Part 29

The only authentic information to be obtained on the point is presented by Maitland, when he tells us that the clearing of the Boroughmoor of timber took place in consequence of a charter from James IV. in 1508. He says nothing of robbers, but attributes the permission granted by the magistrates for the making of wooden projections merely to their desire of getting sale for their timber. After all, I am inclined to trace this fashion to taste. The wooden fronts appear to have originated in open galleries—an arrangement often spoken of in early writings. These, being closed up or formed into a range of windows, would produce the wooden-fronted house. It is remarkable that the wooden fronts do not in many instances bear the appearance of afterthoughts, as the stone structure within often shows such an arrangement of the fore wall as seems designed to connect the projecting part with the chambers within, or to give these chambers as much as possible of the borrowed light. At the same time, it is somewhat puzzling to find, in the closes below the buildings, gateways with hooks for hinges seven feet or so from the present street-front—an arrangement which does not appear necessary on the supposition that the houses were built designedly with a stone interior and a wooden projection.

In the Netherbow the street receives a contraction from the advance of the houses on the north side, thus closing a species of parallelogram, of which the Luckenbooths formed the upper extremity—the market-place of our ancient city. The uppermost of the prominent houses—having of course two fronts meeting in a right angle, one fronting to the line of street, the other looking up the High Street—is pointed to by tradition as the residence or manse of John Knox during his incumbency as minister of Edinburgh, from 1560 till (with few interruptions) his death in 1572. It is a picturesque building of three above-ground floors, constructed of substantial ashlar masonry, but on a somewhat small scale, and terminating in curious gables and masses of chimneys. A narrow door, right in the angle, gives access to a small room, lighted by one long window presented to the westward, and apparently the _hall_ of the mansion in former times. Over the window and door is this legend, in an unusually old kind of lettering:

LVFE·GOD·ABVFE·AL·AND·YI·NYCHTBOVR·[AS·]YI·SELF·

The word ‘as’ is obliterated. The words are, in modern English, simply the well-known scriptural command: ‘Love God above all, and thy neighbour as thyself.’ Perched upon the corner above the door is a small effigy of the Reformer, preaching in a pulpit, and pointing with his right hand to a stone above his head in that direction, which presents in rude sculpture the sun bursting from clouds, with the name of the Deity inscribed on his disc in three languages:

ΘΕΟΣ DEUS GOD

Dr M’Crie, in his _Life of John Knox_, states that the Reformer, on commencing duty in Edinburgh at the conclusion of the struggles with the queen-regent, ‘lodged in the house of David Forrest, a burgess of Edinburgh, from which he removed to the lodging which had belonged to Durie, Abbot of Dunfermline.’ The magistrates acted liberally towards their minister, giving him a salary of two hundred pounds Scottish money, and paying his house-rent for him, at the rate of fifteen merks yearly. In October 1561 they ordained the Dean of Guild, ‘with al diligence, to mak ane warm studye of dailles to the minister, Johne Knox, within his hous, aboue the hall of the same, with lyht and wyndokis thereunto, and all uther necessaris.’ This study is generally supposed to have been a very small wooden projection, of the kind described a few pages back, still seen on the front of the _first floor_. Close to it is a window in the angle of the building, from which Knox is said by tradition to have occasionally held forth to multitudes below.

The second floor, which is accessible by two narrow spiral stairs, one to the south, another to the west, contains a tolerably spacious room, with a ceiling ornamented by stucco mouldings, and a window presented to the westward. A partition has at one time divided this room from a narrow one towards the north, the ceiling of which is composed of the beams and flooring of the attic flat, all curiously painted with flower-work in an ancient taste. Two inferior rooms extend still farther to the northward. It is to be remarked that the wooden projection already spoken of extends up to this floor, so that there is here likewise a small room in front; it contains a fireplace, and a recess which might have been a cupboard or a library, besides two small windows. That this fireplace, this recess, and also the door by which the wooden chamber is entered from the decorated room should all be formed in the front wall of the house, and with a necessary relation to the wooden projection, strikes one as difficult to reconcile with the idea of that projection being an afterthought; the appearances rather indicate the whole having been formed at once, as parts of one design. The attic floor exhibits strong oaken beams, but the flooring is in bad order.

In the lower part of the house there is a small room, said by tradition to have been used in times of difficulty for the purpose of baptising children; there is also a well to supply the house with water, besides a secret stair, represented as communicating subterraneously with a neighbouring alley.

