Chapter C: K. Sharpe, Notes to Law’s Memorials, p. xlvii (3)

From the size of this house, and the variety of accesses to it, it becomes tolerably certain that Knox could have occupied only a portion of it. The question arises, which part did he occupy? Probability seems decidedly in favour of the _first floor_—that containing the window from which he is traditionally said to have preached, and where his effigy appears. An authentic fact in the Reformer’s life favours this supposition. When under danger from the hostility of the queen’s party in the castle—in the spring of 1571—‘one evening a musket-ball was fired in at his window, and lodged in the roof of the apartment in which he was sitting. It happened that he sat at the time in a different part of the room from that which he had been accustomed to occupy, otherwise the ball, from the direction it took, must have struck him’ (M’Crie). The second floor is too high to have admitted of a musket being fired in at one of the windows. A ball fired in at the ground-floor would not have struck the ceiling. The only feasible supposition in the case is that the Reformer dwelt in the _first floor_, which was not beyond an assassin’s aim, and yet at such a height that a ball fired from the street would hit the ceiling.[223]

PAGE 274.]

FOOTNOTES

[223] [The right of this house to be called ‘John Knox’s House’ has been strenuously disputed; several other houses in which Knox actually lived have been identified by Robert Miller, F.S.A. Scot., Lord Dean of Guild of Edinburgh, in _John Knox and the Town Council of Edinburgh, with a Chapter on the so-called ‘John Knox’s House’_ (1898). For the genuineness of the tradition, said not to be older than 1806, see Lord Guthrie’s _John Knox and John Knox’s House_ (1898).]

HYNDFORD’S CLOSE.

At the bottom of the High Street, on the south side, there is an uncommonly huge and dense mass of stone buildings or _lands_, penetrated only by a few narrow closes. One of these is Hyndford’s Close, a name indicating the noble family which once had lodgment in it. This was a Scotch peerage not without its glories—witness particularly the third earl, who acted as ambassador in succession to Prussia, to Russia, and to Vienna. It is now extinct: its _bijouterie_, its pictures, including portraits of Maria Theresa, and other royal and imperial personages, which had been presented as friendly memorials to the ambassador, have all been dispersed by the salesman’s hammer, and Hyndford’s Close, on my trying to get into it lately (1868), was inaccessible (literally) from filth.

The entry and stair at the head of the close on the west side was a favourite residence, on account of the ready access to it from the street. In the second floor of this house lived, about the beginning of the reign of George III., Lady Maxwell of Monreith, and there brought up her beautiful daughters, one of whom became Duchess of Gordon. The house had a dark passage, and the kitchen door was passed in going to the dining-room, according to an agreeable old practice in Scotch houses, which lets the guests know on entering what they have to expect. The fineries of Lady Maxwell’s daughters were usually hung up, after washing, on a screen in this passage to dry; while the coarser articles of dress, such as shifts and petticoats, were slung decently out of sight at the window, upon a projecting contrivance similar to a dyer’s pole, of which numerous specimens still exist at windows in the Old Town for the convenience of the poorer inhabitants.

So easy and familiar were the manners of the great in those times, fabled to be so stiff and decorous, that Miss Eglintoune, afterwards Lady Wallace, used to be sent with the tea-kettle across the street to the Fountain Well for water to make tea. Lady Maxwell’s daughters were the wildest romps imaginable. An old gentleman, who was their relation, told me that the first time he saw these beautiful girls was in the High Street, where Miss Jane, afterwards Duchess of Gordon, was riding upon a sow, which Miss Eglintoune thumped lustily behind with a stick. It must be understood that in the middle of the eighteenth century vagrant swine went as commonly about the streets of Edinburgh as dogs do in our own day, and were more generally fondled as pets by the children of the last generation.[224] It may, however, be remarked that the sows upon which the Duchess of Gordon and her witty sister rode, when children, were not the common vagrants of the High Street, but belonged to Peter Ramsay, of the inn in St Mary’s Wynd, and were among the last that were permitted to roam abroad. The two romps used to watch the animals as they were let loose in the forenoon from the stable-yard (where they lived among the horse-litter), and get upon their backs the moment they issued from the close.

The extraordinary cleverness, the genuine wit, and the delightful _abandon_ of Lady Wallace made an extraordinary impression on Scottish society in her day. It almost seemed as if some faculty divine had inspired her. A milliner bringing home a cap to her when she was just about to set off to the Leith races was so unlucky as to tear it against the buckle of a porter’s knee in the street. ‘No matter,’ said her ladyship; and instantly putting it on, restored all to grace by a single pin. The cap thus misarranged was found so perfectly exquisite that ladies tore their caps on nails, and pinned them on in the hope of imitating it. It was, however, a grace beyond the reach of art.

Of the many _bon mots_ attributed to her, one alone seems worthy, from its being unhackneyed, of appearing here. The son of Mr Kincaid, king’s printer—a great Macaroni, as the phrase went; that is, dandy—was nicknamed, from his father’s lucrative patent, _Young Bibles_. This beau entering a ballroom one evening, some of the company asked who was that extraordinary-looking young man. ‘Only Young Bibles,’ quoth Lady Wallace, ‘bound in calf, and gilt, but not lettered!’

