised the pressure of royal business was enormous.
32:11He didn't come back so much.
32:13And when James did come to Edinburgh,
32:16he preferred to stay in nearby Holyrood Palace,
32:19a more comfortable, less windswept royal residence.
32:23Yet Edinburgh Castle remained important to him,
32:27as a symbol of the Stuart's royal lineage.
32:30In 1615, James ordered that major repairs
32:34and improvements to the castle should be completed in time
32:37to mark the 50th anniversary of his proclamation
32:41as King of Scotland two years later.
32:45In the years running up to the celebrations
32:48for his homecoming and his golden jubilee,
32:50he invested a great deal in the royal palace block.
32:54Much of the exterior details that we see on the royal palace
32:58at the castle today are as a result of the work of James' sake.
33:02You can see in there today the heraldic symbols.
33:07Oak from Essex and stone from local quarries
33:12were brought up to the castle.
33:14Plasterers transformed the ceilings in the royal apartments.
33:18Walls were rebuilt and weatherproofed using a technique known as harling.
33:24The men who worked on the more dangerous parts of the castle
33:28were rewarded with extra money.
33:31There was a lot of excitement about harling the walls
33:36and putting glass in some of the windows
33:38and improving the decoration.
33:40Partly to celebrate rooms like this, the great hall
33:43where there was going to be banquets.
33:45But there is evidence he not only came back here,
33:47but he also came back here on his 51st birthday in June 1617
33:51and apparently feasted in here from 4 o'clock
33:54until 9 o'clock in the evening.
33:59The castle's mighty 15th century gun known as Mons Meg,
34:04one of the largest artillery pieces in Europe,
34:07was fired in honour of the steward king.
34:10James was back home, where he was born.
34:14The importance of the castle was not lost on him
34:18or any British monarch to come.
34:21Edinburgh Castle is a fortress, but it also is a palace
34:25because kings and queens lived there.
34:27It was so vital.
34:29It was fought over.
34:30And it was fought over in a much more symbolic way
34:33than a Hollywood palace was.
34:35When it came to taking Edinburgh, you had to take the castle.
34:38And when you took Edinburgh Castle, you'd taken Edinburgh
34:41and by association, you'd taken all of Scotland.
34:44So although the king wasn't perpetually there,
34:47it really was seen by everyone as the king's seat.
34:50If you got it, you'd depose the king.
34:55The arrival of an infamous Englishman brought about
34:58one of the greatest changes to Edinburgh Castle.
35:01In December 1650, Oliver Cromwell,
35:06the newly appointed Captain General of the Commonwealth,
35:10invaded Scotland and seized the castle.
35:13For the man who led the forces that defeated
35:17and then executed the steward king, Charles I, James' son,
35:21it was a symbolic moment.
35:26Cromwell turned the royal fortress into a military garrison.
35:30Even the finest building in the castle was transformed.
35:34He rides his horse into what was the Great Hall
35:37and from then on there are floors inserted in there
35:41and it becomes a barracks for about 300 men.
35:44And the buildings all around Crown Square
35:47lose their royal function.
35:48They go over to become functional military buildings,
35:53military storehouses, barracks, canteens,
35:56that sort of thing.
35:58So we see this great shift in the middle of the 1600s
36:02and the period of the Civil War,
36:04the need for a standing army.
36:06And therefore, at places like this,
36:09the need for accommodation
36:11and everything that was involved in looking after the troops.
36:15And that's the character of Edinburgh Castle
36:19from then on for the next 200 plus years
36:23is as a military garrison, first and foremost.
36:29After the restoration of the English monarchy in 1660,
36:33Edinburgh Castle remained a valued military prize.
36:37In the 18th century, it became an obsession
36:41for a movement known as the Jacobites,
36:44supporters of Catholic James II of England
36:47and later, Bonnie Prince Charlie.
36:50It's so symbolic of the Jacobites
36:52who want to seize the throne back.
36:54You feel that they have the truthful,
36:56the real monarch throughout the 18th century.
36:58And if they get Edinburgh Castle,
37:00they think they'll have got the throne.
37:02It's not Hollywood Palace.
37:04It's not anywhere else in Scotland.
37:06It's Edinburgh Castle they want.
37:07And once they've got that,
37:08from there they feel they can cement their claim
37:11to the throne and govern the whole of Scotland
37:14and hopefully get their hands on England.
37:17The Jacobite threat means that actually Scotland
37:20is regarded, some places of it,
37:22almost like a war zone in the early 18th century.
37:25The Jacobites laid siege to the castle in 1689
37:30but failed to capture it.
37:32However, they weren't finished.
37:35In 1715, they returned,
37:38only for their attack to end in farce.
37:42They almost get it but the ladder they're using
37:45is actually a bit too short
37:47and then it all fails and they're hanged and flogged
37:50because Edinburgh Castle is so symbolic.
37:53A further unsuccessful Jacobite attack in 1745
38:00proved to be the final siege in the castle's history.
