Sample copy of “Whispering Gallery” - Centre for Medieval and ...

Dorothy Dunnett Society 

Whispering 

Issue 115 | June 2012 

Gallery 

Filippo Scolari: A Real-Life Nicholas de Fleury 

Landscapes, Marthe and Stirling Palace

Monica Murray

DUNNETT WEEKEND 2012 

Clockwise from 

top: The Wallace 

Monument; a 

refurbished room 

at Stirling Palace; 

the Palace; the 

Palace’s exterior 

decoration. 

All photos: Tom 

Blackie. 

Whispering Gallery 9

12 Whispering Gallery 

Clockwise from top: Alec recounts the life of William 

Wallace; James V; unicorn tapestry; mermaid carving 

on the outside of the Great Hall; painted head of Mary 

of Guise; cipher of Queen Anne above the main gate; 

painted heads on the ceiling of the king’s reception room. 

Photo credits: Tom Blackie and Anne Buchanan.


Renaissance 

Strength and Splendour 

Margaret Sanders 

Saturday morning and the Dunnett Weekend kicked 

off with a talk on Stirling Castle, the destination of 

our Sunday visit. Dennis Gallagher and Gordon Ewart 

from Kirkdale Archaeology had both worked on the Historic 

Scotland project, which was the fourth and final part 

of a long-term plan to restore the castle. 

Dennis Gallagher began by telling us of the Renaissance 

palace of James V, formerly known as the palace 

block, and of the now complete refurbishment of the six 

royal apartments to a high degree of style and luxury that 

would have been familiar to Mary of Guise, James’s second 

wife. From a text of 1470 entitled ‘The Governance 

of England’ came the advice that the role of kingship was 

to demonstrate magnificence in everything and James V 

endeavoured to follow this dictate. Prior to his first marriage, 

to Madeleine of Valois, he travelled in France and 

saw for himself Renaissance splendour in the furnishing 

and dressing of buildings. This he wanted for his royal palaces 

in Scotland, and Madeleine’s large dowry was going 

to help achieve his aim, no doubt! 

Stirling was one of Scotland’s four great fortresses, and 

the Renaissance palace at its heart was completed around 

1545. The use of models of castles enabled the monarch 

to demonstrate the power and prestige of his ownership. 

Mention was made of the ‘Triumphal Entry into Rouen’ 

of 1550. Recognition registered in the audience, but more 

because of a man named Archie and his elephant Hughie 

rather than the picture we were shown of the soldiers parading 

poles held aloft topped with models of castles captured 

by the French (see p. 14). 

After the early death of James V in 1542, Mary of Guise 

continued to work on the palace. Inventories from that 

time list tapestries, furnishings in the French style, sumptuous 

clothing and gold christening gifts to the children. 

Such luxury was bound to impress and demonstrate familiarity 

with mainstream trends and contact with European 

courts. 

Outside walls were lavishly decorated with stone carvings 

and statues. On the outer public façade devils and 

guards armed with longbows and swords defended the 

palace. On the inner more private walls the statues were 

of a gentler style representing musicians and allegorical 

figures. 

Within the palace the apartments of the king and queen 

were identical in number and layout but furnished as separate 

households, although their bedchambers were adjacent 

and linked by an internal door. The outer hall was 

a place of meetings and for those awaiting a royal audience. 

Feasting and dancing would also take place here. 

The inner hall was for royal business and the bedchamber 

Above: Unicorn tapestry at the Palace. Photo: Tom Blackie 


a more intimate space for 

prayer, relaxation and time 

spent with close friends 

and advisors, but the actual 

sleeping space was 

a smaller chamber to the 

side. 

Walls were painted or 

hung with tapestries and 

luxurious fabrics, furnishings 

were rich and elaborate 

and ornate ceilings 

and heraldic displays demonstrated 

to the court and 

its visitors that Scotland 

had wealth, power and 

fashionable taste. The 

rich and powerful would 

admire this message and 

absorb the importance it 

conveyed. One mystery remains: 

what was the purpose of the floor level alcoves? In 

Whispering Gallery from August 2000 a press release from 

the Dundee Courier suggests that they were warm sleeping 

places for the royal dogs. I would love to believe that 

this theory still holds. 

Other snippets from the talk gave fascinating insights 

into the life of the court. Graffiti from the children’s apartments, 

possibly written by Henry, Duke of Rothesay and, 

later, Prince of Wales, who was born at Stirling Castle in 

1594, declares that ‘God made man, woman and James 

6’. Interestingly, the Roman numeral was common at this 

time in Scotland and was superseded by the Latin form 

at the Union of the Crowns in 1603. Protection against 

witches was also found in the form of letters and symbols 

incised on doorways. A further Dunnett moment occurred 

when we heard of a royal lament for a dead parrot – perhaps 

a pet. 

Gordon Ewart then talked about the importance of placing 

the palace project within a very long-term investigation 

and restoration of the castle. 

Stirling Castle, atop a volcanic rock at the head of the 

navigable Forth, is an enduring symbol of defiance and 

grandeur. For many centuries it was used as both fortress 

and dwelling. The earliest buildings took their shape and 

limit from the rock beneath, but later earthworks allowed 

extension outwards. During the current restoration, great 

emphasis was placed upon the integration of belowground 

archaeology with 

that of the buildings that 

still exist above. 

In 1997 excavations in 

the area known as the Governor’s 

Kitchen revealed 

what are thought to be the 

13th-century remains of 

St. Michael’s Chapel plus 

several skeletons. In the 

light of new knowledge 

and techniques, two of 

the skeletons were investigated 

for a television programme 

about historical 

‘cold cases’. Forensic examination 

revealed one to be 

a male, strongly built, who 

died in his twenties from 

an arrow wound. He probably 

was an English knight, 

who died when the Scots besieged the castle. 

For many years the castle functioned as an army barracks 

and the military built, rebuilt and altered it again. 

Ironically, by the blocking up of 16th-century doorways, 

further damage and modernisation was prevented. They 

did, however, cover one ancient room in black paint to 

make a disco! 

Gordon paid tribute to the many experts from diverse 

specialist fields who also contributed to the refurbishment. 

Such a specialism is dendrochronology, the scientific 

method of dating based on the analysis of patterns 

of tree-rings, which is often a more reliable dating tool 

than pottery or coins. From doors, ceilings and the wood 

from the famous decorative carvings known as the Stirling 

Heads comes evidence that the timber used in the building 

of the palace was felled in the 16th century and more 

specifically in Poland in approximately 1539. 

Concluding his talk, Gordon Ewart paid tribute to the 

high achievement of British archaeology in its work on 

this project. This is demonstrated in the quality of the 

draughtsmanship and drawings produced, which have 

now been scanned and can be seen by the public on the 

web at http://tinyurl.com/WG115-Stirling. 

Margaret Sanders, High Bentham, England 

Above: Soldiers in the triumphal entry of Henry II into 

Rouen. Image credit: www.tumblr.com. 

Continued from p. 8: Dunnett Weekend Comment 

Lymond or Niccolò series better! (It was an entirely new 

idea to me that it was even possible to like the Niccolò 

series better than Lymond – clearly a reread of Niccolò is 

in order.) 

One highlight was the presentation on Marthe given by 

Bill Marshall. I was amazed by his careful preparation and 

insight into Marthe’s enigmatic character. It was satisfying 

to have ideas clearly voiced concerning Marthe that 

had only been vague inklings in my previous readings. The 

pleasure in the room as he read directly from the text was 

palpable; that sounds odd, but it was true. 

I am so glad I braved the unknown and went to the Edinburgh 

Weekend. I learned so much, met great people, and 

enjoyed myself immensely. 

Rosina Sonntag, Colorado, USA 

14 Whispering Gallery


chippy tragic bitch complicated bitter 

ruthless ill-fated indecipherable tiresome 

Marthe 

untrustworthy transgressive conflicting 

calculating intriguing closed alter-ego 

obsessive misunderstood disappointed 

Tragic Pawn or a Lost Soul 

Redeemed? 

needle chippy tragic bitch complicated bitter 


untrustworthy Bill Marshall transgressive conflicting 


Photo credit: Colin McMillan 

Bill opened his talk by asking the audience to give him a single 

word describing Marthe: the suggestions received are shown 

on the title panel. 

I 

have a single word which Dorothy used to describe 

Marthe, and I believe it gives us a unique insight into 

her actions and her decisions before the end of Checkmate. 

What that word is I’ll come back to later but it was 

enough to encourage me to search for more textual evidence 

for my gut feelings about the ideas behind Marthe 

and the ultimate impression that she is meant to make on 

us. 

Marthe is probably one of the most confusing and enigmatic 

characters in The Lymond Chronicles. From reading 

letters and Internet posts I would say that the majority of 

readers either dislike her or are, at best, ambivalent about 

her. Some may even regard her as a mere plot device. However 

I always had an instinctive liking for Marthe, after all 

she’s blonde and gorgeous and we men need a romantic 

fantasy object as well. Why should you girls have all the 

fun with sexy characters like Lymond and Jerott? 

I’ve come to rely on my instincts because, right from the 

beginning, I felt an affinity with Dorothy’s writing, felt I 

was on the same wavelength, understood at least part of 

the psychology of the way she wrote, the values she discussed 

and the connections she made (sometimes across 

four or five books’ worth of material). Of course that may 

be simple self-delusion – we all like to think we understand 

more than we do when faced with genius! But maybe that 

affinity was why I didn’t have the problems that some had 

with the first 100 pages of The Game of Kings, though, of 

course, being Scottish did help. 

To me there was never any danger of Lymond not turning 

out to be a hero – Will Scott’s early view felt very much 

that of a young man being shocked and manipulated by 

someone who had seen far more of life than he had – while 

by the time of the encounter with Christian Stewart and 

his recovery from amnesia there was no doubt in my mind 

that Lymond was on the side of the angels. 

But I digress; like Dorothy herself I get carried away 

when talking about Lymond, we were talking about Marthe. 

So let’s take a look at her character as it’s presented 

to us. 

She’s had a pretty loveless upbringing, with no father or 

mother to guide and protect her, she had possibly been 

abused by Gaultier – there is a suspicion that he is worse 

than just a miserly old moan – and she seems to be merely 

a pawn in a far larger plot being conducted by her grandmother 

the Dame de Doubtance. (Imagine having her as 

a grandmother!) 

When we meet Marthe in Pawn in Frankincense she casts 

a rather aloof and somewhat bitter figure: bitter about being 

uncared for; at being cut off from the sort of advantages 

that Lymond (and even more, Richard) has as a member 

of a noble family; about being a powerless woman in a 

man’s world 

We find that she has resorted to looking for love with 

Güzel – surely a desperate choice of partner whatever you 

think of Kiaya Khátún. She’s worldly wise and for a long 

time despises Jerott for being naive and idealistic, and for 

lacking in political and personal insight. She’s embraced a 

Muslim religion that seems to offer her a status that Christianity 

denies her. We see her being cold and cynical, see 

her leading poor Jerott into situations he isn’t remotely 

emotionally equipped to handle. Later, in Checkmate, we 

even see her stabbing Danny after rejecting Sybilla’s attempts 

at reconciliation. Doesn’t sound much of a character 

reference does it? 


And yet there is much there to like. She is certainly highly 

intelligent and learned, skilled in the antiques trade, 

which requires a broad understanding of many subjects, 

and, of course, as the virtual twin of Francis, she’s beautiful. 

OK, we know from Gabriel that beauty isn’t always to 

be trusted – a lesson that will be reinforced with Simon 

in The House of Niccolò – but there is never the feeling 

with Marthe that it’s being used as a disguise; she’s a very 

upfront character. Let’s look at a few descriptions of her. 

The first time Philippa sets eyes on her: ‘The face of a 

Delia Robbia angel, set in gleaming hair, golden as Jupiter’s 

shower.’ (PiF, Ch 3) Later when Lymond tries to stop 

her from sailing with him: ‘Looking into that angelic, fair 

face Philippa saw the authority she had missed before: the 

small lines round the mouth; the winged curve of spirit on 

either side of the fine planes of the nose; the faint, single 

line between the arched brows.’ (PiF, Ch 3) 

There is a scene below decks, also in chapter 3, with 

Philippa after the latter has been shown the galley and 

Marthe tells her that Lymond was once a galley slave. Marthe 

smiles, and from Philippa’s perspective she’s described 

as having an ‘enchanting’ smile. Not beautiful, not confident, 

‘enchanting’. Had a man been quoted using that description 

it might conceivably be interpreted in a negative 

way, but surely not from the point of view of Kate’s sensible 

daughter. Indeed it’s notable that these descriptions are 

all from her point of view. 

The next one is from Lymond’s viewpoint: 

He did not need to turn to know how she looked. 

Mantled in the satin of her gilt unbound hair, with 

the wide severe brow, the white skin, the borrowed 

skirts and the pearls she had, unaccountably, produced, 

each one as big as a hazelnut, she was a vision 

to make all the arquebuses droop and the crossbowmen 

slacken and sweat. (PiF, Ch 8) 

And this from Jerott’s eyes: 

A woman high, cool, remote as a cloud forest, trailing 

mosses and bright birds and orchids; a woman 

with a body like moonlight seen through a pearl curtain. 

(PiF, Ch 15) 

And even in the midst of an argument he thinks this: 

And in spite of all that, he remained obsessed with 

her: with the long veiling lashes round the intense 

blue of her eyes; the high polished brow over which 

her hair fell, cream and ochre and lemon and chrome 

in the sun; and the colour of the sun on her cheekbones 

and the thin bridge of her nose. The slimness of 

her arms ... the long, slender bones of her foot. Her 

voice; her wit; her laugh when she was entertained. 

(PiF, Ch 19) 

Isn’t that a wonderful collection of descriptions, and no 

negative connotations such as we see with Gabriel or Simon. 

Certainly she has issues of self-worth and seems engaged 

in a battle with the world, particularly the male world, 

but another positive aspect of Marthe that we are shown 

is her ability to learn from her mistaken beliefs. When she 

becomes trapped in the seraglio and later complains to 

Philippa that no-one had come to rescue her, she is astonished 

when Philippa tells her that she would have risked 

her life in a rescue attempt; but she takes it on board. 

Here’s the passage: 

‘Yes. For Kuzúm,’ said Philippa. She hesitated, guessing. 

‘People help one another. Wouldn’t ... Mr Blyth 

perhaps do the equivalent for you?’ 

Marthe laughed, without amusement, deep in her 

long throat. 

‘Mr Blyth put me here. Mr Crawford and I owe 

each other nothing. My uncle I hate and you I do 

not know. No one, as far as I see, has endeavoured to 

engineer my escape.’ 

‘I think ... that was only because they didn’t know 

you were a prisoner,’ said Philippa. She was rather 

pale. She said, in a small voice, ‘I would do it for 

you.’ 

The colour left Marthe’s face too, in patches; then 

flooded in, deep rose over her brow and cheeks and 

slim neck. She stood up. ‘Because I look like my 

brother ?’ she said. 

Philippa’s dark brows had met in a straight line; 

her brown eyes opaque with a new self-control fighting 

with a faint and horrified understanding. After 

a while she said simply, ‘No. Because I know what it 

is to need help.’ 

For a moment longer Marthe studied her; and 

Philippa rather bleakly wondered what amused rejoinder, 

what cutting remark she had called on herself. 

