THE OLD TOLBOOTH.
Whether I was brought into this world by the usual human helps and
means, or was a special creation, might admit of some controversy, as
I have never known the name of parent or of kindred.--THE
IMPROVISITORE.
Many of the citizens of Edinburgh may remember the old Bank close,
and the edifice about to be described. On the west side of that
narrow street, which descended abruptly on the southern side of the
city's central hill, stood in former days a house of massive
construction and sombre aspect. Its walls were enormously thick and
elaborately jointed; its passages narrow, dark, and devious; its
stairs ascended and descended in secret corners, and one led to the
paved bartizan, which formed the roof. Many of its gloomy chambers
were vaulted. Over its small and heavy doorway appeared the date
1569, encrusted by smoke and worn with time. The whole aspect of the
edifice was peculiarly dismal; the walls were black as if coated over
with soot, the windows were thickly grated with rusted iron
stanchells, and sunk in massive frames, the little panes were
obscured by the dust and cobwebs of years.
It was the ancient prison of the city. In older days it had been
built by a rich citizen named Gourlay, and had held within its walls
the ambassadors of England and France. From its strength it had been
converted into a Tolbooth, and was used as such until the time of the
Solemn League and Covenant, when the spacious and more famous prison
was adopted for that purpose; but the older, darker, more obscure,
and more horrid place of confinement was still used at this time.
A party of the ancient City Guard, armed with swords and Lochaber
axes, buff coats, and steel bonnets, occupied one of the lower
apartments entering from the turnpike stair, at the foot of which
stood a sentinel with his axe, before the door, which though small,
was a solid mass of iron-studded oak, bolts and long bars.
In a small but desolate chamber of this striking old edifice--the
same in which the hapless Earl of Argyle passed the night of the 29th
June, 1685, his last in the land of the living--Walter Fenton was
confined a prisoner, while the Reverend Mr. Ichabod Bummel, Mr.
Drouthy the butler, and other servitors of Lady Bruntisfield, were in
close durance in the greater or upper Tolbooth. The roof, the walls,
and the floor of this squalid apartment were all of squared stones,
stained with damp and scrawled over with hideous visages, pious
sentences, and reckless obscenity. Its only window was thickly
grated within and without, and there in the sickly light the busy
spiders spun their webs from bar to bar in undisturbed industry. It
opened to a narrow, dark, and steep Close of dreary aspect; the
opposite houses were only one yard distant, and ten stories high; the
alley was like a chasm or fissure; a single ray of sunlight streamed
down it, and penetrating the cobwebs and dust of the prison window,
radiated through its deep embrasure, and threw the iron gratings in
strong shadow on the paved floor. Though the day was a chill one, in
March, there was no fire under the small archway, where one should
have been, and the only articles of furniture were a coarse and heavy
table like a carpenter's bench, a miserable palliasse on a truckle
bedstead, and a water flagon of Flemish pewter. One or two rusty
chains hung from enormous blocks in the dirty walls, for the more
secure confinement of prisoners who might be more than usually
dangerous or refractory, and the whole tout ensemble of the chamber
when viewed by the dim and fast-fading light of the evening was
cheerless, desolate, and disgusting.
The day had passed away, and now, divested of his gay accoutrements,
and clad in a plain unlaced frock of grey cloth, the young prisoner
awaited impatiently, perhaps apprehensively, the hour that would
bring him before that terrible council whose lawless will was
nevertheless the law of the land. Sunk in moody reverie, he remained
with his arms folded, and his head sunk forward on his breast.
The shadow of the grating on the floor grew less and less distinct,
for as the light faded, his vaulted prison became darker, until all
became blackness around him. Anon the pallid moon rose slowly into
its place, and from the blue southern sky poured a cold but steady
flood of silver light into the cheerless room, and again, for a time,
the shadow of the massive grating was thrown on the discoloured
floor. All around it was involved in obscurity, from amid which the
damp spots on the walls seemed like great and hideous visages,
mocking and staring at the captive.
Bitter were the thoughts, and sad the memories that thronged fast
upon the mind of Walter Fenton; his dark eyes were lit, his lip
compressed, but there were none to behold the changes; his handsome
features were alternately clouded by chagrin, contracted by anger,
and softened by love. Though ever proud in spirit, and fired by an
inborn nobility of soul, never until now did he feel so keenly the
dependence of his situation, or so fierce a longing for an
opportunity when by one brilliant act of heroism and courage, he
might place himself for ever above his fortune, or--die. And Lilian!