[In the same stair in Hyndford’s Close lived another lady of rank, and one who, for several reasons, filled in her time a broad space in society. This was Anne, Countess of Balcarres, the progenitrix of perhaps as many persons as ever any woman was in the same space of time. Her eldest daughter, Anne, authoress of the ballad of _Auld Robin Gray_, was, of all her eleven children, the one whose name is most likely to continue in remembrance—yea, though another of them put down the Maroon war in the West Indies. When in Hyndford’s Close, Lady Balcarres had for a neighbour in the same alley Dr Rutherford, the uncle of Sir Walter Scott; and young Walter, often at his uncle’s, occasionally accompanied his aunt ‘Jeanie’ to Lady Balcarres’s. Forty years after, having occasion to correspond with Lady Anne Barnard, _née_ Lindsay, he told her: ‘I remember all the _locale_ of Hyndford’s Close perfectly, even to the Indian screen with Harlequin and Columbine, and the harpsichord, though I never had the pleasure of hearing Lady Anne play upon it. I suppose the close, once too clean to soil the hem of your ladyship’s garment, is now a resort for the lowest mechanics—and so wears the world away.... It is, to be sure, more picturesque to lament the desolation of towers on hills and haughs, than the degradation of an Edinburgh close; but I cannot help thinking on the simple and cosie retreats where worth and talent, and elegance to boot, were often nestled, and which now are the resort of misery, filth, poverty, and vice.’[225]

The late Mrs Meetham, a younger sister of Miss Spence Yeaman, of Murie, in the Carse of Gowrie, had often heard her grand-aunt, Miss Molly Yeaman, describe, from her own recollection, the tea-drinkings of the Countess of Balcarres in Hyndford’s Close. The family was not rich, and it still retained something of its ancient Jacobitism. The tea-drinkings, as was not uncommon, took place in my lady’s bedroom. At the foot of a four-posted bed, exhibiting a finely worked coverlet, stood John, an elderly man-servant, and a _character_, in full Balcarres livery, an immense quantity of worsted lace on his coat. Resting with his arm round a bedpost, he was ready to hand the kettle when required. As the ladies went chattering on, there would sometimes occur a difficulty about a date or a point in genealogy, and then John was appealed to to settle the question. For example, it came to be debated how many of the Scotch baronetcies were real; for, as is still the case, many of them were known to be fictitious, or assumed without legal grounds. Here John was known to be not only learned, but eloquent. He began: ‘Sir James Kinloch, Sir Stuart Threipland, Sir John Wedderburn, Sir —— Ogilvy, Sir James Steuart of Coltness’ [all of them forfeited baronets, be it observed]: ‘these, leddies, are the only _real_ baronets. For the rest, I do believe, the Deil’——then a figurative declaration not fit for modern print, but which made the Balcarres party only laugh, and declare to John that they thought him not far wrong.]

FOOTNOTES

[224] The following advertisement, inserted in the _Edinburgh Courant_ of August 1, 1754, illustrates the above in a striking manner: ‘If any person has lost a LARGE SOW, let them call at the house of Robert Fiddes, gardener to Lord Minto, over against the Earl of Galloway’s, in the Horse Wynd, where, upon proving the property, paying expenses and damages done by the said sow, they may have the same restored.’

[225] Lord Lindsay’s _Lives of the Lindsays_, iii. 190.

HOUSE OF THE MARQUISES OF TWEEDDALE—THE BEGBIE TRAGEDY.

The town mansion of the Marquises of Tweeddale was one of large extent and dimensions, in a court which still bears the title of that family, nearly opposite to the mansion of John Knox.[226] When John, the fourth marquis, was Secretary of State for Scotland, in the reign of George II., this must have been a dwelling of considerable importance in the eyes of his countrymen. It had a good garden in the rear, with a yard and coach entry from the Cowgate. Now all the buildings and ‘pertinents’ are in the occupation of Messrs Oliver & Boyd, the well-known publishers.

The passage from the street into Tweeddale Court is narrow and dark, and about fifteen yards in length. Here, in 1806, when the mansion was possessed as a banking-house by the British Linen Company, there took place an extraordinary tragedy. About five o’clock of the evening of the 13th of November, when the short midwinter day had just closed, a child, who lived in a house accessible from the close, was sent by her mother with a kettle to obtain a supply of water for tea from the neighbouring well. The little girl, stepping with the kettle in her hand out of the public stair into the close, stumbled in the dark over something which lay there, and which proved to be the body of a man just expiring. On an alarm being given, it was discovered that this was William Begbie, a porter connected with the bank, in whose heart a knife was stuck up to the haft, so that he bled to death before uttering a word which might tend to explain the dismal transaction. He was at the same time found to have been robbed of a package of notes to the value of above four thousand pounds, which he had been entrusted, in the course of his ordinary duty, to carry from the branch of the bank at Leith to the head-office.[227] The blow had been given with an accuracy and a calculation of consequences showing the most appalling deliberation in the assassin; for not only was the knife directed straight into the most vital part, but its handle had been muffled in a bunch of soft paper, so as to prevent, as was thought, any sprinkling of blood from reaching the person of the murderer, by which he might have been by some chance detected. The knife was one of those with broad thin blades and wooden handles which are used for cutting bread, and its rounded front had been ground to a point, apparently for the execution of this horrible deed. The unfortunate man left a wife and four children to bewail his loss.

