Chapter XI: Edinburgh in 1792

The house from which I had just issued stood nearly opposite to the old Tolbooth, or Heart of Midlothian, which was built almost in the centre of the High Street, and in the lower story thereof were nightly lodged a lieutenant with a party of the ancient city guard. The cries of Macfarisee readily reached the sentinel at the door, and he turned out the watch. Armed with fixed bayonets and Lochaber axes, they issued forth in pursuit; but I fled before them like an arrow and darted down the Lord President's Stairs, which, I knew communicated with the Fishmarket Close, and the entrance to which was in a great tenement on the eastern side of the Parliament-square--all since removed and numbered with the things that were. I plunged breathlessly down the steep Close, cries of "The guard! the guard! to the Tolbooth with him," following me, for these shouts, though uttered heedlessly by those I passed, were additional incentives to flight; and panting with rage and fear, I sped on, while I could hear the guardsmen swearing in Gaelic behind me. I could also hear the clank of their terrible Lochaber axes, which were furnished with sharp hooks, wherewith to catch fugitives, or to drag the refractory, and I could see the dim glimmer of their large horn lanterns, as I crossed the narrow Cowgate and rushed up the steep College Wynd towards a gate in the town wall known as the Potter How Porte. Here stood a sentinel, who put his axe before me and demanded sixpence for allowing me to pass. I pretended to search my pockets, wherein I had not a stiver; and while thus throwing him off his guard, darted through the barrier, and, with a shout of triumph, rushed into the darkness beyond. My first impulse was to run into the country, and take refuge in the village where my mother's cottage stood; but a fear lest Macfarisee might send the guards there first, deterred me; and hastening to the Meadows, which lie southward of the city, and were then, as now, a lonely and sequestered place, rendered unwholesome by swamps, being the bed of an ancient lake, and dangerous as the haunt of armed footpads, robbers, and outcasts. I had nothing to lose but my liberty, and they were not likely to deprive me of that.

In those meadows are a few stone seats placed at intervals under the trees. On one of these I seated myself, and began to reflect on the situation of my affairs. Though moonless, the sky was clear, and the night was warm and pleasant. The intense solitude of the place contrasted with the recent fiery turmoil of my own thoughts. I felt for a time all the visionary independence of youth: I had left, as it were, all my fetters behind me; but there were my mother, little Lotty, and Amy Lee! How sore, and sad, and bitter, the thoughts of them made my aching heart! The bloody gash on the head of Quirky, and the malevolent smile of Macfarisee, seemed to haunt me amid the darkness, and vague fears came over me.

I thought of how gladly I would work hard, even for a pittance, if well treated; I thought of my own friendlessness, and of all I had endured at the hands of these sanctimonious knaves--these legal parvenus--but my fury had passed away, and I felt it would have been a relief to my soul, could I have wept bitterly.

The low-muttered voices of a number of men approaching now fell upon my ear. I thought immediately of the guard, and seeking a more sequestered place, climbed up a beech tree, amid the thick foliage of which I deemed myself perfectly secure. I had not been perched there three minutes, when, to my terror, I heard voices on all sides of me, and beheld numbers of men coming straight towards the place of my concealment. There was a tingling sensation in my ears, and my breath came thick and fast; while, as if they had sprung from the swampy turf, in an incredibly short space of time, the beech tree was environed by a mob of more than a thousand men, many of whom were armed, as I could perceive swords, pikes, and muskets among them. A torch was now lighted, and its wavering gleam fell redly on their faces--the grim and dirty faces of an excited and unwashed multitude--as, amid cries of "Robert Watt--Robert Watt--hurrah!" they were all turned to one point, where an orator or leader, who was elevated on the shoulders of four men, proceeded to harangue them in a subdued but determined tone of voice.

He was a pale, sallow-visaged and sad-eyed young man, who in no way suggested the idea of a patriot or hero.

My anxiety now increased to agony, when I found myself compelled to act the spy upon a band of these desperate men, who, at that period, styled themselves the "Friends of the People"--a small but desperate section, who were instigated to revolt against all monarchical government, and who had corresponding societies in all parts of Great Britain--men whose avowed object was to reform a very defective parliamentary representation, while, ultimately, they aimed at the seizure of the Castle of Edinburgh, the plunder of the banks and government offices, and the capture, if not the murder, of all the senators of the College of Justice, and other heads of departments, civil, military, and religious.

If discovered by these worthies on my perch in the tree, I had little doubt they would have shot me like a sparrow, and perhaps buried me on the ground where they stood to silence my tongue for ever. I scarcely dared to breathe. I thought of my mother, and imagined her sensations, if I were found there murdered, or if I disappeared for ever, like a bubble on a stream, and, like many other honest persons, was moved to tears, by the prospect of my own untimely demise. Meanwhile the mass below me swayed to and fro; the torches continued to sputter and gleam, and the orator to spout treason, fire and sword against all crowned heads, especially "the old tyrant who dwelt in the castle of Windsor;" liberty, equality, fraternity--the rights of men--oppression, chains and slavery--kings and tyrants, were the staple subjects of his inflammatory discourse, until he mentioned the slave trade and borough reform, in connection with the name of Henry Dundas, the city member, when a yell of hatred broke from the multitude, with cries of,--

"To the lamp-post with him!"

"Up with the barricades!"

