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Title: Edinburgh - Painted by John Fulleylove; described by Rosaline Masson
Author: Masson, Rosaline
Language: English
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*** Start of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "Edinburgh - Painted by John Fulleylove; described by Rosaline Masson" ***
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[Illustration: EDINBURGH FROM CALTON HILL
West from the Hill shows the picturesque and irregular mass of the
Castle, immediately behind the classic monument to Dugald Stewart, which
occupies the foreground of the picture. On the right of the monument and
the south side of Princes Street appear in succession the tower of the
North British Railway Hotel, and the monument to Sir Walter Scott. On
the left of the picture is seen part of the Old Town, with the Imperial
Crown of St. Giles’s, the spire of the Tolbooth Church, and the dome of
the Bank of Scotland, forming a well-assorted trio. Under these, and
over the railway, stretches the North Bridge; below lies the Calton Old
burial-ground, with its obelisk. In the near foreground of the picture
is a rustic stone seat much used by weary sightseers.]
EDINBURGH
PAINTED BY
JOHN FULLEYLOVE, R.I.
DESCRIBED BY
ROSALINE MASSON
WITH
TWENTY-ONE FULL-PAGE ILLUSTRATIONS
IN COLOUR
[Illustration]
LONDON: ADAM AND CHARLES BLACK
TORONTO: THE COPP CLARK COMPANY, LTD.
1904
Contents
PART I--THE OLD TOWN
CHAPTER I
PAGE
EDINBURGH CASTLE: ITS LEGENDS AND ROMANCES 1
CHAPTER II
HOLYROOD: THE PALACE AND THE ABBEY 22
(The Six Royal Jameses; Mary, Queen of Scots; and Prince Charlie)
CHAPTER III
THE CHURCH OF ST. GILES 45
(Gavin Douglas; John Knox; and Jenny Geddes)
CHAPTER IV
STORIES OF THE CLOSES, THE WYNDS, AND THE LANDS 62
CHAPTER V
SOME NOTABLE INHABITANTS, AND THEIR DWELLINGS 83
CHAPTER VI
SOME FAMOUS VISITORS, AND THEIR COMMENTS 102
PART II--THE NEW TOWN
CHAPTER VII
THE BUILDING OF THE NEW TOWN: A STAMPEDE FOR FRESH AIR 119
CHAPTER VIII
THE EDINBURGH OF SIR WALTER SCOTT AND HIS CIRCLE 129
CHAPTER IX
SOCIAL EDINBURGH OF YESTERDAY 147
CHAPTER X
THE HOMES AND HAUNTS OF ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 156
CHAPTER XI
EDINBURGH TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW 163
INDEX 169
***On page 88, line 2, _for_ James III. _read_ James V.
List of Illustrations
1. Edinburgh from Calton Hill _Frontispiece_
FACING PAGE
2. The Castle from the Esplanade 8
3. The Castle from the Terrace of Heriot’s Hospital 16
4. Edinburgh from the Castle 22
5. Holyrood Palace from the Public Gardens under Calton
Hill 30
6. The Apartments of Mary Queen of Scots in Holyrood Palace 40
7. St. Giles’s Cathedral from the Lawnmarket 46
8. St. Giles’s Cathedral from the Courts 54
9. John Knox’s House, High Street 62
10. Lady Stair’s Close 70
11. The Canongate Tolbooth, looking West 80
12. North Front of George Heriot’s Hospital 84
13. Quadrangle of George Heriot’s Hospital 90
14. The Martyrs’ Monument in the Graveyard, Greyfriars’ 96
15. Old Houses in Canongate 108
16. Princes Street from the Steps of the New Club 120
17. The High School and Burns’s Monument from Jeffrey Street 130
18. Sir Walter Scott’s Monument from the East Princes Street Gardens 154
19. Arthur’s Seat from the Braid Hills 160
20. The Water of Leith from Dean Bridge 162
21. The National Monument on Calton Hill 166
_The Illustrations in this volume were engraved in England by the
Hentschel Colourtype Process._
PART I
THE OLD TOWN
CHAPTER I
EDINBURGH CASTLE: ITS LEGENDS AND ROMANCES
There, watching high the least alarms,
Thy rough, rude fortress gleams afar;
Like some bold veteran, gray in arms,
And marked with many a scamy scar;
The ponderous wall and massy bar,
Grim rising o’er the rugged rock,
Have oft withstood assailing war,
And oft repelled the invader’s shock.
BURNS.
The great line of east coast lying between the two headlands of Norfolk
and Aberdeenshire is nowhere broken by another so bold and graceful
indentation as that of the Firth of Forth. The Forth has its birth among
hills that look down on Loch Katrine and Loch Lomond; flows thence in a
pretty tortuous course towards the east, forming a boundary-line between
the countries of the Gael and the Sassenach; is replenished by the Teith
from the Trossachs and by the Allan from Strathmore; meanders at the
foot of Stirling Castle, and seems never to weary of weaving its silver
windings into that green expanse of country where most the Scottish
imagination loves to linger; until at last, when there is poured into it
the Devon from the Ochils, its channel widens to the sea somewhat
suddenly. But even here the diverging banks, once so near, show an
occasional friendly inclination to meet; and at one point there is only
a mile of blue water and white waves between them, and then the view
widens and the shores part irrevocably, the one stretching away to the
extreme “east neuk” of Fife, and looking
To Norroway, to Norroway,
To Norroway ower the faem!
and the other rolling with softer curves to the South and England, while
the great German Ocean ebbs and flows between.
The point where the banks of the Forth are but a mile apart is now
spanned by that triumph of engineering, the Forth Bridge,--the largest
bridge in the world; but in olden days there was here a famous crossing,
and the names of the villages on the opposite banks, North Queensferry
and South Queensferry, still carry the mind back to the days when
Malcolm Canmore’s stately Saxon Queen, Saint Margaret of Scotland, was
ferried across here on her way between the palace of Dunfermline and the
Castle of Edinburgh. Edinburgh was not then, nor for centuries after,
the Capital of Scotland, but merely a useful stronghold near the
Borders,--a great rock rising abruptly among woods and lochs and hills,
on which, from before the earliest legends of history, a fortress had
stood,--an impregnable castle, built so long ago that none knows its
origin, nor even the origin of its name. Stow’s _Chronicle_, indeed,
dates the foundation of the “Castell of Maydens” 989 B.C., which is a
sensational date to mention lightly to the inquiring tourist from the
newer world. It is supposed that the name “Castell of Maydens” was
gained because, in legendary days, certain Pictish princesses were kept
there for safety; and certainly, from those hazy times right on till the
time of Mary, Queen of Scots, when she was sent to the Castle for
security before the birth of King James, Edinburgh Castle has always
been a useful place of safety to which to send royalties and rebels.
The earliest authentic romance of Edinburgh Castle is that of Malcolm
Canmore and Queen Margaret; and the oldest building extant in Edinburgh
is Queen Margaret’s chapel in the Castle.
The well-known story of Queen Margaret, the grand-niece of Edward the
Confessor, is that she and her brother Edgar Atheling and her sister
Christian all fled from England and William the Conqueror, and were
wrecked in the Firth of Forth. The King of Scotland, Malcolm Canmore,
was the son of that Duncan whom Macbeth put out of the way--in Scottish
history as well as in Shakespeare’s play,--and he had fled from the
usurper, and had spent his years of exile at the Saxon Court of Edward
the Confessor.
The son of Duncan
From whom this tyrant holds the due of birth
Lives in the English court; and is received
Of the most pious Edward with such grace
That the malevolence of fortune nothing
Takes from his high respect.
Little wonder that he received the Saxon exiled royal family hospitably.
He was a widower, and much older than the Princess Margaret, and a
warrior-prince; and he married her at Dunfermline. It all reads like an
old-fashioned fairy story,--the Queen, lovely and pious, washing the
feet of the poor, founding abbeys and endowing the Church, and filling
the Scottish Court with luxury of gold plate and rich raiment, and the
pomp of royal guards: the King, brave, warlike, and unlearned, kissing
his wife’s missals he was unable to read, and sending for his goldsmith
to bind one of them in vellum incased in gold and set with jewels, and
then hurrying off to the wars with England, and bringing back English
captives to serve as slaves in Scottish homes. The fairy story ends as
romantically as it began, for the last chapter tells of the winter days
when King Malcolm and his two eldest sons were laying siege to Alnwick
Castle to revenge a Scottish garrison, and Queen Margaret, dangerously
ill, watched and waited with her group of younger children and her
Confessor, Bishop Turgot, at Edinburgh Castle. Bitterly cold it must
have been in the Castle, where the bleak wind would howl at night, and
the snow melt as it fell on the rough masonry jutting out of the rougher
rock. Below, the leafless winter woods skirted wild morasses and lochs,
and stretched over hill and dale to the line of sea--that sea where the
Queen had been wrecked nearly a quarter of a century before, and which
she had crossed so often by ferry. But, in spite of cold and suffering,
the ascetic Queen spent her time in the little stone oratory in prayer
and vigil for her absent lord. On the fourth day Prince Edgar, the
second son, returned, and told his dying mother that her husband and her
firstborn son had both been killed. Queen Margaret, with words of prayer
and resignation, died almost immediately after hearing the news. This
was on the 16th of November 1093. Hardly had Bishop Turgot and the royal
orphans closed the mother’s eyes before they were roused by new
troubles. They looked down over the fortress walls and saw the Castle
hill surrounded by what must have seemed to them a horde of howling
savages,--men dressed in the skins of deer, with “hauberks of jingling
rings.” These were the Highlanders from the Hebrides, whither Donald
Bane, Malcolm’s younger brother, had fled when Malcolm had gone to
England. The Hebrides and the Saxon Court had educated the two brothers
somewhat differently; and now, after long years, Donald Bane had come
hopefully and cheerfully forth to kill his nephews and make himself
King. But not in vain had Queen Margaret lived the life of a saint. Up
from the Firth of Forth on that November day in 1093 there came a
crawling white mist, creeping over the woods and morasses, covering the
hills, leaving white density in its trail, till it blotted the whole
Castle out of sight of the enemy below. And who are these figures that
come stealing out of the western postern into the white woolly mist? And
what is the burden they bear so reverently? These are the royal orphan
children and the faithful Confessor, Bishop Turgot; and the burden is
the dead queen in her coffin. Safely down the precipitous rock, step by
step, they carry it,--awe-stricken by the miraculous mist sent by Heaven
to help them. Heaven sends many such mists from the Forth into
Edinburgh. It sent another to greet Mary, Queen of Scots, when she first
landed from France; but then it was not by a Catholic Confessor called a
miracle, but by a Presbyterian Reformer an omen. Nowadays they are
called “easterly haars.”
And so Queen Margaret made her last journey from Edinburgh Castle across
the Forth by ferry to Dunfermline, to the Abbey she had built, where, a
century and a half later, silver lamps were kindled on her tomb, for she
had been canonised by Pope Innocent IV. Of the group of children who
helped to carry their mother’s coffin down through the mist that day,
four of the five sons were Kings of Scotland in their turn, and one of
the two daughters became a Queen of England.
The Castle was always a safe royal residence; and, though the Scottish
Kings had palaces and castles elsewhere, they all lived from time to
time in this Castle of Edinburgh. Also, because of its impregnable
strength, it was used as a place of safety in which to stow away such
things as monks and nuns, political
[Illustration: EDINBURGH CASTLE FROM THE ESPLANADE
Immediately beneath the Half-Moon Battery is the entrance to the Castle.
To the extreme right of the picture on the north side of the Esplanade
shows a bronze statue of the Duke of York, whilst the Celtic cross in
its foreground was erected to the memory of the 78th Highlanders, behind
which is the Forewall Battery. Men of the Black Watch in khaki occupy
the south side of the Esplanade, with a drummer in the foreground.]
prisoners, royal brides-elect, young widowed queens, and the coveted
persons of infant princes. Scottish sovereigns, especially in the Stuart
days, seldom died peaceful deaths; and so there were generally left a
youthful queen-widow and a little crowned boy chafing under a long
minority in the Castle. Weary days must all these semi-prisoners have
spent there, looking out over wooded and hilly country to the Forth.
One such fretted treasure kept in the Castle was Margaret, the daughter
of Henry III. of England, when she was betrothed to Alexander III. The
King was only ten years old when he married her at York; so the little
Queen could not have been very aged, and she complained in letters to
her father of the sad and solitary place she was kept in, and that it
was “without verdure,” and, “by reason of its vicinity to the sea,
unwholesome.”
In the days of Wallace, and of Bruce and Balliol, Edinburgh Castle was
the scene of many a fight and many a siege. Edward I. of England, whose
name must ever be a black one in Scotland, garrisoned the Castle with
English soldiers and took away all the documents of national interest to
the Tower of London; and he also stole Queen Margaret’s Black Rood of
Scotland; and it was in Queen Margaret’s own little oratory that he
received the enforced oaths of fealty from a small band of five Scottish
clergy, among them the Abbot of Holyrood, and a Prioress. Sir William
Wallace recaptured the Castle, and the English took it again; and then
comes a romantic incident of the days of Bruce. The Bruce had entrusted
the retaking of Edinburgh Castle to Sir Thomas Randolph of Strathdon.
Among Randolph’s soldiers was one named Frank, who, long before this,
when he had been stationed at the Castle, had found out a way of getting
up and down the Castle Rock in order to visit a sweetheart who lived in
the town below. Frank undertook to lead a small body of men up the
perilous path he had so often traversed alone. Randolph consented; and,
one dark and stormy night in March 1314,--March has ever been a fateful
month in Scottish history,--when the howling wind and lashing rain would
help to cover the sounds of stealthy climbing, thirty men crept after
Frank up the precipitous cliffs, the walls were silently scaled, the
English garrison was overpowered, and Edinburgh Castle was once more in
the hands of Scots. Randolph, to prevent further fighting, dismantled
the whole place; and for twenty-four years the proud old fortress stood
silent and deserted,--neither clash of arms nor call of bugle, neither
shout of command nor shriek of dying,--only the rain and the sunshine,
day after day, high above the city. But this was not to last; and, after
all the English garrisons had been driven out, Edinburgh became the
favourite residence of David II., the Castle was refortified, and
“David’s Tower” built, in which King David II., the last of the Bruce
line, died. Since then, no king has died in Edinburgh,--though in
Edinburgh many a king has been born and many a king has been married.
When Henry IV. of England besieged the Castle, the young Duke of
Rothesay, eldest son of Robert III., was in command,--that gallant and
fascinating and profligate prince who was afterwards, tradition and Sir
Walter both aver, starved to death at Falkland. From the Castle he
looked down on the hated English hosts, and the story is that he sent a
challenge to Henry to meet him in mortal combat, with a hundred men of
good blood on either side. Although it was the month of August, the
invaders had been troubled with excessive rain and cold. The climate of
Edinburgh had risen to the occasion; and the chilly Plantagenet on the
plain sent a verbal message to the hot Stuart on the height, and hurried
home amid dripping banners and rusty lances.
The first of the royal Stuart widows who watched over a baby king in the
Castle was Queen Jane,--that gentle consort of the poet King James I.,
who had seen her first from the window of his English prison, as she
walked in the gardens of Windsor.
And therewith cast I down mine eyes again
Where as I saw, walking under the Tower
Full secretly, new comen her to playn,
The fairest and the freshest youngé flower
That ever I saw, methought, before that hour:
For which sudden abate anon astart
The blood of all my body to my heart....
King James had married Jane Beaufort in London at St. Mary Overie,[1]
and had brought her back to Scotland with him as his Queen. Thirteen
years later he was assassinated in her presence at Perth. It was to
Edinburgh Castle that she fled with her little son for safety after the
tragedy. But “Fair and false and fickle is the South”; and, less than a
year after the murder of the poet King, his “fairest and freshest youngé
flower” married Sir John Stuart, the Black Knight of Lorn, and so passed
out of view, leaving her little son to be wrangled over by the great
rival barons of Scotland.
And now there took place in the Castle one of the most tragic scenes
ever enacted there,--the “Black Dinner.” The old Earl of Douglas, head
of the great house of Douglas--ever in the history of Scotland
struggling for supremacy with the royal house of Stuart--died, and was
succeeded by his son, a youth of seventeen. When the young earl
surpassed the King in the splendour of his state, and rode out with a
retinue of two thousand lances, and sent ambassadors to the Court of
France, the ten-year-old King “admired his bold and haughty ways”; but
the King’s guardians thought it time to interfere. On the 24th of
November 1440 the Earl of Douglas and his only brother and their old
adviser, Sir Malcolm Fleming of Cumbernauld, were invited to a banquet
at Edinburgh Castle, and their retinue were excluded. Whilst they
feasted with the boy King and the Court, suddenly a black bull’s head
was set before them. The warlike young Douglases instantly recognised
and understood the ancient Scottish symbol of the death-doom, and sprang
up, drawing their swords, but were overpowered by armed men, the poor
little King being powerless to save them. After a form of trial for
treason, the two brothers and Sir Malcolm Fleming were executed on the
Castle Hill.
Edinburgh Castle, towne and toure,
God grant thou sink for sinne!
And that even for the black dinoir
Erl Douglas gat therin.
Another story of the Castle is that of the escape of the Duke of Albany,
the brother of James III. Albany, imprisoned in the Castle on suspicion
of treason, was to die next day. But Albany was twenty years old and
full of life and daring; he had a faithful “chalmer chield”[2] in the
Castle with him, and he had a strong castle at Dunbar, and knew he would
be safe could he reach it. What more was needed? Just what was brought
to him concealed within two flasks of French wine--a rope, and an
unsigned message that a vessel lay awaiting him in the roads of Leith.
The Captain of the Guard and three soldiers were invited to taste the
French wine, and “the fire was hett and the wine was strong.” At a late
hour Albany “lap from the board and stak the captain with ain whinger.”
The drunken soldiers were then despatched, and Albany stole out and
knotted the rope over two hundred feet of jagged cliff. The Groom of the
Chamber went down first; but the rope was too short, and he fell. The
young Duke returned from the cool night air to the hot scene of the
butchery, and brought sheets to lengthen the rope. When he reached the
bottom of the Castle Rock, this young Stuart who had just killed four
men, and who was doomed to death next day, would not forsake a “chalmer
chield” with a broken thigh-bone, but carried him on his shoulder the
two perilous miles to Leith and safety.
And there to-day stands the Castle, so grim and old and full of
memories; but down that northern cliff dangles no rope, and the two
miles between the Castle and Leith are two miles of busy, crowded
streets.
A few years later, James III. was himself a prisoner in the Castle; and,
by a strange irony of fate, it was this same brother, the Duke of
Albany, who helped him to escape,--not in the same picturesque fashion
he had adopted in his own case, for this time it was the provost and
citizens who assisted in place of one “chalmer chield.” For their
loyalty, the provost was rewarded with the “Golden Charter,” giving the
city magistrates right of Sheriffdom within burgh, and the citizens
received their “Banner of Blue,” embroidered by the Queen and her women.
But not all the Castle prisoners had the luck to escape; and some of the
memories of the Castle are of dark and dreadful tragedies. Numberless
wretches must have languished, their miseries and tortures unknown and
unrecorded, in dungeons cut out of the rock, or in noisome dens and
cells. The fates of some of those of higher rank are matters of history.
It was on the Castle Hill, in the reign of James V., that the beautiful
Lady Glammis, on an accusation of treason too readily believed against a
Douglas,[3] was burnt alive at the stake in sight of her husband and her
little son, Lord Glammis, who were imprisoned in the Castle. The
husband, mad with grief and horror, tried to escape during the night
that followed, and was dashed to pieces on the cliffs.
The Castle is associated with the name of Mary, Queen of Scots, as
closely as with that of Saint Margaret,--two Queens so very different,
and yet both Queens of Scotland, and each the mother of a race of Kings.
The tourist, when he passes from the dark little Oratory into the room
in which James VI. was born, steps across the centuries from the
beginning of Scottish history to the close of Scottish history.
It was amid all the unhappiness of Queen Mary’s life and the troubles of
her reign, shortly after the brutal scene of Riccio’s murder in her
presence, that the Queen was advised, by the Lords of Council, to remain
in the Castle until after the birth of her child. Here, then, in the
palace of the Castle, can still be seen the tiny, irregularly shaped
chamber, scarcely nine feet square, in which King James VI. of Scotland
and I. of England was born. And here, from the one small window
overlooking the Grassmarket, tradition says that the new-born infant was
lowered in a basket to the Catholic friends waiting for him below.
In the days of the last Stuarts, the two Argyles, father and son, were
both prisoners in the Castle before their executions; and, after the
Stuart dynasty had fallen, the Jacobites often felt the hospitality of
Edinburgh Castle. The better class in Edinburgh were very Jacobite in
their leanings and sympathies,--Jacobite almost to a man, certainly to a
woman. In George I.’s reign many a loyal Scot suffered torture,
imprisonment, and death in the Castle; and women of gentle birth were
among the Jacobites who endured barbarous treatment for their loyalty to
the fallen race.
With every century the outward aspect of the Castle has changed, so that
its jagged outline to-day, blotted against the sunset sky, is utterly
different from what dwellers in Edinburgh of any other century would
have known. But still, looking up at the perpendicular cliffs of the
Castle Rock and the strong walls and towers and fortifications that seem
part of them, one can picture all those stirring scenes,--the imprisoned
“maydens” of dim, legendary days; Queen Margaret and the escape through
the miraculous mist; the many sieges; the starving patriotic garrisons;
the prisoners in their dungeons; the wild escapes ending in liberty or
in death; the brilliant scenes during the reign of James IV., that royal
“knight errant,” who sat amid his knights and ladies to watch the
tournaments below the Castle walls, and presented a lance tipt with pure
Scottish gold to the winner.
Within the Castle much remains. Queen Margaret’s chapel is the oldest
bit; but there are also the palace
[Illustration: THE CASTLE FROM THE TERRACE OF HERIOT’S HOSPITAL
The opening in the terrace on the left of the picture shows a staircase
descending to the playground of the school. Most of the Castle is seen,
including the Half-Moon Battery, and part of the south retaining wall of
the Esplanade. A figure in a master’s gown occupies the foreground.]
and the great hall. This great hall was used for all State ceremonials,
banquets, and gatherings. It was here, in all likelihood, that Alexander
III. held that Council in the Castle on that stormy day in March 1286
before he took horse and rode through the darkness and storm towards
Kinghorn, where the bride he had married a few months before awaited
him,--rode till, close to his journey’s end, his horse stumbled--a
stumble that cost Scotland dear, for it plunged her into two and a half
centuries of incessant war.
Quhen Alysander oure Kyng wes dede
That Scotland led in luve and lé
Away wes sons off ale and brede
Off wyne and wax, off gamyn and glé;
Our gold wes changed in to lede,
Cryst, born in to Vyrgynyté,
Succoure Scotland and remede
That stad is in perplexyté.
It was in the great hall of the Castle that the treacherous “Black
Dinner” was held in James II.’s minority. It was in the great hall that
many of the Scottish Parliaments met, for they were always held wherever
the King happened to be at the moment, and the King often happened to be
in Edinburgh Castle. Here, then, gathered all those grave or stormy
Parliaments of Scottish nobles, presided over by a gallant Stuart. Here
they discussed the affairs of the brave and troubled kingdom; here they
doomed men to death or exile; here they planned wars with the “auld
enemy”; here they passed those laws which were “good laws, had they been
kept.”
It was in this great hall that Charles I. sat, surrounded by Scottish
and English nobles, on a June evening in 1633, at a great banquet given
by the Earl of Mar in his honour, the day before he was crowned at
Holyrood. It was here that, a few years later, Alexander Leslie, the
Covenanting General, gave a banquet to Cromwell and the Covenanting
lords, whilst a blue banner waved above them bearing the angry legend,
“For an Oppressed Kirk and a Broken Covenant.”
There is another room in the Castle, a smaller room, in which tangible
symbols of the days of Scottish independence can be seen. There, under a
vaulted roof, on a table covered with glass and set within an iron cage,
are the Scottish Regalia. The dim light reveals the rubies and sapphires
and diamonds and the big pearls set in the ancient golden diadem of the
crown, of date unknown, but which must have rested on the head of the
Bruce and have been worn by each of the Stuarts. It was James V., the
“Red Tod,” who added to the old diadem the two arches of gold,
surmounted by globe and cross; and it was in 1685 that, the former cap
of purple having become faded and threadbare during the concealment of
the Regalia in the Civil War times, the rather theatrical tiara of
crimson velvet, ermine, and pearls was substituted. This is the crown
worn by the hapless Mary, Queen of Scots, and that crowned her infant
son, James VI., after her forced abdication. This is the crown that was
set on the head of Charles I. at Holyrood; and this is what was so
pointedly alluded to by the preacher as “a tottering crown,” the last
time it was ever worn by a king of Scotland--when Charles II. was
crowned and scolded and lectured at Scone. “The Presbyterian solemnity
with which it was given to Charles II.,” says Mr. Robert Chambers,[4]
“was only a preface to the disasters of Worcester; and, afterwards, it
was remembered by this monarch, little to the advantage of Scotland,
that it had been placed upon his head with conditions and restrictions
which wounded at once his pride and his conscience.”
By the side of the cushion on which the crown rests lies the slender
chased sceptre, three little statues on the top--the Virgin, St. Andrew,
and St. James--surmounted by a crystal globe. This sceptre, in the hands
of the Chancellor of Scotland, has touched each of the acts of the
Scottish Parliaments, in token of royal assent. The mace has also a
crystal globe, said to have decorated a still more ancient Scottish
sceptre. A crystal or beryl of this kind, called in Gaelic
“Clach-Buaidh” (stone of victory), tradition avers to have been the
badge of the Arch Druid. Its position on the mace and sceptre is,
therefore, a symbolic emblem of dateless antiquity. The rich Italian
sword of State was a gift from Pope Julius II. to James IV. in 1507.
“Taking these articles in connection with the great historical events
and personages that enter into the composition of their present value,”
writes Mr. Robert Chambers,[5] “it is impossible to look upon them
without emotions of singular interest; while at the same time their
essential littleness excites wonder at the mighty circumstances and
destinies which have been determined by the possession, or the want of
possession, of what they emblematise and represent.”
One other romance of the Castle remains to tell--a stout and tangible
romance--“the great iron murderer, Muckle Mag,” as Cromwell’s list has
it. Mons Meg is thirteen feet long, and weighs four thousand stones. She
is the most ancient cannon but one in Europe, and she is a travelled
cannon. She accompanied James IV. in 1497 to the siege of Norham (James
IV. was fond of ordnance, and forged the “seven sisters of Borthwick”
lost at Flodden), and in the Lord High Treasurer’s accounts of her
travelling expenses on this occasion she is spoken of with an easy
familiarity--
Item, to the menstralis that playit befoir
Mons down the gait XIIjs.
Item, giffen for VIIj of cammas, to be
Mons a clath to covir hir IXs. IIIjd.
Item, for ijc spikin nalis, to turs with
Mons IIjs.
In 1758 she laboriously journeyed as far as England under the mistaken
impression that she had become unserviceable, and there for seventy-five
years formed one of the sights shown in the Tower of London. In 1829 Sir
Walter Scott personally insisted on the return home of what was so dear
to the national pride, and the portly prodigal was met at Leith by three
troops of cavalry and the 73rd Regiment, and escorted back to the
Castle in triumph to the tune of the pipes. With seven huge stone
cannon-balls lying beside her, “after life’s fitful fever” she stands on
the ramparts of Edinburgh Castle and looks across the new city to the
Forth.
CHAPTER II
HOLYROOD, THE PALACE AND THE ABBEY:
THE SIX ROYAL JAMESES; MARY, QUEEN OF SCOTS; AND PRINCE CHARLIE
The moon passed out of Holyrood, white-lipped, to open sky;
The night wind whimpered on the Crags to see the ghosts go by;
And stately, silent, sorrowful, the lonely lion lay,
Gaunt shoulder to the Capital and blind eyes to the Bay.
WILL H. OGILVIE.
There are two Holyroods--Holyrood Abbey, dating back to the twelfth
century, and founded by David I.; and Holyrood House, the palace of the
Stuarts, dating from fully three centuries later. The Abbey had always
contained royal apartments, and had been a place of royal residence in
turn with the Castle; and so it was natural that the tradition should be
retained, and the royal palace built in connection with the splendid old
Abbey. Of the once great and wealthy Abbey of Holyrood only a ruined
fragment remains, open to the sky; and of the palace only part of the
large sixteenth-century royal residence remains, included in a smaller
seventeenth-century building.
[Illustration: EDINBURGH FROM THE CASTLE
In the foreground of the picture are the embrasured battlements of the
Argyle Battery, at the end of which, over the steps, rises the spire of
Tolbooth Church. On a lower level of the Castle, to the spectator’s
left, is an iron cage used for beacons. Above this cage and facing the
Mound are the Royal Institution and National Gallery, and immediately
above the latter is the Scott Monument. The row of trees fronting the
tall buildings denote the position of Princes Street running east
towards Calton Hill, which appears crowned by the Nelson Monument and
backed by the Firth of Forth exactly in the centre of the picture. To
the right of Calton Hill on the distant horizon appears the Bass Rock,
to the left the coast of Fife with a portion of the island of
Inchkeith.]
When Edinburgh was only a castle rising out of woods and morasses, with
a cluster of wooden, thatched huts below it, all the land lying between
the Castle and Arthur’s Seat was part of the unhewn forest of
Drumsheugh; and there, where the red elk and the Caledonian boar roamed
under primeval oaks, the pious Celtic kings of Scotland were wont to
take their pleasure in the chase. David, the last of Malcolm’s five sons
who reigned, rode out from the Castle one day, followed by his
courtiers, to go a-hunting--this in spite of the protests of his
confessor, for it was the Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross, and a
day rather for vigil than for sport. Good fortune could not attend the
King in so rebellious a mood. He became separated from the “noys and dyn
of bugillis” of the royal hunt, and suddenly found himself alone and
confronted by a huge white stag, which, furious and at bay, turned and
attacked him. King David defended himself with his short hunting sword,
and would have fared but ill had not a miracle happened--a hand from the
clouds placed a cross in his hand, before which sacred emblem the white
stag fled. And that night, as the awed and wearied monarch slept in the
Castle, St. Andrew, the patron saint of Scotland, appeared to him, and
told him to found yet another monastery on the scene of the miracle. So
Holyrood Abbey was founded, and the canons lived in the Castle till
their Abbey was ready for them, in all its beauty, in the valley close
at the foot of Arthur’s Seat. But David I. of Scotland must not be
remembered only as a “sair sanct for the crown,” chidden by his
confessor and founding abbeys in obedience to dreams, but as “the
beld[6] of all his kyn,” who by his munificence to the Church protected
the land from ravage, and fostered arts and learning; who fought with
England till Scotland included Durham, Northumberland, and Westmoreland;
and who left Scotland peaceful and prosperous. It was in his reign that
St. Giles’s assumed the dignity of a parochial Church. The little rough
huts of the dwellers in the town, which would naturally have clustered
near the Castle to the east--its one not precipitous side, and where was
its main entrance--would now tend to straggle down towards the Church
and the Abbey, and so began that long street from the Castle to
Holyrood--that curious steep mediæval street down the ridge, so
characteristic of Old Edinburgh to this very day.
