The principal entrance to the Tolbooth, and the only one used in
later days, was at the bottom of the turret next the church. The
gateway was of tolerably good carved stone-work, and occupied by a
door of ponderous massiness and strength, having, besides the lock, a
flap-padlock, which, however, was generally kept unlocked during the
day. In front of the door there always paraded, or rather loitered, a
private of the town-guard, with his rusty red clothes and Lochaber axe
or musket. The door adjacent to the principal gateway was, in the final
days of the Tolbooth, ‘MICHAEL KETTEN’S SHOE-SHOP,’ but had formerly
been a _thief’s hole_. The next door to that, stepping westward, was
the residence of the turnkey; a dismal, unlighted den, where the gray
old man was always to be found, when not engaged in unlocking or
closing the door. The next door westward was a lock-up house, which
in later times was never used. On the north side, towards the street,
there had once been shops, which were let by the magistrates; but
these were converted, about the year 1787, into a guard-house for the
city-guard, on their ancient capitol in the High Street being destroyed
for the levelling of the streets. The ground-floor, thus occupied
for purposes in general remote from the character of the building,
was divided lengthwise by a strong partition wall; and communication
between the rooms above and these apartments below was effectually
interdicted by the strong arches upon which the superstructure was
reared.
On passing the outer door—where the rioters of 1736 thundered with
their sledge-hammers, and finally burnt down all that interposed
between them and their prey—the keeper instantly involved the entrant
in darkness by reclosing the gloomy portal. A flight of about twenty
steps then led to an inner door, which, being duly knocked at, was
opened by a bottle-nosed personage, denominated Peter, who, like his
sainted namesake, always carried two or three large keys. You then
entered _the Hall_, which, being free to all the prisoners except those
of the _East End_, was usually filled with a crowd of shabby-looking
but very merry loungers. A small rail here served as an additional
security, no prisoner being permitted to come within its pale. Here
also a sentinel of the city-guard was always walking, having a bayonet
or ramrod in his hand. The _Hall_, being also the chapel of the jail,
contained an old pulpit of singular fashion—such a pulpit as one
could imagine John Knox to have preached from; which, indeed, he was
traditionally said to have actually done. At the right-hand side of
the pulpit was a door leading up the large turnpike to the apartments
occupied by the criminals, one of which was of plate-iron. The door
was always shut, except when food was taken up to the prisoners. On
the west end of the hall hung a board, on which were inscribed the
following emphatic lines:
‘A prison is a house of care,
A place where none can thrive,
A touchstone true to try a friend,
A grave for men alive—
Sometimes a place of right,
Sometimes a place of wrong,
Sometimes a place for jades and thieves,
And honest men among.’[62]
Apart of the hall on the north side was partitioned off into two
small rooms, one of which was the captain’s pantry, the other his
counting-room. In the latter hung an old musket or two, a pair of
obsolete bandoleers, and a sheath of a bayonet, intended, as one might
suppose, for his defence against a mutiny of the prisoners. Including
the space thus occupied, the hall was altogether twenty-seven feet
long by about twenty broad. The height of the room was twelve feet.
Close to the door, and within the rail, was a large window, thickly
stanchioned; and at the other end of the hall, within the captain’s
two rooms, was a double window of a somewhat extraordinary character.
Tradition, supported by the appearance of the place, pointed out this
as having formerly been a door by which royalty entered the hall in the
days when it was the Parliament House. It is said that a kind of bridge
was thrown between this aperture and a house on the other side of the
street, and that the sovereign, having prepared himself in that house
to enter the hall in his state robes, proceeded at the proper time
along the arch—an arrangement by no means improbable in those days of
straitened accommodation.
The window on the south side of the hall overlooked the outer gateway.
It was therefore employed by the inner turnkey as a channel of
communication with his exterior brother when any visitor was going
out. He used to cry over this window, in the tone of a military order
upon parade: ‘_Turn your hand_,’ whereupon the gray-haired man on the
pavement below opened the door and permitted the visitor, who by this
time had descended the stair, to walk out.
The floor immediately above the hall was occupied by one room for
felons, having a bar along part of the floor, to which condemned
criminals were chained, and a square box of plate-iron in the centre,
called THE CAGE, which was said to have been constructed for the
purpose of confining some extraordinary culprit who had broken half the
jails in the kingdom. Above this room was another of the same size,
also appropriated to felons.
