[47] Lady Stair’s Close was originally a _cul de sac_. When the Mound
was begun a thoroughfare was cut through the garden, making the
close the principal communication between the Lawnmarket and Hanover
Street, then the western extremity of the New Town. The name it first
bore was ‘Lady Gray’s Close,’ after the wife of the builder of the
house, and that of Lady Stair’s Close was given to it (_The Book of
the Old Edinburgh Club_, vol. iii.) early in the eighteenth century,
when the house passed into the possession of the first Lady Stair, a
granddaughter of Sir William Gray of Pittendrum. Lord Rosebery, who
represents a branch of the Primroses (other than that to which the
second viscount, mentioned below, belonged), restored the house and
presented it to the city in 1907.
[48] ‘Grace, Countess of Aboyne and Moray, in her early youth, had
the weakness to consult a celebrated fortune-teller, inhabiting an
obscure close in Edinburgh. The sibyl predicted that she would become
the wife of two earls, and how many children she was to bear; but
withal assured her that when she should see a new coach of a certain
colour driven up to her door as belonging to herself, her hearse must
speedily follow. Many years afterwards, Lord Moray, who was not aware
of this prediction, resolved to surprise his wife with the present of
a new equipage; but when Lady Moray beheld from a window a carriage of
the ominous colour arrive at the door of Darnaway, and heard that it
was to be her own property, she sank down, exclaiming that she was a
dead woman, and actually expired in a short time after, November 17,
1738.’—_Notes to Law’s Memorials_, p. xcii.
[49] Lady Primrose’s story forms the groundwork of one of Sir Walter
Scott’s best short stories, _My Aunt Margaret’s Mirror_.
[50] This story loses its point by the discovery made in St Peter’s
upon Cornhill, London, of the marriage register of the second Earl
of Stair with Lady Primrose, 27th March 1708. Thus they were married
persons several years before the presumed date of this story. Miss
Rosaline Masson announced the discovery in an article in _Chambers’s
Journal_ for 1912, entitled, ‘The Secret Marriage of Lady Primrose and
John, Second Earl of Stair.’ She makes this comment: ‘The testimony
of John Waugh, Parson, has lain buried for over two hundred years in
the old Register in the city; but the tale, whispered one day, some
time about the year 1714, in the High Street of Edinburgh, first
among the strutting gallants and loungers at the Cross at noon, and
later on, over the delicate tea-cups, in the gossipy gatherings of
the fair sex—that tale was nowise buried. It has never died. Did not
Kirkpatrick Sharpe repeat it, sixty years after Lady Stair’s death,
to young Robert Chambers, at that time collecting material for his
inimitable book, _Traditions of Edinburgh_?’ The article further tries
to answer the question why the Earl of Stair and the young widow made
this clandestine marriage, which gave opportunity for the story.
[51] Negroes in a servile capacity had been long before known in
Scotland. Dunbar has a droll poem on a female black, whom he calls
‘My lady with the muckle lips.’ In _Lady Marie Stuart’s Household
Book_, referring to the early part of the seventeenth century, there
is mention of ‘ane inventorie of the gudes and geir whilk pertenit to
Dame Lilias Ruthven, Lady Drummond,’ which includes as an item, ‘the
black boy and the papingoe [peacock];’ in so humble an association was
it then thought proper to place a human being who chanced to possess a
dark skin.