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 History of Stobhall
In 1367 Sir John Drummond received a charter of the
lands of Stobhall and Cargill which had been inherited
by his wife Mary Mountfitchet, only daughter of Sir
William
of
Montifex (Mountfitchet). Their daughter Annabella
married the future Robert III in 1367 and became, like
her aunt Margaret,
Queen of Scotland. Queen Annabella died in 1401 and
is an ancestress of all succeeding sovereigns of Scotland,
Great Britain and the United Kingdom. At this time
the Chapel itself may already have been standing; if
not
it was constructed
soon afterwards. Apart from the Chapel little remains
of the house where the family lived for over a hundred
years.
In 1490 the 1st Lord Drummond obtained permission
from the King to build a fortified castle. This he
did at Concraig near Crieff and called it Drummond
Castle. As the crow flies it is about 25 miles west
of Stobhall. Thereafter Stobhall was kept as a secondary
estate, and used for hunting and fishing by the family.
His daughter Margaret was believed to have
been married to James IV; she was certainly poisoned
in 1501 along with two
of
her sisters
probably to facilitate James’s dynastic marriage
to Margaret Tudor. (The elder son William Drummond
was executed in 1490 for the burning of eight score
Murrays in Monzievaird Church: an obviously excessive
sentence for this trivial crime. Fortunately he had
already had a son.)
In 1578 the small Castle was added to the Chapel building;
the Chapel was converted into living quarters,
with the Chapel room itself reduced in size to allow
a passage and two small rooms to be inserted. Around
the 1640’s the ceiling in the Chapel, then a
living room, was painted. The ceiling depicts the mounted
monarchs of Christendom including the mythical Prester
John and, somewhat surprisingly, the splendid King
of Mauretania on elephant back. The source of the illustrations
from which these images were copied remains unknown,
but some are good likenesses – notably Charles
I and Henry IV of France. (The labels over the King
of France and the Holy Roman Emperor are reversed so
Henry IV is labelled Imperator Germaniae).
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