Part 11

The case of Katherine Nairne, in 1766, excited in no small degree the attention of the Scottish public. This lady was allied, both by blood and marriage, to some respectable families. Her crime was the double one of poisoning her husband and having an intrigue with his brother, who was her associate in the murder. On her arrival at Leith in an open boat, her whole bearing betrayed so much levity, or was so different from what had been expected, that the mob raised a cry of indignation, and were on the point of pelting her, when she was with some difficulty rescued from their hands by the public authorities. In this case the Old Tolbooth found itself, as usual, incapable of retaining a culprit of condition. Sentence had been delayed by the judges on account of the lady’s pregnancy. The midwife employed at her accouchement (who continued to practise in Edinburgh so lately as the year 1805) had the address to achieve a jail-delivery also. For three or four days previous to that concerted for the escape, she pretended to be afflicted with a prodigious toothache, went out and in with her head enveloped in shawls and flannels, and groaned as if she had been about to give up the ghost. At length, when the Peter of that day had become so habituated to her appearance as not very much to heed her exits and her entrances, Katherine Nairne one evening came down in her stead, with her head wrapped all round with the shawls, uttering the usual groans, and holding down her face upon her hands, as with agony, in the precise way customary with the midwife. The inner doorkeeper, not quite unconscious, it is supposed, of the trick, gave her a hearty thump upon the back as she passed out, calling her at the same time a howling old Jezebel, and wishing she would never come back to trouble him any more. There are two reports of the proceedings of Katherine Nairne after leaving the prison. One bears that she immediately left the town in a coach, to which she was handed by a friend stationed on purpose. The coachman, it is said, had orders from her relations, in the event of a pursuit, to drive into the sea, that she might drown herself—a fate which was considered preferable to the ignominy of a public execution. The other story runs that she went up the Lawnmarket to the Castle-hill, where lived Mr ——, a respectable advocate, from whom, as he was her cousin, she expected to receive protection. Being ignorant of the town, she mistook the proper house, and applied at that of the crown agent,[63] who was assuredly the last man in the world that could have done her any service. As good luck would have it, she was not recognised by the servant, who civilly directed her to her cousin’s house, where, it is said, she remained concealed many weeks.[64] Her future life, it has been reported, was virtuous and fortunate. She was married to a French gentleman, became the mother of a large family, and died at a good old age. Meanwhile, Patrick Ogilvie, her associate in the dark crime which threw a shade over her younger years, suffered in the Grassmarket. He had been a lieutenant in the —— regiment, and was so much beloved by his fellow-soldiers, who happened to be stationed at that time in Edinburgh Castle, that the public authorities judged it necessary to shut them up in a fortress till the execution was over lest they might have attempted a rescue.

The Old Tolbooth was the scene of the suicide of Mungo Campbell while under sentence of death (1770) for shooting the Earl of Eglintoune. In the district where this memorable event took place, it is somewhat remarkable that the fate of the murderer was more generally lamented than that of the murdered person. Campbell, though what was called ‘a graceless man,’ was rather popular in his profession of exciseman, on account of his rough, honourable spirit, and his lenity in the matter of smuggling. Lord Eglintoune, on the contrary, was not liked, on account of his improving mania, which had proved a serious grievance to the old-fashioned farmers of Kyle and Cunningham. There was one article, called rye-grass, which he brought in amongst them, and forced them to cultivate; and black prelacy itself had hardly, a century before, been a greater evil. Then, merely to stir them up a little, he would cause them to exchange farms with each other; thus giving their ancient plenishings, what was doubtless much wanted, an airing, but also creating a strong sense that Lord Eglintoune was ‘far ower fashious.’ His lordship had excited some scandal by his private habits, which helped in no small degree to render unpopular one who was in reality an amiable and upright gentleman. He was likewise somewhat tenacious about matters respecting game—the besetting weakness of British gentlemen in all ages. On the other hand, Campbell, though an austere and unsocial man, acted according to popular ideas both in respect of the game and excise laws. The people felt that he was on their side; they esteemed him for his integrity in the common affairs of life, and even in some degree for his birth and connections, which were far from mean. It was also universally believed, though erroneously, that he had only discharged his gun by accident, on falling backward, while retreating before his lordship, who had determined to take it from him. In reality, Mungo, after his fall, rose on his elbow and wilfully shot the poor earl, who had given him additional provocation by bursting into a laugh at his awkward fall. The Old Tolbooth was supposed by many, at the time, to have had her usual failing in Mungo’s case. The interest of the Argyll family was said to have been employed in his favour; and the body which was found suspended over the door, instead of being his, was thought to be that of a dead soldier from the Castle substituted in his place. His relations, however, who were very respectable people in Ayrshire, all acknowledged that he died by his own hand; and this was the general idea of the mob of Edinburgh, who, getting the body into their hands, dragged it down the street to the King’s Park, and, inspired by different sentiments from those of the Ayrshire people, were not satisfied till they got it up to the top of Salisbury Crags, from which they precipitated it down the _Cat Nick_.