The singular nature and circumstances of Begbie’s murder occasioned much excitement in the public mind, and every effort was of course made to discover the guilty party. No house of a suspicious character in the city was left unsearched, and parties were despatched to watch and patrol all the various roads leading out into the country. The bank offered a reward of five hundred pounds for such information as might lead to the conviction of the offender or offenders; and the government further promised the king’s pardon to any except the actual murderer who, having been concerned in the deed, might discover their accomplices. The sheriff of Edinburgh, Mr Clerk Rattray, displayed the greatest zeal in his endeavours to ascertain the circumstances of the murder, and to detect and seize the murderer, but with surprisingly little success. All that could be ascertained was that Begbie, in proceeding up Leith Walk on his fatal mission, had been accompanied by ‘a man;’ and that about the supposed time of the murder ‘a man’ had been seen by some children to run out of the close into the street and down Leith Wynd, a lane leading off from the Netherbow at a point nearly opposite to the close. There was also reason to believe that the knife had been bought in a shop about two o’clock on the day of the murder, and that it had been afterwards ground upon a grinding-stone and smoothed on a hone. A number of suspicious characters were apprehended and examined; but all, with one exception, produced satisfactory proofs of their innocence. The exception was a carrier between Perth and Edinburgh, a man of dissolute and irregular habits, of great bodily strength, and known to be a dangerous and desperate character. He was kept in custody for a considerable time on suspicion, having been seen in the Canongate, near the scene of the murder, a very short time after it was committed. It has since been ascertained that he was then going about a different business, the disclosure of which would have subjected him to a capital punishment. It was in consequence of the mystery he felt himself impelled to preserve on this subject that he was kept so long in custody; but at length facts and circumstances came out to warrant his discharge, and he was discharged accordingly.

Months rolled on without eliciting any evidence respecting the murder, and, like other wonders, it had ceased in a great measure to engage public attention, when, on the 10th of August 1807, a journeyman mason, in company with two other men, passing through the Bellevue grounds in the neighbourhood of the city, found, in a hole in a stone enclosure by the side of a hedge, a parcel containing a large quantity of bank-notes, bearing the appearance of having been a good while exposed to the weather. After consulting a little, the men carried the package to the sheriff’s office, where it was found to contain about £3000 in large notes, being those which had been taken from Begbie. The British Linen Company rewarded the men with two hundred pounds for their honesty; but the circumstance passed without throwing any light on the murder itself.

Up to the present day the murderer of Begbie has not been discovered; nor is it probable, after the space of time which has elapsed, that he will ever be so. It is most likely that the grave has long closed upon him. The only person on whom public suspicion alighted with any force during the sixteen years ensuing upon the transaction was a medical practitioner in Leith, a dissolute man and a gambler, who put an end to his own existence not long after the murder. But I am not acquainted with any particular circumstances on which this suspicion was grounded beyond the suicide, which might spring from other causes. It was not till 1822 that any further light was thrown on this mysterious case. In a work then published under the title of _The Life and Trial of James Mackoull_, there was included a paper by Mr Denovan, the Bow Street officer, the object of which was to prove that Mackoull was the murderer, and which contained at least one very curious statement.

Mr Denovan had discovered in Leith a man, then acting as a teacher, but who in 1806 was a sailor-boy, and who had witnessed some circumstances immediately connected with the murder. The man’s statement was as follows: ‘I was at that time (November 1806) a boy of fourteen years of age. The vessel to which I belonged had made a voyage to Lisbon, and was then lying in Leith harbour. I had brought a small present from Portugal for my mother and sister, who resided in the Netherbow, Edinburgh, immediately opposite to Tweeddale’s Close, leading to the British Linen Company’s Bank. I left the vessel late in the afternoon, and as the articles I had brought were contraband, I put them under my jacket, and was proceeding up Leith Walk, when I perceived a tall man carrying a yellow-coloured parcel under his arm, and a genteel man, dressed in a black coat, dogging him. I was a little afraid: I conceived the man who carried the parcel to be a smuggler, and the gentleman who followed him to be a custom-house or excise officer. In dogging the man, the supposed officer went from one side of the Walk to the other [the Walk is a broad street], as if afraid of being noticed, but still kept about the same distance behind him. I was afraid of losing what I carried, and shortened sail a little, keeping my eyes fixed on the person I supposed to be an officer, until I came to the head of Leith Street, when I saw the smuggler take the North Bridge, and the custom-house officer go in front of the Register Office; here he looked round him, and imagining he was looking for me, I hove to, and watched him. He then looked up the North Bridge, and, as I conceive, followed the smuggler, for he went the same way. I stood a minute or two where I was, and then went forward, walking slowly up the North Bridge. I did not, however, see either of the men before me; and when I came to the south end or head of the Bridge, supposing that they might have gone up the High Street or along the South Bridge, I turned to the left, and reached the Netherbow, without again seeing either the smuggler or the officer. Just, however, as I came opposite to Tweeddale’s Close, _I saw the custom-house officer come running out of it with something under his coat_: I think he ran down the street. Being much alarmed, and supposing that the officer had also seen me and knew what I carried, I deposited my little present in my mother’s with all possible speed, and made the best of my way to Leith, without hearing anything of the murder of Begbie until next day. On coming on board the vessel, I told the mate what a narrow escape I conceived I had made: he seemed somewhat alarmed (having probably, like myself, smuggled some trifling article from Portugal), and told me in a peremptory tone that I should not go ashore again without first acquainting him. I certainly heard of the murder before I left Leith, and concluded that the man I saw was the murderer; but the idea of waiting on a magistrate and communicating what I had seen never struck me. We sailed in a few days thereafter from Leith; and the vessel to which I belonged having been captured by a privateer, I was carried to a French prison, and only regained my liberty at the last peace. I can now recollect distinctly the figure of the man I saw; he was well dressed, had a genteel appearance, and wore a black coat. I never saw his face properly, for he was before me the whole way up the Walk; I think, however, he was a stout big man, but not so tall as the man I then conceived to be a smuggler.’

