Part 10
Strange to say, this great merchant came to poverty, and died in a prison. The reader of the Waverley novels may remember David Deans telling how his father ‘saw them toom the sacks of dollars out o’ Provost Dick’s window intill the carts that carried them to the army at Dunse Law’—‘if ye winna believe his testimony, there is the window itsell still standing in the Luckenbooths—I think it’s a claith-merchant’s buith the day.’ This refers to large advances which Dick made to the Covenanters to enable them to carry on the war against the king. The house alluded to is actually now a claith-merchant’s booth, having long been in the possession of Messrs John Clapperton & Company. Two years after Dunse Law, Dick gave the Covenanters 100,000 merks in one sum. Subsequently, being after all of royalist tendencies, he made still larger advances in favour of the Scottish government during the time when Charles II. was connected with it; and thus provoking the wrath of the English Commonwealth, his ruin was completed by the fines to which he was subjected by that party when triumphant, amounting in all to £65,000.
Poor Sir William Dick—for he had been made a baronet by Charles I.—went to London to endeavour to recover some part of his lost means. When he represented the indigence to which he had been reduced, he was told that he was always able to procure pie-crust when other men could not get bread. There was, in fact, a prevalent idea that he possessed some supernatural means—such as the philosopher’s stone—of acquiring money. (Pie-crust came to be called _Sir William Dick’s Necessity_.) The contrary was shown when the unfortunate man died soon after in a prison in Westminster. There is a picture in Prestonfield House, near Edinburgh, the seat of his descendant, representing him in this last retreat in a mean dress, surrounded by his numerous hapless family. A rare pamphlet, descriptive of his case, presents engravings of three such pictures; one exhibiting him on horseback, attended by guards as Lord Provost of Edinburgh, superintending the unloading of one of his rich ships at Leith; another as a prisoner in the hands of the bailiffs; the third as dead in prison. A more memorable example of the instability of fortune does not occur in our history. It seems completely to realise the picture in Job (chap. xxvii.): ‘The rich man shall lie down, but he shall not be gathered: he openeth his eyes, and he is not. Terrors take hold on him as waters, a tempest stealeth him away in the night. The east wind carrieth him away, and he departeth: and as a storm, hurleth him out of his place. For God shall cast upon him, and not spare: he would fain flee out of his hand. Men shall clap their hands at him, and shall hiss him out of his place.’
The fortunes of the family were restored by Sir William’s grandson, Sir James, a remarkably shrewd man, who was likewise a merchant in Edinburgh. There is a traditionary story that this gentleman, observing the utility of manure, and that the streets of Edinburgh were loaded with it, to the detriment of the comfort of the inhabitants, offered to relieve the town of this nuisance on condition that he should be allowed, for a certain term of years, to carry it away gratis. Consent was given, and the Prestonfield estate became, in consequence, like a garden. The Duke of York had a great affection for Sir James Dick, and used to walk through the Park to visit him at his house very frequently. Hence, according to the report of the family, the way his Royal Highness took came to be called _The Duke’s Walk_; afterwards a famous resort for the fighting of duels. Sir James became Catholic, and, while provost in 1681, had his house burned over his head by the collegianers; but it was rebuilt at the public expense. His grandson, Sir Alexander Dick, is referred to in kindly terms in Boswell’s _Tour to the Hebrides_ as a venerable man of studious habits and a friend of men of letters. The reader will probably learn with some surprise that though Sir William’s descendants never recovered any of the money lent by him to the State, a lady of his family, living in 1844, was in the enjoyment of a pension with express reference to that ancient claim.
THE BIRTH OF LORD BROUGHAM.
[1868.—It has been remarked elsewhere that, for a great number of years after the general desertion of the Old Town by persons of condition, there were many denizens of the New who had occasion to look back to the Canongate and Cowgate as the place of their birth. The nativity of one person who achieved extraordinary greatness and distinction, and whose death was an occurrence of yesterday, Henry, Lord Brougham, undoubtedly was connected with the lowly place last mentioned.
