It was built in the year of the assassination of the Regent Moray,
and one is somewhat surprised to think that, at so dark a crisis of
our national history, a mansion of so costly a character should have
taken its rise. The owner, whatever grade he held, seems to have felt
an apprehension of the popular talk on the subject of his raising
so elegant a mansion; and he took a curious mode of deprecating its
expression. On a tablet over the ground-floor he inscribes: HODIE MIHI:
CRAS TIBI. CUR IGITUR CURAS? along with the year of the erection,
1570. This is as much as to say: ‘I am the happy man to-day; your turn
may come to-morrow. Why, then, should you repine?’ One can imagine
from a second tablet, a little way farther along the front, that as
the building proceeded, the storm of public remark and outcry had come
to be more and more bitter, so that the soul of the owner got stirred
up into a firm and defying anger. He exclaims (for, though a lettered
inscription, one feels it as an exclamation): UT TU LINGUÆ TUÆ, SIC
EGO MEAR. AURIUM, DOMINUS SUM (‘As thou of thy tongue, so I of my
ears, am lord’); thus quoting, in his rage on this petty occasion, an
expression said to have been used in the Roman senate by Titus Tacitus
when repelling the charges of Lucius Metellus.[245] Afterwards he
seems to have cooled into a religious view of the predicament, and in
a third legend along the front he tells the world: CONSTANTI PECTORI
RES MORTALIUM UMBRA; ending a little farther on with an emblem of the
Christian hope of the Resurrection, ears of wheat springing from a
handful of bones. It is a great pity that we should not know who was
the builder and owner of this house, since he has amused us so much
with the history of his feelings during the process of its erection. A
friend at my elbow suggests—a schoolmaster! But who ever heard of a
schoolmaster so handsomely remunerated by his profession as to be able
to build a house?
Nothing else is known of the early history of this house beyond the
fact of the Canongate magistrates granting a charter for it to the
Hammermen of that burgh, September 10, 1647.[246] It was, however,
in 1753 occupied by a person of no less distinction than the Dowager
Duchess of Gordon.[247]
In the alley passing under this mansion there is a goodly building of
more modern structure, forming two sides of a quadrangle, with a small
court in front divided from the lane by a wall in which there is a
large gateway. Amidst filthiness indescribable, one discerns traces of
former elegance: a crest over the doorway—namely, a cock mounted on
a trumpet, with the motto ‘VIGILANTIBUS,’ and the date 1633; over two
upper windows, the letters ‘S. A. A.’ and ‘D. M. H.’ These memorials,
with certain references in the charter before mentioned, leave no
room for doubt that this was the house of Sir Archibald Acheson of
Abercairny, Secretary of State for Scotland in the reign of Charles I.,
and ancestor to the Earl of Gosford in Ireland, who to this day bears
the same crest and motto. The letters are the initials of Sir Archibald
and his wife, Dame Margaret Hamilton. Here of course was the _court_
of Scotland for a certain time, the Secretary of State being the grand
dispenser of patronage in our country at that period—_here_, where
nothing but the extremest wretchedness is now to be seen! That boastful
bird, too, still seeming to assert the family dignity, two hundred
years after it ceased to have any connection with the spot! Verily
there are some moral preachments in these dark old closes if modern
refinement could go to hear the sermon!
[Illustration: Acheson House.]
Sir Archibald Acheson acquired extensive lands in Ireland,[248]
which have ever since been in the possession of his family. It was a
descendant of his, and of the same name, who had the gratification of
becoming the landlord of Swift at Market-hill, and whom the dean was
consequently led to celebrate in many of his poems. Swift seems to have
been on the most familiar terms with this worthy knight and his lady;
the latter he was accustomed to call _Skinnibonia_, _Lean_, or _Snipe_,
as the humour inclined him. The inimitable comic painting of her
ladyship’s maid Hannah, in the debate whether Hamilton’s Bawn should
be turned into a malt-house or a barrack, can never perish from our
literature. In like humour, the dean asserts the superiority of himself
and his brother-tenant Colonel Leslie, who had served much in Spain,
over the knight:
‘Proud baronet of Nova Scotia,
The dean and Spaniard much reproach ye.
Of their two fames the world enough rings;
Where are thy services and sufferings?
What if for nothing once you kissed,
Against the grain, a monarch’s fist?
What if among the courtly tribe,
You lost a place and saved a bribe?
And then in surly mood came here
To fifteen hundred pounds a year,
And fierce against the Whigs harangued?
You never ventured to be hanged.
How dare you treat your betters thus?
Are you to be compared to us?’
Speaking also of a celebrated thorn at Market-hill, which had long been
a resort of merry-making parties, he reverts to the Scottish Secretary
of former days:
‘Sir Archibald, that valorous knight,
The lord of all the fruitful plain,
Would come and listen with delight,
For he was fond of rural strain:
Sir Archibald, whose favourite name
Shall stand for ages on record,
By Scottish bards of highest fame,
Wise Hawthornden and Stirling’s lord.’
[Illustration]
The following letter to Sir Archibald from his friend Sir James
Balfour, Lord Lyon, occurs amongst the manuscript stores of the latter
gentleman in the Advocates’ Library:
‘To Sir ARCHIBALD ACHESONE,
one of the Secretaries of Staite.
‘WORTHY SIR—Your letters, full of Spartanical brevity to the
first view, bot, againe overlooked, Demosthenicall longe;
stuffed full of exaggerations and complaints; the yeast of your
enteirest affections, sent to quicken a slumbring friend as you
imagine, quho nevertheless remains vigilant of you and of the
smallest matters, which may aney wayes adde the least rill of
content to the ocean of your happiness; quherfor you may show
your comerad, and intreat him from me, as from one that trewly
loves and honors his best pairts, that now he vold refraine,
both his tonge and pen, from these quhirkis and obloquies,
quherwith he so often uses to stain the name of grate
personages, for hardly can he live so reteiredly, in so voluble
ane age, without becoming at one tyme or uther obnoxious to the
blow of some courtier. So begging God to bless you, I am your—
JA. BALFOUR.
‘_LONDON, 9 Apryll 1631._’
Twenty years before the Duchess of Gordon lived in the venerable house
at the head of the close, a preceding dowager resided in another part
of the town. This was the distinguished Lady Elizabeth Howard (daughter
of the Duke of Norfolk, by Lady Anne Somerset, daughter of the Marquis
of Worcester), who occasioned so much disturbance in the end of Queen
Anne’s reign by the Jacobite medal which she sent to the Faculty of
Advocates. Her grace lived in a house at the Abbeyhill, where, as we
are informed by Wodrow, in a tone of pious horror,[249] she openly
kept a kind of college for instructing young people in Jesuitism and
Jacobitism together. In this labour she seems to have been assisted
by the Duchess of Perth, a kindred soul, whose enthusiasm afterwards
caused the ruin of her family, by sending her son into the insurrection
of 1745.[250] The Duchess of Gordon died here in 1732. I should suppose
the house to have been that respectable old villa, at the extremity of
the suburb of Abbeyhill, in which the late Baron Norton, of the Court
of Exchequer, lived for many years. It was formerly possessed by Baron
Mure, who, during the administration of the Earl of Bute, exercised the
duties and dispensed the patronage of the _sous-ministre_ for Scotland,
under the Hon. Stuart Mackenzie, younger brother of the Premier.
This was of course in its turn the _court_ of Scotland; and from the
description of a gentleman old enough to remember attending the levees
(Sir W. M. Bannatyne), I should suppose that it was as much haunted by
suitors of all kinds as ever were the more elegant halls of Holyrood
House. Baron Mure, who was the personal friend of Earl Bute, died in
1774.