One of the most remarkable criminals ever confined in the Old Tolbooth was the noted William Brodie. This was a man of respectable connections, and who had moved in good society all his life, unsuspected of any criminal pursuits. It is said that a habit of frequenting cock-pits was the first symptom he exhibited of a decline from rectitude. His ingenuity as a mechanic gave him a fatal facility in the burglarious pursuits to which he afterwards addicted himself. It was then customary for the shopkeepers of Edinburgh to hang their keys upon a nail at the back of their doors, or at least to take no pains in concealing them during the day. Brodie used to take impressions of them in putty or clay, a piece of which he would carry in the palm of his hand. He kept a blacksmith in his pay, who forged exact copies of the keys he wanted, and with these it was his custom to open the shops of his fellow-tradesmen during the night. He thus found opportunities of securely stealing whatever he wished to possess. He carried on his malpractices for many years, and never was suspected till, having committed a daring robbery upon the Excise Office in Chessels’s Court, Canongate, some circumstances transpired which induced him to disappear from Edinburgh. Suspicion then becoming strong, he was pursued to Holland, and taken at Amsterdam, standing upright in a press or cupboard. At his trial, Henry Erskine, his counsel, spoke very eloquently in his behalf, representing, in particular, to the jury how strange and improbable a circumstance it was that a man whom they had themselves known from infancy as a person of good repute should have been guilty of such practices as those with which he was charged. He was, however, found guilty, and sentenced to death, along with his accomplice Smith. At the trial he had appeared in a full-dress suit of black clothes, the greater part of which was of silk, and his deportment throughout the affair was composed and gentlemanlike. He continued during the period which intervened between his sentence and execution to dress well and keep up his spirits. A gentleman of his acquaintance, calling upon him in the condemned room, was surprised to find him singing the song from the _Beggars’ Opera_, ‘’Tis woman seduces all mankind.’ Having contrived to cut out the figure of a draughtboard on the stone floor of his dungeon, he amused himself by playing with any one who would join him, and, in default of such, with his right hand against his left. This diagram remained in the room where it was so strangely out of place till the destruction of the jail. His dress and deportment at the gallows (October 1, 1788) displayed a mind at ease, and gave some countenance to the popular notion that he had made certain mechanical arrangements for saving his life. Brodie was the first who proved the excellence of an improvement he had formerly made on the apparatus of the gibbet. This was the substitution of what is called the _drop_ for the ancient practice of the double ladder. He inspected the thing with a professional air, and seemed to view the result of his ingenuity with a smile of satisfaction. When placed on that insecure pedestal, and while the rope was adjusted round his neck by the executioner, his courage did not forsake him. On the contrary, even there he exhibited a sort of levity; he shuffled about, looked gaily around, and finally went out of the world with his hand stuck carelessly into the open front of his vest.

