EDINBURGH IN 1792.
The house from which I had just issued stood nearly opposite to the
old Tolbooth, or Heart of Midlothian, which was built almost in the
centre of the High Street, and in the lower story thereof were
nightly lodged a lieutenant with a party of the ancient city guard.
The cries of Macfarisee readily reached the sentinel at the door, and
he turned out the watch. Armed with fixed bayonets and Lochaber
axes, they issued forth in pursuit; but I fled before them like an
arrow and darted down the Lord President's Stairs, which, I knew
communicated with the Fishmarket Close, and the entrance to which was
in a great tenement on the eastern side of the Parliament-square--all
since removed and numbered with the things that were. I plunged
breathlessly down the steep Close, cries of "The guard! the guard! to
the Tolbooth with him," following me, for these shouts, though
uttered heedlessly by those I passed, were additional incentives to
flight; and panting with rage and fear, I sped on, while I could hear
the guardsmen swearing in Gaelic behind me. I could also hear the
clank of their terrible Lochaber axes, which were furnished with
sharp hooks, wherewith to catch fugitives, or to drag the refractory,
and I could see the dim glimmer of their large horn lanterns, as I
crossed the narrow Cowgate and rushed up the steep College Wynd
towards a gate in the town wall known as the Potter How Porte. Here
stood a sentinel, who put his axe before me and demanded sixpence for
allowing me to pass. I pretended to search my pockets, wherein I had
not a stiver; and while thus throwing him off his guard, darted
through the barrier, and, with a shout of triumph, rushed into the
darkness beyond. My first impulse was to run into the country, and
take refuge in the village where my mother's cottage stood; but a
fear lest Macfarisee might send the guards there first, deterred me;
and hastening to the Meadows, which lie southward of the city, and
were then, as now, a lonely and sequestered place, rendered
unwholesome by swamps, being the bed of an ancient lake, and
dangerous as the haunt of armed footpads, robbers, and outcasts. I
had nothing to lose but my liberty, and they were not likely to
deprive me of that.
In those meadows are a few stone seats placed at intervals under the
trees. On one of these I seated myself, and began to reflect on the
situation of my affairs. Though moonless, the sky was clear, and the
night was warm and pleasant. The intense solitude of the place
contrasted with the recent fiery turmoil of my own thoughts. I felt
for a time all the visionary independence of youth: I had left, as it
were, all my fetters behind me; but there were my mother, little
Lotty, and Amy Lee! How sore, and sad, and bitter, the thoughts of
them made my aching heart! The bloody gash on the head of Quirky,
and the malevolent smile of Macfarisee, seemed to haunt me amid the
darkness, and vague fears came over me.
I thought of how gladly I would work hard, even for a pittance, if
well treated; I thought of my own friendlessness, and of all I had
endured at the hands of these sanctimonious knaves--these legal
parvenus--but my fury had passed away, and I felt it would have been
a relief to my soul, could I have wept bitterly.
The low-muttered voices of a number of men approaching now fell upon
my ear. I thought immediately of the guard, and seeking a more
sequestered place, climbed up a beech tree, amid the thick foliage of
which I deemed myself perfectly secure. I had not been perched there
three minutes, when, to my terror, I heard voices on all sides of me,
and beheld numbers of men coming straight towards the place of my
concealment. There was a tingling sensation in my ears, and my
breath came thick and fast; while, as if they had sprung from the
swampy turf, in an incredibly short space of time, the beech tree was
environed by a mob of more than a thousand men, many of whom were
armed, as I could perceive swords, pikes, and muskets among them. A
torch was now lighted, and its wavering gleam fell redly on their
faces--the grim and dirty faces of an excited and unwashed
multitude--as, amid cries of "Robert Watt--Robert Watt--hurrah!" they
were all turned to one point, where an orator or leader, who was
elevated on the shoulders of four men, proceeded to harangue them in
a subdued but determined tone of voice.
He was a pale, sallow-visaged and sad-eyed young man, who in no way
suggested the idea of a patriot or hero.
My anxiety now increased to agony, when I found myself compelled to
act the spy upon a band of these desperate men, who, at that period,
styled themselves the "Friends of the People"--a small but desperate
section, who were instigated to revolt against all monarchical
government, and who had corresponding societies in all parts of Great
Britain--men whose avowed object was to reform a very defective
parliamentary representation, while, ultimately, they aimed at the
seizure of the Castle of Edinburgh, the plunder of the banks and
government offices, and the capture, if not the murder, of all the
senators of the College of Justice, and other heads of departments,
civil, military, and religious.
If discovered by these worthies on my perch in the tree, I had little
doubt they would have shot me like a sparrow, and perhaps buried me
on the ground where they stood to silence my tongue for ever. I
scarcely dared to breathe. I thought of my mother, and imagined her
sensations, if I were found there murdered, or if I disappeared for
ever, like a bubble on a stream, and, like many other honest persons,
was moved to tears, by the prospect of my own untimely demise.
Meanwhile the mass below me swayed to and fro; the torches continued
to sputter and gleam, and the orator to spout treason, fire and sword
against all crowned heads, especially "the old tyrant who dwelt in
the castle of Windsor;" liberty, equality, fraternity--the rights of
men--oppression, chains and slavery--kings and tyrants, were the
staple subjects of his inflammatory discourse, until he mentioned the
slave trade and borough reform, in connection with the name of Henry
Dundas, the city member, when a yell of hatred broke from the
multitude, with cries of,--
"To the lamp-post with him!"
"Up with the barricades!"