The Celtic dynasty had inherited from Saint Margaret their dutiful
generosity to the Church; and in their reigns Holyrood Abbey became very
rich and important, and the Augustine canons of Holyrood were permitted
to build the Canongate round about, and to rule it as a separate burgh.
But, with the death of Alexander III., the last of the Celtic dynasty,
troubled times began for Scotland. First came the patriotic struggle of
Sir William Wallace against the English oppression. Then came days of
civil wars of the Bruce and that splendid hero the Black Douglas, and
all the selfish tyranny of Edward I. of England, ending in the legacy
he left to Scotland--a century and a half of incessant war.
Those were days when no man had time to lay his hand to the plough, and
no woman bore a son but he was reared a fighter and a hater; when
English armies or rude bands of raiders would trample down the growing
grain; when, the sound of the axes scarcely still, the little thatched
homes of the wooden city would be wantonly kindled and left in smoking
ashes and desolation. During all this time, neither was the Abbey of
Holyrood spared by the “auld enemy.” In 1322 Edward II. laid it in
ashes; and when David II., son of the Bruce, was buried before the High
Altar, the silver shrine above it no longer held the miraculous Cross,
for it had fallen into the hands of the English at Durham, and had there
remained, a venerated exile in their Cathedral.
With the Stuart dynasty, in Holyrood as everywhere else, the age of
romance began.
It was in 1429, five years after King James I. had come to Scotland,
that a very dramatic scene took place in the Abbey. The King and Queen
and Court were present at Mass in Holyrood Church on the Feast of St.
Augustine. Suddenly the chanting of the priests broke off as the solemn
ceremony was interrupted by the apparition of a half-clad man before the
High Altar, who, holding a naked sword by the blade, knelt and presented
it to the amazed King. This was the Lord of the Isles, one of the most
powerful of the wild Highland chieftains whom James had been trying to
subdue, and who had lately taken arms against the King, and burnt
Inverness to the ground. In this savage and poetic way did the great
ruined Chieftain give in his desperate submission, and tradition
continues the poetry by insisting that it was at the intercession of
Queen Jane that his life was spared.
In the same year the twin infant sons of James I. were born in Holyrood
Abbey; and, seven years later, when Queen Jane had fled to Edinburgh
Castle with her eldest son after the murder of the King at Perth, it was
at Holyrood Abbey that the little James II. was hastily crowned. It was
at Holyrood Abbey that James II. was married to Mary of Gueldres. Their
son, James III., was also married at Holyrood Abbey, to that Margaret of
Denmark who sailed into Leith with her Danish fleet, and made Scotland
the richer by the Orkneys and Shetlands as her marriage portion.
In the brilliant reign of their son, James IV., Edinburgh consisted of a
steep ascent of “stane-sclated” houses climbing the mile and a quarter
of ridge from Holyrood to the Castle; and the closes and the pleasure
gardens of the “lands” ran down to the edge of the Nor’ Loch, which lay
dark and deep, and guarded the town on the north. The city wall, built
in 1240 to keep out the “auld enemy,” guarded the town to the south, and
climbed over the ridge and met the loch, leaving Holyrood out in the
cold,--for consecrated ground was considered safe, and in no need of lay
assistance. And here Holyrood lay, the huge Norman Abbey with its open
arches, Salisbury Crags and the green slopes of Arthur’s Seat behind
it, and country in front of it stretching down to the shores of the
Forth.
James IV. was crowned at Scone; but it was at Edinburgh he usually held
his Court, and what a brilliant Court it must have been! To Edinburgh,
as in Spenser’s _Faerie Queene_, there journeyed, in James IV.’s days,
knights from all over Europe, to take part in the famous tournaments
held below the Castle Rock or on the open spaces beside Holyrood, and to
try and win the lance tipped with pure Scottish gold with which the King
rewarded the best tilter. There gathered in Edinburgh, in the days of
James IV., not only the flower of chivalry, but men of science, and men
of art, and men of learning. Up at the Castle, Borthwick, the Master
Gunner, was forging the “Seven Sisters” under James’s supervision. Down
at Leith the King delighted in visiting the shipping yards, and seeing
the great progress of Scottish trade. At the Provost’s house at St.
Giles’s, young Gavin Douglas, son of the great Earl of Angus, was
translating Virgil into Scottish verse. In the city, Walter Chepman and
Andro Myllar were sending forth that new wonder into the land,--printed
books. James not only granted them a patent to print, but endowed their
types and bought their books; and in 1510 he granted the estate of
Priestfield[7] to Walter Chepman, who paid the crown suit for it by
“delivery of a pair of gloves on St. Giles’s day.”[8] Sir Andrew Wood,
that splendid old sailor and gallant figure in Scottish history, must
have been often seen about the streets of Edinburgh and at the Court,
and must often have held consultation with the King about James’s
darling scheme of a Scottish Navy. Lingering with groups of courtiers in
the beautiful precincts of Holyrood, there were many of the great
Scottish nobles whose town houses were in the Edinburgh closes,--Angus
and Argyle, Mar and Morton, and fifty more. There was the much-travelled
friar and Laureate, William Dunbar, “flyting” with his rival poet, “gude
Maister Walter Kennedy.” “As a courtier,” writes Mr. Oliphant Smeaton in
his _Life of Dunbar_,[9] “Dunbar boarded at the King’s expense, and
received each year his robe of red velvet fringed with costly fur. He
was required to be present at every public function, and, if it
presented scope for poetic treatment, to render it into verse. This was
the office of a ‘King’s Makar’ or Laureate.” There was Warbeck, the
pretended Duke of York, plotting in the shadows and wearying the
chivalry of James. There was Don Pedro de Ayala, the courtly Spanish
Ambassador (who had come on the pretext of offering James a Spanish
princess as his Queen, well aware that there was no Spanish princess),
and who was writing home to Ferdinand and Isabella enthusiastic
descriptions of King James, Scotland, and the Scottish people. “The
kingdom is very old, and very noble, and the king possesses great
virtues, and no defects worth mentioning.”[10] “An open and magnificent
court,” Drummond of Hawthornden acknowledges it; and Dunbar gives a
picture of the diversity of men that James IV.’s many interests brought
round him:--
Kirkmen, courtmen, and craftsmen fine,
Doctors in jure and medicyne:
Divinours, rhetours, and philosophours:
Astrologists, artists, and oratours:
Men of armes and valliant knights:
And mony other goodly wights:
Musicians, minstrels, and merry singers,
Chevalouris, callandaris, and flingars,
Cunyeours, carvours, and carpenters,
Builders of barks and ballingars,
Masouns, lying upon the land,
And ship wrights hewing upon the strand,
Glasing wrights, goldsmiths, and lapidaris,
Printers, paintours, and potingaris.
And the King who presided over all this, if but half of De Ayala’s
praises be true, was himself as skilled in the arts of peace as of war,
spoke eight languages, and said “all his prayers.”[11] Holbein’s
miniature is a witness of his personal beauty. All agree that he was a
fearless rider, a chivalrous knight, and a brave man. But he was
sensitive, subject to sudden fits of depression alternating with his gay
humour, and it is told of him that, though he had been but a boy when
his father’s estranged nobles had used him as a figure-head for their
rebellion, yet he always wore to the day of his death a hidden chain
round his body, in constant penance for his father’s death.
In his thirtieth year King James married little Margaret Tudor, daughter
of Henry VII. of England. The marriage was brought about by the
persistence of Henry VII., and was nowise according to the inclinations
of the Scottish King, who evaded it for several years after it was first
proposed to him. But State reasons prevailed, and at last James gave
way. The bridegroom was thirty and the bride was fourteen. But, if James
was a tardy wooer, the florid little Tudor had nothing to complain of in
the chivalry of the welcome she received from the courteous and
sensitive Stuart.
In August 1503 she was brought to Scotland, with a train of knights and
nobles, and James rode as far as Dalkeith to meet her, “gallantly
dressed in a jacket of crimson velvet bordered with cloth of gold.”[12]
Before the procession entered the city the King mounted in front of his
bride on her palfrey--his own charger being too restive to bear a double
burden--and so they rode into the decorated and expectant capital, where
the people filled the windows, and gaily dressed ladies thronged the
“fore-stairs”--open stairways outside the houses,--and all shouted or
waved their loyalty and their welcome. Tournaments and shows took place;
and, when they were alone, the king played to the little princess on the
virginal, and
[Illustration: HOLYROOD PALACE FROM THE PUBLIC GARDENS UNDER CALTON HILL
Holyrood Palace stretches across the picture east and west, and is
dominated by Arthur’s Seat and Salisbury Crags. The dark turret at the
west end of the nearest and north wing contains the private supper-room
of Queen Mary, the room from which the Italian Rizzio was taken to his
death. The end of the south wing shows beyond, and through a gap in the
mean buildings, occupying the foreground of the picture, is seen the
open space in front of the Palace, the restored fountain, and the
entrance to a carriage road called the Queen’s Drive. The conical roofs
of the towers of the Guard House appear to the extreme right. The gable
and east window of the Chapel Royal (part of the ancient Abbey),
together with the tower, show at the eastern extremity of the north
wing.]
then listened with bent knee and bared head whilst she sang and played
to him. The marriage took place at Holyrood with much magnificence; and
Dunbar the Laureate wrote “The Thristle and the Rois.” All this life and
poetry and splendour glowed in Holyrood, in a braver and a warmer time
than ours,--perhaps the brightest age Edinburgh has known. Little wonder
that Dunbar pitied his royal master when he had to leave it even for a
visit to Stirling, and wrote greeting to him from--
We that here in Hevenis glory
* * * * *
I mean we folk in Paradyis
In Edinburgh with all merriness.
But bright things come quickly to confusion. As always, the undoing of
the brave little land was brought about by England. Ten years after that
marriage day at Holyrood there gathered at midnight, in the moonshine at
the city Cross of Edinburgh, a spectral throng of heralds and
pursuivants. Trumpets sounded, and the terrified spectators heard a
ghostly voice read “the awful summons” to King James and to his Scottish
chivalry: the long death-roll of all who were to fall at Flodden.
Outside the city, on the Boroughmuir (part of the old hunting-ground of
the forest of Drumsheugh, now a built-over suburb, but whose every inch
is historic ground) lay the whole encamped host of the Scottish army.
When the sun next morning rose in the August sky, it lit up a thousand
pavilions white as snow, a thousand streamers flaunting over them, and
reared in their midst the huge royal banner of Scotland, with its “ruddy
lion ramped in gold,”--all in readiness to start on the fatal march
towards Flodden. The army moved on southward, leaving every home, from
the palace to the hovel, bereft of father and sons: and the women
waited.
Suddenly the stillness was broken, as the first wind whispers over the
land and troubles the trees with warning of a storm; and the people--the
women and the old men and the children--looked into one another’s
blanched faces and ran out into the street to learn the truth. One man,
escaped from the field of carnage, had brought the tidings to Edinburgh.
And then the storm burst.
Woe, and woe, and lamentation!
What a piteous cry was there!
Widows, maidens, mothers, children,
Shrieking, sobbing in despair!
Through the streets the death-word rushes,
Spreading terror, sweeping on--
“Jesu Christ! Our King has fallen--
O Great God, King James is gone!
Holy Mother Mary, shield us,
Thou who erst did lose thy Son!
O the blackest day for Scotland
That she ever knew before!
O our King--the good, the noble,
Shall we see him never more?
Woe to us, and woe to Scotland!
O our sons, our sons and men!
Surely some have ’scaped the Southron?
Surely some will come again?”
Till the oak that fell last winter
Shall uprear its shattered stem,
Wives and mothers of Dunedin,
Ye may look in vain for them![13]
All this Edinburgh has seen and known and felt. Remember it, as you walk
in her streets to-day--it is not good for us for the heroic to be
forgotten.
And how did Edinburgh take the blow? The first sound the people heard,
breaking through their cries of grief, was a Proclamation that “all
maner of personis ... haue reddye thair fensible geir and wapponis for
weir,” for defence of the town, and that “wemen of gude pas to the kirk
and pray.”[14] An indomitable race, that nothing could crush! The arms
in readiness were not needed, however; England was too crippled to move.
After another long minority, such as had occurred with each of the
Jameses, the wax candles at Holyrood once again lit up Court scenes. The
royal palace, the building of which had been begun about 1503 by James
IV.,[15] had been inhabited in the interval by the Duke of Albany, the
Regent, during his sojourns in Scotland, who had, no doubt, brought his
French ideas of elegance to bear on it. James V.,--the “Red Tod” of so
many adventures,--who had been born within its walls, held his councils
and his Court there, and, between 1529 and 1535, completed the building
begun by his father, and spoilt by the English soldiers. To Holyrood,
when he was but two-and-twenty, James V. brought his fragile little
French bride, Madeleine, daughter of Francis I., whom he had married in
Nôtre Dame at Paris. The poet Ronsard was a twelve-year-old page in the
Queen’s train when she came to Holyrood; and another in her train was
the founder of the great Scottish family of Hope, including that Sir
Thomas Hope who was King’s Advocate in Charles I.’s time. The gentle
French princess, when she landed with James at Leith on the 19th of May
1537, was already dying of consumption. She stooped and kissed the
“Scottis eard” when she set foot on it; and seven weeks afterwards,
within Holyrood Abbey, she was laid pitifully beneath the same kindly
“Scottis eard.”
Thief! saw thou nocht the great preparatives
Of Edinburgh, the noble famous town?
Thou saw the people labouring for their lives
To mak triumph with trump and clarioun:
Sic pleasour never was in this regioun
As suld have been the day of her entrace,
With great propinis given to her Grace.
Provost, Bailies, and Lordis of the town,
The Senatours, in order consequent,
Cled into silk of purpur, black, and brown;
Syne the great Lordis of the Parliament,
With mony knichtly Baron and Banrent,
In silk and gold, in colours comfortable:
But thou, alas! all turnit into sable.[16]
James V. had not a happy reign. His boyhood had been one of restraint
under the tyranny of nobles; and, after eight years of putting his
kingdom into order and subduing the troublesome Douglases, his journey
to France to seek a bride had thus ended tragically in her death. The
vagaries of his mother, Margaret Tudor, who, after her husband’s fall at
Flodden, had emulated her brother Henry VIII. in her marriages and
divorcings and remarryings, must have made her a domestic trouble to her
son; and abroad, constant wars with England broke his spirit. Four years
after his second wife, Mary of Lorraine, had landed at Crail to become
Queen of Scotland, James V., though not yet thirty years old, was a
miserable, half demented, sorely stricken man, dragging himself home on
the tidings of the disastrous defeat of Solway Moss, first to Edinburgh,
and then to the greater seclusion of Falkland. There, hearing of the
last trouble of all, that the child to whom Mary of Lorraine had given
birth at Linlithgow was a daughter, he, like Ahab of old, turned his
face to the wall. “It cam’ wi’ a lass, and it’ll gang wi’ a lass,--and
the deil gang wi’ it!” he cried: and so the Red Tod died.
The next scene at Holyrood is twenty years after, and the palace in the
plain, and the Castle on the height, and the city between, are all
covered with a thick, heavy white mist, like that which shrouded Malcolm
Canmore’s children as they escaped from the Castle with their mother’s
coffin. The “haar” has crept up from the Firth of Forth, and the Firth
of Forth is lost in impenetrable fog; but this time it is not a
ferry-boat bearing a dead Queen across to Dunfermline, but a State
galley bringing a living Queen home from France.
Mary Stuart, surrounded by her Scottish and French retinue, and with
three of her French Guise and Lorraine uncles on board, and her four
Scottish Marys in attendance, sailed up the Firth of Forth on Tuesday,
19th of August 1561, in so dense a mist that none could see from the
stern of the vessel to her prow. “Si grand brouillard,” the horrified
Sieur de Brantôme called it. Truly, if Queen Margaret’s haar was
miraculous, Queen Mary’s haar was prophetic; for little indeed did the
Stuart Princess see of what lay before her in Scotland.
The people of Leith and Edinburgh were taken by surprise, not having
expected their Queen for another week, and nothing was ready for her
reception,--except the haar. She rode in state to Holyrood next day. The
“grand brouillard” would have prevented her from seeing anything except
a vista of mist and drizzle, and no doubt she was glad to dismount and
find herself in the light and warmth of the palace, with her four Marys
and her French-speaking courtiers gazing curiously about them at their
new surroundings.
It was not many hours before Queen Mary was to learn to how different a
Scotland she had come from the Catholic Scotland her father and
grandfathers had known. After she had supped, and whilst the bonfires
still burnt on Arthur’s Seat, and the crowds were dispersing home
through the foggy streets, the weary Queen wished to rest. Suddenly a
noise;--a crowd of about five hundred people had gathered below the
palace windows, and were serenading the Catholic Queen by singing her
Protestant psalms to the accompaniment of fiddles. “Vile fiddles and
rebecks,” Brantôme designates them; and adds that the crowds sang “so
ill and with such bad accord that there could be nothing worse. Ah! what
music, and what a lullaby for the night!” Yes, Sieur de Brantôme! And
what a different picture from that of James IV. kneeling bareheaded
before little Margaret Tudor whilst she played to him on the virginal!
So, with a “grand brouillard,” with a serenade of psalms ill sung to
fiddles, and with a riot in her chapel during Mass, Queen Mary’s life
and troubles at Holyrood began.
Although the first stress of the religious revolution had greatly
changed the daily life and the characters of the people, it had as yet
not spoilt Holyrood Abbey, and Queen Mary saw it as the royal Jameses
had seen it, in all its grandeur of size and its grace of early Norman
architecture, as it had been built by David I. The armies of Henry
VIII., it is true, had recently plundered and burnt it; but English fire
never made much impression on Scottish stone.
The palace of Holyrood adjoining the Abbey was built round a great
square court, with a towered and pinnacled frontage facing a huge outer
courtyard separating the palace precincts from the fringes of the town,
and at the back meeting the Abbey. The whole palace and its extensions
and smaller courts were set in walled grounds, stretching to the base
of Arthur’s Seat. These included pleasure gardens, plantations, and
buildings, among which was the quaint building still called “Queen
Mary’s Bath.” The north-west corner of the palace proper terminated in a
turreted tower which contained Queen Mary’s rooms, and this tower,
rebuilt by James V. on the foundations of James IV.’s building, still
forms part of the modern Holyrood, and in it, to-day, Mary’s life stands
revealed. In these rooms she moved and smiled, spoke and wept. Here it
was that she tried, with her beauty and her wit and her courtesy and her
wonderful power of forbearance, to soften her rude nobles and turn their
harsh disapproval into loyalty. Here, in the audience chamber, the first
two of her famous interviews with John Knox took place. In Queen Mary’s
day most of the ground now devoted to the formal grass and gravel of
unused palace gardens was covered by the great Abbey. It was at the High
Altar of this Abbey, where the Royal Jameses had led their very youthful
brides, that Queen Mary, dressed in a robe of black velvet, was married,
between five and six o’clock one Sunday morning in July, to her cousin
Lord Darnley, a dissipated boy of nineteen. It was in the tiny little
room leading off the Queen’s room, where the lifted tapestry still shows
the entrance to the secret stair between her room and Darnley’s, that
she sat at supper on the night of Riccio’s murder. With her were her
sister the Countess of Argyle, and several of the Household, including
the lay Abbot of Holyrood, and the Queen’s Secretary, the doomed Riccio.
Darnley entered and seated himself. At that signal suddenly there broke
in upon them the brutal Lord Ruthven, followed by the other assassins,
and seized the Italian favourite who was clinging to the Queen’s skirts
for protection and crying “Sauve ma vie, Madame! sauve ma vie!” The
table was thrown down on the Queen as they struggled, and one of the
murderers levelled a pistol at her. They dragged the bleeding body out,
across the Queen’s bedroom to the entrance of the presence chamber,
where they despatched him with “whingers and swords,” and the blood from
his fifty-six wounds soaked through the wooden floor. All that night the
outraged Queen was a captive in her own palace, whence the Earls of
Bothwell and Huntly had escaped by ropes from the back windows. The
Provost and town “caused ring their common bell,” and came to see to the
safety of their Queen; but the Queen was told by her lords, her
husband’s accomplices, that they would “cut her into collops and cast
her over the wall if she attempted to speak to them.” All this a few
months before the birth of her child.
Stern swords are drawn, and daggers gleam--her words, her prayers are vain--
The ruffian steel is in his heart--the faithful Rizzio’s slain!
Then Mary Stuart brushed aside the tears that trickling fell:
“Now for my father’s arm,” she said, “my woman’s heart, farewell!”[17]
A year later, on the night of Sunday, 9th February 1567, there were
doings grave and gay in Edinburgh. Darnley lay “full of small-pox in a
velvet-hung bed in an upper storey of the Prebendaries’ chamber at
Kirk-o’-Field. The infant Prince James slept in his carved cradle at
Holyrood. Bastian, one of the Queen’s servants, was celebrating his
marriage in the palace. The “Queen’s Grace” went from her husband’s
sick-room, afoot under a silken canopy, with a guard of Archers, “with
licht torches up the Blackfriar Wynd,” to attend the masque at Holyrood
in honour of the marriage. Lord Bothwell, disguised in “a loose cloak
such as the Swartrytters wear,”[18] skulked with his accomplices in the
shadows of the Cowgate. And then--“a little after two hours after
midnight, the house wherein the King was lodged was in an instant blown
in the air,”--and Darnley was dead.
It was to Holyrood that Darnley’s body was brought, and the Queen lay in
a darkened room and her voice sounded “very doleful.” Well it might, for
the vicious Darnley dead and embalmed was to prove a greater curse to
her than had proved the vicious Darnley living.
It was in the old Chapel at Holyrood, at two o’clock on a May morning
three months later, that Queen Mary was married to Bothwell, “not with
the Mass, but with preaching,” by Adam Bothwell, Bishop of Orkney. “At
this marriage there was neither pleasure nor pastime used, as use was
wont to be used when princes were married.”[19] There were at least two
causes and
[Illustration: THE APARTMENTS OF MARY QUEEN OF SCOTS IN HOLYROOD PALACE
An ancient bed hung with faded crimson silk stands in Queen Mary’s
bed-chamber, together with chairs and other furniture of a later date.
Under the raised tapestry on the far side of the room is an open door,
through which is entered the private supping-room of Queen Mary, and
from which the Italian Rizzio was dragged to his death by the
conspirators. They gained admittance to the apartments by the small door
closely adjoining the supping-room. The ceiling of the bedroom is of
wood, divided into panels, decorated with initials and coats-of-arms.]
just impediments why those two persons should not have been joined
together in holy Matrimony; but none declared them.
It was to Holyrood that Queen Mary was brought on foot at eight o’clock
on the evening of the day after the battle of Carberry Hill; after the
parting with Bothwell; after the hootings and hideous insults of the
mobs gathered in the windows and on the fore-stairs as she rode
vanquished through her capital. She had spent the night “in the
Provost’s lodging” in the town. Thence she was brought to Holyrood for a
wretched interval before she was forced to ride, “mounted on a sorry
hackney,” at a furious pace all the June night, between the coarse and
brutal Ruthven and Lindsay, “men of savage manners, even in that age,”
says Mignet, to Lochleven and captivity.
After the days of the hapless Queen Mary the history of Holyrood
consists only of a series of more or less dramatic scenes. The first
three of these are in James VI.’s reign, and end the days when Holyrood
was the home of a Royal race. James VI.’s two sons, Prince Henry,
afterwards the friend of Sir Walter Raleigh, and Prince Charles,
afterwards Charles I., were christened at Holyrood. All the earls of
James VI.’s creation were created at Holyrood. And it was into the
courtyard of Holyrood, on Saturday evening the 26th of March 1603, when
the King and Queen had supped and retired, and “the palace lights were
going out one by one,” that Sir Robert Carey clattered, half dead with
fatigue and excitement, having ridden from London to Edinburgh in three
days, and dropt on his knees before the King and cried, “Queen Elizabeth
is dead, and your Majesty is King of England.”
Did the shades of all the brave and splendid Scottish kings hover near
as the words were spoken? Bruce, who fought at Bannockburn--Bruce, whose
daughter Marjory was the mother of the first Stuart king; all the
Stuarts, down to the gallant James who had ridden into his capital with
his Tudor bride behind him on the palfrey, and had fallen on the field
of Flodden; their son who, with Tudor blood in his veins, had died
cursing England, and whose daughter the English Elizabeth had
beheaded--did all their shades hover near as the words were spoken in
Holyrood? James VI., eighth of the line from the High Steward of
Scotland, knew himself to be King of the “auld enemy”--and the lights of
Holyrood went out one by one.
But as, at the end of the play, the curtain is raised once or twice
after it has fallen, and the scene-shifters stand back in the wings
whilst the gaily dressed figures bow before an applauding audience, so
the curtain has been raised once or twice on Holyrood to the sound of
the multitude huzzaing. One such occasion was when Charles I. was
crowned at Holyrood. A brilliant day for Edinburgh--a revival of the
royal pageantries once so familiar in her streets; a long procession
from the Castle to Holyrood between lines of soldiers in white satin
doublets and black velvet breeches and plumed hats; a long procession of
nobles on horseback, of heralds and trumpeters, of bishops with lawn
sleeves, of civic dignitaries in scarlet and ermine; a flash of colour
winding down the mediæval street, as of old, from the Castle to the
Palace--and then Charles returned to England, and the curtain fell.
It was Charles II., the Merry Monarch, who rebuilt Holyrood and gave it
its present aspect. His own desire was to erect a large new palace, such
as Charles I. had contemplated building. In the Bodleian Library at
Oxford is a plan of the second storey, dated October 1663, and endorsed
“the surveyes and plat mead by John Mylne, his Majestie’s Mr. Massone,”
and to it is attached by sealing-wax a piece of paper, on which is
written: “This was his Majesties blessed fatheres intentione in anno
1633.”[20]
James VII., while Duke of York, held Court in Holyrood and restored the
Abbey Church, and had Mass celebrated in it for his Catholic subjects.
News of the landing of William of Orange gave lawlessness the leave, and
the Presbyterian mob sacked the Chapel, burnt the Altar and organ at the
City Cross, and desecrated the royal vault, tearing open the leaden
coffins of the dead Kings and Queens of Scotland. But in 1745 the
curtain rose once again, and for the last time, on the Stuart drama.
Edinburgh was filled with loyal Highlanders, was noisy with the skirling
of pipes and the din of bugles, and Edinburgh folk went decorated with
white cockades, and the air was charged with excitement. There rode up
to the door of Holyrood that “gallant and handsome young Prince, who
threw himself on the mercy of his countrymen, rather like a hero of
romance than a calculating politician.”[21] How did they receive him?--
As he cam’ marching doon the street,
The pipes played loud and clear;
And a’ the folk cam’ rinnin’ oot
To meet the Chevalier!
Oh, Charlie is my darling!...
Holyrood again sheltered a Stuart, and all was hope and enthusiasm. It
was in the long picture-gallery of Holyrood Palace that Scotland’s
capital gathered her beauty and her chivalry, and gave her ball in the
Prince’s honour,--that ball immortalised in _Waverley_.
Again the curtain fell, and the scene-shifters peopled the stage.
In the middle of the eighteenth century the ruinous roof of the Abbey,
ill repaired, fell in, carrying with it the ancient arches. The ruins
were desecrated, filled with rubbish and insulted, the coffins of the
dead were stolen, and the skulls and bones of kings and queens lay
exposed, exhibited--were carried away, and lost. Among them was the
gentle Madeleine who had kissed the “Scottis eard.” Holyrood Abbey had
survived over six centuries the invasions of the wanton English, only to
be laid in ruins by the citizens of Edinburgh themselves.
CHAPTER III
THE CHURCH OF ST. GILES:
GAVIN DOUGLAS, JOHN KNOX, AND JENNY GEDDES
Age to age succeeds,
Blowing a noise of tongues and deeds,
A dust of systems and of creeds.
TENNYSON.
There is a saying that no one who has suffered an Episcopalian childhood
knows the story of Jonah and the gourd, and that the reply given is
invariably, “Jonah and the gourd? The _gourd_? What about a gourd? I
know all about the _whale_, of course!” It is observable that the
ordinary tourist who visits Edinburgh associates St. Giles’s Church with
the one incident of Jenny Geddes throwing her stool at the dean--an
incident of which it might be submitted that, like the connection
between Jonah and the whale, it was perhaps not the most dignified,
though certainly an uncomfortably dramatic, moment of its history. The
Church of St. Giles, like the prophet, had had other experiences--which
is perhaps not wonderful when one recollects that it was in all
probability the parish church of “Edwinsburch” in the ninth century. It
was certainly there in the days of David I., when Edinburgh was a
cluster of huts, built of the wood and thatched with the boughs of the
forest of Drumsheugh, with its dominating fortress up on the rock, its
great Abbey down on the plain, and half-way on the slope between them
the beautiful little massive early Norman Church. From its belfry, as
the sun rose high over the Forth beyond the Calton Hill, the bell would
toll the pious Scots to Matins, or to Vespers when it sank red at the
back of their Castle.
This early parochial church--probably built on the site of a still older
church, and that again maybe on the site of some heathen temple--was, on
the 6th of October 1243, in the reign of Alexander II., dedicated to St.
Giles by David de Bernham, Norman Bishop of St. Andrews.[22] The church,
like all other buildings in Edinburgh, suffered much at the hands of the
English Edwards, of Richard II. of England, and of Henry VIII. of
England; and the marks of the flames of those ruthless invaders are
still visible on the pillars of the choir. If it was misused by the
“auld enemy,” it was--until the Reformation--well treated by its own
people. It was restored from Richard’s fire, and building went on until
Flodden. In 1387 five chapels were added on the south of the Nave,
“thekyt” with stone, by three well-paid Scottish masons, on the model
[Illustration: THE CHURCH OF ST. GILES FROM THE LAWNMARKET
The statue of the Duke of Buccleuch shows immediately under the tower of
the Cathedral, backed by the modernised west end of the building.
Farther down the High Street, to the east, is the Tron Church, while to
the right of the picture is a portion of the new County Hall. On the
extreme left is the entrance from Lawnmarket to Baxter’s Close, where
Burns once lodged. (See “Lady Stair’s Close.”)]
of a chapel at Holyrood. The Regent Albany founded chapels[23]; and
storks built nests in the roof. Every one seemed busy building in the
church.
In 1454 William Preston of Gorton bequeathed to St. Giles’s a
much-prized relic--“the arm-bone of Sanct Gele,” which he had procured
from France; and the Provost and magistrates built the “Preston Aisle”
as a mark of gratitude, with “a brass for his lair,” and a chaplain “to
sing at the altar from that time forth”; and the male representative of
the Preston family, until the Reformation, bore the sacred relic in all
processions.