This description of the supposed custom-house officer coincides exactly with that of the appearance of Mackoull; and other circumstances are given which almost make it certain that he was the murderer. This Mackoull was a London rogue of unparalleled effrontery and dexterity, who for years haunted Scotland, and effected some daring robberies. He resided in Edinburgh from September 1805 till the close of 1806, and during that time frequented a coffee-house in the _Ship Tavern_ at Leith. He professed to be a merchant expelled by the threats of the French from Hamburg, and to live by a new mode of dyeing skins, but in reality he practised the arts of a gambler and a pickpocket. He had a mean lodging at the bottom of New Street in the Canongate, near the scene of the murder of Begbie, to which it is remarkable that _Leith Wynd_ was the readiest as well as most private access from that spot. No suspicion, however, fell upon Mackoull at this period, and he left the country for a number of years, at the end of which time he visited Glasgow, and there effected a robbery of one of the banks. For this crime he did not escape the law. He was brought to trial at Edinburgh in 1820, was condemned to be executed, but died in jail while under reprieve from his sentence.

The most striking part of the evidence which Mr Denovan adduces against Mackoull is the report of a conversation which he had with that person in the condemned cell of the Edinburgh jail in July 1820, when Mackoull was very doubtful of being reprieved. To pursue his own narrative, which is in the third person: ‘He told Captain Sibbald [the superior of the prison] that he intended to ask Mackoull a single question relative to the murder of Begbie, but would first humour him by a few jokes, so as to throw him off his guard, and prevent him from thinking he had called for any particular purpose [it is to be observed that Mr Denovan had a professional acquaintance with the condemned man]; but desired Captain Sibbald to watch the features of the prisoner when he (Denovan) put his hand to his chin, for he would then put the question he meant. After talking some time on different topics, Mr Denovan put this very simple question to the prisoner: “By the way, Mackoull, if I am correct, you resided at the foot of New Street, Canongate, in November 1806—did you not?” He stared—he rolled his eyes, and, as if falling into a convulsion, threw himself back upon his bed. In this condition he continued for a few moments, when, as if recollecting himself, he started up, exclaiming wildly: “No, —— ——! I was then in the East Indies—in the West Indies. What do you mean?” “I mean no harm, Mackoull,” he replied; “I merely asked the question for my own curiosity; for I think when you left these lodgings you went to Dublin. Is it not so?” “Yes, yes, I went to Dublin,” he replied; “and I wish I had remained there still. I won £10,000 there at the tables, and never knew what it was to want cash, although you wished the folks here to believe that they locked me up in Old Start (Newgate), and brought down your friend Adkins to swear he saw me there: this was more than your duty.” He now seemed to rave, and lose all temper, and his visitor bade him good-night, and left him.’

It appears extremely probable, from the strong circumstantial evidence which has been offered by Mr Denovan, that Mackoull was the murderer of Begbie.

One remaining fact regarding the Netherbow will be listened to with some interest. It was the home—perhaps the native spot—of William Falconer, the author of _The Shipwreck_, whose father was a wigmaker in this street.[228]

FOOTNOTES

[226] ‘During this peaceable time [1668-1675], he [John, Earl of Tweeddale] built the park of Yester of stone and lime, near seven miles about, in seven years’ time, at the expense of 20,000 pound; bought a house in Edinburgh from Sir William Bruce for 1000 pound sterling, and ane other house within the same court, which, being rebuilt from the foundation, the price of it and reparations of both stood him 1000 sterling.’—Father Hay’s _Genealogie of the Hayes of Tweeddale_ (Edinburgh, 1835), p. 32.

[227] The notes are thus described in the _Hue and Cry_: £1300 in twenty-pound notes of Sir W. Forbes and Company; £1000 in twenty-pound notes of the Leith Banking Company; £1400 in twenty, ten, and five pound notes of different banks; 240 guinea and 440 pound notes of different banks—in all, £4392.

[228] It was in this part of the High Street also that Robert Lekprevick, the Scottish printer, lived before he removed to St Andrews in 1571.

[THE LADIES OF TRAQUAIR.

Lady Lovat was at the head of a genus of old ladies of quality, who, during the last century, resided in third and fourth _flats_ of Old Town houses, wore pattens when they went abroad, had miniatures of the Pretender next their hearts, and gave tea and card parties regularly every fortnight. Almost every generation of a Scottish family of rank, besides throwing off its swarm of male cadets, who went abroad in quest of fortune, used to produce a corresponding number of daughters, who stayed at home, and for the most part became old maids. These gentlewomen, after the death of their parents, when, of course, a brother or nephew succeeded to the family seat and estate, were compelled to leave home, and make room for the new laird to bring up a new generation, destined in time to experience the same fate. Many of these ladies, who in Catholic countries would have found protection in nunneries, resorted to Edinburgh, where, with the moderate family provision assigned them, they passed inoffensive and sometimes useful lives, the peace of which was seldom broken otherwise than by irruptions of their grand-nephews, who came with the hunger of High School boys, or by the more stately calls of their landed cousins and brothers, who rendered their visits the more auspicious by a pound of hyson for the caddy, or a replenishment of rappee for the snuff-box. The _leddies_, as they were called, were at once the terror and the admiration of their neighbours in the stair, who looked up to them as the patronesses of the _land_, and as shedding a light of gentility over the flats below.

