SOME NOTABLE INHABITANTS, AND THEIR DWELLINGS
I ken a toon, wa’d roond, and biggit weel,
Where the women’s a’ weel-faured, and the men’s brave and leal,
And ye ca’ ilka ane by a weel-kent name;
And when I gang to yon toon,--I’m gangin’ to my hame!
I ken a toon: it’s gey grim and auld;
It’s biggit o’ grey stane, and some finds it cauld;
It’s biggit up and doon on heichts beside the sea;
But gif I get to yon toon--I’se bide there till I dee!
The cosmopolitan view is nowadays the fashionable one, and no man stoops
to own to a national prejudice, a national accent, or even a national
pride. It may be as well. Trafalgar might have been won had Nelson never
advised his men to hate a Frenchman as they would the devil. Perhaps,
and perhaps not. It sounds a trifle harsh that King Robert the Bruce, on
the mere suspicion that Sir Piers de Lombard had “ane English hart,”
“made him to be hangit and drawen.” Perhaps, and perhaps not. At any
rate, our stay-at-home ancestors bore the stamp of their nationality on
character, thought, physiognomy, and speech. There were strong feelings
in those days, that often found strong expression, and there were racy
eccentricities and unsuppressed play of individuality; and all this gave
colour and zest to local society. Before centralisation robbed Edinburgh
of so many of her best citizens, her society was full of intellectual
chiefs, of notabilities, and of “characters.” After all that has been
said and sung of the beauty and romance of the grey metropolis, it is in
great part due to the number and variety of remarkable persons who have
been citizens of Edinburgh, or are in some way associated with it, that
it wields so great a fascination and inspires so deep an interest.
The history of Edinburgh to the end of the eighteenth century is the
history of the Old Town; and all the inhabitants till then were Old Town
citizens. Few cities can enumerate so varied and brilliant a series. In
the first place, of the unbroken line of Stuart sovereigns of Scotland,
all, from the poet King James I. to Queen Mary, are famed alike for
their beauty and their intellect. _Their_ Edinburgh dwellings were the
Castle and Holyrood. Then there is a long train of great Scottish nobles
and clergy who lived in Edinburgh and helped to rule Scotland. There is
a goodly company of learned men--prose writers, politicians, historians,
“humanists,” mathematicians. In the earlier centuries they were mostly
Catholic Churchmen; but, after the Reformation, they were Catholics,
Presbyterian divines, or Episcopalians, or they were clustered about the
University in unsectarian pasturages. There is a splendid procession
[Illustration: GEORGE HERIOT’S HOSPITAL FROM THE NORTH-EAST
This picture was made from the playing-grounds of the school, and shows
part of the terrace which entirely surrounds this noble building. A
portion of the Royal Infirmary appears in the distance.]
of “makars,”[47] men and women, who were Edinburgh citizens. There is a
bevy of Scottish queens of society, each in her generation; clever and
brilliant women, who, if they did not contribute to literature
themselves, were the patrons and inspirers of those who did. James V.
enlivened Edinburgh by the foundation of the Court of Session, since
which time her society has been dominated by lawyers, and many a
Scottish judge has left his name for wit and oddity among the glories of
the Parliament House. James VI. enriched Edinburgh by the foundation of
a University; and thence onwards she counted among her citizens many a
learned scholar of eccentric dress and speech. Edinburgh has had her
architects, her philanthropists, her great soldiers, and her explorers;
and she has always been especially noted for her printers and her
publishers. Nor is Edinburgh, with her love for romance, likely to
forget her illustrious criminals. To enumerate merely the names of the
notable citizens of all sorts would form a small volume in itself: it
must suffice to hurry through the centuries, picking out a name at
random here and there, and especially those connected with houses still
standing in the Old Town of Edinburgh. So-called “improvements” have
swept away many of Edinburgh’s historic possessions, among them
Sandilands’ Close, with the old mansion said to have been the residence
of Bishop Kennedy.[48] This name carries one back to the days of James
II. and the early part of James III.’s reign, when Bishop Kennedy, one
of the most important figures in Scottish history, was the great man in
Scotland, and he and the Earl of Angus were struggling against Mary of
Gueldres, the Queen-Mother, for supremacy. Scotland was then a fighting
nation; and bale-fires were erected on hill-tops, in sight of one
