Part 32

On the west side of the street, immediately to the south of the Canongate Kilwinning Mason Lodge, there is a neat self-contained house of old fashion, with a flower-plot in front. This was the residence of —— Anderson, merchant in Leith, the father of seven sons, all of whom attained respectable situations in life: one was the late Mr Samuel Anderson of St Germains, banker. They had been at school with Mr Henry Dundas (afterwards Lord Melville); and when he had risen to high office, he called one day on Mr Anderson, and expressed his earnest wish to have the pleasure of dining with his seven school companions, all of whom happened at that time to be at home. The meeting took place at Mr Dundas’s, and it was a happy one, particularly to the host, who, when the hour of parting arrived, filled a bumper in high elation to their healths, and mentioned that they were the only men who had ever dined with him since he became a public servant who had not asked some favour either for themselves or their friends.

The house adjoining to the one last mentioned—having its gable to the street, and a garden to the south—was, about 1780, the residence of the Earl of Wemyss. A Lady Betty Charteris, of this family, occupied the one farthest to the south on that side of the street. She was a person of romantic history, for, being thwarted in an affair of the heart, she lay in bed for twenty-six years, till dismissed to the world where such troubles are unknown.

FOOTNOTES

[241] Strap in _Roderick Random_ was supposed to represent one Hutchinson, a barber near Dunbar. The man encouraged the idea as much as possible. When Mr [Warren] Hastings (governor of India) and his wife visited Scotland, they sent for this man, and were so pleased with him that Mr Hastings afterwards sent him a couple of razors, mounted in gold, from London.

MORAY HOUSE.

In the Canongate there is a house which has had the fortune to be connected with more than one of the most interesting points in our history. It is usually styled Moray House, being the entailed property of the noble family of Moray. The large proportions and elegant appearance of this mansion distinguish it from all the surrounding buildings, and in the rear (1847) there is a fine garden, descending in the old fashion by a series of terraces. Though long deserted by the Earls of Moray, it has been till a recent time kept in the best order, being occupied by families of respectable character.[242]

This house was built in the early part of the reign of Charles I. (about 1628) by Mary, Countess of Home, then a widow. Her ladyship’s initials, M. H., appear, in cipher fashion, underneath her coronet upon various parts of the exterior; and over one of the principal windows towards the street there is a lozenge shield, containing the two lions rampant which form the coat armorial of the Home family. Lady Home was an English lady, being the daughter of Edward Sutton, Lord Dudley. She seems to have been unusually wealthy for the dowager of a Scottish earl, for in 1644 the English Parliament repaid seventy thousand pounds which she had lent to the Scottish Covenanting Government; and she is found in the same year lending seven thousand to aid in paying the detachment of troops which that Government had sent to Ireland. She was also a sufferer, however, by the civil war, in as far as Dunglass House, which was blown up in 1640, by accident, when in the hands of the Covenanters, belonged to her in liferent. To her affluent circumstances, and the taste which she probably brought with her from her native country, may be ascribed the superior style of this mansion, which not only displays in the outside many traces of the elegant architecture which prevailed in England in the reign of James I., but contains two state apartments, decorated in the most elaborate manner, both in the walls and ceilings, with the favourite stucco-work of that reign. On the death of Lady Home the house passed (her ladyship having no surviving male issue) to her daughters and co-heiresses, Margaret, Countess of Moray, and Anne, Countess (afterwards Duchess) of Lauderdale, between whom the entire property of their father, the first Earl of Home, appears to have been divided, his title going into another line. By an arrangement between the two sisters, the house became, in 1645, the property of the Countess of Moray and her son James, Lord Doune.

It stood in this condition as to ownership, though still popularly called ‘Lady Home’s Lodging,’ when, in the summer of 1648, Oliver Cromwell paid his first visit to Edinburgh. Cromwell had then just completed the overthrow of the army of the _Engagement_—a gallant body of troops which had been sent into England by the more Cavalier party of the Scottish Covenanters, in the hope of rescuing the king from the hands of the sectaries. The victorious general, with his companion Lambert, took up his quarters in this house, and here received the visits of some of the leaders of the less loyal party of the Covenanters—the Marquis of Argyll, the Chancellor Loudoun, the Earl of Lothian, the Lords Arbuthnot, Elcho, and Burleigh, and the Reverend Messrs David Dickson, Robert Blair, and James Guthrie. ‘What passed among them,’ says Bishop Henry Guthrie in his _Memoirs_, ‘came not to be known infallibly; but it was talked very loud that he did communicate to them his design in reference to the king, and had their assent thereto.’ It is scarcely necessary to remark that this was probably no more than a piece of Cavalier scandal, for there is no reason to believe that Cromwell, if he yet contemplated the death of the king, would have disclosed his views to men still so far tinctured with loyalty as those enumerated. Cromwell’s object in visiting Edinburgh on this occasion and in holding these conferences, was probably limited to the reinstatement of the ultra-Presbyterian party in the government, from which the Duke of Hamilton and other loyalists had lately displaced it.