"Down with the three estates--kings, lords, and clergy!"
Then this strange band, after giving three cheers for Tom Paine and
Robert Watt, passed a unanimous resolution to burn the Tory M.P. in
effigy on the next day, the 4th of June, the anniversary of George
the Third's birth. They uprooted some hundred yards of paling for
staves to arm them with; the torch was extinguished; the orator
descended from his perch; in a few minutes they had all disappeared,
and the wooded parks became voiceless and silent as before.
This leader was that unfortunate Robert Watt, who, on the 15th of the
succeeding October (for the very same opinions which he there
expressed so freely) was drawn on a low hurdle, heavily chained, to
the Castle Hill of Edinburgh, and had his head struck from his body
by three blows of an axe, pursuant to a sentence passed on him by the
Lord Justice General of Scotland.
I drew a long breath when they separated, deeming that I had narrowly
escaped a sudden death. Still I was afraid to leave my retreat
altogether; so descending from the beech, I sought a place where the
grass was soft and dry at the root of an old oak tree, and lay down
to think over my situation, and the truths I had heard--for much that
was solemn, and stern truth had fallen from the lips of Robert Watt.
I had ample food for reflection, but amid it I fell into a sound and
heavy sleep.
In the year of which I write--to wit, 1792--the Scottish capital had
made but little progress (as we now understand that great and
comprehensive word) since the commencement of the century, save in
noisy professions of religion, and an external air of sanctity to
cloak hypocrisy and vice.
Though a new town on the north, and another on the south, were rising
into existence, the mass of the citizens dwelt yet within the steep,
narrow closes and wynds of the ancient city, from which many made
vows they would never remove. The streets were without sewerage, and
dimly lighted by a few oil-lamps, which were placed on wooden posts
at long intervals. People dined at two o'clock, and were all a-bed
by eleven. The High Street alone was well watched. There, the city
guard, a body of three hundred old soldiers, who wore the
square-skirted red coats and cocked hats of Queen Anne's time, and
were armed with the long muskets and bayonets, and the Lochaber axes
used by Scottish regiments in her wars, were the custodiers of the
public safety. Being all Highlanders, they spoke no language save
the Celtic, and were alternately the jest and the terror of the
people. Women were still flogged at a cart's-tail, or drummed
through the streets for petty offences, and poor debtors begged for
alms at the door of St. Giles', as they had done in the days of the
Jameses.
Though the capital was little changed in its _external_ aspect, the
hearty old Scottish spirit was dead, or dying fast; and so
narrow-minded were the people, that a few years before, a clergyman
had to strip off his gown and turn soldier, for having penned a
tragedy, which now ranks as one of the British Classics. I allude to
Home, the author of "Douglas." Any one who entered a theatre,
especially on a Saturday; or read a novel, especially on a Sunday; or
who, on that grim Scottish day of silence or psalmsinging, ventured
to whistle or hum an air, received public censure; for now it seemed
as if fasting and preaching, hypocrisy and craft, were all to
flourish together, each bearing a due proportion to the progress of
the other. Thus choked amid such evil weeds, nothing truly good, or
great, or pure, can thrive or be attempted, without exciting the envy
of some, or the contumely of others; for many men are there, who
would oppose even the redemption of mankind, if to do so suited the
advancement of their vulgarly-sectarian, selfishly-political, or
personal interests--and so, as Macfarisee would say, "the wicked
flourished like the green bay tree." So still the tide rolls
on--religion becoming a surly burlesque--society a system of
miserable cliques, and the nation itself a provincial tradition.
In 1792 the ideas of the people were so contracted and thoroughly
local, that the appearance of a strange carriage in the streets put
all Edinburgh a-tiptoe for three days to discover its owner--and so
low had the old military spirit sunk, that the appearance of the
pirate Paul Jones in the river, in 1779, threw eighty thousand
citizens into a paroxysm of terror.
Few persons left, and fewer still visited, Edinburgh in those days.
Any one departing thence for London--perhaps the great and only event
of a long stupid and monotonous life--cautiously settled his worldly
affairs by will, was duly prayed for in "the kirk"--took solemn leave
of his weeping relations, and was escorted by all his friends to the
eastern gate of the town; and all were there again to receive and
conduct him with acclamations to his home in some dingy close of the
middle ages, when he returned three months after, by the well-armed
stage-coach, "General Wolfe" or the letter-of-marque smack, "The
Lovely Jenny," carrying four 6-pounders--and brimful of hair-breadth
escapes from footpads and masked highwaymen, to be related, amid due
libations of reeking whiskey toddy, to a gaping circle of provincials.
By the spread of education among the lower, and the almost general
flight of the upper classes, the old order of society became
inverted. Dukes and earls no longer lived in the Canongate; nor
lords, nor lairds, nor aristocratic grandmothers, who remembered "the
bonnie prince" dancing in Holyrood, or the cannon that boomed for his
downfall at Culloden; nothing now remained to Scotland, but the dregs
and lees of her once warlike and kingly post--the sour kirk and the
subtle law.
So matters had been going on for years, and all had been quiet in the
Scottish capital since the terrible Porteous mob of 1735, and the
irruption of the Clans ten years later, until this year, 1792, when
the political convulsions in France began to affect their
well-wishers in Scotland, a country so long neglected by a foreign
race of kings and an alien peerage, as to have lost all sympathy for
either; thus the sentiments of republicanism spread like a contagion
among certain classes, who began to arm them in secret--to form
clubs, on the principle of those over which Marat and others presided
in Paris, and to designate themselves, "The Friends of the People."