Secrets Of Great British Castles - Season 2, Episode 1 Edinburgh Castle
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00:00For me, a great British castle is a fortress, a palace, a home.
00:11And a symbol of power, majesty and fear.
00:16For nearly 1,000 years,
00:18castles have shaped Britain's famous landscape.
00:24These magnificent buildings have been home
00:27to some of the greatest heroes and villains in our national history.
00:32And many of them still stand proudly today,
00:35bursting with incredible stories of warfare, treachery,
00:40intrigue, passion and murder.
00:45Join me, Dan Jones,
00:47as I uncover the secrets behind six great British castles.
00:53This time, I'm in Edinburgh,
00:55these days home to the famous yearly spectacle that is the Military Tattoo.
01:01But over its 1,000-year history,
01:03it's earned the accolade of being the most besieged castle in the land.
01:09Edinburgh Castle is a truly iconic British landmark,
01:13with a truly deadly history.
01:16It's been the scene of legendary betrayals, backstabbing and conspiracies,
01:21as well as some of the most epic battles ever witnessed
01:25between England and Scotland's kings and queens.
01:34Edinburgh Castle is the most fought-over castle in Britain.
01:41It's been attacked 23 times,
01:43by everyone from boring Scottish clans
01:46to English kings and even German airships.
01:52It has survived them all,
01:54and today it still stands dominant over the surrounding landscape.
02:00Bristling with cannon, unbroken and magnificent,
02:05one of the greatest fortresses ever built.
02:10And one that still packs a punch today.
02:16This is the One O'Clock Gun,
02:18and a gun like this has been fired from the walls of Edinburgh Castle
02:22every day, except for Sundays, Christmas Day and Good Fridays,
02:26since 1861.
02:28Now, the boom it makes echoes over the city of Edinburgh below
02:33and out to the Firth of Forth, where it helps shipping keep time.
02:49Ooh!
02:54Now, that explosion is a daily reminder
02:57that Edinburgh Castle still has a working military garrison.
03:01This is a living fortress, and a very impressive one too.
03:09Wherever you walk for miles around,
03:12you see this mighty castle looming over the countryside.
03:18The granite it stands on is a natural wonder.
03:22Edinburgh Castle sits on top of Castle Rock,
03:26a vast outcrop of volcanic rock
03:28that first erupted from the earth 350 million years ago.
03:33Now, the volcano that produced it, well, that's long extinct,
03:37but the rock remains the focal point of the city.
03:40It's also the perfect defensive spot to put a military settlement,
03:45so if you're preparing to everyone for miles around,
03:48we are here to dominate you.
03:56People have lived on Castle Rock since the Bronze Age.
04:00That's nearly 3,000 years ago.
04:05And for at least half of that time,
04:07it's been the base for warriors to get together
04:10before going off to battle.
04:12To fight, to fight, and, of course, to get drunk.
04:17We know there was a castle full of warriors at Edinburgh
04:20from as far back as 1,400 years ago
04:22because it's mentioned in one of the earliest known poems
04:25in British history, The Gododdin.
04:27The Gododdin celebrates the deeds of one of these warriors
04:30and it says,
04:31There was no one who more completely
04:33from the fortress of Aden scattered the enemy.
04:36The fortress of Aden, well, that's Edinburgh Castle.
04:39The poem also says that these warriors spent a full year
04:43feasting and drinking mead before they went out to fight.
04:49By the Middle Ages, Scotland was becoming a unified kingdom.
04:53Edinburgh was its leading city
04:56and the castle was controlled by the Scottish kings and their families.
05:00And that's when the castle we see today started taking shape.
05:09This tiny building within the sprawling castle complex
05:13lets us peer inside that long-forgotten world.
05:21It's this chapel, dedicated to Scotland's only royal saint.
05:27This is St Margaret's Chapel
05:29and it was put up nearly 900 years ago, in 1130,
05:33by King David I of Scotland
05:36and the wife of his mother, Queen Margaret.
