The head of the Old Bank Close was the scene of the assassination of
President Lockhart by Chiesly of Dalry,[56] March 1689. The murderer
had no provocation besides a simple judicial act of the president,
assigning an aliment or income of £93 out of his estate to his wife
and children, from whom it may be presumed he had been separated. He
evidently was a man abandoned to the most violent passions—perhaps
not quite sane. In London, half a year before the deed, he told Mr
Stuart, an advocate, that he was resolved to go to Scotland before
Candlemas and kill the president; when, on Stuart remarking that the
very imagination of such a thing was a sin before God, he replied: ‘Let
God and me alone; we have many things to reckon betwixt us, and we will
reckon this too.’ The judge was informed of the menaces of Chiesly, but
despised them.
On a Sunday afternoon, the last day of March—the town being then
under the excitement of the siege of the Castle by the friends of the
new government—Lockhart was walking home from church to his house in
this alley, when Chiesly came behind, just as he entered the close,
and shot him in the back with a pistol. A Dr Hay, coming to visit the
president’s lady, saw his lordship stagger and fall. The ball had gone
through the body, and out at the right breast. He was taken into his
house, laid down upon two chairs, and almost immediately was a dead
man. Some gentlemen passing seized the murderer, who readily owned he
had done the deed, which he said was ‘to learn the president to do
justice.’ When immediately after informed that his victim had expired,
he said ‘he was not used to do things by halves.’ He boasted of the
deed as if it had been some grand exploit.
After torture had been inflicted, to discover if he had any
accomplices, the wretched man was tried by the magistrates of
Edinburgh, and sentenced to be carried on a hurdle to the Cross,[57]
and there hanged, with the fatal pistol hung from his neck, after which
his body was to be suspended in chains at the Gallow Lee, and his right
hand affixed to the West Port. The body was stolen from the gallows, as
was supposed, by his friends, and it was never known what had become
of it till more than a century after, when, in removing the hearthstone
of a cottage in Dalry Park, near Edinburgh, a human skeleton was found,
with the remains of a pistol near the situation of the neck. No doubt
was entertained that these were the remains of Chiesly, huddled into
this place for concealment, probably in the course of the night in
which they had been abstracted from the gallows.