From the size of this house, and the variety of accesses to it, it becomes tolerably certain that Knox could have occupied only a portion of it. The question arises, which part did he occupy? Probability seems decidedly in favour of the _first floor_—that containing the window from which he is traditionally said to have preached, and where his effigy appears. An authentic fact in the Reformer’s life favours this supposition. When under danger from the hostility of the queen’s party in the castle—in the spring of 1571—‘one evening a musket-ball was fired in at his window, and lodged in the roof of the apartment in which he was sitting. It happened that he sat at the time in a different part of the room from that which he had been accustomed to occupy, otherwise the ball, from the direction it took, must have struck him’ (M’Crie). The second floor is too high to have admitted of a musket being fired in at one of the windows. A ball fired in at the ground-floor would not have struck the ceiling. The only feasible supposition in the case is that the Reformer dwelt in the _first floor_, which was not beyond an assassin’s aim, and yet at such a height that a ball fired from the street would hit the ceiling.[223]

FOOTNOTES

[223] [The right of this house to be called ‘John Knox’s House’ has been strenuously disputed; several other houses in which Knox actually lived have been identified by Robert Miller, F.S.A. Scot., Lord Dean of Guild of Edinburgh, in _John Knox and the Town Council of Edinburgh, with a Chapter on the so-called ‘John Knox’s House’_ (1898). For the genuineness of the tradition, said not to be older than 1806, see Lord Guthrie’s _John Knox and John Knox’s House_ (1898).]

HYNDFORD’S CLOSE.

At the bottom of the High Street, on the south side, there is an uncommonly huge and dense mass of stone buildings or _lands_, penetrated only by a few narrow closes. One of these is Hyndford’s Close, a name indicating the noble family which once had lodgment in it. This was a Scotch peerage not without its glories—witness particularly the third earl, who acted as ambassador in succession to Prussia, to Russia, and to Vienna. It is now extinct: its _bijouterie_, its pictures, including portraits of Maria Theresa, and other royal and imperial personages, which had been presented as friendly memorials to the ambassador, have all been dispersed by the salesman’s hammer, and Hyndford’s Close, on my trying to get into it lately (1868), was inaccessible (literally) from filth.

The entry and stair at the head of the close on the west side was a favourite residence, on account of the ready access to it from the street. In the second floor of this house lived, about the beginning of the reign of George III., Lady Maxwell of Monreith, and there brought up her beautiful daughters, one of whom became Duchess of Gordon. The house had a dark passage, and the kitchen door was passed in going to the dining-room, according to an agreeable old practice in Scotch houses, which lets the guests know on entering what they have to expect. The fineries of Lady Maxwell’s daughters were usually hung up, after washing, on a screen in this passage to dry; while the coarser articles of dress, such as shifts and petticoats, were slung decently out of sight at the window, upon a projecting contrivance similar to a dyer’s pole, of which numerous specimens still exist at windows in the Old Town for the convenience of the poorer inhabitants.

So easy and familiar were the manners of the great in those times, fabled to be so stiff and decorous, that Miss Eglintoune, afterwards Lady Wallace, used to be sent with the tea-kettle across the street to the Fountain Well for water to make tea. Lady Maxwell’s daughters were the wildest romps imaginable. An old gentleman, who was their relation, told me that the first time he saw these beautiful girls was in the High Street, where Miss Jane, afterwards Duchess of Gordon, was riding upon a sow, which Miss Eglintoune thumped lustily behind with a stick. It must be understood that in the middle of the eighteenth century vagrant swine went as commonly about the streets of Edinburgh as dogs do in our own day, and were more generally fondled as pets by the children of the last generation.[224] It may, however, be remarked that the sows upon which the Duchess of Gordon and her witty sister rode, when children, were not the common vagrants of the High Street, but belonged to Peter Ramsay, of the inn in St Mary’s Wynd, and were among the last that were permitted to roam abroad. The two romps used to watch the animals as they were let loose in the forenoon from the stable-yard (where they lived among the horse-litter), and get upon their backs the moment they issued from the close.

The extraordinary cleverness, the genuine wit, and the delightful _abandon_ of Lady Wallace made an extraordinary impression on Scottish society in her day. It almost seemed as if some faculty divine had inspired her. A milliner bringing home a cap to her when she was just about to set off to the Leith races was so unlucky as to tear it against the buckle of a porter’s knee in the street. ‘No matter,’ said her ladyship; and instantly putting it on, restored all to grace by a single pin. The cap thus misarranged was found so perfectly exquisite that ladies tore their caps on nails, and pinned them on in the hope of imitating it. It was, however, a grace beyond the reach of art.