But Marthe in the end said merely, ‘Then when 

I need help, I shall have to call on you, shan’t I?’ in 

a voice whose coolness and impatience did not ring 

entirely true. There was a silence, and then Philippa 

said awkwardly, ‘I didn’t know. ... Is Mr Crawford 

your brother?’ 

The blue eyes this time were both cool and amused. 

‘If he knew, he might prefer you to put it differently,’ 

said Marthe. ‘I am his bastard sister. We have the 

same failings. Didn’t you guess ?’ (PiF, Ch 25) 

We know that she has a genuine appreciation for fine objects 

and for antiquity from her swim in the sea when she 

finds a marble figure of Cupid. We feel robbed of further 

insight into her character when Jerott spoils the moment. 

She appreciates and is knowledgeable about poetry, and 

crucially uses it to help Lymond through the worst of his 

cold turkey at Volos. And we discover her sense of humour 

and fun in the glorious episode at Mehedia where she 

plays the part of Donna Maria Mascarenhas in an echo of 

Lymond’s own impersonation of Don Luis from The Game 

of Kings, surely two of the most exuberantly uninhibited 

examples of Dorothy’s own sense of humour. There is that 

lovely moment of discovery when Lymond remarks that 


she enjoys this, and she replies simply, ‘Of course’. And 

there is this glorious piece of deadpan comedy: 

‘My father,’ said Marthe, ‘unhappily, was not a fastidious 

man. I have several of Señor Maldonado’s 

brothers as well in the household. They also suffer 

from fits.’ 

‘Of the same kind?’ said the captain, gazing. 

‘Approximately,’ said Marthe coolly. ‘They scream, 

struggle, and try to throw off all my clothes.’ (PiF, 

Ch 8) 

I mentioned Volos a moment ago and it’s a very important 

section in my view – it gives us some remarkable 

insights. Curiously I don’t see it discussed very often – it 

seems that the fatal chess game absorbs so much of readers’ 

emotions that they almost forget about the last section of 

the book from the escape onwards. 

At Volos Francis is at the lowest possible point and his 

survival is in severe doubt. In excruciating pain he throws 

Jerott out of his sick room and threatens to kill Marthe if 

she enters, and he attempts to blank out the pain by concentrating 

on poetry. Unexpectedly Marthe joins him and 

leads him through the poems and the pain. We see that 

it costs her but also that she learns from it, and that they 

connect. Here is the most telling passage: 

‘You see,’ said Marthe. ‘I am not here to mock. I 

have worn out my revenge. You have guided me into 

a world which has been closed to me all my life. You 

have shown me that what I hold by, you hold by and 

more. You have shown me strength I do not possess, 

and humanity I thought belonged only to women. 

You are a man, and you have explained all men to 

me ...’ (PiF, Ch 29) 

The next day they talk again: 

Staring down at his spent face on the pillow, Marthe’s 

expression was wry. ‘The wife who calls you Mr 

Crawford,’ she said. ‘The child you don’t even know.’ 

And as he didn’t answer, Marthe said suddenly, 

‘How many souls on this earth call you Francis? 

Three? Or perhaps four?’ 

For a moment he looked at her unsmiling; and for 

a moment she wished, angrily that she could recall 

the question. Then quite suddenly he smiled, and 

held out his hand. ‘Five,’ he said. ‘Surely? Since last 

night.’ (PiF, Ch 29) 

So at the end of Pawn in Frankincense it seems they are 

friends and that Marthe has grown away from the bitter 

figure we were first presented with. But then Lymond goes 

to Russia, with Güzel, while she marries Jerott. 

We see nothing of Marthe in The Ringed Castle and it’s 

three years before they meet again in Lyon. When we do 

she seems to have reverted to the bitterness and it’s clear 

the marriage is not going well. Jerott is drinking again and 

she hardly seems able to stop taunting him. Why is not 

entirely clear at first, although we have some clues. 

Her thoughts when she watches Lymond entering Lyon: 

Conscious of her own singular beauty she had wondered 

if he had lost his own looks, but this was not 

so. Indeed, he had come into them in an odd way; 

the pastel colours subtly enlivened by the snows of 

Muscovy; or what he had found there. The thought 

did not please her. (CM, Pt 1, Ch 2) 

So it seems she resents that he has lived with Güzel, her 

former lover, but there is more to it than that and only one 

real clue as to what is wrong with her marriage. We hear it 

when Lymond talks to Jerott in Paris, and after discussing 

military tactics, asks why he married her: 

‘I know what you feel about her. Why did you insist 

on marriage?’ Beneath Jerott’s drawn brows, his 

splendid dark eyes were stark with misery. ‘She thinks 

it was to compensate for her birth. I suppose it was, I 

loved her. I wanted to give her a position.’ 

‘She has a position,’ Lymond said. ‘It is not that of 

housekeeper, nor a mother, to you or your children. 

Marriage has weakened it: she is fighting not to lose 

it altogether.’ It hurt. ‘You mean,’ said Jerott, ‘she 

wants to be like Güzel? A courtesan selling her body 

round Europe for power?’ 

He had meant to wound. But instead Lymond 

said, smiling faint ‘No. Not like Güzel. Kiaya 

Khátún is above and beyond any male criticism, 

whereas Marthe is aware of shortcomings. She requires 

to be taught, Jerott; not to be worshipped.’ 

(CM, Pt 2, Ch 1) 

Lymond you see, understands. Marthe has been put on 

a pedestal by Jerott when what she needs is to be nurtured 

and to further expand her mind to its full potential. We 

get more of an idea later when she surrounds herself with 

poets and musicians. She needs to grow and explore and 

Jerott’s love, for all that it is well-intentioned, is suffocation 

to her. We can imagine that the communication between 

them will easily break down and the more Jerott tries the 

more she will push him away with barbed comments until, 

unable to understand, he resorts to the wine flask. 

We later hear Jerott’s mind watching Lymond and 

Philippa regaling his friends with the hilarious failed banquet 

performance and his despairing hope that Philippa 

isn’t falling for Lymond as he fell for Marthe. 

The knowledge that one had his total friendship but 

never the key to the innermost door. And there was an innermost 

door, which Marthe did not have, and had never 

had, although his hopes of that, and that alone, had been 

his reason for marrying her. 

Yet Jerott is a biased and unreliable witness – I believe 

that Marthe has that inner door, but that Jerott doesn’t 

have the key. 

With a perception that few others possess Marthe realises 

that Lymond and Philippa are born for each other and 


tries to push them together at a time when everyone else 

wants to keep them apart. Her only failing being that from 

her tough, street-wise perspective she can’t see the emotional 

torture that each is suffering. It causes the cruel jibe 

about Güzel that Lymond uses in anguished self-defence 

in that same scene and it seems for a while to have revived 

her hatred. 

We have the scene where Sybilla goes to visit her with 

Danny and reveals that she wanted to raise her. That scene 

is rife with many subcurrents and yet Marthe seems not 

entirely averse to Sybilla by the end. And she seems to act 

from good intentions. She goes back to Jerott, and she visits 

Philippa at Sevigny – although the result of that is the 

opposite of what she hopes for as Philippa decides to leave 

for England rather than overcoming her trauma and consummating 

her marriage. 

After Sybilla revives Francis from the coma, things 

change. He has promised to return to Scotland and when 

Marthe visits him – ‘How do you take leave, for all time, 

of a brother?’ – and asks for continued contact, he refuses 

because of what it would mean for Richard. That seems 

to trigger a renewed outbreak of animosity, but if we look 

closely it’s not towards him but to Richard and his family. 

In fact she seems to be angry as much on Lymond’s behalf 

as her own. She retrieves the hitherto missing documents 

and when Danny tries to snatch them she stabs him. It’s 

only his mail shirt that saves him. 

With that stabbing scene at Blois we’re set up to believe 

that Marthe has travelled to England with the intention 

of revealing Sybilla’s secret to Richard. She says so herself. 

But is all what it seems? Danny clearly likes her despite 

his failed attempt to seize the papers, and we’ve been led to 

have some respect for his judgement and powers of observation. 

Nostradamus appears to be advising caution in his 

very carefully phrased reaction. Marthe herself seems to be 

more in shock than Danny at what she’s done. 

Which brings me back to that word that you’ve doubtless 

been wondering about. 

The first reading of books as complex as these is always a 

compromise between watching the plot, keeping track of 

the characters, and understanding the hidden meanings. 

We can’t apply our full attention to them all. We re-read, 

whether in full or delving into certain chapters, to fill in 

what we didn’t catch the first time, or the second, or the 

tenth! 

Inevitably it blurs into a single picture of understanding, 

so there is a danger in looking back that you think you saw 

more than you really did that first time. 

I’m glad that I documented at least some of my reactions 

at the time in the old newsletters because it reminds me 

of the feelings I had in a more reliable way than memory, 

warped by subsequent re-reads, can hope to do. 

So I don’t think I could claim that I noticed what I regard 

as the key word relating to Marthe on that first read. 

However it may well have been on the second, or in one of 

my first few mini-readings of that emotionally devastating 

scene that is the climax of Checkmate, that this one word 

suddenly leapt out of the page at me. One which in all the 

years of online discussion I’ve never heard anyone remark 

on, but which to me speaks volumes. 

Here’s the section it’s contained in. You all know it – it’s 

probably engraved on some of our hearts. 

The fair-haired rider is cresting the hill and Austin Grey 

has just stepped from his hiding place: 

At point blank range, there was no possibility of 

missing. He aimed into the fair, weary, rancourless 

face, and then at the heart, and both balls found 

their mark and brought death in the end, not with 

the sweet ambiguity of an arrow but with the finality 

which frees the earth at once of body and soul, 

and all that was good or bad in either. (CM, Pt 5, 

Ch 12) 

Did you spot it? ‘Rancourless’ 

Marthe, rancourless. 

One of the dictionary definitions I looked up said: 

‘not possessing a long-lasting resentment or deep-seated 

ill-will’. Why would Dorothy use that word there? She 

doesn’t waste words – we’re all long familiar with the fact 

that every single one counts, and this was her at the very 

peak of her skill, writing the climax of a mighty six-volume 

series that was rewriting the rules and standards of historical 

fiction. It can’t be there by accident. 

Why ‘rancourless’? 

It isn’t needed to convince us that this is Francis Crawford 

on the receiving end of the fatal shots. It wouldn’t fit 

his character anyway, whatever his faults he’s never been 

given to rancour so it would make no sense to mention 

here. She’s already engaged us in a masterly juxtaposition 

of scene and perspective. We’ve been so much in Lymond’s 

head at this point, something that’s hardly ever been the 

case in the rest of the series, all through the capture by 

Margaret Lennox and his shamanistic preservation of life 

in the cold tower, and the ride back after his release; plus 

a little in Philippa’s mind, who thinks only of him. In a 

positively cinematic piece of scene cutting we’ve just been 

on the other side of that hill with him. On the edge of 

our seats and scarcely daring to breath as we hear, or more 

accurately feel, the raw tortured emotions of the two of 

them, we can think of no-one else. We need no convincing! 

So why ‘rancourless’? 

It has to be describing Marthe. 

And it has to be a message, conveying in a single word a 

story Dorothy can’t show us any other way. 

My interpretation is this: Marthe’s had her crisis, been 

shocked to the core at what she almost did to Danny, and 

impressed by his loyalty, even while wounded, to Lymond, 

as well as his concern for her. She’s rethought her jealousy 

during the journey and detention in England, and seen the 

truth of Danny’s statement that what hurts the Crawford 

family hurts Lymond. 

She was no longer planning to reveal the papers to Richard 

– she was going to give them to Francis! 

If I’m right then Dorothy has just done something few 

continued on p. 24 


HISTORY PRIZE 2011: WINNING ESSAY 

Merchant, 

Administrator 

and General 

Filippo Scolari in 

the Service of the 

Hungarian King, 

1397–1426 

Mark Whelan 

Above: Portrait of Condottiere Filippo Scolari by Andrea 

del Castagno, c. 1450. Fresco transferred to wood. Photo 

credit: The Yorck Project on Wikimedia Commons. 

Filippo Scolari was born in 1369 in the Tuscan village of 

Tizzano and seemed destined for a career in finance 

and trade. However, while doing business in Buda 

during the 1390s he had a chance meeting with Sigismund 

of Luxemburg, King of Hungary (1387–1437), who took 

him into his service and treated him like his own son. This 

marked the start of a remarkable career which would see 

Sigismund use Scolari in a variety of roles, most notably 

as a diplomat, administrator and military commander, in 

missions not just in the kingdom of Hungary but across 

Europe. His loyal and effective service was rewarded with 

numerous titles, lands and offices, and turned him into the 

most powerful baron in the Hungarian kingdom until his 

death in 1426, when he was killed while leading a joint 

Hungarian, Serbian and Portuguese army against the Ottoman 

Turks on the southern border of Hungary. 

This essay will demonstrate how Filippo Scolari was very 

much like a real-life Nicholas de Fleury, the protagonist 

in Dorothy Dunnett’s eight-volume series, The House of 

Niccolò. The same combination of mercantile acumen, 

linguistic skill and diplomatic ability are present in both 

figures, and both travelled extensively, met the extraordinary 

figures of their day and enjoyed remarkable careers. 

While doing so, this essay will also attempt to alter some 

of the existing historiographical conclusions surrounding 

Scolari and his role in early 15th-century Hungarian politics 

and government. 

Scolari, a man who would be so instrumental in the 

development of banking, finance, diplomacy and warmaking 

in 15th-century Hungary, came from humble beginnings. 

The only information about Scolari’s first years 

comes from a near-contemporary biography, written by 

Jacopo di Poggio Bracciolini (d. 1478). Bracciolini stresses 

how Scolari descended from ‘a most ancient and noble 

family of the Republic of Florence’, which, because it had 

been excluded from politics since the early 13th-century, 

meant that Scolari was ‘raised with his father and mother 

in poverty in a village called Tizzano’. 1 Much like Nicholas 

de Fleury, his lack of wealth and status proved of no hindrance 

to his chosen career in trade and finance, and by 

the 1390s Scolari was apparently trading in ‘many things’ 

1 Iacopo di Poggio Bracciolini, ‘Vita di Messer Filippo Scolari’, 

Archivio Storico Italiano, 4 (1843), 163–84 (pp. 163– 

4). ‘antichissima e nobile nella Repubblica fiorentina ... 

allevato col padre e madre poveramente in una villa chiamata 

Tizzano’. All translations are my own. 


in Buda with his master, Luca Pecchia. 2 At some point in 

the late 1390s, Sigismund, meeting Scolari by chance, 

was so taken by the Florentine’s skill in accounting and 

management that he instantly decided to take him into 

his service. This marked the start of a career in Hungarian 

royal service that would last for almost three decades. 

