THE CHURCH OF ST. GILES:
GAVIN DOUGLAS, JOHN KNOX, AND JENNY GEDDES
Age to age succeeds,
Blowing a noise of tongues and deeds,
A dust of systems and of creeds.
TENNYSON.
There is a saying that no one who has suffered an Episcopalian childhood
knows the story of Jonah and the gourd, and that the reply given is
invariably, “Jonah and the gourd? The _gourd_? What about a gourd? I
know all about the _whale_, of course!” It is observable that the
ordinary tourist who visits Edinburgh associates St. Giles’s Church with
the one incident of Jenny Geddes throwing her stool at the dean--an
incident of which it might be submitted that, like the connection
between Jonah and the whale, it was perhaps not the most dignified,
though certainly an uncomfortably dramatic, moment of its history. The
Church of St. Giles, like the prophet, had had other experiences--which
is perhaps not wonderful when one recollects that it was in all
probability the parish church of “Edwinsburch” in the ninth century. It
was certainly there in the days of David I., when Edinburgh was a
cluster of huts, built of the wood and thatched with the boughs of the
forest of Drumsheugh, with its dominating fortress up on the rock, its
great Abbey down on the plain, and half-way on the slope between them
the beautiful little massive early Norman Church. From its belfry, as
the sun rose high over the Forth beyond the Calton Hill, the bell would
toll the pious Scots to Matins, or to Vespers when it sank red at the
back of their Castle.
This early parochial church--probably built on the site of a still older
church, and that again maybe on the site of some heathen temple--was, on
the 6th of October 1243, in the reign of Alexander II., dedicated to St.
Giles by David de Bernham, Norman Bishop of St. Andrews.[22] The church,
like all other buildings in Edinburgh, suffered much at the hands of the
English Edwards, of Richard II. of England, and of Henry VIII. of
England; and the marks of the flames of those ruthless invaders are
still visible on the pillars of the choir. If it was misused by the
“auld enemy,” it was--until the Reformation--well treated by its own
people. It was restored from Richard’s fire, and building went on until
Flodden. In 1387 five chapels were added on the south of the Nave,
“thekyt” with stone, by three well-paid Scottish masons, on the model
[Illustration: THE CHURCH OF ST. GILES FROM THE LAWNMARKET
The statue of the Duke of Buccleuch shows immediately under the tower of
the Cathedral, backed by the modernised west end of the building.
Farther down the High Street, to the east, is the Tron Church, while to
the right of the picture is a portion of the new County Hall. On the
extreme left is the entrance from Lawnmarket to Baxter’s Close, where
Burns once lodged. (See “Lady Stair’s Close.”)]
of a chapel at Holyrood. The Regent Albany founded chapels[23]; and
storks built nests in the roof. Every one seemed busy building in the
church.
In 1454 William Preston of Gorton bequeathed to St. Giles’s a
much-prized relic--“the arm-bone of Sanct Gele,” which he had procured
from France; and the Provost and magistrates built the “Preston Aisle”
as a mark of gratitude, with “a brass for his lair,” and a chaplain “to
sing at the altar from that time forth”; and the male representative of
the Preston family, until the Reformation, bore the sacred relic in all
processions.
In 1467 St. Giles’s was transformed from a parish church into a
collegiate church, having a Provost, a perpetual Vicar having care of
souls, a minister of the choir, fourteen canons or prebendaries, a
sacristan, a beadle, a secular clerk, and four choristers taught by the
best-qualified canon. By the time St. Giles’s became a collegiate
foundation it was rich in chaplainries and altarages; and afterwards
there were many more endowments. Each trade that formed into a Guild
maintained its own altar; and, as these Guilds were rich, this was a
great source of wealth. The last endowment before Flodden was an annuity
of twenty-three merks from Walter Chepman, the earliest Scottish
printer, to found a chaplaincy at the altar of St. John the Evangelist.
This was confirmed by charter of James IV., on the 1st of August
1513--eight days before Flodden.
Ah, the summer days of Edinburgh in the year 1513! The King reading the
poems of his Franciscan friar Dunbar, printed by the honoured and pious
Chepman, who endowed the altars of St. Giles’s, where the young
Poet-Provost, of the proud race of Douglas, walked at the end of the
chanting procession amid the stone pillars, and went home afterwards to
turn Virgil into Scottish verse....
