STORIES OF THE CLOSES, THE WYNDS, AND THE LANDS
It is, to be sure, more picturesque to lament the desolation of
towns on hills and haughs than the degradation of an Edinburgh
close; but I cannot help thinking on the simple and cosic retreats
where worth and talent, and elegance to boot, were often nestled.
SIR WALTER SCOTT, _Letter to Lady Anne Barnard_.
The long irregular line of slowly ascending mediæval street from
Holyrood to the Castle was, and is, the backbone of Old Edinburgh. From
this backbone there jut out on either side, forming, as it were, the
ribs from the spine, all those narrow wynds and quaint closes so
characteristic of the Old Town, and so full of the traditions and
stories of Old Town life. The main street itself is in three
divisions--the Canongate, nearest to Holyrood, then the main portion, or
High Street, and, highest up and nearest to the Castle, the Lawnmarket.
Between the Canongate and the High Street there used, in bygone days, to
be the famous old city gate, the Netherbow Port, for the Canongate, a
separate burgh, was beyond the Flodden wall, which at this point crossed
the ridge of the town. At the junction
[Illustration: JOHN KNOX’S HOUSE, HIGH STREET
To the left of the square stone water-conduit, which occupies the centre
of the picture, is seen the west front of this picturesque structure,
and still farther to the left a “fore-stair” of a building which may be
of an earlier date than the one known as John Knox’s House. The opening
into the Canongate to the right of the picture is St. Mary Street.]
of the High Street and the Lawnmarket stood the Church of St. Giles,
and, right out in the middle of the street and dividing the traffic into
two narrow streams, the hoary Tolbooth, or “Heart of Midlothian.”
This, then, was Old Edinburgh, the Edinburgh that Taylor, the
Water-poet, so well describes. “So, leaving the castle,” he writes, “as
it is both defensive against any opposition and magnificke for lodging
and receite, I descended lower to the city, wherein I observed the
fairest and goodliest streete that ever mine eyes beheld, for I did
never see or heare of a street of that length (which is half an English
mile from the castle to a faire port, which they call the Nether-bow);
and from that port, the streete which they call the Kenny-hate is one
quarter of a mile more, downe to the kings palace, called
Holyrood-house; the buildings on each side of the way being all of
squared stone, five, six, or seven stories high, and many by-lanes and
closes on each side of the way, wherein are gentlemens houses, much
fairer than the buildings in the high-street, for in the high-street
marchants and tradesmen do dwell, but the gentlemens mansions and
goodliest houses are obscurely founded in the aforesaid lanes: the
walles are eight or tenne foote thicke, exceeding strong, not built for
a day, a weeke, a moneth, or a yeere, but from antiquitie to posteritie,
for many ages.”[34]
Edinburgh, before the sudden extension of its boundaries at the end of
the eighteenth century, was thus a small, compact city, measuring in its
proudest days but a mile in length and a half mile in width; but,
though it was small, it was densely populated. Bounded in its growth by
deep ravines and by a wall and a great loch--defences against the
English--it extended itself in the only way it could, upwards towards
the sky, whence it need fear “no enemy, but winter and rough weather.”
Some of the highest houses in old Edinburgh were like vertical streets,
with a spiral “common stair”; and they contained from floor to roof
almost as many families as would a street in another town. The richer
and better-born citizens lived in the most comfortable “flats,” and
their poorer neighbours carried on their lives and their trades below
them; by which means all ranks and sorts of persons were jostled
together in a cosy, sociable “hugger-mugger” existence, quite
incomprehensible to the modern citizen.