Scolari, much like Nicholas de Fleury, owed much of his 

success to his extraordinary intelligence and brilliance 

with figures and he immediately put these to good use 

against the Ottoman Turks, who were by far the greatest 

threat to Hungary. An anecdote from Bracciolini’s biography 

clearly shows why Sigismund felt his kingdom could 

benefit from Scolari’s expertise; when Sigismund and his 

barons were discussing the ‘custody and guard of the Danube, 

for the defence of that land from the assaults of the 

Turks who had [recently] seized Serbia’, 3 they were struggling 

to work out the pay and materials necessary to supply 

12,000 horsemen for a campaign. For an Italian with a 

mercantile background it was easy, and ‘Filippo, taking his 

pen, by that fact itself, did the counting with such swiftness 

so that all those surrounding were amazed and they 

greatly praised [him]’. 4 

As this story implies, the sophisticated financial and 

accounting skills that Scolari and other members of the 

European mercantile classes had were not present in the 

Hungarian court. While Bracciolini may be exaggerating 

slightly, this anecdote accurately reflects Sigismund’s desperate 

need for figures such as Scolari in the later 1390s 

as his kingdom was in economic and military crisis. After 

suffering a heavy defeat at the hands of the Ottomans at 

the Battle of Nicopolis in 1396, 5 Sigismund was forced to 

come up with new ideas which could help his kingdom 

resist the Ottoman attacks on his beleaguered southern 

frontier. 6 One small part of this drive was to increase the 

income that could be drawn from the royal mines and 

2 Ibid., p. 164. For information about Luca Pecchia, see Katalin 

Prajda, ‘The Florentine Scolari Family at the Court of 

Sigismund of Luxemburg in Buda’, Journal of Early Modern 

History, 14 (2010), 513–33 (p. 517). 

3 Ibid., p. 165. ‘custodia e guardia del Danubio, per difendere 

quell paese dall’assaulto de’Turchi, i quali aveano 

preso Cervia’. 

4 Ibid., p. 165. ‘Filippo, e preso lui la penna, ipso facto con 

tale celeritá ebbe il conto fatto, che tutti i circostanti si maravigliavona, 

grandissimamente lodandolo.’ For another 

demonstration of Scolari’s talents, see Anonymous, ‘La 

Vita di Meser Philippo Scholari’, Archivio Storico Italiano, 

4 (1843), 152–62 (p. 153). 

5 For the campaign, see Norman Housley, The Later Crusades, 

1274–1580: From Lyons to Alcazar (Oxford: Oxford 

University Press, 1992), 73–9. 

6 Gustav Beckmann, Der Kampf Kaiser Sigmunds gegen die 

werdende Weltmacht der Osmanen, 1392–1437 (Gotha: 

Friedrich Andreas Perthes, 1902), pp. 5–12; János M. Bak, 

‘Sigismund and the Ottoman Advance’, in Sigismund von 

Luxemburg: Ein Kaiser in Europa, ed. Michel Pauly and 

Francois Reinert (Mainz am Rhein: Philip von Zabern, 

2006), p. 91–4. 

mints, which could then go to supporting garrisons and 

the building of fortifications on the Danube frontier. 7 Scolari’s 

recruitment needs to be seen in the context of Sigismund’s 

attempts at garnering more economic resources, 

because as early as 1399 Sigismund had appointed Scolari 

as ‘the count of our city of Kremnica’, 8 where a royal mint 

was based, and by 1401 he was in charge of the Transylvanian 

salt chambers, another major source of royal income, 

as a document refers to him as ‘the count of the royal salt 

chambers’. 9 

Scolari’s services were obviously deemed useful as in 

the later 1390s he was rewarded with the wardenship of 

Simontornya by Sigismund, a town roughly 100 miles to 

the south of Buda, where he presumably met and married 

his wife, the Hungarian noblewoman Barbara of Ozora. 

10 In 1403 though, Scolari successfully took part in the 

resistance to an invasion led by Ladislaus of Naples (d. 

1414) aimed at dethroning Sigismund. 11 By supporting 

Sigismund, Scolari not only demonstrated his loyalty but 

also his aptitude for military matters, as he successfully 

captured several fortresses and helped drive Ladislaus’ 

supporters back to their bases in Italy. 12 With Sigismund 

assured of his loyalty and military competence, Scolari’s 

career reaches new heights and begins to assume distinct 

military and diplomatic dimensions. 

In 1404, Scolari was made a baron of the Hungarian 

realm by Sigismund, who appointed him to rule the strategically 

important County of Temesvár. 13 At this point, 

Bracciolini’s biography records how, upon being ‘given as 

a present Temesvár castle, [he also took] the nickname 

Spano’, with Spano being a form of the Hungarian word 

ispán, meaning governor. 14 It was around this time that 

Scolari also began using a different form of his fore name, 

shortening Filippo to Pipo. Scolari’s name changes echo 

those of Nicholas de Fleury, who also changes his name 

several times from his original of Claes vander Poele. In 

both cases their name changes demonstrate who they re- 

7 The royal monopoly on the mints and salt mines was 

enshrined in Hungarian law. See, The Laws of the Medieval 

Kingdom of Hungary, trans. and ed. János M. Bak, Pál 

Engel et. al. (Salt Lake City: Charles Schacks Jr., 1992), 2, 

p. 144. 

8 Gusztáv Wenzel, ‘Okmánytar Ozorai Pipό Történetéhez’, 

Történelmi Tár, 27 (1884), 1–31, 220–47, 412–37, 613–27 

(p. 7). ‘Comitis urburam nostrarum de Crempnica’. 

9 Zsigmondkori Oklevéltár, ed. Elemér Mályusz (Budapest: 

Akadémiai Kiadό, 1951), 2, p. 113 (nr. 831). ‘comitis camararum 

salium regalium’. 

10 Prajda, ‘Scolari Family’, p. 518. 

11 Bracciolini, ‘Scolari’, pp. 166–70. See also Elemér Mályusz, 

Kaiser Sigismund in Ungarn, 1387–1437 (Budapest: 

Akadémiai Kiadό, 1990), pp. 59–69; Pál Engel, The Realm 

of St Stephen: A History of Medieval Hungary, 895–1526, 

trans. Tamás Pálosfalvi (London: I. B. Tauris, 2005), 204–8. 

12 Bracciolini, ‘Scolari’, pp. 168–70. 

13 Ibid., p. 169-70. 

14 Ibid., p. 170. ‘Nondimeno, donargli per al presente Timiscivario 

castello, ed il sopranome Spano’. 


late to and identify with most closely, and by 1404 it is 

clear that Scolari is making an effort to assimilate himself 

into the Hungarian nobility of which he is now a member. 

Scolari would come to be given more offices and greater 

responsibility in the financial administration of the Hungarian 

kingdom. Within three years and much earlier than 

historians such as Pál Engel have proposed, Scolari’s influence 

had spread to the treasury, 15 with Sigismund referring 

to him in 1407 as ‘the excellent Pipo of Ozora, charged 

with the [management] of the Treasury and also our count 

of Temesvár and of the salt chambers’. 16 

It is hard to ascertain what Scolari’s precise administrative 

responsibilities were, but the glimpses offered by the 

sources reveal that his mercantile background and linguistic 

skills would have certainly been in demand. A letter 

written by Sigismund in 1428 to Scolari’s wife, reveals 

how Scolari was responsible for the most of the treasury’s 

operation, stating that ‘count Pipo ... for many past years 

held from us the duty of [managing] all of our royal salt 

chambers ... and furthermore, he bore and secured yearly 

many of our royal issues and rents by our command in 

each of the aforesaid years’. 17 The income from these vari- 

15 Engel, Realm of St Stephen, p. 212. 

16 Wenzel, ‘Ozorai Pipό’, p. 20. ‘Magnifici Piponis de Ozora 

sumpni nostri Thesaurarij nec non Themesiensis et camerarum 

salium nostrarum comitis’. 

17 Wenzel, ‘Ozorai Pipό’, p. 622. ‘Pipo ... comes ... pluribus 

retroactis annis officium omnium camerarum salium nostrarum 

Regalium a nobis tenedo ... et eciam multos alios 

nostros regales proventus et redditus de nostro mandato 

in singulis predictorum annorum tulerit et perceperit annis.’ 

Jörg K. Hoensch, Kaiser Sigismund: Herrscher an der 

Schwelle zur Neuzeit, 1368-1439 (Munich: Verlag Beck, 

1996), pp. 135–6. 

ous streams would then be allotted to ‘our various royal 

campaigns and arrangements’ by Scolari as well, a process 

that would have taken much financial skill. 18 Scolari also 

had responsibility for transporting vital royal supplies and 

stocks, such as salt, grain and timber, 19 and worked closely 

with figures such as Mark of Nuremburg, a German financier 

employed by Sigismund to work in Hungarian administration. 

20 Scolari and Mark both worked together 

in 1415 for example, to mint new Hungarian currency as 

the current coins were said to be in a state of ‘total ruin 

and destruction’. 21 Having to work alongside Germans and 

Hungarians as well as Serbians and Wallachians with their 

various tongues would have been linguistically taxing, but 

Scolari, with his background in international trade, was 

skilled with languages. Bracciolini reports how, ‘as well 

as the Florentine and Hungarian languages, he knew German, 

Polish, Czech ... and Valachian ... so well, that whatever 

he spoke, it seemed as though it were his own.’ 22 

18 Wenzel, ‘Ozorai Pipό’, p. 622. ‘ad nostras regias varios 

expediciones disposicionem’. 

19 For such a case in 1419, see ibid., p. 222. 

20 Codex Diplomaticus Hungariae: Ecclesiasticus ac Civilis, 

ed. Georgius Fejér, (Buda: University of Hungary, 1841), 

10, 4, p. 283. 

21 Wenzel, ‘Ozorai Pipό’, p. 246. ‘in totalem ... ruinam et 

destruccionem’. 

22 Bracciolini, ‘Scolari’, p. 176. ‘oltre alle fiorentina ed unghera 

lingua, la tedesca, la pollaca e la boema...e la valacca 

... cosi ben sepea, che qualunque proferia, quella la sua 

propria parea’. 

Above: Golubac fortress, where Scolari met his death in 

1426. Photo credit: Denis Barthel, licensed under Creative 

Commons. 


However, alongside his career 

in the royal administration, 

Scolari also won great fame and 

renown as a military commander 

and organiser. His most remarkable 

achievement was the 

development of perhaps medieval 

Europe’s first permanently 

fortified military border. Scolari 

was given the unenviable task 

of making Hungary’s southern 

frontier able to withstand the 

constant Ottoman threat, a 

task which he accomplished by 

building or renovating dozens 

of castles along the Danube and 

manning them permanently 

with garrisons of infantry and 

artillery for defence and heavy 

and light cavalry for attacks into 

Ottoman territory. 23 

Within a year of his appointment 

as Count of Temesvár, 

Scolari was already employing 

castle builders, including a certain Jacob and Nicholas 

Cheph, to repair fortresses. 24 With his numerous offices 

in the Hungarian administration, which allowed easy access 

to resources, as well as the continued support of Sigismund, 

who eventually gave Scolari the right to rule all 

of the seven counties that formed the Hungarian southern 

border, the Florentine was responsible for most of the 14 

new fortresses established on the southern frontier during 

Sigismund’s reign. 25 Scolari, hailing from one of the most 

advanced states in medieval Europe, was able to apply the 

advances in military architecture and engineering taking 

place in Italy to the Hungarian frontier. 26 In one instance, 

for example, he was able to surround a castle with a moat 

by leading water from a lake through a mountain over 

four miles away, through a channel constructed specially 

for the purpose. 27 These fortresses laid the foundations of 

the Hungarian defensive system that was to keep the Ottomans 

out of central Europe until the 16th century. 28 

23 Ferenc Szakály, ‘The Hungarian-Croatian Border Defense 

System and its Collapse’, in From Hunyadi to Rákoćzi, 

ed. János Bak and Bela Kiraly (Brooklyn, NY: Colombia University 

Press, 1982), pp. 141–58 (esp. pp. 142–7). 

24 Wenzel, ‘Ozorai Pipό’, p. 18. 

25 Bak, ‘Ottoman Advance’, p. 93. 

26 László Veszprémy, ‘Militärtechnische Innovationen und 

Handschriften aus dem Umfeld Sigismunds’, in Sigismundus 

Rex et Imperator: Kunst and Kultur zur zeit Sigismunds 

von Luxemburg 1387–1437, ed. Imre Takács (Mainz: 

Philipp von Zabern, 2006), p. 289. 


28 For Scolari’s building activities, see Ioan Hategan, ‘Das 

King Sigismund of Hungary, possibly by Pisanello, from c. 

1430. Image credit: Wikimedia Commons. 

As well as being an effective 

organiser of economic and military 

resources, Scolari also developed 

a fearsome reputation 

as a military commander, with 

one legend circulating after his 

death claiming that he fought 

and won no less than 18 major 

battles against the Turks. 29 

He led armies on campaigns 

on numerous occasions and 

in several theatres. In 1407 he 

commanded a Hungarian army 

tasked with conquering and 

subduing rebellious Bosnian 

lords and their Turkish allies on 

Hungary’s south-western flank. 

Scolari’s military success in this 

campaign resulted in more rewards 

from the Hungarian king. 

He was given more estates and 

privileges and most significantly, 

membership in the Order of 

the Dragon, a chivalric order 

founded by Sigismund and his wife in 1408 with the aim of 

galvanising support among European nobility to fight the 

Turks. 30 The addition of Zewreniensis (modern day Turnu 

Severin) to Scolari’s name in the statutes of the Order 

would also imply that Scolari was in charge of the strategically 

key Danubian fortress of the same name by 1408. 31 

Scolari was also tasked with invading Venetian territory 

in 1412, where Eberhart Windecke, a contemporary German 

chronicler, comments on Scolari’s military skill, claiming 

that Scolari, who was the senior commander because 

of Sigismund’s absence ‘won 32 towns and castles’ during 

his first season of campaigning alone. 32 Scolari’s military 

activities were not the only things that caught Windecke’s 

attentions, as the chronicler also comments on his humble 

beginnings and his rise to prominence, stating that ‘Pipo 

was a shoemaker’s son from Florence, whom the king had 

made a great lord’. 33 Aside from a brief spell campaign- 

Mittelalterliche Schloss von Temesvár und die von Filippo 

Scolari im Banat gebauten order renovierten Schlösser’, 

Castrum Bene, 2 (1992), 268–75. 

29 Joseph Aschbach, Geschichte Kaiser Sigmund’s (Hamburg: 

Friedrich Perthes, 1845), 4, pp. 414–5; Hoensch, Sigismund, 

p. 121. 

30 Diplomaticus Hungariae, 10, 4, pp. 682–94. D’arcy 

Jonathan Boulton, The Knights of the Crown (Woodbridge: 

Boydell, 1987), pp. 350–352. 

31 Diplomaticus Hungariae, 10, 4, p. 689. 

32 Eberhart Windecke, Erberhart Windeckes Denkwürdigkeiten 

zur Geschichte des Zeitalters Kaiser Sigmunds, ed. 

Wilhelm Altmann (Berlin: R. Gaertners, 1893), p. 111. ‘und 

wol 32 stete und sloβ gewonnen’. 