Gavin Douglas had been made Provost by James IV. in 1501, when he was
but twenty-six, and it was whilst he was living in the Provost’s
dwelling, bounding the west side of the churchyard (where Parliament
House now stands), that he wrote _The Palace of Honour_ and _King Hart_,
and turned Virgil’s _Æneid_ into the vernacular. Gavin Douglas was the
third son of that grim old statesman, the Earl of Angus, who had earned
the sobriquet of “Archibald Bell-the-Cat” on the day when the haughty
Scottish nobles hanged all James III.’s plebeian favourites over the
bridge at Lauder.
Son of mine,
Save Gawain, ne’er could pen a line,
Scott makes the Earl of Angus say; but “Gawain” penned many a line, and
penned the last of the _Æneid_ on the 22nd of July 1513, when
For to behold, it was a gloir to see
The stabled windes and the calmed sea,
The soft seasoun, the firmament serene,
The lowne illumined air, and firth amene,
* * * * *
Towers, turrets, kirnels, pinnacles hie
Of kirks, castells, and ilke fair city,
Stood painted, every fyall, fane and stage,
Upon the plain ground by their own umbrage.
After Flodden there were many prayers in St, Giles’s, but few
endowments.[24] No doubt, when that first Proclamation bade the women go
into the churches and pray, many a Scottish wife, many a mother, many a
girl with a secret sorrow to carry with her to the grave, took her
broken heart into the shadows of the old Church, and wept her
supplications before the little altars there.
Gavin Douglas was still Provost of St. Giles’s during these troubled
days, and his father, the Earl of Angus, was Provost of the city, having
succeeded Sir Alexander Lauder of Blyth, who had marched under him to
Flodden, and fallen on the field. So the Douglases held the helm; and
there could be this entry in the Burgh Records:--
Archibald Dowglas erle of Angius, Provest.--
Magister Gavinus Dowglas prepositus ecclesie collegiate Beati
Egidij hujusmodi burgi effectus est burgenssis pro communi bono
ville gratis.[25]
In 1516 Gavin Douglas was made Bishop of Dunkeld; but five years later,
on Albany’s return to the regency, the day of the Douglases was over,
and Gavin found an asylum in England (his nephew, the Earl of Angus,
was now Henry VIII.’s brother-in-law, having married the widowed Queen
Margaret); and he died in London of the plague in 1522.
Through the later part of the sixteenth century Scotland lay between
Scylla and Charybdis--between France and England; and politics, at home
and abroad, were strenuous. Henry VIII. “scourged Scotland as no English
king had scourged her since Edward I.,” and his soldiers left Edinburgh
burnt to the ground, and laid waste a circuit of five miles round it.
France offered help with one hand, and with the other attempted to grasp
the Scottish crown for the coronation of the Dauphin on his marriage to
Mary Stuart. Meanwhile Protestantism, already established in England,
was gaining a gradual and independent hold in Scotland; and against
this, and against the English alliance it threatened, Mary of Lorraine
and Cardinal Beaton struggled desperately and in vain. In 1534 and 1540
Cardinal Beaton burnt heretics; in 1546 Cardinal Beaton was murdered.
Mary of Lorraine had been made Regent in succession to Arran--to the
intense disapproval of Buchanan and Knox; “als semlye a sight (yf men
had eis) as to putt a sadill upoun the back of ane unrewly kow,” is
Knox’s rough comment. She filled Edinburgh with her countrymen, and
heaped honours on them, and riots in the streets of Edinburgh ensued
between the French soldiers and the native citizens, and hatred of the
French and of their faith grew bitter and strong.
In 1556 the most precious of the Church valuables were stolen, and the
life-sized statue of the patron saint was ducked in the Nor’ Loch by the
rabble and then burnt. The Archbishop of St. Andrews “caused his curate
Tod to curse them as black as cole,” and the Church authorities borrowed
an image from Greyfriars for the St. Giles’s Day procession, in which
the Queen Regent herself walked to do them honour; but when she left it
a riot ensued, and the borrowed image was rudely handled and defaced.
After this the Church valuables were boarded out for safety among the
faithful; but the army of the Congregation entered the town on 29th June
1559, and that same day the stones of St. Giles’s echoed back the stern
thundering eloquence of John Knox, the great Presbyterian reformer. John
Knox was the first minister of the city under the new form of religion,
and he preached in the central part of the church, opening from the
south, which division was called “the Old Kirk.”[26]
The interior of the Church was partitioned off and the subdivisions
appropriated, not only by various preachers of the new religion for
their own special services, but also by the laity for various secular
purposes. A court of justice was held in one, a grammar school in
another, the town clerk’s office in a third, a prison in a fourth, and
so on; and the Town Council found one of the ancient chapels a suitable
place in which to erect looms to test the exhibits of city weavers
accused of peculations. Any great religious upheaval produces, on the
part of the rude and vulgar, these manifestations of irreverence toward
the old order of things; and too much importance must not be attached to
them.