The nobles of Scotland, before the Union drew them away to London, had
their fine old town residences in Edinburgh--the “lands”[35] bearing
their names. These were generally within closes, “obscurely founded in
the aforesaid lanes,” as Taylor has it; but many were in the Cowgate, a
fashionable suburb, or in the Canongate, which, being nearest Holyrood,
was the court end of the city. It is down this “fairest and goodliest
streete” that the tourist of to-day drives from the Castle to Holyrood,
or up from Holyrood to the Castle. The driver will point with his whip
at a gabled house standing forward into the street, and tell him it is
John Knox’s house. At the Church of St. Giles he will probably stop the
cab and descend, and, finding the door locked, will wander round the
building and gaze down at the heart marked on the stones where once
stood the Tolbooth, and at the initials I. K. where Knox is supposed to
be buried, though another version has it that his grave is below the
equestrian statue of Charles II. And so he will find himself in the
precincts of Parliament House, built on ground which in past ages was
the graveyard of the parish church. If he enter and have a glimpse of
the great hall filled with lawyers in their wigs and gowns, strutting
and fretting their hour as past generations did in their time, and as
future generations will do in theirs, then he will probably let his mind
rest upon Sir Walter Scott, the greatest of them all. And so his day in
Edinburgh will leave him with a confused impression of a long squalid
street full of draggled women and barefooted children, of groups of
soldiers from the Castle, of carts and cries, of open “fore-stairs” and
street wells, of ancient gabled roofs and of flapping garments hung out
of windows on poles to dry, of pious legends and obliterated carvings,
of an appalling number of drunken men, and of dark entries giving
glimpses of tortuous obscurities, or leading steeply down some narrow
tunnel with a flashing vista of the New Town in a blaze of sunshine at
the end of it.
But, in driving down that ridge of street from the Castle to Holyrood,
the tourist drives right through the history of Old Edinburgh, through
centuries of her stories and traditions, her pride and her romances and
her crimes. Down this street have ridden many gay processions, many
royal pageants. Often have the “fore-stairs” and windows been crowded to
witness a king lead home a foreign bride; or a regiment of brave Scots
go by, with music and the tramp of feet; or a prisoner driven to his
death; or, most familiar sight of all in ancient Edinburgh, to watch a
“tulzie,” a quarrel settled “à la mode d’Edimbourg,” as they said on the
Continent,--a duel to the death, or a street fight between armed men,
followers of great rival houses, the popular side ably assisted by the
fighting burghers with their spears. In the month of August 1503 the
ladies of Edinburgh gathered on the decorated fore-stairs, “gay as beds
of flowers,” to see King James IV. ride into the town with his Tudor
bride on her palfrey. During the minority of James V. the windows were
crowded with excited faces, whilst the terrific “Cleanse the Causeway”
raged below, and the townspeople handed out spears to the Douglases, and
the dead Hamiltons blocked the entries to the closes. Here Queen Mary
rode, a dishevelled prisoner, after the battle of Carberry Hill, after
she had parted with Bothwell, and “as she came through the town the
common people cried out against Her Majesty at the windows and stairs,
which it was a pity to hear. Her Majesty again cried out to all
gentlemen and others that passed up and down the causeway, declaring how
that she was their native princess, and doubted not but all honest
subjects would respect her as they ought to do, and not suffer her to
be mishandled.”[36]
When one turns aside from the main thoroughfare and penetrates into the
closes, one leaves the public life of the city and comes upon the
stories of the private lives of Old Edinburgh. Many of the closes, alas!
are gone. Sometimes only an entrance remains, with a name above it
recalling a hundred memories,--but the entrance leads to nowhere, or to
modern buildings. But some closes remain; and, as one makes one’s way
down from the Castle to the Canongate one can turn aside here and there,
crossing and recrossing the street to dive down some steep entry, and,
standing within it, where the broken plaster shows the bare oaken
rafters overhead, may read half-obliterated Latin, or trace armorial
bearings over doorways, or gaze through the open doors up spiral wooden
stairs, or--over the heads of the swarming little children playing in
the courts--at ancient gabled roofs and rounded turrets and beautiful
old windows, whence once fair ladies peeped, and where now the
ever-present “washings” hang suspended on poles, and add impressionist
touches of colour to the scene.
Every close and every wynd and every land has its history; and, as
nearly a hundred closes even now survive, besides the sites and memories
of many more, and as every close contains its lands, it would take
several volumes to tell all there is to be told. And so that invidious
and vexing thing, a selection, must be made, and a few of the thousand
crowding names taken haphazard.