33 Ibid., p. 111. ‘der selbe Pipo was eins schumachers son 

von Florenz, wanne in der konig zu eim herren gemacht 

hette’. 


ing against the heretical Hussites in Bohemia with an army 

supposedly 15,000 strong in 1422, 34 Scolari would spend 

most of his career as a military commander on the Hungaro-Turkish 

frontier and defending the seven counties that 

he was responsible for. Given Sigismund’s long absences 

from Hungary in the 1410s and early 1420s for diplomatic 

reasons, Scolari alone bore the bulk of the responsibility 

for keeping the southern frontier secure. Scolari would 

eventually meet his death in battle against the Turks in 

1426, when, with a Hungarian force supplemented by Serbian 

troops under the command of the Despot of Serbia 

and also a force of 800 soldiers under the command of 

Pedro, a prince of Portugal, he engaged a Turkish army 

near the fortress of Galamboc, in modern day Serbia. 35 

Scolari also proved himself an able diplomat. He was 

responsible for preparing much of the ground for the 

Council of Constance, an international council convened 

by Sigismund between 1414–18 in order to solve the Papal 

schism. Scolari undertook an extensive tour of Italy in 

1410 in an attempt to rally support for the council, which 

included a visit to his native home of Florence where he 

was accompanied by his personal guard of ‘one hundred 

and fifty horse, each one a great knight of Hungary’. 36 The 

council was convened successfully but Scolari’s performance 

at the actual council was not quite as effective as 

his work beforehand. He failed to keep Pope John XXIII, 

whose safe custody he was entrusted with, from escaping 

to the camp of the Duke of Austria, one of Sigismund’s 

political opponents. 37 Other diplomatic missions included 

an embassy to Ragusa in 1407 38 and also negotiations with 

Florentine embassies active in Hungary during the mid 

1420s. 39 

Scolari’s rise from an impoverished, politically powerless 

Florentine family to the most pre-eminent baron and 

royal advisor in the Hungarian kingdom is truly a story of 

rags to riches. However, the reasons underlying his rise 

have frequently been obscured. Sigismund’s recruitment 

of foreign servants has been seen by some historians, 

such as Mályusz, as an attempt to counter the power of 

Hungarian barons and to aid in his consolidation of power. 

40 Mályusz, and other historians such as János Bak and 

34 Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini, Historica Bohemica, ed. 

Joseph Hejnic (Cologne: Böhlau Verlag, 2005), pp. 312–3. 


36 ‘Diario Fiorentino di Bartolomeo di Michele del Corozza, 

anno 14-5-1438’, Archivio Storico Italiano, quinta serie, 

14 (1894), 233–98 (p. 248). ‘con centocinquanta cavalla e 

tutti cavagli grossi ungheri’. 

37 Gizella Nemeth Popo, Pippo Spano: un eroe antiturco 

antesignorno del rinascimento (Garizia: Edizione della Laguna, 

2006), p. 110. 

38 Jόzsef Gelcich and Lajos Thallóczy, Diplomatarium Relationum 

Reipublicae Ragusana cum Regno Hungariaee 

(Budapest, Tudományos Akadémia, 1887), pp. 174–5. 

39 Prajda, ‘Scolari Family’, p. 526. See also, Péter E. Kovács, 

‘Egy Firenzei Követjárás Magyarországon’, Századok, 

144 (2010), 1455–1536 (English summary on p. 1536). 

40 Elemér Mályusz, ‘Die Zentralisationbestrebungen König 

Jörg Hoensch, have recently come to more positive conclusions 

regarding Scolari’s recruitment, stressing, for example, 

how his skills were invaluable to Sigismund and 

his political activities. 41 However their arguments can be 

taken further. Scolari and Nicholas de Fleury both formed 

part of a ‘talent pool’ in later medieval Europe upon which 

rulers drew, and Scolari’s true utility needs to be seen in 

the context of the Turkish threat and the increasing demands 

on governance that it entailed. In the face of the 

Ottoman danger, where military command and economic 

reforms were becoming intertwined as Hungary was being 

forced to develop Europe’s first standing armies and the 

means to pay for them, a figure such as Scolari made the 

ideal servant thanks to his combination of financial skill 

and military competence. Scolari, much like Nicholas de 

Fleury, stood on the threshold of a new age that would 

see great changes in the political and economic structures 

of Europe and of European states. Luckily for them, they 

both had the required skill and wit to thrive and flourish in 

whatever world they were in. 

Mark Whelan, London, England 

Bibliography 

Primary Sources: 

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Storico Italiano, 4 (1843), 152–62 

Bak, János M., Pál Engel et. al. (eds.) The Laws of the Medieval 

Kingdom of Hungary (Salt Lake City: Charles Schacks 

Jr., 1992) 

Bracciolini, Iacopo di Poggio, ‘Vita di Messer Filippo Scolari’, 

Archivio Storico Italiano, 4 (1843), 163–84 

Corozza, Michele del, ‘Diario Fiorentino di Bartolomeo di 

Michele del Corozza, anno 14-5-1438’, Archivio Storico 

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Georgius Fejér (ed.), Codex Diplomaticus Hungariae: Ecclesiasticus 

ac Civilis (Buda: University of Hungary, 1829- 

44), 40 vols 

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Relationum Reipublicae Ragusana cum Regno Hungariaee 

(Budapest, Tudományos Akadémia, 1887) 

Mályusz, Elemér and Iván Borsa (eds.), Zsigmondkori 

Oklevéltár (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadό, 1951–2005) 9 vols 

Piccolomini, Aeneas Silvius, Historica Bohemica, ed. 

Joseph Hejnic and Hans Rothe (Cologne: Böhlau Verlag, 

2005) 

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zur Geschichte des Zeitalters Kaiser Sigmunds, ed. 

Wilhelm Altmann (Berlin: R. Gaertners, 1893) 

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Friedrich Perthes, 1839–1845) 4 vols 

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Hungaricae, 50 (1960), 1–42 (p. 11). 

41 See Hoensch, Sigismund, pp. 121–2. 


in Sigismund von Luxemburg: Ein Kaiser in Europa, ed. 

Michel Pauly and Francois Reinert (Mainz am Rhein: Philip 

von Zabern, 2006) 

Beckmann, Gustav, Der Kampf Kaiser Sigmunds gegen die 

werdende Weltmacht der Osmanen, 1392–1437 (Gotha: 

Friedrich Andreas Perthes, 1902) 

Boulton, D’arcy Jonathan, The Knights of the Crown 

(Woodbridge: Boydell, 1987) 

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Hungary, 895–1526, trans. Tamás Pálosfalvi (London: I. B. 

Tauris, 2005) 

Hategan, Ioan, ‘Das Mittelalterliche Schloss von Temesvár 

und die von Filippo Scolari im Banat gebauten order renovierten 

Schlösser’, Castrum Bene, 2 (1992), 268–75 

Housley, Norman, The Later Crusades, 1274–1580: From 

Lyons to Alcazar (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992) 

Hoensch, Jörg K., Kaiser Sigismund: Herrscher an der 

Schwelle zur Neuzeit, 1368–1439 (Munich: Verlag Beck, 

1996) 

Kovács, Péter E., ‘Egy Firenzei Követjárás Magyarországon’, 

Századok, 144 (2010), 1455–1536 

Mályusz, Elemér, ‘Die Zentralisationbestrebungen König 

Sigismunds in Ungarn’, Studia Historica Academiae Scientarum 

Hungaricae, 50 (1960), 1–42 

― Kaiser Sigismund in Ungarn, 1387–1437 (Budapest: 

Akadémiai Kiadό, 1990) 

Popo, Gizella Nemeth, Pippo Spano: un eroe antiturco 

antesignorno del rinascimento (Garizia: Edizione della Laguna, 

2006), 

Prajda, Katalin, ‘The Florentine Scolari Family at the Court 

of Sigismund of Luxemburg in Buda’, Journal of Early Modern 

History, 14 (2010), 513–33 

Szakály, Ferenc, ‘The Hungarian-Croatian Border Defense 

System and its Collapse’, in From Hunyadi to Rákoćzi: War 

and Society in Late Medieval and Early Modern Hungary, 

ed. János Bak and Bela Kiraly (Brooklyn, NY: Colombia University 

Press, 1982), pp. 141–58 

Veszprémy, László, ‘Militärtechnische Innovationen und 

Handschriften aus dem Umfeld Sigismunds’, in Sigismundus 

Rex et Imperator: Kunst and Kultur zur zeit Sigismunds 

von Luxemburg 1387–1437, ed. Imre Takács (Mainz: 

Philipp von Zabern, 2006), pp. 287–91 

THE DOROTHY DUNNETT HISTORY PRIZE 

Six essays were submitted in 2011 for the first Dorothy Dunnett History Prize, 

covering subject matter including Irish-Scottish politics during the 16th century, 

the Auld Alliance between Scotland and France, the opposing roles of 

women in early modern England, and the significance of the printer in the dissemination 

of controversial texts. 

The judges liked Mark Whelan’s interesting and well-researched essay because 

its picture of a socially mobile and skilled financier, diplomat and soldier 

resonated very strongly with the themes of The House of Niccolò books. 

Mark is currently writing a PhD, at Royal Holloway, University of London, entitled: 

‘Outside Expertise in the Hungarian fight against the Ottoman Turks, c. 

1396–1456’. 

Continued from p. 18 

Marthe 

other writers could have imagined, let alone pulled off. 

She’s implied an entire character revelation and resolution 

in a single word! 

If we’ve spotted this coup then we get some confirmation 

of it later. Sybilla thinks that maybe she was coming 

to give Lymond the papers or maybe reveal them to the 

family. Consider this in the context that Dorothy has taken 

the time to tell us back in France that they are originally 

addressed to Lymond, not to Richard, and that Marthe 

rewrapped them using Jerott’s seal. Surely if she was bent 

on revealing them to Richard she’d have re-addressed them 

in case of accident? 

What Marthe’s exact motives were is more difficult to 

say. We necessarily have little to go on and have to rely 

on instinct. Perhaps it was her only way of showing her 

brother that he could trust her, that she could after all 

maintain some contact with him without them hurting 

each other, though whether there could ever have been any 

wider contact with the family is open to doubt unless one 

gives Richard rather more credit for perceptiveness and 

discretion than we, and Lymond, have tended to. But then 

Richard, for all his failings, is a Crawford too, and despite 

some blind spots is certainly not unintelligent. Moreover 

he loves his brother and mother deeply enough to ignore 

things that might worry other men. 

Marthe’s tragedy is that she dies at the one point in her 

life when she has come to accept who she is and perhaps 

allowed herself to be motivated by love instead of jealousy. 

Perhaps that inner door that Jerott sought had at last 

opened a little. 

So to return to the question in the title of this talk. 

Marthe is both: tragic, though no longer a pawn, and a 

lost soul now redeemed. 

Perhaps the real tragic character of the series is Jerott, 

but that is another story. 

Bill Marshall, Edinburgh, Scotland 


LITERATURE 

Landscapes, 

Physical and Figurative, 

in The Lymond Chronicles 

Jennifer Newton 

The outsider’s eye is a writer’s stock-in-trade, a persistent 

effort to grasp events through place and season, 

or through nuances of intonation, language, rhythm, 

phraseology, or through regional physical characteristics, 

climate and weather … The characters in a 

story, like people in life, behave as their landscape 

makes them behave … 1 

Landscape, both physical and figurative, is an important 

narrative tool in the construction of The 

Lymond Chronicles. It plays a significant role in setting 

individual scenes, and in vividly portraying the various 

characters populating the novels’ physical landscapes 

and utilising their figurative ones. ‘Landscape’ in literature 

can refer to a variety of scenarios. In The Lymond Chronicles 

there are landscapes of language and of emotion, the 

1 Annie Proulx, “Big Skies, Empty Places”. The New Yorker. 

25 Dec 2000, 1 Jan 2001: 139, cited in Barbara Britton 

Wenner, Prospect and Refuge in the Landscape of Jane Austen 

(Aldershot, Hants and Burlington, VT: 2006) 1–2. 

latter closely linked with musical landscapes. There are 

personal landscapes, landscapes of narrative structure, and 

religious and political landscapes. Perhaps the overarching 

‘literary landscape’ in The Lymond Chronicles is the 

labyrinth, which has been described as ‘a paradigm for 

all literary discourse’. 2 Wendy Faris maintains that ‘like a 

text, a labyrinth is a half-closed, half-open space, which 

both reveals and hides, invites entry and prevents easy 

penetration; like any puzzle, it incites and delays its own 

solution.’ 3 Each of the landscapes discussed here is laby- 

2 Wendy B Faris, Labyrinths of Language: Symbolic Landscape 

and Narrative Design in Modern Fiction (Baltimore 

and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988) 

2. 

3 Faris, 8–9. 

Above: The Cretan Labyrinth, from a series entitled 

‘Landscapes with Biblical and Mythological Scenes’, by Hieronymus 

Cock. Etching, 1558. © Trustees of the British 

Museum. 


inthine in nature: each suggests play and terror, order and 

confusion, reason and passion; each is a half-closed and 

half-open space, serving the author’s development of both 

character and story line. 

Literature’s fascination with the labyrinth has its roots in 

Greek mythology, with the story of Theseus setting out to 

kill the Minotaur at the heart of the labyrinth at Knossos. 

In modern literature Theseus’s labyrinthine journey translates 

into ‘a journey of self-discovery; ostensibly a voyage 

out, it is symbolically a voyage within.’ 4 At the heart of the 

literary labyrinth is the place in which the central protagonists 

must face their nemeses and overcome their fears, real 

or imagined, before finding their places of spiritual and/or 

physical rest. At the centre of Francis Crawford’s labyrinth 

lies the truth about his birthright. But before resolution 

can be achieved Lymond must travel through many convoluted 

landscapes, most of his own devising because of 

his desire to avoid the truth as he incorrectly believes it 

to be. The heroine of The Lymond Chronicles, Philippa 

Somerville, must also travel through tortuous emotional 

and physical landscapes before finding resolution and rest 

in the labyrinth’s centre. 

Other characters in the novels also travel circuitous 

paths. Some find the centre of their labyrinths; others continue 

to wander, apparently never finding the answers to 

their questions or the rest that those answers could afford. 

Whatever the particular outcome of each character’s odyssey, 

it seems that all fall prey to the labyrinth’s essential 

trap: before resolution can be reached they inevitably become 

lost in the maze of their own creation, ‘entrapped 

in [their] own deceptive enclosure’. 5 Lymond’s mother Sybilla 

becomes lost in the maze created by the mystery surrounding 

her marriage and the birth of her two younger 

children. Her efforts to protect her children only serve to 

entrap them in the deception. Lymond becomes trapped 

in the maze created by his attempts to avoid uncovering a 

truth which in fact does not exist. Philippa becomes ensnared 

first in the emotional maze created by her search for 

the details of Lymond’s birth, and then in the psychological 

maze created by Leonard Bailey’s assault. 

Landscape, whether natural or man-made, has been discussed 

in terms of refuge and prospect; that is, places in 

which to obtain safe haven, and places from which to seek 

out information about the world and its inhabitants. 6 Francis 

Crawford and Philippa Somerville ‘move from zones of 

safety ... to landscapes of exposure – exposure not so much 

to their physical safety but to a questioning of who they 

themselves are.’ 7 Philippa is associated with landscape as 

refuge and prospect in both emotional and physical contexts. 

In the early novels her childhood offers refuge from 

the intrigues of the adult world, at the same time as offering 

a haven from which to view that world, and to gain the 

4 Faris, 122. 

5 Faris, 5. 

6 Barbara Britton Wenner, Prospect and Refuge in the 

Landscape of Jane Austen (Aldershot, Hants and Burlington, 

VT: 2006) 63. 

7 Barbara Britton Wenner, 63. 

insight and knowledge she requires to take her place in it. 

In Pawn in Frankincense Philippa sacrifices her freedom in 

the Sultan Suleiman’s seraglio, seeking refuge for the child 

she believes to be Lymond’s from the threat posed by Sir 

Graham Reid Malett. But eventually, this sacrifice places 

Philippa in a unique position to gain information about 

the world of the Sultan and the place of power in it that 

Malett has assumed, information that assists Lymond in 

his attempts to extricate herself and the child. Similarly, 

in The Ringed Castle and Checkmate Philippa is a member 

of the court of Mary Tudor, a position which allows her to 

seek refuge as a young woman alone, albeit the titular wife 

of Lymond. This environment permits her to infiltrate the 

world of political intrigue, and thus become a valuable asset 

to her husband in his dealings with English, Scots and 

French alike. 

