It was Queen Mary who threw open the gardens of the Grey Friars: a new
and semi-rural cemetery in those days, although it has grown an antiquity
in its turn and been superseded by half-a-dozen others. The Friars must
have had a pleasant time on summer evenings; for their gardens were
situated to a wish, with the tall castle and the tallest of the castle
crags in front. Even now, it is one of our famous Edinburgh points of
view; and strangers are led thither to see, by yet another instance, how
strangely the city lies upon her hills. The enclosure is of an irregular
shape; the double church of Old and New Greyfriars stands on the level at
the top; a few thorns are dotted here and there, and the ground falls by
terrace and steep slope towards the north. The open shows many slabs and
table tombstones; and all round the margin, the place is girt by an array
of aristocratic mausoleums appallingly adorned.
Setting aside the tombs of Roubiliac, which belong to the heroic order of
graveyard art, we Scotch stand, to my fancy, highest among nations in the
matter of grimly illustrating death. We seem to love for their own sake
the emblems of time and the great change; and even around country
churches you will find a wonderful exhibition of skulls, and crossbones,
and noseless angels, and trumpets pealing for the Judgment Day. Every
mason was a pedestrian Holbein: he had a deep consciousness of death, and
loved to put its terrors pithily before the churchyard loiterer; he was
brimful of rough hints upon mortality, and any dead farmer was seized
upon to be a text. The classical examples of this art are in Greyfriars.
In their time, these were doubtless costly monuments, and reckoned of a
very elegant proportion by contemporaries; and now, when the elegance is
not so apparent, the significance remains. You may perhaps look with a
smile on the profusion of Latin mottoes—some crawling endwise up the
shaft of a pillar, some issuing on a scroll from angels’ trumpets—on the
emblematic horrors, the figures rising headless from the grave, and all
the traditional ingenuities in which it pleased our fathers to set forth
their sorrow for the dead and their sense of earthly mutability. But it
is not a hearty sort of mirth. Each ornament may have been executed by
the merriest apprentice, whistling as he plied the mallet; but the
original meaning of each, and the combined effect of so many of them in
this quiet enclosure, is serious to the point of melancholy.
Round a great part of the circuit, houses of a low class present their
backs to the churchyard. Only a few inches separate the living from the
dead. Here, a window is partly blocked up by the pediment of a tomb;
there, where the street falls far below the level of the graves, a
chimney has been trained up the back of a monument, and a red pot looks
vulgarly over from behind. A damp smell of the graveyard finds its way
into houses where workmen sit at meat. Domestic life on a small scale
goes forward visibly at the windows. The very solitude and stillness of
the enclosure, which lies apart from the town’s traffic, serves to
accentuate the contrast. As you walk upon the graves, you see children
scattering crumbs to feed the sparrows; you hear people singing or
washing dishes, or the sound of tears and castigation; the linen on a
clothes-pole flaps against funereal sculpture; or perhaps the cat slips
over the lintel and descends on a memorial urn. And as there is nothing
else astir, these incongruous sights and noises take hold on the
attention and exaggerate the sadness of the place.
[Picture: Greyfriars]
Greyfriars is continually overrun by cats. I have seen one afternoon, as
many as thirteen of them seated on the grass beside old Milne, the Master
Builder, all sleek and fat, and complacently blinking, as if they had fed
upon strange meats. Old Milne was chaunting with the saints, as we may
hope, and cared little for the company about his grave; but I confess the
spectacle had an ugly side for me; and I was glad to step forward and
raise my eyes to where the Castle and the roofs of the Old Town, and the
spire of the Assembly Hall, stood deployed against the sky with the
colourless precision of engraving. An open outlook is to be desired from
a churchyard, and a sight of the sky and some of the world’s beauty
relieves a mind from morbid thoughts.
