Magdalen Chapel, 41 Cowgate, Edinburgh

The Magdalen Chapel on the Cowgate, in the heart of Edinburgh's Old Town, is one of the most historically charged small buildings in Scotland: a Category A listed chapel of the 1540s that contains the only intact pre-Reformation stained glass window in the country, hosted the General Assembly of the infant Church of Scotland, prepared the bodies of executed Covenanter martyrs for burial, sheltered Edinburgh's second Baptist congregation — and now serves as the headquarters of the Scottish Reformation Society.

The chapel was built between 1541 and 1544 with money bequeathed by Michael MacQueen (died 1537), a merchant who supplied spices and linen to the royal household, supplemented by his widow Jonet Rynd. The Foundation Charter of 1547 records that MacQueen, "greatly troubled with an heavy Disease, and oppressed with Age, yet mindful of Eternal Life... esteemed it ane good Way to obtain Eternal Life, to erect some Christian Work, for ever to remain and endure". The chapel was to house a chaplain and serve as an almshouse for seven poor men, who were to pray for the soul of the young Mary, Queen of Scots; the Queen Regent, Mary of Guise, arranged academic lectures there before the Reformation. Jonet Rynd died in December 1553 and was buried in the chapel, where her tomb with its coat of arms and inscribed border survives in the south-east corner. The early donors did not always agree: a John Rynd was censured for removing the carved coat of arms of Isobel Mauchan, who had given £1,000 Scots in 1555. Over the door an inscription still admonishes: "He that hath pity upon the poore lendeth unto the Lord and the Lord will recompence him that which he hath given."

On Jonet Rynd's death the patronage passed to the Incorporation of Hammermen — Edinburgh's metalworkers — whose wealth alone carried the chapel through the storm of the Reformation. The Catholic chaplain was replaced by a Protestant minister but successfully sued to keep his salary until his death in 1567, and since the Foundation Charter required Catholic worship on pain of the property reverting to Rynd's heirs, the tenants simply stopped paying rent, knowing the Hammermen could not compel them. The chapel nonetheless became a cradle of the new Kirk: the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland met here in April 1578, tradition holds that the very first Assembly of December 1560 also gathered in the chapel, and the Dominican-turned-Reformer John Craig preached here — in Latin, having been so long out of Scotland that his native tongue had rusted. From 1596 the chapel was the regular meeting place of the Convenery of the Trades of Edinburgh, so closely identified with it that "Magdalen Chapel" became a metonym for the Convenery itself.

The Covenanting age gave the chapel its most sombre associations. Conventicles met here — the largest on 17 May 1674, with William Weir preaching — and after the executions in the nearby Grassmarket, the bodies of the Marquis of Argyll (1661), Hew Mackail (1666) and John Dick (1684) were prepared for burial in the chapel; in 1689 the heads and hands of martyred Covenanters, displayed about Edinburgh, were gathered here before burial at Greyfriars. The table on which the martyrs' bodies were prepared is still in the chapel, together with a sword that reputedly belonged to the Covenanter Captain John Paton.

Later centuries brought a parade of tenants: Episcopalians; the second Baptist congregation in Edinburgh, formed in May 1765 when Robert Carmichael and seven others withdrew from their Independent church — Carmichael, baptised in London, then baptised four men and three women in the Water of Leith at Canonmills on 25 November 1765, an event reported by The Scots Magazine — worshipping here until 1774; an eighteenth-century printing press in or beside the chapel; and in the early nineteenth century the Bereans, followers of John Barclay's modified Calvinism. The Hammermen sold the chapel in 1857 to the Protestant Institute for Scotland, and the Edinburgh Medical Missionary Society later used it. After a fund-raising campaign supported by Alex Neish, the architects Simpson and Brown carried out a major restoration in 1992–93, and the chapel is now the headquarters of the Scottish Reformation Society.

The fabric keeps its layered story. A semi-circular wooden platform was installed at the east end around 1615; the carved armorial panel over the door, by John Sawer of the same year, moved to its present place in 1649; the tower and spire were added about 1620, and the bell of 1632 is by the Dutch founder Michael Burgerhuys of Middelburg. A fragment of the lost ceiling of 1725 — painted by Alexander Boswall in "skye colour with clouds and a sin [sun] gilded in the centre" — is displayed on the south wall, and the panelling records the gifts of generations of Hammermen. Above all, the middle window of the south wall holds the Royal Arms of Scotland and the arms of Mary of Guise in glass made before the Reformation — the only such window in Scotland to survive intact, glowing on in the chapel that watched the old faith fall and the new one rise. The main south window's glass of 1893 is by William Graham Boss.