As its infirmities increased with old age, the Tolbooth showed itself incapable of retaining prisoners of even ordinary rank. Within the recollection of people living not long ago, a youth named Hay, the son of a stabler in the Grassmarket, and who was under sentence of death for burglary, effected his escape in a way highly characteristic of the Heart of Mid-Lothian, and of the simple and unprecise system upon which all public affairs were managed before the present age.

A few days before that appointed for the execution, the father went up to the condemned room, apparently to condole with his unhappy son. The irons had been previously got quit of by files. At nightfall, when most visitors had left the jail, old Hay invited the inner turnkey, or man who kept the hall-door, to come into the room and partake of some liquor which he had brought with him. The man took a few glasses, and became mellow just about the time when the bottle was exhausted and when the time of locking up the jail (ten o’clock at that period) was approaching. Hay expressed unwillingness to part at the moment when they were just beginning to enjoy their liquor; a sentiment in which the turnkey heartily sympathised. Hay took a crown from his pocket, and proposed that his friend should go out and purchase a bottle of good rum at a neighbouring shop. The man consented, and staggering away downstairs, neglected to lock the inner door behind him. Young Hay followed close, as had been concerted, and after the man had gone out, and the outer turnkey had closed the outer door, stood in the stair just within that dread portal, ready to spring into the street. Old Hay then put his head to the great window of the hall, and cried: ‘Turn your hand!’—the usual drawling cry which brought the outer turnkey to open the door. The turnkey came mechanically at the cry, and unclosed the outer door, when the young criminal sprang out, and ran as fast as he could down Beth’s Wynd, a lane opposite the jail. According to the plan which had been previously concerted, he repaired to a particular part of the wall of the Greyfriars Churchyard, near the lower gate, where it was possible for an agile person to climb up and spring over; and so well had every stage of the business been planned that a large stone had been thrown down at this place to facilitate the leap.

The youth had been provided with a key which could open Sir George Mackenzie’s mausoleum—a place of peculiar horror, as it was supposed to be haunted by the spirit of the bloody persecutor; but what will not be submitted to for dear life? Having been brought up in Heriot’s Hospital, in the immediate neighbourhood of the churchyard, Hay had many boyish acquaintances still residing in that establishment. Some of these he contrived to inform of his situation, enjoining them to be secret, and beseeching them to assist him in his distress. The Herioters of those days had a very clannish spirit—insomuch that to have neglected the interests or safety of any individual of the community, however unworthy he might be of their friendship, would have been looked upon by them as a sin of the deepest dye. Hay’s confidants, therefore, considered themselves bound to assist him by all means in their power. They kept his secret faithfully, spared from their own meals as much food as supported him, and ran the risk of severe punishment, as well as of seeing eldritch sights, by visiting him every night in his dismal abode. About six weeks after his escape from jail, when the hue and cry had in a great measure subsided, he ventured to leave the tomb, and it was afterwards known that he escaped abroad.

So ends our gossip respecting a building which has witnessed and contained the meetings of the Scottish parliament in the romantic days of the Jameses—which held the first fixed court of law established in the country—which was looked to by the citizens in a rude age as a fortified place for defence against external danger to their lives and goods—which has immured in its gloomy walls persons of all kinds liable to law, from the gallant Montrose and the faithful Guthrie and Argyll down to the humblest malefactor in the modern style of crime—and which, finally, has been embalmed in the imperishable pages of the greatest writer of fiction our country has produced.

FOOTNOTES

[62] These verses are to be found in a curious volume, which appeared in London in 1618, under the title of _Essayes and Characters of a Prison and Prisoners_, by Geffray Mynshul, of Grayes Inn, Gent. Reprinted, 1821, by W. & C. Tait, Edinburgh. The lines were applied specially to the King’s Bench Prison.

[63] A large white house near the Castle, on the north side of the street, and now (1868) no more.