05:40Queen Margaret was an English princess who came to Scotland
05:44to marry King David's father,
05:46the powerful, long-ruling Scottish king, Malcolm III.
05:52Tragically, she died three days after learning
05:55that her husband, King Malcolm, and her eldest son
05:58had been killed in battle by the English.
06:02Three of Margaret's surviving sons went on to become kings of Scotland,
06:08each of them consolidating Edinburgh's place
06:12as the seat of Scottish royal power.
06:18But hostilities with the kings of England would continue for centuries.
06:25And none was deadlier than the war with the English warrior king,
06:29Edward I, who would earn the nickname the Hammer of the Scots.
06:37In March 1296, Edward's army invaded Scotland and marched on Edinburgh.
06:47Now, people didn't call Edward I the Hammer of the Scots for nothing.
06:54He was a warrior king with a vast collection of siege catapults
06:58known as trebuchets.
07:01And arriving in Edinburgh, he deployed the most fearsome of them all,
07:06War Wolf.
07:08Said to be the largest trebuchet ever made,
07:11War Wolf needed 30 wagons to transport it
07:15and Pearl missiles weighing around 300 pounds.
07:29After a three-day battering,
07:31the Scottish defenders of Edinburgh Castle quite sensibly gave up
07:35and the English moved in.
07:37They installed their own garrison and, humiliatingly for the Scots,
07:40they stayed here for the next 18 years.
07:45It would take nearly two decades for the Scots
07:48to dislodge the English from Edinburgh Castle.
07:51Edward I's invasion marked the beginning of a conflict
07:55between the wars of Scottish independence,
07:57which would rage between the two sides for over half a century.
08:02When they weren't fighting the English,
08:04competing claimants to the Scottish throne plotted against each other.
08:08Give him fire!
08:10This grinding period of unrest meant Edinburgh Castle
08:13would be the scene of a litany of murders, massacres
08:17and jaw-dropping treachery
08:20as conflicting sides fought over this mighty fortress.
08:29In the Middle Ages, England's warmonger king Edward I invaded Scotland.
08:35He used the latest military machinery
08:38to smash Edinburgh Castle into submission
08:42and he took the castle for himself.
08:45The English then held it for nearly 20 years.
08:51This fortress, built to house and protect Scottish royalty,
08:56had become a humiliating sign of English triumph.
09:02The Scots didn't have the firepower to retake Edinburgh Castle by force,
09:07but what they did have was stealth, cunning
09:11and a little bit of top-secret information.
09:15In 1314, a wily Scottish nobleman called Thomas Randolph, Earl of Moray,
09:22hatched a simple and astonishingly brazen plot
09:26to regain this monster of a castle.
09:29He was going to climb over the wall.
09:36You look at that cliff and it's pretty daunting, but that's the point.
09:40The whole reason the castle is up there
09:43is because that is supposed to be impossible to climb.
09:47But that's not what Moray thought.
09:50According to chronicles of the time,
09:52he'd learned about a secret route up the rock face,
09:56over the wall and into the castle at the top.
10:00Historian David Caldwell thinks he's got to the bottom
10:03of this incredible story.
10:05They knew it was possible because they met up with a guy
10:09who was part of the previous governor of the castle, William Francis,
10:13and he used to escape over the wall at that point at night
10:16to go and visit his woman in town.
10:19So he knew it was possible with the use of a ladder
10:22over the wall at the top.
10:24How on earth did Moray get up this rock face?
10:27With a great deal of difficulty, I think, by the look of it.
10:30But I don't know, you can just imagine
10:32that they could have got up that sort of gully there
10:35and you can see there's a sort of platform
10:37and a substantial ledge.
10:39Now, I think that's where 30 men could have had a rest,
10:42as we know from the accounts of the escapade.
10:44Just a rope ladder to get over? Just a rope ladder, yeah.
10:47And there's just 30 of them,
10:49and the garrison of the castle was probably about 200,
10:52so even just getting into the castle was still a major risk
10:55that they could actually overpower the garrison and take it.