another, from the Borders to Stirling and the North, and were watched
day and night, ready to bring Scotland under arms within two hours of
any hostile movement of the English. Edinburgh was thronged with
citizens clad according to James II.’s arbitrary regulations: its women
of humbler class muffled, as they went to kirk or market, “under penalty
of escheat of their kerchiefs”; its Bailies’ wives in “clothes of silk
and costly scarlet and the fur of martens”; its labourers in grey or
white, and on “hailie daies” in light-blue or green or red. A gay little
town it must have been,--a gay little town, safe inside its encircling
wall, with the bells of St. Giles’s telling every one the hour, and the
Royal Standard waving on the Castle. Law, so omnipresent in Edinburgh
nowadays, was then represented by nine persons meeting twice a year to
administer justice. Education was going on in divers ways; was not the
royal child learning the love of peaceable arts and crafts, and that
respect for artists and craftsmen that was to prove his undoing with his
warlike nobles? The upper windows of many of the city homes must have
commanded a prospect of trees and broom growing on the hillsides beyond
the city, where the landowners were bidden by law to plant and to
preserve the game, where wolves prowled by night, where any Englishman
was lawfully the captive of his captor, and where a sturdy beggar or a
wandering bard might be nailed by his ear to any convenient tree. A
pleasant prospect from one’s back windows!
Through the reigns of James IV. and James V. Edinburgh possessed many
brilliant citizens. There was the poet William Dunbar, James IV.’s friar
of St. Francis, and his “King’s Messenger.” With Flodden, Dunbar totally
disappears,--all his poetic fire, his droll humour, his Scottish
force,--buried in obscurity and silence. It will never be known whether
“the auld grey horse, Dunbar” was patriotically amongst those who
followed their royal master and--
... on Flodden’s trampled sod,
For their king and for their country
Rendered up their souls to God,
or whether he survived and got his benefice at last, from the hands of
the widowed Queen, or whether he died in broken-hearted poverty. Gavin
Douglas, when he was Provost of St. Giles’s, lived in the Provost’s
lodging beside the Church. Afterwards, when he became Bishop of Dunkeld,
he lived in the palace of the Bishops of Dunkeld, in the Cowgate. The
Cowgate was then a fashionable and but half-built suburb, lying below
the main ridge of the city to the south, and communicating with the main
city above it by numerous wynds and closes. The Flodden wall included
the Cowgate, which the earlier wall had not done. Here were the palaces
of many great Church dignitaries and many nobles,--the palace of the
Bishops of Dunkeld, the town mansion of the Earl of Angus, (who in
James III.’s reign was Gavin Douglas’s nephew); and in Blackfriars Wynd,
which leads from the Cowgate up to the High Street, was the palace of
the Archbishops of Glasgow (in Gavin Douglas’s day occupied by the
famous Archbishop James Beaton). The memory of the great street fight
known as “Cleanse the Causeway” clings round the sites of those three
houses. This was the most famous of all the many fights that have taken
place in the streets of Edinburgh, and was a political contest between
the Douglases and the Hamiltons. From a conference held in the house of
the Earl of Angus, the head of the Douglases, there hurried forth Bishop
Gavin Douglas, his uncle, bearing a message from his nephew to the Earl
of Arran, head of the Hamiltons, “to caution them against violence.”
Finding them intent on violence, he appealed to his fellow-cleric, the
Archbishop of Glasgow, who was with them. “On my conscience, I know
nothing of the matter!” Archbishop Beaton assured Bishop Douglas, and
struck his breast in emphasis. But the blow returned a rattling sound,
betraying that the reverend Prelate was wearing armour below his rochet.
“Your conscience _clatters_,[49] my Lord!” answered Gavin Douglas. So
the peace mission failed, and the Hamiltons streamed through all the
narrow wynds leading from the Cowgate into the High Street, and there
found the Douglases awaiting them in a compact mass, and amid cries of
“A Douglas! A Douglas!” and “A Hamilton! A Hamilton!” the slaughter
began. When the causeways and the closes were piled with the dead, and
the battle had been won by the Douglases, the Earl of Arran cut his way
through his enemies and escaped by swimming the Nor’ Loch on a collier’s
horse. Archbishop Beaton sought sanctuary in Blackfriars, and was
dragged out from behind the Altar, and was saved, not by his clattering
armour, but by the timely intercession of Gavin Douglas.
