One of the intriguing things about history is that quite often, when something begins to look like established fact, up pops something which throws it into doubt. A lovely example came up this week when I got an email from Historic Scotland interiors expert Michael Pearce. It concerned the wife of Pierre Quesnel, the Frenchman we believe may have been commissioned to decorate the castle’s royal palace in the early 1540s.

For the last couple of years I have been confidently telling people that Pierre, a member of the household of Mary of Guise (wife of James V) married a Scottish woman called Madeleine Digby. Michael, who has been doing a brilliant job piecing together all sorts of information about the origins of the palace, has heard from a French academic who says that records from after Pierre’s move back to France give the surname as both Digby and Hideby.

What makes this so interesting is that we’d never had any idea who Madeleine might have been, but Michael points out that there was a tapestry man at the Scottish court whose name was recorded as William ‘Edbe’. Could they have been related? There were plenty of intermarriages between paid courtiers at the time – just like many couples meet at work these days. Michael gives the examples of Janet Douglas embroiderer and David Lindsay herald/poet; John Tennent wardober/pursemaster and Mavis Acheson laundress; Kat Bellenden embroiderer/shirtmaker and Oliver Sinclair favourite/pursemaster.

It’s far from being conclusive that Madeleine and William were from the same family, but with more evidence we might be able to develop a whole family story where we presently have only a name. And one of the real pleasures of historical research lies in doing things like that, making the lives of our ancestors more real to the people of today.

Matthew Shelley