When, in 1650, the Lord Lorn, eldest son of the Marquis of Argyll, was married to Lady Mary Stuart, eldest daughter of the Earl of Moray, the wedding feast ‘stood,’ as contemporary writers express it, at the Earl of Moray’s house in the Canongate. The event so auspicious to these great families was signalised by a circumstance of a very remarkable kind. A whole week had been passed in festivity by the wedded pair and their relations, when, on Saturday the 18th of May, the Marquis of Montrose was brought to Edinburgh, an excommunicated and already condemned captive, having been taken in the north in an unsuccessful attempt to raise a Cavalier party for his young and exiled prince. When the former relative circumstances of Argyll and Montrose are called to mind—when it is recollected that they had some years before struggled for an ascendancy in the civil affairs of Scotland, that Montrose had afterwards chased Argyll round and round the Highlands, burned and plundered his country undisturbed, and on one occasion overthrown his forces in a sanguinary action, while Argyll looked on from a safe distance at sea—the present relative circumstances of the two chiefs become a striking illustration of the vicissitudes in personal fortune that characterise a time of civil commotion. Montrose, after riding from Leith on a sorry horse, was led into the Canongate by the Watergate, and there placed upon a low cart, driven by the common executioner. In this ignominious fashion he was conducted up the street towards the prison, in which he was to have only two days to live, and in passing along was necessarily brought under the walls and windows of Moray House. On his approach to that mansion, the Marquis of Argyll, his lady, and children, together with the whole of the marriage-party, left their banqueting, and stepping out to a balcony which overhangs the street, there planted themselves to gaze on the prostrated enemy of their house and cause. Here, indeed, they had the pleasure of seeing Montrose in all external circumstances reduced beneath their feet; but they had not calculated on the strength of nature which enabled that extraordinary man to overcome so much of the bitterness of humiliation and of death. He is said to have gazed upon them with so much serenity that they shrank back with some degree of discomposure, though not till the marchioness had expressed her spite at the fallen hero by spitting at him—an act which in the present age will scarcely be credible, though any one well acquainted with the history of the seventeenth century will have too little reason to doubt it.

In a Latin manuscript of this period, the gardens connected with the house of the Earl of Moray are spoken of as ‘of such elegance, and cultivated with so much care, as to vie with those of warmer countries, and perhaps even of England itself. And here,’ pursues the writer, ‘you may see how much the art and industry of man may avail in supplying the defects of nature. Scarcely any one would believe it possible to give so much beauty to a garden in this frigid clime.’ One reason for the excellence of the garden may have been its southern exposure. On the uppermost of its terraces there is a large and beautiful thorn, with pensile leaves; on the second there are some fruit-trees, the branches of which have been caused to spread out in a particular way, so as to form a kind of cup, possibly for the reception of a pleasure-party, for such fantastic twistings of nature were not uncommon among our ancestors. In the lowest level of the garden there is a little receptacle for water, beside which is the statue of a fishing-boy, having a basket of fish at his feet, and a _clam-shell_ inverted upon his head.[243] Here is also a small building, surmounted by two lions holding female shields, and which may therefore be supposed contemporaneous with the house: this was formerly a summer-house, but has latterly been expanded into the character of a conservatory. Tradition vaguely reports it as the place where the Union between England and Scotland was signed; though there is also a popular story of that fact having been accomplished in a _laigh shop_ of the High Street (marked No. 117), at one time a tavern, and known as the _Union Cellar_.[244] Probably the rumour, in at least the first instance, refers only to private arrangements connected with the passing of the celebrated statute in question. The Chancellor Earl of Seafield inhabited Moray House at that time on lease, and nothing could be more likely than that he should there have after-dinner consultations on the pending measure, which might in the evening be adjourned to this garden retreat.