Off the Lawnmarket there is a wide quadrangle called, after its
architect, Mylne’s Court. There was a long line of royal master masons
of that name, descending from father to son, from the reign of James
III. This close, built in 1690 by Robert Mylne, the seventh royal master
mason, whose handiwork is to be seen in many of the beautiful bits of
Old Town architecture, had a graceful doorway with a peaked arch over
it, grateful to the eye of the old master who designed it, but now
broken and defaced. When the close was built it enclosed some building
of earlier date, for another doorway had 1580 engraved over it, with the
legend “Blissit be God in al his Giftis”--the most popular of all the
numberless pious mottoes, Latin and English, that embellish the homes of
the Old Town. This building is now gone.
James’s Court, close by, is connected with the names of David Hume and
of James Boswell, and Boswell’s two guests, Paoli the Corsican, and Dr.
Johnson; but the buildings in it where they lived were burnt down in the
middle of the nineteenth century. Next to it--leading from it--is Lady
Stair’s Close, quite recently restored by Lord Rosebery, after whose
ancestress it is named. Originally it was called Lady Gray’s Close, and
the coat-of-arms and the initials W G and G S carved under the words
“Feare the Lord and depart from evill” are those of the original owners,
Sir William (afterwards Lord) Gray of Pittendrum and his wife Egidia
Smith, and the date 1622 is the date when they built it.[37] This Lord
Gray was a wealthy Scottish merchant in Charles I.’s time, and was one
of those who were ruined by their adherence to Montrose. He lost all his
wealth by heavy fines, and, after imprisonment in the Castle and in the
Tolbooth, died in 1648. Three years before his death, his daughter had
died of the plague in this close. Lady Gray survived her husband, but
apparently left the house “they had built to be so happy in,” and it
then became the residence of the Dowager Lady Stair. It must have been a
stately home in those days, with the Lawnmarket in front, and terraced
gardens behind, stretching down to the Nor’ Loch. The romantic story of
Lady Stair (born Lady Eleanor Campbell, grand-daughter of the Earl of
Loudoun, the Covenanting Chancellor of Charles I.’s time, and married
first to James, Viscount Primrose, and afterwards to the Earl of Stair)
forms the plot of Scott’s _Aunt Margaret’s Mirror_. Scott used to own
that he liked to “put a cocked hat” on to a story; and the cocked hat on
this one is very evident. Lord Stair died in 1647--the year before Lord
Gray; so it was probably just after she became a widow for the second
time that Lady Stair came to live in the close that now bears her name;
and here she lived for about twelve years, till her death in 1659. She
had long reigned as one of the queens of Edinburgh society; in her old
age she was noted and much envied for that luxury, a black servant--the
only one in Edinburgh; and whatever truth there is in Sir Walter’s
story, her troubles had not taken the colour from her life or from her
speech. When the Earl of Dundonald accused Lady Stair of libelling Lady
Jane Douglas (whose case was then before the Court of Session), and
further gave the world leave to call him “a damned villain” if he did
not speak the truth, the high-spirited old gentlewoman, Lady Stair, went
off straight to Holyrood, where the Duke and Duchess of Douglas were,
and there, before them and their attendants, said she had lived to a
good old age and never till now got entangled in any “clatters,”[38] and
struck the floor thrice with her stick, each time calling the Earl of
Dundonald “a damned villain,”--and then retired.
Baxter’s Close, where Burns stayed in 1786, is now part of Lady Stair’s
Close, and from the moment the tourist enters James’s Court he is
surrounded to-day by a mob of intelligent small Scots, with bare feet
and eager eyes, and told by a chorus of voices that “Robbie Burrrns
lived in yon hoose”--“It was yonder Robbie Burrrns stoppit”; and, if the
tourist linger to read the carvings, he is hastily helped: “Fear the
Lorrrd and depairt frae evil--but it’s over yonder Robbie Burrrns’s
hoose is!”
On the other side of the street is Brodie’s Close, where Deacon Brodie,
the daring burglar, one of Edinburgh’s picturesque criminals, lived.