Darnley, three weeks after his marriage to Queen Mary, attended service
at St. Giles’s, but Knox preached “an hour or more longer than the time
appointed” on the wickedness of princes, and how “boys and women” are
set up as rulers and tyrants; and young Darnley was “crabbit”
afterwards, spent the afternoon in hawking, and never came to St.
Giles’s again.
After Queen Mary’s flight to England, Edinburgh was in a state of civil
war; and Kirkaldy of Grange, who held the Castle for the Queen for three
years, garrisoned St. Giles’s as a fort, hoisted cannon and soldiers up
into the steeple, and loopholed the gables for arquebuses, and John Knox
once again fled for his life.
Until 1585 Edinburgh citizens had contentedly, and perhaps with
sufficient punctuality, regulated their doings by the bells of St.
Giles’s; but in that year the Town Council bought, for the sum of
fifty-five pounds Scots, a clock from the Abbey Church of Lindores, and
hung it up in the steeple. Stormy hours were the hands of that clock
from the quiet Fifeshire Abbey destined to mark!
In King James VI.’s reign, stirring events happened in the Church of St.
Giles. The King often used the Church for conferences, which sometimes
ended in disputes between the King and representatives of early
Presbyterian zeal, not conducted with due regard to kingly dignity on
either side. In 1596 it was the scene of a difference of opinion of this
nature, and James had to take refuge from it in the adjacent Tolbooth,
and thence, when the Tolbooth was attacked by an armed mob, to hurry
home to Holyrood. It was after this incident that the King, instead of
carrying out his original intention of razing Edinburgh to the ground
and salting its site, contented himself with ordering the four ministers
of St. Giles’s to live in different and distant parts of the town,
instead of all four together in “ain clois,” hatching treason at their
ease.
It was in St. Giles’s Church, in 1603, that King James bade farewell to
his Scottish subjects, and that he was preached to by the Rev. Mr. Hall,
a Presbyterian divine, and wept over and exhorted,--and in his turn
wept, and promised, and took leave. It was at St. Giles’s Church, in
1617, that King James attended a service immediately on his entry into
Edinburgh on his first visit home from England. He had promised to
return to his Scottish capital every third year; but the years had
extended to fifteen, during which he had been able, as the powerful
sovereign of all Britain, to complete his long-cherished plan for the
establishment of Episcopacy in Scotland. It was therefore not now a
Presbyterian minister who preached, but the Bishop of St. Andrews.
In 1628 the “Krames” were first erected,--wooden booths with lean-to
roofs, sticking like barnacles on to the sides of the church, and
filling up the angles between the buttresses. The church then, rising
out of a huddledom of booths and goldsmiths’ shops and open markets and
stalls and jostling crowds, all closely hemmed in by the tall houses of
the narrow street, must have resembled many of the foreign Cathedrals of
the present day.
In 1633 Edinburgh became an Episcopal See, the diocese being formed out
of that of St. Andrews; and St. Giles’s, which during its long Roman
Catholic existence had been first a parochial church and then a
collegiate church, was converted into a cathedral church. It is still
very commonly called “St. Giles’s Cathedral,” the designation dating
from this short period of its life. The first Bishop of Edinburgh was
William Forbes, who died in the same year that he was appointed, 1634,
and was succeeded by five others, the fifth being Bishop Abernethy Rose,
the last of the Established Episcopalian Bishops of Edinburgh. He was
deprived on the abolition of Episcopacy in 1688, and became Primus of
the Scottish Episcopal Church, and died in 1720 in Whitehorse Close. “I
know at least one person,” writes Mr. Robert Chambers in his _Traditions
of Edinburgh_, “who never goes past the place without an emotion of
respect, remembering the self-abandoning devotion of the Scottish
prelates to their engagements at the Revolution.”
It was on the 23rd of July 1637 that the folly and obstinacy of Charles
I. brought about the riot in the Cathedral during which the celebrated
Jenny Geddes threw her stool at the Dean.
[Illustration: THE CHURCH OF ST. GILES FROM THE COURTS
A portion of the south end of the transept appears at the extreme left
of the picture, and farther in the picture, to the east, is an
equestrian statue of Charles II. A little to the west of this statue,
and just out of the limits of the picture, is a stone, believed to cover
the remains of John Knox. Above all rises the fine crown and spire of
the tower.]