The next Scottish poet after Gavin Douglas was Lindsay, who was
Lyon-King-at-Arms to James V. He also was a notable inhabitant of
Edinburgh, and, like Gavin, has left poems addressed to it:--
Adieu, Edinburgh! thou heich triumphant toun,
Within whose bounds richt blithefull have I been,
Of true merchands the root of this regioun
Most ready to receive Court, King, and Queen!
Thy policy and justice may be seen:
Were devotioun, wisdom, and honesty,
And credence tint, they micht be found in thee.
James V.’s widow, Mary of Guise, for six years Queen Regent of Scotland,
had her palace and her oratory on the north side of the Castle Hill,
where she was well protected by the guns of the Castle. It was
accessible through narrow closes until 1846, with some remains of its
former grandeur to be seen in lofty ceilings, in mouldings and carvings,
the words “Laus et Honor Deo” and a monogram of the Virgin on the
residence, and “Nosce Teipsum” and the date 1557 on the oratory. Now,
its place knoweth it no more, and the United Free Assembly Hall reigns
in its stead.
But, though the palace of the Frenchwoman, who struggled so hard against
the wave of the Reformation as it swept over Scotland, is gone, the
manse of the Reformer, her enemy, John Knox, remains,--not only
preserved from destruction, but turned into a species of museum, with a
custodian to click on the electric light. John Knox’s house[50] forms
one of the popular sights of Edinburgh, and is a conspicuous and
picturesque object, standing half-way down the High Street, with its
angle of wooden frontage jutting out into the street, and its
“fore-stair” and its gables. Over the door is the half-obliterated
legend “Lufe God abufe al and yi nychtbour as yi self,” and there is a
small effigy of Knox preaching, his hand pointing to a sun on which is
engraved the name of God in English, in Greek, and in Latin. The house
is three-storeyed. It is supposed that the Reformer occupied the first
storey, where are shown the window from which he is said to have
preached to the populace below, and his tiny study, with the old
Scottish pin or risp on the door.
In James VI.’s reign there was many a notable inhabitant of Edinburgh;
though James carried off some of them to England, to enliven the English
Court, as he carried off the most valuable of the Holyrood pictures, and
everything else he could lay his hands on. There was George Heriot,
“Jingling Geordie”; and there was “Tam o’ the Cowgate,” the first Earl
of
[Illustration: QUADRANGLE OF GEORGE HERIOT’S HOSPITAL
The picture shows parts of the north and east sides of the Quadrangle.
In the centre of the north side is the entrance doorway to the chapel,
above which rises an oriel window combined with a half octagonal tower,
peculiar and picturesque in construction. An octagonal tower of five
storeys is seen in the north-east angle of the court.]
Haddington; and there was George Buchanan. George Heriot’s shop, said to
have been but seven feet square, was the centre one of three small shops
in a narrow passage leading from the door of the old Tolbooth to the
“Laigh Council House,” where the Signet Library now stands. It remained
in existence until 1809. His name was carved on the architrave of the
door, and in the booth were found his forge and bellows, and the hollow
stone of the furnace, with the stone cover to extinguish it at night.
These were presented to the governors of Heriot’s Hospital. It was in
this tiny booth, the story goes, that the goldsmith entertained the King
with a “costly fire.” Heriot had been to Holyrood, and had found the
King sitting by a fire of cedar wood, and had commented on the pleasant
odour the burning of it made. Sordid King Jamie replied that it was as
costly as it was pleasant. Heriot immediately answered that if the King
would come and visit him he would show him a costlier fire. The King
went, only to find a fire of ordinary fuel burning merrily in the little
booth. But Jingling Geordie took from his press a bond for two thousand
pounds he had lent the King, and laid it on the flames, and then
inquired whether the Holyrood cedar or this formed the more costly fuel.
“Yours, most certainly, Master Heriot,” said his monarch.