The Edinburgh tradition on the subject was that Henry Brougham, younger, of Brougham Hall, in the county of Cumberland, in consequence of a disappointment in love, came to Edinburgh for the diversion of his mind. Principal Robertson, to whom he bore a letter of introduction, recommended the young man to the care of his sister—Mrs Syme, widow of the minister of Alloa—who occupied what was then considered as a good and spacious house at the head of the Cowgate—strictly the third floor of the house now marked No. 8—a house desirable from its having an extraordinary space in front. Here, it would appear, Mr Brougham speedily consoled himself for his former disappointment by falling in love with Eleonora, the daughter of Mrs Syme; and a marriage, probably a hurried one, soon united the young pair. They set up for themselves (Whitsunday 1778) in an upper floor of a house in the then newly built St Andrew Square, where, in the ensuing September, their eldest son, charged with so illustrious a destiny, first saw the light.[61]
Mr Brougham conclusively settled in Edinburgh; he subsequently occupied a handsome house in George Street. He was never supposed to be a man of more than ordinary faculties; but any deficiency in this respect was amply made up for by his wife, who is represented by all who remember her as a person of uncommon mental gifts. The contrast of the pair drew the attention of society, and was the subject of a gently satiric sketch in Henry Mackenzie’s _Lounger_, No. 45, published on the 10th December 1785, which, however, would vainly be looked for in the reprinted copies, as it was immediately suppressed.]
FOOTNOTES
[52] Raised to the Bench with the title of Lord Kerse.
[53] The lintel bearing this legend is preserved in a doorway at the top of the staircase of the Free Library, George IV. Bridge. The Cowgate portion of the Library building (1887-89) occupies the site of Sir Thomas Hope’s house.
[54] While King’s Advocate, Sir Thomas Hope had the unique experience of pleading at the Bar before two of his sons who were judges—Lord Craighall and Lord Kerse. There is a tradition that when addressing the Court he remained covered, and that from this circumstance the Lord Advocates still have this privilege, although they do not exercise it. Probably the custom introduced by Sir Thomas Hope originated in his being an officer of state, which entitled him to sit in parliament wearing his hat, and he claimed the same privilege when appearing before the judges.
[55] See a Memoir by Sir Archibald Steuart Denham in the publications of the Maitland Club.
[56] The site of Chiesly’s house is that occupied by the Episcopal Church Training College in Orwell Place.
[57] In _The Domestic Annals of Scotland_ the place of his execution is given as Drumsheugh, and Sir Walter Scott says he was hanged near his own house of Dalry.
[58] This was the first High School, built in 1578 in the grounds of the Blackfriars’ Monastery, of which David Malloch, or Mallet, was janitor in 1717. The building faced the Canongate. In 1777 it was replaced by the building now facing Infirmary Street and used in connection with the university. It is this later building that is associated with Sir Walter Scott, Lord Brougham, Lord Jeffrey, Lord Cockburn, and other eminent men of the last quarter of the eighteenth and first quarter of the nineteenth century.
[59] The Mechanics’ Library was discontinued when the Free Library was opened. Bailie Macmoran’s house is now used as a university settlement.
[60] After being the residence for a time of Sir John Clerk of Penicuik and other notable citizens, it was latterly occupied by the widow (the seventh wife) of the Rev. David Williamson—‘Dainty Davie’—minister of St Cuthbert’s Church at the time of the Revolution.
[61] The house is marked No. 21. Its back windows enjoy a fine view of the Firth of Forth and the Fife hills. The registration of his lordship’s birth appears as follows: ‘Wednesday, 30th September 1778, Henry Brougham, Esq., parish of St Gilles (_sic_), and Eleonora Syme, his spouse, a son born the 19th current, named Henry Peter. Witnesses, Mr Archibald Hope, Royal Bank, and Principal Robertson.’ The parts of the New Town then built belonged to St Giles’s parish.