In 1467 St. Giles’s was transformed from a parish church into a
collegiate church, having a Provost, a perpetual Vicar having care of
souls, a minister of the choir, fourteen canons or prebendaries, a
sacristan, a beadle, a secular clerk, and four choristers taught by the
best-qualified canon. By the time St. Giles’s became a collegiate
foundation it was rich in chaplainries and altarages; and afterwards
there were many more endowments. Each trade that formed into a Guild
maintained its own altar; and, as these Guilds were rich, this was a
great source of wealth. The last endowment before Flodden was an annuity
of twenty-three merks from Walter Chepman, the earliest Scottish
printer, to found a chaplaincy at the altar of St. John the Evangelist.
This was confirmed by charter of James IV., on the 1st of August
1513--eight days before Flodden.
Ah, the summer days of Edinburgh in the year 1513! The King reading the
poems of his Franciscan friar Dunbar, printed by the honoured and pious
Chepman, who endowed the altars of St. Giles’s, where the young
Poet-Provost, of the proud race of Douglas, walked at the end of the
chanting procession amid the stone pillars, and went home afterwards to
turn Virgil into Scottish verse....
Gavin Douglas had been made Provost by James IV. in 1501, when he was
but twenty-six, and it was whilst he was living in the Provost’s
dwelling, bounding the west side of the churchyard (where Parliament
House now stands), that he wrote _The Palace of Honour_ and _King Hart_,
and turned Virgil’s _Æneid_ into the vernacular. Gavin Douglas was the
third son of that grim old statesman, the Earl of Angus, who had earned
the sobriquet of “Archibald Bell-the-Cat” on the day when the haughty
Scottish nobles hanged all James III.’s plebeian favourites over the
bridge at Lauder.
Son of mine,
Save Gawain, ne’er could pen a line,
Scott makes the Earl of Angus say; but “Gawain” penned many a line, and
penned the last of the _Æneid_ on the 22nd of July 1513, when
For to behold, it was a gloir to see
The stabled windes and the calmed sea,
The soft seasoun, the firmament serene,
The lowne illumined air, and firth amene,
* * * * *
Towers, turrets, kirnels, pinnacles hie
Of kirks, castells, and ilke fair city,
Stood painted, every fyall, fane and stage,
Upon the plain ground by their own umbrage.
After Flodden there were many prayers in St, Giles’s, but few
endowments.[24] No doubt, when that first Proclamation bade the women go
into the churches and pray, many a Scottish wife, many a mother, many a
girl with a secret sorrow to carry with her to the grave, took her
broken heart into the shadows of the old Church, and wept her
supplications before the little altars there.
Gavin Douglas was still Provost of St. Giles’s during these troubled
days, and his father, the Earl of Angus, was Provost of the city, having
succeeded Sir Alexander Lauder of Blyth, who had marched under him to
Flodden, and fallen on the field. So the Douglases held the helm; and
there could be this entry in the Burgh Records:--
Archibald Dowglas erle of Angius, Provest.--
Magister Gavinus Dowglas prepositus ecclesie collegiate Beati
Egidij hujusmodi burgi effectus est burgenssis pro communi bono
ville gratis.[25]
In 1516 Gavin Douglas was made Bishop of Dunkeld; but five years later,
on Albany’s return to the regency, the day of the Douglases was over,
and Gavin found an asylum in England (his nephew, the Earl of Angus,
was now Henry VIII.’s brother-in-law, having married the widowed Queen
Margaret); and he died in London of the plague in 1522.
Through the later part of the sixteenth century Scotland lay between
Scylla and Charybdis--between France and England; and politics, at home
and abroad, were strenuous. Henry VIII. “scourged Scotland as no English
king had scourged her since Edward I.,” and his soldiers left Edinburgh
burnt to the ground, and laid waste a circuit of five miles round it.
France offered help with one hand, and with the other attempted to grasp
the Scottish crown for the coronation of the Dauphin on his marriage to
Mary Stuart. Meanwhile Protestantism, already established in England,
was gaining a gradual and independent hold in Scotland; and against
this, and against the English alliance it threatened, Mary of Lorraine
and Cardinal Beaton struggled desperately and in vain. In 1534 and 1540
Cardinal Beaton burnt heretics; in 1546 Cardinal Beaton was murdered.
Mary of Lorraine had been made Regent in succession to Arran--to the
intense disapproval of Buchanan and Knox; “als semlye a sight (yf men
had eis) as to putt a sadill upoun the back of ane unrewly kow,” is
Knox’s rough comment. She filled Edinburgh with her countrymen, and
heaped honours on them, and riots in the streets of Edinburgh ensued
between the French soldiers and the native citizens, and hatred of the
French and of their faith grew bitter and strong.
In 1556 the most precious of the Church valuables were stolen, and the
life-sized statue of the patron saint was ducked in the Nor’ Loch by the
rabble and then burnt. The Archbishop of St. Andrews “caused his curate
Tod to curse them as black as cole,” and the Church authorities borrowed
an image from Greyfriars for the St. Giles’s Day procession, in which
the Queen Regent herself walked to do them honour; but when she left it
a riot ensued, and the borrowed image was rudely handled and defaced.
After this the Church valuables were boarded out for safety among the
faithful; but the army of the Congregation entered the town on 29th June
1559, and that same day the stones of St. Giles’s echoed back the stern
thundering eloquence of John Knox, the great Presbyterian reformer. John
Knox was the first minister of the city under the new form of religion,
and he preached in the central part of the church, opening from the
south, which division was called “the Old Kirk.”[26]
The interior of the Church was partitioned off and the subdivisions
appropriated, not only by various preachers of the new religion for
their own special services, but also by the laity for various secular
purposes. A court of justice was held in one, a grammar school in
another, the town clerk’s office in a third, a prison in a fourth, and
so on; and the Town Council found one of the ancient chapels a suitable
place in which to erect looms to test the exhibits of city weavers
accused of peculations. Any great religious upheaval produces, on the
part of the rude and vulgar, these manifestations of irreverence toward
the old order of things; and too much importance must not be attached to
them.
Darnley, three weeks after his marriage to Queen Mary, attended service
at St. Giles’s, but Knox preached “an hour or more longer than the time
appointed” on the wickedness of princes, and how “boys and women” are
set up as rulers and tyrants; and young Darnley was “crabbit”
afterwards, spent the afternoon in hawking, and never came to St.
Giles’s again.
After Queen Mary’s flight to England, Edinburgh was in a state of civil
war; and Kirkaldy of Grange, who held the Castle for the Queen for three
years, garrisoned St. Giles’s as a fort, hoisted cannon and soldiers up
into the steeple, and loopholed the gables for arquebuses, and John Knox
once again fled for his life.
Until 1585 Edinburgh citizens had contentedly, and perhaps with
sufficient punctuality, regulated their doings by the bells of St.
Giles’s; but in that year the Town Council bought, for the sum of
fifty-five pounds Scots, a clock from the Abbey Church of Lindores, and
hung it up in the steeple. Stormy hours were the hands of that clock
from the quiet Fifeshire Abbey destined to mark!
In King James VI.’s reign, stirring events happened in the Church of St.
Giles. The King often used the Church for conferences, which sometimes
ended in disputes between the King and representatives of early
Presbyterian zeal, not conducted with due regard to kingly dignity on
either side. In 1596 it was the scene of a difference of opinion of this
nature, and James had to take refuge from it in the adjacent Tolbooth,
and thence, when the Tolbooth was attacked by an armed mob, to hurry
home to Holyrood. It was after this incident that the King, instead of
carrying out his original intention of razing Edinburgh to the ground
and salting its site, contented himself with ordering the four ministers
of St. Giles’s to live in different and distant parts of the town,
instead of all four together in “ain clois,” hatching treason at their
ease.
It was in St. Giles’s Church, in 1603, that King James bade farewell to
his Scottish subjects, and that he was preached to by the Rev. Mr. Hall,
a Presbyterian divine, and wept over and exhorted,--and in his turn
wept, and promised, and took leave. It was at St. Giles’s Church, in
1617, that King James attended a service immediately on his entry into
Edinburgh on his first visit home from England. He had promised to
return to his Scottish capital every third year; but the years had
extended to fifteen, during which he had been able, as the powerful
sovereign of all Britain, to complete his long-cherished plan for the
establishment of Episcopacy in Scotland. It was therefore not now a
Presbyterian minister who preached, but the Bishop of St. Andrews.
In 1628 the “Krames” were first erected,--wooden booths with lean-to
roofs, sticking like barnacles on to the sides of the church, and
filling up the angles between the buttresses. The church then, rising
out of a huddledom of booths and goldsmiths’ shops and open markets and
stalls and jostling crowds, all closely hemmed in by the tall houses of
the narrow street, must have resembled many of the foreign Cathedrals of
the present day.
In 1633 Edinburgh became an Episcopal See, the diocese being formed out
of that of St. Andrews; and St. Giles’s, which during its long Roman
Catholic existence had been first a parochial church and then a
collegiate church, was converted into a cathedral church. It is still
very commonly called “St. Giles’s Cathedral,” the designation dating
from this short period of its life. The first Bishop of Edinburgh was
William Forbes, who died in the same year that he was appointed, 1634,
and was succeeded by five others, the fifth being Bishop Abernethy Rose,
the last of the Established Episcopalian Bishops of Edinburgh. He was
deprived on the abolition of Episcopacy in 1688, and became Primus of
the Scottish Episcopal Church, and died in 1720 in Whitehorse Close. “I
know at least one person,” writes Mr. Robert Chambers in his _Traditions
of Edinburgh_, “who never goes past the place without an emotion of
respect, remembering the self-abandoning devotion of the Scottish
prelates to their engagements at the Revolution.”
It was on the 23rd of July 1637 that the folly and obstinacy of Charles
I. brought about the riot in the Cathedral during which the celebrated
Jenny Geddes threw her stool at the Dean.
[Illustration: THE CHURCH OF ST. GILES FROM THE COURTS
A portion of the south end of the transept appears at the extreme left
of the picture, and farther in the picture, to the east, is an
equestrian statue of Charles II. A little to the west of this statue,
and just out of the limits of the picture, is a stone, believed to cover
the remains of John Knox. Above all rises the fine crown and spire of
the tower.]
“Since the days of John Knox,” says Professor Hume Brown in his _History
of Scotland_, “the citizens of Edinburgh had been noted for their
stubborn adhesion to Presbyterian doctrine and polity. With no other
section of his subjects had James VI. found greater difficulty in
enforcing the Articles of Perth. In 1584, Bishop Adamson, as the
representative of Episcopacy, had been violently interrupted while
conducting service in the church of St. Giles. If, therefore, Edinburgh
should patiently endure the new Liturgy,[27] its example could not fail
to have a good effect on the rest of the country. It was in the same
church of St. Giles that the experiment with the new Service-Book was
now made; and, unluckily for its promoters, Edinburgh even surpassed its
evil record. Every precaution was taken to ensure the decorous behaviour
of the congregation. The two archbishops with several of their
suffragans, the Lords of Privy Council, and the Lords of Session, were
present to give solemnity to the occasion. No sooner, however, had the
dean opened the new Liturgy than the tumult began. There arose ‘such an
uncouth noise and hubbub in the Church that not any one could either
hear or be heard. The gentlewomen did fall a tearing and crying that the
Masse was entered among them and Baal in the Church. There was a
gentleman who standing behind a pew and answering Amen to what the dean
was reading, a she zealot hearing him starts up in choler, “Traitor
(says she), dost thou say Mass at my ear,” and with that struck him on
the face with her bible in great indignation and fury.’[28] It was in
vain that Archbishop Spottiswoode endeavoured to allay the tumult, and
the service closed amid uproar and confusion--the bishop being pursued
to his residence with volleys of stones and imprecations. Such was the
discouraging reception of Laud’s Service-Book in the leading church of
Scotland.”[29]
And during this uproar tradition avers that a “kail-wife,” when the
collect was given out, hurled her stool at the Dean, crying, “Deil colic
the wame o’ ye!”
It is all very well to cast doubt on whether Jenny Geddes existed in
mortal life: none can doubt her claim to immortality. If tangible proof
be demanded,--is not the very stool she aimed at the Dean to be seen in
the Scottish Antiquarian Museum to this day?
It is difficult now for a stranger to understand fully the very strong
antagonism between the Episcopalians and the Presbyterians.
’Piscy, ’Piscy, Amen!
Doon on yer knees and up agen!
the little street urchins still cry in shrill disapproval as the
“chapels” skale.[30] The antagonism was in its early days political and
temperamental as well as ecclesiastical, for the Episcopalians were
royalists and cavaliers to a man. In the eighteenth century the terms
Episcopalian and Jacobite were held as almost synonymous. The two
classes were diametrically opposed in their dispositions and ways and
ideals; and yet each represented many of the finest characteristics of
the Scottish character, and each can lay claim to a goodly number of the
Scotsmen and Scotswomen of whom Scotland is proudest and fondest. But
the feeling betrays itself even yet where education has tended to
sharpen the angles of temperament instead of rounding them off.
“This is Edinburg,” a Cockney youth with a tourist ticket was overheard
to say, as the train approached the Northern Capital.
“Oh, Edinboro’, is it?” answered his companion, letting down the window.
“Oh, I s’y, this ain’t town,--I can smell the ’y!”
“That is the fimous Castle of Edinburg,” said the first, and both gazed
out at the Calton jail.
A little old woman, shrivelled with age, and neat and clean as a russet
apple in her white mutch and her shawl, gave a restless movement, but
said nothing. No one noticed her.
“Wasn’t it at Edinboro’ that Janie Gedds lived?” asked the second youth,
drawing in his head.
“Janie Gedds?--’oo was she?”
“W’y, Janie Gedds, that threw a stool at a dean’s ’ead and stopt a
Church service.”
“Threw a stool at a dean’s ’ead and stopt a Church service? W’y,
w’atever did she do that for? W’at imperence!”
And then suddenly the little old woman whom no one had noticed leant
forward, a flash of fire in the deep-set eyes under the white mutch, and
a brown wrinkled fist thrust out from the folds of the shawl. “Indeed,
an’ she was verra richt, sirs! Verra richt, she was!--An’ _I’d dae the
same mysel’!_”
The two Cockney youths collapsed as completely as ever did the dean.
When the deep-laid schemes of Charles I. “went agee,” the Presbyterians
held undisputed possession of the Church of St. Giles. It was during
this time that Sir John Gordon of Haddo, a Royalist, was imprisoned in
the “Priest’s Chamber,” afterwards known as “Haddo’s Hole.” But, when
Cromwell entered Edinburgh after the battle of Dunbar, the town was
flooded with English Independents,--all manner of sects,--who preached
in St. Giles’s Church and harassed the Presbyterians more than ever
either Roman Catholics or Episcopalians had done, until even the General
Assembly itself was prohibited by them from meeting in the church, and
“It must have been a curious spectacle to see these gentlemen marched
out of St. Giles’s by a band of fanatics more fanatical than
themselves.”[31] So, when there came the Restoration of 1660, and
Charles II. promised all that the Presbyterians asked, there was general
rejoicing, and feasting at the City Cross, and after the Lord Provost
and magistrates had “turned up their spiritual thanks to Heaven for so
blessed an occasion,” they “in a most magnificent manner regaled
themselves with those human lawful refreshment which is allowable for
the grandeur of so eminent a blessing.”[32] And even Jenny Geddes, it is
told, contributed her creels and her creepies to help form a bonfire.
But the Covenanters were to learn not to put their faith in
princes--especially in princes coerced to their faith. On the 11th of
May 1661, the head of the gallant Royalist, the Marquis of Montrose, was
taken down from its spike on the Tolbooth, and his mutilated remains
were gathered, and buried in St. Giles’s with pomp and pity by Wishart,
who had been his chaplain, and who, a year later, was consecrated Bishop
of Edinburgh. When the poor persecuted Covenanters taken at Rullion
Green were imprisoned in Haddo’s Hole and treated with barbarous
severities, it was this Wishart who fed them and did all he could to
obtain mercy for them,--this Wishart, who had himself suffered so much
at the hands of Covenanters that to his dying day he bore the marks on
his face of the rats who “had been like to devour” him in his loathsome
dungeon.[33]
It is pleasant to turn from all the stormy and tragic memories of man’s
inhumanities to man to the pretty and peaceful fact that in the spring
of 1700 there were hung in the steeple of St. Giles’s “a good and
sufficient cheme or sett of musical bells, according to the rules of
musick, for the use of the good toun of Edinburgh.” Was this the peal
that continued faithfully to jangle--
’Twas within a mile of Edinburgh toun,
In the rosy time o’ the year,
until, by reason of age, the jangling grew fitful, with little pauses
and blanks of silence, like a pulse that is beating out its last of a
long and busy life?...
If the Beatitude promised to those whom men shall revile and persecute
and despitefully use is also granted to stone and lime, then “Sanct
Gellis kirk “ is blessed indeed. Over six centuries ago it was burnt to
ashes by the English, and carefully and reverently restored and rebuilt.
Then, for nearly two hundred years it was slowly enriched and
laboriously embellished, till every pillar had its shrine and every
niche its altar, and its outer walls were irregular with the chapels
that had been added to it, and the beautiful open arched crown steeple,
the pride of Edinburgh to-day, was added by unknown hands.
And then all the altars were dashed down and the images burnt; and,
scarcely had the Church been “cleansed of popery,” when she was again
sprinkled and re-consecrated after the sacrilege; then again she was
“purged of idolatry,” and the Latin chantings of a French bishop had to
give place to the noise of workmen’s hammers and the creaking of pulleys
and the falling of altars and carvings, and nine days later St. Giles’s
found herself bare and empty and--whitewashed!
Her shadows have been cast by the wax candles bequeathed for the souls
of those in purgatory; and they have been banished by the torches when
John Knox held his Communions at four o’clock on winter mornings. Her
aisles have echoed to many doctrines, many angry denunciations, many
whispered prayers; they have held cannon and soldiers, they have immured
prisoners, they have seen gay wedding pageantries, they have watched
martyrs and statesmen laid to rest. And at last they were left dusty and
neglected: cobwebs hung on the walls,--spiders spun their altars
unreproved.
In 1758 the old Norman doorway, a survival of the thirteenth century,
was ruthlessly demolished: and, in 1829, under the name of
“improvement,” the architecture of the church was ruined, at the cost of
over twenty thousand pounds, according to the taste of the
builders,--the roof was plastered, the carvings and tombs and monuments
were broken, destroyed, and desecrated, galleries were built, and all
the past was insulted and the present rendered hideous,--and then again
it was left in dirt and neglect. From this state it was rescued in 1883
by the late William Chambers, who undid the deeds of vandalism as far as
possible, and magnificently restored the old Church of St. Giles.
CHAPTER IV
STORIES OF THE CLOSES, THE WYNDS, AND THE LANDS
It is, to be sure, more picturesque to lament the desolation of
towns on hills and haughs than the degradation of an Edinburgh
close; but I cannot help thinking on the simple and cosic retreats
where worth and talent, and elegance to boot, were often nestled.
SIR WALTER SCOTT, _Letter to Lady Anne Barnard_.
The long irregular line of slowly ascending mediæval street from
Holyrood to the Castle was, and is, the backbone of Old Edinburgh. From
this backbone there jut out on either side, forming, as it were, the
ribs from the spine, all those narrow wynds and quaint closes so
characteristic of the Old Town, and so full of the traditions and
stories of Old Town life. The main street itself is in three
divisions--the Canongate, nearest to Holyrood, then the main portion, or
High Street, and, highest up and nearest to the Castle, the Lawnmarket.
Between the Canongate and the High Street there used, in bygone days, to
be the famous old city gate, the Netherbow Port, for the Canongate, a
separate burgh, was beyond the Flodden wall, which at this point crossed
the ridge of the town. At the junction
[Illustration: JOHN KNOX’S HOUSE, HIGH STREET
To the left of the square stone water-conduit, which occupies the centre
of the picture, is seen the west front of this picturesque structure,
and still farther to the left a “fore-stair” of a building which may be
of an earlier date than the one known as John Knox’s House. The opening
into the Canongate to the right of the picture is St. Mary Street.]
of the High Street and the Lawnmarket stood the Church of St. Giles,
and, right out in the middle of the street and dividing the traffic into
two narrow streams, the hoary Tolbooth, or “Heart of Midlothian.”
This, then, was Old Edinburgh, the Edinburgh that Taylor, the
Water-poet, so well describes. “So, leaving the castle,” he writes, “as
it is both defensive against any opposition and magnificke for lodging
and receite, I descended lower to the city, wherein I observed the
fairest and goodliest streete that ever mine eyes beheld, for I did
never see or heare of a street of that length (which is half an English
mile from the castle to a faire port, which they call the Nether-bow);
and from that port, the streete which they call the Kenny-hate is one
quarter of a mile more, downe to the kings palace, called
Holyrood-house; the buildings on each side of the way being all of
squared stone, five, six, or seven stories high, and many by-lanes and
closes on each side of the way, wherein are gentlemens houses, much
fairer than the buildings in the high-street, for in the high-street
marchants and tradesmen do dwell, but the gentlemens mansions and
goodliest houses are obscurely founded in the aforesaid lanes: the
walles are eight or tenne foote thicke, exceeding strong, not built for
a day, a weeke, a moneth, or a yeere, but from antiquitie to posteritie,
for many ages.”[34]
Edinburgh, before the sudden extension of its boundaries at the end of
the eighteenth century, was thus a small, compact city, measuring in its
proudest days but a mile in length and a half mile in width; but,
though it was small, it was densely populated. Bounded in its growth by
deep ravines and by a wall and a great loch--defences against the
English--it extended itself in the only way it could, upwards towards
the sky, whence it need fear “no enemy, but winter and rough weather.”
Some of the highest houses in old Edinburgh were like vertical streets,
with a spiral “common stair”; and they contained from floor to roof
almost as many families as would a street in another town. The richer
and better-born citizens lived in the most comfortable “flats,” and
their poorer neighbours carried on their lives and their trades below
them; by which means all ranks and sorts of persons were jostled
together in a cosy, sociable “hugger-mugger” existence, quite
incomprehensible to the modern citizen.
The nobles of Scotland, before the Union drew them away to London, had
their fine old town residences in Edinburgh--the “lands”[35] bearing
their names. These were generally within closes, “obscurely founded in
the aforesaid lanes,” as Taylor has it; but many were in the Cowgate, a
fashionable suburb, or in the Canongate, which, being nearest Holyrood,
was the court end of the city. It is down this “fairest and goodliest
streete” that the tourist of to-day drives from the Castle to Holyrood,
or up from Holyrood to the Castle. The driver will point with his whip
at a gabled house standing forward into the street, and tell him it is
John Knox’s house. At the Church of St. Giles he will probably stop the
cab and descend, and, finding the door locked, will wander round the
building and gaze down at the heart marked on the stones where once
stood the Tolbooth, and at the initials I. K. where Knox is supposed to
be buried, though another version has it that his grave is below the
equestrian statue of Charles II. And so he will find himself in the
precincts of Parliament House, built on ground which in past ages was
the graveyard of the parish church. If he enter and have a glimpse of
the great hall filled with lawyers in their wigs and gowns, strutting
and fretting their hour as past generations did in their time, and as
future generations will do in theirs, then he will probably let his mind
rest upon Sir Walter Scott, the greatest of them all. And so his day in
Edinburgh will leave him with a confused impression of a long squalid
street full of draggled women and barefooted children, of groups of
soldiers from the Castle, of carts and cries, of open “fore-stairs” and
street wells, of ancient gabled roofs and of flapping garments hung out
of windows on poles to dry, of pious legends and obliterated carvings,
of an appalling number of drunken men, and of dark entries giving
glimpses of tortuous obscurities, or leading steeply down some narrow
tunnel with a flashing vista of the New Town in a blaze of sunshine at
the end of it.
But, in driving down that ridge of street from the Castle to Holyrood,
the tourist drives right through the history of Old Edinburgh, through
centuries of her stories and traditions, her pride and her romances and
her crimes. Down this street have ridden many gay processions, many
royal pageants. Often have the “fore-stairs” and windows been crowded to
witness a king lead home a foreign bride; or a regiment of brave Scots
go by, with music and the tramp of feet; or a prisoner driven to his
death; or, most familiar sight of all in ancient Edinburgh, to watch a
“tulzie,” a quarrel settled “à la mode d’Edimbourg,” as they said on the
Continent,--a duel to the death, or a street fight between armed men,
followers of great rival houses, the popular side ably assisted by the
fighting burghers with their spears. In the month of August 1503 the
ladies of Edinburgh gathered on the decorated fore-stairs, “gay as beds
of flowers,” to see King James IV. ride into the town with his Tudor
bride on her palfrey. During the minority of James V. the windows were
crowded with excited faces, whilst the terrific “Cleanse the Causeway”
raged below, and the townspeople handed out spears to the Douglases, and
the dead Hamiltons blocked the entries to the closes. Here Queen Mary
rode, a dishevelled prisoner, after the battle of Carberry Hill, after
she had parted with Bothwell, and “as she came through the town the
common people cried out against Her Majesty at the windows and stairs,
which it was a pity to hear. Her Majesty again cried out to all
gentlemen and others that passed up and down the causeway, declaring how
that she was their native princess, and doubted not but all honest
subjects would respect her as they ought to do, and not suffer her to
be mishandled.”[36]
When one turns aside from the main thoroughfare and penetrates into the
closes, one leaves the public life of the city and comes upon the
stories of the private lives of Old Edinburgh. Many of the closes, alas!
are gone. Sometimes only an entrance remains, with a name above it
recalling a hundred memories,--but the entrance leads to nowhere, or to
modern buildings. But some closes remain; and, as one makes one’s way
down from the Castle to the Canongate one can turn aside here and there,
crossing and recrossing the street to dive down some steep entry, and,
standing within it, where the broken plaster shows the bare oaken
rafters overhead, may read half-obliterated Latin, or trace armorial
bearings over doorways, or gaze through the open doors up spiral wooden
stairs, or--over the heads of the swarming little children playing in
the courts--at ancient gabled roofs and rounded turrets and beautiful
old windows, whence once fair ladies peeped, and where now the
ever-present “washings” hang suspended on poles, and add impressionist
touches of colour to the scene.
Every close and every wynd and every land has its history; and, as
nearly a hundred closes even now survive, besides the sites and memories
of many more, and as every close contains its lands, it would take
several volumes to tell all there is to be told. And so that invidious
and vexing thing, a selection, must be made, and a few of the thousand
crowding names taken haphazard.
Off the Lawnmarket there is a wide quadrangle called, after its
architect, Mylne’s Court. There was a long line of royal master masons
of that name, descending from father to son, from the reign of James
III. This close, built in 1690 by Robert Mylne, the seventh royal master
mason, whose handiwork is to be seen in many of the beautiful bits of
Old Town architecture, had a graceful doorway with a peaked arch over
it, grateful to the eye of the old master who designed it, but now
broken and defaced. When the close was built it enclosed some building
of earlier date, for another doorway had 1580 engraved over it, with the
legend “Blissit be God in al his Giftis”--the most popular of all the
numberless pious mottoes, Latin and English, that embellish the homes of
the Old Town. This building is now gone.
James’s Court, close by, is connected with the names of David Hume and
of James Boswell, and Boswell’s two guests, Paoli the Corsican, and Dr.
Johnson; but the buildings in it where they lived were burnt down in the
middle of the nineteenth century. Next to it--leading from it--is Lady
Stair’s Close, quite recently restored by Lord Rosebery, after whose
ancestress it is named. Originally it was called Lady Gray’s Close, and
the coat-of-arms and the initials W G and G S carved under the words
“Feare the Lord and depart from evill” are those of the original owners,
Sir William (afterwards Lord) Gray of Pittendrum and his wife Egidia
Smith, and the date 1622 is the date when they built it.[37] This Lord
Gray was a wealthy Scottish merchant in Charles I.’s time, and was one
of those who were ruined by their adherence to Montrose. He lost all his
wealth by heavy fines, and, after imprisonment in the Castle and in the
Tolbooth, died in 1648. Three years before his death, his daughter had
died of the plague in this close. Lady Gray survived her husband, but
apparently left the house “they had built to be so happy in,” and it
then became the residence of the Dowager Lady Stair. It must have been a
stately home in those days, with the Lawnmarket in front, and terraced
gardens behind, stretching down to the Nor’ Loch. The romantic story of
Lady Stair (born Lady Eleanor Campbell, grand-daughter of the Earl of
Loudoun, the Covenanting Chancellor of Charles I.’s time, and married
first to James, Viscount Primrose, and afterwards to the Earl of Stair)
forms the plot of Scott’s _Aunt Margaret’s Mirror_. Scott used to own
that he liked to “put a cocked hat” on to a story; and the cocked hat on
this one is very evident. Lord Stair died in 1647--the year before Lord
Gray; so it was probably just after she became a widow for the second
time that Lady Stair came to live in the close that now bears her name;
and here she lived for about twelve years, till her death in 1659. She
had long reigned as one of the queens of Edinburgh society; in her old
age she was noted and much envied for that luxury, a black servant--the
only one in Edinburgh; and whatever truth there is in Sir Walter’s
story, her troubles had not taken the colour from her life or from her
speech. When the Earl of Dundonald accused Lady Stair of libelling Lady
Jane Douglas (whose case was then before the Court of Session), and
further gave the world leave to call him “a damned villain” if he did
not speak the truth, the high-spirited old gentlewoman, Lady Stair, went
off straight to Holyrood, where the Duke and Duchess of Douglas were,
and there, before them and their attendants, said she had lived to a
good old age and never till now got entangled in any “clatters,”[38] and
struck the floor thrice with her stick, each time calling the Earl of
Dundonald “a damned villain,”--and then retired.
Baxter’s Close, where Burns stayed in 1786, is now part of Lady Stair’s
Close, and from the moment the tourist enters James’s Court he is
surrounded to-day by a mob of intelligent small Scots, with bare feet
and eager eyes, and told by a chorus of voices that “Robbie Burrrns
lived in yon hoose”--“It was yonder Robbie Burrrns stoppit”; and, if the
tourist linger to read the carvings, he is hastily helped: “Fear the
Lorrrd and depairt frae evil--but it’s over yonder Robbie Burrrns’s
hoose is!”
On the other side of the street is Brodie’s Close, where Deacon Brodie,
the daring burglar, one of Edinburgh’s picturesque criminals, lived.