"Down with the three estates--kings, lords, and clergy!"

Then this strange band, after giving three cheers for Tom Paine and Robert Watt, passed a unanimous resolution to burn the Tory M.P. in effigy on the next day, the 4th of June, the anniversary of George the Third's birth. They uprooted some hundred yards of paling for staves to arm them with; the torch was extinguished; the orator descended from his perch; in a few minutes they had all disappeared, and the wooded parks became voiceless and silent as before.

This leader was that unfortunate Robert Watt, who, on the 15th of the succeeding October (for the very same opinions which he there expressed so freely) was drawn on a low hurdle, heavily chained, to the Castle Hill of Edinburgh, and had his head struck from his body by three blows of an axe, pursuant to a sentence passed on him by the Lord Justice General of Scotland.

I drew a long breath when they separated, deeming that I had narrowly escaped a sudden death. Still I was afraid to leave my retreat altogether; so descending from the beech, I sought a place where the grass was soft and dry at the root of an old oak tree, and lay down to think over my situation, and the truths I had heard--for much that was solemn, and stern truth had fallen from the lips of Robert Watt. I had ample food for reflection, but amid it I fell into a sound and heavy sleep.

In the year of which I write--to wit, 1792--the Scottish capital had made but little progress (as we now understand that great and comprehensive word) since the commencement of the century, save in noisy professions of religion, and an external air of sanctity to cloak hypocrisy and vice.

Though a new town on the north, and another on the south, were rising into existence, the mass of the citizens dwelt yet within the steep, narrow closes and wynds of the ancient city, from which many made vows they would never remove. The streets were without sewerage, and dimly lighted by a few oil-lamps, which were placed on wooden posts at long intervals. People dined at two o'clock, and were all a-bed by eleven. The High Street alone was well watched. There, the city guard, a body of three hundred old soldiers, who wore the square-skirted red coats and cocked hats of Queen Anne's time, and were armed with the long muskets and bayonets, and the Lochaber axes used by Scottish regiments in her wars, were the custodiers of the public safety. Being all Highlanders, they spoke no language save the Celtic, and were alternately the jest and the terror of the people. Women were still flogged at a cart's-tail, or drummed through the streets for petty offences, and poor debtors begged for alms at the door of St. Giles', as they had done in the days of the Jameses.

Though the capital was little changed in its _external_ aspect, the hearty old Scottish spirit was dead, or dying fast; and so narrow-minded were the people, that a few years before, a clergyman had to strip off his gown and turn soldier, for having penned a tragedy, which now ranks as one of the British Classics. I allude to Home, the author of "Douglas." Any one who entered a theatre, especially on a Saturday; or read a novel, especially on a Sunday; or who, on that grim Scottish day of silence or psalmsinging, ventured to whistle or hum an air, received public censure; for now it seemed as if fasting and preaching, hypocrisy and craft, were all to flourish together, each bearing a due proportion to the progress of the other. Thus choked amid such evil weeds, nothing truly good, or great, or pure, can thrive or be attempted, without exciting the envy of some, or the contumely of others; for many men are there, who would oppose even the redemption of mankind, if to do so suited the advancement of their vulgarly-sectarian, selfishly-political, or personal interests--and so, as Macfarisee would say, "the wicked flourished like the green bay tree." So still the tide rolls on--religion becoming a surly burlesque--society a system of miserable cliques, and the nation itself a provincial tradition.

In 1792 the ideas of the people were so contracted and thoroughly local, that the appearance of a strange carriage in the streets put all Edinburgh a-tiptoe for three days to discover its owner--and so low had the old military spirit sunk, that the appearance of the pirate Paul Jones in the river, in 1779, threw eighty thousand citizens into a paroxysm of terror.

Few persons left, and fewer still visited, Edinburgh in those days. Any one departing thence for London--perhaps the great and only event of a long stupid and monotonous life--cautiously settled his worldly affairs by will, was duly prayed for in "the kirk"--took solemn leave of his weeping relations, and was escorted by all his friends to the eastern gate of the town; and all were there again to receive and conduct him with acclamations to his home in some dingy close of the middle ages, when he returned three months after, by the well-armed stage-coach, "General Wolfe" or the letter-of-marque smack, "The Lovely Jenny," carrying four 6-pounders--and brimful of hair-breadth escapes from footpads and masked highwaymen, to be related, amid due libations of reeking whiskey toddy, to a gaping circle of provincials.

By the spread of education among the lower, and the almost general flight of the upper classes, the old order of society became inverted. Dukes and earls no longer lived in the Canongate; nor lords, nor lairds, nor aristocratic grandmothers, who remembered "the bonnie prince" dancing in Holyrood, or the cannon that boomed for his downfall at Culloden; nothing now remained to Scotland, but the dregs and lees of her once warlike and kingly post--the sour kirk and the subtle law.

So matters had been going on for years, and all had been quiet in the Scottish capital since the terrible Porteous mob of 1735, and the irruption of the Clans ten years later, until this year, 1792, when the political convulsions in France began to affect their well-wishers in Scotland, a country so long neglected by a foreign race of kings and an alien peerage, as to have lost all sympathy for either; thus the sentiments of republicanism spread like a contagion among certain classes, who began to arm them in secret--to form clubs, on the principle of those over which Marat and others presided in Paris, and to designate themselves, "The Friends of the People."