THE OLD TOLBOOTH.
The genius of Scott has shed a peculiar interest upon this ancient structure, whose cant name of the _Heart of Mid-Lothian_ has given a title to one of his happiest novels. It stood in a singular situation, occupying half the width of the High Street, elbow to elbow, as it were, with St Giles’s Church. Antique in form, gloomy and haggard in aspect, its black stanchioned windows opening through its dingy walls like the apertures of a hearse, it was calculated to impress all beholders with a due and deep sense of what was meant in Scottish law by the _squalor carceris_. At the west end was a projecting ground-floor, formed of shops, but presenting a platform on which executions took place. The building itself was composed of two parts, one more solid and antique than the other, and much resembling, with its turret staircase, one of those tall, narrow fortalices which are so numerous in the Border counties. Indeed, the probability is that this had been a kind of peel or house of defence, required for public purposes by the citizens of Edinburgh when liable to predatory invasions. Doubtless the house or some part of it was of great antiquity, for it was an old and ruinous building in the reign of Mary, and only narrowly saved at that time from destruction. Most likely it was the very _pretorium burgi de Edinburgi_ in which a parliament assembled in 1438 to deliberate on the measures rendered necessary by the assassination of the poet-king, James I. In those simple days great and humble things came close together: the house which contained parliaments upstairs, presented shops in the lower story, and thus drew in a little revenue to the magistrates. Here met the Court of Session in its earliest years. Here Mary assembled her parliaments; and here—on the Tolbooth door—did citizens affix libels by night, charging the Earl of Bothwell with the murder of Darnley. Long, long since all greatness had been taken away from the old building, and it was condemned to be a jail alone, though still with shops underneath. At length, in 1817, the fabric was wholly swept away, in consequence of the erection of a better jail on the Calton Hill. The gateway, with the door and padlock, was transferred to Abbotsford, and, with strange taste on the part of the proprietor, built into a conspicuous part of that mansion.
The principal entrance to the Tolbooth, and the only one used in later days, was at the bottom of the turret next the church. The gateway was of tolerably good carved stone-work, and occupied by a door of ponderous massiness and strength, having, besides the lock, a flap-padlock, which, however, was generally kept unlocked during the day. In front of the door there always paraded, or rather loitered, a private of the town-guard, with his rusty red clothes and Lochaber axe or musket. The door adjacent to the principal gateway was, in the final days of the Tolbooth, ‘MICHAEL KETTEN’S SHOE-SHOP,’ but had formerly been a _thief’s hole_. The next door to that, stepping westward, was the residence of the turnkey; a dismal, unlighted den, where the gray old man was always to be found, when not engaged in unlocking or closing the door. The next door westward was a lock-up house, which in later times was never used. On the north side, towards the street, there had once been shops, which were let by the magistrates; but these were converted, about the year 1787, into a guard-house for the city-guard, on their ancient capitol in the High Street being destroyed for the levelling of the streets. The ground-floor, thus occupied for purposes in general remote from the character of the building, was divided lengthwise by a strong partition wall; and communication between the rooms above and these apartments below was effectually interdicted by the strong arches upon which the superstructure was reared.
