Not counting the weeks between 15th May and 23rd July 2006, all of the public statues in Edinburgh but two are of women. (Queen Victoria stands at the foot of Leith Walk, and an unnamed South African woman stands in Festival Square.)
There is no statue of Margaret of Wessex, who dis-established the Celtic church of Scotland and established the Roman Catholic church in Scotland, for which Pope Innocent IV made her a saint in 1250. (There is a stained-glass window in her chapel in Edinburgh Castle, but no statue.)
There is no statue of Mary Queen of Scots, despite her being probably the most famous monarch Scotland ever had, and the only one children reliably remember – though oral history via children’s games can get a tad confused.
There is no statue of any of the Maries who have been Queen of Scots – not even Mary of Guise, who was Queen Regent of Scotland from 1554–60 and who in Henry VIII’s war of rough wooing (1543-1549, Henry’s war on Scotland to get possession of the young Queen Mary to marry her to his son Edward – a marriage which if it had taken place would have left Mary widowed and in the power of the English court in 1553) took such a part that The Complaynt of Scotland said “her courage and virtue exceeded those of the ancient heroines Tomyris, Semiramis and Penthesilea.”
There is no statue of Margaret of Denmark, the Queen Consort of Scotland from 1469 to 1486, though the dowry she brought to her marriage was Orkney and Shetland. She is the woman responsible for so much North Sea oil being in Scottish waters. You’d think the SNP or the oil industry – or both – would have set up a statue to her sometime since the 1970s.
There are statues of Hume and Adams in the High Street, and John Knox in St Giles, but none yet to Elsie Inglis Continue reading →