Huntly Castle (Scotland)

Huntly Castle is a ruined castle in Huntly in Aberdeenshire, a region of northern Scotland. It is the ancestral home of the chief of the Gordon clan, Earl of Huntly. It is not to be confused with the 15th century Huntly Castle, west of Dundee and currently used as a prison.

Originally named Strathbogie, the castle was given to Sir Adam Gordon of Huntly in the 14th century. King Robert I of Scotland was a guest of the castle in 1307, before his victory over the Earl of Buchan.

In 1449 the king found himself in conflict with the powerful Earl of Douglas and the Gordons sided with the king. In 1452, while their men were in the south of the country, the Earl of Moray, an ally of the Douglas, took the opportunity to plunder the Gordon lands, setting fire to Huntly Castle. The Gordons returned and were able to quickly defeat their enemies. Although the castle was burnt to the ground, extensive reconstruction was undertaken and a larger castle was built.

In 1496, the pretender to the throne of England, Perkin Warbeck was married to Catherine Gordon at Huntly Castle, an act witnessed by King James IV of Scotland (in English James IV).

Wings were added to the castle in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

In 1640, the place was occupied by the army of the governor of Scotland under the responsibility of General Robert Monro. According to the pastor of Rothiemay, a small village about ten minutes from Huntly, the castle: “was neither robbed nor damaged, except for certain emblems and images, of a papist nature; and therefore, under the application of Captain James Wallace (one of the captains of Munro's infantry), they were destroyed and removed from the frontispiece of the house; but all the rest of the frontispiece, containing the escutcheon of the Huntly's, etc., was left intact, as it stands today. "

Taken in October 1644, the castle was held briefly by James Graham against the Duke of Argyll.

In 1647 Lord Charles Gordon defended the castle against General David Leslie, but his Irish garrison starved and had to surrender. They suffered brutal treatment, the men being hanged and their officers beheaded. In December of that same year, Huntly himself was captured; on the way to his execution in Edinburgh, he was held in his own castle in a refinement of cruelty, his escort being shot against the walls.

In 1650, Charles II of England quickly visited the castle on his way to the Battle of Worcester, where it was defeated by Oliver Cromwell. The long occupation of the castle by the Gordon family ended with the Civil War.

At the beginning of the 18th century, the castle was already starting to decay, and the villagers were collecting materials there to build their own houses. In 1746, during the Jacobite Rebellion, it was occupied by British government troops. Subsequently, it became a sort of quarry, until an antique dealer in the nineteenth century tried to save what was left.

The castle remained in the possession of the Gordon Clan until 1923. Today, its remains are managed by Historic Scotland, Scotland's agency for historic monuments.