O it was the thought of her alone that raised these vivid aspirations
to their utmost pitch; but his heart sank, and even hope--the lover's
last rallying point--faded away when he pictured the difference of
their fortunes and positions in life. Scotland was then a country
where pride of birth was carried to excess; and a remnant of that
feeling still exists among us. He reflected that he was poor and
nameless, compelled from infancy to eat the bread of dependence and
mortification, and now in manhood, having no other estate than his
sword and a ring, which, as he had often told Lilian with a smile
(and he knew not how prophetically he spoke) "contained the secret of
his life:" she the representative of a long line of illustrious
barons, whose shields had shewn their blazons on the fields of
Bannockburn, Sark, and Arkinholme, the inheritrix of their honours,
their pride, and their possessions. Poor Walter! but he was too
thoroughly in love to lose courage altogether.
As a boy, he had sighed for Lilian, and he felt his enthusiasm
kindled by her gentleness and infantile beauty, for then his heart
knew not the great gulf which a few years would open up between them.
The ardour of his temperament made him now feel alternately despair
and hope--but the latter feeling predominated, for though the clergy
railed at wealth and all the good things of this life, and took
peculiar care to enjoy a good share thereof--the world was not so
intensely selfish then as it is now, for a high spirit and a bold
heart, when united to a gallant bearing, a velvet cloak, a tall
feather, and a long sword, were valued more than an ample purse by
the young ladies of that age, who were quite used to find in their
ponderous folio romances, how beautiful and disinterested queens and
princesses bestowed their hands, hearts, and kingdoms on those
valiant knights-errant and penniless cavaliers, who alone, or by the
aid of a single faithful squire, freed them from enchanted castles,
and slew the wicked enchanters, giants, gnomes, and fire-vomiting
dragons who had persecuted them from childhood.
To resume: poor Walter was intensely sad, for deeply at that moment
he experienced the desolate feeling, that he was utterly alone in
this wide world, and that within all its ample space there existed
not one being with whom he could claim kindred. He felt that it was
all a blank, a void to him; but his thoughts went back to those days
when the suppression of the rising at Bothwell, struck terror and
despair into the hearts of the Presbyterians, and filled the dungeons
of the Scottish castles, and the Tolbooths of the cities with the
much-enduring adherents of the Covenant, beneath the banner of which
his father was supposed to have died with his sword in his hand--so
with her dying lips had his mother told him, and his heart swelled
and his eye moistened, as he recalled the time, the place, and her
tremulous accents, with a vivid distinctness that wrung his breast
with the tenderest sorrow, even after the lapse of so many years.
During the summer of 1679 those citizens of Edinburgh, whose mansions
commanded a view of the Grey friars kirkyard, beheld from their
windows a daily scene of suffering such as had never before been seen
in Scotland.
This ancient burial-place lies to the south of the long ridge
occupied by the ancient city; it is spacious, irregular, and
surrounded by magnificent tombs, many of them being of great
antiquity, and marking the last resting-places of those who were
eminent for their virtues and talents, or distinguished by their
birth. It is a melancholy place withal. For three hundred years
never a day has passed without many persons being interred there; and
the hideous clay, the yellow and many-coloured loam, that had once
lived and breathed, and loved and spoken, has now risen several feet
above the adjacent street, against the walls of the great old church
in the centre, and has buried the basements of the quaint and dark
monuments that surround it. The inscriptions and grotesque carving
of the latter, have long since been encrusted and blackened by the
smoke of the city, or worn and obliterated by the corroding and fetid
atmosphere of the great grave-yard. There is not a spot in all the
Lothians where the broad-leaved docken, the rank dog-grass, the long
black nettle, and other weeds grow so luxuriantly, for terrible is
the mass of human corruption, for ever festering and decaying beneath
the verdant turf.
In the year before mentioned, this ancient city of the dead was
crowded to excess with those unhappy non-conformists whom the prisons
could not contain, for already were their gloomy dungeons and squalid
chambers filled with the poor, the miserable, and devoted
Covenanters. Strong guards and chains of sentinels watched by day
and night the walls of the burial-ground; and then the buff-coated
dragoon, with his broadsword and carbine, and the smart musqueteer,
with his dagger and matchlock, were ever on the alert to deal instant
death as the penalty of any attempt to escape. The rising at
Bothwell had been quenched in blood; and these unhappy people had
been collected--principally from Bathgate--by the cavalry employed in
riding down the country, and being driven like a herd of cattle to
the capital, were penned up in the old churchyard. And there, for
months, they lay in hundreds, exposed to the scorching glare of the
sun by day, and the chill dew by night--the rain and the wind and the
storm! God's creatures, formed in his own image, reduced to the
level of the hare and the fox, with no other canopy than the changing
sky, and no other bed than the rank grass, reeds, and nettles, that
sprung in such hideous luxuriance from the fetid graves beneath them.
