Stone of Scone Stolen: Scotland's Identity Awakens

Four Scottish university students broke into Westminster Abbey on Christmas morning 1950 and stole the 336-pound Stone of Scone from beneath the Coronation Chair, pulling off the most audacious act of Scottish nationalist protest since the Jacobite rebellions. The heist was planned by Ian Hamilton, a 25-year-old Glasgow University law student, who recruited Gavin Vernon, Kay Matheson, and Alan Stuart for an operation that combined patriotic fervor with an alarming amount of improvisation. The Stone of Destiny had rested in Westminster Abbey since 1296, when Edward I seized it from Scone Palace and incorporated it into the coronation throne as a symbol of English dominance over Scotland. For 654 years, every British monarch had been crowned sitting above it. Hamilton had been planning the theft for months after a conversation with nationalist politician John MacCormick. The operation nearly failed immediately. The students drove from Glasgow to London in two cars, entered the abbey through a side door on Christmas night, and managed to drag the stone from beneath the chair. In the process, the stone broke into two pieces, a crack along an existing fault line. They loaded the larger piece into one car and hid the smaller piece in the abbey grounds, returning for it later. The London police launched a massive search, setting up roadblocks throughout southern England, but the students had already spirited the stone north. A Glasgow stonemason repaired the break, and the stone was hidden for several months before the students arranged for it to be draped in a Scottish Saltire flag and left on the altar of Arbroath Abbey on April 11, 1951, the symbolic site of the 1320 Declaration of Arbroath. No charges were ever filed. The British government returned the stone to Westminster, where it remained until 1996 when the Major government formally returned it to Scotland. The Stone now resides in Edinburgh Castle, traveling south only for coronations.