Francis Crawford moves through several prospect and 

refuge landscapes, both physical and metaphysical, during 

his journey of self-discovery. An example of the former is 

his outlaw camp in The Game of Kings, a base from which 

to hide from the authorities, and from which to seek out 

the information that will clear his name. An example of 

the latter is his disguise as Thady Boy Ballagh in Queens’ 

Play. As Thady Boy he takes refuge from the notoriety acquired 

by Francis Crawford in the previous novel at the 

same time as searching for information that will facilitate 

his role of undercover bodyguard of Mary, Queen of Scots. 

From Queens’ Play onwards Lymond seeks refuge from 

Scotland, the site of the perceived shame of his birth, in 

various places and activities ranging from the Mediterranean 

fighting alongside the Knights of St John and against 

Graham Reid Malett, to Russia leading the Tsar’s army, 

and to France joining forces against the English. It is only 

in the later novels that Lymond reluctantly uses these refuges 

as prospects in the search for his true heritage, and the 

truth that will allow his return to Scotland. 

Physical landscapes in The Lymond Chronicles range 

from the natural wilds of the Scottish countryside, to 

those of foreign cultures, to the man-made architecture 

of the royal courts of Scotland, England, France and Russia, 

and the Ottoman Empire. In the case of architecture 

Dunnett obliquely refers to the labyrinth and its mythical 

architect in the description of the Hôtel Gaultier. Described 

as ‘rich as Daedalus’ honeycomb’, in true labyrinthine 

fashion, it ‘did not easily give up its privacies’ (CM, 

Pt 1, Ch 5). Similarly, in Pawn in Frankincense the Sultan’s 

seraglio consists of a number of maze-like courts in which 

Philippa becomes imprisoned. These courts are reflected 

in the honeycomb of tunnels underneath Constantinople, 

through which Lymond and his party escape from the 

city. In turn, this network of subterranean passages, together 

with the action that takes place in them, serves as 

a metaphor for the lives and ambitions of the characters: 

the greed of Gaultier and Marthe; the misplaced loyalty of 

Onophrion Zitwitz; the uncertain future that lies before 

them all, but particularly the child Kuzúm. 

Physical landscapes are a driving force for characterisation 

in the novels. The rugged Scottish countryside is 

symbolic of Scots pride and individuality, and this back- 


drop is important in portraying historical figures such as 

Sir Walter Scott of Buccleuch and his son, William Scott 

of Kincurd. Like the physical landscapes they reside in 

these characters are enduring and proud, steadfast and 

in some cases, unchanging; qualities that simultaneously 

strengthen and retard the growth of Scotland as a nation. 

Sir Walter represents the old feudal Scotland when he 

warns Lymond not to interfere in the hostilities between 

the Kerrs and the Scotts: ‘“Meddle with me, laddie, and 

your axe’ll be blunt before summer … The Scott family 

fights its own wars.”’ (DK, Pt 3, Ch 6) On the other hand, 

Will Scott champions Lymond’s attempts to police the 

feud, but doubts his chances of success: ‘“Ye ken there’s no 

hope,” said Buccleuch’s son to Lymond. “The auld yin’ll 

not change.”’ (DK, Pt 3, Ch 6) Will Scott symbolises the 

borderline between the old Scotland represented by feuding 

families and irresolute nobles, and the new Scotland 

enabled by forces united against her enemy England. 

Most importantly, physical landscapes play a significant 

role in the characterisation of the fictional protagonists. 

The natural topography of Scotland, its ruggedness and 

remoteness, together with its man-made landscapes of fine 

castles and cathedrals, serves to exemplify the hero, Francis 

Crawford. When these are combined with the metaphysical 

landscapes of religion and politics he may be seen as 

the personification of 16th-century Scotland: rough yet 

refined; maintaining allegiance to a Catholic queen whilst 

keeping an open mind on the ‘new religion’, Protestantism; 

paying court to France at the same time as fiercely 

defending Scotland’s independence, and keeping a wary 

eye on England. 

How characters interact with the landscape is also significant. 

In the opening lines of The Game of Kings Lymond 

returns to Scotland after several years on the Continent 

as an outlaw. Waiting for him in Edinburgh Lymond’s 

men ‘wondered briefly … how he proposed to penetrate a 

walled city to reach them’ (GoK, Opening Gambit). His ingenuity 

is soon revealed when Lymond times his entry to 

coincide with a shipment of smuggled goods arriving via 

the Nor’ Loch. He ‘quietly stripped to silk shirt and hose 

and stood listening, before sliding softly into the water’ 

(GoK, Opening Gambit). As the boat comes to rest on the 

shore ‘[t]he swimmer, collared with duckweed, grounded, 

shook himself, and unseen followed gently into, and out of 

the same house. Crawford of Lymond was in Edinburgh’ 

(GoK, Opening Gambit). The image of Lymond shaking 

himself as would a bird or animal indicates his comfort in, 

and control of, his surroundings. 

Lymond’s comfort on water or land is underscored in 

the opening scenes of Queens’ Play. Masquerading as the 

Irish ollave, Thady Boy Ballagh, he projects the image of 

an overweight and clumsy man, more at home with academic 

pursuits than with feats of physical dexterity. However, 

when the ship on which he is sailing from England 

to France is in danger of colliding with another, Thady 

Boy takes control of the situation, first shouting orders in 

the language of the seamen and then saving the day as 

he ‘climbed straight to the yardarm, made his way to the 

peak, and sixty feet up over a listing deck, knife in hand, 

probed the lashings’ to free a constricted sail (QP, Pt 1, 

Ch 1). This scene highlights Lymond’s innate qualities as 

a commander of men, as does the rooftop race later in 

Queens’ Play which also underscores his adaptability to any 

landscape, in this case an architectural one. 

During this race, run in pairs, Lymond’s ingenuity and 

physical strength are displayed, but the physical feats that 

Lymond undertakes are largely observed through the accomplishments 

of Robin Stewart, urged on by Lymond. 

Through the vehicle of the race, a psychological landscape 

is being explored: 

As he watched the Irishman above him moving 

steadily, delicately exploring, there stirred in Stewart 

something life-giving; a surprised gratitude for 

what Thady had tried to do; a fierce pride in what he 

himself had done. Strong, confident and free, for one 

evening envious of no man, Robin Stewart followed 

his leader up and into the belfry. (QP, Pt 2, Ch 5) 

Stewart’s eventual betrayal and attempted assassination 

of Lymond represent further explorations of this psychological 

landscape. 

The English countryside surrounding Hexham sets the 

scene for Philippa Somerville’s initial characterisation. 

In line with her rural environment she is portrayed as 

the down-to-earth child of unpretentious parents, even 

though her father has served in the household of the royal 

Princess Mary. This juxtaposition of country and court 

points towards the adult she will become: the perfect combination 

of common sense and courtliness. Physical landscapes 

also indicate the growth of Philippa’s character as 

she ages in years. This is particularly evident in her perilous 

journey in The Disorderly Knights. After long withholding 

information from Lymond out of spite because of a perceived 

childhood indignity, Philippa, ‘from the wisdom 

of her encroaching years … had reached the conclusion 

that she had made a false judgement’ (DK, Pt 3, Ch 14) 

and single-mindedly sets out to right it. She travels from 

Hexham in England to Lymond’s Scottish headquarters 

on St Mary’s Loch, accompanied only by an elderly family 

retainer. They travel by night pursued by a tinker, a wouldbe 

assassin intent on preventing her from divulging the 

information she holds. 

The landscape of darkness is described from the points 

of view of both Philippa and the tinker. In the case of the 

latter it is described as ‘sheltering’ (DK, Pt 3, Ch 14); it 

portrays the tinker as a furtive character, and highlights 

his sinister intentions. On the other hand, nature exposed 

in the night landscape is alien to Philippa who, along the 

way ‘found creeping into her mind a little, gem-like fantasy 

of herself … curled up … under her striped woollen 

blankets …’ (DK, Pt 3, Ch 14). The night landscape lays 

bare her awkwardness in this unfamiliar environment, and 

offers neither prospect nor refuge to Philippa. The hazardous 

journey also has connotations of the labyrinth in that 

Philippa ‘did not know where to go’ (DK, Pt 3, Ch 14), 

and is in danger of becoming lost in a landscape of Scottish 

exposure far from the zone of safety represented by her 


English home in Flaw Valleys. 

At the beginning of Pawn in Frankincense a wilful 

15-year-old Philippa again leaves her zone of safety and 

sets out on an odyssey to find Lymond’s missing son. It 

could be argued that this journey across Europe, North 

Africa and into the heart of the Ottoman Empire is Dunnett’s 

20th-century equivalent to the 18th-century’s ‘Grand 

Tour’; the way in which the protagonists of 18th-century 

novels saw more of the world than their own neighbourhoods 

and class circles. Though often perilous, such journeys 

were usually taken at a leisurely pace, and in luxury; it 

could be argued that not a great deal was learned about the 

world outside the traveller’s own class. In contrast, Philippa’s 

travels allowed her to see life on a number of levels 

quite different from her own as a daughter of the landed 

gentry class: from the frivolity and luxury of the bathhouse 

in Baden, to her enforced quarantine sharing quarters with 

men in the Lazaretto on the island of Zakynthos; from her 

overland peregrinations with the Pilgrims of Love, to her 

luxurious confinement in the Sultan Suleiman’s seraglio in 

Stamboul. During these expeditions Philippa undergoes 

her rite of passage and grows physically, intellectually and 

emotionally. She develops an understanding of the political 

machinations of her time, and proves she has the intellect 

to comprehend them and the intelligence to handle 

them. Philippa’s ‘Grand Tour’ prepares her for her life as 

an adult amongst the drama and intrigue of the English 

court of Mary Tudor, and equips her to be Lymond’s life 

partner. 

Landscape has been discussed as a sounding-board; a 

mechanism through which opinions and views are propagated. 

8 An example of this is in The Game of Kings after 

Lymond, struck down by hackbut fire in Hexham Abbey, 

is rescued by Tom Erskine and delivered into the hands of 

his brother, Richard, waiting in a disused dovecote. Richard 

elects to remove Lymond from the dovecote, with 

its connotations of peace and rest, to a secluded location 

in a small gorge by a running stream; ‘a place where the 

rocky sides of the banks steeply overhung and enclosed the 

grass, forming a shallow cave within’ (GoK, Pt 4, Ch 3). 

The rocky banks of the gorge are reminiscent of the relationship 

between the brothers in recent years. The shallow 

cave, with its connotations of echoing hollowness, may be 

seen as a metaphor for the family unit in which they have 

been raised. However, it is in this landscape that their relationship 

is destined to come full circle. 

Another example of landscape as a sounding-board may 

be found in Queens’ Play. But this time the landscape is 

man-made. After foiling the attempted assassination of 

the child Mary, Queen of Scots, Lymond must rendezvous 

with Robin Stewart, a conspirator in the plot. Stewart 

awaits his arrest at Lymond’s hands in a cottage in a 

clearing in the woods outside Chateaubriand, but before 

Lymond arrives Stewart commits suicide and is found by 

Phelim O’LiamRoe. As Lymond approaches the clearing 

8 Richard Cody, The Landscape of the Mind: Pastoralism 

and Platonic Theory in Tasso’s Aminta and Shakespeare’s 

Early Comedies (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1969) 49. 

‘the avenue of trees lift and curtsey to the passing of his 

horse’ (QP, Pt 4, Ch 6), as if nature itself stands aside for 

Lymond. But the scene inside the cottage tells a different 

story: 

Mice had been at the table. The new cheese and the 

horny bread were half eaten and the scrubbed table 

was scattered with mice dirt and crumbs. The fire 

was out. But all the rest of the room was as Robin 

Stewart had left it: the mended chair and the clean 

floor, the perfect pack and the shining sword; the 

signs of thought and decision and a painfully meticulous 

striving. (QP, Pt 4, Ch 6) 

The physical landscape of the cottage matches the personal 

landscape of the dead Robin Stewart: 

He lay before the hearth, the author of it all, the 

scoured hands idle on the floor, the dagger fallen, 

his lifeblood jellied on the blade. The loose-jointed 

sprawl was Robin Stewart, characteristic, not to be 

helped, outwith his last desperate control. But from 

the burnished hair so laboriously cut to the straight 

hose and waxed boots he was Lymond; Lymond in a 

last furious attempt to defy his stars; Lymond even in 

the privacy of his failure. (QP, Pt 4, Ch 6) 

These passages serve to hold up a mirror to Lymond, to 

encourage him to reflect on his way of life and the effect he 

has on those around him. After Lymond and O’LiamRoe 

lay Robin Stewart to rest, birdsong returns to the wood; 

their horses’ bits tinkle ‘like Mass bells’ (QP, Pt 4, Ch 6), 

as an exhausted Lymond falls asleep. Such scenes point 

to the importance of musical landscapes in The Lymond 

Chronicles as a power for healing, but also as a weapon 

sharper than any sword thrust. 

Music – its presence and sometimes notable absence – is 

a prominent feature in most of the significant events of 

Lymond’s life. Through music, song and poetry he expresses 

the truth and depth of his feelings. Perhaps the first major 

example is in The Game of Kings in the scene in which 

the blind Scotswoman, Christian Stewart, dies. Christian 

has helped Lymond in his quest to uncover the perpetrator 

of the false accusation of treason against him. Eventually, 

she comes to believe she has acquired documentary proof 

of Lymond’s innocence, but, pursued by the Countess of 

Lennox’s men, she is fatally injured in a riding accident 

near Flaw Valleys, the home of Kate Somerville. Kate takes 

Lymond to Christian’s bedside, and before she dies Christian 

asks Lymond to complete a song he had once played 

for her: 

A moment later the music began, and Kate shrank 

beneath the onslaught of its message; the fury of hope 

and joy that towered in the notes, outburning the 

sunlight and outpouring the volumes of the sea. All 

that was bold and noble and happy in created sound 

burst from the metempirical quills, and it was a 

blasphemy not to rejoice. 


Christian died in its midst … (GoK, Pt 2, Ch 4) 

The music expresses Lymond’s grief over Christian’s 

death, and anger that it was in vain because at this point 

he knows that the papers proving his innocence, ‘which 

Christian had brought with such pains from Haddington 

… were quite blank’ (GoK, Pt 2, Ch 4). 

Music allows the hero to express his true feelings especially 

in situations where an overt expression would be out 

of the question. Illustrative of this is the banquet Lymond 

holds for the Scottish Commissioners come to France 

to attend Mary, Queen of Scots’ wedding in Checkmate. 

At this point Lymond’s estrangement from his mother is 

evident to all, but the reason is known only to Lymond, 

Sybilla and Philippa. The musicians perform Wyatt’s ‘The 

piller pearisht’; it is ‘the bitter outburst of a wronged and 

unforgiving mind’ (CM, Pt 4, Ch 1): 

The piller pearisht is whearto I lent 

The strongest staye of myne unquyet mynde; 

The lyke of it no man agayne can fynde, 

Ffrom East to West, still seeking thoughe he went, 

To myne unhappe! For happe away hath rent 

Of all my joye the vearye bark and rynde. 

