Archibald Stewart (merchant)

Archibald Stewart (c. 1530–1584) was a Scottish merchant and Provost of Edinburgh.

He was a younger brother of James Stewart, 1st Lord Doune.[1]

In 1569 he married Helen or Ellen Acheson, a daughter of the goldsmith and mint official John Acheson. She was the widow of another Edinburgh merchant, William Birnie, and had a daughter Margaret Fraser from a previous marriage. Margaret Fraser was married to Thomas Acheson, a master coiner in the Edinburgh mint. Birnie had been the richest merchant in Edinburgh.[2]

The Canongate goldsmith James Gray made a cup for the couple, now known as the "Galloway mazer".[3] It has their initials "AS EA"[4] and the inscription, "Ane good mane is to be chosen above great riches, and loving favour is above silver and above most fyne golde, 1569".[5]

During the Marian Civil War, Stewart and Helen Acheson lent money to William Kirkcaldy of Grange who held Edinburgh Castle for Mary, Queen of Scots, taking some of the jewels of Mary, Queen of Scots as security. The goldsmith James Mosman arranged the loans.[6] Acheson and her servant came to the lodging of the English commander William Drury in Leith and received his obligation or IOU for the jewels.[7]

Stewart was Provost of Edinburgh in 1578 and 1579. The next Provost was Alexander Clark of Balbirnie.

He died in 1584, a year before his wife.

Helen Acheson died on 26 March 1586. They had a farm at Restalrig. She owned fishing rights at Inverspey.[8] She also had an interest in a property, a "great lodging" in the Cowgate, and paid an "annualrent" from it to the lawyer John Shairp and his wife, Eufame Acheson. The lodging was the venue for a banquet for Danish ambassadors in 1590 at the coronation of Anna of Denmark. Her will includes the debt from 1573 for money loaned to William Kirkcaldy and also money owed to her by the English commander at the "lang siege", William Drury, who had collected the queen's jewels from Kirkcaldy's creditors.[9]

They had no children. The mazer descended in the Stewart of Burray family to the Earls of Galloway. In 1954 the politician Jo Grimond spoke in the House of Commons that the mazer ought to be retained in Scotland, and it was purchased for the National Museums of Scotland with assistance from the Art Fund.

References
  1. G. How, 'Scottish Standing Mazers', PSAS (1934), p. 406.
  2. Michael Lynch, Edinburgh and the Reformation (Edinburgh, 1981), p. 52.
  3. The Galloway Mazer, Art Fund
  4. G. How, 'Canongate Goldsmiths and Jewellers', Burlington Magazine, 74:435 (June 1939), p. 287.
  5. Andrea Thomas, Glory and Honour: The Renaissance in Scotland (Edinburgh, 2013), p. 72.
  6. Michael Lynch, Edinburgh and the Reformation (Edinburgh, 1981), pp. 129, 139, 147.
  7. Joseph Robertson, Inventaires de la Royne Descosse (Edinburgh, 1863), p. clviii: National Records of Scotland, Achesoun, Helene, Edinburgh Commissary Court, CC8/8/15 p. 379.
  8. Simeon Ross Macphail, History of Pluscardyn (Edinburgh, 1881), pp. 245-6.
  9. National Records of Scotland, Achesoun, Helene, Edinburgh Commissary Court, CC8/8/15 p. 379.
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