There is a fine old archway inside the close, and a pleasant and
innocent odour of burnt treacle from a bakery near by. Riddle’s Close
has also been lately renovated, and was
[Illustration: LADY STAIR’S CLOSE
On the extreme right, in the foreground of the picture, is the house of
Eleanor, Dowager Countess of Stair, recently almost rebuilt by Lord
Rosebery. The large opening close to the circular building on the left
leads into the Lawnmarket, and in this building, which stands in
Baxter’s Close, Robert Burns once lodged.]
used as a settlement for students. It has a story of sudden death to
tell--probably several, were all known, for the enclosed court was
evidently intended for defence. Here was the house of Bailie Macmorran,
a rich merchant of James VI.’s reign, when rich merchants were held in
great repute by a needy king: this special one had more than once
banqueted the King and Queen Anne of Denmark in this very house. The
High School boys had a “barring out,” and actually held the High School
in a state of siege, and Bailie Macmorran was sent to settle the matter,
ordered the door to be forced open, and was then and there shot dead by
one of the boys. It is said that the boy who fired was the son of the
Chancellor of Caithness, and thus the ancestor of the earls of
Caithness, and that his gentle blood saved him from his ever being
discovered or brought to justice. Another thing to remember of Riddle’s
Close is that, two centuries later, David Hume lived up a spiral stair
on the east side of it, and there began to write his history of England.
Byers’ Close[39] brings one back from tragedy to comedy. In the old
house overhanging this close on the east, with three richly carved
windows at its polygonal end, there once lived that Adam Bothwell,
Bishop of Orkney, who married Mary, Queen of Scots to Bothwell “with
preachings.” A bit of old stair leading to a garden terrace that once
overlooked the Nor’ Loch, can be seen from Advocates’ Close. But in
Byers’ Close Lord Coalstoun’s wig, to any one who has read the
inimitable story in Chambers’s _Traditions of Edinburgh_, still remains,
like the coffin of Mahomet, suspended in mid-air. The author tells how
in that day (1757) it was the general custom for judges and advocates to
don their wigs and gowns in their own houses, and proceed in state, with
their cocked hats in their hands, when St. Giles’s bell sounded a
quarter to nine, to the Parliament House. Earlier hours must have
prevailed then than now, for we are led to understand that, though the
legal brethren assembled at nine o’clock instead of at ten, they yet
found time to lean over their windows after breakfasting, “enjoying the
morning air, and perhaps discussing the news of the day, or the
convivialities of the preceding evening, with a neighbouring advocate on
the opposite side of the alley.” It so happened that one morning two
very young women in the window immediately above that of Lord Coalstoun,
were killing time by the somewhat cruel sport of swinging a kitten,
suspended by a cord secured round it, up and down out of their window.
As the kitten came down, the learned judge popped out his head. In a
moment the maidens above saw it, and drew the kitten rapidly up,--but
the judge’s wig came with it, firmly fixed in the little angry claws.
Imagine the mirth tempered by dread at the upper window! But also
imagine the feelings of the senator below,--his wig lifted as by magic
from his head, and the morning air blowing “caller” on his exposed
cranium! A wild glance upward, and behold, his wig ascending
heaven-ward without any visible means of support! The laugh, so to
speak, was now on the cat’s side. “The perpetrators did afterwards get
many injunctions from their parents never again to fish over the window,
with such a bait, for honest men’s wigs”; and the incident was pardoned
by Lord Coalstoun,--if not by the kitten.
In Advocates’ Close there existed in the seventeenth century, in an
upper storey of the house of John Scougall the artist, a
picture-gallery,--the first public exhibition of works of art, it is
said, in Scotland; and preceding any such attempt of the same kind,
either in England or France.[40]
On the south side of the street the Old Assembly Close and Bell’s Wynd
are connected with another phase of polite society in bygone Edinburgh.
It was in the Old Assembly Close that those rigid and awe-inspiring
functions were held, presided over by some lady of rank and mistress of
the unwritten laws of etiquette, of which Goldsmith and Captain Topham
have both left such graphic accounts, and which form the theme of one of
the chapters in Chambers’s _Traditions of Edinburgh_.
Then the Assembly Close received the fair:
Order and elegance presided there,
Each gay Right Honourable had her place,
To walk a minuet with becoming grace.
No racing to the dance with rival hurry--
Such was thy sway, O famed Miss Nicky Murray![41]
Miss Nicky Murray was indeed famed. She was a sister of the Earl of
Mansfield, and lived in Bailie Fyfe’s Close, and there “finished” young
lady cousins from the country, and introduced them into society. She
presided over the Assemblies, seated on a raised throne, and a wave of
her fan silenced the musicians. “It is said that Miss Murray,” writes
Mr. Robert Chambers, “on hearing a young lady’s name pronounced for the
first time, would say: ‘Miss ----, of what?’ If no territorial addition
could be made, she manifestly cooled.”
After 1758 the Assemblies were held in Bell’s Wynd, until the building
of the New Town, and in 1824 the Assembly rooms, where Miss Nicky Murray
had ruled, were burnt down.
Niddry Street stands nearly on the site of Niddry’s Wynd, of many
memories, two of which throw light on the æsthetic side of the social
life of Edinburgh. It was here that Lord Grange, a Lord of Session,
lived. He had spirited his wife away to the wilds of the Hebrides, where
he kept her in captivity till she lost her reason and died; but none the
less was he deeply shocked at the immorality of the joyous Jacobite,
Allan Ramsay, when he began the first circulating library in Edinburgh.
Here St. Cecilia’s Hall still stands. This once beautiful oval concert
room was built by Robert Mylne the Master Mason in 1762,[42] after the
model of the Theatre Farnese at Parma, and here the music-loving _élite_
of Edinburgh gathered weekly, to listen and criticise. You were lost in
Edinburgh, an English visitor complained, unless you were competent to
talk about music all night, not only as an art, but as a science.
In Anchor Close,[2] on the opposite side of the High Street, was “Dawney
Douglas’s Tavern,” where Burns drank and jested among the “Crochallan
Fencibles.” Old Stamp Office Close,[43] almost next to it, has had a
varied career. The first scene in its history is the brightest: “a long
procession of sedans, containing Lady Eglintoune and her daughters,
devolve from the Close, and proceed to the Assembly rooms ... eight
beautiful women, conspicuous for their stature and carriage, all dressed
in the splendid though formal fashions of that period, and inspired at
once with the dignity of birth and the consciousness of beauty.”[3] The
next scene in the Stamp Office Close is when it was the meeting-place of
the famous Poker Club, whose members included all the _literati_ of
Edinburgh. In its early days this Club--a Jacobite institution--had an
entrance fee of half-a-crown, and its members supped at
fourpence-halfpenny per head; but in its Stamp Office Close period it
became more showy and less select. Stamp Office Close, like other closes
in the Old Town, was once the scene of mock-royal state, when the Earl
of Leven was Lord High Commissioner, and held his levées at this same
tavern--Fortune’s Tavern--where the Poker Club had been wont to meet.
And the last scene of all is one of squalid ghastliness; for it was at
the head of Old Stamp Office Close that, in April 1812, a band of young
hooligans, who had spent a night in riot and murder, were hanged on a
gallows on the scene of their crimes.
On the south side of the High Street a fine old “fore-stair” remains,
outside Cant’s Close; and between this and World’s End Close, where the
High Street ends and the Canongate begins, and where formerly stood the
Nether Bow Port, there are several interesting closes. First comes
Strichen’s Close, where the Abbots of Melrose had their dwellings, and
where, later on, Sir George Mackenzie lived. Next it is Blackfriars
Street which once was Blackfriars Wynd, where was the palace of Cardinal
Beaton, and where Queen Mary passed afoot with “licht torches” the night
of Darnley’s murder. Next Blackfriars Street is South Gray’s Close,
where the Scottish Mint, or “Cunyie House” was, after its removal from
Holyrood in Queen Mary’s time until the Union; and here, therefore, were
the Scottish coins struck, of native Scottish gold. Next to South Gray’s
Close is Hyndford’s Close, where Lady Maxwell of Monreith lived, and her
daughters (one of whom was afterwards Duchess of Gordon) used gaily to
ride up and down the High Street mounted on the pigs which had their
humble dwellings under the fore-stairs. In Hyndford’s Close also lived
the Countess of Balcarres, whose eldest daughter was Lady Anne Barnard
(_née_ Lindsay), the author of “Young Jamie lo’ed me weel,” and whose
letters to Lord Melville from South Africa were lately published.
Tweeddale Close, a door or two farther on, once the stately town
residence of the Marquises of Tweeddale, is now indissolubly connected
with the story of a mysterious crime,--the Begbie murder; for it was
just within this close that a bank porter was stabbed to death on a dark
November afternoon in 1806. The murderer, in spite of all the hue and
cry and horror that followed on his crime, died undiscovered.
On the north side of the High Street, on either side of John Knox’s
manse, are two edifices whose outside decorations usually excite the
wonder of the stranger. One of these, Bailie Fyfe’s Close (where Miss
Nicky Murray “finished” her country cousins in all the airs and graces
of the eighteenth century), is the “Heave awa’ Tavern,” and bears the
head of a young lad carved in stone, and the words “Heave awa’ chaps,
I’m no dead yet!” It was here that, on Sunday morning, 24th November
1861, a fine old dwelling, dating from 1612, sank suddenly, and buried
thirty-five people in its ruins. This is the event of which Stevenson
speaks in his _Picturesque Notes_,--enveloping it in a haze of gloom and
rhetoric, and somehow conveying the impression that the fall was a
judgment from Heaven on the city for some sin unknown, but grimly
hinted--possibly its climate. But Stevenson omits the touch of heroism
that crowns the tragedy: the boy whose brave young voice was heard under
the beams and masonry that the rescuers were digging at--“Heave awa’
chaps, I’m no deid yet!” A building on the Canongate side of John Knox’s
manse, a little way farther on, bears the enormous figure of what might
be thought to be an Ethiopian, did not the name “Morocco Close” prove it
intended for a Moor. There are several legends to account for this
effigy; but all agree in giving an Edinburgh maiden (some make her the
daughter of the Provost) to reign over the harem of the Sultan of
Morocco. Some versions say that it was her brother who, having gained
wealth by merchant dealings with his Morocco connexions, proudly
decorated his house with an imaginary portrait of his brother-in-law,
whom he has dressed in a necklace and a turban.
A little farther on is a close commonly called “Bible Close,” from the
fact that it has a large open book carved over its entrance, on the
pages of which is engraved a verse from the metrical version of the
133rd Psalm:--
Behold, how good a thing it is,
And how becoming well,
Together such as brethren are
In unity to dwell.
This is Shoemakers’ Land; and the sentiment was evidently a favourite
one, for the Cordiners’ land in West Port, and a court-house in
Potterrow, also bore it.
It is in the Canongate that the most stately buildings remain, a fact
not wonderful when one learns that in the eighteenth century, before the
Scottish nobles “left their hame,” the Canongate included among its
residents no less than two Dukes, sixteen Earls, two Countesses, seven
Barons of the Realm, thirteen Baronets, four Commanders-in-Chief, seven
Lords of Session, and five “eminent men”; not to mention a bank, a
ladies’ school, and two inns. What material for romance! Some of the
background remains, though the actors are gone.
On the south side of the Canongate are the three great houses: Moray
House; a House “wi’oot a name” or a history, but with three carved Latin
mottoes, and the date 1570 right across its frontage; and Queensberry
House. Between these are several wonderfully interesting old buildings
with rounded turrets containing turnpike stairs, lit by strongly barred
windows.
On the north side of the Canongate, besides innumerable closes, all with
interesting stories, are the Canongate Tolbooth, Whitehorse Inn, and the
Canongate Parish Church.
Moray House was built in the reign of Charles I. by Lady Home (sister of
the Countess of Moray), and is beautiful architecturally as well as
interesting historically. Here Cromwell stayed during his first visit to
Edinburgh in the summer of 1648; and the Cavalier party “talked very
loud that he did communicate,” in Moray House, to the Marquis of Argyle
and other disloyal peers and clergy, “his design in reference to the
King.” But Moray House is chiefly notorious for its Balcony Scene. On
Saturday, 15th May 1650, the Marquis of Argyle was attending the
marriage festivities of his son, Lord Lorn, and the Earl of Moray’s
daughter; and on that day the great Montrose was dragged on a hurdle
through the streets of Edinburgh to the Tolbooth, amid all the insults
that the cruelty of the Covenanting rabble could devise.
He either fears his fate too much,
Or his deserts are small,
Who dares not put it to the touch
To gain or lose it all.[44]
As the procession passed Moray House, the entire wedding party stepped
out on to the balcony to exult over the fallen hero. It was an incident
worthy of the French Revolution--the narrow street packed with a yelling
and execrating populace, and in the midst of them that pale, proud,
beautiful face of the vanquished royalist, and in the balcony above the
gaily dressed group of wedding guests. The enemies looked at each other,
and before the steady dignity of Montrose’s gaze Argyle turned away.
It was in a summer-house in the garden of Moray House that some of the
signatures were affixed to the Treaty of Union in 1707, though others
were signed in the greater secrecy of a cellar in the High Street.
In Queensberry House a horrible tragedy took place
[Illustration: THE CANONGATE TOLBOOTH, LOOKING WEST
On the right of the picture rises the Canongate Tolbooth with its
conical roof and projecting clock, reminding one strongly of French
architecture. The spire showing in the distance belongs to the Tolbooth
Church, at the top of Lawnmarket.]
the day the Treaty of the Union was passed. All Edinburgh had gathered
at the Parliament House, many in order to mob the promoters of the hated
measure, and the Canongate was left silent and deserted. The Marquis of
Queensberry was prominent among those who had brought about the Union;
and, when he returned home in triumph with his family and household, it
was to find that in their absence the gigantic idiot son, Lord
Drumlanrig, had escaped from his darkened prison-room, had wandered
through the empty house till he came to the kitchen, and had there found
the little turnspit turning the joint roasting for dinner. He had taken
the joint from the fire, killed and spitted the child, and was devouring
the half-roasted body. “This horrid act of his child was, according to
the common sort of people, the judgment of God upon him for his wicked
concern in the Union.”[45]
A pleasanter memory of Queensberry House is of
... Kitty, beautiful and young,
And wild as colt untamed,
who was the patroness of the poet Gay.
The Canongate Tolbooth, with its barred windows, square tower, and
turrets, forms to-day a picturesque and noticeable feature just where
the Canongate ends.
Close to it is the gem of all the Edinburgh closes,--Whitehorse
Close,--with its famous old inn with overhanging timber porches and its
flight of steps branching to left and right.[46] This very fine old
close is still intact,--has indeed been lately renovated. There is a
story told that it was here that the fourteen Covenanting lords gathered
to ride to Berwick in obedience to King Charles’s summons, and the
Edinburgh citizens filled the court and prevented them, lest evil
communications should corrupt good manners, and Montrose was the only
one who got through the press and rode to his King. But, as a matter of
fact, Loudon and Lothian also went to Berwick; and it is probable that
Argyle and the other ten were inspired by other motives than fear of a
street crowd for their refusal to go. The palace of John Paterson, the
fifth of the Established Episcopalian Bishops of Edinburgh, a stately
old mansion with a stone turnpike stair, is within Whitehorse Close. It
is still called “the Bishop’s palace,” though many who call it so are
unaware what manner of Bishop had his home in it.
Almost the last building, before the street widens out in front of the
palace, is the old Canongate Parish Church, where in Catholic days all
the ancient Guilds had each its pew, and in whose “God’s acre” so many
of Edinburgh’s most famous and worthy citizens lie at rest, at the foot
of the town where they spent their days.
CHAPTER V
SOME NOTABLE INHABITANTS, AND THEIR DWELLINGS
I ken a toon, wa’d roond, and biggit weel,
Where the women’s a’ weel-faured, and the men’s brave and leal,
And ye ca’ ilka ane by a weel-kent name;
And when I gang to yon toon,--I’m gangin’ to my hame!
I ken a toon: it’s gey grim and auld;
It’s biggit o’ grey stane, and some finds it cauld;
It’s biggit up and doon on heichts beside the sea;
But gif I get to yon toon--I’se bide there till I dee!
The cosmopolitan view is nowadays the fashionable one, and no man stoops
to own to a national prejudice, a national accent, or even a national
pride. It may be as well. Trafalgar might have been won had Nelson never
advised his men to hate a Frenchman as they would the devil. Perhaps,
and perhaps not. It sounds a trifle harsh that King Robert the Bruce, on
the mere suspicion that Sir Piers de Lombard had “ane English hart,”
“made him to be hangit and drawen.” Perhaps, and perhaps not. At any
rate, our stay-at-home ancestors bore the stamp of their nationality on
character, thought, physiognomy, and speech. There were strong feelings
in those days, that often found strong expression, and there were racy
eccentricities and unsuppressed play of individuality; and all this gave
colour and zest to local society. Before centralisation robbed Edinburgh
of so many of her best citizens, her society was full of intellectual
chiefs, of notabilities, and of “characters.” After all that has been
said and sung of the beauty and romance of the grey metropolis, it is in
great part due to the number and variety of remarkable persons who have
been citizens of Edinburgh, or are in some way associated with it, that
it wields so great a fascination and inspires so deep an interest.
The history of Edinburgh to the end of the eighteenth century is the
history of the Old Town; and all the inhabitants till then were Old Town
citizens. Few cities can enumerate so varied and brilliant a series. In
the first place, of the unbroken line of Stuart sovereigns of Scotland,
all, from the poet King James I. to Queen Mary, are famed alike for
their beauty and their intellect. _Their_ Edinburgh dwellings were the
Castle and Holyrood. Then there is a long train of great Scottish nobles
and clergy who lived in Edinburgh and helped to rule Scotland. There is
a goodly company of learned men--prose writers, politicians, historians,
“humanists,” mathematicians. In the earlier centuries they were mostly
Catholic Churchmen; but, after the Reformation, they were Catholics,
Presbyterian divines, or Episcopalians, or they were clustered about the
University in unsectarian pasturages. There is a splendid procession
[Illustration: GEORGE HERIOT’S HOSPITAL FROM THE NORTH-EAST
This picture was made from the playing-grounds of the school, and shows
part of the terrace which entirely surrounds this noble building. A
portion of the Royal Infirmary appears in the distance.]
of “makars,”[47] men and women, who were Edinburgh citizens. There is a
bevy of Scottish queens of society, each in her generation; clever and
brilliant women, who, if they did not contribute to literature
themselves, were the patrons and inspirers of those who did. James V.
enlivened Edinburgh by the foundation of the Court of Session, since
which time her society has been dominated by lawyers, and many a
Scottish judge has left his name for wit and oddity among the glories of
the Parliament House. James VI. enriched Edinburgh by the foundation of
a University; and thence onwards she counted among her citizens many a
learned scholar of eccentric dress and speech. Edinburgh has had her
architects, her philanthropists, her great soldiers, and her explorers;
and she has always been especially noted for her printers and her
publishers. Nor is Edinburgh, with her love for romance, likely to
forget her illustrious criminals. To enumerate merely the names of the
notable citizens of all sorts would form a small volume in itself: it
must suffice to hurry through the centuries, picking out a name at
random here and there, and especially those connected with houses still
standing in the Old Town of Edinburgh. So-called “improvements” have
swept away many of Edinburgh’s historic possessions, among them
Sandilands’ Close, with the old mansion said to have been the residence
of Bishop Kennedy.[48] This name carries one back to the days of James
II. and the early part of James III.’s reign, when Bishop Kennedy, one
of the most important figures in Scottish history, was the great man in
Scotland, and he and the Earl of Angus were struggling against Mary of
Gueldres, the Queen-Mother, for supremacy. Scotland was then a fighting
nation; and bale-fires were erected on hill-tops, in sight of one
another, from the Borders to Stirling and the North, and were watched
day and night, ready to bring Scotland under arms within two hours of
any hostile movement of the English. Edinburgh was thronged with
citizens clad according to James II.’s arbitrary regulations: its women
of humbler class muffled, as they went to kirk or market, “under penalty
of escheat of their kerchiefs”; its Bailies’ wives in “clothes of silk
and costly scarlet and the fur of martens”; its labourers in grey or
white, and on “hailie daies” in light-blue or green or red. A gay little
town it must have been,--a gay little town, safe inside its encircling
wall, with the bells of St. Giles’s telling every one the hour, and the
Royal Standard waving on the Castle. Law, so omnipresent in Edinburgh
nowadays, was then represented by nine persons meeting twice a year to
administer justice. Education was going on in divers ways; was not the
royal child learning the love of peaceable arts and crafts, and that
respect for artists and craftsmen that was to prove his undoing with his
warlike nobles? The upper windows of many of the city homes must have
commanded a prospect of trees and broom growing on the hillsides beyond
the city, where the landowners were bidden by law to plant and to
preserve the game, where wolves prowled by night, where any Englishman
was lawfully the captive of his captor, and where a sturdy beggar or a
wandering bard might be nailed by his ear to any convenient tree. A
pleasant prospect from one’s back windows!
Through the reigns of James IV. and James V. Edinburgh possessed many
brilliant citizens. There was the poet William Dunbar, James IV.’s friar
of St. Francis, and his “King’s Messenger.” With Flodden, Dunbar totally
disappears,--all his poetic fire, his droll humour, his Scottish
force,--buried in obscurity and silence. It will never be known whether
“the auld grey horse, Dunbar” was patriotically amongst those who
followed their royal master and--
... on Flodden’s trampled sod,
For their king and for their country
Rendered up their souls to God,
or whether he survived and got his benefice at last, from the hands of
the widowed Queen, or whether he died in broken-hearted poverty. Gavin
Douglas, when he was Provost of St. Giles’s, lived in the Provost’s
lodging beside the Church. Afterwards, when he became Bishop of Dunkeld,
he lived in the palace of the Bishops of Dunkeld, in the Cowgate. The
Cowgate was then a fashionable and but half-built suburb, lying below
the main ridge of the city to the south, and communicating with the main
city above it by numerous wynds and closes. The Flodden wall included
the Cowgate, which the earlier wall had not done. Here were the palaces
of many great Church dignitaries and many nobles,--the palace of the
Bishops of Dunkeld, the town mansion of the Earl of Angus, (who in
James III.’s reign was Gavin Douglas’s nephew); and in Blackfriars Wynd,
which leads from the Cowgate up to the High Street, was the palace of
the Archbishops of Glasgow (in Gavin Douglas’s day occupied by the
famous Archbishop James Beaton). The memory of the great street fight
known as “Cleanse the Causeway” clings round the sites of those three
houses. This was the most famous of all the many fights that have taken
place in the streets of Edinburgh, and was a political contest between
the Douglases and the Hamiltons. From a conference held in the house of
the Earl of Angus, the head of the Douglases, there hurried forth Bishop
Gavin Douglas, his uncle, bearing a message from his nephew to the Earl
of Arran, head of the Hamiltons, “to caution them against violence.”
Finding them intent on violence, he appealed to his fellow-cleric, the
Archbishop of Glasgow, who was with them. “On my conscience, I know
nothing of the matter!” Archbishop Beaton assured Bishop Douglas, and
struck his breast in emphasis. But the blow returned a rattling sound,
betraying that the reverend Prelate was wearing armour below his rochet.
“Your conscience _clatters_,[49] my Lord!” answered Gavin Douglas. So
the peace mission failed, and the Hamiltons streamed through all the
narrow wynds leading from the Cowgate into the High Street, and there
found the Douglases awaiting them in a compact mass, and amid cries of
“A Douglas! A Douglas!” and “A Hamilton! A Hamilton!” the slaughter
began. When the causeways and the closes were piled with the dead, and
the battle had been won by the Douglases, the Earl of Arran cut his way
through his enemies and escaped by swimming the Nor’ Loch on a collier’s
horse. Archbishop Beaton sought sanctuary in Blackfriars, and was
dragged out from behind the Altar, and was saved, not by his clattering
armour, but by the timely intercession of Gavin Douglas.
The next Scottish poet after Gavin Douglas was Lindsay, who was
Lyon-King-at-Arms to James V. He also was a notable inhabitant of
Edinburgh, and, like Gavin, has left poems addressed to it:--
Adieu, Edinburgh! thou heich triumphant toun,
Within whose bounds richt blithefull have I been,
Of true merchands the root of this regioun
Most ready to receive Court, King, and Queen!
Thy policy and justice may be seen:
Were devotioun, wisdom, and honesty,
And credence tint, they micht be found in thee.
James V.’s widow, Mary of Guise, for six years Queen Regent of Scotland,
had her palace and her oratory on the north side of the Castle Hill,
where she was well protected by the guns of the Castle. It was
accessible through narrow closes until 1846, with some remains of its
former grandeur to be seen in lofty ceilings, in mouldings and carvings,
the words “Laus et Honor Deo” and a monogram of the Virgin on the
residence, and “Nosce Teipsum” and the date 1557 on the oratory. Now,
its place knoweth it no more, and the United Free Assembly Hall reigns
in its stead.
But, though the palace of the Frenchwoman, who struggled so hard against
the wave of the Reformation as it swept over Scotland, is gone, the
manse of the Reformer, her enemy, John Knox, remains,--not only
preserved from destruction, but turned into a species of museum, with a
custodian to click on the electric light. John Knox’s house[50] forms
one of the popular sights of Edinburgh, and is a conspicuous and
picturesque object, standing half-way down the High Street, with its
angle of wooden frontage jutting out into the street, and its
“fore-stair” and its gables. Over the door is the half-obliterated
legend “Lufe God abufe al and yi nychtbour as yi self,” and there is a
small effigy of Knox preaching, his hand pointing to a sun on which is
engraved the name of God in English, in Greek, and in Latin. The house
is three-storeyed. It is supposed that the Reformer occupied the first
storey, where are shown the window from which he is said to have
preached to the populace below, and his tiny study, with the old
Scottish pin or risp on the door.
In James VI.’s reign there was many a notable inhabitant of Edinburgh;
though James carried off some of them to England, to enliven the English
Court, as he carried off the most valuable of the Holyrood pictures, and
everything else he could lay his hands on. There was George Heriot,
“Jingling Geordie”; and there was “Tam o’ the Cowgate,” the first Earl
of
[Illustration: QUADRANGLE OF GEORGE HERIOT’S HOSPITAL
The picture shows parts of the north and east sides of the Quadrangle.
In the centre of the north side is the entrance doorway to the chapel,
above which rises an oriel window combined with a half octagonal tower,
peculiar and picturesque in construction. An octagonal tower of five
storeys is seen in the north-east angle of the court.]
Haddington; and there was George Buchanan. George Heriot’s shop, said to
have been but seven feet square, was the centre one of three small shops
in a narrow passage leading from the door of the old Tolbooth to the
“Laigh Council House,” where the Signet Library now stands. It remained
in existence until 1809. His name was carved on the architrave of the
door, and in the booth were found his forge and bellows, and the hollow
stone of the furnace, with the stone cover to extinguish it at night.
These were presented to the governors of Heriot’s Hospital. It was in
this tiny booth, the story goes, that the goldsmith entertained the King
with a “costly fire.” Heriot had been to Holyrood, and had found the
King sitting by a fire of cedar wood, and had commented on the pleasant
odour the burning of it made. Sordid King Jamie replied that it was as
costly as it was pleasant. Heriot immediately answered that if the King
would come and visit him he would show him a costlier fire. The King
went, only to find a fire of ordinary fuel burning merrily in the little
booth. But Jingling Geordie took from his press a bond for two thousand
pounds he had lent the King, and laid it on the flames, and then
inquired whether the Holyrood cedar or this formed the more costly fuel.
“Yours, most certainly, Master Heriot,” said his monarch.
The first Earl of Haddington lived, as King James’s nickname tells, in
the Cowgate, and the house stood there till about 1829. Tam o’ the
Cowgate was a learned judge, and, according to the ideas of that time,
a man of such enormous wealth that it was popularly thought he had found
the philosopher’s stone. One evening, when he was sitting with friend
and flask, tired after a hard day, clad in an easy undress of nightgown,
cap, and slippers, he heard a sudden uproar in the street. The students
of the newly founded University and the boys of the High School were
indulging in a “bicker”; and the University was winning. The Earl of
Haddington had been a High School boy, and, as an old hunter becomes
restive in his cart when he hears the distant chase, so the learned
Privy Councillor leapt up, rushed forth, rallied his old school, and, in
his nightgown, cap, and slippers, led the charge and pursued the routed
students through the town and out at the West Port, locked the city gate
on them, and then returned home to his unfinished flask and his waiting
crony.
Another friend of King James was the Earl of Mar, who had been his
fellow-pupil with George Buchanan. Him the King dubbed a “Jock o’
Sklates”; and when a marriage between the two powerful families of Mar
and Haddington was contemplated, King James cried out, “The Lord haud
grup o’ me! If Tam o’ the Cowgate’s son marry Jock o’ Sklates’s
daughter, what’s to come o’ _me_?”
George Buchanan, the humanist and reformer, was a citizen of Edinburgh
for many years. He was not one of those whom his royal pupil took with
him across the Border. It was in a first-floor room in Kennedy’s
Close,--a close no longer existing,--that George Buchanan died, in his
seventy-sixth year. When he was dying, he was visited by Andrew Melville
and his nephew, and was discovered giving a first reading lesson to a
small boy--“a, b, ab; b, a, ba.” When his visitors expressed mild wonder
at his occupation, the dying scholar, perhaps with some gleam of
remembrance of his own boyhood in Dumbartonshire, replied, “Better this
than stealin’ nowts.” Andrew Melville had brought with him some of the
proof sheets of Buchanan’s Latin history, and--the small boy having
probably slipped willingly off to play--these were discussed. They
contained some allusions to his former pupil, the absent King James, now
so alienated from the doctrines of Buchanan; and Andrew Melville hinted
gently that these might be indiscreet, and productive of trouble. “Are
they _true_?” demanded the historian. To Melville’s mind they had this
quality. “Then I’ll bide his dreid and a’ his kin’s!”
In 1550 there was born at Merchiston Castle, on the southern outskirts
of Edinburgh, John Napier, the great mathematician, the inventor of
logarithms, the chief representative of science in Scotland in his
generation, and the correspondent of Kepler. He died in 1617 in the
castle where he had been born; and this castle still remains, and none
can pass the gateway in the wall, and glance through across the green
sward to the old stone battlements, without remembering Napier of
Merchiston.
During the reigns of James VI. and Charles I. an eminent Scotsman, of
another, but equally patriotic, kind was living within a few miles of
Edinburgh. This was Drummond of Hawthornden, Episcopalian and royalist,
scholar and gentleman, who spent his meditative hours, wrote his poems,
loved books and music and the æsthetic possibilities of existence and
every form of ennobling beauty,--“all great arts and all good
philosophies,” in his--
Dear wood, and you, sweet solitary place,
Where from the vulgar I estranged live.