The larger and western part of the edifice, of coarser and apparently
more modern construction, contained four floors, all of which were
appropriated to the use of debtors, except a part of the lowest one,
where a middle-aged woman kept a tavern for the sale of malt liquors.
A turnpike stair gave access to the different floors. As it was
narrow, steep, and dark, the visitor was assisted in his ascent by a
greasy rope, which, some one was sure to inform him afterwards, had
been employed in hanging a criminal. In one of the apartments on the
second floor was a door leading out to the platform whereon criminals
were executed, and in another, on the floor above, was an ill-plastered
part of the wall covering the aperture through which the gallows was
projected. The fourth flat was a kind of barrack, for the use of the
poorest debtors.
There was something about the Old Tolbooth which would have enabled
a blindfolded person led into it to say that it was a jail. It was
not merely odorous from the ordinary causes of imperfect drainage,
but it had poverty’s own smell—the odour of human misery. And yet it
did not seem at first a downcast scene. The promenaders in the hall
were sometimes rather merry, cutting jokes perhaps upon Peter’s nose,
or chatting with friends on the benches regarding the news of the
day. Then Mrs Laing drove a good trade in her little tavern; and if
any messenger were sent out for a bottle of whisky—why, Peter never
searched pockets. New men were hailed with:
‘Welcome, welcome, brother debtor,
To this poor but merry place;
Here nor bailiff, dun, nor fetter,
Dare to show his gloomy face.’
They would be abashed at first, and the first visit of wife or
daughter, coming shawled and veiled, and with timorous glances, into
the room where the loved object was trying to become at ease with his
companions, was always a touching affair. But it was surprising how
soon, in general, all became familiar, easy, and even to appearance
happy. Each had his story to tell, and sympathy was certain and
liberal. The whole management was of a good-natured kind, as far as a
regard to regulations would allow. It did not seem at all an impossible
thing that a debtor should accommodate some even more desolate friend
with a share of his lodging for the night, or for many nights, as is
said to have been done in some noted instances, to which we shall
presently come.
It was natural for a jail of such old standing to have passed through a
great number of odd adventures, and have many strange tales connected
with it. One of the most remarkable traits of its character was a sad
liability to the failure of its ordinary powers of retention when men
of figure were in question. The old house had something like that
faculty attributed by Falstaff to the lion and himself—of knowing
men who ought not to be too roughly handled. The consequence was
that almost every criminal of rank confined in it made his escape.
Lord Burleigh, an insane peer, who, about the time of the Union,
assassinated a schoolmaster who had married a girl to whom he had paid
improper addresses, escaped, while under sentence of death, by changing
clothes with his sister. Several of the rebel gentlemen confined there
in 1716 were equally fortunate; a fact on which there was lately thrown
a flood of light, when I found, in a manuscript list of subscriptions
for the relief of the other rebel gentlemen at Carlisle, the name of
the Guidman of the Tolbooth—so the chief-keeper was called—down for a
good sum. I am uncertain to which of all these personages the following
anecdote, related to me by Sir Walter Scott, refers.
It was contrived that the prisoner should be conveyed out of the
Tolbooth in a trunk, and carried by a porter to Leith, where some
sailors were to be ready with a boat to take him aboard a vessel about
to leave Scotland. The plot succeeded so far as the escape from jail
was concerned, but was knocked on the head by an unlucky and most
ridiculous accident. It so happened that the porter, in arranging the
trunk upon his back, placed the end which corresponded with the feet of
the prisoner _uppermost_. The head of the unfortunate man was therefore
pressed against the lower end of the box, and had to sustain the weight
of the whole body. The posture was the most uneasy imaginable. Yet life
was preferable to ease. He permitted himself to be taken away. The
porter trudged along with the trunk, quite unconscious of its contents,
and soon reached the High Street. On gaining the Netherbow he met an
acquaintance, who asked him where he was going with that large burden.
To Leith, was the answer. The other inquired if the job was good enough
to afford a potation before proceeding farther upon so long a journey.
This being replied to in the affirmative, and the carrier of the box
feeling in his throat the philosophy of his friend’s inquiry, it was
agreed that they should adjourn to a neighbouring tavern. Meanwhile,
the third party, whose inclinations had not been consulted in this
arrangement, was wishing that it were at once well over with him in the
Grassmarket. But his agonies were not destined to be of long duration.