(CM, Pt 4, Ch 1) 9 

Lymond suspects that his mother had broken her marriage 

vows, and that he and his younger sister Eloise are the 

children of the man they had believed to be their grandfather. 

The song is a superb example of ‘“[m]usic, the knife 

without a hilt”’ (CM, Pt 4, Ch 1). It forcefully highlights 

Lymond’s sense of betrayal and leaves Sybilla – who indeed 

was once the very bark and rind of all Lymond’s joy – in 

no uncertain mind about the depth of his feelings. That 

Philippa, an uninvited guest, also hears this performance is 

perhaps a relief to Lymond in the hope that its devastating 

impact would serve to take her mind away from the other 

musical renditions of the evening. But ‘Philippa listened 

to [the songs]… The theme of the music was earthly passion 

… Songs like a lost hearth-fire, that one had known 

from one’s childhood; songs rarely come upon, and the 

rest like new lovers, moving in their unfamiliarity. Songs 

which spoke direct to the heart. To the heart, and not to 

the intellect’ (CM, Pt 4, Ch 1). 

Music on this occasion is a double-edged sword: one 

edge forces Sybilla to comprehend the depth of the injury 

her perceived faithlessness has inflicted on Lymond; 

the other conveys the intensity of Lymond’s love for the 

woman of his choice. Philippa had believed that woman to 

be Catherine d’Albon, but the powerful feeling and emotion 

conveyed by the music force Philippa to acknowledge 

that Catherine is not the choice of Lymond’s heart. She 

then misconstrues the identity of that woman as her own 

mother, Kate. Lymond corrects her, saying ‘Kate is my 

friend … But the songs were for her daughter. And the 

passion, for ever’ (CM, Pt 4, Ch 2). On the one hand, the 

9 Sir Thomas Wyatt, Collected Poems, Ed Joost Daalder 

(London: Oxford University Press, 1975) 203. 

music on this occasion conveys an unmistakable message, 

and on the other it is ambiguous in the extreme. In these 

examples music conforms to the notion of the labyrinth as 

a place of ‘alternatives and entrapments [that] creates an 

aura of simultaneous confusion and compulsion’. 10 Music 

may be interpreted as a maze-like entity that must be navigated 

both by the novels’ characters and their audience. 

The most significant musical landscape in the novels 

appears in Checkmate when Lymond and Philippa are at 

last united in the consummation of their marriage. Much 

of this joyous occasion is expressed through poetry, music 

and song. Sybilla listens in silence: 

She did not know when they found their way [to 

the music room]; and at first the music she heard 

was only tentative. A harp sang, and then someone 

picked out a low, gentle tune on the harpsichord…. 

Then the harpsichord found its major habit and 

suddenly spoke, firmly and well, and a lute joined in, 

and was discarded for the guitar … 

Sitting still in the dark, Sybilla listened to the condition 

of love, transmuted into brilliant sound, rolling, 

surging, ringing through all the quiet house … 

(CM, Pt 5, Ch 13) 

It is significant that music is foregrounded so strongly in 

the climax of The Lymond Chronicles, at the time when 

all three of the central protagonists reach the centre of 

their labyrinths. 

Religious landscapes permeate The Lymond Chronicles, 

set in a time when Catholicism was the dominant faith 

in Western Europe. In the 1550s Scotland, England and 

France were ruled by Catholic monarchs, but Protestantism 

was a strengthening force as the ‘new religion’. It may 

be assumed that Lymond is Catholic, working as he does 

under the auspices of first Mary of Guise, the Scottish 

Queen Mother, and then Henri II of France, but scenes 

such as his deliverance of the French Calvinists from the 

Hôtel Bétourné in Checkmate reveal Lymond’s ambiguity 

on matters of religion, and perhaps indicate the author’s 

negative stance on such matters. This is particularly evident 

when the narrator states that ‘[a]light with religious frenzy, 

with fear, with unreasoning blood-lust, the God-fearing 

people of Paris set upon the Calvinists trapped in the street 

…’ (CM, Pt 2, Ch 2). In the ensuing mêlée Catholics and 

Calvinists were equally targeted, perhaps pointing towards 

the bigotry of both. The fact that Lymond rescues the Calvinists 

whilst masquerading as the Cardinal of Lorraine 

further underscores his irreverence in matters of religion. 

Religious landscapes assist in the understanding of the 

historical figures as well as the fictional characters. In line 

with the hero’s apparent stance on the evils of organised 

religion, one could expect that historical personages such 

as Mary Tudor would be portrayed in a negative light. 

However, Mary is seen from the point of view of Philippa 

Somerville who, as one of her ladies-in-waiting, observes 

her human side. In this way Mary is not seen as a religious 

10 Faris, 4. 


leader in the manner of her father, Henry VIII, but as the 

monarch of a country in desperate need of an heir to her 

throne; as much as a victim of her religion as were the 

people she sent to the stake. 

The most significant landscape in The Lymond Chronicles 

is a personal one. Inevitably, it involves the hero and 

his transition from self-sufficient soldier of fortune into a 

man made vulnerable both by his love for Philippa and 

for his country. Lymond must convince himself that he is 

worthy of both; not easy, believing as he does throughout 

the novels that those who associate with him on whatever 

level all seem to come to harm. It may be that he holds 

these fears for Scotland as well, and before his time is of 

the modern opinion that absolute power corrupts absolutely. 

In this regard Lymond’s personal landscape is influenced 

by religious landscapes. He is at pains to prevent 

the fraudulent Catholic Graham Reid Malett from gaining 

control of Scotland, and is scathing about the corrupt 

power wielded by Juan de Homedes over the Order of St 

John of Jerusalem. But however much Lymond resists the 

forces drawing him back to Scotland it is obvious that this 

will be the final outcome because ‘Scotland’s destiny is 

11 12 

Dunnett’s abiding theme’. 

The various landscapes that are portrayed in the novels 

may be seen as pathways in the labyrinth that is The 

Lymond Chronicles. Each plays a part in opening up and 

closing off the passages that lead to the maze’s centre. 

Some of these passages may be cul de sacs that force the 

protagonists to reassess the reasons behind their journeys 

of self discovery, but all assist the voyages that contribute 

to the culmination of the rest and resolution that the novels 

provide, not only for the novels’ protagonists and their 

readers, but also for the author. Ultimately, The Lymond 

Chronicles prove that ‘[p]eople – and their intent – and 

the landscape cannot be extricated from one another’. 13 

Jennifer Newton, Sydney, Australia 

11 Lisa Hopkins at http://extra.shu.ac.uk/wpw/ 

historicising/HopkinsL.htm. Lymond becomes for her the 

model of Scottish leadership, bearing out the observation 

that ‘[i]n looking back to the past to create an ideal leader, 

Dunnett is expressing the need for such a leader in the 

present.’ 

12 Diana Wallace, The Woman’s Historical Novel: British 

Women Writers, 1900-2000 (Houndmills, Basingstoke and 

New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005) 145. 

13 Wenner, 79. 

Above right: Louis-Robert de Cuvillon (1848-1931). 

Renaissance Woman Reading a Letter, 1886. Credit: 

Brooklyn Museum, Bequest of Caroline H. Polhemus, 

06.325. 

“I am writing 

to express …” 

Elizabeth 

Francis 

Flaw Valleys 

Dear Sybilla, 

I am writing to express both a delight and a sorrow, one 

major and one minor. Richard called earlier this week to 

make sure that the repairs had been done to my complete 

satisfaction. Satisfaction! Flaws Valley has never been in 

such a pristine state before! The workmen were quiet, 

courteous and diligent. They patiently taught Philippa 

the proportions for mixing cement and how to keep the 

glass in the windows. You never know what information 

may be useful later in life, such as the pea-shooting skill 

she is at this moment learning from … the stable boys. 

My sorrow, though minor, is still of some significance 

to me. As you are probably well aware, Richard quietly 

caused to have much more renovation work done than 

was needed to set right the damage done by Francis and 

himself. He politely, but obdurately refused to discuss 

the value of the extra work, only allowing me to express 

my gratitude verbally. I feel that I would like to do a little 

more. He has, I am informed, or is about to have his first 

child, so, for your first-born grandchild I enclose a silver 

and coral rattle as a humble token of my esteem and 

gratitude. 

It is my hope that the gift arrives safely. I must close 

this epistle and retrieve my daughter from the yard for 

lute practise, or linen counting, or even to tidy her room. 

She was supposed to be grooming her new, larger, faster 

pony, not learning pea-shooting. 

Yours in haste, 

Kate 

Midculter 

Dear Kate, 

My first grandchild, Kevin, is thriving, and teething noisily. 

I wondered if it would be fair for Philippa to come and 

be deafened by the child and his bell rattle? But the ride 

would be a challenge for her and the new pony and an 

excuse for you and I to investigate our family trees together. 

Richard is frequently away and Francis is in France 

at the behest of the Queen Dowager, for the length of 

her visit. I can only assume that she wanted him under 

her eye, like several others of her entourage. Strangely, 

he spent an evening closeted with Mariotta, who he 

swore effectively to silence, and then departed to Ireland. 

He might be exploring his Irish roots, but on the whole 

I find that researching one’s ancestry is a pastime more 

continued on p. 32 


LITERATURE 

Living Dreams 

Follow them and let Francis and Nicholas tell 

you what you missed on ‘Radio Free Lymond’ 

Kate Hannam 

Are you a real Dunnett Person? Then you should 

know. What do you think? Did you guess? Or did 

you just notice ‘something’? Did a friend tell you 

or did you read it on a list? Have you counted them? Have 

you read both series? Why not? 

Because if you haven’t read both series, you’ll never 

know. Will you? 

I refer of course to that fascinating acronym RFL. 

Have you listened to Radio Free Lymond? 

I came late to it – I didn’t even sign up for Whispering 

Gallery until I read To Lie with Lions. A couple of readings 

of that and I asked for an early Christmas present. All the 

back issues of Whispering Gallery and the same of Marzipan 

& Kisses starting with issue 1, which has an interesting 

sketch of a young man on the front and the banner 

headline: 

‘Hell’s hell again: the de’il’s back.’ 

I’m getting a feeling that you, whoever you are, if you’ve 

read to here, you know! 

Right, down to business. This is only the first of what 

will surely feature in more than one issue of Whispering 

Gallery. I don’t know whether RFL has been on paper 

before, but it already existed when I was allowed to join 

Dunnetwork, the online list that so splendidly debates and 

discusses all things Dunnett and continues to do so, under 

the watchful eyes of Elaine Thompson and Judy Amory, 

the owners. 

So, I reckon that I peeped through the Dunnetwork door 

around about the late 90s. But I was a fan already and 

had read The Game of Kings in 1963, thus following Francis 

Crawford of Lymond every two years until Checkmate. 

That was in 1974. In the interim I had a life, an education, 

a bit of work, lots of acting and singing, a daughter, etc., so 

I can’t actually give you a year for when I noticed Niccolò 

Rising in the bookshops 

‘Oooh!’ I thought. So I bought a copy. Then The Spring 

of the Ram, then Race of Scorpions, then Scales of Gold and, 

I will admit that it was a bit of a battle for me to learn to 

love Nicholas when my heart was already given to Francis. 

I know other people say that or exactly the reverse. For 

them, Nicholas and his thoroughbred stable of fantastic 

characters leave Francis dead in the water. So when my 

daughter went to university, I wasn’t exactly shuffling from 

one foot to the other waiting for the next volume of The 

House of Niccolò hot from the press. 

BUT, I had begun to get ‘it’. 

Sometimes, there seems to be a kind of parallel between 

Nicholas (born 1440) and Francis (born 1526) – ‘Living 

Dreams’ I think Dr Andreas says they are. A kind of fantasy 

scene, that’s very brief, but it is only Nicholas who 

sees it. Furthermore, and this is so important, that I can’t 

emphasise it enough. Nicholas feels what Francis will feel 

and see in the future. At any time, anywhere, Nicholas 

finds himself saying some words that he didn’t mean to 

say and feeling emotions that don’t belong to him. But 

they are bad things. They are the unbearable, the extreme 

emotional pain and agony moments from The Lymond 

Above: Tile panel from Iznik, Turkey, 1570–1574. Image © 

Victoria and Albert Museum, London. 


Chronicles. At last, we are inside Lymond’s head – a thing 

that some of us have longed for. But it’s not witty or pretty 

Francis. It’s real Francis. 

I’ll give you an example from my pitiful number that 

I found or was told. It’s from The Spring of the Ram, and 

Nicholas and his crew are all waiting to land in Stamboul. 

Nicholas suddenly asks Tobie, standing conveniently next 

to him, but for no reason at all, as far as Tobie can see: 

‘What does it tell you, this place?’ 

Somewhat blank, Godscalc joins in and asks Nicholas. 

‘Why, does it worry you?’ 

Nicholas turns. ‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘I only feel an 

abomination somehow in the air.’ (Cutting to the next 

page for space, but again from Nicholas, completely irrelevantly 

he speaks again). 

‘After winning, the Sultan made a gift of four hundred 

Greek children to the rulers of Egypt and Tunis 

and Granada. I thought I saw a dead child. I felt as 

if a wave of doom were waiting to fall on me.’ (SoR, 

Ch 13) 

It is impossible to me now that I actually read that twice 

before someone told me to use my head and I realised that 

the dead child is Khaireddin and, what’s more, ‘the wave 

of doom’ has come backwards through time. Or to put it 

another way, we have two men feeling the same emotion 

about the same thing, but one man lived over 80 years 

before the other. 

I just shivered. Here at the keyboard, it’s warm and cosy. 

But I always, always shiver. 

The subject of twins is a very difficult one. I’ll deal with 

that in another piece because I haven’t really got it sorted 

out. Please all think about twins, though, and if you get 

anywhere please tell me. Or Suzanne, the editor. Read the 

Epilogue of Gemini if you have it to hand – and work 

out the names. Rankin was christened Francis, but little 

Margaret couldn’t say that, and so his family name became 

Rankin. Rankin grew up to become Francis Crawford of 

Templehall, First Baron Culter, the father and also grandfather 

of our Francis. FC1, who eventually married one of 

the daughters who were born to Jordan Semple (de Fleury) 

whose ‘little name’ had been Jodi, the very beloved son 

of Nicholas and Gelis. Jordan didn’t like Rankin, He was 

hostile because he believed that the little boy was the cause 

of Margaret’s death and Jordan had been fond of her. His 

daughter’s name was Sybilla. 

Are you with me? 

To finish, may I point you in the direction of To Lie with 

Lions where Nicholas has taken the opportunity to have 

a leisurely ride around the valley of the Cisse, visiting the 

Abbey of Notre Dame de la Guiche checking the names of 

Clemence and Pasque, which are present and correct. After 

a drowsy lunch he swims in the Loire and feels wonderful. 

It is warm and sunny and the birds are singing. When 

he gets out of the water, he sees a young woman standing 

by an exceptionally beautiful horse; other horses have 

grooms with them. He knows the young woman … but I 

implore you, whoever you are, reading this – get the books 

and read the two passages side by side, because they both 

approach perfection. Nicholas is looking at the scene and 

hearing words in his head, when he is totally overwhelmed 

by an agony of mind and body that is beyond any he has 

ever known. He cannot support this pain. No man could. 

Then Nicholas is alone again, nobody is there and there 

are no hoof marks in the damp sand. He has no time to 

think because three men are walking towards him and they 

are thugs unlikely to be asking for directions to the nearest 

church. Fat Father Jordan is taking his revenge. Yet again 

he is fighting for his life. 