“Since the days of John Knox,” says Professor Hume Brown in his _History
of Scotland_, “the citizens of Edinburgh had been noted for their
stubborn adhesion to Presbyterian doctrine and polity. With no other
section of his subjects had James VI. found greater difficulty in
enforcing the Articles of Perth. In 1584, Bishop Adamson, as the
representative of Episcopacy, had been violently interrupted while
conducting service in the church of St. Giles. If, therefore, Edinburgh
should patiently endure the new Liturgy,[27] its example could not fail
to have a good effect on the rest of the country. It was in the same
church of St. Giles that the experiment with the new Service-Book was
now made; and, unluckily for its promoters, Edinburgh even surpassed its
evil record. Every precaution was taken to ensure the decorous behaviour
of the congregation. The two archbishops with several of their
suffragans, the Lords of Privy Council, and the Lords of Session, were
present to give solemnity to the occasion. No sooner, however, had the
dean opened the new Liturgy than the tumult began. There arose ‘such an
uncouth noise and hubbub in the Church that not any one could either
hear or be heard. The gentlewomen did fall a tearing and crying that the
Masse was entered among them and Baal in the Church. There was a
gentleman who standing behind a pew and answering Amen to what the dean
was reading, a she zealot hearing him starts up in choler, “Traitor
(says she), dost thou say Mass at my ear,” and with that struck him on
the face with her bible in great indignation and fury.’[28] It was in
vain that Archbishop Spottiswoode endeavoured to allay the tumult, and
the service closed amid uproar and confusion--the bishop being pursued
to his residence with volleys of stones and imprecations. Such was the
discouraging reception of Laud’s Service-Book in the leading church of
Scotland.”[29]
And during this uproar tradition avers that a “kail-wife,” when the
collect was given out, hurled her stool at the Dean, crying, “Deil colic
the wame o’ ye!”
It is all very well to cast doubt on whether Jenny Geddes existed in
mortal life: none can doubt her claim to immortality. If tangible proof
be demanded,--is not the very stool she aimed at the Dean to be seen in
the Scottish Antiquarian Museum to this day?
It is difficult now for a stranger to understand fully the very strong
antagonism between the Episcopalians and the Presbyterians.
’Piscy, ’Piscy, Amen!
Doon on yer knees and up agen!
the little street urchins still cry in shrill disapproval as the
“chapels” skale.[30] The antagonism was in its early days political and
temperamental as well as ecclesiastical, for the Episcopalians were
royalists and cavaliers to a man. In the eighteenth century the terms
Episcopalian and Jacobite were held as almost synonymous. The two
classes were diametrically opposed in their dispositions and ways and
ideals; and yet each represented many of the finest characteristics of
the Scottish character, and each can lay claim to a goodly number of the
Scotsmen and Scotswomen of whom Scotland is proudest and fondest. But
the feeling betrays itself even yet where education has tended to
sharpen the angles of temperament instead of rounding them off.
“This is Edinburg,” a Cockney youth with a tourist ticket was overheard
to say, as the train approached the Northern Capital.
“Oh, Edinboro’, is it?” answered his companion, letting down the window.
“Oh, I s’y, this ain’t town,--I can smell the ’y!”
“That is the fimous Castle of Edinburg,” said the first, and both gazed
out at the Calton jail.
A little old woman, shrivelled with age, and neat and clean as a russet
apple in her white mutch and her shawl, gave a restless movement, but
said nothing. No one noticed her.
“Wasn’t it at Edinboro’ that Janie Gedds lived?” asked the second youth,
drawing in his head.
“Janie Gedds?--’oo was she?”
“W’y, Janie Gedds, that threw a stool at a dean’s ’ead and stopt a
Church service.”
“Threw a stool at a dean’s ’ead and stopt a Church service? W’y,
w’atever did she do that for? W’at imperence!”
And then suddenly the little old woman whom no one had noticed leant
forward, a flash of fire in the deep-set eyes under the white mutch, and
a brown wrinkled fist thrust out from the folds of the shawl. “Indeed,
an’ she was verra richt, sirs! Verra richt, she was!--An’ _I’d dae the
same mysel’!_”
The two Cockney youths collapsed as completely as ever did the dean.