[64] Katherine Nairne was the niece of Sir William Nairne, later a judge under the title of Lord Dunsinnane, and it was currently reported that her escape from the Tolbooth was effected through his connivance. Sir William’s clerk accompanied the lady to Dover, and had great difficulty in preventing her recognition and arrest through her levity on the journey.

SOME MEMORIES OF THE LUCKENBOOTHS.

LORD COALSTOUN AND HIS WIG—COMMENDATOR BOTHWELL’S HOUSE—LADY ANNE BOTHWELL—MAHOGANY LANDS AND FORE-STAIRS—THE KRAMES—CREECH’S SHOP.

A portion of the High Street facing St Giles’s Church was called the _Luckenbooths_, and the appellation was shared with a middle row of buildings which once burdened the street at that spot. The name is supposed to have been conferred on the shops in that situation as being _close shops_, to distinguish them from the open booths which then lined our great street on both sides; _lucken_ signifying closed. This would seem to imply a certain superiority in the ancient merchants of the Luckenbooths; and it is somewhat remarkable that amidst all the changes of the Old Town there is still in this limited locality an unusual proportion of mercers and clothiers of old standing and reputed substantiality.

Previous to 1811, there remained unchanged in this place two tall massive houses, about two centuries old, one of which contained the town mansion of Sir John Byres of Coates, a gentleman of figure in Edinburgh in the reign of James VI., and whose faded tombstone may yet be deciphered in the west wall of the Greyfriars Churchyard. The Byreses of the Coates died out towards the end of the last century, and their estate has since become a site for streets, as our city spread westwards. The name alone survives in connection with an alley beneath their town mansion—_Byres’s Close_.

LORD COALSTOUN AND HIS WIG.

The _fourth floor_, constituting the Byres mansion, after being occupied by such persons as Lord Coupar, Lord Lindores, and Sir James Johnston of Westerhall, fell into the possession of Mr Brown of Coalstoun, a judge under the designation of Lord Coalstoun, and the father of the late Countess of Dalhousie. His lordship lived here in 1757, but then removed to a more spacious mansion on the Castle-hill.

A strange accident one morning befell Lord Coalstoun while residing in this house. It was at that time the custom for advocates, and no less for judges, to dress themselves in gown, wig, and cravat at their own houses, and to walk in a sort of state, thus rigged out, with their cocked hats in their hands, to the Parliament House.[65] They usually breakfasted early, and when dressed would occasionally lean over their parlour windows, for a few minutes before St Giles’s bell sounded the starting peal of a quarter to nine, enjoying the morning air, such as it was, and perhaps discussing the news of the day, or the convivialities of the preceding evening, with a neighbouring advocate on the opposite side of the alley. It so happened that one morning, while Lord Coalstoun was preparing to enjoy his matutinal treat, two girls, who lived in the second floor above, were amusing themselves with a kitten, which, in thoughtless sport, they had swung over the window by a cord tied round its middle, and hoisted for some time up and down, till the creature was getting rather desperate with its exertions. In this crisis his lordship popped his head out of the window directly below that from which the kitten swung, little suspecting, good easy man, what a danger impended, like the sword of Damocles, over his head, hung, too, by a single—not _hair_, ’tis true, but scarcely more responsible material—_garter_, when down came the exasperated animal at full career directly upon his senatorial wig. No sooner did the girls perceive what sort of a landing-place their kitten had found than, in terror and surprise, they began to draw it up; but this measure was now too late, for along with the animal up also came the judge’s wig, fixed full in its determined talons. His lordship’s surprise on finding his wig lifted off his head was much increased when, on looking up, he perceived it dangling its way upwards, without any means visible to him by which its motions might be accounted for. The astonishment, the dread, the almost _awe_ of the senator below—the half mirth, half terror of the girls above—together with the fierce and relentless energy of retention on the part of Puss between—altogether formed a scene to which language could not easily do justice. It was a joke soon explained and pardoned; but assuredly the perpetrators of it did afterwards get many lengthened injunctions from their parents never again to fish over the window, with such a bait, for honest men’s wigs.

