Trinity College Kirk

Trinity College Kirk was one of the most beautiful and historic churches of medieval Edinburgh — a royal collegiate church founded by a queen in memory of her murdered husband, and adorned with one of the greatest works of art ever made for Scotland. Although the church was dismantled in the nineteenth century to make way for a railway station, and only partly rebuilt, its story is a remarkable one, and the masterpiece painted for it, the Trinity Altarpiece, survives as one of the treasures of Scottish art.

The church was founded in 1460 by Mary of Guelders, the widow of King James II of Scotland, in memory of her husband, who had been killed that very year when a cannon exploded at the siege of Roxburgh Castle. As a royal collegiate church, Trinity College Kirk was established to maintain a community of clergy — a provost, eight prebendaries and two clerks — to pray for the souls of the royal family, supported by the endowments of the queen and by income from lands and benefices across Scotland. Alongside the church, Mary of Guelders founded an almshouse, Trinity Hospital, and manses for the prebendaries, the whole forming the college. Queen Mary herself was buried in the church, and her remains lay there for nearly four hundred years, until they were moved to Holyrood Abbey in 1848.

The church was built of local sandstone — quarried, as it happened, only a short distance to the west, at the spot where the Scott Monument now stands on Princes Street — in the rich and cosmopolitan Scottish late Gothic style. Its ambitious design was never fully completed: only the apse, the choir with its aisles, and the transepts were built, the nave never being finished. Even so, it was a building of great beauty, with water discharged from its roof through carved gargoyles, and, unusually, several carved monkeys said to be hidden among its decorations.

For the church Mary of Guelders, or her successors, commissioned a magnificent altarpiece from the great Flemish master Hugo van der Goes — the Trinity Altarpiece, painted around 1478–79, depicting King James III and his queen at prayer, with their patron saints and the Trinity. This work, one of the finest Netherlandish paintings of its age and an incomparable record of the Scottish royal court, survives today in the National Galleries of Scotland and the Royal Collection, a precious relic of the lost church.

After the Reformation, Trinity College Kirk became a Protestant parish church, and it continued to serve its congregation for nearly three centuries. But in the nineteenth century it stood in the way of progress: the church lay in the valley between the Old Town and Calton Hill, on the very site chosen for the new Waverley Station, and in 1848 it was systematically dismantled to make way for the railway. The stones were carefully numbered in the expectation that the church would be rebuilt, and were stored in a yard on Calton Hill; but the years passed, and by the time a replacement church was finally built on Jeffrey Street in 1872, only about a third of the original stones remained, and these were used to construct a version of the choir and apse, which served as the hall of the new church. Thus only a fragment of the original masterpiece survives, reassembled in a new place.

Today the remnant of Trinity College Kirk stands on Chalmers Close, off the Royal Mile near Jeffrey Street, in the heart of Edinburgh's Old Town, a poignant survival of one of the great lost churches of the city. Its story — of royal foundation, artistic splendour and Victorian demolition — is one of the most evocative in the history of Edinburgh.

The site stands in the heart of Edinburgh, close to Waverley Station and the Royal Mile. Nearby are the great sights of the city: Edinburgh Castle and the Old Town, the National Galleries of Scotland (which hold the Trinity Altarpiece), the Scott Monument and Princes Street Gardens, Calton Hill, and the wider attractions of one of the most beautiful capital cities in Europe.

From its foundation by Mary of Guelders in 1460 in memory of King James II, through the commissioning of the Trinity Altarpiece by Hugo van der Goes, its centuries as a collegiate and then a parish church, and its demolition for Waverley Station in 1848, Trinity College Kirk gathers a remarkable history into its story. Once one of the glories of medieval Edinburgh, it survives in a fragment near the Royal Mile and in its incomparable altarpiece — a memory of one of the great lost churches of Scotland.