I shall never forget one visit. It was a grey, dropping day; the grass
was strung with rain-drops; and the people in the houses kept hanging out
their shirts and petticoats and angrily taking them in again, as the
weather turned from wet to fair and back again. A grave-digger, and a
friend of his, a gardener from the country, accompanied me into one after
another of the cells and little courtyards in which it gratified the
wealthy of old days to enclose their old bones from neighbourhood. In
one, under a sort of shrine, we found a forlorn human effigy, very
realistically executed down to the detail of his ribbed stockings, and
holding in his hand a ticket with the date of his demise. He looked most
pitiful and ridiculous, shut up by himself in his aristocratic precinct,
like a bad old boy or an inferior forgotten deity under a new
dispensation; the burdocks grew familiarly about his feet, the rain
dripped all round him; and the world maintained the most entire
indifference as to who he was or whither he had gone. In another, a
vaulted tomb, handsome externally but horrible inside with damp and
cobwebs, there were three mounds of black earth and an uncovered thigh
bone. This was the place of interment, it appeared, of a family with
whom the gardener had been long in service. He was among old
acquaintances. ‘This’ll be Miss Marg’et’s,’ said he, giving the bone a
friendly kick. ‘The auld ---!’ I have always an uncomfortable feeling
in a graveyard, at sight of so many tombs to perpetuate memories best
forgotten; but I never had the impression so strongly as that day.
People had been at some expense in both these cases: to provoke a
melancholy feeling of derision in the one, and an insulting epithet in
the other. The proper inscription for the most part of mankind, I began
to think, is the cynical jeer, _cras tibi_. That, if anything, will stop
the mouth of a carper; since it both admits the worst and carries the war
triumphantly into the enemy’s camp.
Greyfriars is a place of many associations. There was one window in a
house at the lower end, now demolished, which was pointed out to me by
the gravedigger as a spot of legendary interest. Burke, the resurrection
man, infamous for so many murders at five shillings a-head, used to sit
thereat, with pipe and nightcap, to watch burials going forward on the
green. In a tomb higher up, which must then have been but newly
finished, John Knox, according to the same informant, had taken refuge in
a turmoil of the Reformation. Behind the church is the haunted mausoleum
of Sir George Mackenzie: Bloody Mackenzie, Lord Advocate in the
Covenanting troubles and author of some pleasing sentiments on
toleration. Here, in the last century, an old Heriot’s Hospital boy once
harboured from the pursuit of the police. The Hospital is next door to
Greyfriars—a courtly building among lawns, where, on Founder’s Day, you
may see a multitude of children playing Kiss-in-the-Ring and Round the
Mulberry-bush. Thus, when the fugitive had managed to conceal himself in
the tomb, his old schoolmates had a hundred opportunities to bring him
food; and there he lay in safety till a ship was found to smuggle him
abroad. But his must have been indeed a heart of brass, to lie all day
and night alone with the dead persecutor; and other lads were far from
emulating him in courage. When a man’s soul is certainly in hell, his
body will scarce lie quiet in a tomb however costly; some time or other
the door must open, and the reprobate come forth in the abhorred garments
of the grave. It was thought a high piece of prowess to knock at the
Lord Advocate’s mausoleum and challenge him to appear. ‘Bluidy
Mackingie, come oot if ye dar’!’ sang the fool-hardy urchins. But Sir
George had other affairs on hand; and the author of an essay on
toleration continues to sleep peacefully among the many whom he so
intolerantly helped to slay.
[Picture: The Grassmarket] For this _infelix campus_, as it is dubbed in
one of its own inscriptions—an inscription over which Dr. Johnson passed
a critical eye—is in many ways sacred to the memory of the men whom
Mackenzie persecuted. It was here, on the flat tombstones, that the
Covenant was signed by an enthusiastic people. In the long arm of the
church-yard that extends to Lauriston, the prisoners from Bothwell
Bridge—fed on bread and water and guarded, life for life, by vigilant
marksmen—lay five months looking for the scaffold or the plantations.
And while the good work was going forward in the Grassmarket, idlers in
Greyfriars might have heard the throb of the military drums that drowned
the voices of the martyrs. Nor is this all: for down in the corner
farthest from Sir George, there stands a monument dedicated, in uncouth
Covenanting verse, to all who lost their lives in that contention. There
is no moorsman shot in a snow shower beside Irongray or Co’monell; there
is not one of the two hundred who were drowned off the Orkneys; nor so
much as a poor, over-driven, Covenanting slave in the American
plantations; but can lay claim to a share in that memorial, and, if such
things interest just men among the shades, can boast he has a monument on
earth as well as Julius Cæsar or the Pharaohs. Where they may all lie, I
know not. Far-scattered bones, indeed! But if the reader cares to learn
how some of them—or some part of some of them—found their way at length
to such honourable sepulture, let him listen to the words of one who was
their comrade in life and their apologist when they were dead. Some of
the insane controversial matter I omit, as well as some digressions, but
leave the rest in Patrick Walker’s language and orthography:—
‘The never to be forgotten Mr. _James Renwick_ told me, that he was
Witness to their Public Murder at the _Gallowlee_, between _Leith_
and _Edinburgh_, when he saw the Hangman hash and hagg off all their
Five Heads, with _Patrick Foreman’s_ Right Hand: Their Bodies were
all buried at the Gallows Foot; their Heads, with _Patrick’s_ Hand,
were brought and put upon five Pikes on the _Pleasaunce-Port_. . . .
