SIGNING OF THE COVENANT—HENDERSON’S MONUMENT—BOTHWELL BRIDGE
PRISONERS—A ROMANCE.
[Illustration]
[Illustration: Henderson’s Monument, Greyfriars.]
This old cemetery—the burial-place of Buchanan,[230] George Jameson
the painter, Principal Robertson, Dr Blair, Allan Ramsay, Henry
Mackenzie, and many other men of note—whose walls are a circle of
aristocratic sepulchres, will ever be memorable as the scene of the
Signing of the Covenant; the document having first been produced in the
church, after a sermon by Alexander Henderson, and signed by all the
congregation, from the Earl of Sutherland downward, after which it was
handed out to the multitudes assembled in the kirkyard, and signed on
the flat monuments, amidst tears, prayers, and aspirations which could
find no words; some writing with their blood! Near by, resting well
from all these struggles, lies the preacher under a square obelisk-like
monument; near also rests, in equal peace, the Covenant’s enemy, Sir
George Mackenzie. The inscriptions on Henderson’s stone were ordered
by Parliament to be erased at the Restoration; and small depressions
are pointed out in it as having been inflicted by bullets from the
soldiery when executing this order. With the ’88 came a new order of
things, and the inscriptions were then quietly reinstated.
[Illustration: GREYFRIARS’ CHURCHYARD.