Of the many _bon mots_ attributed to her, one alone seems worthy, from its being unhackneyed, of appearing here. The son of Mr Kincaid, king’s printer—a great Macaroni, as the phrase went; that is, dandy—was nicknamed, from his father’s lucrative patent, _Young Bibles_. This beau entering a ballroom one evening, some of the company asked who was that extraordinary-looking young man. ‘Only Young Bibles,’ quoth Lady Wallace, ‘bound in calf, and gilt, but not lettered!’

[In the same stair in Hyndford’s Close lived another lady of rank, and one who, for several reasons, filled in her time a broad space in society. This was Anne, Countess of Balcarres, the progenitrix of perhaps as many persons as ever any woman was in the same space of time. Her eldest daughter, Anne, authoress of the ballad of _Auld Robin Gray_, was, of all her eleven children, the one whose name is most likely to continue in remembrance—yea, though another of them put down the Maroon war in the West Indies. When in Hyndford’s Close, Lady Balcarres had for a neighbour in the same alley Dr Rutherford, the uncle of Sir Walter Scott; and young Walter, often at his uncle’s, occasionally accompanied his aunt ‘Jeanie’ to Lady Balcarres’s. Forty years after, having occasion to correspond with Lady Anne Barnard, _née_ Lindsay, he told her: ‘I remember all the _locale_ of Hyndford’s Close perfectly, even to the Indian screen with Harlequin and Columbine, and the harpsichord, though I never had the pleasure of hearing Lady Anne play upon it. I suppose the close, once too clean to soil the hem of your ladyship’s garment, is now a resort for the lowest mechanics—and so wears the world away.... It is, to be sure, more picturesque to lament the desolation of towers on hills and haughs, than the degradation of an Edinburgh close; but I cannot help thinking on the simple and cosie retreats where worth and talent, and elegance to boot, were often nestled, and which now are the resort of misery, filth, poverty, and vice.’[225]

The late Mrs Meetham, a younger sister of Miss Spence Yeaman, of Murie, in the Carse of Gowrie, had often heard her grand-aunt, Miss Molly Yeaman, describe, from her own recollection, the tea-drinkings of the Countess of Balcarres in Hyndford’s Close. The family was not rich, and it still retained something of its ancient Jacobitism. The tea-drinkings, as was not uncommon, took place in my lady’s bedroom. At the foot of a four-posted bed, exhibiting a finely worked coverlet, stood John, an elderly man-servant, and a _character_, in full Balcarres livery, an immense quantity of worsted lace on his coat. Resting with his arm round a bedpost, he was ready to hand the kettle when required. As the ladies went chattering on, there would sometimes occur a difficulty about a date or a point in genealogy, and then John was appealed to to settle the question. For example, it came to be debated how many of the Scotch baronetcies were real; for, as is still the case, many of them were known to be fictitious, or assumed without legal grounds. Here John was known to be not only learned, but eloquent. He began: ‘Sir James Kinloch, Sir Stuart Threipland, Sir John Wedderburn, Sir —— Ogilvy, Sir James Steuart of Coltness’ [all of them forfeited baronets, be it observed]: ‘these, leddies, are the only _real_ baronets. For the rest, I do believe, the Deil’——then a figurative declaration not fit for modern print, but which made the Balcarres party only laugh, and declare to John that they thought him not far wrong.]

FOOTNOTES

[224] The following advertisement, inserted in the _Edinburgh Courant_ of August 1, 1754, illustrates the above in a striking manner: ‘If any person has lost a LARGE SOW, let them call at the house of Robert Fiddes, gardener to Lord Minto, over against the Earl of Galloway’s, in the Horse Wynd, where, upon proving the property, paying expenses and damages done by the said sow, they may have the same restored.’

[225] Lord Lindsay’s _Lives of the Lindsays_, iii. 190.

HOUSE OF THE MARQUISES OF TWEEDDALE—THE BEGBIE TRAGEDY.

The town mansion of the Marquises of Tweeddale was one of large extent and dimensions, in a court which still bears the title of that family, nearly opposite to the mansion of John Knox.[226] When John, the fourth marquis, was Secretary of State for Scotland, in the reign of George II., this must have been a dwelling of considerable importance in the eyes of his countrymen. It had a good garden in the rear, with a yard and coach entry from the Cowgate. Now all the buildings and ‘pertinents’ are in the occupation of Messrs Oliver & Boyd, the well-known publishers.