Mr. _Renwick_ told me also that it was the first public Action that
his Hand was at, to conveen Friends, and lift their murthered Bodies,
and carried them to the West Churchyard of _Edinburgh_,’—not
Greyfriars, this time,—‘and buried them there. Then they came about
the City . . . . and took down these Five Heads and that Hand; and
Day being come, they went quickly up the _Pleasaunce_; and when they
came to _Lauristoun_ Yards, upon the South-side of the City, they
durst not venture, being so light, to go and bury their Heads with
their Bodies, which they designed; it being present Death, if any of
them had been found. _Alexander Tweedie_, a Friend, being with them,
who at that Time was Gardner in these Yards, concluded to bury them
in his Yard, being in a Box (wrapped in Linen), where they lay 45
Years except 3 Days, being executed upon the 10th of _October_ 1681,
and found the 7th Day of October 1726. That Piece of Ground lay for
some Years unlaboured; and trenching it, the Gardner found them,
which affrighted him the Box was consumed. Mr. _Schaw_, the Owner of
these Yards, caused lift them, and lay them upon a Table in his
Summer-house: Mr. _Schaw’s_ mother was so kind, as to cut out a
Linen-cloth, and cover them. They lay Twelve Days there, where all
had Access to see them. _Alexander Tweedie_, the foresaid Gardner,
said, when dying, There was a Treasure hid in his Yard, but neither
Gold nor Silver. _Daniel Tweedie_, his Son, came along with me to
that Yard, and told me that his Father planted a white Rose-bush
above them, and farther down the Yard a red Rose-bush, which were
more fruitful than any other Bush in the Yard. . . . Many came’—to
see the heads—‘out of Curiosity; yet I rejoiced to see so many
concerned grave Men and Women favouring the Dust of our Martyrs.
There were Six of us concluded to bury them upon the Nineteenth Day
of _October_ 1726, and every One of us to acquaint Friends of the Day
and Hour, being _Wednesday_, the Day of the Week on which most of
them were executed, and at 4 of the Clock at Night, being the Hour
that most of them went to their resting Graves. We caused make a
compleat Coffin for them in Black, with four Yards of fine Linen, the
way that our Martyrs Corps were managed. . . . Accordingly we kept
the aforesaid Day and Hour, and doubled the Linen, and laid the Half
of it below them, their nether jaws being parted from their Heads;
but being young Men, their Teeth remained. All were Witness to the
Holes in each of their Heads, which the Hangman broke with his
Hammer; and according to the Bigness of their Sculls, we laid the
Jaws to them, and drew the other Half of the Linen above them, and
stufft the Coffin with Shavings. Some prest hard to go thorow the
chief Parts of the City as was done at the Revolution; but this we
refused, considering that it looked airy and frothy, to make such
Show of them, and inconsistent with the solid serious Observing of
such an affecting, surprizing unheard-of Dispensation: But took the
ordinary Way of other Burials from that Place, to wit, we went east
the Back of the Wall, and in at _Bristo-Port_, and down the Way to
the Head of the _Cowgate_, and turned up to the Church-yard, where
they were interred closs to the Martyrs Tomb, with the greatest
Multitude of People Old and Young, Men and Women, Ministers and
others, that ever I saw together.’
And so there they were at last, in ‘their resting graves.’ So long as
men do their duty, even if it be greatly in a misapprehension, they will
be leading pattern lives; and whether or not they come to lie beside a
martyrs’ monument, we may be sure they will find a safe haven somewhere
in the providence of God. It is not well to think of death, unless we
temper the thought with that of heroes who despised it. Upon what
ground, is of small account; if it be only the bishop who was burned for
his faith in the antipodes, his memory lightens the heart and makes us
walk undisturbed among graves. And so the martyrs’ monument is a
wholesome, heartsome spot in the field of the dead; and as we look upon
it, a brave influence comes to us from the land of those who have won
their discharge and, in another phrase of Patrick Walker’s, got ‘cleanly
off the stage.’