It was a sorrowful sight; for there was the strong and athletic
peasant, with his true Scottish heart of stubborn pride and
rectitude, his weak and tender wife with her little infants, his aged
and infirm parents. Their miseries increasing as day by day their
numbers diminished, and other burial-mounds, fresh and earthy, rose
amid the hollow-eyed survivors to mark the last homes of other
martyrs in the cause of "the oppressed Kirk and broken Covenant."
And all this terrible amount of mental misery and bodily suffering
was accumulated within the walls of the capital, amid the noisy and
busy streets of a densely peopled city--and for what?
Religion--religion, under whose wide mantle so many thousand
atrocities have been committed by men of every creed and age; and
because these poor peasants had resolved to worship God after the
spirit of their own hearts, and the fashion of their fathers.
When the Duke of Albany and York (afterwards James VII.) came to
Edinburgh, the persecution was not continued with such rigour; but
the progress of time never overcame the resolution of the
covenanters, though many noble families were reduced to poverty,
exile, and ruin, while their brave and moral tenantry suffered
famine, torture, imprisonment, and every severity that tyrannical
misgovernment could inflict, until the Presbyterians were driven to
the verge of despair; intrigues with the Prince of Orange were set on
foot, and for some years a storm had been gathering, which, in the
shape of a Dutch invasion, was soon to burst over the whole of
Britain.
Walter's memory went back to those days, when, amid the tombs and
graves of that old kirk-yard, he had nestled, a little and wailing
child, on the bosom of his mother, who, imprisoned there among the
"common herd," had soon sunk under the combined effects of exposure,
starvation, degradation, and sorrow; and he remembered when coiled up
within her mantle and plaid, how he hid his little face in her fair
neck, trembling with cold and fear in dreary nights, when the moon
streamed its light between the flying clouds upon the vast and
desolate church and its thick grave-mounds, with the long reedy grass
waving on their solemn and melancholy ridges.
A mystery hung over the fortune of Walter Fenton. Of his family he
knew nothing further than that his mother's name was Fenton, and his
own was Walter, for so she had been wont to call him. Of his father
he knew nothing, save that he had never been seen since the cavalry
of Claverhouse swept over the Bridge of Bothwell, scattering its
defenders in death and defeat. He had heard that his father there
held high command, but was supposed to have perished either in the
furious _mêlée_ on the bridge, or in the stream beneath it.
Concealing her rank in the disguise of a peasant, his mother had been
found in the vicinity of the battle-field, was arrested as a
suspected person, sent to Edinburgh, and imprisoned with other
unfortunates in the old church-yard.
Poor Walter used to remember with pleasure that they had always
remained aloof from the other prisoners, and were treated by them
with marked respect. Their usual shelter was under the great
mausoleum of the Barons of Coates, the quaint devices and antique
sculpture of which had often raised his childish fear and wonder; he
recalled through the struggling and misty perceptions of infancy, how
day by day her fair features became paler and more attenuated, her
eye more sunken and ghastly, her voice more tremulous and weak, and
her strength even less than his own; for (he had heard the soldiers
say) she had been a tenderly nurtured and fragile creature, unable to
endure the hardships to which she was subjected; and so she perished
among the first that died there.
One morning the little boy raised his head from the coarse plaid
which on the previous night her feeble hands had wrapped around him,
and called as usual for her daily kiss; he twisted his dimpled
fingers in the masses of her silky hair, and laid his smiling face to
hers--it was cold as the marble tomb beside them; he shrank back, and
again called upon her, but her still lips gave no reply; he stirred
her--she did not move. Then, struck by the peculiar, the terrible
aspect of her pale and once beautiful face, the ghastly eyes and
relaxed jaw, the child screamed aloud on the mother that heard him no
more. He dreaded alike to remain or to fly; for, alas! there was no
other in whose arms he could find a refuge.
A soldier approached. He was a white-haired veteran, who had looked
on many a battle-field, and speaking kindly to the desolate child, he
gently stirred the dead woman with his halberd.
"Is this thy mother, my puir bairn?" said he.
The child answered only by his tears, and hid his face in the grass.
"Come away with me, my little mannikin," continued the soldier, "for
thy mother hath gone to a better and bonnier place than this."
"Take me there too," sobbed the child, clinging to the soldier's
hand; "oh, take me there too."
"By my faith, little one, 'tis a march I am not prepared for yet--but
our parson will tell you all about it. Tush! I know the flams of
the drum better than how to expound the text; so come away, my puir
bairn; thy mother, God rest her, is in good hands, I warrant. Come
away; and rot me, if thou shalt want while old Willie Wemyss of the
Scots' Musqueteers, hath a bodle in his pouch, or a bannock in his
havresack."