The passage from the street into Tweeddale Court is narrow and dark, and about fifteen yards in length. Here, in 1806, when the mansion was possessed as a banking-house by the British Linen Company, there took place an extraordinary tragedy. About five o’clock of the evening of the 13th of November, when the short midwinter day had just closed, a child, who lived in a house accessible from the close, was sent by her mother with a kettle to obtain a supply of water for tea from the neighbouring well. The little girl, stepping with the kettle in her hand out of the public stair into the close, stumbled in the dark over something which lay there, and which proved to be the body of a man just expiring. On an alarm being given, it was discovered that this was William Begbie, a porter connected with the bank, in whose heart a knife was stuck up to the haft, so that he bled to death before uttering a word which might tend to explain the dismal transaction. He was at the same time found to have been robbed of a package of notes to the value of above four thousand pounds, which he had been entrusted, in the course of his ordinary duty, to carry from the branch of the bank at Leith to the head-office.[227] The blow had been given with an accuracy and a calculation of consequences showing the most appalling deliberation in the assassin; for not only was the knife directed straight into the most vital part, but its handle had been muffled in a bunch of soft paper, so as to prevent, as was thought, any sprinkling of blood from reaching the person of the murderer, by which he might have been by some chance detected. The knife was one of those with broad thin blades and wooden handles which are used for cutting bread, and its rounded front had been ground to a point, apparently for the execution of this horrible deed. The unfortunate man left a wife and four children to bewail his loss.

The singular nature and circumstances of Begbie’s murder occasioned much excitement in the public mind, and every effort was of course made to discover the guilty party. No house of a suspicious character in the city was left unsearched, and parties were despatched to watch and patrol all the various roads leading out into the country. The bank offered a reward of five hundred pounds for such information as might lead to the conviction of the offender or offenders; and the government further promised the king’s pardon to any except the actual murderer who, having been concerned in the deed, might discover their accomplices. The sheriff of Edinburgh, Mr Clerk Rattray, displayed the greatest zeal in his endeavours to ascertain the circumstances of the murder, and to detect and seize the murderer, but with surprisingly little success. All that could be ascertained was that Begbie, in proceeding up Leith Walk on his fatal mission, had been accompanied by ‘a man;’ and that about the supposed time of the murder ‘a man’ had been seen by some children to run out of the close into the street and down Leith Wynd, a lane leading off from the Netherbow at a point nearly opposite to the close. There was also reason to believe that the knife had been bought in a shop about two o’clock on the day of the murder, and that it had been afterwards ground upon a grinding-stone and smoothed on a hone. A number of suspicious characters were apprehended and examined; but all, with one exception, produced satisfactory proofs of their innocence. The exception was a carrier between Perth and Edinburgh, a man of dissolute and irregular habits, of great bodily strength, and known to be a dangerous and desperate character. He was kept in custody for a considerable time on suspicion, having been seen in the Canongate, near the scene of the murder, a very short time after it was committed. It has since been ascertained that he was then going about a different business, the disclosure of which would have subjected him to a capital punishment. It was in consequence of the mystery he felt himself impelled to preserve on this subject that he was kept so long in custody; but at length facts and circumstances came out to warrant his discharge, and he was discharged accordingly.

Months rolled on without eliciting any evidence respecting the murder, and, like other wonders, it had ceased in a great measure to engage public attention, when, on the 10th of August 1807, a journeyman mason, in company with two other men, passing through the Bellevue grounds in the neighbourhood of the city, found, in a hole in a stone enclosure by the side of a hedge, a parcel containing a large quantity of bank-notes, bearing the appearance of having been a good while exposed to the weather. After consulting a little, the men carried the package to the sheriff’s office, where it was found to contain about £3000 in large notes, being those which had been taken from Begbie. The British Linen Company rewarded the men with two hundred pounds for their honesty; but the circumstance passed without throwing any light on the murder itself.

Up to the present day the murderer of Begbie has not been discovered; nor is it probable, after the space of time which has elapsed, that he will ever be so. It is most likely that the grave has long closed upon him. The only person on whom public suspicion alighted with any force during the sixteen years ensuing upon the transaction was a medical practitioner in Leith, a dissolute man and a gambler, who put an end to his own existence not long after the murder. But I am not acquainted with any particular circumstances on which this suspicion was grounded beyond the suicide, which might spring from other causes. It was not till 1822 that any further light was thrown on this mysterious case. In a work then published under the title of _The Life and Trial of James Mackoull_, there was included a paper by Mr Denovan, the Bow Street officer, the object of which was to prove that Mackoull was the murderer, and which contained at least one very curious statement.