The porter in depositing him upon the causeway happened to make the
end of the trunk come down with such precipitation that, unable to
bear it any longer, the prisoner screamed out, and immediately after
fainted. The consternation of the porter on hearing a noise from his
burden was of course excessive; but he soon recovered presence of mind
enough to conceive the occasion. He proceeded to unloose and to burst
open the trunk, when the hapless nobleman was discovered in a state of
insensibility. As a crowd collected immediately, and the city-guard
were not long in coming forward, there was of course no further chance
of escape. The prisoner did not recover from his swoon till he had been
safely deposited in his old quarters; but, if I recollect rightly, he
eventually escaped in another way.
In two very extraordinary instances an escape from justice has, strange
as it may appear, been effected by _means_ of the Old Tolbooth. At
the discovery of the Rye-House Plot, in the reign of Charles II., the
notorious Robert Fergusson, usually styled ‘The Plotter,’ was searched
for in Edinburgh, with a view to his being subjected, if possible,
to the extreme vengeance of the law. It being known almost certainly
that he was in town, the authorities shut the gates, and calculated
securely upon having him safe within their toils. The Plotter, however,
by an expedient worthy of his ingenious character, escaped by taking
refuge in the Old Tolbooth. A friend of his happened to be confined
there at the time, and was able to afford protection and concealment to
Fergusson, who, at his leisure, came abroad, and betook himself to a
place of safer shelter on the Continent. The same device was practised
in 1746 by a gentleman who had been concerned in the Rebellion, and for
whom a hot search had been carried on in the Highlands.
The case of Katherine Nairne, in 1766, excited in no small degree the
attention of the Scottish public. This lady was allied, both by blood
and marriage, to some respectable families. Her crime was the double
one of poisoning her husband and having an intrigue with his brother,
who was her associate in the murder. On her arrival at Leith in an open
boat, her whole bearing betrayed so much levity, or was so different
from what had been expected, that the mob raised a cry of indignation,
and were on the point of pelting her, when she was with some difficulty
rescued from their hands by the public authorities. In this case the
Old Tolbooth found itself, as usual, incapable of retaining a culprit
of condition. Sentence had been delayed by the judges on account
of the lady’s pregnancy. The midwife employed at her accouchement
(who continued to practise in Edinburgh so lately as the year 1805)
had the address to achieve a jail-delivery also. For three or four
days previous to that concerted for the escape, she pretended to be
afflicted with a prodigious toothache, went out and in with her head
enveloped in shawls and flannels, and groaned as if she had been about
to give up the ghost. At length, when the Peter of that day had become
so habituated to her appearance as not very much to heed her exits and
her entrances, Katherine Nairne one evening came down in her stead,
with her head wrapped all round with the shawls, uttering the usual
groans, and holding down her face upon her hands, as with agony, in the
precise way customary with the midwife. The inner doorkeeper, not quite
unconscious, it is supposed, of the trick, gave her a hearty thump upon
the back as she passed out, calling her at the same time a howling
old Jezebel, and wishing she would never come back to trouble him any
more. There are two reports of the proceedings of Katherine Nairne
after leaving the prison. One bears that she immediately left the town
in a coach, to which she was handed by a friend stationed on purpose.
The coachman, it is said, had orders from her relations, in the event
of a pursuit, to drive into the sea, that she might drown herself—a
fate which was considered preferable to the ignominy of a public
execution. The other story runs that she went up the Lawnmarket to the
Castle-hill, where lived Mr ——, a respectable advocate, from whom, as
he was her cousin, she expected to receive protection. Being ignorant
of the town, she mistook the proper house, and applied at that of the
crown agent,[63] who was assuredly the last man in the world that could
have done her any service. As good luck would have it, she was not
recognised by the servant, who civilly directed her to her cousin’s
house, where, it is said, she remained concealed many weeks.[64] Her
future life, it has been reported, was virtuous and fortunate. She was
married to a French gentleman, became the mother of a large family, and
died at a good old age. Meanwhile, Patrick Ogilvie, her associate in
the dark crime which threw a shade over her younger years, suffered in
the Grassmarket. He had been a lieutenant in the —— regiment, and was
so much beloved by his fellow-soldiers, who happened to be stationed at
that time in Edinburgh Castle, that the public authorities judged it
necessary to shut them up in a fortress till the execution was over
lest they might have attempted a rescue.
The Old Tolbooth was the scene of the suicide of Mungo Campbell while
under sentence of death (1770) for shooting the Earl of Eglintoune.