COMMENDATOR BOTHWELL’S HOUSE.

The eastern of the tenements, which has only been renovated by a new front, formerly was the lodging of Adam Bothwell, Commendator of Holyrood, who is remarkable for having performed the Protestant marriage ceremony for Mary and the Earl of Bothwell. This ecclesiastic, who belonged to an old Edinburgh family of note, and was the uncle of the inventor of logarithms,[66] is celebrated in his epitaph in Holyrood Chapel as a judge, and the son and father of judges. His son was raised to the peerage in 1607, under the title of Lord Holyroodhouse, the lands of that abbacy, with some others, being erected into a temporal lordship in his favour. The title, however, sunk in the second generation. The circumstance which now gives most interest to the family is one which they themselves would probably have regarded as its greatest disgrace. Among the old Scottish songs is one which breaks upon the ear with the wail of wronged womanhood, mingled with the breathings of its indestructible affections:

‘Baloo, my boy, lie still and sleep, It grieves me sair to see thee weep. If thou’lt be silent, I’ll be glad; Thy mourning makes my heart full sad.... Baloo, my boy, weep not for me, Whose greatest grief’s for wranging thee, Nor pity her deserved smart, Who can blame none but her fond heart.

Baloo, my boy, thy father’s fled, When he the thriftless son hath played; Of vows and oaths forgetful, he Preferred the wars to thee and me: But now perhaps thy curse and mine Makes him eat acorns with the swine.

Nay, curse not him; perhaps now he, Stung with remorse, is blessing thee; Perhaps at death, for who can tell But the great Judge of heaven and hell By some proud foe has struck the blow, And laid the dear deceiver low,’ &c.

Great doubt has long rested on the history of this piteous ditty; but it is now ascertained to have been a contemporary effusion on the sad love-tale of Anne Bothwell, a sister of the first Lord Holyroodhouse. The only error in the setting down of the song was in calling it _Lady_ Anne Bothwell’s Lament, as the heroine had no pretension to a term implying noble rank. Her lover was a youth of uncommon elegance of person, the Honourable Alexander Erskine, brother of the Earl of Mar, of the first Earl of Buchan, and of Lord Cardross. A portrait of him, which belonged to his mother (the countess mentioned a few pages back), and which is now in the possession of James Erskine, Esq. of Cambo, Lady Mar’s descendant, represents him as strikingly handsome, with much vivacity of countenance, dark-blue eyes, a peaked beard, and moustaches. The lovers were cousins. The song is an evidence of the public interest excited by the affair: a fragment of it found its way into an English play of the day, Broom’s comedy of _The Northern Lass_ (1632). This is somewhat different from any of the stanzas in the common versions of the ballad:

‘Peace, wayward bairn. Oh cease thy moan! Thy far more wayward daddy’s gone, And never will recallèd be, By cries of either thee or me; For should we cry, Until we die, We could not scant his cruelty. Baloo, baloo, &c.

He needs might in himself foresee What thou successively mightst be; And could he then (though me forego) His infant leave, ere he did know How like the dad Would prove the lad, In time to make fond maidens glad. Baloo, baloo,’ &c.

The fate of the deceiver proved a remarkable echo of some of the verses of the ballad. Having carried his military experience and the influence of his rank into the party of the Covenanters, he was stationed (1640) with his brother-in-law, the Earl of Haddington, at Dunglass Castle, on the way to Berwick, actively engaged in bringing up levies for the army, then newly advanced across the Tweed; when, by the revenge of an offended page, who applied a hot poker to the powder magazine, the place was blown up. Erskine, with his brother-in-law and many other persons, perished. A branch of the Mar family retained, till no remote time, the awe-mingled feeling which had been produced by this event, which they had been led to regard as a punishment inflicted for the wrongs of Anne Bothwell.