Sylvia's Journal

Today was for history. We had intended to rise early and get as much bang for the many bucks we paid for the tourist hop on and off buses. Alas, we didn’t get out of the house until past 12 and the ticket expired at 3:45 PM. We just got in a tour of the old city, see the Grassmarket with the free part of the Jazz Festival in full swing (3 different stages, one at each end and one in the middle). I wished I had been more forceful about getting off – it was after all a hop on/off bus, but Axel prevailed and I waffled, so we ended up at the palace of Holyrood while the sun was trying to get out from behind the thick cloud cover. Rain was predicted at 4PM and I figured that at 2PM we should be listening to jazz ‘en plein air.’ But we didn’t. A mistake.

An excellent audioguide took us from room to room and explained what we saw before us. We were reminded off our tour through Versailles where the sequence of rooms also led, eventually, to the monarch’s bedroom where a few very important people could see him going to bed and waking up. What a strange arrangement this now seems to us. 

We tried to keep track of all the Davids and Charleses and Jameses, Stuarts and Tudors, but the (en)tangled history of the English and Scotts remains hard for us to get our heads around. This evening, when I read the history section in one of the guide books I understood my confusion: James VI and James I are one and the same person (as are James VII and James II), the higher number is what he was for the Scotts and the lower one what the English called him. I also learned more about the intertwining of the Stuarts and Tudors, who was catholic and who was protestant, the Hanoverians, the Jacobites, and who was angry about what with whom, etc. 

We keep finding it strange, now being a tad more familiar with the history of both countries, that they are together. To me Scotland and England seem two very different countries. How a monarch who resides most of the time in one country can show up one week a year (and for special occasions) in Edinburgh and be the people’s monarch here, strikes me as odd, unless you call both countries together the United Kingdom. But shouldn’t kingdom be plural then?