11:03Unbelievably, Moray's plan worked.
11:08He and his men climbed the sheer rock,
11:13jumped the walls...
11:17..and slaughtered the English soldiers inside.
11:21In the blink of an eye, Edinburgh Castle was back in Scottish hands.
11:29And Moray was a hero.
11:31But there was plenty more trouble still to come.
11:38Less than 100 years after Moray's climb,
11:41a new Scottish royal family was on the throne.
11:44They were called the Stuarts.
11:47The Stuarts would become one of the most famous dynasties
11:51in British history, but not always for the right reasons.
11:56And Edinburgh Castle saw them at their very worst.
12:01For centuries, this was a place of backstabbing, skullduggery and intrigue,
12:07as kings of Scotland and their enemies played a real-life Game of Thrones.
12:12And no episode better showcases this castle's deadly history
12:17than something that took place somewhere above our heads during the 15th century.
12:22It's one of the most notorious events in all of British history.
12:27It's one of the most notorious events in all of British history.
12:31The Black Dinner.
12:35In 1437, the Stuart king James I was murdered.
12:42This left his young son, James II, as king.
12:46James II came to the throne when he was just six years old,
12:51and on his mother's orders, he was kept in Edinburgh Castle for his own safety.
12:56By the time he was ten, the real power lay in the hands of the governor of the castle,
13:02William Crichton, and his treacherous ally, Alexander Livingstone.
13:07These two would stop at nothing to protect their hold over the young king.
13:13Their scheming and plotting came to a head one fateful night in November 1440.
13:20Crichton and Livingstone's main rivals for influence with James II
13:24were the infamous Douglas clan,
13:26a family who'd been powerful members of the Scottish aristocracy for 300 years.
13:32Like the king, the heads of the Douglas clan were very young.
13:38William Earl of Douglas was 16.
13:41His brother was even younger.
13:43Nevertheless, Crichton and Livingstone still saw them as a dangerous threat,
13:49and they hatched a dastardly plot to silence them forever.
13:55In November 1440, the Douglas boys were invited to Edinburgh Castle for dinner.
14:00It would be the last meal they ever ate.
14:06While the young men were enjoying their dinner,
14:09a servant brought out a very unusual dish.
14:16The severed head of a black bull.
14:20It was a signal. The Douglas boys were dragged from their seats.
14:26Outside, they were subjected to a sham trial.
14:38Then both of them were beheaded.
14:42This grotesque double murder is now known as the Black Dinner.
14:50You might have thought the horrific events of the Black Dinner
14:54would have put James II off bloodshed forever,
14:58but instead he grew up to be a king who relished war.
15:02He particularly loved one lethal weapon that took Europe by storm during his lifetime.
15:09The cannon.
15:13Thanks to James, Edinburgh Castle is full of cannons,
15:18and one in particular really stands out.
15:22This massive cannon is called Mons Meg,
15:25and she came to Edinburgh Castle in the middle of the 15th century
15:29as a gift to King James II from his wife's uncle, the Duke of Burgundy.
15:34Now, Mons Meg was actually a wedding present,
15:37and if she's not very romantic, she certainly was deadly.
15:41This monster could fire a stone nearly two miles and not any old cannonball.
15:47The balls that came out of here would have weighed 150kg,
15:52that's nearly twice my body weight,
15:54and had a diameter of around 500mm,
15:57which isn't too far from a modern Tomahawk missile.
16:01So this wasn't just any old cannon.
16:04She was a medieval weapon of mass destruction.
16:08I met up with medieval firearms expert Professor Ronald Hutton
16:13to check out the sort of cannon that James II would have loved to play with.
16:18It's owned and operated by Colin Herriot.
16:22Colin, this looks like a pretty serious piece of military hardware.
16:26Hefty old piece of art.
16:28It's a copy of a 16th-century port piece, same as was on the Mary Rose.
16:33This is a shortened version, and she's a breech loader.