The first Earl of Haddington lived, as King James’s nickname tells, in
the Cowgate, and the house stood there till about 1829. Tam o’ the
Cowgate was a learned judge, and, according to the ideas of that time,
a man of such enormous wealth that it was popularly thought he had found
the philosopher’s stone. One evening, when he was sitting with friend
and flask, tired after a hard day, clad in an easy undress of nightgown,
cap, and slippers, he heard a sudden uproar in the street. The students
of the newly founded University and the boys of the High School were
indulging in a “bicker”; and the University was winning. The Earl of
Haddington had been a High School boy, and, as an old hunter becomes
restive in his cart when he hears the distant chase, so the learned
Privy Councillor leapt up, rushed forth, rallied his old school, and, in
his nightgown, cap, and slippers, led the charge and pursued the routed
students through the town and out at the West Port, locked the city gate
on them, and then returned home to his unfinished flask and his waiting
crony.
Another friend of King James was the Earl of Mar, who had been his
fellow-pupil with George Buchanan. Him the King dubbed a “Jock o’
Sklates”; and when a marriage between the two powerful families of Mar
and Haddington was contemplated, King James cried out, “The Lord haud
grup o’ me! If Tam o’ the Cowgate’s son marry Jock o’ Sklates’s
daughter, what’s to come o’ _me_?”
George Buchanan, the humanist and reformer, was a citizen of Edinburgh
for many years. He was not one of those whom his royal pupil took with
him across the Border. It was in a first-floor room in Kennedy’s
Close,--a close no longer existing,--that George Buchanan died, in his
seventy-sixth year. When he was dying, he was visited by Andrew Melville
and his nephew, and was discovered giving a first reading lesson to a
small boy--“a, b, ab; b, a, ba.” When his visitors expressed mild wonder
at his occupation, the dying scholar, perhaps with some gleam of
remembrance of his own boyhood in Dumbartonshire, replied, “Better this
than stealin’ nowts.” Andrew Melville had brought with him some of the
proof sheets of Buchanan’s Latin history, and--the small boy having
probably slipped willingly off to play--these were discussed. They
contained some allusions to his former pupil, the absent King James, now
so alienated from the doctrines of Buchanan; and Andrew Melville hinted
gently that these might be indiscreet, and productive of trouble. “Are
they _true_?” demanded the historian. To Melville’s mind they had this
quality. “Then I’ll bide his dreid and a’ his kin’s!”
In 1550 there was born at Merchiston Castle, on the southern outskirts
of Edinburgh, John Napier, the great mathematician, the inventor of
logarithms, the chief representative of science in Scotland in his
generation, and the correspondent of Kepler. He died in 1617 in the
castle where he had been born; and this castle still remains, and none
can pass the gateway in the wall, and glance through across the green
sward to the old stone battlements, without remembering Napier of
Merchiston.
During the reigns of James VI. and Charles I. an eminent Scotsman, of
another, but equally patriotic, kind was living within a few miles of
Edinburgh. This was Drummond of Hawthornden, Episcopalian and royalist,
scholar and gentleman, who spent his meditative hours, wrote his poems,
loved books and music and the æsthetic possibilities of existence and
every form of ennobling beauty,--“all great arts and all good
philosophies,” in his--
Dear wood, and you, sweet solitary place,
Where from the vulgar I estranged live.
And “all through the years of his residence at Hawthornden must not the
seven miles of road between Hawthornden and Edinburgh have been his most
familiar ride or walk? Every other week must he not have been actually
in Edinburgh for hours and days together, visiting his Edinburgh
relatives and friends, seen in colloquy with some of them on the causey
of the old High Street near St. Giles’s Church, and known to have his
favourite lounge in that street in the shop of Andro Hart, bookseller
and publisher, just opposite the Cross?”[51]
Another notable citizen of this reign was Sir Thomas Hope, King’s
Advocate. He was the grandson of that John de Hope, of the family of Des
Houblons in Picardy, who had come over with Madeleine, James V.’s first
queen, from France, in 1537, and from whom are descended, either
directly or indirectly, many of the good old Scottish families,--the
Hopes, the Hopetouns, some of the Erskines, the Bruces of Kinross, and
others. John de Hope had been a staunch Catholic; but his son, Edward,
was “chairged to waird in the Castell” for his usage of the priests; and
the grandson, Sir Thomas Hope, King’s Advocate, was one of the two
lawyers who drew up the National League and Covenant. He lived in a big
mansion in the Cowgate, which he built in 1616, with a wide arched
entrance, a central stair, oak-panelled rooms, and decorated ceilings.
