CHAPTER V

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

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

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

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.