By the good-hearted soldier he was carried away in a paroxysm of
childish grief and terror; and he saw his mother no more.
By the beauty of her person, the exceeding whiteness of her hands,
and a very valuable ring found with her, she was supposed to be of
higher rank than her peasant's attire indicated; and those apparent
proofs of a superior birth, the soldiers never omitted an opportunity
of impressing upon Walter as he grew older; and cited innumerable Low
Country legends and old Scottish traditions, wherein certain heroes
just so circumstanced, had become great personages in the end; and
Walter was taught to consider that there was no reason why he should
be an exception. But _who_ his mother was, had unfortunately
remained locked in her own breast; whether from excessive debility
and broken spirit she lacked strength to communicate with the other
captives, or whether she feared to do so, could not be known now; her
secret was buried with her, and thus a mystery was thrown over the
fortune of the little boy, which through life caused him to be
somewhat of a moody and reflective nature.
William Wemyss, a veteran serjeant of Dunbarton's musqueteers, became
his patron and protector; and a love and friendship sprang up between
them, for the orphan had none other to cling to. Wemyss often led
him to the old churchyard, and showed him the grave where his mother
lay--where the soldiers had interred her; and there little Walter,
overcome by the mystery that involved his fate, and the loneliness of
his heart, wept bitterly; for the soldier, though meaning well, was
rather like one of Job's comforters, and painted his dependance in
such strong colours, and reminded him how narrowly he had escaped
being hanged or banished as "a covenanter's spawn," that the heart of
the poor boy swelled at times almost to breaking. Then the soldier
would desire him to pray for his mother, and made him repeat a
curious but earnest prayer full of quaint military technicalities, in
which the good old halberdier saw nothing either unusual or outré.
Often little Fenton came alone to seek that well-known grave, to
linger and to sit beside it, for it was the only part of all broad
Scotland that his soul clung to. The weeds were now matted over it,
and the waving nettles half hid the humble stone, which with his own
hands the kind soldier had placed there. Walter always cleared away
those luxuriant weeds, and though they stung his hands, he felt them
not. It was a nameless grave too, for the real name of her who slept
within it was unknown to him; and the desolate child often stretched
himself down on the turf, burying his face in the long grass, and
weeping, as he had done in infancy on the poor bosom that mouldered
beneath, retraced in memory, days of wandering and misfortune, of
danger and sorrow, which he could not comprehend. Time, and that
lightness of heart which is incident to youth, enabled him at last to
view the grave with composure; but he sought it not the less, until
after his return from Sedgemoor; he hastened to the well-known place,
but, alas! the grave had been violated, and the charm of grief was
broken for ever. _Another_ had been buried there; the earth was
freshly heaped up; and he rushed away, to return no more.
From childhood to youth the old Serjeant was his only protector:
though poor, he was a kind and sincere one; and the little boy became
the pet of the musqueteers.
A child, a dog, or a monkey is always an object of regard to an old
soldier or sailor; for the human heart must love something.
Little Walter carried the halberdier's can of egg-flip when he
mounted guard, learned to make up bandoliers of powder, polish a
corslet, to rattle dice on a drumhead, and to beat on the drum
itself; to fight with rapier and dagger; to handle a case of
falchions like any sword-player; and became an adept at every game of
chance, from kingly chess, to homely touch-and-take. He learned to
drink "Confusion to the Covenant," in potent usquebaugh without
winking once, and swear a few cavalier-like oaths. Like all such
pets, he was often boxed severely, and roundly cursed too, at the
caprice of his numerous masters, until the poor boy would have been
altogether lost, his ideas corrupted, and his manners tainted by the
roughness of camp and garrison, had not his humble patron been
ordered away on the Tangier expedition; and being unable to take his
little protégé with him, bethought him of craving the bounty of his
commander's wife, the Countess of Dunbarton, a beautiful young
English woman, who was the belle of the capital and the idol of the
Scottish cavaliers. Struck with the soldier's story, envying his
generosity, pitying the little boy, and pleased with his candour and
beauty, she immediately took him under protection, adopting him as
her page; and never was there seen a handsomer youth than Walter
Fenton, when his coarse attire (a cast doublet of the serjeant) was
exchanged for a coat of white velvet slashed with red and laced with
gold, breeches and stockings of silk, a sash, a velvet cloak, and
silver-hilted poniard; and his dark-brown hair curled and perfumed by
Master Peter Pouncet, the famous frizzeur in the Bow. He parted in a
flood of tears from his old patron, who slipped into his pocket a
purse the Countess had bestowed on himself, drew his leather glove
across his eyes, and hurried away.