There is a fine old archway inside the close, and a pleasant and
innocent odour of burnt treacle from a bakery near by. Riddle’s Close
has also been lately renovated, and was
[Illustration: LADY STAIR’S CLOSE
On the extreme right, in the foreground of the picture, is the house of
Eleanor, Dowager Countess of Stair, recently almost rebuilt by Lord
Rosebery. The large opening close to the circular building on the left
leads into the Lawnmarket, and in this building, which stands in
Baxter’s Close, Robert Burns once lodged.]
used as a settlement for students. It has a story of sudden death to
tell--probably several, were all known, for the enclosed court was
evidently intended for defence. Here was the house of Bailie Macmorran,
a rich merchant of James VI.’s reign, when rich merchants were held in
great repute by a needy king: this special one had more than once
banqueted the King and Queen Anne of Denmark in this very house. The
High School boys had a “barring out,” and actually held the High School
in a state of siege, and Bailie Macmorran was sent to settle the matter,
ordered the door to be forced open, and was then and there shot dead by
one of the boys. It is said that the boy who fired was the son of the
Chancellor of Caithness, and thus the ancestor of the earls of
Caithness, and that his gentle blood saved him from his ever being
discovered or brought to justice. Another thing to remember of Riddle’s
Close is that, two centuries later, David Hume lived up a spiral stair
on the east side of it, and there began to write his history of England.
Byers’ Close[39] brings one back from tragedy to comedy. In the old
house overhanging this close on the east, with three richly carved
windows at its polygonal end, there once lived that Adam Bothwell,
Bishop of Orkney, who married Mary, Queen of Scots to Bothwell “with
preachings.” A bit of old stair leading to a garden terrace that once
overlooked the Nor’ Loch, can be seen from Advocates’ Close. But in
Byers’ Close Lord Coalstoun’s wig, to any one who has read the
inimitable story in Chambers’s _Traditions of Edinburgh_, still remains,
like the coffin of Mahomet, suspended in mid-air. The author tells how
in that day (1757) it was the general custom for judges and advocates to
don their wigs and gowns in their own houses, and proceed in state, with
their cocked hats in their hands, when St. Giles’s bell sounded a
quarter to nine, to the Parliament House. Earlier hours must have
prevailed then than now, for we are led to understand that, though the
legal brethren assembled at nine o’clock instead of at ten, they yet
found time to lean over their windows after breakfasting, “enjoying the
morning air, and perhaps discussing the news of the day, or the
convivialities of the preceding evening, with a neighbouring advocate on
the opposite side of the alley.” It so happened that one morning two
very young women in the window immediately above that of Lord Coalstoun,
were killing time by the somewhat cruel sport of swinging a kitten,
suspended by a cord secured round it, up and down out of their window.
As the kitten came down, the learned judge popped out his head. In a
moment the maidens above saw it, and drew the kitten rapidly up,--but
the judge’s wig came with it, firmly fixed in the little angry claws.
Imagine the mirth tempered by dread at the upper window! But also
imagine the feelings of the senator below,--his wig lifted as by magic
from his head, and the morning air blowing “caller” on his exposed
cranium! A wild glance upward, and behold, his wig ascending
heaven-ward without any visible means of support! The laugh, so to
speak, was now on the cat’s side. “The perpetrators did afterwards get
many injunctions from their parents never again to fish over the window,
with such a bait, for honest men’s wigs”; and the incident was pardoned
by Lord Coalstoun,--if not by the kitten.
In Advocates’ Close there existed in the seventeenth century, in an
upper storey of the house of John Scougall the artist, a
picture-gallery,--the first public exhibition of works of art, it is
said, in Scotland; and preceding any such attempt of the same kind,
either in England or France.[40]
On the south side of the street the Old Assembly Close and Bell’s Wynd
are connected with another phase of polite society in bygone Edinburgh.