That is possibly one of the best transmissions from Radio 

Free Lymond. Somehow, and I can’t explain it, there is 

this invisible channel from Francis to Nicholas. A one-way 

channel, because I think Francis has quite enough to bear! 

It is said that there are over 25 broadcasts from Radio 

Free Lymond, named so by Nancy Silberstein, a member of 

Dunnetwork. A brilliant title which we can only marvel at 

now and give Nancy eternal thanks. 

That’s enough from me. If you want to start looking and 

finding now, send what you find to the editor (or me).We 

need all the help we can get. Dorothy Dunnett admitted 

during a conference in Boston in 1992 that her first RFL 

appeared in The Spring of the Ram, the second novel of The 

House of Niccolò but she added that there were several 

references to The Game of Kings. I know of one only so far, 

but I think you will agree that she would be delighted to 

start playing another game with the fans. She loved puzzles 

and would have grinned at her audience with her usual 

mischievous glee, while we were all clueless. 

Although it was my idea to write this article, it is Elaine 

Thompson, the owner of Dunnetwork, who must be 

thanked for responding to my message so quickly at a very 

busy time for her, and who then mailed me again regarding 

Nancy Silberstein’s wonderful coining of the words Radio 

Free Lymond. I cannot thank Elaine enough for pointing 

me in the right direction, giving me the name and THEN 

sending me all 27 RFLs that she and her group have found 

so far, which was above and beyond anything I could have 

hoped for. Thank you so much from me and all who will 

(I hope!) read this article. 

Kate Hannam, Avignon, France 

Continued from p. 30: “I am writing to express ...” 

indulged in by women. After all, in the end a man is of his 

own making, shaped by his own nature and blind chance. 

The Borders are quiet at the moment, and this late lingering 

of summer will make the ride pleasurable. If the weather 

holds, we could consider making an outing to Stirling 

Fair – the spice sellers there are better stocked than any this 

side of London, I am told. Last year I even managed to get 

both ginger and galingal, so good for spicing warm wine 

in the winter. 

Come, and bring Philippa, I would so like to meet you 

both. 

Yours in anticipation, 

Sybilla 


Correspondence • 

VIEWS, REVIEWS AND NEWS 

LETTERS ARE WELCOME on any Dunnett-related subject 

and can be submitted by post to the editor, contact 

details on page 1. 

for the ‘talking point’ you are asked to write in on 

specific subjects. Some of these will be old favourites 

for new readers, but hopefully there will also be some 

fresh ideas to get you thinking. If you have any topics 

you would like to see aired, please let the editor know. 

Letters are included on the understanding that they may 

be edited. 

Themes for the next three issues will be: 

• September 2012: DD’s villains – your thoughts on 

Gabriel, Jordan de Ribérac, Simon or Leonard Bailey 

• December 2012: How DD embeds her stories in history 

• March 2013: Sybilla 

This month’s talking point theme is: Rankin – what he 

did throughout his life, what he failed to do, and the 

consequences of both 

From Jenny Smith 

When discussing Dunnett: ‘Beware of facts’. The Game of 

Kings illustrates how ‘solid facts’ can easily lead to dangerous 

misinterpretations of events. When discussing Francis, 

First Baron Crawford of Culter, we have been given 

a few sparse facts (mostly dates) and limited information 

(or misinformation) from a handful of characters, all with 

agendas and, generally, strong opinions about the man. 

There is much about his life and character that we do not 

know. We need to be careful not to over-interpret what we 

do have. Taking into account the culture of his time, his 

social position, career choices and age when specific events 

occur, as well as what we know about his family and their 

friends and how they were likely to influence events, we 

can decide which interpretations are most likely. However, 

unless firmer information comes to light in the archive, 

these are, at best, educated guesses and, knowing the Dunnett 

community, will fuel a vigorous and varied debate. 

So one thing he leaves behind for us is an enigma and one 

thing he fails to do is give us an explanation of his actions. 

What is firmly established is that the First Baron had a 

considerable international reputation. Obviously, he was 

held in sufficiently high regard (or considered a sufficient 

potential threat if not placated) to be created First Baron 

Crawford of Culter, possibly by Albany after he became 

Regent of Scotland in 1514 but before the fatal sea voyage 

to Scotland in 1515, or possibly earlier by others then in 

control of the Scottish throne, either to give him the social 

standing required of one of Albany’s leading courtiers or 

to try to maintain Scotland’s influence on him in that role. 

But however he got the barony, his actions as a warrior and 

courtier were such that 27 years after his death, Jerott in 

Lyon in 1557, at the beginning of Checkmate, is correcting 

a common misconception about the younger Francis 

Crawford: 

‘Ah!’ said the monk. He looked impressed. ‘I have 

heard of Lord Crawford of Culter.’ And the usual 

answer. ‘You will have heard of the first Baron.’ Jerott 

said. 

Philippa, reading the Dame de Doubtance’s records to 

Marthe and Lymond, refers to him as ‘The splendid first 

Baron’ and later when demanding of Lymond ‘or are you 

still standing outside your grandfather’s door, kicking it?’ 

is elliptically implying that the man behind the metaphorical 

door was the greater of the two, if only in an effort to 

kick Lymond out of his current mental rut. In The Ringed 

Castle, Leonard Bailey sarcastically echoes the public view 

by calling him ‘The great first Baron Crawford of Culter’ 

before starting his character assassination. And so over the 

saga the impression is built of a formidable Renaissance 

knight, who his relatives might have problems living up to. 

After all none other than the Queen of France, Catherine 

de Medici, states to Lymond, ‘I remember well my uncle 

of Albany praising the abilities of your grandfather’. 

Albany, close heir to the Scottish throne, and linked to 

powerful families in France and Italy, who the first Francis 

Crawford went to serve at the age of 20 in 1495, after his 

year of marriage to Honoria Bailey had ended in her death 

giving birth to his son, Gavin Crawford. If, as seems likely, 

Francis was following the profession that had been dearest 

to his father’s heart, knight and courtier, he would still 

have been in training for both roles; ‘graduation’, being 

knighted, tending to occur in the early to mid-20s after 

the musculature needed to wear full armour for prolonged 

periods in the field had developed. So Francis was probably 

being sent to the Court of Albany’s French stepfather 

to give him a high quality finish to his education and to 

provide Albany with contact with an appropriate young 

Scot. Wikipedia (admittedly not always accurate) states 

that Albany was born either in 1481 or 1484, and so was 

either 11 or 14 at the time. Therefore, to me, this smacks 

of a careful political placement and a career opportunity 

that for a 20 year old would be dangerous to turn down. 



We do not know why he married Honoria or anything of 

the quality of the marriage. In Gemini we learn that the 

Bailzie family were notorious for trapping foolish sprigs 

of nobility into marriage: ‘“Well remember,” said Kathie 

with irritation, “the Bailzies all want to be rich, and no 

one ever wants to marry them, so they have a family policy 

of foisting parenthood on very young virgins of both sexes 

and then offering nobly to marry them.”’ Leonard Bailey 

states of his sister: ‘“Married at seventeen, dead at eighteen, 

giving birth to the heir. The ... first Baron ... seized her 

dowry; he took her, and bedded her, and never came near 

her again, from the moment he planted his son until the 

hour she gave her life bearing him.”’ Note the stated order 

of events (dowry paid before bedding) that tacitly implies 

no premarital sex. And Francis Crawford at 19 was probably 

not yet First Baron Crawford of Culter, nor running 

the several love nests Bailey credits him with. Bailey is a 

highly suspect witness. Was Francis a young idiot trapped 

into marriage or did he fall in love and marry a girl from 

a reviled family, or married her so a friend could escape a 

forced match to her and marry his true sweetheart or ... ? 

But, in the end, we do not know other than that Honoria’s 

eight-year-old brother chose to loathe his brother-in-law. 

That hatred, however deserved or undeserved, was part of 

the First Baron’s legacy, as was the child Gavin and his 

three other children who were healthy enough to grow to 

adulthood. 

Francis Crawford’s cultural legacy was in the growing 

glory of Midculter castle. Over the 20 years he was part 

of Albany’s entourage before 1515 he also spent time in 

Scotland most years, maintaining Midculter Castle. Leonard 

Bailey complains to Philippa in chapter eight of 

part one of The Ringed Castle that Francis Crawford was 

‘“away for months, sometimes years at a time at the Court 

of France”’, implying that most years he was usually at 

Midculter for months at a time (as might any father now 

in military service). Leonard Bailey’s following statement 

‘“But he [Francis Crawford] heard [in France what he and 

Gavin got up to]”’ also implies he kept in contact with 

the estate and asked after his son while in France. And 

Sybilla at the end of Checkmate states ‘“And there was the 

castle he had made, with his books in it, and his clothes 

and his music, and all the men who had known him ... 

and his son, importuning me to marry him.”’ So he must 

have spent time (and money and effort) there to create the 

castle that so reminded her of her husband. So Midculter 

and his lesser architectural project, the Hôtel des Sphères 

in Paris, were also his heritage, both gifted to Sybilla and 

her children. 

Ultimately, what Francis Crawford failed to do was reach 

Scotland with Albany and so act as his interpreter of this 

land that the Duke had just taken responsibility for. So 

Francis Crawford was not there to infect him with his love 

of Scotland and a vision for what it could become and 

so failing to fulfil the destinies the Dame de Doubtance 

had seen for him, Albany and Scotland. In the end Albany 

chose to go back to France, giving up the regency. And in 

this lack, and in vanishing from the world and his own 

memory, he inadvertently caused Sybilla to pass into effective 

widowhood and so, through her deep passionate love 

for him, to step on to a path that would create the events 

of The Lymond Chronicles. 

Jenny Smith, Wantage, England 

From Betty Moxon 

For much of The Lymond Chronicles Francis Crawford, 

first Baron Culter, is mentioned with admiration. The gifted 

and determined soldier, cultured and intelligent, the 

bright star burning across Europe, the love of Sybilla’s life: 

all of these things come together to give the reader a very 

positive impression of a hero figure whom the younger 

members of his family must aspire to emulate. Things start 

to get muddier when the bitter and twisted Leonard Bailey 

reveals the story of the unhappy marriage with his sister 

Honoria that resulted in the birth of Gavin Crawford. Finally 

Sybilla sets out her story at the end of Checkmate – all 

has been sacrificed to her passion for and commitment to 

Rankin. 

So by the end of The Lymond Chronicles we have a character 

who was brilliant on the public stage but whose private 

life was a mess. Impetuously married, he then regrets 

it and absents himself to pursue his military career. Later 

smitten with Sybilla Semple, he marries her but in a mysterious 

shipwreck is so injured that he forgets this marriage 

(or perhaps is brought to forget) and has two children 

with Béatris, the Dame de Doubtance’s daughter. It 

is only when this line fails that the Dame brings him back 

to realisation of his marriage, only to find that his wife has 

married his son. That doesn’t stop him reviving the marriage, 

and siring two more children, Francis and Eloise. 

The Niccolò books roll back time and we see young 

Rankin as a charming impetuous boy whose capacity for 

adventure has dire consequences in the death of his elder 

sister. And finally in Gemini he is described as ‘gifted, eager 

and generous, destined surely for fame and determined ... 

to follow a man he thought worthy’. 

What do I think about Rankin? He seems to me to be 

fatally flawed – a successful and charismatic public man 

who in his private life is governed by impetuousity, a desire 

for his own way, and an inability to cope with the consequences 

of his own actions. Rankin’s lack of responsibility 

for his first wife and son creates fallout through the 

generations. Gavin, apparently unloved, grows up boorish 

and uncultured and takes revenge on his apparent ‘son’ 



Francis. Leonard Bailey spends his life obsessed with the 

Crawfords, finally destroying himself in his attempt to 

bring down both Lymond and Phillipa. 

The counterbalance for the mature Rankin is that he inspires, 

and reciprocates, Sybilla’s great passion, and creates 

the beautiful house in Paris for them. But even this 

raises questions in my mind. They were actually together 

for relatively short periods of time. I do wonder whether 

if they had settled down into married life rather than being 

dramatically rent asunder whether this grand passion 

would have survived so strongly or whether the weaknesses 

evident in the younger Rankin would have re-emerged to 

create tensions that even Sybilla could not have contained. 

Rankin was a public success and a private failure. What 

DD does show us is how Rankin, apparently a great hero, 

in reality falls short, and how the strengths that Lymond 

had in leadership, in his control over his private emotions 

and his acute sense of responsibility for friends and family 

make him the genuinely heroic figure that Rankin never 

was. 

Betty Moxon, Elstead, England 

From Linda Butcher 

This is a personal view which has surprised me because 

it threw up ideas I hadn’t had before! I refer to Francis 

as “Rankin” throughout. Rankin was born in 1475. His 

father was Robin Crawford of Berecrofts and his mother 

was Kathi Sersanders. As a child he would have had only 

vague memories of his father as a healthy man; by the time 

Rankin was two his father had lost a leg and was paralysed, 

sound in mind but an invalid all the same, no better than 

baby Margaret. His mother’s time would have been largely 

taken with caring for Robin and running their affairs, as 

well as the affairs of her friend Nicholas. Perhaps later, as a 

teenager, he would have become his father’s legs, running 

errands, inspecting the estates, attending meetings. 

In Scotland he would have been much loved by Archie and 

old Berecrofts – more so at first for they would have assumed 

there to be no more children. From Kathi he would 

have inherited a love of music, games, a quick wit and 

maybe ill-health, at least a frailty – remember Kathi being 

concerned about his lack of stature and especially his 

short legs? From Robin he would have inherited courage, 

loyalty, patience and a talent for wordplay. The loyalty was 

partly his undoing as a child. When he leaves the cellar at 

the priory and Margaret follows him, crawling through the 

hole, it is for Nicholas, his Uncle Nicholas, his best friend. 

Rankin is shown as a brave child who wants to help, rash 

like his mother, foolhardy like his mother. 

Jordan hysterically blames Rankin for Margaret’s death. 

Rankin blames himself and perhaps loses part of his childhood, 

jumping to near-adolescence, never forgiving himself 

and maybe not understanding why his own mother 

isn’t more upset, why she doesn’t blame him. 

At the end of Gemini we see Rankin becoming Francis, 

Rankin being his childish name; there he is, halfway up 

a tree with a flower in his hair. Also there is Jodi. Resentful, 

jealous, spoilt Jordan who hated Kathi for stealing ‘his’ 

Robin, who hated Rankin for not being the girl he had 

awaited, Jordan who wanted to be the only boy in Nicholas’s 

life. Damaged Jordan who would never let Rankin 

into his future family. In the background there is young 

Hob, in thrall to Camille. Thus the seeds are sown. 

So what could Rankin have done, have become? This was 

an age of exploration, invention – Columbus, Da Vinci 

exploding with new ideas, Thomas Moore’s Utopia, Prester 

John and Africa. Science, or rather alchemy as it still was, 

was everywhere. At Stirling Castle in 1507 the court alchemist 

attempted to fly from the battlements, intending to 

reach France using homemade wings! He got as far as the 

dung heap breaking his leg but not his spirit, continuing 

to search for the Elixir of Life and the secret of gold. During 

his early years I think Rankin would have been frustrated, 

all of these openings shut to him, he had a duty to 

his family, he had to follow in his grandfather’s his father’s 

shadow and learn the job of head of the estate. 