And “all through the years of his residence at Hawthornden must not the
seven miles of road between Hawthornden and Edinburgh have been his most
familiar ride or walk? Every other week must he not have been actually
in Edinburgh for hours and days together, visiting his Edinburgh
relatives and friends, seen in colloquy with some of them on the causey
of the old High Street near St. Giles’s Church, and known to have his
favourite lounge in that street in the shop of Andro Hart, bookseller
and publisher, just opposite the Cross?”[51]
Another notable citizen of this reign was Sir Thomas Hope, King’s
Advocate. He was the grandson of that John de Hope, of the family of Des
Houblons in Picardy, who had come over with Madeleine, James V.’s first
queen, from France, in 1537, and from whom are descended, either
directly or indirectly, many of the good old Scottish families,--the
Hopes, the Hopetouns, some of the Erskines, the Bruces of Kinross, and
others. John de Hope had been a staunch Catholic; but his son, Edward,
was “chairged to waird in the Castell” for his usage of the priests; and
the grandson, Sir Thomas Hope, King’s Advocate, was one of the two
lawyers who drew up the National League and Covenant. He lived in a big
mansion in the Cowgate, which he built in 1616, with a wide arched
entrance, a central stair, oak-panelled rooms, and decorated ceilings.
The house was pulled down and the Public Library was built in 1890 on
its site; but the carved inscription, TECVM. HABITA (from the fourth
satire of Persius) which was above the lintel in the dwelling of the old
Covenanting Advocate, is now preserved above an inner doorway of the
Public Library. This Sir Thomas Hope had several sons, three of whom
were judges; and there is an interesting portrait of him, in the
possession of one of his descendants, representing him as wearing his
legal robe and a kind of laurel wreath,--for it was not considered
fitting, in those days of parental dignity, for a father to plead
bareheaded before his sons.
Sir George Mackenzie of Rosehaugh was King’s Advocate later on in the
century, in the reigns of Charles II. and James VII., and his house,
which had formerly been the “lodging” of the Abbots of Melrose, stood in
Strichen’s Close, then called Rosehaugh Close, off the High Street, and
had a large garden down to the Cowgate, and up part of the opposite
slope. Sir George Mackenzie was a man of letters, and the friend and
correspondent of Dryden, and the founder of the Advocates’ Library; but,
_ex officio_, he was the prosecutor of the Covenanters,--and this is all
that is known of him in the popular local mind. He is buried in
Greyfriars’ Churchyard,--where the Covenant was signed on the flat
tombstones,--and in old days little boys used to prove their daring by
calling out at the door of his mausoleum--
Bluidy Mackingie, come oot if ye daur!
Lift the sneck, and draw the bar!
But they never waited so see if their invitation were to be accepted.
It was in this gloomy refuge that James Hay, a youth of sixteen, under
sentence of death for robbery, hid for six weeks after escaping from the
Tolbooth. He was an old Heriot Hospital boy, and the other Herioters
loyally braved Mackenzie’s ghost, and fed their schoolmate till the hue
and cry was passed.
One other Edinburgh figure of the seventeenth century must be mentioned,
the notorious Major Weir, whose story is said to have suggested the
character of _Manfred_ to Byron. He lived in “the sanctified bends of
the Bow,” which was, at the end of the seventeenth century, a nest of
pharisaical fanatics known as “Bow-head saints.” Of these Major Weir was
one. He had “a grim countenance and a big nose”; he wore a black
[Illustration: THE MARTYRS’ MONUMENT IN THE GRAVEYARD OF GREYFRIARS’
To the left of the spire of the Tolbooth Church, in the centre of the
picture, and next the city wall, stands the Martyrs’ Monument, in front
of which is the figure of a girl; above the figure appear some houses in
Candlemaker Row. The low building on the extreme left of the picture is
the old guardhouse. The duty of the guard was to prevent the stealing of
bodies from the graveyard. The elaborate monument on the right of the
picture is one of many erected in this graveyard during the early part
of the eighteenth century.]
cloak and carried a black staff; he was “notoriously regarded among the
Presbyterian strict sect”; and “at private meetings he prayed to
admiration.” In short, he was a pattern of sanctity, and was known among
the “Holy sisters” of the Bow as “Angelical Thomas.” Alas! Angelical
Thomas was not what he seemed. He never broke the Sabbath, but then he
broke every other commandment in the Decalogue. When he was nearly
seventy a severe illness led him to confess a long list of peculiarly
horrible crimes. Perhaps, in this more prosaic age, the Major’s form of
religion, his illness, his crimes and his confessions would all have
been attributed to the same cause, and have landed him comfortably in an
asylum for the insane. As he lived in the good old times, he was
strangled and burnt between Edinburgh and Leith; whilst his sister
Grizel, in deference to her sex, was gently hanged in the Grassmarket.
Round the names of Major Weir and his sister a hundred gruesome legends
sprang up, and “fearsome sichts were seen” in the West Bow; and the
house that he had occupied there remained uninhabited and haunted until
1878, when it was pulled down.
The eighteenth century in Edinburgh, like the seventeenth, teems with so
many names that it is hardly possible to mention all of even the most
notable. There was Edinburgh’s Horace, Allan Ramsay, the poet and
wig-maker, who scandalised the “unco guid” by bravely aiding and
abetting in all that made for innocent joyousness, setting up a
circulating library, doing his best to provide the town with a theatre,
and losing money thereby, and encouraging the Assemblies and writing
verses in their praise. His shop, where all the _literati_ gathered, was
beside the city Cross; but his quaint round house was on the Castle
hill, and was long known in Edinburgh as “the Goose Pie.” It is still
standing, but is incorporated in a large mass of new building, so that
its characteristic shape is lost. Allan Ramsay’s son was another Allan
Ramsay, and was portrait-painter to George III., and _his_ son was
General John Ramsay; so that the Goose Pie was owned in turn by three
generations, all notable Edinburgh citizens.
Those were the days of Jacobite Edinburgh, when Jacobite sentiments were
breathed in every close, and Jacobite sympathies were cherished in many
old families. When the King’s health was drunk the goblet was silently
passed over the caraffe of water to signify which King was meant, and
portraits of the young Chevalier hung in many secret places of honour.
The story of one of these Jacobite queens of society, who were generally
also either authors themselves or patrons of art and letters, is told in
Chambers’s _Traditions of Edinburgh_. Susanna, Countess of Eglintoun,
was the daughter of Sir Archibald Kennedy, and the grand-daughter of
Lord Newark, the Covenanting General. She became, when a very beautiful
girl, the third wife of the ancient Lord Eglintoun, whose previous wives
had left him without a male heir. She had been wooed by Sir John Clerk
of Penicuik, who had sent her love-verses concealed in a flute,
discoverable only to herself when she put her lips to it. But Sir
Archibald, when asked for his daughter’s hand, consulted his old friend
Lord Eglintoun on the subject. “Bide a wee, Sir Archie, my wife’s very
sickly,” was the advice given--and taken. The daughter’s own feelings
are matters of conjecture, not of history. Susanna Kennedy became
Countess of Eglintoun about the time of the Union, and lived in Stamp
Office Close, where seven daughters (who were afterwards to form one of
the sights of Edinburgh as they were carried in sedan-chairs to the
Assemblies) only decided the old peer to divorce his wife. The intention
was diverted by the birth of a son. Having reigned as one of the queens
of Edinburgh society for over a quarter of a century, and the death of
her ancient lord in 1729 having made her a widow, Lady Eglintoun carried
her social triumphs to London in 1730, where she was “much satisfied
with the honour and civilities shewn her ladyship by the Queen and all
the royal family.” In her old age Lady Eglintoun retained her loyalty to
the house of Stuart, for it was told of her that a portrait of Prince
Charlie was hung in her room so that it should be the first thing that
met her sight in the mornings. And the only request she ever refused her
son (10th Lord Eglintoun) was when he wished her to walk as a peeress in
the Coronation of George III. She was a patroness of poets--if they were
Tories (did she ever remember those verses inside a flute?); and to her
Allan Ramsay, as Jacobite at heart as ever she was, dedicated his
_Gentle Shepherd_. It was not in Stamp Office Close, but at her dower
house, Auchans Castle, near Irvine, that she received Boswell and
Johnson on their return from the Hebrides. She was then in her
eighty-fifth year, and she and the lexicographer found their Church and
State principles congenial, and the old lady told him she might have
been his mother, and now adopted him. She kissed him at parting, which,
it is said, made a lasting impression on him. The next curiosity the old
Countess adopted was a large collection of rats, which she also
succeeded in taming.
To the Jacobite gentlewomen of Edinburgh we owe many of our best-known
Scottish songs. Baroness Nairne was of the old Jacobite and Episcopalian
family of the Oliphants of Gask, and lived at Duddingston. Her house
still stands, and is called Nairne Lodge. Mrs. Cockburn, the author of
“The Flowers of the Forest,” lived at one time in a close on the Castle
Hill, and then on the first floor of a house at the end of Crichton
Street, with windows looking along Potterrow. She, it may be remembered,
was a friend of Scott’s mother, and wrote a prophetic letter about him
when he was a child of six.
Adam Smith, after he came to Edinburgh in 1778 as Commissioner of
Customs, lived for twelve years, till he died in 1790, in Panmure’s
Close at the foot of the Canongate, and he is buried in Canongate
Churchyard.
David Hume, born in Edinburgh in 1711, was one of her notable
inhabitants through nearly the whole of the eighteenth century. He was a
rolling stone, for from 1751 to 1753 his home was in Riddle’s Land;
thence he flitted to Jack’s Land, Canongate, was there for nine years,
and deserted that for James’s Court. After this, like every one else, he
joined in the rush to the New Town.
CHAPTER VI
SOME FAMOUS VISITORS, AND THEIR COMMENTS
Fareweel, Edinburgh, and a’ your daughters fair;
Your Palace in the shelter’d glen, your Castle in the air;
Your rocky brows, your grassy knowes, and eke your mountains bauld;
Were I to tell your beauties a’, my tale wad ne’er be tauld.
Now fareweel, Edinburgh, where happy I hae been;
Fareweel, Edinburgh, Caledonia’s Queen!
Prosperity to Edinburgh, wi’ every rising sun,
And blessings be on Edinburgh, till Time his race has run.
_Scottish Ballad._[52]
When James VI. returned to his native land after fourteen years of
reigning in England, he brought with him a group of English nobles. Very
anxious must King James have been about the impression that Edinburgh
would make on these new friends of his--as anxious as he had been
twenty-eight years before when he was bringing back his bride, Anne of
Denmark, and wrote to the Provost “for God’s sake see all things are
richt at our hamecoming.” This frenzied request applied not only to the
street “middens,” for which Edinburgh was so famous then, but also to
the hospitalities to be shown. James need have had no fear about the
hospitalities, whatever qualms he felt regarding the middens. With the
Scotch, hospitality is an instinct; and in Edinburgh they have both time
and inclination to obey it. Among the English nobles who attended James
in 1617, and who must have wandered curiously about the old capital, and
wondered at her long steep street, her tall lands and her mighty castle,
and sniffed her odoriferousness superciliously, and fled in their silks
and their feathers before the warning cries of “Gardez l’eau!” and who
were given the freedom of the city, and whose names are therefore
enrolled among her burgesses, was the Earl of Pembroke, the friend of
Shakespeare, the supposed hero of the mysterious Sonnets.
Had Shakespeare himself been one of Edinburgh’s famous visitors? The
obscurity that envelops his life veils this also. Companies of English
comedians came to Scotland in 1599, and again in 1601; and Mr. Charles
Knight holds that Shakespeare was with this latter company, and that
_Macbeth_ is his comment on his Scottish experience. But was he in
Edinburgh? It is one of those questions about him that must ever remain
unanswered; yet, as the Scotsman said in maintaining the argument that
Shakespeare was born in Paisley, “his abeelities would justify the
inference.” Other English poets have left clearer records behind them.
The year after King James and his courtiers had returned south, Taylor
the Water-poet, the “Penniless Pilgrim,” came to Edinburgh; and at the
same time Ben Jonson was six months in Scotland, most of which time was
spent in the vicinity of Edinburgh. Ben Jonson lived at Leith, and paid
his famous week’s visit to Drummond of Hawthornden, and wrote a pastoral
drama about Loch Lomond, which no doubt included a rapturous comment on
Edinburgh, but which unfortunately perished in the flames when the
poet’s house was burnt down after his return home. All the comment
Edinburgh can claim from Ben Jonson is the length of his stay there, and
the compliments he sent, in a letter to Drummond, to the various friends
he had made, and by whom he had been hospitably entertained; but
Edinburgh had known how to honour literature, for she had extended to
Ben Jonson, during his visit, the public recognition of giving him the
freedom of the city.
Taylor the Water-poet has well repaid the pleasure his visit to
Edinburgh evidently gave his amiable soul, for he has left not only many
a kindly comment, but a legacy of a vivid description of the Edinburgh
of that day,--the Edinburgh, therefore, that Ben Jonson saw, and that
James VI. showed to his English guests.[53]
Almost a hundred years later Defoe was in Edinburgh, editing the
_Edinburgh Courant_. This must have been after his release from the
State prosecution that followed his publication “The Shortest Way with
Dissenters,” and that brought him to prison, the pillory, and temporary
ruin. He is supposed to have lived in Salamander Land in the High Street
(so called because it survived fires to right of it and fires to left of
it). Wilson throws doubt on this; but Defoe must have lived somewhere,
and it may as well have been in Salamander Land as anywhere
else,--especially as the land is now no longer existing to deny it.
Defoe has left his comment, quoted by Mr. Robert Chambers in his _Walks
in Edinburgh_. The Old Town, he said, “presents the unique appearance of
_one vast castle_.”
Steele visited Edinburgh in 1717, and gave the mendicants of the city a
supper in Lady Stair’s Close, and afterwards said he had “drunk enough
of native drollery to compose a comedy.”
Twelve years later the poet Gay spent a few weeks in Edinburgh. He came
in the cortège of his patroness, that witty and eccentric Duchess of
Queensberry who had already been sung to and of by Pope and Prior. It is
said that Gay lived in an attic opposite Queensberry House in the
Canongate; but that he wrote the “Beggar’s Opera” there is denied by Mr.
Robert Chambers as an “entirely gratuitous assumption.” But there was an
alehouse as well as an attic opposite the home of his patroness, and Mr.
Chambers evidently did not think it an entirely gratuitous assumption
that the poet spent much of his time at “Jennie Ha’s,” drinking the
claret from the butt for which she was so famed. On the first flat of
“Creech’s Land,” at the end of the Luckenbooths, was Allan Ramsay’s
circulating library, the rendezvous of all the Edinburgh _literati_.
Here, during the weeks of Gay’s visit, might often have been seen “a
pleasant little man in a tye wig.” This was the author of--
How happy could I be with either,
Were t’other dear charmer away!
who had walked up from the Canongate to enjoy a friendly interchange of
ideas with the author of--
Wae’s me! For baith I canna get,
To ane by law we’re stented;
Then I’ll draw cuts, and take my fate,
And be with ane contented.
And Allan Ramsay would point out to Gay the leading citizens as they
lounged and gossiped round the Cross opposite the library; and Gay in
his turn would ask for explanations of Scottish words and customs, that
he might, on his return, be able to enlighten Pope, who was already an
admirer of the “Gentle Shepherd.”
In the middle of the eighteenth century Goldsmith was a medical student
in Edinburgh, living, it is said, in College Wynd, and writing amusing
accounts of the dulness and formality and drollery of the Assemblies. An
Edinburgh tailor’s account for the year 1753, found by the late Mr.
David Laing in the pages of an old ledger, allows one to imagine Goldie
gracing Edinburgh in a suit of sky-blue satin and black velvet, and a
“superfine small hatt” which bore “8s. worth of silver hatt lace.” Mr.
Filby the tailor charged the modest sum of £3:6:6 for a “superfine high
claret-coloured” cloth suit; but possibly he might have charged double
that amount or half that amount with equal profit to himself, for the
account was “carried over,” and no ledger remains to tell the tale.[54]
Tobias Smollett paid two visits to Edinburgh, the last in 1766, when he
stayed with his sister, Mrs. Telfer of Scotstoun, in St. John Street.
This street, then inhabited by some of the aristocracy of Edinburgh,
still retains a distinguished look; and much of the fine old
architecture remains, including Mrs. Telfer’s home, which was in the
first floor of the house over the great archway through which the street
is entered. This house, which was previously the residence of the Earl
of Hopetoun, attracts the eye immediately by its turnpike stair,
occupying the corner of the street, beside the arched entrance. Smollett
was introduced by Dr. Carlyle of Inveresk to Edinburgh literary
celebrities, among them Home, who had so scandalised his brother clergy
by writing a play,--“The Douglas”; and, like Gay thirty years before, he
haunted Allan Ramsay’s library,--in Smollett’s day the property of
Alexander Kincaid the publisher. _Humphrey Clinker_ contains all
Smollett’s comments on Edinburgh society, men, and manners.
Three years later, in 1769, Benjamin Franklin visited Edinburgh. He was
given the freedom of the city, and was accorded the usual hospitable
welcome from all the chief people of the town.
On a Saturday evening in August 1773, Dr. Johnson’s huge figure filled
the doorway of the old Whitehorse Inn in Boyd’s Close, and presently
Boswell, in his house in James’s Court, received the following note:--
_Saturday night._
Mr. Johnson sends his compliments to Mr. Boswell, being newly
arrived at Boyd’s.
Boswell hurried off to welcome the traveller, and found him roaring
passionately at the waiter, who had put sugar into the lemonade with his
fingers. Out into the hot August evening the two friends went, and
walked up the High Street arm-in-arm to James’s Court, where Mrs.
Boswell waited to administer tea to her ponderous rival. “Boswell has
very handsome and spacious rooms,” Johnson wrote to Mrs. Thrale, “level
with the ground on one side of the house, and on the other, four stories
high.” Here Mr. and Mrs. Boswell invited all the people of brilliant
achievement in the city to meet him,--Dr. Robertson, Dr. Blair, Mrs.
Murray of Henderland, Allan Ramsay the artist, Beattie the poet, Lord
Kames, Lord Hailes, and many others; but among them was the Duchess of
Douglas, “talking broad Scotch with a paralytic voice,” and Dr. Johnson
showed open preference for her society. What all these people thought of
Dr. Johnson is suggested by the wit of Henry Erskine, the well-known
Edinburgh advocate, brother of the Earl of Buchan. After much inimitable
politeness and good-humour during his presentation to Johnson, he
slipped a shilling into Boswell’s hand for the sight of “your English
bear.” Mrs. Boswell (_née_ Montgomery, one of the Eglintoun family) was
equally
[Illustration: OLD HOUSES IN CANONGATE
In the foreground of the picture are the piers and entrance gates of the
Canongate Parish Church. Past the shaft of the cross on the other side
of the Canongate is the opening into Bakehouse Close. The timber-fronted
houses with their gables present as picturesque an appearance as any in
Edinburgh.]
witty and even more frank. She had certainly some provocation, because,
as Boswell himself tells, Dr. Johnson had, among other habits, one of
turning the candles upside down when they did not burn brightly enough.
“I have often seen a bear led by a man,” the much-tried hostess told her
infatuated lord, “but I never before saw a man led by a bear.”
Boswell not only invited all Edinburgh to meet Dr. Johnson, but took Dr.
Johnson to all the sights of the city. On Sunday, after they had
attended service in the Episcopal chapel in Blackfriars Wynd, Johnson
saw Holyrood; and, under the guidance of Principal Robertson, he and
Boswell went over the University. Boswell also took his guest to the
island of Inchkeith, and to stay with Sir Alexander Dick of Prestonfield
for a few days, and they dined and drank tea at the old inn at Roslin,
and
Went to Hawthornden’s fair scene by night,
Lest e’er a Scottish tree should wound his sight.
Many of Dr. Johnson’s comments on things Scottish were quite genial; but
two terse ones expressed decided disapproval. “No, Sir!” he bellowed,
when some one proposed to introduce him to David Hume. And again, “I can
smell you in the dark!” he grumbled to Boswell, no doubt most
truthfully, as they walked through the city.
A year after Dr. Johnson’s visit there came to Edinburgh and its
hospitalities another Englishman. Captain Topham cannot be called a
famous visitor, but he deserves mention, both because of his charming
little book, _Letters from Edinburgh, written in the Years 1774 and
1775_, and because of the artistic contrast he forms to Dr. Johnson.
Captain Topham must have re-established his country’s character for good
manners in the opinion of Edinburgh citizens. He had not compiled a
dictionary; neither had he “kept a school and ca’d it an academy,” as
old Lord Auchinleck, Boswell’s father, said of Johnson; but he was a
wide-minded man of good breeding, had been educated at Eton and Trinity
College, Cambridge, had travelled, and held a commission in the Guards,
and seems to have been equipped for enjoying social existence, and
adding to its enjoyment by others. He was by no means sparing in his
comments; his humour would make that impossible. Amid all his graphic
descriptions it is difficult to choose what comments to quote. Of the
city itself he says, “The situation of Edinburgh is probably as
extraordinary as one can well imagine for a metropolis. The immense
hills, on which great part of it is built, though they make the views
uncommonly magnificent, not only in many places render it impassable for
carriages, but very fatiguing for walking.” He tells of the bad inns,
and here again his good-humour saves him. No swearing at the waiter
without sugar-tongs, but--“Well, said I to my friend (for you must know
that I have more patience on these occasions than wit on any other)
there is nothing like seeing men and manners; perhaps we may be able to
repose ourselves at some coffeehouse.” He describes the amusements,--the
theatre, the assemblies and dances, the oyster cellars, the funerals,
and the executions. The Kirk and devotion, the University and education,
trade and the booksellers, all are spoken of. He gives a warm picture of
a very friendly and hospitable town, simple in its ways and hours and
incomes and requirements, but brimful of intellect and cultured love of
letters and music, and peopled by a kindly, couthy race, with very
strongly marked characters, dwelling together in unity at very close
quarters.
The only social error Captain Topham seems to have made was when a lady
invited him to an oyster supper in a cellar. He “agreed immediately,”
but complains pathetically to his correspondent, “You will not think it
very odd that I should expect, from the place where the appointment was
made, to have had a _partie tête-à-tête_. I thought I was bound in
honour to keep it a secret, and waited with great impatience till the
hour arrived. When the clock struck the hour fixed on, away I went, and
inquired if the lady were there. ‘Oh yes,’ cried the woman, ‘she has
been here an hour or more.’ I had just time to curse my want of
punctuality when the door opened, and I had the pleasure of being
ushered in, not to one lady as I had expected, but to a large and
brilliant company of both sexes, most of whom I had the honour of being
acquainted with.”
But even Captain Topham’s amiable temper has its limits. Of two things
he speaks evil,--of his predecessor, Dr. Johnson, and of a haggis.
In November 1786 Burns paid his first and famous visit to Edinburgh. He
came, dejected, unknown, his mind hovering on the thoughts of intended
exile; and in a moment, as it were, Edinburgh recognised him, and
flashed on all her lights to welcome him and do his genius honour. There
followed the most brilliant and triumphant period of all his short life.
He was fêted and lionised by all ranks of society; the magnates and the
celebrities, the literary and the learned, the high-born and the
low-born, the fashionable and the gay, beautiful women and great men,
vied with each other in entertaining this wonderful poet with the rustic
garb and the dark eyes. Burns was the honoured and petted guest of every
man and woman of note in Edinburgh--of Sir William Forbes of Pitsligo,
of Sir John Whiteford, of the Ferriers at 15 George Street, of the
eccentric Lord Monboddo and his “angel” daughter at 13 St. John Street,
and of a hundred more. He rollicked in Dowie’s tavern in Libberton’s
Wynd, or, among the “Crochallan Fencibles,” listened to Dawney Douglas
quavering the minor pathos of his Gaelic song, “Cro Chalien.” He stood
bareheaded beside the unmarked grave of Fergusson in the Canongate
Churchyard, and knelt and kissed the spot, and sent to ask if the
“Ayrshire ploughman” might erect a stone to the memory of the poet to
whom he owed so much. He read aloud his “Cottar’s Saturday Night” before
the young Duchess of Gordon and the lovely Miss Burnet, and bewildered
them with his fascination and his genius. He published his Edinburgh
edition of his poems, and dedicated them to the Caledonian Hunt; and
the names of all his admirers and hosts are still there--a long list of
good, well-known Scottish names.
In 1786 there occurred the memorable meeting, at the house of Professor
Adam Fergusson, between Burns and Scott. There was a gathering of
“several gentlemen of literary reputation,” and Scott, a boy of fifteen,
was present. Scott “had sense and feeling enough to be much interested
in his poetry, and would have given the world to know him,” but, with
the better manners of that period, “of course we youngsters sat silent
and listened.” Burns was affected by one of the pictures on the wall,
and the lines printed beneath it. He “actually shed tears,” and asked
whose the lines were. None of the “gentlemen of literary reputation”
volunteering the information, Scott whispered to a friend that they were
Langhorne’s, and the friend told Burns, who turned to the boy with a
“look and a word.” “You’ll be a man yet!” is what Burns said: and those
words and that look are all the link between these two great Scottish
poets, who “spoke each other in passing.”
It was not until December 1787 that Burns met “Clarinda,” the very
lovely Mrs. M‘Lehose, a cousin-german of Lord Craig’s. She, forsaken by
her husband, lived in a house of three rooms in General’s Entry, between
Bristo Street and Potterrow. Burns had met her only once, at a tea-party
gathering, before--he having met with a carriage accident and being
unable to leave his lodgings--their famous “Clarinda and Sylvander”
correspondence began. Clarinda possessed more than beauty, as her
letters and verses show. There were many beautiful faces in Edinburgh,
and Burns has immortalised them in his eulogies--Miss Burnet, Miss
Ferrier, Miss Whiteford; but poor Clarinda’s verses he has mingled with
his own. It is said that it was these two marvellous lines of hers that
first struck him:--
Talk not to me of Love! for Love hath been my foe.
He bound me with an iron chain, and flung me deep in woe.
Clarinda continued to live on in Edinburgh, and died there when nearly
eighty, with a picture of the long-dead Sylvander beside her.
Of all comments on Edinburgh the best-known is Burns’s passionate
salutation to the venerable city:--
Edina! Scotia’s darling seat!
All hail thy palaces and towers,
Where once beneath a monarch’s feet
Sat Legislation’s sovereign powers.
From marking wildly scattered flowers,
As on the banks of Ayr I strayed,
And singing, lone, the lingering hours,
I shelter in thy honoured shade.
Here wealth still swells the golden tide,
As busy trade his labour plies;
There Architecture’s noble pride
Bids elegance and splendour rise;
Here Justice, from her native skies,
High wields her balance and her rod;
There Learning, with his eagle eyes,
Seeks science in her coy abode.
There, watching high the least alarms,
Thy rough, rude fortress gleams afar,
Like some bold veteran grey in arms,
And marked with many a seamy scar:
The ponderous wall and massy bar,
Grim rising o’er the rugged rock,
Have oft withstood assailing war,
And oft repelled the invader’s shock.
With awe-struck thought, and pitying tears
I view that noble, stately dome,
Where Scotia’s kings of other years,
Famed heroes! had their royal home.
Alas, how changed the times to come!
Their royal name low in the dust!
Their hapless race wild-wandering roam,
Though rigid law cries out, ’Twas just!
Wild beats my heart to trace your steps,
Whose ancestors, in days of yore,
Through hostile ranks and ruined gaps
Old Scotia’s bloody lion bore:
Even I who sing in rustic lore,
Haply, _my_ sires have left their shed,
And faced grim danger’s loudest roar,
Bold following where your fathers led!
Edina! Scotia’s darling seat!
All hail thy palaces and towers!
Where once beneath a monarch’s feet
Sat Legislation’s sovereign powers!
From marking wildly scattered flowers,
As on the banks of Ayr I strayed,
And singing, lone, the lingering hours,
I shelter in thy honoured shade.
PART II
THE NEW TOWN
CHAPTER VII
THE BUILDING OF THE NEW TOWN: A STAMPEDE FOR FRESH AIR
Even thus, methinks, a city reared should be,
Yea, an imperial city that might hold
Five times a hundred noble towns in fee,
And either with their might of Babel old,
Or the rich Roman pomp of empery,
Might stand compare, highest in arts enrolled,
Highest in arms, brave tenement for the free
Who never crouch to thrones, nor sin for gold.
Thus should her towers be raised; with vicinage
Of clear bold hills that curve her very streets,
As if to vindicate, ’mid choicest seats
Of Art, abiding Nature’s majesty;
And the broad sea beyond, in calm or rage
Chainless alike, and teaching liberty.
ARTHUR HALLAM, _Sonnet to Edinburgh_.
Towards the end of the eighteenth century, Edinburgh, “a picturesque,
odorous, inconvenient, old-fashioned town,” as Mr. Robert Chambers
describes it, had become densely over-populated. Seventy thousand
inhabitants lived, breathed, and had their being within its confined
area. The quaint and impressive site of this “city set on a hill,”
however, did not admit of an easy extension of its boundaries. Fields
and braes lay to the north, open and ready, blazing with whins and
sunshine, and swept over by the fresh winds off the sea--a perfect _El
Dorado_ for the stifling and cramped inhabitants to look at from the
high windows of the eyries in the dark obscurities of their closes and
wynds. But, between the city and this fair open country, there lay a
deep chasm filled by the Nor’ Loch; and so Edinburgh remained in its old
state, a city straggling down the ridge from the Castle to Holyrood,
with St. Giles’s Church and the Tolbooth standing in the centre of this
street and blocking its breadth, and all the teeming wynds and closes
leading from it, and with the lower-lying Cowgate over the ridge to the
south, terminating in the Grassmarket beneath the Castle Rock.
“Everything,” says Mr. Robert Chambers, “was on a homely and narrow
scale. The College--where Munro, Cullen, and Black were already making
themselves great names--was to be approached through a mean alley, the
College Wynd. The churches were chiefly clustered under one roof; the
jail was a narrow building, half filling up the breadth of the street;
the public offices, for the most part, obscure places in lanes or dark
entries. The men of learning and wit, united with a proportion of men of
rank, met as the _Poker Club_ in a tavern, the best of its day, but only
a dark house in a close.... The town was, nevertheless, a familiar,
compact, and not unlikable place. Gentle and
[Illustration: PRINCES STREET FROM THE STEPS OF THE NEW CLUB
The spectator is looking east towards the Scott Monument, which rises in
the centre of the picture; to the right of the monument is a portion of
the Royal Institution, while to the left is the tower of the North
British Railway Hotel, with the top of the Nelson Monument appearing
over the window shade. Down the steps of the New Club a page boy is
carrying golf clubs. The time is a sunny afternoon in September.]
simple living within the compass of a single close, or even a single
stair, knew and took an interest in each other. Acquaintances might not
only be formed, Pyramus-and-Thisbe fashion, through party walls, but
from window to window across alleys, narrow enough in many cases to
allow of hand coming to hand, and even lip to lip.... The jostle and
huddlement was extreme everywhere.” And the overcrowding!