16:36She's not a muzzle loader, and everything don't get stoked in from that end.
16:41This is a gunstone.
16:43That's heavy. How much do you think that weighs?
16:45About 20 pounds.
16:46And how do you aim her?
16:48We squint along the barrel, and aiming is probably the wrong word,
16:52but pointing is more like it.
16:54It's quite worrying when you're firing it, and that's what we're going to do now.
16:58So we're going to fire this piece of marble into that van.
17:03Hopefully.
17:04You jacks had better clear off into a safety place, I think.
17:08With a pleasure.
17:09This, hopefully, is going to go bang.
17:14What would a 14th- or 15th-century cannon be made from?
17:19It's a disgusting tub of metal,
17:23in which you put stone or sometimes metal balls,
17:26and as often as not in the early days, it blows up.
17:28So this is something very dangerous to fire?
17:30It's extremely dangerous.
17:32They smell horrible, but everyone senses, rightly,
17:35that they have a future, and they have.
17:40Until now, it'd take a couple of months to reduce a castle.
17:44Now you can take one out with less than a week.
17:47That's extraordinary.
17:54Preparing to give fire.
17:56Give him fire!
17:58Fire!
18:09Whoa!
18:14Wow!
18:17Oh!
18:18My ears are ringing, but I'm glad I wasn't in that van.
18:22Ronald, can you see what it's done to it?
18:24Yes, I can see.
18:26Wow!
18:27That was a loud one.
18:38It's ripped the metal clean off the top.
18:41That is horrific.
18:42I mean, you need only a little imagination
18:45to imagine what that does to personnel.
18:47It changes the world.
18:49Nothing is ever the same once they learn how to use gunpowder.
18:52I think that's the point, isn't it?
18:54You know, castles had been these great edifices
18:57that it would take you months to get through,
18:59but as soon as a weapon like that comes along,
19:02the whole game has changed.
19:04Mons Meg would only get one outing against the English,
19:08and it wasn't at Edinburgh Castle, but instead in Northumberland.
19:12Although she made a big bang,
19:15her great weight made her impractical to carry around.
19:19But James II continued to line the walls of his castles
19:23with the very latest in gun technology,
19:27and cannons were to be his undoing.
19:32James II's love of guns quite literally backfired on him.
19:36In 1460, he was besieging Roxburgh Castle
19:39and trying to fire a new type of cannon from Flanders called the Lion,
19:44but it exploded and it blew the king to pieces.
19:47He was just 29 years old.
19:50His successors were just as keen on collecting artillery as James was,
19:54and under the Stuart kings, Edinburgh Castle became
19:57one of the most heavily armed fortresses in Britain.
20:02Which was just as well.
20:06Because Edinburgh Castle had plenty of enemies
20:09who would stop at nothing to try and breach its mighty walls.
20:16And one of the bloodiest assaults of all
20:19came from Britain's most infamous king, Henry VIII.
20:31Edinburgh Castle has been besieged more times
20:34than any other fortress in Britain,
20:37but no attackers ever caused as much trouble for this grand old lady
20:42as Britain's most notorious royal dynasty, the Tudors.
20:50The Tudors' poisonous relationship with the Stuart kings of Scotland
20:55led to wars, invasions, attempted kidnappings
20:59and even a plot to kill a queen.
21:05But it all started with a marriage,
21:08which amazingly is still commemorated on the walls of the royal palace.
21:13This incredible and lavish suite of rooms built
21:17in the heart of Edinburgh Castle.
21:20These are the royal apartments,
21:22and there's an image here that crops up all over the castle.
21:26It's the image of a rose and a thistle entwined,
21:29and that's more than just a pretty piece of decoration.
21:32The rose is a symbol of the Tudors,
21:35that great English dynasty of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I,
21:39and the thistle represents the Stuart kings of Scotland.
21:42And the fact that they're entwined is a reference to the marriage
21:46in 1503 of James IV of Scotland and Henry VIII's sister Margaret.
