CHAPTER III

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

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.

“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.