When the deep-laid schemes of Charles I. “went agee,” the Presbyterians
held undisputed possession of the Church of St. Giles. It was during
this time that Sir John Gordon of Haddo, a Royalist, was imprisoned in
the “Priest’s Chamber,” afterwards known as “Haddo’s Hole.” But, when
Cromwell entered Edinburgh after the battle of Dunbar, the town was
flooded with English Independents,--all manner of sects,--who preached
in St. Giles’s Church and harassed the Presbyterians more than ever
either Roman Catholics or Episcopalians had done, until even the General
Assembly itself was prohibited by them from meeting in the church, and
“It must have been a curious spectacle to see these gentlemen marched
out of St. Giles’s by a band of fanatics more fanatical than
themselves.”[31] So, when there came the Restoration of 1660, and
Charles II. promised all that the Presbyterians asked, there was general
rejoicing, and feasting at the City Cross, and after the Lord Provost
and magistrates had “turned up their spiritual thanks to Heaven for so
blessed an occasion,” they “in a most magnificent manner regaled
themselves with those human lawful refreshment which is allowable for
the grandeur of so eminent a blessing.”[32] And even Jenny Geddes, it is
told, contributed her creels and her creepies to help form a bonfire.
But the Covenanters were to learn not to put their faith in
princes--especially in princes coerced to their faith. On the 11th of
May 1661, the head of the gallant Royalist, the Marquis of Montrose, was
taken down from its spike on the Tolbooth, and his mutilated remains
were gathered, and buried in St. Giles’s with pomp and pity by Wishart,
who had been his chaplain, and who, a year later, was consecrated Bishop
of Edinburgh. When the poor persecuted Covenanters taken at Rullion
Green were imprisoned in Haddo’s Hole and treated with barbarous
severities, it was this Wishart who fed them and did all he could to
obtain mercy for them,--this Wishart, who had himself suffered so much
at the hands of Covenanters that to his dying day he bore the marks on
his face of the rats who “had been like to devour” him in his loathsome
dungeon.[33]
It is pleasant to turn from all the stormy and tragic memories of man’s
inhumanities to man to the pretty and peaceful fact that in the spring
of 1700 there were hung in the steeple of St. Giles’s “a good and
sufficient cheme or sett of musical bells, according to the rules of
musick, for the use of the good toun of Edinburgh.” Was this the peal
that continued faithfully to jangle--
’Twas within a mile of Edinburgh toun,
In the rosy time o’ the year,
until, by reason of age, the jangling grew fitful, with little pauses
and blanks of silence, like a pulse that is beating out its last of a
long and busy life?...
If the Beatitude promised to those whom men shall revile and persecute
and despitefully use is also granted to stone and lime, then “Sanct
Gellis kirk “ is blessed indeed. Over six centuries ago it was burnt to
ashes by the English, and carefully and reverently restored and rebuilt.
Then, for nearly two hundred years it was slowly enriched and
laboriously embellished, till every pillar had its shrine and every
niche its altar, and its outer walls were irregular with the chapels
that had been added to it, and the beautiful open arched crown steeple,
the pride of Edinburgh to-day, was added by unknown hands.
And then all the altars were dashed down and the images burnt; and,
scarcely had the Church been “cleansed of popery,” when she was again
sprinkled and re-consecrated after the sacrilege; then again she was
“purged of idolatry,” and the Latin chantings of a French bishop had to
give place to the noise of workmen’s hammers and the creaking of pulleys
and the falling of altars and carvings, and nine days later St. Giles’s
found herself bare and empty and--whitewashed!
Her shadows have been cast by the wax candles bequeathed for the souls
of those in purgatory; and they have been banished by the torches when
John Knox held his Communions at four o’clock on winter mornings. Her
aisles have echoed to many doctrines, many angry denunciations, many
whispered prayers; they have held cannon and soldiers, they have immured
prisoners, they have seen gay wedding pageantries, they have watched
martyrs and statesmen laid to rest. And at last they were left dusty and
neglected: cobwebs hung on the walls,--spiders spun their altars
unreproved.
In 1758 the old Norman doorway, a survival of the thirteenth century,
was ruthlessly demolished: and, in 1829, under the name of
“improvement,” the architecture of the church was ruined, at the cost of
over twenty thousand pounds, according to the taste of the
builders,--the roof was plastered, the carvings and tombs and monuments
were broken, destroyed, and desecrated, galleries were built, and all
the past was insulted and the present rendered hideous,--and then again
it was left in dirt and neglect. From this state it was rescued in 1883
by the late William Chambers, who undid the deeds of vandalism as far as
possible, and magnificently restored the old Church of St. Giles.