21:52Now, that marriage was supposed to bring about peace between the two families,
21:57but as with many families,
21:59there were as many fights as there were hugs and smiles.
22:03In fact, when the Tudors and the Stuarts clashed,
22:06the whole of Britain had to take cover,
22:09and one of the bloodiest fallings out happened right here at Edinburgh Castle.
22:17Henry VIII and James IV of Scotland may have been brothers-in-law,
22:22but they were also deadly rivals.
22:25So just ten years after the Tudors and Stuarts
22:28had joined their families in marriage, their armies were at war.
22:35King James IV was killed in 1513 at the Battle of Flodden.
22:40His death was Henry VIII's most significant military achievement.
22:46In 1542, James's son, James V, also died,
22:51following another military humiliation, this time at the Battle of Solway Moss.
23:00That left James V's six-day-old daughter as the new monarch.
23:06She would come to be known as Mary Queen of Scots,
23:10and her reign plunged Scotland and Edinburgh Castle
23:14into crisis.
23:18That crisis began straightaway,
23:20as Henry VIII ordered the Scots to marry little Mary to his own son, Edward,
23:26so that England and Scotland would one day be united.
23:34The Scots were having none of it.
23:37They refused to be bossed around by the arrogant Tudor king of England.
23:43Henry was furious. He decided to teach the Scots a lesson.
23:50In 1544, he sent an army to Edinburgh
23:54to settle things the way he knew best, with the sword.
23:59This is the Firth of Forth,
24:01where the North Sea meets land just outside the city of Edinburgh.
24:05And in May 1544, all this water was teeming with ships,
24:10and he sent his English soldiers on a very simple mission.
24:14They had instructions from Henry VIII, and he said,
24:18put all to fire and sword, burn Edinburgh,
24:22as there may remain forever a perpetual memory
24:25of the vengeance of God lightened upon them for their falsehood and disloyalty.
24:31Henry VIII wanted control of Mary Queen of Scots,
24:35and if he couldn't have her,
24:37he would kill her, and her castle would be the first to suffer.
24:46They called this period, with typical Scots gallows humour,
24:51the Rough Wooing.
24:53For eight years, Scotland was battered by English military force,
24:58but they refused to be beaten.
25:02The accounts of the invasion are pretty chilling.
25:05More than 1,000 men piled off the English ships in just four hours.
25:10There are records of the English commandeering local fishing boats
25:14just to speed up the landing process.
25:16And once the men hit the shore, they started burning buildings
25:20between the Firth of Forth and the city of Edinburgh.
25:23The noise, the violence, the sheer size of the invasion
25:28must have been absolutely terrifying.
25:32On 3rd May 1544, the English stormed the city,
25:37blowing open the medieval gates and killing hundreds of defenders.
25:43Those who survived the assault retreated behind the safety of the castle walls.
25:52The English set fire to the town,
25:55withdrawing to their base at Leith for the night to watch Edinburgh burn.
26:02Over the next three days, the burning and looting continued,
26:07not just in Edinburgh, but also in the surrounding towns.
26:12Reports of the time say that neither within the walls nor in the suburbs
26:18was left any one house unburned.
26:27So you had boats coming from the Forth
26:30and you had troops coming across the border from England.
26:33Yeah. This is an incredible time in the city.
26:36What the English had been ordered by King Henry VIII to do
26:40was to burn Edinburgh, take the castle, do a lot of destruction,
26:44get lots of loot in order to encourage them
26:47to have Mary Queen of Scots marry his son.
26:49How much damage did they do to Edinburgh?
26:51Some of the main gun positions
26:53fired right down the high street of Edinburgh
26:56and at various times that's exactly what the holders of the castle did
27:02and what they evidently did in 1544,
27:05they fired their guns right down the high street to hit the English.
27:08So, actually, you could come into Edinburgh
27:10and do as much damage in the surrounding area as you want,
27:13but taking the castle is a totally different matter.