On passing the outer door—where the rioters of 1736 thundered with their sledge-hammers, and finally burnt down all that interposed between them and their prey—the keeper instantly involved the entrant in darkness by reclosing the gloomy portal. A flight of about twenty steps then led to an inner door, which, being duly knocked at, was opened by a bottle-nosed personage, denominated Peter, who, like his sainted namesake, always carried two or three large keys. You then entered _the Hall_, which, being free to all the prisoners except those of the _East End_, was usually filled with a crowd of shabby-looking but very merry loungers. A small rail here served as an additional security, no prisoner being permitted to come within its pale. Here also a sentinel of the city-guard was always walking, having a bayonet or ramrod in his hand. The _Hall_, being also the chapel of the jail, contained an old pulpit of singular fashion—such a pulpit as one could imagine John Knox to have preached from; which, indeed, he was traditionally said to have actually done. At the right-hand side of the pulpit was a door leading up the large turnpike to the apartments occupied by the criminals, one of which was of plate-iron. The door was always shut, except when food was taken up to the prisoners. On the west end of the hall hung a board, on which were inscribed the following emphatic lines:
‘A prison is a house of care, A place where none can thrive, A touchstone true to try a friend, A grave for men alive—
Sometimes a place of right, Sometimes a place of wrong, Sometimes a place for jades and thieves, And honest men among.’[62]
Apart of the hall on the north side was partitioned off into two small rooms, one of which was the captain’s pantry, the other his counting-room. In the latter hung an old musket or two, a pair of obsolete bandoleers, and a sheath of a bayonet, intended, as one might suppose, for his defence against a mutiny of the prisoners. Including the space thus occupied, the hall was altogether twenty-seven feet long by about twenty broad. The height of the room was twelve feet. Close to the door, and within the rail, was a large window, thickly stanchioned; and at the other end of the hall, within the captain’s two rooms, was a double window of a somewhat extraordinary character. Tradition, supported by the appearance of the place, pointed out this as having formerly been a door by which royalty entered the hall in the days when it was the Parliament House. It is said that a kind of bridge was thrown between this aperture and a house on the other side of the street, and that the sovereign, having prepared himself in that house to enter the hall in his state robes, proceeded at the proper time along the arch—an arrangement by no means improbable in those days of straitened accommodation.
The window on the south side of the hall overlooked the outer gateway. It was therefore employed by the inner turnkey as a channel of communication with his exterior brother when any visitor was going out. He used to cry over this window, in the tone of a military order upon parade: ‘_Turn your hand_,’ whereupon the gray-haired man on the pavement below opened the door and permitted the visitor, who by this time had descended the stair, to walk out.
The floor immediately above the hall was occupied by one room for felons, having a bar along part of the floor, to which condemned criminals were chained, and a square box of plate-iron in the centre, called THE CAGE, which was said to have been constructed for the purpose of confining some extraordinary culprit who had broken half the jails in the kingdom. Above this room was another of the same size, also appropriated to felons.
The larger and western part of the edifice, of coarser and apparently more modern construction, contained four floors, all of which were appropriated to the use of debtors, except a part of the lowest one, where a middle-aged woman kept a tavern for the sale of malt liquors. A turnpike stair gave access to the different floors. As it was narrow, steep, and dark, the visitor was assisted in his ascent by a greasy rope, which, some one was sure to inform him afterwards, had been employed in hanging a criminal. In one of the apartments on the second floor was a door leading out to the platform whereon criminals were executed, and in another, on the floor above, was an ill-plastered part of the wall covering the aperture through which the gallows was projected. The fourth flat was a kind of barrack, for the use of the poorest debtors.
There was something about the Old Tolbooth which would have enabled a blindfolded person led into it to say that it was a jail. It was not merely odorous from the ordinary causes of imperfect drainage, but it had poverty’s own smell—the odour of human misery. And yet it did not seem at first a downcast scene. The promenaders in the hall were sometimes rather merry, cutting jokes perhaps upon Peter’s nose, or chatting with friends on the benches regarding the news of the day. Then Mrs Laing drove a good trade in her little tavern; and if any messenger were sent out for a bottle of whisky—why, Peter never searched pockets. New men were hailed with:
‘Welcome, welcome, brother debtor, To this poor but merry place; Here nor bailiff, dun, nor fetter, Dare to show his gloomy face.’
They would be abashed at first, and the first visit of wife or daughter, coming shawled and veiled, and with timorous glances, into the room where the loved object was trying to become at ease with his companions, was always a touching affair. But it was surprising how soon, in general, all became familiar, easy, and even to appearance happy. Each had his story to tell, and sympathy was certain and liberal. The whole management was of a good-natured kind, as far as a regard to regulations would allow. It did not seem at all an impossible thing that a debtor should accommodate some even more desolate friend with a share of his lodging for the night, or for many nights, as is said to have been done in some noted instances, to which we shall presently come.