It was in the Old Assembly Close that those rigid and awe-inspiring
functions were held, presided over by some lady of rank and mistress of
the unwritten laws of etiquette, of which Goldsmith and Captain Topham
have both left such graphic accounts, and which form the theme of one of
the chapters in Chambers’s _Traditions of Edinburgh_.
Then the Assembly Close received the fair:
Order and elegance presided there,
Each gay Right Honourable had her place,
To walk a minuet with becoming grace.
No racing to the dance with rival hurry--
Such was thy sway, O famed Miss Nicky Murray![41]
Miss Nicky Murray was indeed famed. She was a sister of the Earl of
Mansfield, and lived in Bailie Fyfe’s Close, and there “finished” young
lady cousins from the country, and introduced them into society. She
presided over the Assemblies, seated on a raised throne, and a wave of
her fan silenced the musicians. “It is said that Miss Murray,” writes
Mr. Robert Chambers, “on hearing a young lady’s name pronounced for the
first time, would say: ‘Miss ----, of what?’ If no territorial addition
could be made, she manifestly cooled.”
After 1758 the Assemblies were held in Bell’s Wynd, until the building
of the New Town, and in 1824 the Assembly rooms, where Miss Nicky Murray
had ruled, were burnt down.
Niddry Street stands nearly on the site of Niddry’s Wynd, of many
memories, two of which throw light on the æsthetic side of the social
life of Edinburgh. It was here that Lord Grange, a Lord of Session,
lived. He had spirited his wife away to the wilds of the Hebrides, where
he kept her in captivity till she lost her reason and died; but none the
less was he deeply shocked at the immorality of the joyous Jacobite,
Allan Ramsay, when he began the first circulating library in Edinburgh.
Here St. Cecilia’s Hall still stands. This once beautiful oval concert
room was built by Robert Mylne the Master Mason in 1762,[42] after the
model of the Theatre Farnese at Parma, and here the music-loving _élite_
of Edinburgh gathered weekly, to listen and criticise. You were lost in
Edinburgh, an English visitor complained, unless you were competent to
talk about music all night, not only as an art, but as a science.
In Anchor Close,[2] on the opposite side of the High Street, was “Dawney
Douglas’s Tavern,” where Burns drank and jested among the “Crochallan
Fencibles.” Old Stamp Office Close,[43] almost next to it, has had a
varied career. The first scene in its history is the brightest: “a long
procession of sedans, containing Lady Eglintoune and her daughters,
devolve from the Close, and proceed to the Assembly rooms ... eight
beautiful women, conspicuous for their stature and carriage, all dressed
in the splendid though formal fashions of that period, and inspired at
once with the dignity of birth and the consciousness of beauty.”[3] The
next scene in the Stamp Office Close is when it was the meeting-place of
the famous Poker Club, whose members included all the _literati_ of
Edinburgh. In its early days this Club--a Jacobite institution--had an
entrance fee of half-a-crown, and its members supped at
fourpence-halfpenny per head; but in its Stamp Office Close period it
became more showy and less select. Stamp Office Close, like other closes
in the Old Town, was once the scene of mock-royal state, when the Earl
of Leven was Lord High Commissioner, and held his levées at this same
tavern--Fortune’s Tavern--where the Poker Club had been wont to meet.
And the last scene of all is one of squalid ghastliness; for it was at
the head of Old Stamp Office Close that, in April 1812, a band of young
hooligans, who had spent a night in riot and murder, were hanged on a
gallows on the scene of their crimes.
On the south side of the High Street a fine old “fore-stair” remains,
outside Cant’s Close; and between this and World’s End Close, where the
High Street ends and the Canongate begins, and where formerly stood the
Nether Bow Port, there are several interesting closes. First comes
Strichen’s Close, where the Abbots of Melrose had their dwellings, and
where, later on, Sir George Mackenzie lived. Next it is Blackfriars
Street which once was Blackfriars Wynd, where was the palace of Cardinal
Beaton, and where Queen Mary passed afoot with “licht torches” the night
of Darnley’s murder. Next Blackfriars Street is South Gray’s Close,
where the Scottish Mint, or “Cunyie House” was, after its removal from
Holyrood in Queen Mary’s time until the Union; and here, therefore, were
the Scottish coins struck, of native Scottish gold. Next to South Gray’s
Close is Hyndford’s Close, where Lady Maxwell of Monreith lived, and her
daughters (one of whom was afterwards Duchess of Gordon) used gaily to
ride up and down the High Street mounted on the pigs which had their
humble dwellings under the fore-stairs. In Hyndford’s Close also lived
the Countess of Balcarres, whose eldest daughter was Lady Anne Barnard
(_née_ Lindsay), the author of “Young Jamie lo’ed me weel,” and whose
letters to Lord Melville from South Africa were lately published.