“A country gentleman and a lawyer, not long after raised to the Bench,
lived with his wife and children and servants in three rooms and a
kitchen. A wealthy goldsmith had a dwelling of two small rooms above his
booth, the nursery and kitchen, however, being placed in a cellar under
the level of the street, where the children are said to have rotted off
like sheep.”[55] Edinburgh citizens came to consider the highest storeys
in their tall “lands” the most desirable; and the tale is told of one
old Edinburgh gentleman who, on a visit to London, expressed pleased
surprise that the top flat where he had perched himself was the cheapest
in the house. On being gently enlightened that this was in consequence
of its being also the least thought of, he replied that he kent fine
what gentility was, and after having lived sixteen storeys up all his
life, was not going to come down in the world.
The first efforts at extension of the town were due to a private
commercial speculation. The open country beyond the Nor’ Loch and the
“Lang Dykes” was inaccessible till an Act of Parliament could be passed
and drastic measures taken; and, where Acts of Parliament are
necessary, progress is slow. Whilst time was passing, and others were
talking and scheming for the public good, a builder named George Brown
saw that the tide had come in his affairs, and took it at the flood and
made his fortune. He built, with stones from Craigmillar Quarry, two
squares of substantial dwelling-houses. The first built and bigger of
these was George Square, whose site had formerly been part of the park
of Ross House, the suburban residence of the Lords Ross, where
later--after 1753--the famous George Lockhart of Carnwath had lived. The
smaller square, Brown Square, was built after the first had proved a
success, and several of the houses in it been taken by well-known
citizens. George Square is still, though hemmed in by poor localities on
three sides, a favourite place of residence, with a pleasant garden in
the centre, and “the Meadows” near at hand. Here it was, at number 25,
that Scott’s father lived, and part of Scott’s boyhood was spent. Brown
Square has not survived socially, though it, too, has had its notable
residents. It was from Brown Square that Lord Glenlee, the last person
to use a sedan-chair in Edinburgh, used to sally forth in wig and cocked
hat, in knee-breeches and silk stockings and buckled shoes; and in Brown
Square there once lived the author of “The Flowers of the Forest,” Miss
Jeanie Elliott of Minto, one of the many gifted Jacobite ladies of
Jacobite Edinburgh. These two squares formed a little southern colony by
themselves, confined their hospitalities to themselves, and, in fact,
as the Scottish phrase says, “kept themselves to themselves.”
At last, in 1767, the Act of Parliament for extending the city over the
northern fields was passed, and the North Bridge was built from the High
Street across the valley. And then, suddenly, as with the touch of a
magician’s wand, the beginnings of the New Town of Edinburgh came into
being: stately squares and noble buildings, wide, broad streets that put
London thoroughfares to shame, graceful curved terraces and crescents;
all the cold dignity of unlimited grey stone--stone pavements, stone
roads, stone houses; and, nestling in every crevice of the stone, the
green of the invaded country. New Edinburgh, like Jonah’s gourd, sprang
up in a night, to shade many a prophet.
And who wielded the magician’s wand? The name of Lord Provost Drummond
ought to be remembered in Edinburgh, of which, like a veritable Dick
Whittington, he was six times Lord Provost. He was a man of public
spirit and large enterprise, who brought dignity on himself and his
office and his city. The New Town dates from his Provostship. At first,
however, as all pioneers must do, he saw men look askance at the
triumphs of his energy. He was probably called extravagant, and accused
of squandering public money. “The scheme was at first far from popular,”
Mr. Robert Chambers tells his readers. “The exposure to the north and
east winds was felt as a grievous disadvantage, especially while houses
were few. So unpleasant even was the North Bridge considered, that a
lover told a New Town mistress--to be sure only in an epigram--that
when he visited her he felt as performing an adventure not much short of
that of Leander. The aristocratic style of the place alarmed a number of
pockets, and legal men trembled lest their clients and other employers
should forget them, if they removed so far from the centre of things as
Princes Street and St. Andrew Square. Still, the move was unavoidable,
and behoved to be made.”[56]
And then the bees swarmed.
Those of the Scottish nobles whom the Union had left in the capital took
their persons and their households across the valley to the New Town,
and left their family mansions and their family traditions behind them
in the Old. All the legal dignitaries--Lord President, Lord Justice
Clerk, Lord Advocate, Dean of Faculty, Solicitor-General, Lords of
Council and Session--all those “carls” whom James VI. had made “lairds,”
accompanied by the “carlins” whom he had declined to make “leddies”; the
advocates, the “writers”; all the old Scottish “gentry,” the wealthy
burghers: all hurried out of their closes and took up their residences
in the big new houses across the Nor’ Loch.
Nature, however, abhors a vacuum, and so do landlords; and the deserted
High Street and Canongate filled up rapidly with humbler citizens. “The
Lord Justice Clerk Tinwald’s house possessed by a French teacher, Lord
President Craigie’s house by a rouping wife or saleswoman of old
furniture, and Lord Drummore’s house left by a chairman for want of
accommodation; ... the house of the Duke of Douglas at the Union, now
possessed by a wheelwright!”[57]
David Hume was one of the bees who swarmed. He was buzzing busily on the
third floor of a house in James’s Court with (what was particularly
characteristic of Edinburgh houses of that period, but perhaps not so
appealing to Hume as to some others) two little oratories, one off his
dining-room and one out of his drawing-room. But neither the oratories
nor the view to the north from his windows had the power to retain him.
He spread his wings and alighted on the west corner house on the south
side of St. Andrew Square. When his house at the corner was almost the
only one in the street leading from Princes Street to St. Andrew Square,
and before the names of the New Town streets had been inscribed on them,
Dr. Webster, a humorous minister, wrote in chalk on the great sceptic’s
dwelling “Saint David’s Street.” Hume’s old servant ran indignantly to
her master to tell him; but Hume was a humorist too. “Weel, weel,
Janet,” he said, “never mind. I am not the first man of sense that has
been made a saint of.”
St. David Street it remains to this day.
Sir Laurence Dundas built himself a house in St. Andrew Square, but lost
it in play to General Scott, a noted gambler, who staked £30,000 against
it. Sir Laurence retained his house, however, by building General Scott
another mansion-house, “Bellevue,” which for long stood in the centre
of Drummond Place.
Along the line of the present Princes Street had formerly been the “Lang
Gait,” or “Lang Dykes,” a rough road through rough country, where
Claverhouse had clattered angrily towards the Highlands at the head of
his troopers. This had been the scene of many a footpad robbery and
murder, and many lovers’ evening strolls; but, when the New Town was
built, it gradually was feued out, from east to west; and along it were
built a single line of houses looking right across the valley and up
towards the Old Town. It was proposed to call this--the principal street
of New Edinburgh--“St. Giles Street,” after the patron saint of
Edinburgh, which would have been a very appropriate name, and a slight
offer of amends to the Saint for the insult offered to his effigy when
the rude-minded rabble ducked it in the Nor’ Loch in the first days of
the Reformation. However, George III. objected. “Hey, hey--what, what?
St. Giles Street! never do! never do!” No doubt to Londoners the name
might awaken associations with a neighbourhood unknown beyond London;
but George III. showed some ignorance of Scottish history, for the
district of St. Giles in London owes its name to the founder of a leper
hospital--Maud, daughter of Malcolm Canmore and Queen Margaret, who,
when Queen of England, evidently sometimes felt a little homesick and
very patriotic, and bestowed on her charity the name of the patron saint
of Edinburgh.
And what became of the Nor’ Loch? The citizens had no longer to swim
across it two at a time on a collier’s horse, as had the Hamiltons after
the “Cleanse the Causeway” battle. The Nor’ Loch, formed in 1450 when
first Edinburgh was walled, had done its duty and had its day, and was
drained; and its place--now well-kept gardens--was for long a boggy
morass. Across this morass some Lawnmarket shopkeepers were accustomed
to make their way to investigate the progress of the new city; and, as
the ground was marshy and muddy, they laid a few planks across to form a
foot-bridge. George Boyd, a dealer in tartan, called “Five o’clock,” in
jocular allusion to his bandy legs, seems to have been particularly
impressed by the plank bridge; and, when some loose earth from a quarry
fell on it and made the bridge more secure, his mind, which worked
better than his legs, caught at the suggestion that the earth flung out
by the builders from the foundations of the New Town might form a bridge
across the valley. The suggestion was adopted, and the earth, to the
amount, it has been calculated, of about two million cartloads, was
deposited and a great mound formed in the valley of the Nor’ Loch, just
below the centre of the High Street; and “Geordie Boyd’s brig” became
“the Earthen Mound,” and so continued to be called until well on in the
nineteenth century. So, indeed, one well-known and venerable Edinburgh
citizen still speaks of it.
And this is how, within about forty years of its first conception, the
New Town of Edinburgh spread itself over the plain and superseded the
crumbling cluster of seven centuries. And this is how modern Edinburgh
presents that curious spectacle, unknown in any other town, of two
distinct divisions, divided topographically as well as historically and
socially--Old Edinburgh and New Edinburgh.
CHAPTER VIII
THE EDINBURGH OF SIR WALTER SCOTT AND HIS CIRCLE
Benevolence, charitableness, tolerance, sympathy with those about
him in their joys and their sorrows, kindly readiness to serve
others when he could, utter absence of envy or real
ill-will,--these are qualities that shine out everywhere in his
life and in the succession of his writings.... Positively, when I
contemplate this richness of heart in Scott, and remember also how
free he was from those moral weaknesses which sometimes accompany
and disfigure an unusually rich endowment in this species of
excellence ... positively, I say, with all this in my mind, I can
express my feeling about Scott no otherwise than by declaring him
to have been one of the very best men that ever breathed.
PROFESSOR MASSON’S _Edinburgh Sketches and Memories_.
It is easy to trace Sir Walter Scott’s Edinburgh life from door to door.
The house in the College Wynd, in which, on August 15, 1771, he was
born, was pulled down in his lifetime. Sir Walter once pointed out its
site to Mr. Robert Chambers during one of their walks together, and told
him that his father had “received a fair price for his portion of it”;
and, when Mr. Chambers naturally suggested that more money might have
been made and the public much more gratified had Scott’s birthplace been
retained to be shown,--“Ay, ay,” said Sir Walter, “that is very well;
but I am afraid I should have required to be dead first, and that would
not have been so comfortable, you know.”
The home of his boyhood and youth, 25 George Square, still stands,
looking exactly the same to-day as it did then. Here the little lame boy
lived, and regretted the country life at Sandyknowe among dogs and sheep
and legends; and the troubles of life began for him as he limped
backwards and forwards to the High School, or sensitively shrank from
the rough tyranny of his elder brother; and the triumphs of life fired
him as he took his share in the street “bickers” between the High School
boys and the rough lads of Potterrow, or as he gained fame in the High
School yard as a story-teller. It was under his parents’ roof in George
Square that Scott lived all the years from those schoolboy days till he
was a young man of many friendships, and slovenly dress and deep
feelings and enthusiasms, studying law in deference to his father’s
wishes, but thinking his own long thoughts during his rambles over
Blackford Hill and the country round Edinburgh; and at home, in his
father’s house, giving full play to his fancies in the safety of his own
small den in the sunk basement, where he was surrounded by “more books
than shelves,” where he hoarded collections of Scottish and Roman coins,
and where he had proudly crossed a claymore and a Lochaber axe over a
little print of Prince Charlie. But perhaps the fondest
[Illustration: THE HIGH SCHOOL AND BURNS’S MONUMENT FROM JEFFREY STREET
To the left of the picture, over a roof in the foreground, appears part
of the tunnel of the North British Railway, above which rises that fine
classic building, the (modern) High School. It stands on the southern
slope of the Calton Hill, a portion of which is seen to the extreme
left. On the extreme right is the monument to Robert Burns.]
treasure in that den was a certain china saucer which,--possibly unknown
to the father upstairs,--the young Cavalier kept hung on the wall, and
whose tale he no doubt often unfolded to his friends. Once upon a time
Mrs. Scott’s curiosity had been roused by the visits, night after night,
of a mysterious stranger, who came in a sedan-chair and a cloak, and
remained closeted with her husband in his business-room till long after
the household had retired. Mr. Scott preserved a stern reticence; but
woman’s wit found out a way. One night, very late, when the house was
silent in sleep, Mrs. Scott entered the business-room with a smile and
two cups of tea, and the hospitable suggestion that, as they had sat so
long, they might be glad of some refreshment. The stranger proved to be
a richly dressed man, who bowed, took one of the cups, and drank it. But
Mr. Scott, turning aside, neither drank his tea nor introduced his
guest. Presently, returning from showing the stranger out, he took the
empty cup, and, throwing up the window-sash, flung it out into the
night, with the now famous words, “Neither lip of me nor mine comes
after Murray of Broughton’s.”[58]
It was here, in this small den on the sunk floor of 25 George Square,
that Jeffrey found Scott when he called on him the evening after he had
asked to be introduced to him at the Speculative Society, where young
Scott had read a paper on “Ballads”: and Jeffrey evidently did not
extend his approval of Scott and of the paper on Ballads to this sunk
den,--or was it that Scott had no command of hospitalities in his
father’s house?--for they sallied forth together and supped at a tavern.
No doubt, before they went, Jeffrey had looked round curiously at the
treasures of his new acquaintance, and had been told how the “Broughton
saucer” had come by its widowed condition.
It was decided that Scott should become an advocate, and he and his
friend Clerk--a friendship made in the High School days, to last through
life--read for the Bar together. Poor Scott, with his open-air nature
and his dreamy enthusiasms, how he hated the drudgery! But he buckled to
it; and every summer morning for two summers he used to walk from George
Square to the house of his friend Clerk, “at the extremity of Princes
Street, New Town,” arriving at seven o’clock, to rouse his sleepy
fellow-student to an examination of Heineccius’s _Analysis of the
Institutes and Pandects_ and Erskine’s _Institutes of the Law of
Scotland_. It speaks well for Clerk that their friendship did last.
They were called to the Bar together; and together, when the ceremony
was over, they stood about in their wigs and gowns in the great hall,
till at last Scott whispered to Clerk, imitating a farm servant-lass
waiting at the Cross to be hired, “We’ve stood here an hour by the Tron,
hinny, and de’il an ane has speered our price.” Before the Court rose,
however, Scott had earned his first guinea,--and he spent it on a silver
taper-stand for his mother.
It was all in Edinburgh--all his “supreme moments.” Was it not in a
shower of rain in Greyfriars’ Churchyard that he met his first love?
Greyfriars’ Churchyard in a shower of rain, after a sermon; and Scott
offered her his umbrella, and together they walked home under it.
Probably it was a very shabby umbrella, for Scott was slovenly in his
dress in those days. What did it matter? There were more walks--more
talks. Presently Scott’s father thought it right to warn the other
father, for Scott was but a dependent youth; and, moreover, his love had
been given to the daughter and heiress of Sir John and Lady Jane Stuart
Belches of Invermay, and in those days in Scotland every shade of rank
was considered. Did Scott ever know what his father had done? Still the
romance went on, till the day when Scott rode home from Invermay back to
Edinburgh, and “the iron entered into his soul.” A long ride through the
beloved Scottish Highlands--
Never the time and the place and the loved one all together.
She married Sir William Forbes of Pitsligo. Of course she did. Had it
not been ordained since the beginning of time that she who had won the
first love of Walter Scott was to marry another? Who knows her story?
Who, for the matter of that, knows his? Who has measured the influence
on his life?
It was in Edinburgh that Scott’s youth passed, and that most of the
happenings took place that went to the making of him. In Edinburgh was
clustered his group of friends: Clerk (afterwards the original of
“Darsie Latimer”); Thomas Thomson, the legal antiquary; John Irving;
Adam Ferguson; George Cranstoun (afterwards Lord Corehouse); George
Abercromby (Lord Abercromby); Patrick Murray of Simprim; Patrick Murray
of Auchtertyre; and, most congenial of all to Scott’s own nature,
Erskine, the son of a Scottish Episcopalian clergyman of good family,
and the only Tory, save Scott himself, among the set of young Whigs then
predominant at Parliament House.
In those days Scott indulged in many rambles to the Borders or the
Highlands, to interesting neighbourhoods and historic houses and worthy
hosts; but it was from one of these excursions that he returned to
Edinburgh to see the execution of Watt the republican; and it was in the
Edinburgh theatre that he assisted to break the heads of a band of young
Irish rowdies who howled and hooted during the National Anthem; and it
was in Edinburgh that he haunted the vaults below Parliament House among
hoards of MSS. and deeds, and came up again steeped in dust and lore to
be made a curator of the Advocates’ Library, with Professor David Hume
and Malcolm Laing the historian as his colleagues.
Scott’s first serious attempt at verse was a rhymed translation of
Bürger’s _Lenore_. It was written when he was four-and-twenty, and was
done under the inspiration of hearing that Mrs. Barbauld, then on her
first visit to Edinburgh, had read aloud Taylor’s then unpublished
version of it at a party at Dugald Stewart’s. Scott, already deeply
interested in German literature, was fired; and one morning before
breakfast he brought his translation to show to his friend Miss
Cranstoun.
Walter Scott was not without women friends. Miss Cranstoun, to whom he
brought his poem before breakfast, had already been his confidante in
his love-story. Of his young kinswoman, the wife of the head of his
family, Hugh Scott of Harden,--who was a daughter of Count Brühl
Martkirchen, Saxon Ambassador at the Court of St. James’s, and Almeria,
Dowager Countess of Egremont--he says that she “was the first woman of
real fashion that took him up.”
It was about this time also that Scott’s martial ardour and patriotism
found vent in helping to organise the Scottish Light-horse Volunteers,
in preparation for the expected French Invasion. When, therefore, in his
twenty-sixth year, he brought home to Edinburgh the little half-French
bride to whose dark prettiness and novel vivacity he had fallen a victim
whilst a fellow-visitor at a watering-place, she found a warm welcome
awaiting her from a large and various circle of friends, all devoted to
her young husband, and sharing with him one or other of his
enthusiasms,--military or literary, antiquarian or sporting. Among these
must not be forgotten Skene of Rubislaw, whose friendship with Scott
began in a mutual love for German literature, and ended only with death.
Scott took his young wife first to lodgings in George Street, his house
at 10 South Castle Street not being quite ready; and the following
summer he hired that first and humblest of those three country homes
near Edinburgh where his happiest days were spent, a pretty cottage,
with a garden and a paddock, at Lasswade. It is still standing and
unchanged. Here and at Castle Street the young people lived comfortably
on their combined incomes for many years, and made themselves and their
friends happy with much simple and inexpensive hospitality. At Lasswade
it was that they formed friendships with the neighbouring great houses
of Melville and Buccleuch; that they were near--as the country counts
near--to Scott’s old friends the Clerks of Penicuik and Tytlers of
Woodhouselee, and Henry Mackenzie, the “Man of Feeling,” who lived at
Auchendinny. And it was at the Lasswade cottage that Wordsworth and his
sister Dorothy arrived before breakfast on the morning of September 17,
1803. Scott was then writing the _Lay of the Last Minstrel_, and read
the first four cantos to Wordsworth. He walked with his guests to
Roslin, and afterwards met them for the famous days in the Border
country, where he was Sheriff. Hogg’s first celebrated visit was paid at
Castle Street. It was in the drawing-room there that the Ettrick
Shepherd, feeling sure he “could never do wrong to copy the lady of the
house,” lay down at full length on the sofa opposite hers. It was here
that he “dined heartily and drank freely and, by jest, anecdote, and
song, afforded plentiful merriment.” It was here that, as the hour grew
later, his enthusiasm showed itself in a descending warmth of
appellations for his host, who, first “Mr. Scott,” became “Shirra,” and
then “Scott,” “Walter,” and, finally, “Wattie”; and the “plentiful
merriment” must have reached its culmination when Mrs. Scott was
addressed as “Charlotte.”
When Thomas Campbell published his “Pleasures of Hope,” Walter Scott was
an enthusiastic admirer of his fellow-poet. “I have repeated these lines
so often on the North Bridge that the whole fraternity of coachmen know
me by tongue as I pass. To be sure, to a mind in sober, serious,
street-walking humour, it must bear an appearance of lunacy when one
stamps with the hurried pace and fervent shake of the head, which
strong, pithy poetry excites.”
Oh days of enthusiasms and strong feelings! Nowadays, we are all jaded
with travel, and washed over with the neutral tint of cosmopolitanism,
and as insipid as bread and water. No Scott stamps and rolls his head to
the rhythm of his thoughts on the North Bridge; no Scott protests out of
his full heart against the innovations of Whiggery, and leans his brow
against the wall of the Mound, unashamed if his tears be seen by a
jesting Jeffrey, and tells him, “No, no--’tis no laughing matter; little
by little, whatever your wishes may be, you will destroy and undermine,
until nothing of what makes Scotland Scotland shall remain!”[59]
When Scott’s worldly prospects were very prosperous, when he was Sheriff
of Selkirk, and the author of the successful _Lay of the Last Minstrel_,
and a contributor to the _Edinburgh Review_, under the editorship first
of Sydney Smith and then of Jeffrey, he was an established citizen of
Edinburgh, in his second house in Castle Street--“poor 39”--as he lived
to call it. Here were his most brilliant days spent,--here, and at
Ashestiel, the picturesque farm on the banks of the Tweed which
superseded the Lasswade cottage, and then at Abbotsford, the proudest
home of all. But 39 Castle Street remained his town home through all the
brilliant and wonderful years, till the financial crash came in 1826. It
was here that Joanna Baillie paid a visit of a week or so,--here that
Crabbe stayed,--here that every one of worth or want found a ready
welcome. The dining-room in 39 Castle Street!--what scenes and what
voices have its walls seen and heard! Here all Scott’s famous dinners
took place, including those Sunday ones “without silver dishes” to his
intimates--Mrs. Maclean of Torloisk and her daughters; his school friend
Clerk; Kirkpatrick Sharpe of caustic humour and scandalous memory; Sir
Alexander Boswell of Auchinleck, “Bozzie’s” son, and author of “Jenny
dang the weaver”; Sir Alexander Don of Newton; William Allan, the
artist; and many others. It was here he had his orderly “den” behind the
dining-room, with its many books, its big writing-table, its two
armchairs, the staghound on the floor, and the cat safely atop the
book-ladder, and one picture--the beautiful, sad face of Graham of
Claverhouse, who, as Scott said, “foully traduced” by Covenanting
historians, “still passed among the Scottish vulgar for a ruffian
desperado.”
It must have been in the window of this study that Scott sat writing
night after night, when the son of William Menzies, living at his
father’s house in George Street, looked across from the back windows of
their house to the back of Scott’s, when, at a gathering of “gay and
thoughtless” young men, mostly advocates, he asked one to change places
with him that he might not see a hand that fascinated his eye. “It never
stops--page after page is finished and thrown on that heap of MS., and
still it goes on unwearied--and so it will be till candles are brought
in, and God knows how long after that.... I well know what hand it
is--’tis Walter Scott’s.”
It was in this self-same study that an attempt was made on Scott’s life
by a man named Webber, whose literary efforts Scott had befriended.
Webber had taken to drinking, and a sudden mad resentment against Scott
filled his unhinged mind. In this study Scott suddenly found himself
confronted by a madman with firearms, insisting on a duel then and
there; and it was only because of Scott’s absolute self-control and
courage that the great man’s life did not end in the year 1818. He
suggested that a duel in the house might disturb the ladies of the
family and had better be postponed till after dinner; and then, locking
up the pistols, he calmly brought Webber into the dining-room, and,
whilst they dined with an unconscious hostess, Scott sent for the young
man’s friends.
It was to Castle Street that Scott walked home across the Mound leaning
on his daughter’s arm, his own trembling, speaking not a word all the
way, on the day after the Scottish Regalia had been discovered. It was
owing to Scott’s representations to his friend the Prince Regent that
the Commission had been appointed to examine the Crown Room in the
Castle, and the long-lost Regalia had been brought to light. The next
day he and his fellow-commissioners had brought the ladies of their
families to view it, and Sophia Scott had been so wrought upon by the
sight that she had turned faint, and was drawing back from the group
when she heard her father’s voice, “something between anger and
despair,” exclaim, “By God, no!” and turned to see that one of the
Commissioners had been, in play, about to put the Scottish crown on the
head of a young girl present. The father and daughter walked home
together in silence, with a new sympathy between them.
It was of this very year, 1818, that Lockhart said: “At this moment, his
position, take it for all in all, was, I am inclined to believe, what no
other man had ever won for himself by the pen alone. His works were the
daily food, not only of his countrymen, but of all educated Europe. His
society was courted by whatever England could show of eminence. Station,
power, wealth, beauty, and genius, strove with each other in every
demonstration of respect and worship, and--a few political fanatics and
envious poetasters apart--wherever he appeared, in town or country,
whoever had Scotch blood in him, ‘gentle or simple,’ felt it move more
rapidly through his veins when he was in the presence of Scott.”[60]
Lockhart goes on to say that, “descending to what many looked on as
higher things,” the annual profits of Scott’s novels alone had been for
several years not less than £10,000, and his Castle of Abbotsford was
being built, and “few doubted that ere long he might receive from the
just favour of his Prince some distinction in the way of external rank,
such as had seldom before been dreamt of as the possible consequences of
mere literary celebrity.”
On February 2, 1820, Scott took Prince Gustavus Vasa, and his attendant,
Baron Polier, who were spending some months in Edinburgh, to the window
over Constable’s shop in the High Street, to hear George IV. proclaimed
King at the site of the Cross. Here Scott lamented to the Prince the
“barbarity of the Auld Reekie Bailies,” who had removed the historic
Cross; and when the exiled Prince broke down on hearing the National
Anthem sung by the crowd, Scott drew Lockhart away into another window,
whispering: “Poor lad! poor lad! God help him!”
Scott’s friend and admirer the Prince Regent once King, the distinctions
came. In 1820 Scott went to London to receive the baronetcy which, as
Lord Sidmouth had told him, it had been the Prince Regent’s desire to
confer on him. Whilst in London he sat to Sir Thomas Lawrence for his
portrait for the King, and to Chantrey for his bust, and the degree of
D.C.L. was offered him by both the English Universities. Three Edinburgh
distinctions were conferred on him. He was elected President of the
Royal Scottish Society; he was first President of the Bannatyne Club,
which he had founded; and he was appointed Professor of Ancient History
to the Royal Scottish Academy. Those years were his most active time as
a citizen as well as an author, for he was chairman of nearly every
public meeting, or charity, or educational scheme in the town. Every day
must have seen him limping along Princes Street, recognised by all,
coming from Parliament House, or his meetings, or his printer’s; perhaps
one of a group talking eagerly, pausing to disperse at the door of some
bookshop or on the steps of a club, or at the corner of Castle Street.
Many a head must have turned to gaze after the rugged familiar figure;
many a whisper to child or stranger must have followed him, “There,
look! That is Sir Walter Scott!”
In August 1822 George IV. paid his state visit to Edinburgh, and stayed
a fortnight in the capital of the ancient kingdom. This fortnight was
perhaps the proudest and most brilliant of Scott’s life,--“his supreme
moment”--and again it was in Edinburgh. The Tories, their dream of
Jacobitism dead with the Cardinal of York, were more personally loyal
than the Whigs; and Scott, most tory of Tories, was loyalest of the
loyal. It was his influence that had brought about the royal visit, and
on him devolved all the arrangements; and for weeks Castle Street was
like a green-room, filled by all the actors in the great play. When the
day came and in the rain the King’s yacht cast anchor in Leith
Roads--where Mary Stuart’s galleys had in the mist cast anchor on a
bygone August day--Scott rowed alongside and boarded the _Royal George_.
The King toasted him in native whisky; and Scott, in his enthusiasm,
asked leave to keep the glass. He put it, carefully wrapped up, in his
deep coat-tail pocket, and went home holding the skirt of his coat
carefully in front of him. Alas for the vanity of human wishes! At
Castle Street he found that Crabbe the poet had chosen this inopportune
season to arrive unexpectedly on a visit. Scott, ever hospitable,
welcomed him warmly, and promptly sat down beside him; and crash!--the
glass was smashed to atoms.
At six next morning, Queen Street--that sober terrace!--saw Sir Walter
Scott clad in Campbell tartans at a muster of the Celtic Club; and a
little later an inimitable scene took place in the dining-room of 39
Castle Street. Scott had hospitably brought some half-dozen Celts home
to breakfast; and, on entering the room himself from his study, he
discovered Crabbe, the dapper English clergyman, punctiliously neat and
decorous in his black clothes and buckled shoes, standing surrounded by
huge kilted and plaided Highlanders, like a sleek spaniel surrounded by
collies. To Scott’s amazement, the tongue in which all were endeavouring
to exchange ideas proved to be French; for Crabbe, as ignorant as an
Englishman can be about Scotland, had heard the Gaelic; and, judging the
strangely garbed men to be foreigners, and addressing them amiably in
French, had been promptly taken by them for a French _abbé_.
Throughout all the busy fortnight Scott was the centre of everything.
Daily he dined at Dalkeith Palace,[61] and attended the King at the
levées and drawing-rooms at Holyrood, at St. Giles’s Church on Sunday,
at the performance by Murray’s company of _Rob Roy_, and at the banquet
given by the Magistrates to the King at the Parliament House. It was
Scott who organised the great procession from Holyrood to the Castle in
copy of the “Riding of the Parliament.” And, as Lockhart points out in
his _Life of Scott_, it was due to Scott’s Celtic ardour that in all the
arrangements the kilts and pipes were made so prominent that King George
became impressed with the false idea that Scotland’s glory rested on
them alone, and that he showed this by giving as his one toast at the
banquet: “The Chieftains and Clans of Scotland, and Prosperity to the
Land of Cakes.” Perhaps it dates from this that the English to this day
think the kilt the national--if not the usual--dress of the Scot, and
that _Punch_ makes Highlanders talk lowland Scotch, and Scotsmen speak
Gaelic. But some results of the King’s visit--also due to Sir Walter
Scott’s influence--were better. The King knighted Adam Ferguson,
Deputy-Keeper of the Regalia, and Raeburn, the Scottish
portrait-painter; and Mons Meg was returned from the Tower, after much
correspondence; and the Scottish peerages forfeited in 1715 and 1745
were restored.
Four years later, Scott sent for his old friend Skene of Rubislaw. It
was a cold January morning--seven o’clock--when Skene arrived, and
Scott’s greeting to him was: “My friend, give me a shake of your hand:
mine is that of a beggar.” The crash had come. Offers of assistance
poured in--from his children, from the principal banks of Edinburgh,
from friends high and low. Scott, hearing that Sir William Forbes the
banker, his old rival in love, was foremost in wishing to help, wrote in
his diary: “It is fated our planets should cross, though, and that at
periods most interesting for me. Down--down--a hundred thoughts.”
No help was accepted. “This right hand shall pay it all,” he said. That
eident hand!...
Two months later he left Castle Street. “So farewell, poor 39.... _Ha
til mi tulidh._”[62] Two months later he went all alone to lodgings, in
North St. David Street, and heard next day of Lady Scott’s death at
Abbotsford. And so--first there, and then next winter alone with his
youngest daughter in a furnished house in Walker Street, and finally at
No. 6 Shandwick Place,--Sir Walter Scott worked himself to death in
Edinburgh to pay his debts: perhaps more loved and honoured than even in
the days of his prosperity.