In the district where this memorable event took place, it is somewhat
remarkable that the fate of the murderer was more generally lamented
than that of the murdered person. Campbell, though what was called ‘a
graceless man,’ was rather popular in his profession of exciseman, on
account of his rough, honourable spirit, and his lenity in the matter
of smuggling. Lord Eglintoune, on the contrary, was not liked, on
account of his improving mania, which had proved a serious grievance
to the old-fashioned farmers of Kyle and Cunningham. There was one
article, called rye-grass, which he brought in amongst them, and
forced them to cultivate; and black prelacy itself had hardly, a
century before, been a greater evil. Then, merely to stir them up a
little, he would cause them to exchange farms with each other; thus
giving their ancient plenishings, what was doubtless much wanted, an
airing, but also creating a strong sense that Lord Eglintoune was
‘far ower fashious.’ His lordship had excited some scandal by his
private habits, which helped in no small degree to render unpopular
one who was in reality an amiable and upright gentleman. He was
likewise somewhat tenacious about matters respecting game—the
besetting weakness of British gentlemen in all ages. On the other
hand, Campbell, though an austere and unsocial man, acted according to
popular ideas both in respect of the game and excise laws. The people
felt that he was on their side; they esteemed him for his integrity
in the common affairs of life, and even in some degree for his birth
and connections, which were far from mean. It was also universally
believed, though erroneously, that he had only discharged his gun by
accident, on falling backward, while retreating before his lordship,
who had determined to take it from him. In reality, Mungo, after his
fall, rose on his elbow and wilfully shot the poor earl, who had given
him additional provocation by bursting into a laugh at his awkward
fall. The Old Tolbooth was supposed by many, at the time, to have had
her usual failing in Mungo’s case. The interest of the Argyll family
was said to have been employed in his favour; and the body which was
found suspended over the door, instead of being his, was thought to
be that of a dead soldier from the Castle substituted in his place.
His relations, however, who were very respectable people in Ayrshire,
all acknowledged that he died by his own hand; and this was the
general idea of the mob of Edinburgh, who, getting the body into their
hands, dragged it down the street to the King’s Park, and, inspired
by different sentiments from those of the Ayrshire people, were not
satisfied till they got it up to the top of Salisbury Crags, from which
they precipitated it down the _Cat Nick_.
[Illustration: Deacon Brodie’s Keys and Dark-Lantern.]
One of the most remarkable criminals ever confined in the Old
Tolbooth was the noted William Brodie. This was a man of respectable
connections, and who had moved in good society all his life,
unsuspected of any criminal pursuits. It is said that a habit of
frequenting cock-pits was the first symptom he exhibited of a decline
from rectitude. His ingenuity as a mechanic gave him a fatal facility
in the burglarious pursuits to which he afterwards addicted himself. It
was then customary for the shopkeepers of Edinburgh to hang their keys
upon a nail at the back of their doors, or at least to take no pains
in concealing them during the day. Brodie used to take impressions of
them in putty or clay, a piece of which he would carry in the palm of
his hand. He kept a blacksmith in his pay, who forged exact copies of
the keys he wanted, and with these it was his custom to open the shops
of his fellow-tradesmen during the night. He thus found opportunities
of securely stealing whatever he wished to possess. He carried on his
malpractices for many years, and never was suspected till, having
committed a daring robbery upon the Excise Office in Chessels’s
Court, Canongate, some circumstances transpired which induced him
to disappear from Edinburgh. Suspicion then becoming strong, he was
pursued to Holland, and taken at Amsterdam, standing upright in a
press or cupboard. At his trial, Henry Erskine, his counsel, spoke
very eloquently in his behalf, representing, in particular, to the
jury how strange and improbable a circumstance it was that a man whom
they had themselves known from infancy as a person of good repute
should have been guilty of such practices as those with which he was
charged. He was, however, found guilty, and sentenced to death, along
with his accomplice Smith. At the trial he had appeared in a full-dress
suit of black clothes, the greater part of which was of silk, and his
deportment throughout the affair was composed and gentlemanlike. He
continued during the period which intervened between his sentence and
execution to dress well and keep up his spirits. A gentleman of his
acquaintance, calling upon him in the condemned room, was surprised
to find him singing the song from the _Beggars’ Opera_, ‘’Tis woman
seduces all mankind.’ Having contrived to cut out the figure of a
draughtboard on the stone floor of his dungeon, he amused himself by
playing with any one who would join him, and, in default of such,
with his right hand against his left. This diagram remained in the
room where it was so strangely out of place till the destruction of
the jail. His dress and deportment at the gallows (October 1, 1788)
displayed a mind at ease, and gave some countenance to the popular
notion that he had made certain mechanical arrangements for saving his
life. Brodie was the first who proved the excellence of an improvement
he had formerly made on the apparatus of the gibbet. This was the
substitution of what is called the _drop_ for the ancient practice
of the double ladder. He inspected the thing with a professional
air, and seemed to view the result of his ingenuity with a smile of
satisfaction. When placed on that insecure pedestal, and while the rope
was adjusted round his neck by the executioner, his courage did not
forsake him. On the contrary, even there he exhibited a sort of levity;
he shuffled about, looked gaily around, and finally went out of the
world with his hand stuck carelessly into the open front of his vest.
