The ancient Tolbooth of Edinburgh, Situated as described in this CHAPTER,
was built by the citizens in 1561, and destined for the accommodation of
Parliament, as well as of the High Courts of Justice;* and at the same
time for the confinement of prisoners for debt, or on criminal charges.
Since the year 1640, when the present Parliament House was erected, the
Tolbooth was occupied as a prison only.
* [This is not so certain. Few persons now living are likely to remember
the interior of the old Tolbooth, with narrow staircase, thick walls,
and small apartments, nor to imagine that it could ever have been used
for these purposes. Robert Chambers, in his _Minor Antiquities_ of
Edinburgh, has preserved ground-plans or sections, which clearly show
this,--the largest hall was on the second floor, and measuring 27 feet
by 20, and 12 feet high. It may have been intended for the meetings of
Town Council, while the Parliament assembled, after 1560, in what was
called the Upper Tolbooth, that is the south-west portion of the
Collegiate Church of St. Giles, until the year 1640, when the present
Parliament House was completed. Being no longer required for such a
purpose, it was set apart by the Town Council on the 24th December 1641
as a distinct church, with the name of the Tolbooth parish, and
therefore could not have derived the name from its vicinity to the
Tolbooth, as usually stated.]
Gloomy and dismal as it was, the situation in the centre of the High
Street rendered it so particularly well-aired, that when the plague laid
waste the city in 1645, it affected none within these melancholy
precincts. The Tolbooth was removed, with the mass of buildings in which
it was incorporated, in the autumn of the year 1817. At that time the
kindness of his old schoolfellow and friend, Robert Johnstone, Esquire,
then Dean of Guild of the city, with the liberal acquiescence of the
persons who had contracted for the work, procured for the Author of
Waverley the stones which composed the gateway, together with the door,
and its ponderous fastenings, which he employed in decorating the
entrance of his kitchen-court at Abbotsford. “To such base offices may we
return.” The application of these relies of the Heart of Mid-Lothian to
serve as the postern-gate to a court of modern offices, may be justly
ridiculed as whimsical; but yet it is not without interest, that we see
the gateway through which so much of the stormy politics of a rude age,
and the vice and misery of later times, had found their passage, now
occupied in the service of rural economy. Last year, to complete the
change, a tomtit was pleased to build her nest within the lock of the
Tolbooth,--a strong temptation to have committed a sonnet, had the
Author, like Tony Lumpkin, been in a concatenation accordingly.
It is worth mentioning, that an act of beneficence celebrated the
demolition of the Heart of Mid-Lothian. A subscription, raised and
applied by the worthy Magistrate above mentioned, procured the
manumission of most of the unfortunate debtors confined in the old jail,
so that there were few or none transferred to the new place of
confinement.
[The figure of a Heart upon the pavement between St. Gilesís Church and
the Edinburgh County Hall, now marks the site of the Old Tolbooth.]