27:15And they failed in their one key objective,
27:18which was to capture Mary Queen of Scots.
27:20Exactly.
27:27Mary Queen of Scots was barely a year old at the time of the rough wooing
27:33and the nobles governing Scotland in her name sent her to France,
27:37where she was betrothed to the heir to the French throne.
27:40In 1558, when she was 15,
27:43she and her husband were crowned King and Queen of France.
27:48But two years later, her husband died of a mysterious illness.
27:53Now a widow in a foreign land,
27:55and with her mother-in-law, the feared and powerful Catherine de' Medici,
27:59making it clear she was no longer welcome,
28:02Mary decided her future lay back in Scotland.
28:07Despite her years in France,
28:09she was still Queen of Scotland
28:11and eager to reclaim her throne from the nobles who'd ruled in her absence.
28:17But when she returned to England,
28:20But when she arrived in Edinburgh,
28:22she received a mixed reception.
28:24This flame-haired, intelligent woman had French clothes and manners
28:29and was also a Catholic.
28:31Much of Scotland was now Protestant,
28:33and in 1560, while she was away,
28:36the Scottish Parliament had adopted Protestantism as the state religion.
28:41Many Scots were now suspicious of Mary.
28:44How was Mary received?
28:46Joy that at last a Queen, an absent Queen, had returned to Scotland
28:50and that she was no longer a minor and would be ruling,
28:54but at the same time a recognition
28:56that her religion was going to be unpopular in some quarters.
29:01In 1565, five years after her return from France,
29:05the headstrong young Queen of Scots married for a second time.
29:09She chose a Scottish nobleman who was also her cousin,
29:13Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley.
29:17Why did she marry him?
29:18She was attracted to him, and politically there were reasons
29:21why she thought it would be advantageous to her.
29:24It would help her claim to be Elizabeth I of England's successor.
29:29Henry Darnley was born in England,
29:32so there was a political advantage to her.
29:35Henry Darnley was born in England, so there was a political advantage.
29:40But Darnley was bad news.
29:43Described as spoilt, vain and vindictive,
29:46he had no interest in helping Mary run the country.
29:50Instead, he spent his time drinking and chasing women.
29:55His disrespectful behaviour quickly made him unpopular with the Scots
29:59and dragged down Mary's reputation too.
30:05Despite their troubled marriage, by 1566,
30:09Mary was pregnant with her first child.
30:12But there were rumours the child was not Darnley's.
30:17What Darnley did next doomed their marriage.
30:21It resulted in Darnley conspiring against her
30:25and conspiring ultimately to possibly seize the Queen
30:30but certainly murder one of her favourites,
30:33Queen David Rischio.
30:35Because she was, I think, fairly fearful for her life
30:39and possibly concerned that if she died in childbirth,
30:42her son would become a prisoner of Darnley
30:45and Darnley would seize the throne,
30:47that she decided to give birth
30:49in this very well-fortified castle of Edinburgh.
30:53In this period, women, about 20% between the ages of 20 and 35,
30:59died from childbirth.
31:04SHE GROANS
31:09And so Mary wrote out her will. In fact, she wrote out three wills...
31:15..which would make provision if she died and her son survived
31:21or if both died in childbirth.
31:23So she was very, very well aware of the risks.
31:27Mary gave birth to a son whom she named James
31:32and she survived the birth,
31:34but the turmoil that marked her ill-fated reign
31:38was about to get worse.
31:41Within months of the birth of Mary's child,
31:44Darnley himself would be murdered.
31:47His naked body was found not far from Edinburgh Castle,
31:51strangled in the garden of a house that had been abandoned
31:55and the garden of a house that had been blown up with gunpowder.
31:59Mary was suspected of having a hand in his death.
32:03She became increasingly unpopular
32:06and the country descended into civil war.
32:11A group of rebellious Scottish lords forced her to abdicate
32:15in favour of her one-year-old son, James,
32:18and she fled to England in 1568,
32:21hoping for support from her English cousin, Queen Elizabeth I.