Sir Walter Scott has often been compared to Shakespeare. Be that as it
may, in what he has done for Scotland he may even better be compared to
Napoleon; for, as Napoleon found France shattered and in chaos, and
lifted her to the pinnacle of power, so Scott came at an epoch in
Scotland’s history when her “flowers were a’ wede awa’,” and raised her
again to her place among the nations. And what he did was accomplished,
not by over two hundred battles, but by twenty-nine novels.
CHAPTER IX
SOCIAL EDINBURGH OF YESTERDAY
And the days of auld lang syne.
BURNS.
Social Edinburgh of yesterday,--that is to say, the social life of
Edinburgh from the death of Sir Walter Scott to the death of Queen
Victoria,--what does it imply? It means all the life of Edinburgh during
those seventy years, all the individual lives lived in Edinburgh, and
what each one did towards pushing the world onwards. And what hundreds
of names rise in the memory--names of all sorts and conditions of men,
“thick as the leaves in Vallombrosa”! It means also the shifting scenery
in the background of all those lives--a piling up of noble architecture
against the cloudy Scottish sky; a running up of numberless “long
unlovely streets”; a constant pulling down of dear, dirty, historic
dwellings; an occasional restoration of some ancient building; a
widening out of all the suburbs. It means many statues in the streets of
those who once were alive in them. It means the intersection of the
heart of the beautiful city by gleaming lines of rail, and overhead by
gleaming telegraph and telephone wires; it means the light of
electricity flashing suddenly through the town, and the old gas-lamps
burning dimly, and then put out for the last time; it means railway
whistles and cable tramway bells; it means smoke rising from miles and
miles of cold grey streets. But it is still the smoke of domestic fires,
as in the days when Gavin Douglas, waking on a winter morning in 1512,
“bade beit the fire and the candel allicht,” and _not_ the smoke of
belching chimneys of commerce. Edinburgh, as befits her intellect,
prints and publishes; and, as befits her climate, she brews and distils;
and the streams that flow down her valleys towards the Firth of Forth
pass on their way many mills that provide paper for printers and
authors; but farther than this she declines to go.
During Scott’s lifetime there were living in Edinburgh a remarkable
cluster of men; and some of those who, as young men, had been his
fellow-citizens, survived him right on until past the middle of the
century, and wrote their names large in the annals not only of Edinburgh
but of the world, before they too in their turn passed away. In
literature, during Scott’s lifetime, there was the immortal Baroness
Nairne, of the “weel-kent” Jacobite and Episcopalian family, the
Oliphants of Gask. Baroness Nairne, while she lived and when she
died,--during the meetings she must have had with Scott at the house of
her sister, Mrs. Keith of Ravelston,--was all the time the unavowed
author of some of the best-loved and best-known of our national songs.
There were Jeffrey the critic, Lord Cockburn, Henry Mackenzie, the “Man
of Feeling,” Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd, Campbell the poet, M‘Crie, the
historian and biographer of Knox, Dugald Stewart, and his antagonist,
Dr. Thomas Brown, Sir William Allan, the artist, Sir Henry Raeburn, the
great Scottish portrait-painter, Miss Ferrier, the novelist, Dr.
Alexander Murray, the philologist, Kirkpatrick Sharpe of the bitter
tongue, and David Laing, the kindly antiquary. In 1817 _Blackwood’s
Magazine_ had been started in Tory rivalry to the Whiggism of Jeffrey’s
_Edinburgh Review_; and in 1832, the very year of Scott’s death, William
and Robert Chambers began the publication of _Chambers’s Edinburgh
Journal_. Robert Chambers--who may be regarded, in virtue of his
long-unacknowledged _Vestiges of Creation_, as the forerunner of
Darwin--had, as a boy of twenty, written his inimitable _Traditions of
Edinburgh_. The compiling of the _Traditions_ had brought him at once
under the astonished and delighted notice of Scott, and begun a
friendship between them, resulting in many walks all about Edinburgh,
and many talks--also all about Edinburgh. After Scott’s death there were
in Edinburgh many notabilities. There was a brilliant literary coterie
scintillating in the Blackwood Saloon: Professor Wilson, “Christopher
North”; Scott’s son-in-law, Lockhart; Professor Wilson’s son-in-law,
Professor Aytoun, the writer of those stirring national ballads that
have thrilled so many Scottish hearts; Hogg, enticed from his Ettrick
pastures into the turmoil of _Noctes Ambrosianæ_; Dr. Moir, known as
“Delta.” These names are associated with the early days of _Blackwood_,
as are those of Lord Jeffrey, Lord Brougham, and Lord Cockburn with the
early days of the _Edinburgh Review_. Sir William Hamilton was living at
16 Great King Street; and somewhere in Edinburgh, invisible as a
microbe, but as far-reaching in achievement, there was the quaint little
figure of De Quincey. In one of a row of small houses in Comely Bank, on
the north-west outskirts of the city, lived Thomas Carlyle. Among the
judges were Lord Jeffrey and Lord Cockburn, survivors of the Whig party
of Scott’s days, and Lord Neaves, a staunch Conservative. Chiefest among
the Presbyterian Scottish clergy was the great Dr. Chalmers, and grouped
with him were Dr. Cunningham, Dr. Guthrie, and Dr. Candlish. Chiefest
among the Episcopalian Scottish clergy was the much-loved Scotsman, Dean
Ramsay, author of _Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character_.
In 1842 Queen Victoria paid her first royal visit to her Scottish
capital. She came, like George IV., by sea, and arrived at Granton on
September 1--most opportunely, for it was St. Giles’s Day. In the
following year, 1843, a great event occurred in the history of the
Church of Scotland, and the scene of its enactment was St. Andrew’s
Church in George Street, Edinburgh. No nation, it is said, knows
anything of what lies north of it. France knows nothing about England:
England’s ignorance in all regarding Scotland is supreme. Ask the
average Englishman what is meant by “the Disruption,” and he will stare
at you. And yet the Disruption was the outcome of a controversy that
agitated Scotland for years, a controversy strong enough to split the
Church of Scotland into two. Three years after the Disruption, the
“Philosophical Institution” was founded, and this was an event in the
history of intellectual and social Edinburgh that can best be valued
when it is remembered that among the first presidents were such men as
Lord Macaulay, Lord Brougham, Thomas Carlyle, and Adam Black, and that
among the first lecturers who came to Edinburgh by invitation of the
Philosophical were Dickens and Thackeray, Anthony Trollope and Charles
Kingsley, and Ruskin, who so roundly abused our New Town architecture.
Through the second half of the century, social Edinburgh was proud of
such men as Sir James Y. Simpson, the discoverer of the anæsthetic
properties of chloroform; Dr. John Brown, the author of _Rab and his
Friends_; Hugh Miller, the geologist, author of _Old Red Sandstone_;
Alexander Smith, the poet; John Skelton, the essayist and historian;
Alexander Russel, the witty editor of the _Scotsman_; Dr. John Hill
Burton, the Historiographer-Royal; and Skene, his successor in that
office, who was the son of Sir Walter Scott’s old friend. George Combe
lived in Edinburgh until 1858; and in the University, besides those
already named, were Sir David Brewster, Sir Robert Christison, Professor
Syme, John Goodsir, Lyon Playfair, and Professor Tait. And does not the
whole of Listerian surgery date from Edinburgh? And is not Lister’s own
great original “spray,” though long since superannuated, still the
glory of an Edinburgh Infirmary ward? Through the last hours of
yesterday, Edinburgh was familiar with the picturesque figure of
Professor Blackie in his plaid, with his beautiful old face framed in
its silver hair, and his joyous Celtic exuberance and enthusiasms that
so often startled the sober Scot. He, too, is gone.
When, in 1884, Edinburgh University, “the Town College,” celebrated her
Tercentenary, and invited all the greatest celebrities of Europe to
attend it, the streets of the sober grey city were for one wondrous week
illuminated by flashes of academic colours and faces of foreign poets
and soldiers, foreign men of science and statesmen, foreign historians
and philosophers, foreign theologians and artists; Englishmen,
Canadians, and Americans; Frenchmen, Germans, and Austrians; Russians,
Italians, and Greeks. It was a week of compliments and fireworks, of
lions and lionising, when every one who wished saw his own special
Shelley plain, and he stopped and spoke to him; and then all the great
European savants went away again, the richer by another honorary degree,
and left Edinburgh to calm down again, the richer by another memory.
The town itself has changed greatly since the days when Cockburn,
Jeffrey, and Horner stood in Queen Street and listened to the corncrake
in the fields stretching between them and the sea. It has changed since
they lamented the cutting down of the trees round “Bellevue,” the
beautiful house of General Scott, in the centre of Drummond Place. It
has changed since the “Highland Lady” spent the winters of her girlhood
there, attended the routs and balls, and walked in Princes Street
attired in a white gown, a pink spencer, yellow tan boots with dangling
tassels, and a deep-poked bonnet with three tall white ostrich feathers
held aloft by the wind. The men and women who felt Edinburgh their own
during the first half of last century would scarcely find their way
about it to-day; they would wander through vast tracts of busy streets
where for them were green fields and yellow whins, and discover further
indentations of the country in new suburbs embracing fragments of old
villages, or enclosing in a new street some ancient castle or homestead.
Merchiston Castle, for instance, the home of the Napiers, a hoary and
battlemented old keep, now stands within a walled garden among modern
villas; and the fine old turreted dwelling of Chiesley of Dalry is now
imbedded in mean streets, and saved from ignominy, and kept clean and
orderly, by being an Episcopalian Training College. The various new
buildings that have sprung up during the Victorian era to decorate or to
deface the city are of course too numerous to mention; but a few of them
are closely connected with the social life of Edinburgh yesterday. “It
is not for nothing that the very central and supreme object in the
architecture of our present Edinburgh is the monument to Sir Walter
Scott,” writes the author of _Edinburgh Sketches and Memories_; “the
finest monument, I think, that has yet been raised anywhere on the earth
to the memory of a man of letters.”[63] It stands on the green velvet
of the grass of Princes Street Gardens, noblest in the long line of
statues of Edinburgh’s notable citizens, facing the gayest and most
crowded thoroughfare of the modern city; but through its fine Gothic
arches one sees the old town Scott loved so well.
The University New Buildings have considerably enlarged the University
itself; and the M‘Ewan Hall has been further added to it by the
generosity of Mr. William M‘Ewan, and the Students’ Union by the efforts
of the ladies of the University and the town; and Mr. Andrew Carnegie
has given Edinburgh its splendid Public Library.
In 1879 there was consecrated the great Cathedral Church of St. Mary,
then the largest ecclesiastical building that had been built in Britain
since the Reformation.[64] The Cathedral was built by endowment of the
Misses Walker, and the architect was Sir Gilbert Scott. It stands at the
west end of Edinburgh, and its grounds include Old Coates House, one of
the two or three houses that stood beyond the Nor’ Loch in the days
before the New Town was thought of.
In 1887 the National Portrait Gallery in Queen Street was presented to
Edinburgh by the late Mr. J. R. Findlay; and though many of the
portraits of our
[Illustration: SIR WALTER SCOTT’S MONUMENT FROM THE EAST PRINCES ST.
GARDENS
On the higher level above the green slope lies the part of the Gardens
fronting Princes Street. The monument gains in height viewed from this
lower level. The tower in the distance is that attached to the North
British Railway Hotel.]
great dead, like the faces of our great living, have gone to London, yet
there is now a goodly collection of national portraits in the capital of
Scotland. And there must not be forgotten the greatest building of
all--if building it can be called--that has been achieved near Edinburgh
during yesterday: the Forth Bridge, the highest bridge in the world,
finished in 1890, with its monster claws planted firmly on either side
of the Firth of Forth, just where Queen Margaret and Malcolm Canmore
used to be ferried to and fro on their journeyings between Edinburgh
Castle and Dunfermline Palace.
It is not only by the building of new edifices that wealthy citizens
have generously endowed Edinburgh; there is another form of patriotism
which seeks to restore the old, and two such inestimable benefits have
been conferred not only on Edinburgh, but on all who visit her, and who
venerate the past. In 1883 the late Mr. William Chambers restored with
reverence and taste the Church of St. Giles, which had been half ruined
by ruthless vandalism in 1829, and in 1892 the late Mr. Thomas Nelson
restored magnificently the splendid old hall of the Castle, the scene of
so many banquets and so many Parliaments, and of not a few
tragedies.[65]
CHAPTER X
THE HOMES AND HAUNTS OF ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
The Tropics vanish; and meseems that I
From Halkerside, from topmost Allermuir
Or steep Caerketton, dreaming gaze again.
Far set in fields and woods, the town I see
Spring gallant from the shadow of her smoke,
Cragged, spired, and turreted, her virgin fort beflagged.
R. L. STEVENSON.
Robert Louis Stevenson, remembering his Edinburgh days, must have
remembered three homes and many haunts. There was his parents’ town
house, 17 Heriot Row; there was his grandfather’s manse at Colinton, set
low in the old village graveyard by the river; and there was little
Swanston, rented by his parents many years as a country residence,
nestling in a little hollow high up on the edge of the Pentlands.
During all Stevenson’s Edinburgh days from his eighth year 17 Heriot Row
was his home proper. Heriot Row, one of the pleasantest resident streets
in Edinburgh, is, like all Edinburgh resident streets, a row of grey
stone houses built in absolute uniformity. It is built on the northern
slope of the New City, parallel with the three large main
streets,--Princes Street, George Street, and Queen Street,--but below
them, and is a single row of houses with an open outlook, facing the
green trees and turf of the gardens that stretch between Heriot Row and
Queen Street above. It was in the nursery facing the gardens and looking
up to the dignified dwellings of Queen Street through the trees that the
little fretful invalid child was soothed by his faithful Calvinistic
nurse, Alison Cunningham, and that on summer evenings, after he had gone
to bed, he lay listening to “grown-up people’s feet” on the street
below, and watching the birds in the trees.
Till yesterday, when electricity turned night into day, the lamplighter
used to go quickly at evening along the Edinburgh streets with his
ladder, fix the hook at the end of it into the cross-bar of each
lamp-post in turn, run up, lift off the glass top, and light the lamp.
Every small street urchin in Scotland knows the cry of “Leerie, Leerie,
licht the lamps!”--and the little town child, in his cosy Edinburgh
nursery, counted himself very lucky to have a lamp-post just before the
front door of his home, and used to sit until his tea was ready and
watch for “Leerie” posting down the street with his ladder and his
light.
The grandfather Balfour’s manse at Colinton was associated with holidays
when all the young cousins played in the dark, shabby, homelike rooms,
or, “sin without pardon,” broke the branches and got through a breach
in the garden wall, and so to the joys of the river.
It is all there to-day: the damp old harled manse beside the parish
church; the graveyard with its ancient tombs and the great iron
coffin,--memento of the days of “resurrectionist” terror; the great
swirling brown river under the magnificent trees of Colinton Dell; even
the “weir with its wonder of foam,” and the old mill with the “wheel in
the river.” It is one of the prettiest spots round Edinburgh, cool and
quiet, with the reflections of the branches on the brown, foam-flecked
surface of the deeper pools; and, close to the village end of the Dell,
where the tall, wonderful cedars stand high against the sky above the
manse and the church, there is a little fragment of ruin half-hidden
among the trees on the steep bank, and tradition speaks vaguely, but
suggestively, of a forgotten hermit and his cell.
The village itself is changed since Stevenson knew it. There is now a
little double line of railway passing through, and an occasional train
puffs out of a rocky tunnel into a little station, and presently
proceeds on its leisurely way up the valley. The old parts of Colinton
remain in picturesque patches, but round them has blossomed forth a
community of red-roofed, gabled houses, with quaint latticed windows,
and every shade of “harled” walls. They face every way; but whichever
way they face they command lovely views, seen through the clear, brisk
Midlothian air, across fields under the rule of the famed Midlothian
farming, and to the grand range of the Pentlands, with the beautiful,
richly-coloured valley between, and overhead a Scottish sky of great
fleecy clouds and deep blue vistas.
Of Stevenson it may be submitted that he was a wandering sheep who did
not love the fold; and his _Picturesque Notes_, for all their literary
value, are tinged with the Calvinism he learnt at his nurse’s knee, and
inhaled unconsciously in his native air, and that glooms his outlook
even whilst he is most jeeringly observant of its effects on others. He
was not happy in Edinburgh. But, underlying all the sarcasm, all the
sneers, all the bitterness and fretfulness--whether directed at
convention, custom, clothes, creeds, or climate--one seems to hear the
cry of despairing indignation of youth lacking its birthright of
strength and health.
It is pleasanter to think of Stevenson playing the truant from the
University, in his country haunts amid whins and whimsies, than of his
facing a “downright meteorological purgatory” in the “draughty
parallelograms” of the city. Every inch of the Pentlands, of Blackford
Hill, of the Braids, of “classic Hawthornden” and all the valley of the
Esk, of the windings of the Water of Leith and of the shores of the
Firth of Forth--all of it was known to the youthful Stevenson, known so
well and so faithfully that he could describe it afterwards from the
Tropics. But especially dear and homelike must the Pentlands have been
to him--the Pentlands, where the old manse of his boyish holidays lies,
and where “Little Swanston” of his later years still nestles in the
trees beside one of the most picturesque villages in Scotland, within
half-an-hour’s walk from Edinburgh. All the ground between Colinton and
Swanston is historic. Had the countryside kept a diary, the first leaves
would have been inscribed in Roman characters; for here was once a Roman
town, though all that now remains of the conquering race of the old
world is a little Roman bridge, and the great unhewn Battlestone
standing huge and awesome alone in a field, and telling of the battle
fought here, centuries ago, between the Picts and the Romans. A few
hundreds of pages farther on in the diary would come the stern words of
the persecuted Covenanters, who were encamped near here before the
battle of Rullion Green.
All this romance and lore was known to Stevenson and loved by him, as
well as he knew and loved the cry of the sea-gulls as they circled
overhead, or followed the plough with loud cries of hunger. Often must
the young Stevenson, with his strange face and long hair and his
eccentric garb, have climbed the steep hill road, past “Hunter’s Tryst,”
five hundred feet above sea-level, where, it is told, Allan Ramsay laid
the scenery of the _Gentle Shepherd_,[66] and where the members of the
Six Feet Club used to meet in the little roadside inn which Sir Walter
Scott and the Ettrick Shepherd both knew well. The quiet cart-road to
Swanston leads out of this road, a little beyond the sharp turn at
“Hunter’s Tryst,” and before the
[Illustration: ARTHUR’S SEAT FROM THE BRAID HILLS
In the immediate foreground is a portion of the Braid Hills; farther on
the Blackford Hill with the shelter on its highest point, and at the end
of the slope to the right the New Royal Observatory. To the left are
part of Edinburgh, the mass of the Castle, and the shores of Fife. The
Salisbury Crags and “Lion” of Arthur’s Seat are above all.]
cross-roads at Fairmilehead. It leads yet another hundred feet higher, a
gentle ascent between fields and pastures, and across a tiny trickling
burn fringed with willows, to the green slopes at the foot of
Caerketton, one of the Pentland range. Passing a big open cart-shed,
many empty carts, a cottage or two, cackling poultry, and a barking dog,
you come to Swanston, the garden gate open, giving a most alarming view
of a very modern and grotesque effigy of Tam o’ Shanter--usually taken
for a statue of Stevenson--which is set on a rockery half-way up the
little drive. All this is visible and prominent; but the village lies
hidden behind the house; and Swanston Cottage, Stevenson’s home, is a
little to one side, on the slope of the hill, and remains unseen,
especially in spring or summer when the trees are full of leaf. Swanston
itself, now a farm, was originally a grange belonging to some
neighbouring religious house, probably Currie, and is a fine old stone
building, its tall gabled side having the characteristically Scottish
“crow steps.” The road continues, a mere cart track, in front of the
garden wall, and curls round at the back to some modern cottages, “stane
sclated”; and here it ends, as if unwilling to betray that a few steps
farther on is one of the prettiest villages in Scotland--a rustic group
of thatched and harled homesteads, with here and there fenced-in gardens
of old-fashioned flowers, and all set round about an irregular patch of
village green and Swanston Burn, beside which play the little healthy,
bonny Scottish bairns, “like tumbled fruit in grass.”
The inhabitants of this village remember Stevenson well. They thought he
was “daft.” His fame has not yet impressed them. “Ay, he was much aboot
the place,” an old dame will say, indifferently. “But, whenever the wind
was in the east, he would be off to his grandfather’s at Colinton,” a
hale and sturdy old man will add.
“He was much aboot the place.” To the Stevenson lover this is its charm
to-day--above the bleating of the lambs, above the delight of the
wholesome air, above the tones and tints of thatch against the hill or
of wood reek against the sky. And yet, to Stevenson, it was all these
things that charmed, and that he recollected so tenderly when he lay
slowly dying in far-away Samoa: the barking of the sheep-dog and the
voice of the shepherd in the grey early morning, and the pure air that
was “rustically scented”--all the sights and sounds so dear to the
country-lover. And yet, climb up a little among the whins and the
pastures behind his home, and turn--and there lies Edinburgh below you,
painted like a picture in the haze of smoke and sunshine.
[Illustration: THE WATER OF LEITH FROM DEAN BRIDGE
We are looking west up stream, towards the sun setting behind
Corstorphine Hill. Above the waterfall is a distillery with its chimney
pointing to the Dean U.F. Church. On the right of the picture are the
two towers of the Orphan Hospital.]
CHAPTER XI
EDINBURGH TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW
Life holds not an hour that is better to live in:
the past is a tale that is told,
The future a sun-flecked shadow, alive and asleep,
with a blessing in store.
SWINBURNE.
In Edinburgh, at whatever other hour of the day the resident or tourist
may let his mind dwell in the past, at one o’clock he will always be
brought back to the present moment; for at one o’clock the gun goes off
at the Castle, and horses and men and women that are gun-shy are greatly
startled, and every one pulls out his watch. But, except precisely at
one o’clock, it is as impossible to exist in Edinburgh without living in
the past as it would be to walk along Princes Street without seeing the
Castle. We are a little archaic in Edinburgh. Yet there are other things
of the present that you may notice after you have set your watch to
Greenwich time by the one-o’clock gun. Princes Street is gay with shop
windows under awnings, with the big bow-windows of the Clubs, with many
hotels; and now there are bigger and newer hotels to east and to west,
at the railway stations. And Princes Street is full of a constant stream
of traffic, plying in the wide street between the one broad pavement on
the north side and the row of statues along the green sward and the
blazing flower-beds in the beautiful gardens opposite: cable cars with
noisy bells, motor cars, carriages, bicycles, electric broughams,
station lorries, hansom cabs, and the crawling “char-a-bancs,” with
their scarlet-coated drivers, picking up passengers for the Forth Bridge
or Roslin. But still the north-east wind takes the liberty of blowing
from the Forth among all these modern innovations, and whirling an
unwary hat or a too-lightly-held newspaper high into the air.
As the wind is unchanged in temper, so are the natural features
unchanged in beauty; and the views of the city, “from a’ the airts the
wind can blaw,” are pictures to gladden the artist or the poet. There is
the “Marmion view” from the south,--the view that Scott loved and Turner
painted,--but with a denser massing of suburb than they saw, reaching
right up to the furzy knoll where Marmion stood. Here is the Castle in
all its majesty, with the Grassmarket and Cowgate huddled picturesquely
under its precipices, and the old dark descending spine of the High
Street, with St. Giles’s open crown over the roofs, and then all the
maze and glitter of a newer world, with its many domes and steeples, and
the Forth beyond.
This is from the south; but, seen from the western roads and heights,
the city is even more striking. As you drive to the Forth Bridge along
the fine old coach road to Queensferry,--the very road along which
Jonathan Oldbuck and his companion drove in their journey in _The
Antiquary_--you pass an occasional farm-house with mellow stacks about
it and a smoky throat, and you must remember you are “within a mile of
Edinburgh toun,” where “Bonny Jockie, blythe and gay, kissed sweet Jenny
making hay.” Here, turn your head and you will see the dark mass of
Arthur’s Seat lifted up in the air, and upon its western wall the
fretted outline of the city and the Castle Rock, seeming not painted but
actually engraven like some old hieroglyphic.
To view Edinburgh from the north, you must journey over the Forth Bridge
and look across from the Fife coast opposite. From the wooded “haughs”
between Aberdour and Burntisland, Edinburgh, seen through a veil of
green summer leaves across six miles of rough bright blue, seems painted
in air, a scene of magic loveliness not to be excelled in all the
idyllic world of romance or dream. In the nearest foreground the little
island of Inchcolm with its tiny golden strand and ruined monastery;
farther out to sea Inchkeith’s lighthouse ringed with a fringe of foam;
and, beyond, a world of heights and hollows: Arthur’s Seat and the rigid
uncurved slant of the Salisbury Crags, and the gabled intricacy of the
Old Town, stretching from the hollow up to the black mass of rock on
which the Castle glooms in mid-air, and then the New Town fantastically
domed and steepled in the low foreground, and the white-columned summit
of Calton Hill. Down at the water’s edge, between the Forth and this
fairy show, are the dusky roofs and docks and shipping of Granton and
Leith. Away to the west, the dwindling Forth is spanned by the arches of
the monster bridge; and beyond it stretch the woods of Dalmeny and
Abercorn. In the far east, where the Forth has widened to the sea, are
the outjutting headlands, and on one of them is the curious cone called
Berwick Law; while, behind all, for a background, the distant Pentlands
slope to the south in softest purple.
Dear to the heart of the resident is the view seen as one comes down the
Mound on a winter’s afternoon at sunset, when the Castle stands dark
against the glorious red of the western sky, and Princes Street, her
lamps and her windows all alight, looks like a jewelled necklace.
But of all views of Edinburgh the most mystically beautiful is that seen
from the Calton Hill by night. The city is close about you; but in the
darkness there is isolation. Across a gulf of impenetrable gloom there
is spread a panorama of heights and depths, beaded by a myriad of
lights, with those in the depths seeming to be reflected from those in
the heights, like a starry sky seen in a deep pool. And, as you encircle
the hill, you find always some new phantasy of light and gloom, until on
the side towards the Firth there seems to be a stretch of flat black
country garlanded with lights that dip and rise with every bend of the
land down to the lip of the sea; and all round the coast every
[Illustration: THE NATIONAL MONUMENT ON CALTON HILL
This noble monument represents a partial reproduction of the Parthenon
on the Acropolis at Athens. In the picture the spectator is supposed to
be looking at the north-west angle of the Temple, showing the eight
columns of the west front and two on the north side. On the left of the
picture is a glimpse of the Firth of Forth, while to the right, behind
the columns, rises Arthur’s Seat.]
point and pier and headland is studded with coloured sea-lights; and far
out in the measureless mid-Firth flashes the great Eye of the revolving
light of Inchkeith.
Brave the “sharp sops of sleet and snipand snaw,” and come to Edinburgh
in winter, and you will find all the residents at home and busy: the Law
Courts sitting; the University at work; a regiment, with khaki coverings
to their kilts, quartered at the Castle, and tramping through the town
in rhythm to the tune of the pipes; and all the gaiety of balls and
dinners and theatres in the evening hours. Risk the keen blast of the
east wind, and come to Edinburgh in April, and you will be able to
attend the Graduation in Arts at the M‘Ewan Hall,--in the character
of an honorary graduate if you deserve it. Come in May, and you will
find the streets thronged with black-coated ministers and elders from
every parish in Scotland; for the Assemblies will be sitting, and the
Lord High Commissioner will be holding semi-royal state at Holyrood.
Come in autumn, as you always will; and it will be to find the long rows
of stately stone dwellings left tenantless, and their appalling
regularity and monotony rendered even more appalling by the brown paper
that fills the windows, and by the boarding that is up before the doors.
But the shop windows will be full of tartans for your edification, and
you will find your cabman able to tell you all you want to know. At any
other season Edinburgh is a hospitable city, and it is growing every day
a more cosmopolitan one. English residents have altered national ways;
ruthless hands are tearing down our beautiful old stone houses, and
building tenements in their places; and soon--too soon--all Scottish
traits will be lost.
But the Castle Rock cannot be levelled. It was there, in the mist and
the rain, before Edinburgh began; and it will be there, in the mist and
the rain, when Edinburgh has ceased to be.