In the best days of the Old Town, people of all ranks lived very closely and cordially together, and the whole world were in a manner next-door neighbours. The population being dense, and the town small, the distance between the houses of friends was seldom considerable. When a hundred friends lived within the space of so many yards, the company was easily collected, and consequently meetings took place more frequently, and upon more trivial occasions, than in these latter days of stately dinners and fantastic balls. Tea—simple tea—was then almost the only meal to which invitations were given. Tea-parties, assembling at four o’clock, were resorted to by all who wished for elegant social intercourse. There was much careful ceremonial in the dispensation of those pretty, small china cups, individualised by the numbers marked on each of the miniature spoons which circulated with them, and of which four or five returns were not uncommon. The spoon in the saucer indicated a wish for more—in the cup the reverse. A few tunes on the spinnet, a Scotch song from some young lady (solo), and the unfailing whist-table furnished the entertainment. At eight o’clock to a minute would arrive the sedan, or the lass with the lantern and pattens, and the whole company would be at home before the eight o’clock drum of the Town-guard had ceased to beat.

In a house at the head of the Canongate, but having its entrance from St Mary’s Wynd, and several stairs up, lived two old maiden ladies of the house of Traquair—the Ladies Barbara and Margaret Stuart. They were twins, the children of Charles, the fourth earl, and their birth on the 3rd of September, the anniversary of the death of Cromwell, brought a Latin epigram from Dr Pitcairn—of course previous to 1713, which was the year of his own death. The learned doctor anticipated for them ‘timid wooers,’ but they nevertheless came to old age unmarried. They drew out their innocent, retired lives in this place, where, latterly, one of their favourite amusements was to make dolls, and little beds for them to lie on—a practice not quite uncommon in days long gone by, being to some degree followed by Queen Mary.[229]

I may give, in the words of a long-deceased correspondent, an anecdote of the ladies of Traquair, referring to the days when potatoes had as yet an equivocal reputation, and illustrative of the frugal scale by which our ‘leddies’ were in use to measure the luxuries of their table. ‘Upon the return one day of their weekly ambassador to the market, and the anxious investigation by the old ladies of the contents of Jenny’s basket, the little morsel of mutton, with a portion of accompanying off-falls, was duly approved of. “But, Jenny, what’s this in the bottom of the basket?” “Oo, mem, just a dozen o’ ’taties that Lucky, the green-wife, wad ha’e me to tak’—they wad eat sae fine wi’ the mutton.” “Na, na, Jenny; tak’ back the ’taties—we need nae provocatives in this house.”’

The latest survivor of these Traquair ladies died in 1794.]

FOOTNOTES

[229] ‘—— deliure a Jacques le tailleur deux chanteaux de damas gris broches dor pour faire vne robbe a vne poupine;’ also ‘trois quartz et demi de toille dargent et de soze blanche pour faire vne cotte et aultre chose a des poupines.’—_Catalogues of the Jewels, Dresses, Furniture, &c. of Mary Queen of Scots_, edited by Joseph Robertson. Edinburgh, 1863, p. 139.

GREYFRIARS CHURCHYARD.

SIGNING OF THE COVENANT—HENDERSON’S MONUMENT—BOTHWELL BRIDGE
PRISONERS—A ROMANCE.

This old cemetery—the burial-place of Buchanan,[230] George Jameson the painter, Principal Robertson, Dr Blair, Allan Ramsay, Henry Mackenzie, and many other men of note—whose walls are a circle of aristocratic sepulchres, will ever be memorable as the scene of the Signing of the Covenant; the document having first been produced in the church, after a sermon by Alexander Henderson, and signed by all the congregation, from the Earl of Sutherland downward, after which it was handed out to the multitudes assembled in the kirkyard, and signed on the flat monuments, amidst tears, prayers, and aspirations which could find no words; some writing with their blood! Near by, resting well from all these struggles, lies the preacher under a square obelisk-like monument; near also rests, in equal peace, the Covenant’s enemy, Sir George Mackenzie. The inscriptions on Henderson’s stone were ordered by Parliament to be erased at the Restoration; and small depressions are pointed out in it as having been inflicted by bullets from the soldiery when executing this order. With the ’88 came a new order of things, and the inscriptions were then quietly reinstated.

PAGE 288.]

BOTHWELL BRIDGE PRISONERS.

As if there had been some destiny in the matter, the Greyfriars Churchyard became connected with another remarkable event in the religious troubles of the seventeenth century. At the south-west angle, accessible by an old gateway bearing emblems of mortality, and which is fitted with an iron-rail gate of very old workmanship, is a kind of supplement to the burying-ground—an oblong space, now having a line of sepulchral enclosures on each side, but formerly empty. On these enclosures the visitor may remark, as he passes, certain names venerable in the history of science and of letters; as, for instance, Joseph Black and Alexander Tytler. On one he sees the name of Gilbert Innes of Stow, who left a million, to take six feet of earth here. These, however, do not form the matter in point. Every lesser particular becomes trivial beside the extraordinary use to which the place was put by the Government in the year 1679. Several hundred of the prisoners taken at Bothwell Bridge were confined here in the open air, under circumstances of privation now scarcely credible. They had hardly anything either to lie upon or to cover them; their allowance of provision was four ounces of bread per day, with water derived from one of the city pipes, which passed near the place. They were guarded by day by eight and through the night by twenty-four men; and the soldiers were told that if any prisoner escaped, they should answer it life for life by cast of dice. If any prisoner rose from the ground by night, he was shot at. Women alone were permitted to commune with them, and bring them food or clothes; but these had often to stand at the entrance from morning till night without getting access, and were frequently insulted and maltreated by the soldiers, without the prisoners being able to protect them, although in many cases related by the most endearing ties. In the course of several weeks a considerable number of the prisoners had been liberated upon signing a bond, in which they promised never again to take up arms against the king or without his authority; but it appears that about four hundred, refusing mercy on such terms, were kept in this frightful bivouac for five months, being only allowed at the approach of winter to have shingle huts erected over them, which was boasted of as a great mercy. Finally, on the 15th of November, a remnant, numbering two hundred and fifty-seven, were put on board a ship to be sent to Barbadoes. The vessel was wrecked on one of the Orkney Islands, when only about forty came ashore alive.