At Lady Dunbarton's he had often seen Lilian Napier; she was then a
little girl, and always accompanied her tall and stately relative in
the vast old rumbling coach, with its two footmen behind and
outriders in front, armed with sword and carbine; for the noble dame
set forth in great state on all visits of ceremony. Lady Grizel's
majestic aspect and frigid stateliness scared and awed the little
footpage; but the prattle of the fair-haired Lilian soothed and
charmed him, and he soon learned to love the little girl, to call her
his sister, to be joyous when she came, and to be sad when she
departed.
Young Walter, from his well-knit figure, and a determined aspect
which he had acquired by his camp education, was as great a favourite
among the starched little damoiselles of the Countess's
withdrawing-room, as his clenched fist and bent brows made him a
terror at times to the little cavaliers whose jealousy he excited;
and his military preceptors (the old Royals, then battling and
broiling at Tangiers) had inculcated a pugnacity of disposition that
sometimes was very troublesome; and he once proceeded so far as to
d--n the old Dowager of Drumsturdy pretty roundly, and draw his
poniard on the young lord her son, who, with his companions, had
mocked him as "a covenanter's brat." The Countess made him crave
pardon of the little noble, and they shook hands like two
cut-and-thrust gallants of six feet high.
But when their companions, with childish malevolence, taunted poor
Walter as "my lord's loon," "the soldier's varlet," or "the powder
puggy," epithets which always kindled his rage and drew tears from
his eyes, Lilian, ever gentle and kind, wept with him, espoused his
cause, and told that "Walter's mother was a noble lady, for the
Countess had her ring of gold;" and the influence of the little
nymph, with her cheeks like glowing peaches, and her bright hair
flowing in sunny ringlets around a face ever beaming with
happiness--was never lost, or failed to maintain peace among them.
And thus days passed swiftly into years, and the girl was twelve and
the boy sixteen when they were separated. Walter followed his noble
patron to the field, when the landing of Argyle in the west, and
Monmouth in the south, threw Britain into a flame. Dunbarton, now a
general officer, marched with the Scottish forces against the former;
but Walter, as a volunteer, served under Colonel Halkett, with a
battalion of Scottish musqueteers, at the battle of Sedgemoor, where
he felt what it was to have lead bullets rebounding from his buff
coat and headpiece. Since then he had been serving as a private
gentleman; but in a country like Scotland, swarming with idle young
men of good birth and high spirit, who despised every occupation save
that of arms, preferment came not, and he had too often experienced
the mortification of seeing others obtain what he justly deemed his
due, the commission of King James VII.
His recent interview with Lilian had recalled in full force all the
friendship of their childhood and the dawning love of older years;
but the manner in which he was now involved with the supreme
authorities seemed to destroy all his hopes for ever--in Scotland at
least; and yet, though that reflection wrung his heart, so little did
he regret the part he had acted, that for Lilian's sake he would
willingly run again, a hundred-fold greater risk. The last three
years of his life had been spent amid the stirring turmoil of
military duty in a discontented country, where each succeeding day
the spirit of insurrection grew riper. In the rough society with
which he mingled, never had he been addressed by a female so fair in
face and so winning in manner as Lilian of Bruntisfield; and thus the
charm of her presence acted more powerfully upon him. Her accents of
entreaty and distress--her affection for Lady Grizel struggling with
anxiety for himself, had in one brief interview recalled all the soft
and happy impressions of his earlier and more innocent days, and love
obtained a sway over his heart, that made him for a time forget his
own dangerous predicament, in pondering with pleasure on the
mortifications from which he had saved the ladies of Bruntisfield,
the risks he had run for their sake, and consequently the debt of
gratitude they owed him.
From his breast he drew forth her glove a hundred times, to admire
its delicate texture and diminutive form; but he could not repress a
bitter sigh when contemplating how slight were the chances of his
ever again beholding the gentle owner, now when both unhappily were
under the ban of the law,--she a homeless fugitive, and he a close
prisoner, with death, imprisonment, or distant service in the Scots'
Brigade his only prospects. Even were it otherwise,--and, oh! this
idea was more tormenting than the first,--her heart might be
dedicated to another; and she might, with the true pride of a noble
Scottish maiden, deem it an unpardonable presumption in the poor and
unhonoured pikeman to raise his eyes to the heiress of Sir Archibald
Napier of Bruntisfield and the Wrytes. And thus, having introduced
to the reader the grand feature upon which our story must "hinge," we
shall get on with renewed ardour.