It was natural for a jail of such old standing to have passed through a great number of odd adventures, and have many strange tales connected with it. One of the most remarkable traits of its character was a sad liability to the failure of its ordinary powers of retention when men of figure were in question. The old house had something like that faculty attributed by Falstaff to the lion and himself—of knowing men who ought not to be too roughly handled. The consequence was that almost every criminal of rank confined in it made his escape. Lord Burleigh, an insane peer, who, about the time of the Union, assassinated a schoolmaster who had married a girl to whom he had paid improper addresses, escaped, while under sentence of death, by changing clothes with his sister. Several of the rebel gentlemen confined there in 1716 were equally fortunate; a fact on which there was lately thrown a flood of light, when I found, in a manuscript list of subscriptions for the relief of the other rebel gentlemen at Carlisle, the name of the Guidman of the Tolbooth—so the chief-keeper was called—down for a good sum. I am uncertain to which of all these personages the following anecdote, related to me by Sir Walter Scott, refers.
It was contrived that the prisoner should be conveyed out of the Tolbooth in a trunk, and carried by a porter to Leith, where some sailors were to be ready with a boat to take him aboard a vessel about to leave Scotland. The plot succeeded so far as the escape from jail was concerned, but was knocked on the head by an unlucky and most ridiculous accident. It so happened that the porter, in arranging the trunk upon his back, placed the end which corresponded with the feet of the prisoner _uppermost_. The head of the unfortunate man was therefore pressed against the lower end of the box, and had to sustain the weight of the whole body. The posture was the most uneasy imaginable. Yet life was preferable to ease. He permitted himself to be taken away. The porter trudged along with the trunk, quite unconscious of its contents, and soon reached the High Street. On gaining the Netherbow he met an acquaintance, who asked him where he was going with that large burden. To Leith, was the answer. The other inquired if the job was good enough to afford a potation before proceeding farther upon so long a journey. This being replied to in the affirmative, and the carrier of the box feeling in his throat the philosophy of his friend’s inquiry, it was agreed that they should adjourn to a neighbouring tavern. Meanwhile, the third party, whose inclinations had not been consulted in this arrangement, was wishing that it were at once well over with him in the Grassmarket. But his agonies were not destined to be of long duration. The porter in depositing him upon the causeway happened to make the end of the trunk come down with such precipitation that, unable to bear it any longer, the prisoner screamed out, and immediately after fainted. The consternation of the porter on hearing a noise from his burden was of course excessive; but he soon recovered presence of mind enough to conceive the occasion. He proceeded to unloose and to burst open the trunk, when the hapless nobleman was discovered in a state of insensibility. As a crowd collected immediately, and the city-guard were not long in coming forward, there was of course no further chance of escape. The prisoner did not recover from his swoon till he had been safely deposited in his old quarters; but, if I recollect rightly, he eventually escaped in another way.
In two very extraordinary instances an escape from justice has, strange as it may appear, been effected by _means_ of the Old Tolbooth. At the discovery of the Rye-House Plot, in the reign of Charles II., the notorious Robert Fergusson, usually styled ‘The Plotter,’ was searched for in Edinburgh, with a view to his being subjected, if possible, to the extreme vengeance of the law. It being known almost certainly that he was in town, the authorities shut the gates, and calculated securely upon having him safe within their toils. The Plotter, however, by an expedient worthy of his ingenious character, escaped by taking refuge in the Old Tolbooth. A friend of his happened to be confined there at the time, and was able to afford protection and concealment to Fergusson, who, at his leisure, came abroad, and betook himself to a place of safer shelter on the Continent. The same device was practised in 1746 by a gentleman who had been concerned in the Rebellion, and for whom a hot search had been carried on in the Highlands.