From the gloom of this sad history there is shed one ray of romance. Amongst the charitable women of Edinburgh who came to minister to the prisoners, there was one attended by a daughter—a young and, at least by right of romance, a fair girl. Every few days they approached this iron gate with food and clothes, either from their own stores or collected among neighbours. Between the young lady and one of the juvenile prisoners an attachment sprang up. Doubtless she loved him for the dangers he had passed in so good a cause, and he loved her because she pitied them. In happier days, long after, when their constancy had been well tried by an exile which he suffered in the plantations, this pair were married, and settled in Edinburgh, where they had sons and daughters. A respectable elderly citizen tells me he is descended from them.[231]

FOOTNOTES

[230] A skull represented as Buchanan’s has long been shown in the College of Edinburgh. It is extremely thin, and being long ago shown in company with that of a known idiot, which was, on the contrary, very thick, it seemed to form a commentary upon the popular expression which sets forth density of bone as an invariable accompaniment of paucity of brain. The author of a diatribe called _Scotland Characterised_, which was published in 1701, and may be found in the _Harleian Miscellany_, tells us that he had seen the skull in question, and that it bore ‘a very pretty distich upon it [the composition of Principal Adamson, who had caused the skull to be lifted]—the first line I have forgot, but the second was:

“Et decus es tumulo jam, Buchanane, tuo.”’

[231] [Dr David Hay Fleming has shown that the contemporary evidence is all in favour of the Covenant’s having been signed _in_ the Greyfriars’ Church, and not in the churchyard; see a chapter by him in Mr Moir Bryce’s _Old Greyfriars’ Church, Edinburgh_ (1912). And in the same book Mr Moir Bryce has proved that the small strip of ground long erroneously believed to be the Covenanters’ prison was not separated off till 1703-4, and that the Covenanters were interned on a much larger area to the east, now built over.]

STORY OF MRS MACFARLANE.

‘Let them say I am romantic; so is every one said to be that
either admires a fine thing or does one. On my conscience, as
the world goes, ’tis hardly worth anybody’s while to do one for
the honour of it. Glory, the only pay of generous actions, is
now as ill paid as other just debts; and neither Mrs Macfarlane
for immolating her lover, nor you for constancy to your lord,
must ever hope to be compared to Lucretia or Portia.’—_Pope to
Lady Mary W. Montagu._

Pope here alludes to a tragical incident which took place in Edinburgh on the 2nd of October 1716. The victim was a young Englishman, who had been sent down to Scotland as a Commissioner of Customs. It appears that Squire Cayley, or Captain Cayley, as he was alternatively called, had become the slave of a shameful passion towards Mrs Macfarlane, a woman of uncommon beauty, the wife of Mr John Macfarlane, Writer to the Signet in Edinburgh. One Saturday forenoon Mrs Macfarlane was exposed, by the treachery of Captain Cayley’s landlady, with whom she was acquainted, to an insult of the most atrocious kind on his part, in the house where he lodged, which seems to have been situated in a close in the Cowgate, opposite to what were called the Back Stairs.[232] Next Tuesday Mr Cayley waited upon Mrs Macfarlane at her own house, and was shown into the drawing-room. According to an account given out by his friends, he was anxious to apologise for his former rudeness. From another account, it would appear that he had circulated reports derogatory to the lady’s honour, which she was resolved to punish. A third story represents him as having repeated the insult which he had formerly offered; whereupon she went into another room, and presently came back with a pair of pistols in her hand. On her bidding him leave the house instantly, he said: ‘What, madam, d’ye design to act a comedy?’ To which she answered that ‘_he would find it a tragedy if he did not retire_.’ The infatuated man not obeying her command, she fired one of the pistols, which, however, only wounded him slightly in the left wrist, the bullet slanting down into the floor. The mere instinct, probably, of self-preservation caused him to draw his sword; but before he could use it she fired the other pistol, the shot of which penetrated his heart. ‘This dispute,’ says a letter of the day, ‘was so close that Mr Cayley’s shirt was burnt at the sleeves with the fire of one of the pistols, and his cravat and the breast of his shirt with the fire of the other.’[233] Mrs Macfarlane immediately left the room, locking the door upon the dead body, and sent a servant for her husband, who was found at a neighbouring tavern. On his coming home about an hour after, she took him by the sleeve, and leading him into the room where the corpse lay, explained the circumstances which had led to the bloody act. Mr Macfarlane said: ‘Oh, woman! what have you done?’ But soon seeing the necessity for prompt measures, he went out again to consult with some of his friends. ‘They all advised,’ says the letter just quoted, ‘that he should convey his wife away privately, to prevent her lying in jail, till a precognition should be taken of the affair, and it should appear in its true light. Accordingly [about six o’clock], she walked down the High Street, followed by her husband at a little distance, and now absconds.

