THE ORIGINS OF EDINBURGH'S 'TOUN COLLEGE': A REVISION ARTICLE

Abstract

On 14 October 1583 Edinburgh's 'toun college' opened officially to admit its first class of students. The project which had been in the mind of the town council since 1561 and had been actively revived in 1579 had finally come to fruition. The achievement has customarily been credited to the persistence of the town council and that in turn has always been attributed to the influence upon it of Edinburgh's impressive collection of radical presbyterian ministers, chief among them James Lawson, sub-principal of King's College, Aberdeen, until he succeeded John Knox as first minister of Edinburgh in 1572.' The delay after 1579 in founding the college has been variously explained: there were inevitable and complex difficulties in securing finance; there may have been opposition from entrenched interests at St Andrews; and there were lengthy legal technicalities to surmount before a site could be found, first at Trinity College and subsequently at the Kirk o' Field.2 There was also in these years a complex, shifting sequence of political events, beginning with the rise to, influence of Esme Stewart and James Stewart of Bothwellhaugh, later created earl of Arran, and the consequent fall and eventual execution in 1581 of Regent Morton. Their ascendancy at court was brought to a sudden halt, in turn, in August 1582 by the Ruthven Raid, in which a group of nobles headed by William Ruthven, earl of Gowrie, seized the king in a palace coup, to the undisguised delight of the radical ministers. The Ruthven regime, however, itself crumbled when the king escaped from his captors in June 1583, so that Arran was firmly restored to power by the time the college eventually opened.