32:26But she was out of luck.
32:28A suspicious Elizabeth had her arrested
32:31and the crisis in Edinburgh escalated.
32:36The Scottish lords were now deeply divided.
32:39One side supported Mary's Catholic claim to the throne
32:43while the rebels backed her young son, James VI,
32:46who'd been placed on the throne in her absence
32:49and had spent his childhood up the road in Stirling Castle.
32:54The standoff between the two sides would take two long years to resolve
32:59and it would nearly destroy Edinburgh Castle,
33:02whose defenders were still loyal to the Queen's cause.
33:06In May 1571, Elizabeth's English troops marched on Edinburgh
33:10and joined forces with the supporters of James VI.
33:14Using the latest guns and mortars,
33:16they literally blasted the castle into submission.
33:20After a month-long bombardment, the walls were breached.
33:24David's Tower, the centrepiece of the medieval castle
33:28and the tallest tower, was demolished.
33:31Mary's demoralised Catholic supporters within the castle surrendered.
33:36James VI was now secure as King of Scotland,
33:40but his mother, Mary Queen of Scots, remained an English prisoner.
33:45She would be shunted around various English castles for 19 years
33:50before finally being beheaded for plotting against Elizabeth in 1587.
33:58Yet the Scots had the last laugh.
34:01When Elizabeth I died without any children,
34:04her Scottish cousin, James VI, was named her heir
34:08and crowned James I of England in 1603.
34:13The Thistle and the Rose were finally reunited.
34:18But for Edinburgh Castle, there was plenty more drama still to come.
34:32For hundreds of years, Edinburgh Castle was besieged, battered and bombarded
34:38as war raged between Scotland and England.
34:42The conflict left its mark on the very stone of this incredible fortress,
34:48and nowhere more than here at the Half Moon Battery,
34:52built after the Tudor Queen Elizabeth I's army
34:56knocked down the old medieval building called David's Tower.
35:02After David's Tower was demolished during Elizabeth's siege of 1571,
35:07the rebuilding programme included one of the most distinctive features
35:11of Edinburgh Castle today.
35:14The Half Moon Battery wraps right around the southern face of the castle
35:19and it's designed to give the men firing these cannon
35:22the maximum range of fire over the area below.
35:27It's not the prettiest area of the castle, but I think it's utterly magnificent.
35:32You can't look at all this without understanding
35:35why they call Edinburgh Castle the most besieged castle in Britain.
35:40It looks as though it's still ready to go.
35:45Despite the fortified majesty of Edinburgh Castle,
35:49its days as a royal home ended more than 400 years ago.
35:55For all its formidable defences and palatial apartments,
36:00by the start of the 17th century,
36:03Edinburgh Castle had long ceased to be a place for kings and queens to live.
36:11Instead, royalty preferred to stay
36:14in the sumptuously decorated rooms of Holyrood Palace
36:18at the other end of the Royal Mile.
36:23Occasionally, visiting kings would hold court in Edinburgh Castle,
36:28but for the most part, that grand old fortress was now a military barracks.
36:35During the middle of the 17th century,
36:38Charles II turned Edinburgh Castle into a military headquarters
36:43fit to house a large standing army.
36:49In the 18th century, new buildings and barracks were added to the castle complex
36:55to prepare against the threat of foreign enemies,
36:58like the infamous French dictator Napoleon Bonaparte.
37:03But as well as a barracks, Edinburgh Castle also became a jail.
37:09The castle vaults, rooms dug into the giant rock,
37:13were made into detention blocks.
37:19Chris, this room was once a prison vault.
37:23How many prisoners would have been in here?
37:25There would be over 1,000 people in these vaults in Edinburgh Castle.
37:29Most of them were French, because in the 18th century,
37:33Britain spent most of its time fighting the French.
37:37But other countries were sucked into the conflicts.
37:41Spanish, Italian, Dutch, American, and even some British prisoners of war.
37:47So these are the prison rations, are they?