‘The thing continued a profound secret to all except those concerned in the house till past ten at night, when Mr Macfarlane, having provided a safe retreat for his wife, returned and gave orders for discovering it to the magistrates, who went and viewed the body of the deceased, and secured the house and maid, and all else who may become evidence of the fact.’

Another contemporary says: ‘I saw his [Cayley’s] corpse after he was cereclothed, and saw his blood where he lay on the floor for twenty-four hours after he died, just as he fell; so it was a difficulty to straight him.’

A careful investigation was made into every circumstance connected with this fatal affair, but without demonstrating anything except the passionate rashness or magnanimity of the fair homicide. Mr Macfarlane was discharged upon his own affirmation that he knew nothing of the deed till after it had taken place. A pamphlet was published by Mrs Murray, Mr Cayley’s landlady, who seems to have kept a grocery shop in the Cowgate, vindicating herself from the imputation which Mrs Macfarlane’s tale had thrown upon her character; but to this there appeared an answer, from some friend of the other party, in which the imputation was fixed almost beyond the possibility of doubt. Mrs Murray denied that Mrs Macfarlane had been in her house on the Saturday before the murder; but evidence was given that she was seen issuing from the close in which Mrs Murray resided, and, after ascending the Back Stairs, was observed passing through the Parliament Square towards her own house.

It will surprise every one to learn that this Scottish Lucrece was a woman of only nineteen or twenty years of age, and some months _enceinte_, at the time when she so boldly vindicated her honour. She was a person of respectable connections, being a daughter of Colonel Charles Straiton, ‘a gentleman of great honour,’ says one of the letters already quoted, and who further appears to have been entrusted with high negotiations by the Jacobites during the reign of Queen Anne. By her mother, she was granddaughter to Sir Andrew Forrester.

Of the future history of Mrs Macfarlane we have but one glimpse, but it is of a romantic nature. Margaret Swinton, who was the aunt of Sir Walter Scott’s mother, and round whom he and his boy-brothers used to close to listen to her tales, remembered being one Sunday left by her parents at home in their house of Swinton in Berwickshire, while the rest of the family attended church. Tiring of the solitude of her little nursery, she stole quietly downstairs to the parlour, which she entered somewhat abruptly. There, to her surprise, she beheld the most beautiful woman she had ever seen, sitting at the breakfast-table making tea. She believed it could be no other than one of those enchanted queens whom she had heard of in fairy tales. The lady, after a pause of surprise, came up to her with a sweet smile, and conversed with her, concluding with a request that she would speak only to her mamma of the stranger whom she had seen. Presently after, little Margaret having turned her back for a few moments, the beautiful vision had vanished. The whole appeared like a dream. By-and-by the family returned, and Margaret took her mother aside that she might talk of this wonderful apparition. Mrs Swinton applauded her for thus observing the injunction which had been laid upon her. ‘Had you not,’ she added, ‘it might have cost that lady her life.’ Subsequent explanations made Margaret aware that she had seen the unfortunate Mrs Macfarlane, who, having some claim of kindred upon the Swinton family, had been received by them, and kept in a secret room till such time as she could venture to make her way out of the country. On Margaret looking away for a moment, the lady had glided by a sliding panel into her Patmos behind the wainscot, and thus unwittingly increased the child’s apprehension of the whole being an event out of the course of nature.

FOOTNOTES

[232] The Back Stairs, built on the site of St Giles’ Churchyard, gave direct communication between the Cowgate and Old Parliament Square. It was by this way that Robertson the smuggler escaped from the Tolbooth Church, where he and his accomplice Wilson had been taken, as was usual with condemned prisoners, the Sunday before their execution. It was Porteous’s behaviour at the execution of Wilson that led to the riot and his own death in the Grassmarket.

[233] The pistols belonged to Mr Cayley himself, having been borrowed a few days before by Mr Macfarlane.

THE CANONGATE.

DISTINGUISHED INHABITANTS IN FORMER TIMES—STORY OF A
BURNING—MOROCCO’S LAND—NEW STREET.

The Canongate, which takes its name from the Augustine canons of Holyrood (who were permitted to build it by the charter of David I. in 1128, and afterwards ruled it as a burgh of regality), was formerly the court end of the town. As the main avenue from the palace into the city, it has borne upon its pavement the burden of all that was beautiful, all that was gallant, all that has become historically interesting in Scotland for the last six or seven hundred years. It still presents an antique appearance, although many of the houses are modernised. There is one with a date from Queen Mary’s reign,[234] and many may be guessed, from their appearance, to be of even an earlier era. Previously to the Union, when the palace ceased to be occasionally inhabited, as it had formerly been, by at least the vicar of majesty in the person of the Commissioner to the Parliament, the place was densely inhabited by persons of distinction. Allan Ramsay, in lamenting the death of Lucky Wood, says:

‘Oh, Canigate, puir elrich hole,
What loss, what crosses does thou thole!
London and death gars thee look droll,
And hing thy head;
Wow but thou has e’en a cauld coal
To blaw indeed;’

and mentions in a note that this place was ‘the greatest sufferer by the loss of our members of parliament, which London now enjoys, many of them having had their houses there;’ a fact which Maitland confirms. Innumerable traces are to be found, in old songs and ballads, of the elegant population of the Canongate in a former day. In the piteous tale of Marie Hamilton—one of the Queen’s Maries—occurs this simple but picturesque stanza:

‘As she cam’ doun the Cannogait,
The Cannogait sae free,
Mony a lady looked owre her window,
Weeping for this ladye.’