The house was pulled down and the Public Library was built in 1890 on
its site; but the carved inscription, TECVM. HABITA (from the fourth
satire of Persius) which was above the lintel in the dwelling of the old
Covenanting Advocate, is now preserved above an inner doorway of the
Public Library. This Sir Thomas Hope had several sons, three of whom
were judges; and there is an interesting portrait of him, in the
possession of one of his descendants, representing him as wearing his
legal robe and a kind of laurel wreath,--for it was not considered
fitting, in those days of parental dignity, for a father to plead
bareheaded before his sons.
Sir George Mackenzie of Rosehaugh was King’s Advocate later on in the
century, in the reigns of Charles II. and James VII., and his house,
which had formerly been the “lodging” of the Abbots of Melrose, stood in
Strichen’s Close, then called Rosehaugh Close, off the High Street, and
had a large garden down to the Cowgate, and up part of the opposite
slope. Sir George Mackenzie was a man of letters, and the friend and
correspondent of Dryden, and the founder of the Advocates’ Library; but,
_ex officio_, he was the prosecutor of the Covenanters,--and this is all
that is known of him in the popular local mind. He is buried in
Greyfriars’ Churchyard,--where the Covenant was signed on the flat
tombstones,--and in old days little boys used to prove their daring by
calling out at the door of his mausoleum--
Bluidy Mackingie, come oot if ye daur!
Lift the sneck, and draw the bar!
But they never waited so see if their invitation were to be accepted.
It was in this gloomy refuge that James Hay, a youth of sixteen, under
sentence of death for robbery, hid for six weeks after escaping from the
Tolbooth. He was an old Heriot Hospital boy, and the other Herioters
loyally braved Mackenzie’s ghost, and fed their schoolmate till the hue
and cry was passed.
One other Edinburgh figure of the seventeenth century must be mentioned,
the notorious Major Weir, whose story is said to have suggested the
character of _Manfred_ to Byron. He lived in “the sanctified bends of
the Bow,” which was, at the end of the seventeenth century, a nest of
pharisaical fanatics known as “Bow-head saints.” Of these Major Weir was
one. He had “a grim countenance and a big nose”; he wore a black
[Illustration: THE MARTYRS’ MONUMENT IN THE GRAVEYARD OF GREYFRIARS’
To the left of the spire of the Tolbooth Church, in the centre of the
picture, and next the city wall, stands the Martyrs’ Monument, in front
of which is the figure of a girl; above the figure appear some houses in
Candlemaker Row. The low building on the extreme left of the picture is
the old guardhouse. The duty of the guard was to prevent the stealing of
bodies from the graveyard. The elaborate monument on the right of the
picture is one of many erected in this graveyard during the early part
of the eighteenth century.]
cloak and carried a black staff; he was “notoriously regarded among the
Presbyterian strict sect”; and “at private meetings he prayed to
admiration.” In short, he was a pattern of sanctity, and was known among
the “Holy sisters” of the Bow as “Angelical Thomas.” Alas! Angelical
Thomas was not what he seemed. He never broke the Sabbath, but then he
broke every other commandment in the Decalogue. When he was nearly
seventy a severe illness led him to confess a long list of peculiarly
horrible crimes. Perhaps, in this more prosaic age, the Major’s form of
religion, his illness, his crimes and his confessions would all have
been attributed to the same cause, and have landed him comfortably in an
asylum for the insane. As he lived in the good old times, he was
strangled and burnt between Edinburgh and Leith; whilst his sister
Grizel, in deference to her sex, was gently hanged in the Grassmarket.
Round the names of Major Weir and his sister a hundred gruesome legends
sprang up, and “fearsome sichts were seen” in the West Bow; and the
house that he had occupied there remained uninhabited and haunted until
1878, when it was pulled down.
The eighteenth century in Edinburgh, like the seventeenth, teems with so
many names that it is hardly possible to mention all of even the most
notable. There was Edinburgh’s Horace, Allan Ramsay, the poet and
wig-maker, who scandalised the “unco guid” by bravely aiding and
abetting in all that made for innocent joyousness, setting up a
circulating library, doing his best to provide the town with a theatre,
and losing money thereby, and encouraging the Assemblies and writing
verses in their praise. His shop, where all the _literati_ gathered, was
beside the city Cross; but his quaint round house was on the Castle
hill, and was long known in Edinburgh as “the Goose Pie.” It is still
standing, but is incorporated in a large mass of new building, so that
its characteristic shape is lost. Allan Ramsay’s son was another Allan
Ramsay, and was portrait-painter to George III., and _his_ son was
General John Ramsay; so that the Goose Pie was owned in turn by three
generations, all notable Edinburgh citizens.