38:03As a result of the Jacobite scare,
38:08a number of engineers were employed to modernise
38:12and repair the castle.
38:14New storehouses and barracks were built
38:17as well as more visible battlements
38:20creating the castle we recognise today.
38:23Partly the defences needed to be improved
38:26to meet the advances in military technology at the time
38:30but the castle had also suffered
38:33very intensive siege in 1689
38:36and so there were a number of repairs that were needed.
38:40The defences were 50 to 100 years old
38:44in many parts of the site, if not older.
38:47They really transformed the defences of Edinburgh Castle
38:52building the Argyll battery, the western defences
38:57that cover the lower western side of the site
39:01and they improved parts of the half moon battery,
39:05the gun bastion there.
39:07As the castle evolved, nothing of the old was wasted.
39:13Any stone in the castle has probably been in five or six buildings
39:18in its life going back into prehistory
39:22and once the stone was here
39:25and you know you maybe had buildings that you didn't need anymore
39:28or buildings that had been destroyed by cannon fire,
39:31you simply reused the stone and there's loads of evidence
39:33so any of these stones have got amazing stories to tell,
39:37tremendous time depth.
39:39As well as keeping people out,
39:44Edinburgh Castle was built as a place to keep people in.
39:48The largest number of prisoners held on Castle Rock
39:51was during the Napoleonic Wars of the early 19th century
39:55in which French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte
39:58and his allies attempted to conquer Europe.
40:01Up to a thousand French, Spanish and Dutch prisoners were held here.
40:06Attempts to escape were understandable
40:08given the conditions they were held in.
40:10The vaults themselves would have been really quite dark
40:14and cramped spaces with the soldiers sleeping on hammocks
40:18hung up in lines throughout the vaults.
40:21During Napoleonic Wars they were really pushed to breaking point.
40:25They had such a huge number of prisoners coming into the castle
40:29and that were held within the vaults.
40:31It would have been really cramped and confined conditions
40:34and it actually inspired escape.
40:37We get the impression that there must have been so many soldiers here
40:40that perhaps it was quite difficult to keep track of the individuals.
40:44We have evidence of important prisoners
40:47undertaking daring escapes from the castle,
40:50knotting their bed sheets together and climbing over the rock,
40:54hiding in heaps of dung,
40:57all sorts of glamorous stories in their attempts to escape.
41:02And some did.
41:03Some escaped by dressing up and managing to fool the guards
41:07or by sheer bribery.
41:10And unfortunately in Edinburgh Castle,
41:13many parts of the castle were built of sandstone
41:15and it was rather soft.
41:17So that later, when it was converted into a prison,
41:20the prisoners could actually dig their way out.
41:23At which point it was realised that sandstone was perhaps not the best material.
41:29Around 1780, during the middle of the American War of Independence,
41:35a prisoner from the then colony carved a distinctive flag.
41:40There's some fascinating graffiti on one of the doors that survives,
41:45including depictions of ships that these men would have been sailing on,
41:49and really famously one of the earliest depictions of the stars and stripes banner,
41:54what's now the American flag.
41:56Any Americans in Edinburgh Castle today are likely to be tourists.
42:05The fortress is now one of the most popular attractions in Scotland,
42:10drawing over a million visitors a year from all over the world.
42:15They are fascinated by its hundreds of years of royal history
42:19and its military traditions that continue today.
42:24At one o'clock every day, apart from Sundays, Good Friday and Christmas Day,
42:29the one o'clock guns fired from here at Edinburgh Castle.
42:32This back to 1861, where at the request of the ship's captains,
42:36they requested an audio signal to be fired,
42:38so they could mark their carometers for obviously navigation throughout the world.
42:43Over thousands of years, builders and engineers have turned an extinct volcano
42:53into a living fortress so valuable,
42:56it's been fought over more than any other castle or palace in Britain.
43:01Its walls have witnessed key moments in the story of the Scottish people.
43:07Scotland doesn't have a Shakespeare,
43:09but one feels that if there was a Shakespeare who was writing history plays,
43:12in every single play that had to be a scene in Edinburgh Castle almost,
43:16it's seen murders, endless sieges, warfare, royalty.
43:22It is intimidating, it is inconquerable,
43:25it is saying you will not invade Edinburgh, you will not take our city.
43:29It is a big statement of strength and power,
43:33one that very few people would want to take on.
43:38If you want an understanding of the great history of Scotland,
43:42and Scotland does have the most extraordinary history,
43:45you can come to one place, you can come here,
43:48and you can be in the place where so many of these great events happened,
43:53which were pivotal to the whole of Scotland's story.
43:58In the future,
44:02I will talk after a meeting of the Scottish people's коллег,
44:15because I have discovered some of the Scottish people who are haya Desperate,
44:17and I will talk to you later on.
44:19When you were followed by a feud,
44:20let me go to the Scottish's castle and a country's castle.
44:22Where are we going?