Edinburgh - A City in Crisis 1544

So what is important about 1544? In the spring of 1544, the English king Henry VIII ordered a vast army of about fifteen thousand men north to Scotland.1 Acting on instructions from their monarch, the English forces captured and sacked Leith before turning their attention to the burgh of Edinburgh. In a few days of fierce fighting in early May, the English managed to temporarily gain entry to Edinburgh and set fire to sections of the capital. They also sacked the abbey and royal palace at Holyrood, burnt Leith (and tore down the pier in the harbour), and attacked many castles and smaller burghs around Edinburgh and in southern Fife. The English then returned south, part of the forces travelling by sea, and part going by land (where they continued their trail of destruction). Our depiction of Edinburgh and the Canongate was inspired by a drawing in the British Library made by the English military engineer Richard Lee, who accompanied Hertford’s forces in 1544. Lee’s drawing is the earliest moderately realistic picture of Edinburgh and would influence how the English portrayed the Scottish capital into the seventeenth century (a variant of Lee’s illustration is included in John Speed’s atlas, The Theatre of the Empire of Great Britain, published c.1611). It is possible that Lee’s plan was created to explain the outcome of the Edinburgh expedition to Henry VIII of England. On 19 May 1544 the Earl of Hertford informed Henry that he was sending him ‘Master Lee, who I assure your Majesty hath served in the journey both honestly and willingly, [and] doth bring unto your Highness a plat of Leith and Edinburgh so as your Majesty shall perceive the situations of the same, which is undoubtedly set forth as well as is possible.’ This project was kindly funded by Innovate UK.