An old popular rhyme expresses the hauteur of these Canongate dames towards their city neighbours of the male sex:

‘The lasses o’ the Canongate,
Oh they are wondrous nice;
They winna gi’e a single kiss
But for a double price.

Gar hang them, gar hang them,
Hich upon a tree;
For we’ll get better up the gate
For a bawbee!’

Even in times comparatively modern, this faubourg was inhabited by persons of very great consideration.[235] Within the memory of a lady living in 1830, it used to be a common thing to hear, among other matters of gossip, ‘_that there was to be a braw flitting[236] in the Canongate to-morrow_;’ and parties of young people were made up to go and see the fine furniture brought out, sitting perhaps for hours in the windows of some friend on the opposite side of the street, while cart after cart was laden with magnificence.[237] Many of the houses to this day are fit for the residence of a first-rate family in every respect but _vicinage_ and _access_. The last grand blow was given to the place by the opening of the road along the Calton Hill in 1817, which rendered it no longer the avenue of approach to the city from the east. Instead of profiting by the comparative retirement which it acquired on that occasion, it seemed to become the more wretchedly squalid from its being the less under notice—as a gentleman dresses the least carefully when not expecting visitors. It is now a secluded and, in general, meanly inhabited suburb, only accessible by ways which, however lightly our fathers and grandfathers might regard them, are hardly now pervious to a lady or gentleman without shocking more of the senses than one, besides the difficulty of steering one’s way through the herds of the idle and the wretched who encumber the street.

One of the houses near the head of the Canongate, on the north side of the street, was indicated to me by an old lady a few years ago as that which tradition in her young days pointed to in connection with a wild story related in the notes to _Rokeby_. She had often heard the tale told, nearly in the same manner as it has been given by Scott, and the site of the house concerned in the tragedy was pointed out to her by her seniors. Perhaps the reader will again excuse a quotation from the writings of our late gifted fellow-townsman: if to be related at all—and surely in a work devoted to Edinburgh popular legends it could not rightly be overlooked—it may as well be given in the language of the prince of modern _conteurs_:

‘About the beginning of the eighteenth century, when the large castles of the Scottish nobles, and even the secluded hotels, like those of the French _noblesse_, which they possessed in Edinburgh, were sometimes the scenes of strange and mysterious transactions, a divine of singular sanctity was called up at midnight to pray with a person at the point of death. This was no unusual summons; but what followed was alarming. He was put into a sedan-chair, and after he had been transported to a remote part of the town, the bearers insisted upon his being blindfolded. The request was enforced by a cocked pistol, and submitted to; but in the course of the discussion, he conjectured, from the phrases employed by the chairmen, and from some part of their dress, not completely concealed by their cloaks, that they were greatly above the menial station they assumed. After many turns and windings, the chair was carried upstairs into a lodging, where his eyes were uncovered, and he was introduced into a bedroom, where he found a lady, newly delivered of an infant. He was commanded by his attendants to say such prayers by her bedside as were fitting for a person not expected to survive a mortal disorder. He ventured to remonstrate, and observe that her safe delivery warranted better hopes. But he was sternly commanded to obey the orders first given, and with difficulty recollected himself sufficiently to acquit himself of the task imposed on him. He was then again hurried into the chair; but as they conducted him downstairs he heard the report of a pistol. He was safely conducted home; a purse of gold was forced upon him; but he was warned, at the same time, that the least allusion to this dark transaction would cost him his life. He betook himself to rest, and after long and broken musing, fell into a deep sleep. From this he was awakened by his servant, with the dismal news that a fire of uncommon fury had broken out in the house of ——, near the head of the Canongate, and that it was totally consumed; with the shocking addition that the daughter of the proprietor, a young lady eminent for beauty and accomplishments, had perished in the flames. The clergyman had his suspicions, but to have made them public would have availed nothing. He was timid; the family was of the first distinction; above all, the deed was done, and could not be amended. Time wore away, however, and with it his terrors. He became unhappy at being the solitary depositary of this fearful mystery, and mentioned it to some of his brethren, through whom the anecdote acquired a sort of publicity. The divine, however, had been long dead, and the story in some degree forgotten, when a fire broke out again on the very same spot where the house of —— had formerly stood, and which was now occupied by buildings of an inferior description. When the flames were at their height, the tumult which usually attends such a scene was suddenly suspended by an unexpected apparition. A beautiful female, in a nightdress extremely rich, but at least half a century old, appeared in the very midst of the fire, and uttered these tremendous words in her vernacular idiom: “_Anes_ burned, _twice_ burned; the _third_ time I’ll scare you all!” The belief in this story was formerly so strong that on a fire breaking out, and seeming to approach the fatal spot, there was a good deal of anxiety testified, lest the apparition should make good her denunciation.’

A little way farther down the Canongate, on the same side, is an old-fashioned house called _Morocco’s Land_, having an alley passing under it, over which is this inscription[238]—a strange cry of the spirit of man to be heard in a street:

MISERERE MEI, DOMINE: A PECCATO, PROBRO,
DEBITO, ET MORTE SUBITA, LIBERA ME.