Perhaps that was why he married. He was about 18 or 19 

when he wed Honoria; at any rate he was 20 when Gavin 

was born. Was it an arranged marriage? Given the times, 

quite likely from Bailey’s report that it was not a marriage 

of joy, and Bailey goes on to say that Rankin left home 

almost as soon as Honoria was cold, travelling around 

France, spending money and living life high on the hog, 

returning rarely. What a life for Gavin, what a childhood. 

Motherless and growing up to hear of his dazzling father, a 

father he hardly knew, this popular, fabulous man who ignored 

him. I have an image of Rankin, sprawled elegantly 

in a stateroom chair, theatrically smoking a pipe, discussing 

Machiavelli, engaging in swordplay, but I don’t see him 

actually fighting. Perhaps Hob was the one sent to war. 

When Rankin was 28, James IV and Margaret Tudor were 

married, forming an alliance between England and Scotland, 

much to the chagrin of France unwilling to give up 

the ‘Auld Alliance’. In most of Scotland there must have 

been a sense of relief, albeit short-lived with constant skirmishes, 

and war is tiring and economically draining. A 

Scottish Renaissance began, first with the refurbishment 

of Stirling Castle and then with an outpouring of poetry, 

music and literature. James IV had recovered most of the 

money his father had purloined and hoarded and new important 

families came to the fore including Hepburn who 



General Correspondence • 

From Shirley Ambrose 

I read with a great deal of interest Elizabeth Holden’s article 

about Archie in March’s issue of Whispering Gallery. 

It is like Bill Marshall said at the Dunnett Weekend, no 

matter how many times you read, or in my case more 

often or not, listen to the books, something new always 

comes to light. 

I am, as most of you know, the proud owner of DD’s portrait 

of Archie. We have long, very one-sided conversations 

when I tell him that as he didn’t like flying he won’t 

be going back to Edinburgh, but that whenever I go to 

a Dunnett event by car he will go with me and that our 

annual trip to Oxford is soon coming up 

I quote from Queens’ Play: ‘The keeper had unbuttoned 

his brocade coat, displaying a wonderful silk shirt and 

breech hose beneath’. That is how DD has painted him 

(complete with accompanying elephant) but for some 

reason or other she has painted him clean shaven. 

I never noticed the difference between the written 

word and the portrait until it was pointed out to me by 

somebody else. I am so used to seeing him clean shaven 

that mention of a beard in the book had passed me 

by. As Bill said, something new coming to light. 

We will never know why DD painted Archie without his 

beard – perhaps so that we can see his face better – but 

I love him as he is. 

From Kate Hannam 

Shirley Ambrose, Chelmsford, Essex 

Mike Brain: Regarding your comments on ‘Gelis’ [WG 

114] – thanks very much, but she fought back the 

whole time. It felt like she was running fast and I had 

to grab her legs, bring her down and sit on her. As for 

the ‘stone spitting’ I think that was a touch of ‘Anything 

you can do, I can do better’, but it was Nicholas who 

put out the candle. The scene always reminds me of 

the one in Caprice & Rondo, when they were in Adelina’s 

apparent custody, and fighting back like one person, 

so attuned were they by now. Nicholas: ‘Well use your 

head.’ ‘I am!’ she replies indignantly. Then the lovely line, 

‘Sweetheart, date stones!’ 

They finally reached their Terminus. C&R, Pt 4, Ch 41. 

Kate Hannam, Avignon, France 

became the Earl of Bothwell, and Hume who became the 

Warden of the East Marches. 

A brief insurrection by Lennox and Gordon was quashed 

but resulted in a petition being sent to the king asking 

for a political parliament and a new privy council. Both 

were granted and this led to a fairer system of government. 

Either Robin or Rankin himself may have had some part 

to play in this assembly. At any rate this is the time that 

Rankin would have been spreading his political contacts, 

travelling to England and Europe, perhaps as an envoy, a 

sort of pseudo ambassador, using his charm to woo courts 

and noble families. No wonder Bailey was so bitter. 

Was it also during this time that he meets Sybilla Semple 

and they marry secretly, Jordan would rather kill Rankin 

than let him into his family. It must have taken some doing 

if Jordan was anything like his father, eyes in every 

corner! I suspect it was with the Dame’s help even then. 

Now we come to the ‘missing years’. What was he doing? 

Where was he? Why did he stay away? We are told by Sybilla 

‘there were years of illness and imprisonment, then 

he returned to France’. Why France? Because he thought 

that she was there, waiting for him. Had he really been 

lost at sea, then captured, lost his memory? It doesn’t ring 

true when you remember that Francis, the sickly child was 

born in 1516, the same year that Richard was born, when 

Rankin had been missing for about a year. 

Marthe isn’t born until 1524, a gap of eight years. In those 

eight years we have had an English-French cod-war, the 

Field of the Cloth of Gold, the beginning of an Ottoman- 

French alliance and Albany bringing a French force to 

Scotland, renewing that famous ‘Auld Alliance’. 

Perhaps Rankin was travelling Europe and the East with 

Gaultier, not knowing who he was, maybe he was serving 

as a mercenary thinking he was Béatris’s husband, returning 

to the Dame’s house from time to time until Béatris 

dies giving birth to a daughter, Marthe. Now the Dame 

has to change her plans, she rekindles his memory of Sybilla 

and his life in Scotland. The Dame respects Sybilla but 

she had eliminated her from the original scheme, maybe 

because there was no progeny. 

That’s another thing, this surprising lack of offspring. As 

the marriage of Sybilla and Rankin was secret they ‘arranged’ 

things to avoid pregnancy but Gavin doesn’t seem 

the sort to forego his marital rights and as Sybilla thought 

Rankin dead, why would she deny herself children? 

Rankin’s return causes gossip but not a great deal of questioning 

– a good excuse ‘illness and imprisonment’. He is 

as charming as ever, as rich and as flawed, almost blaming 

Gavin for the marriage and pushing him, forcing him for 

his son Richard’s sake into an unbearable situation. No 

wonder Gavin was disliked, his childhood had been bad 

enough, now this. 



On top of it all he loses the one person who has known 

him all his life, his Uncle Bailey. Bailey tells Philippa that 

Rankin hated children and had left his son in the hands of 

rough servants while he lived in luxury in France, that the 

boy had often been hungry and dressed in rags, growing 

up wild but for his (Bailey’s) influence. Exaggeration, yes, 

but maybe a tinge of truth. Both Rankin and Sybilla come 

out of the whole sorry mess looking very selfish. 

Whatever Rankin went through during the missing years 

he returned with only four years left but he had the love 

of the only woman he wanted and he had given the Dame 

the son she wanted to work on. ‘It was the wrong time 

for the first baron to do things’, thus paving the way for 

Lymond. 

Linda Butcher, Laindon, England 

From Jenny Garland 

I suppose your view of Rankin must vary depending on 

whether you read The Lymond Chronicles or The House 

of Niccolò first. I read The Lymond Chronicles first, and 

throughout the series saw FC1 as an almost mythical hero, 

because that’s how he was portrayed. Actually very little 

was specified as to what he did during his illustrious career 

in and for France, but the general view was that it was 

notable and he was much respected eg by Piero Strozzi: “... 

your grandfather, who fought all his life in France and in 

Italy for love of war and of Albany ... and lost all his beauty 

for it” (CM Pt 2, Ch 5). 

Of course, it was also clear in The Lymond Chronicles that 

his home life left a lot to be desired. It was all very well 

him having a wonderfully successful time in France, but 

he left his son back home at Midculter to get on without 

him. No doubt he visited from time to time, but there’s no 

suggestion that he ever took him to France to be with him. 

One wonders why he married Honoria, and what she was 

like. It’s unlikely that she was very rich, given her brother 

Leonard’s situation, or particularly well connected (since 

she was orphaned). Was she beautiful? Nicer than her 

brother? Did they fall in love? I don’t think there are any 

clues to this at all. According to Bailey (RC Pt 1, Ch 8) – 

and I’ll believe him on this, if on little else – Honoria was 

17 when she married and 18 when she died giving birth 

to Gavin. So why didn’t FC1 marry again? One son is not 

very secure for the succession; you would have thought he 

would have wanted more children. 

I wonder who FC1 left in charge of Gavin when he went 

off to France? Even if he was devastated by Honoria’s 

death and blamed baby Gavin for it (possible), I bet he left 

someone competent in charge of the estate, and you would 

think he would have been as careful about his heir. 

We know nothing about FC1’s domestic behaviour in 

France until years later, when he fell for a much younger 

woman he seems to have come across in a convent. Then 

he forgot he had married her, and allowed the Dame de 

Doubtance to manipulate him into bed with her daughter 

without, apparently, any thought of marrying her. I 

wonder what he said to the Dame when she casually mentioned 

that he was actually married to Sybilla. 

Even so, it was pretty clear to me that FC1 had to be FC2’s 

father, partly because he was suitably heroic, but mainly 

because I didn’t think that DD would cheat. It would have 

been cheating to introduce an entirely new character (deus 

ex machina) at the last moment to be FC2’s father; and 

it would have been cheating to use one of the historical 

characters. Which didn’t leave many options, so I decided 

on FC1! 

Having read The Lymond Chronicles, it was fairly obvious, 

the moment Rankin was born, who he would turn 

out to be, even though Robin’s family name had been carefully 

omitted. I was glad FC1 had a background and came 

of such distinguished stock. But in Gemini he completely 

lost my sympathy, behaving in such a silly, selfish way and 

causing the death of his sister. In the Epilogue, he also 

showed himself as a self-centred show-off. Not at all the 

heroic figure of The Lymond Chronicles. 

But isn’t it a good thing that FC1 brought up his son so 

poorly and dealt so badly with Leonard Bailey? It would 

have ruined the story if Gavin had been a sympathetic 

character, and if Bailey had lived out his life a benevolent 

old man in charge of the Midculter library! 

Jenny Garland, London, England 

From Ros Williams 

At first read, I thought Rankin wonderfully romantic! I’d 

devoured The Lymond Chronicles far too quickly (and totally 

out of sequence) to digest the hints of a perhaps less 

attractive side to his character. Since then, theories have 

ranged to and fro endlessly. Did he really love Sybilla? 

What did he really feel about Béatris? Did he really lose 

his memory or did he want to escape from Sybilla – pehaps 

finding her ‘Grand Passion’ suffocating for all we know? 

He hadn’t wanted to marry that first time and perhaps he’d 

been a ‘bachelor’ since Honoria’s death for too long, decid- 



ed he didn’t want to ‘settle down’ so went off back to war and continued to visit 

Béatris. How come his return to war after he’s recovered from the shipwreck 

injury isn’t heard of back in Scotland, for example by any Scot returning from 

the same wars and talking about him? It’s important to remember that he’d 

known Béatris before he knew Sybilla – as I recall Sybilla telling us at the end 

of Checkmate. It seemed clear he’d never marry Béatris – her family background 

presumably wasn’t good enough, he’d made that mistake already with Honoria 

of marrying ‘beneath his station’. His attitude to Honoria seems to have been 

very cavalier – play around with her, then resent it when he got her pregnant, 

making some excuse that ‘her family used her to trap him ...’ That may be true, 

or it may be totally false; we can’t know as we didn’t observe their time together, 

we only heard of it from two biased people – angry, vengeful Bailey, who resented 

Rankin and the way he treated his sister and Gavin, and near-demented 

for a while and possibly amoral Sybilla, who believed or wanted to believe her 

lover was perfect. I honestly can’t blame Bailey for his anger though of course 

the blackmail that his anger leads to is destructive. I always feel sorry for Béatris 

yet it’s possible she was the strong one Rankin preferred to return to. 

It’s easy with DD’s writing style and tendency to mysteries to wonder if the 

Grand Passion was one-sided, if Sybilla was demented or amoral, if Béatris was 

strong, if Rankin was weak! 

Writing a prequel is risky and it threw up more mysteries around Rankin that 

hadn’t been there before. When did Rankin and Sybilla really first meet? Did 

Sybilla fall in love with or marry Rankin secretly when she was about 16? And 

had they known each other when she was a young child, or at least known of 

each other since his father’s and her grandfather’s families were so close (though 

there is the get-out that her father dislikes Rankin). How come, too, that 

Rankin’s parents who were ‘flourishing’ in 1508, long after Gavin was born, 

didn’t take Gavin into their care whilst their son Rankin was at war in France? 

And then what really happened when Béatris died? Did Rankin return home 

because his memory was restored at last, or because with Béatris dead he was 

curious how things were in Scotland? And when he gets home, there’s Sybilla 

all over him yet she’s married to the son he seems to have pretty well ignored. 

Didn’t the servants notice what went on between Sybilla and her ‘father-in-law’ 

in some bedroom? Or did they wait until eventually reaching Paris – which 

makes the timing of conception quite difficult to fit in if Lymond is to be born 

that coming November, unless he was premature? 

There are so many questions regarding what really could have happened, too 

many options leading to different conclusions. There is no doubting that 

Rankin is one of DD’s most enigmatic characters: because of the questions and 

anomalies, one we can discuss for ever and never be sure about. And didn’t I 

read somewhere (I could have dreamed it!) that DD felt the spirit of the plot 

was more important than worrying about any anomalies that might inadvertently 

occur? 

By the way, it’s always been said that Philippa isn’t related to Lymond in any 

way, and DD said there could be too many connections, but I’ve just noticed 

(how have I missed this before now?) that Kate is shown in DD’s family tree 

as descended from Diniz and Tilde [Ed. one of the unpublished family trees in 

the Dunnett Archive]. But that’s not in the text of course so we don’t need to 

believe it! 

Ros Williams, Somerset, England 

MY NAME IS Christine Deasey 

and I have been reading Whispering 

Gallery since the early days of 

Marzipan & Kisses. I still love the 

way it refreshes my DD enthusiasm, 

and still miss the lady herself. 

I volunteered to help at the 2012 

Olympics in Cardiff, as that is my 

nearest venue, and naturally I have 

been allocated to the Paralympic 

Equestrian Event in Greenwich! I 

am therefore searching somewhat 

desperately for somewhere to stay 

in the Greenwich area of London 

from 30th August to 4th September. 

Is there a generous and hospitable 

reader out there with a spare 

bed or sofa or even stable?! Audrey 

Beach has kindly offered a character 

reference, having been a friend 

for about 15 years. 

My address is 41 Moreton Eye, 

Leominster, Herefordshire, HR6 

0DP, phone: 0784 555 4657, email: 

veiledandcloaked@hotmail.co.uk 

Continued from p. 35 

The Secret Diary 

look in my clothes chest. Feta says 

that Will-Wat’s cast off doublet looks 

gothick on me as it puffs up my shoulders 

but says the colour is horrible. I 

agree. We decide to dye it black like 

King Henry wears. 

We went to Grandpa Adam’s library 

and spent HOURS looking for a book 

about dyeing – TOO MANY BOOKS 

and they are all BORING. Eventually 

Feta found a pamphlet called ‘The 

Charetty Dyeworks, A History’ by 

Mathilde Vasquez translated by Euphemia 

Adorne. It was really really 

dull (except for a bit about a fire) but 

it did say that if you want to dye stuff 

you have to soak it in wee first. This 

is disgusting but VITAL. I shall be a 

true Artisan, a Leader of the workers. 

Sharing in their troubles and toils and 

giving of myself for the betterment of 

all and a black doublet. 

I got a bucket and said that if Feta 

and I drank lots of water we could fill

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