Dear Rowina"

I served in the US Army from 1957-1961.  I spent three years of that time stationed in various locations in West Germany.  In the summer of 1959, I was contemplating the idea of being discharged in West Germany and enrolling for a semester at Edinburgh College in Edinburgh, Scotland.  My family roots are in Scotland and Northern Ireland.  I thought it would be a neat idea to enroll for a semester, spend some time touring the countries of Scotland, Wales, and Ireland, and weigh the decision of going to college there or back in the states.

I thought before making a commitment, that I should take some leave time and get a taste of college life at Edinburgh as well as take advantage of the tourist opportunities.  At that time, I still had nearly two years left on my enlistment time, and I did not feel rushed to make a decision.  A friend of mine, a squad member, was a librarian at the Library of Congress.  He had been drafted, but we were both from Pittsburgh, and so we both took two weeks of leave time and headed for the Isles.  He had a Master's Degree in History and in Library Science.  I was a late bloomer as they called us back in the day.  I didn't get a real taste for education until I found myself in a nuclear artillery unit in West Germany.  My squad was composed of all draftees (9) and three enlistees.  I joined the army, two weeks right out of high school.  My buddy was more cosmopolitan and cultured and I was just a blue collar kid.  He like to drink and I didn't, making for a perfect touring situation with me being a designated driver.  He paid for my lunch and dinner every day and I did the driving.

We spent the first week in Belfast and Dublin, visiting cousins, he too was of Irish-Catholic roots.  He really knew his way around so I relented to him planning our itinerary.  He knew what I had been thinking about in regards to enrolling at Edinburgh.  My interest in history and education rubbed off being around all these guys that had bachelor's and master's degrees.  It quickly dawned on me that I did not want to make a career out of the military so I saved my money, took "through-the-mail" classes at the University of Maryland's military program.  We spent our second week in Scotland, using Edinburgh as our center of venturing out, and where we sat in on various history classes as American guests.  Two mornings we sat in on a class on the English Monarchs.  The professor was a bit much himself aristocratic from my observation.  In the second morning he was lecturing on Mary Stuart, and named several men that Mary Stuart had adulterous relationships with, and suggested that the Earl of Bothwell was really the father of James I, and that she [Mary Stuart] did not want to have her marriage annulled and doing so would have forfeited James I's rights of royalty and the throne.  Hence, the plot to kill Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley.  I remember the professor telling how Mary Stuart was obsessed with royalty and to her extent to protect the future of her son's future chance at being king.  I could not tell you the name of the huge text book the students had, but it was a huge book, at least six-hundred pages.

Once our leave time was over we returned to our post near the East German border, I soon forgot about going to school in Scotland.  Things changed, I got a job at the University of Pittsburgh as a computer programmer, enrolled in an employee of the university free-tuition program as a major in civil engineering.  I did that for two years until I experienced the call to ministry.  I transferred to a United Presbyterian college where I majored in History, in a Pre-Ministerial program.  My college mentor was a Harvard-trained historian and he had also confirmed what I had witnessed and heard at Edinburgh.

I really appreciated your informative remarks about Mary Stuart, obviously because of her son's ties to the Bible. It is interesting what you learn about celebrity types when you dig into their past.  My grandfather was an iron worker in the shipyards of Belfast, Ireland.  He is a descendant of Leif Erickson, worked on the building of the HRS Titanic, and sired 24 children, 12 to each of two wives.  The first wife died in of all places, a birthing clinic.

Given that Mary Stuart was a person obsessed with the "divine right of kings" it may help explain why efforts were made to cover her affair with Earl Bothwell, and the illegitimate birth of James I.  We will probably never know the whole story because there will always be people wanting to whitewash history, one way or the other.  The death of Princess Diana being the most recent celebrity for which the whole truth may still allude the public.  Thank you so much for your sharing an interesting bit of history.

God bless,


Pastor Bob