37:49Well, these are the prison rations for Americans.
37:52They got half rations, because the Americans weren't really a nation then.
37:56They were still considered British.
37:58So they were traitors.
37:59They didn't look too bad.
38:00I mean, what did you get?
38:01A quarter and a half of beer every day, a pound of bread every day,
38:05three quarters of a pound of beef every day.
38:07Apart from Fridays, when we had cheese.
38:09Yes, they would have their fish or their cheese they got on Friday.
38:12And this was the basic diet, but could you supplement this if you were a prisoner?
38:16Oh, yes.
38:17They were able to make things and sell them to people
38:20from the town of Edinburgh who'd come up to the castle.
38:23They could buy their fags then, their tobacco for their pipe.
38:25The more you tell me about prison in the Edinburgh Castle in the 18th century,
38:29the more it doesn't sound like too bad a deal.
38:31You've got your beer, you've got your fags, you've got a bit of writing paper.
38:34I don't think I'd need anything more in life.
38:36Unless you're an American. Unless you're an American.
38:38And you were denied all that.
38:40When the 20th century dawned,
38:42most castles had long been left behind as tools of war.
38:47But when the First World War broke out in 1914,
38:51Edinburgh Castle still managed to find itself in the firing line.
38:57This time, the threat came from above.
39:02During this war, Britain was bombed from the air for the first time.
39:07And in the sky above Edinburgh,
39:09there appeared monstrous new air balloons laden with explosives.
39:14They were called zeppelins.
39:17The zeppelin was named after its inventor, Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin.
39:23Before the war, they were used for passenger flights.
39:26But from 1915, the Germans adapted them for bombing raids to Britain,
39:31and from 1916, they were targeting Edinburgh.
39:35And you can imagine how terrifying that must have been.
39:38For the first time, civilians were facing the threat of bombing raids from above.
39:43A war could literally break into their homes at any moment.
39:49On the evening of Sunday 2nd April 1916,
39:53two German zeppelins reached the Firth of Forth
39:56and carried out the first ever air raid on Scotland.
40:03Reports of bombs exploding came shortly before midnight.
40:08In less than an hour, 24 bombs landed on the city of Edinburgh.
40:1313 people were killed, 24 were injured,
40:16and buildings across the city were destroyed.
40:19The bombs rained around the castle.
40:22One bounced from the road up to the main gate.
40:25Another landed here in the grass market, shattering windows and damaging homes.
40:30But that was as close as they got.
40:34That old castle was built to withstand a battering from medieval trebuchets,
40:39but it stood up pretty well to 20th-century aerial bombardment too.
40:49Thankfully, Edinburgh Castle's active military duty is now a part of history.
40:55But it's celebrated every summer
40:58in one of the world's most popular military pageants,
41:02the Edinburgh Tattoo.
41:07The Edinburgh Military Tattoo,
41:09a sight to stir the Scottish heart and a feast of sound to go with it.
41:13The tattoo's roots are in the 16th century,
41:16when drummers would be sent out from the garrison at the last post each night
41:21to inform the local innkeepers that it was time to turn off the beer taps
41:26and send the soldiers back to barracks.
41:33Today, over 1.5 million tourists a year flock to Edinburgh Castle.
41:42While they're in the castle, they can also look at the Scottish crown jewels
41:47and the Stone of Schoon, an ancient rock
41:50on which the monarchs of England and Scotland still sit for their coronations.
41:55They call Edinburgh Castle the most besieged place in Britain,
41:59and it's hard to disagree when you think of the number of times it's been assaulted
42:05by everyone from medieval soldiers with rope ladders
42:08to German airships dropping bombs.
42:13But I think its greatest claim to fame
42:15isn't the number of times it's been attacked,
42:18but the fact that it's always survived.
42:24And it's still here today,
42:26looming from its rocky perch, towering over the city around it,
42:30booming its gun from the walls every day
42:34to remind the world that it is, as it always has been, unbreakable.
42:56END CREDITS