Tweeddale Close, a door or two farther on, once the stately town
residence of the Marquises of Tweeddale, is now indissolubly connected
with the story of a mysterious crime,--the Begbie murder; for it was
just within this close that a bank porter was stabbed to death on a dark
November afternoon in 1806. The murderer, in spite of all the hue and
cry and horror that followed on his crime, died undiscovered.
On the north side of the High Street, on either side of John Knox’s
manse, are two edifices whose outside decorations usually excite the
wonder of the stranger. One of these, Bailie Fyfe’s Close (where Miss
Nicky Murray “finished” her country cousins in all the airs and graces
of the eighteenth century), is the “Heave awa’ Tavern,” and bears the
head of a young lad carved in stone, and the words “Heave awa’ chaps,
I’m no dead yet!” It was here that, on Sunday morning, 24th November
1861, a fine old dwelling, dating from 1612, sank suddenly, and buried
thirty-five people in its ruins. This is the event of which Stevenson
speaks in his _Picturesque Notes_,--enveloping it in a haze of gloom and
rhetoric, and somehow conveying the impression that the fall was a
judgment from Heaven on the city for some sin unknown, but grimly
hinted--possibly its climate. But Stevenson omits the touch of heroism
that crowns the tragedy: the boy whose brave young voice was heard under
the beams and masonry that the rescuers were digging at--“Heave awa’
chaps, I’m no deid yet!” A building on the Canongate side of John Knox’s
manse, a little way farther on, bears the enormous figure of what might
be thought to be an Ethiopian, did not the name “Morocco Close” prove it
intended for a Moor. There are several legends to account for this
effigy; but all agree in giving an Edinburgh maiden (some make her the
daughter of the Provost) to reign over the harem of the Sultan of
Morocco. Some versions say that it was her brother who, having gained
wealth by merchant dealings with his Morocco connexions, proudly
decorated his house with an imaginary portrait of his brother-in-law,
whom he has dressed in a necklace and a turban.
A little farther on is a close commonly called “Bible Close,” from the
fact that it has a large open book carved over its entrance, on the
pages of which is engraved a verse from the metrical version of the
133rd Psalm:--
Behold, how good a thing it is,
And how becoming well,
Together such as brethren are
In unity to dwell.
This is Shoemakers’ Land; and the sentiment was evidently a favourite
one, for the Cordiners’ land in West Port, and a court-house in
Potterrow, also bore it.
It is in the Canongate that the most stately buildings remain, a fact
not wonderful when one learns that in the eighteenth century, before the
Scottish nobles “left their hame,” the Canongate included among its
residents no less than two Dukes, sixteen Earls, two Countesses, seven
Barons of the Realm, thirteen Baronets, four Commanders-in-Chief, seven
Lords of Session, and five “eminent men”; not to mention a bank, a
ladies’ school, and two inns. What material for romance! Some of the
background remains, though the actors are gone.
On the south side of the Canongate are the three great houses: Moray
House; a House “wi’oot a name” or a history, but with three carved Latin
mottoes, and the date 1570 right across its frontage; and Queensberry
House. Between these are several wonderfully interesting old buildings
with rounded turrets containing turnpike stairs, lit by strongly barred
windows.
On the north side of the Canongate, besides innumerable closes, all with
interesting stories, are the Canongate Tolbooth, Whitehorse Inn, and the
Canongate Parish Church.
