Pilgrim Ways

Chapter Eight - Whitekirk and Haddington, St.Andrews and Other Scottish Sites On a cold, wet February evening in the millennium year I began my pilgrimage to Haddington. Curiously, I began the journey to Scotland in Jerusalem. To be more precise, it was at a reception held in the Jerusalem Chamber of Westminster Abbey. The Dean and Chapter had made the room available to the Earl of Lauderdale, who, thirty years earlier , had the inspiration to re-establish the medieval pilgrimage to Haddington. Before we gathered there was the opportunity to hear choral evensong in the Abbey church, surely the most wonderful of the services held in the Anglican communion. It is said that Henry IV had always believed that he would die in Jerusalem. When his time for departing finally arrived he was taken in a semi-conscious state to the Abbey and when he came to he asked a retainer where he was. “Jerusalem” came the reply. And here, in the Jerusalem Chamber, where he died, we heard of another strange death, wrought by the hands of another Henry.

Haddington‟s History Until the Reformation, the church of St.Mary‟s, Haddington, fifteen miles east of Edinburgh, was one of Scotland‟s principal places of pilgrimage. It is the county town of East Lothian and is linked to the tiny village of Whitekirk, which is set on a green plateau close to the East Lothian coastline. At Whitekirk an image of the Christ child, embraced and held in his mother‟s arms, became the focus of pilgrimage from many parts of Europe. As many as 15,000 pilgrims came to Whitekirk annually during the twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. In 1356, English sea-raiders destroyed the shrine and it was then moved six miles inland to Haddington. One of the patrons of the shrine, Professor Sir Robin Barbour, says that the shrine was visited by a future Pope, Pius II. Sir Robin told the gathering in the Jerusalem Chamber that in 1435 Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomine was sent to the Scottish Court by the Council of Basle as a papal emissary. After landing at Dunbar Piccolomini found the shrine had been destroyed and that the monks who had cared for it had departed. He wrote that “there wasn‟t even any food there, so we had to go to another village.” This was probably Haddington where a new church dedicated to the Virgin Mary was being built over the remains of an earlier building, which had also been despoiled by the English. In the 1540s Henry VIII tried to force his Scottish neighbours to give the infant Queen of Scots as a child bride for the young sickly Prince Edward of England. When the Scots rebuffed Henry‟s “rough wooing” he retaliated in his usual petulant and high-handed way. The choir and the transepts of the great church of Haddington were ripped and torn and left as a ruin without even a roof until the 1970s. In 1560, after the Scottish reformation, the remainder of the church became a Presbyterian Church. Although it is thought that there was continued devotion to Our Lady at Haddington for the remainder of the sixteenth century, it is unsurprising that in this birthplace of John Knox, the devotion and the shrine were excoriated from Scotland‟s collective memory.

Haddington and Walsingham