Index
Abbotsford, 138, 141, 145
Abercromby, George (Lord), 134
Adamson, Bishop (1584), 55
Advocates’ Close, 72, 73
Albany, Duke of, brother of James III., 13-14
Alexander II., 46
Alexander III., 9, 17, 24
Allan, Sir William, 138, 149
Alnwick Castle, 6
Anchor Close, 75, and _note_
Angus, Earl of, called “Archibald Bell-the-Cat,” 48, 49
Angus, Earl of, 15 _note_, 50, 88
Anne of Denmark, wife of James VI., 71, 102
Argyle, Marquis of, 15-16, 80
Arran, Earl of, 88, 89
Arthur’s Seat, 23, 27, 36, 38, 165
Ashestiel, 138
Assembly Rooms (Old Edinburgh), 73, 74, 75
Auchinleck, Lord, his caustic saying concerning Dr. Johnson, 110
Ayala, Don Pedro de, ambassador from Ferdinand and Isabella
of Spain to the Court of James IV., 28, 29
Aytoun, Professor, 149
Bailie Fyfe’s Close, 74, 77
Baillie, Joanna, 138
Balcarres, Countess of. _See_ Hyndford’s Close
Balfour, Dr., grandfather of R. L. Stevenson, 157
Bannatyne Club, the, 142
“Banner of Blue,” 14
Barbauld, Mrs., 134
Barnard, Lady Anne (_née_ Lindsay), 62, 77
Bastian, servant of Mary, Queen of Scots, 40
Baxter’s Close, 70
Beaton, Cardinal, 50, 76
Beaton, James, Archbishop of Glasgow, 88-89
Beattie, the poet, 108
Beaufort, Jane, wife of James I., 11-12, 25-26
“Begbie murder,” the, 77
Belches of Invermay, Sir John and Lady Jane, and their
daughter, Scott’s first love, 133
“Bell-the-Cat.” _See_ Angus
Bell’s Wynd, 73, 74
Bernham, David de, Norman Bishop of St. Andrews (1243), 46
“Bible Close,” 78
Bishops of Edinburgh (Established Episcopalian), 54
Bishop’s Palace. _See_ Whitehorse Close
Black, Adam, 151
Black, Professor, 120
Blackford Hill, 130, 159
Blackfriars Street, formerly Wynd, 40, 76, 88, 109
Blackie, Professor, 152
_Blackwood’s Magazine_, 149
Blair, Dr., 108
Borthwick, Master Gunner to James IV., 27
Boswell, Sir Alexander, his verses on Miss Nicky Murray, 73-74, 138
Boswell, James, 68, 100, 108-109, 110
Boswell, Mrs., 108-109
Bothwell, Adam, Bishop of Orkney, 40, 71-72
Bothwell, Earl of, 39, 40, 41, 66, 71
“Bow-head Saints,” the, 96-97
Boyd, George. _See_ Mound
Boyd’s Close, 82 _note_, 107-108
Braid Hills, the, 159
Brantôme, Sieur de, 36, 37
Brewster, Sir David, 151
Bristo Street, 113
Brodie’s Close, 70
Brougham, Lord, 150, 151
Brown, George, builder of George Square and Brown Square, 122
Brown, Dr. John, 151
Brown, Dr. Thomas, 149
Brown Square, 122
Bruce, King Robert the, 9, 10, 18, 42, 83
Bruce, Marjory, daughter of King Robert the Bruce, 42
Buchan, Earl of, 108
Buchanan, George, 50, 91, 92-93
Burnet, Miss, 112, 114
Burns, Robert, lodges in Baxter’s Close, 70, 75;
his triumphant reception in Edinburgh, 111-113;
meeting with Scott, 113;
“Clarinda and Sylvander,” 113-114;
_Edina, Scotia’s darling seat_, 114-115
Burton, Dr. John Hill, 151
Byers’ Close, 71-73, and 71 _note_
Byers of Coates, John, 71 _note_
Caledonian Hunt, the, and Burns’s Poems, 112-113
Calton Hill, 46;
the view from, 166
Campbell, Thomas, 137, 149
Candlish, Dr., 150
Canongate, the, 24, 62, 63, 64, 67, 78-82, 100, 101, 105, 106, 124
Cant’s Close, 76
Carberry Hill, battle of, 41, 66
Carey, Sir Robert, 41-42
Carlyle, Dr., of Inveresk, 107
Carlyle, Thomas, 150, 151
Carnegie, Andrew, 154
“Castell of Maydens,” 5
Castle, the, 3-21;
story of Malcolm Canmore and Queen Margaret, 5-8;
Queen Margaret’s Chapel in, 5, 7, 9, 15, 16;
“Frank’s Escalade,” 10;
besieged by Henry IV. of England, 11;
the “Black Dinner” (1440), 12-13, 17;
story of the Duke of Albany, 13-14;
James VI. born in the Palace of, 15;
Jacobites imprisoned in, 16;
the Great Hall of, 16-18, 155;
the Regalia, 18-20, 140;
“Mons Meg,” 20-21, 144;
mentions of, 23, 24, 26, 69, 86, 120;
the “one-o’clock gun,” 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 168
Castle Street, 135, 136, 137 _note_, 138, 139, 142, 143, 145
Cathedral (St. Giles’s). _See_ St. Giles, Church of
St. Mary, 71 _note_, 154
Chalmers, Dr., 150
_Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal_, 149
Chambers, Robert, 19, and _note_, 20, 54, 72, 73, 74, 81, 119-121, 129;
his writings, and his friendship with Scott, 149
Chambers, William, 61, 155
Charles I., 18, 41, 42, 43, 54, 82, 94
Charles II., 19, 43, 58, 65, 95
Charles Edward Stuart (Prince Charlie), 43-44, 99, 130, 131 _note_
Chepman, Walter, earliest Scottish printer, 27, 47, 48, 49 _note_
Chiesley of Dalry, 153
Christison, Sir Robert, 151
“Christopher North.” _See_ Wilson
Church of St. Giles. _See_ St. Giles
“Clarinda” (Mrs. M‘Lehose), 113-114
Claverhouse, Graham of, 126, 138
“Cleanse the Causeway,” 66, 88-89, 127
Clerks of Penicuik, the, 98, 132, 133, 136, 138
Closes and Wynds of Edinburgh, 62-82, 88, 95-96,
99, 100, 105, 106, 108, 109, 120, 129
Coalstoun, Lord, story of, 72-73
Coates House, 71 _note_
Cockburn, Lord, 149, 150
Cockburn, Mrs., 100
Colinton, 156, 157, 158, 160, 162
College Wynd, 106, 120, 129
Combe, George, 151
Comely Bank, 150
Constable, Thomas, 141
Court of Session, 85
Covenanters, the, 59, 96, 160
Cowgate, the, 40, 64, 87, 88, 90, 91, 95, 96, 120, 164
Crabbe, George, 138, 143
Craig, Lord, 113
Craigie, Lord President, 124
Craigmillar, 144 _note_
Craigmillar Quarry, 122
Crail, 35
Cranstoun, George (Lord Corehouse), 134
Cranstoun, Miss, 134, 135
Creech’s Land, 105
“Crochallan Fencibles,” 75, 112
Cromwell, Oliver, banquets in the Hall of the Castle, 18;
stays at Moray House, 79-80;
enters Edinburgh after the battle of Dunbar, 58
Cross, the City, 31, 43, 58, 98, 132, 141
Cullen Professor, 120
Cunningham, Alison, 157
Cunningham, Dr., 150
Cunyie House (the Scottish Mint), 76
Currie, 161
Dalkeith, 30, 144
Dalmeny, the woods of, 166
Darnley, Earl of, 38-39, 39-40, 42, 76
David I., 23-24, 46
David II., and David’s Tower in the Castle, 10
Dawney Douglas’s Tavern, 75, 112
Deacon Brodie. _See_ Brodie’s Close
Defoe, 104-105
“Delta.” _See_ Moir
De Quincey, 150
Dick of Prestonfield, Sir Alexander, 109
Dickens, Charles, 151
Disruption, the, 150-151
Don of Newton, Sir Alexander, 138
Donald Bane, 7
Douglas, Duchess of, 108
Douglas, Duke of, 125
Douglas, Gavin, 27;
account of, 48-50, 87-89, 148
Douglas, Lady Jane, 70
Dowie’s Tavern, 112
Drummond of Hawthornden, 29, 94, 104
Drummond, Lord Provost, 123
Drummond Place, 125, 126, 152
Drummore, Lord, 124-125
Drumsheugh, the ancient forest of, 23, 31, 46
Duddingston, 100
Dunbar, William, 28, 29, 31, 87
Dundas, Sir Laurence, 125
Dundonald, Earl of, 70
Dunfermline, 4, 6, 8, 155
Edgar, second son of Malcolm Canmore, 7
Edinburgh made an Episcopal See (1633), 54
_Edinburgh Courant_, 104
_Edinburgh Review_, 137 and _note_, 149
Edward I. of England, 9, 24, 46, 50
Edward II. of England, 25, 46
Edward “the Confessor,” 5
Eglintoun, Susanna, Countess of, 75, 98-100
Eglintoun, Lord, 98-99
Elizabeth, Queen of England, 42
Elliott of Minto, Miss Jeanie, 122
Erskine, friend of Scott, 134
Erskine, Henry, Advocate, 108
“Ettrick Shepherd,” the. _See_ Hogg
Fairmilehead, 161
Falkland, 11, 35
Fergusson, Professor, 113, 134
Fergusson, Robert, 112
Ferrier, the family of, 112, 114
Ferrier, Miss, 149
Findlay, John Ritchie, 154
Firth of Forth. _See_ Forth
Fleming of Cumbernauld, Sir Malcolm, 12, 13
Flodden, battle of, 31-33, 35, 49 _note_;
the Flodden Wall, 62, 87
Forbes of Pitsligo, Sir William, and Burns, 112
Forbes of Pitsligo, Sir William, and Scott, 133, 145
Forbes, William, first Established Episcopal Bishop of Edinburgh (1634), 54
“Fore-stairs,” 65, 66, 76
Forth (river, and Firth of), 3-4, 5, 7, 8,
21, 35, 36, 46, 155, 159, 165, 166, 167
Forth Bridge, the, 4, 155, 164, 165, 166
Fortune’s Tavern, 75-76
Franklin, Benjamin, 107
Gay, John, 81, 105-106
General’s Entry, 113
George I., 16
George III., 98, 99, 126
George IV., 141, 142
George Square, 122, 130, 131
George Street, 135, 139, 150, 157
Glammis, Lady, 14-15, and _note_
Glenlee, Lord, 122
“Golden Charter,” 14
Goldsmith, Oliver, 73, 106
Goodsir, Professor John, 151
“Goose Pie, the,” 98
Gordon, Duchess of, 76-77, 112
Gordon of Haddo, Sir John, 58
Grange, Lord, 74
Granton, 150, 166
Grassmarket, the, 15, 97, 120, 164
Gray of Pittendrum, Lord, and Lady, 68-69, and _note_
Great King Street, 150
Greyfriars’ Church and Churchyard, 51, 96, 133
Gustavus Vasa, Prince, 141
Guthrie, Dr., 150
Haddington, first Earl of (“Tam o’ the Cowgate”), 90-92
“Haddo’s Hole,” in St. Giles’s, 58, 59
Hailes, Lord, 108
Hall, the Rev. Mr., Presbyterian divine (1603), 53
Hamilton, Sir William, 150
Hart, Andro, 94
Hawthornden, 94, 109, 159
Hay, James, story of, 96
“Heart of Midlothian,” 63. _See also_ Tolbooth
Henry III. of England, 9
Henry IV. of England, 11
Henry VII. of England, 30
Henry VIII. of England, 35, 37, 46, 50
Henry, Prince, eldest son of James VI., 41
Heriot, George, 90-91
Heriot Row, 156, 157
High School, the (in Old Edinburgh), 71, 92, 130
High Street, the, 62, 76, 77, 80, 88, 90, 94,
96, 105, 108, 123, 124, 127, 141, 164
“Highland Lady,” the, 153
Hogg, James (the “Ettrick Shepherd”), 136-137, 149, 160
Holbein, his miniature portrait of James IV., 29
Holyrood, 18, 22-44, 47, 53, 62, 63, 64, 65,
70, 76, 84, 91, 109, 120, 144, 167;
legend of the founding of the Abbey, 23;
Abbey burnt by Edward II., 25;
in reign of James IV., 26-33;
in reign of James V., 33-35;
in reign of Queen Mary, 35-41;
Charles I. christened at, 41;
and crowned at, 42;
rebuilt by Charles II., 43;
Abbey Church restored by James VII., 43;
Prince Charlie at, 43-44;
the Abbey desecrated and destroyed, 44
Home, John, 107
Hope, Sir Thomas, King’s Advocate, 34, 95
Homer, Francis, 52
Hume, David, 68, 71, 100-101, 109, 125
Hunter’s Tryst, 160
Huntly, Earl of, 39
Hyndford’s Close, 76, 77
Inchcolm, 165
Inchkeith, 109, 165
Irving, John, 134
Isles, Lord of the, story of, in 1429, 25-26
Jack’s Land, 101
Jacobites imprisoned in the Castle, 16
James I., 11, 12, 22, 26, 84
James II., 17, 26, 85, 86
James III., 14, 26, 68, 85
James IV., 16, 19, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32,
33, and _note_, 37, 38, 42, 49 _note_, 66, 87
James V., 14, 18, 33, 35, 85, 87, 88, 89
James VI., 15, 18, 41-42, 43, 52, 53, 71, 85, 90,
91, 92, 93, 94, 102-103, 104, 124
James VII., 43, 95
James’s Court, 68, 70, 101, 108, 125
Jeffrey, Lord, 131-132, 137, and _note_, 138, 149, 150
“Jenny Geddes,” 45, 54-58, 59
“Jock o’ Sklates.” _See_ Mar, Earl of
Jonson, Ben, 104
Johnson, Dr., 68, 82 _note_, 100, 107-109, 110, 111
Kames, Lord, 108
Keith of Ravelston, Mrs., 148
Kemp, architect of the Scott Monument, 154 _note_
Kennedy, Bishop, 85-86
Kennedy, Sir Archibald, 98
Kincaid, Alexander, publisher, 107
Kingsley, Charles, 151
Kirkaldy of Grange, 52
Knox, John, 38, 49 _note_, 50, 51, and _note_, 52, 55, 61;
his house, 65, 77, 90, and _note_;
his grave, 65, 149
Krames, the, 53
Lady Stair’s Close, 68-70, 105
“Laigh Council House,” the, 91
Laing, David, 106, 149
Laing, Malcolm, 134
Lands, the (in Old Edinburgh), 62-82, 85,
87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 95, 99, 100, 101, 103, 105, 107, 108, 112, 113
Lang Dykes (_called also_ Lang Gait), 121, 126
Lasswade, Scott’s cottage at, 136
Laud, Archbishop, his Service-Book, 55, and _note_, 56
Lauder, 48
Lauder of Blyth, Sir Alexander, 49
Lawnmarket, the, 62, 63, 68, 69, 127
Leith, 13, 14, 20, 26, 27, 34, 36, 97, 104, 142, 166
Leslie, Alexander, the Covenanting General, 18
Leven, Earl of, 76
Libberton’s Wynd, 112
Library, Advocates’, 96, 134;
Public, 95, 154;
Signet, 91
Lindores, Abbey Church of, 52
Lindsay, Earl of, 41
Lindsay, Sir David, 34, 89
Linlithgow, 35
Lister, Lord, 151-152
Lockhart of Carnwath, George, 122
Lockhart, John Gibson, 140, 141, 144, 149
“Logy, Maister Leonard,” 33 _note_
Lord of the Isles. _See_ Isles
Lorn, Lord (1650), 80
Loudoun, Earl of, 69
Luckenbooths, the, 105
Macaulay, Lord, 151
M‘Crie, Thomas, 149
M‘Ewan, William, 154
M‘Ewan Hall, the, 154, 167
Mackenzie, Sir George, 76, 95-96
Mackenzie, Henry (“the Man of Feeling”), 149
Maclean, of Torloisk, Mrs., and her daughters, 138
Macmorran, Bailie, 71
Madeleine, first wife of James V., 34, 44, 94
Malcolm Canmore, 4, 5-8, 35, 126, 155
Mansfield, Earl of, 74
Mar, Earl of, 18;
Earl of Mar called “Jock o’ Sklates,” 92
Margaret, Saint, Queen of Scotland, second wife of Malcolm Canmore,
5-8, 9, 15, 16, 24, 126, 155
Margaret, daughter of Henry III. of England, betrothed to Alexander III., 9
Margaret of Denmark, wife of James III., 26
Margaret Tudor, wife of James IV., 30, 35, 37, 50, 66, 87
“Marmion view,” the, 164
Mary of Gueldres, wife of James II., 26, 86
Mary of Lorraine (Mary of Guise), second wife of James V., and Regent
of Scotland, 35, 50, 51, 89-90
Mary, Queen of Scots, 5, 8, 15, 18, 35-41, 50, 52, 66, 76, 84, 143
Maud, daughter of Malcolm Canmore and Queen Margaret, 126
Maxwell of Monreith, Lady, and her daughters, 76-77
Meadows, the, 122
Melrose, dwelling of the Abbots of, 76, 95
Melville, Andrew, 93
Menzies, William, anecdote concerning Scott and son of, 138
Merchiston Castle, 93, 153
Miller, Hugh, 151
Mint, the Scottish. _See_ Cunyie House
Moir, Dr. (“Delta”), 150
Monboddo, Lord, 112
“Mons Meg,” 20-21, 144
Montrose, Marquis of, 59, 69, 80, and _note_
Moray House, account of, 79-80
Morocco Close, 78
Mound, the, formation of, 127;
and Sir Walter Scott, 137, 139;
view from, 166
Munro, Professor, 120
Murray, Dr. Alexander, 149
Murray of Auchtertyre, Patrick, 134
Murray of Broughton, 131, and _note_
Murray of Henderland, Mrs., 108
Murray, Miss Nicky, 74, 77
Murray of Simprim, Patrick, 134
Murray, manager of the Theatre Royal, 144
Myllar, Andro, 27
Mylne’s Court, 68
Mylne, John, Royal Master Mason, 43
Mylne, Robert, Royal Master Mason, 68
Mylne, Robert, F.R.S., Royal Master Mason, account of, 74-75, and _note_
Nairne, Baroness, 100, 148
Nairne Lodge, 100
Napier of Merchiston, 93
National Portrait Gallery, 154
Neaves, Lord, 150
Nelson, Thomas, 155
Netherbow Port, the, 62, 63
Newark, Lord, Covenanting General, 98
Niddry’s Wynd, 74
Nor’ Loch, 26, 51, 69, 120, 124, 126-127
North Bridge, the, 123, 137
Old Assembly Close, 73
“Old Kirk, the” (in St. Giles’s), 51
Oliphants of Gask, the, 100, 148
“Outer Tolbooth,” the, 49 _note_
Panmure’s Close, 100
Paoli, the Corsican, 68
Parliament House, 65, 72, 81, 85, 134, 142, 144
Paterson, John, Bishop of Edinburgh, 82
Pembroke, Earl of (Shakespeare’s friend), 103
Pentlands, the, 156, 159, 161, 166
Philosophical Institution, the, and its first Presidents and Lecturers, 151
Playfair, Lyon (Lord Playfair), 151
Poker Club, the, 75, 76, 120
Pope Innocent IV. (and St. Margaret), 8
Pope Julius II. (and James IV)., 19
Potterrow, 79, 100, 113, 130
Preston Aisle, the (in St. Giles’s), 47
Preston of Gorton, William, 47
Priestfield (now Prestonfield), 27, 109
Primrose, James, Viscount, 69
Princes Street, 124, 125, 126, 132, 142, 153, 154, 157, 163, 164, 166
Printing in Edinburgh in the reign of James IV., 27
Queen Street, 143, 152, 154, 157
Queensberry, Duchess of (“Kitty”), 81, 105
Queensberry House, 79;
tragedy in, 80-81
Queensberry, Marquis of, 81
Queensferry Road, view of Edinburgh from, 165
Raeburn, Sir Henry, 144, 149
Ramsay, Allan (the poet), 74, 97-98, 99, 105-106, 107, 160
Ramsay, Allan (the artist), 98, 108
Ramsay, Dean, 150
Ramsay, General, 98
Randolph of Strathdon, Sir Thomas, 10
Regalia, the Scottish, 18-20, 140, 144
Riccio, David, 15, 38-39
Richard II. of England, 46
Riddle’s Close, 70, 101
Robertson, Principal, 108, 109
Ronsard (the French poet), 34
Rose, Abernethy, Bishop of Edinburgh, 54
Rosebery, the Earl of, 68
Rosehaugh Close, 95-96
Roslin, Boswell takes Dr. Johnson to, 109;
Scott takes Wordsworth to, 136, 164
Ross, the Lords, and Ross House, 122
Rothesay, the Duke of, eldest son of Robert III., 11
Royal Scottish Academy, 142
Royal Scottish Society, 142
Rullion Green, battle of, 59, 160
Ruskin, John, 151
Russel, Alexander, 151
Ruthven, Earl of, 41
St. Andrew’s Church in George Street, 150
St. Andrew Square, 124, 125
St. Cecilia’s Hall, 74-75
St. David Street, 125, 145
St. Giles, Church of, 24, 27, 45-61, 63,
65, 72, 86, 87, 94, 120, 144, 155, 164
St. John Street, 107
Salamander Land, 105
Salisbury Crags, 26, 165
Sandilands’ Close, 85
Scott, Anne, 145
Scott, General, 125-126, 152
Scott, Sir Gilbert, 154
Scott of Harden, Hugh, 135
Scott, Lady, wife of Sir Walter Scott, 135, 137;
death of, 145
Scott, Mr. and Mrs., parents of Sir Walter, 131
Scott, Sophia, 140
Scott, Sir Walter, 11, 20, 65, 69-70, 113, 129-146, 147, 160;
his homes in and near Edinburgh, 135-139, 141, 143, 145;
his later places of residence, 145;
his circle of friends, 148-150;
the Scott Monument, 153-154
Scottish Regalia. _See_ Regalia
Scougall, John, artist, 73
“Seven Sisters of Borthwick,” 20, 27
Simpson, Sir James Y., 151
Shakespeare, 5;
was he in Edinburgh? 103
Shandwick Place, 145
Sharpe, Kirkpatrick, 138, 149
Shoemaker’s Land, 78
Six Feet Club, 160
Skelton, John, 151
Skene of Rubislaw, 135, 145
Skene, W. F., 151
Smith, Adam, 100
Smith, Alexander, 151
Smith, Sydney, 138
Smollett, Tobias, 107
Solway Moss, battle of, 35
South Gray’s Close, 76
Spottiswoode, Archbishop, 56
Stair, the Earl of, 69
Stair, Lady, and Lady Stair’s Close, 68-70
Stamp Office Close, 75-76, 99
Steele, Richard, 105
Stevenson, Robert Louis, 77, 78, 156-162
Stewart, Dugald, 149
Strichen’s Close, 76, 95
Stuart, Sir John (the “Black Knight of Lorn”), 12
Swanston, 156, 159-160, 161
Syme, Professor, 151
Tait, Professor, 151
“Tam o’ the Cowgate.” _See_ Haddington, Earl of
Taylor, “the Water Poet,” 64, 104
Telfer, Mrs., of Scotstoun, 107
Tercentenary of the University, 152
Thackeray, 151
Thomson, Thomas, legal antiquary, 133
Tinwald, Lord Justice Clerk, 124
“Tolbooth Kirk, the” (in St. Giles’s), 51 _note_
Tolbooth, the, 53, 59, 63, 65, 69, 80, 155 _note_
Topham, Captain, 73, 109-111
Trollope, Anthony, 151
Tron Church, the, 132
“Tulzie,” a, 66
Turgot, Bishop, 6, 7, 8
Tweeddale Close, 77
Tytlers of Woodhouselee, the, 136
Union, the (1707), 64, 76;
Treaty of, 80, 81
Union, the Students’ University, 154
United Free Assembly Hall, 90
University, the, 85, 92, 109, 111, 120, 151, 152, 154, 159, 167
Vasa, Prince Gustavus, and the Baron Polier, 141
Victoria, Queen, her first visit to Edinburgh (1842), 147, 150
Volunteers, the Scottish Light Horse, 135
Walker Street, 145
Wallace, Sir William, 9, 24
Warbeck, Perkin, at the Court of James IV., 28
Watt, the Republican, 134
Webber, his attempt on Scott’s life, 139
Weir, Major, and his sister Grisel, 96-97
West Bow, 97
West Port, 92
Whiteford, Sir John, 112
Whiteford, Miss, 114
Whitehorse Close, 54, 81-82, and 82 _note_
Whitehorse Inn. _See_ Boyd’s Close
Wilson, Professor (“Christopher North”), 149
Wishart, Chaplain to Montrose, and afterward Bishop of Edinburgh, 59
Wood, Sir Andrew, 27-28
Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy visit Scott in 1803, 136
World’s End Close, 76
Wynds (of Edinburgh). _See_ Closes
THE END
_Printed by_ R. & R. CLARK, LIMITED, _Edinburgh_.
* * * * *
Books by Rosaline Masson
In Our Town.
“A romance of Edinburgh which will captivate even a degenerate
Southerner.”--_Guardian._
“A graceful and touching love-story, grafted on much interesting and
detailed description of her city of Edinburgh.”--_Illustrated London
News._
“Full of the atmosphere and legal life of modern
Edinburgh.”--_Literature._
“Lovers of Edinburgh, and all exiled Scots will joy over _In Our
Town_.”--_Outlook._
“Miss Masson knows her Edinburgh thoroughly--its sets, its prejudices,
its pride; and she touches them all gently, wittily, and
thoughtfully.”--_Ladies’ Field._
“Something of the persistent persuasiveness of delightful Jane
Austen.”--_Glasgow Herald._
“A book of more than passing interest.”--_Spectator._
[HODDER & STOUGHTON.
Leslie Farquhar.
“The most attractive Scotch novel we have read for a long
while.”--_Standard._
“A book which in respect of its strength and its beauty of diction, its
excellent portrayal of a wide range of character, and its workmanlike
construction--not the least essential of the novel--deserves to take a
high place in modern fiction.”--_Scotsman._
“Not since William Black’s pen was laid aside has so much of the colour,
fragrance, and feeling of Western Scotland been rendered in print....
The story would appear to be the outcome of a moving realisation of all
that makes the Highlands what they are to the poetic sense, of which the
author of _A Princess of Thule_ was perhaps the best modern
interpreter.”--_Glasgow Herald._
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* * * * *
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FOOTNOTES:
[1] Now St. Saviour’s.
[2] Groom of the Chamber.
[3] She was a sister of the Earl of Angus, and had married, first,
Lord Glammis, and, second, Archibald Campbell of Skipness.
[4] Chambers’s _Walks in Edinburgh_, p. 50.
[5] _Ibid._ p. 49.
[6] Paragon.
[7] Now Prestonfield.
[8] Miss Warrender’s _Walks near Edinburgh_. Edinburgh: David Douglas.
[9] _William Dunbar_, by Oliphant Smeaton, “Famous Scots Series.”
Edinburgh: Oliphant, Anderson, and Ferrier.
[10] Bergenroth, _Simancas Papus_, vol. i. p. 169. Quoted in _Early
Travellers in Scotland_, edited by Professor Hume Brown. Edinburgh:
David Douglas.
[11] _Ibid._
[12] Scott’s _Tales of a Grandfather_.
[13] W. E. Aytoun, _Lays of the Cavaliers_.
[14] _Burgh Records of Edinburgh_ (1403-1528), p. 144.
[15] In September of that year “Maister Leonard Logy” was pensioned
by James IV. for his “diligent and grate labour” in “bigging of the
palace beside the Abbey of the Holy Croce.”
[16] Sir David Lindsay.
[17] Henry Glassford Bell.
[18] From _Buchanan’s Detection_ (first Scots translation) quoted in
_Mary, Queen of Scots_, by Robert S. Rait, p. 108.
[19] _Diurnal of Occurrents in Scotland_, quoted in _Mary, Queen of
Scots_, by Robert S. Rait, pp. 120-121.
[20] R. S. Mylne’s _The King’s Master Masons_.
[21] Sir Walter Scott.
[22] _History of St. Giles’s, Edinburgh_, by the Very Rev. James
Cameron Lees, D.D. W. and R. Chambers.
[23] Still called “The Albany Aisle.”
[24] Walter Chepman built a chapel of the Crucifixion in the lower
part of the churchyard, endowing its chaplain for the welfare of the
soul of King James and those who were slain with him at Flodden. This
chapel was pulled down during John Knox’s ministry to form the “Outer
Tolbooth” for the Lords of Session.
[25] _Burgh Records of Edinburgh_ (1403-1528), p. 144.
[26] At the end of his life, Knox preached within another division,
designated “The Tolbooth Kirk.”
[27] Laud’s Service-Book.
[28] Gordon, _Hist. of Scots Affairs_ (Spalding Club), i. 7.
[29] _History of Scotland_, Professor Hume Brown, ii. 301.
[30] The stream of people pouring out of a church-door is called “the
church skaling” in Scotland.
[31] _History of St. Giles’s, Edinburgh_, by the Very Rev. Dr. Cameron
Lees. W. and R. Chambers.
[32] “Edinburgh’s Joy,” etc. Quoted in Dr. Hill Burton’s _History_,
vii. 387.
[33] _History of St. Giles’s, Edinburgh_, by the Very Rev. Dr. Cameron
Lees. W. and R. Chambers.
[34] Taylor’s _Pennyless Pilgrimage_.
[35] A “land” is a house of several storeys, usually consisting of
different tenements.
[36] _Melville’s Memoirs_, p. 181.
[37] The initials G. S. for the wife suggest that the formal “Egidia”
was softened, after the homely Scottish fashion, into “Gidy.”
[38] Scandals.
[39] Byers’ Close takes its name from John Byers of Coates, and the
carved lintel, “I.B: M.B: 1611 Blissit be God in al his giftis,” now
on the old family mansion, Coates House, within the grounds of St.
Mary’s Cathedral, was removed from Byers’ Close.
[40] Wilson’s _Memorials_, ii. footnote to p. 12; and Grant’s _Old and
New Edinburgh_, i. 223.
[41] Sir Alexander Boswell.
[42] This Robert Mylne (F.R.S.) was a great-grandson of the Robert
Mylne mentioned on p. 68, and was tenth in the line of Scottish Royal
Master Masons of that name. He afterwards settled in London, where he
built Blackfriars Bridge over the Thames, was the successor of Wren as
Superintendent of St. Paul’s Cathedral, and died in 1811.
[43] Only the entries to these closes have been suffered to remain.
Chambers’s _Traditions of Edinburgh_, p. 214.
[44] _Heroic Love_, James Graham, Marquis of Montrose.
[45] Chambers’s _Traditions of Edinburgh_, pp. 354-356.
[46] This inn must not be confused with Whitehorse Inn in Boyd’s
Close (no longer existing), where Dr. Johnson went on his arrival in
Edinburgh in 1773.
[47] Poets.
[48] Wilson’s _Memorials_, ii. 48.
[49] Tells tales.
[50] It is disputed now by some whether this house was really Knox’s.
[51] Professor Masson’s _Edinburgh Sketches and Memories_, p. 86. A.
and C. Black.
[52] From Chambers’s _Collection of Scottish Songs and Ballads_.
Authorship attributed to two young lady visitors to Edinburgh.
[53] See Chapter IV., p. 63.
[54] Grant’s _Old and New Edinburgh_.
[55] Chambers’s _Traditions of Edinburgh_, p. 13.
[56] Chambers’s _Traditions of Edinburgh_, p. 16.
[57] _Vide_ Provost Creech, quoted in Chambers’s _Traditions of
Edinburgh_.
[58] Murray of Broughton, Prince Charlie’s secretary, who afterwards
gave evidence against the Cause.
[59] Presently Jeffrey, in his slashing review of _Marmion_ in the
_Edinburgh Review_, was to accuse Scott of want of patriotism. He
dined with Scott that night at Castle Street, and found Scott as
hospitable and kind as ever; but from that moment Scott broke off his
connection with the _Review_.
[60] Lockhart’s _Life of Scott_. Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black,
1884.
[61] Dalkeith Palace, the residence of the Dukes of Buccleuch, is held
by them, as Craigmillar used to be held, on the understanding that the
Sovereign may command it as a Royal residence.
[62] “I return no more.”
[63] The architect was Kemp, who, when a poor lad, trudging along the
Selkirk road with his joiner’s tools on his back, had been given “a
lift” by the kindly Sir Walter Scott as he drove by. Shortly after the
erection of the monument Kemp was drowned.
[64] Truro Cathedral, and the great Roman Catholic Cathedral at
Westminster, both built since, are larger.
[65] This is often erroneously called “Old Parliament Hall,” a name
that not only limits the uses to which it was habitually put, and thus
lessens its interest, but also gives the wrong impression that the
Scottish Parliaments were held there, and there only. The Scottish
Parliaments were held wherever the King happened to be. If the King
was in Edinburgh, they were held in Edinburgh, either at this hall in
the Castle, or at the Tolbooth.
[66] Miss Warrender’s _Walks near Edinburgh_, p. 33 (footnote).
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