Those were the days of Jacobite Edinburgh, when Jacobite sentiments were
breathed in every close, and Jacobite sympathies were cherished in many
old families. When the King’s health was drunk the goblet was silently
passed over the caraffe of water to signify which King was meant, and
portraits of the young Chevalier hung in many secret places of honour.
The story of one of these Jacobite queens of society, who were generally
also either authors themselves or patrons of art and letters, is told in
Chambers’s _Traditions of Edinburgh_. Susanna, Countess of Eglintoun,
was the daughter of Sir Archibald Kennedy, and the grand-daughter of
Lord Newark, the Covenanting General. She became, when a very beautiful
girl, the third wife of the ancient Lord Eglintoun, whose previous wives
had left him without a male heir. She had been wooed by Sir John Clerk
of Penicuik, who had sent her love-verses concealed in a flute,
discoverable only to herself when she put her lips to it. But Sir
Archibald, when asked for his daughter’s hand, consulted his old friend
Lord Eglintoun on the subject. “Bide a wee, Sir Archie, my wife’s very
sickly,” was the advice given--and taken. The daughter’s own feelings
are matters of conjecture, not of history. Susanna Kennedy became
Countess of Eglintoun about the time of the Union, and lived in Stamp
Office Close, where seven daughters (who were afterwards to form one of
the sights of Edinburgh as they were carried in sedan-chairs to the
Assemblies) only decided the old peer to divorce his wife. The intention
was diverted by the birth of a son. Having reigned as one of the queens
of Edinburgh society for over a quarter of a century, and the death of
her ancient lord in 1729 having made her a widow, Lady Eglintoun carried
her social triumphs to London in 1730, where she was “much satisfied
with the honour and civilities shewn her ladyship by the Queen and all
the royal family.” In her old age Lady Eglintoun retained her loyalty to
the house of Stuart, for it was told of her that a portrait of Prince
Charlie was hung in her room so that it should be the first thing that
met her sight in the mornings. And the only request she ever refused her
son (10th Lord Eglintoun) was when he wished her to walk as a peeress in
the Coronation of George III. She was a patroness of poets--if they were
Tories (did she ever remember those verses inside a flute?); and to her
Allan Ramsay, as Jacobite at heart as ever she was, dedicated his
_Gentle Shepherd_. It was not in Stamp Office Close, but at her dower
house, Auchans Castle, near Irvine, that she received Boswell and
Johnson on their return from the Hebrides. She was then in her
eighty-fifth year, and she and the lexicographer found their Church and
State principles congenial, and the old lady told him she might have
been his mother, and now adopted him. She kissed him at parting, which,
it is said, made a lasting impression on him. The next curiosity the old
Countess adopted was a large collection of rats, which she also
succeeded in taming.
To the Jacobite gentlewomen of Edinburgh we owe many of our best-known
Scottish songs. Baroness Nairne was of the old Jacobite and Episcopalian
family of the Oliphants of Gask, and lived at Duddingston. Her house
still stands, and is called Nairne Lodge. Mrs. Cockburn, the author of
“The Flowers of the Forest,” lived at one time in a close on the Castle
Hill, and then on the first floor of a house at the end of Crichton
Street, with windows looking along Potterrow. She, it may be remembered,
was a friend of Scott’s mother, and wrote a prophetic letter about him
when he was a child of six.
Adam Smith, after he came to Edinburgh in 1778 as Commissioner of
Customs, lived for twelve years, till he died in 1790, in Panmure’s
Close at the foot of the Canongate, and he is buried in Canongate
Churchyard.
David Hume, born in Edinburgh in 1711, was one of her notable
inhabitants through nearly the whole of the eighteenth century. He was a
rolling stone, for from 1751 to 1753 his home was in Riddle’s Land;
thence he flitted to Jack’s Land, Canongate, was there for nine years,
and deserted that for James’s Court. After this, like every one else, he
joined in the rush to the New Town.