Moray House was built in the reign of Charles I. by Lady Home (sister of
the Countess of Moray), and is beautiful architecturally as well as
interesting historically. Here Cromwell stayed during his first visit to
Edinburgh in the summer of 1648; and the Cavalier party “talked very
loud that he did communicate,” in Moray House, to the Marquis of Argyle
and other disloyal peers and clergy, “his design in reference to the
King.” But Moray House is chiefly notorious for its Balcony Scene. On
Saturday, 15th May 1650, the Marquis of Argyle was attending the
marriage festivities of his son, Lord Lorn, and the Earl of Moray’s
daughter; and on that day the great Montrose was dragged on a hurdle
through the streets of Edinburgh to the Tolbooth, amid all the insults
that the cruelty of the Covenanting rabble could devise.
He either fears his fate too much,
Or his deserts are small,
Who dares not put it to the touch
To gain or lose it all.[44]
As the procession passed Moray House, the entire wedding party stepped
out on to the balcony to exult over the fallen hero. It was an incident
worthy of the French Revolution--the narrow street packed with a yelling
and execrating populace, and in the midst of them that pale, proud,
beautiful face of the vanquished royalist, and in the balcony above the
gaily dressed group of wedding guests. The enemies looked at each other,
and before the steady dignity of Montrose’s gaze Argyle turned away.
It was in a summer-house in the garden of Moray House that some of the
signatures were affixed to the Treaty of Union in 1707, though others
were signed in the greater secrecy of a cellar in the High Street.
In Queensberry House a horrible tragedy took place
[Illustration: THE CANONGATE TOLBOOTH, LOOKING WEST
On the right of the picture rises the Canongate Tolbooth with its
conical roof and projecting clock, reminding one strongly of French
architecture. The spire showing in the distance belongs to the Tolbooth
Church, at the top of Lawnmarket.]
the day the Treaty of the Union was passed. All Edinburgh had gathered
at the Parliament House, many in order to mob the promoters of the hated
measure, and the Canongate was left silent and deserted. The Marquis of
Queensberry was prominent among those who had brought about the Union;
and, when he returned home in triumph with his family and household, it
was to find that in their absence the gigantic idiot son, Lord
Drumlanrig, had escaped from his darkened prison-room, had wandered
through the empty house till he came to the kitchen, and had there found
the little turnspit turning the joint roasting for dinner. He had taken
the joint from the fire, killed and spitted the child, and was devouring
the half-roasted body. “This horrid act of his child was, according to
the common sort of people, the judgment of God upon him for his wicked
concern in the Union.”[45]
A pleasanter memory of Queensberry House is of
... Kitty, beautiful and young,
And wild as colt untamed,
who was the patroness of the poet Gay.
The Canongate Tolbooth, with its barred windows, square tower, and
turrets, forms to-day a picturesque and noticeable feature just where
the Canongate ends.
Close to it is the gem of all the Edinburgh closes,--Whitehorse
Close,--with its famous old inn with overhanging timber porches and its
flight of steps branching to left and right.[46] This very fine old
close is still intact,--has indeed been lately renovated. There is a
story told that it was here that the fourteen Covenanting lords gathered
to ride to Berwick in obedience to King Charles’s summons, and the
Edinburgh citizens filled the court and prevented them, lest evil
communications should corrupt good manners, and Montrose was the only
one who got through the press and rode to his King. But, as a matter of
fact, Loudon and Lothian also went to Berwick; and it is probable that
Argyle and the other ten were inspired by other motives than fear of a
street crowd for their refusal to go. The palace of John Paterson, the
fifth of the Established Episcopalian Bishops of Edinburgh, a stately
old mansion with a stone turnpike stair, is within Whitehorse Close. It
is still called “the Bishop’s palace,” though many who call it so are
unaware what manner of Bishop had his home in it.
Almost the last building, before the street widens out in front of the
palace, is the old Canongate Parish Church, where in Catholic days all
the ancient Guilds had each its pew, and in whose “God’s acre” so many
of Edinburgh’s most famous and worthy citizens lie at rest, at the foot
of the town where they spent their days.