How the west tamed the unicorn
At Stirling castle in central Scotland, seven handwoven tapestries, each 12 feet tall and 14 feet wide, adorn the Queen’s Inner Hall, home in the 1540s to King James V’s wife, Mary of Guise, and their young daughter, Mary Queen of Scots. They were commissioned in 2001 after royal inventories revealed that when James V built the palace, he owned more than 100 tapestries, though there is no record of what happened to them. Their fate is a mystery.
The inventories describe a set of dazzling tapestries depicting “the historie of the unicorne”. Something like that now hangs on the walls, modelled on the famous late
