Church of the Holy Rude, Stirling

The Church of the Holy Rude — in Scottish Gaelic, Eaglais na Crois Naoimh — is the medieval parish church of Stirling, named after the Holy Rood, a relic of the True Cross on which Jesus was crucified. Standing beside Stirling Castle at the head of the old town, it is the second oldest building in Stirling after the castle itself, and it carries a distinction shared by only three churches still in use in Britain: a reigning monarch was crowned within its walls. Here, on 29 July 1567, the infant James VI was crowned King of Scots while John Knox preached the sermon.

The church was founded in 1129, during the reign of David I, but a fire in 1405 destroyed the early structure, and nothing of it remains. Construction of the new nave had begun by 1414, and the evidence of carved heraldry shows that the nave vault was completed between 1440 and 1480. Work on the chancel did not begin until 1507 and was finished around 1530, when the west tower was also raised to its present height. The church historian Hew Scott recorded that the fine parish church of the Holy Rood was built to replace the church of St Modan, which had burned down — and that an even earlier record speaks of a church built at Stirling by St Monenna, though it was unlikely to have been a stone building.

Stirling Castle was long a favoured residence of the Scottish monarchs and grew into a Renaissance palace under the later Stewart kings, and the Church of the Holy Rude, hard by the castle, became bound up with the monarchy in turn, hosting royal baptisms as well as the coronation of 1567 — performed by Adam Bothwell, Bishop of Orkney, with Knox in the pulpit. Royal and pious Stirling thickened around the church across the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries: the Hospital of St James was erected at the town end of the bridge over the Forth in 1463 under James III, with a chapel of St Roque built near the bridge somewhat later; Robert Spital, tailor to the king, founded a second hospital that still exists; a house of the Grey Friars dedicated to St Modan was established in 1494; and James IV, who lived much at Stirling, set up the Collegiate Church of the Chapel Royal, dedicated to St Mary and St Michael and famed for its elaborate musical services. Across the Forth stand the ruins of the Augustinian Abbey of Cambuskenneth, founded by David I in 1147, where James III and his queen, Margaret of Denmark, lie buried beneath a monument erected by Queen Victoria; little remains of the abbey but its very complete church tower. The Rood Kirk itself held many altars and shrines, with dedications to the Holy Trinity, St Mary, St Michael, St Anne, St Andrew, St James, St John the Baptist, St Ninian, St Salvator, St Peter, St Paul, St Laurence, St Katherine, St Modan, St Cuthbert, St Eloi, St Severinus and St Aubert; the parish had wells of St Mary, St John and St Thomas, and Stirling held fairs on Ascension Day, Roodmas Day and Our Lady Day in Harvest.

The Reformation centuries brought division — literally. A second charge was secured for the parish in 1607 and a third founded in 1731, whose growing congregation eventually built the North Church in 1840. More dramatically, in the aftermath of General Monk's siege of Stirling Castle in 1651 during the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, the minister James Guthrie — later executed for his Covenanting principles — appointed Robert Rule as his colleague with the backing of only two or three elders, causing a schism in the congregation. In 1656 a dividing wall was built across the church, and each half was treated as a separate kirk: two congregations, back to back, in one medieval building. The wall stood for two hundred and eighty years, until 1936. As for the pockmarks of musket shot visible on the church and churchyard walls, tradition blames the 1651 siege — but the damage all faces the south rampart of Stirling Castle and clusters around the slot windows, so it is more likely the remnant of a "game" played by soldiers firing from the castle, trying to put a musket ball through the slots; an attacking force would have left its marks on the south side.

The church was restored in 1940, when the fine medieval oak-beam roof of the nave was re-exposed — one of the great surviving timber roofs of Scotland. The building contains many fine stained glass windows, mainly of the late nineteenth century, with examples by Ballantine & Co., Adam & Small, and Cottier & Co., and its semi-octagonal apse was the inspiration for that of St Leonard's-in-the-Fields Church in Perth.

The churchyard, lying mainly west and north-west of the church with stones from the sixteenth century onward, is among the most storied in Scotland. It was extended in 1851 to create the Valley Cemetery to the north, divided from the old ground by only a path and adorned with a series of statues of Reformation figures by Alexander Handyside Ritchie. The old graveyard contains a stone unique in Scotland: a carved depiction of body-snatching, marking the theft of Mary Stevenson (1767–1822) by James McNab — the local gravedigger who had buried her two days earlier — aided by his friend Daniel Mitchell on 16 November 1822. The body was passed to John Forrest for dissection; the two men were caught but released on legal technicalities, a riot ensued, and Mary's body was reburied beneath the stone carved to record the strange event. Notable graves in the old cemetery include John Cowane, founder of Cowane's Hospital; the engineer and shipbuilder Charles Randolph, co-founder of Randolph & Elliott; the Revd John Russell, satirised in the poems of Robert Burns; Professor Henry Drummond; the historian John Elliot Shearer; the psychiatrist David Yellowlees; the artist John Terris; and John Sconce, beneath a huge Renaissance monument. The new cemetery under the castle ramparts holds the artist A. R. W. Allan RSA, the architect of Craig House Asylum Charles Henry Greig, the cricketer Irvin Iffla, and the pilot Charles Livingstone DFM, killed on BOAC Flight 781.

Still the parish church of Stirling within the Church of Scotland, the Holy Rude announced in 2023 a partnership with Stirling District Tourism to promote the site as a visitor destination — opening ever wider the doors of the kirk where a king of Scots was crowned, where a wall once split one congregation into two, and where the gravedigger's crime is carved in stone beneath the castle rock.