[Illustration: Brodie’s Close.]
As its infirmities increased with old age, the Tolbooth showed itself
incapable of retaining prisoners of even ordinary rank. Within the
recollection of people living not long ago, a youth named Hay, the son
of a stabler in the Grassmarket, and who was under sentence of death
for burglary, effected his escape in a way highly characteristic of the
Heart of Mid-Lothian, and of the simple and unprecise system upon which
all public affairs were managed before the present age.
A few days before that appointed for the execution, the father went
up to the condemned room, apparently to condole with his unhappy son.
The irons had been previously got quit of by files. At nightfall, when
most visitors had left the jail, old Hay invited the inner turnkey, or
man who kept the hall-door, to come into the room and partake of some
liquor which he had brought with him. The man took a few glasses, and
became mellow just about the time when the bottle was exhausted and
when the time of locking up the jail (ten o’clock at that period) was
approaching. Hay expressed unwillingness to part at the moment when
they were just beginning to enjoy their liquor; a sentiment in which
the turnkey heartily sympathised. Hay took a crown from his pocket,
and proposed that his friend should go out and purchase a bottle of
good rum at a neighbouring shop. The man consented, and staggering away
downstairs, neglected to lock the inner door behind him. Young Hay
followed close, as had been concerted, and after the man had gone out,
and the outer turnkey had closed the outer door, stood in the stair
just within that dread portal, ready to spring into the street. Old Hay
then put his head to the great window of the hall, and cried: ‘Turn
your hand!’—the usual drawling cry which brought the outer turnkey to
open the door. The turnkey came mechanically at the cry, and unclosed
the outer door, when the young criminal sprang out, and ran as fast as
he could down Beth’s Wynd, a lane opposite the jail. According to the
plan which had been previously concerted, he repaired to a particular
part of the wall of the Greyfriars Churchyard, near the lower gate,
where it was possible for an agile person to climb up and spring over;
and so well had every stage of the business been planned that a large
stone had been thrown down at this place to facilitate the leap.
The youth had been provided with a key which could open Sir George
Mackenzie’s mausoleum—a place of peculiar horror, as it was supposed
to be haunted by the spirit of the bloody persecutor; but what will
not be submitted to for dear life? Having been brought up in Heriot’s
Hospital, in the immediate neighbourhood of the churchyard, Hay had
many boyish acquaintances still residing in that establishment. Some
of these he contrived to inform of his situation, enjoining them to
be secret, and beseeching them to assist him in his distress. The
Herioters of those days had a very clannish spirit—insomuch that
to have neglected the interests or safety of any individual of the
community, however unworthy he might be of their friendship, would
have been looked upon by them as a sin of the deepest dye. Hay’s
confidants, therefore, considered themselves bound to assist him by
all means in their power. They kept his secret faithfully, spared from
their own meals as much food as supported him, and ran the risk of
severe punishment, as well as of seeing eldritch sights, by visiting
him every night in his dismal abode. About six weeks after his escape
from jail, when the hue and cry had in a great measure subsided, he
ventured to leave the tomb, and it was afterwards known that he escaped
abroad.
[Illustration: Sir George Mackenzie’s Mausoleum.]
So ends our gossip respecting a building which has witnessed and
contained the meetings of the Scottish parliament in the romantic days
of the Jameses—which held the first fixed court of law established
in the country—which was looked to by the citizens in a rude age as
a fortified place for defence against external danger to their lives
and goods—which has immured in its gloomy walls persons of all kinds
liable to law, from the gallant Montrose and the faithful Guthrie
and Argyll down to the humblest malefactor in the modern style of
crime—and which, finally, has been embalmed in the imperishable pages
of the greatest writer of fiction our country has produced.