It would appear that about this period the garden attached to the house was a sort of a public promenade or lounging-place; as was also the garden connected with Heriot’s Hospital. In this character it forms a scene in the licentious play called _The Assembly_, written in 1692 by Dr Pitcairn. _Will_, ‘a discreet smart gentleman,’ as he is termed in the prefixed list of _dramatis personæ_, but in reality a perfect debauchee, first makes an appointment with Violetta, his mistress, to meet her in this place; and as she is under the charge of a sourly devout aunt, he has to propound the matter in metaphorical language. Pretending to expound a particular passage in the Song of Solomon for the benefit of the dame, he thus gives the hint to her young protégée:

‘_Will._ “Come, my beloved, let us walk in the fields, let us lodge in the villages.” The same metaphor still. The kirk not having the liberty of bringing her servant to her mother’s house, resolveth to meet him in the villages, such as the Canongate, in respect of Edinburgh; and the vineyard, such as _my Lady Murray’s Yards_, to use a homely comparison.

‘_Old Lady._ A wondrous young man this!

* * * * *

‘_Will._ The eighth chapter towards the close: “Thou that dwellest in the gardens, cause me to hear thy voice.”

‘_Violetta._ That’s still alluding to the metaphor of a gallant, who, by some signs, warns his mistress to make haste—a whistle or so. The same with early in the former chapter; that is to say, to-morrow by six o’clock. Make haste to accomplish our loves.

‘_Old L._ Thou art a hopeful girl; I hope God has blest my pains on thee.’

In terms of this curious assignation, the third act opens in a walk in Lady Murray’s Yards, where Will meets his beloved Violetta. After a great deal of badinage, in the style of Dryden’s comedies, which were probably Dr Pitcairn’s favourite models, the dialogue proceeds in the following style:

‘_Will._ I’ll marry you at the rights, if you can find in your heart to give yourself to an honest fellow of no great fortune.

‘_Vio._ In truth, sir, methinks it were fully as much for my future comfort to bestow myself, and any little fortune I have, upon you, as some reverend spark in a band and short cloak, with the patrimony of a good gift of prayer, and as little sense as his father, who was hanged in the Grassmarket for murdering the king’s officers, had of honesty.

‘_Will._ Then I must acknowledge, my dear madam, I am most damnably in love with you, and must have you by foul or fair means; choose you whether.

‘_Vio._ I’ll give you fair-play in an honest way.

‘_Will._ Then, madam, I can command a parson when I please; and if you be half so kind as I could wish, we’ll take a hackney, and trot up to some honest curate’s house: besides, a guinea or so will be a charity to him perhaps.

‘_Vio._ Hold a little; I am hardly ready for that yet,’ &c.

After the departure of this hopeful couple, Lord Huffy and Lord Whigriddin, who are understood to have been intended for Lord Leven (son of the Earl of Melville) and the Earl of Crawford, enter the gardens, and hold some discourse of a different kind.

FOOTNOTES

[242] For many years the Practising School for Teachers under the management of the Free Church of Scotland, now the Training College for Teachers under the Provincial Council of Education.

[243] The terraces have long since been deprived of their last semblance of the old gardens; but while recent excavations were being made for an extension of the educational buildings, the statue of the boy was discovered underground in the lowest terrace. The statue is preserved, and forms a connecting link between ‘My Lady Murray’s Yards’ and the ‘Yards’ of the modern school.

[244] On the north side of the High Street, opposite the Tron Church. The site is now covered by the opening of Cockburn Street.

THE SPEAKING HOUSE.

The mansion on which I venture to confer this title is an old one of imposing appearance, a little below Moray House. It is conspicuous by three gables presented to the street, and by the unusual space of linear ground which it occupies. Originally, it has had no door to the street. A _porte-cochère_ gives admittance to a close behind, from which every part of the house had been admissible, and when this gateway was closed the inhabitants would be in a tolerably defensible position. In this feature the house gives a striking idea of the insecurity which marked the domestic life of three hundred years ago.

It was built in the year of the assassination of the Regent Moray, and one is somewhat surprised to think that, at so dark a crisis of our national history, a mansion of so costly a character should have taken its rise. The owner, whatever grade he held, seems to have felt an apprehension of the popular talk on the subject of his raising so elegant a mansion; and he took a curious mode of deprecating its expression. On a tablet over the ground-floor he inscribes: HODIE MIHI: CRAS TIBI. CUR IGITUR CURAS? along with the year of the erection, 1570. This is as much as to say: ‘I am the happy man to-day; your turn may come to-morrow. Why, then, should you repine?’ One can imagine from a second tablet, a little way farther along the front, that as the building proceeded, the storm of public remark and outcry had come to be more and more bitter, so that the soul of the owner got stirred up into a firm and defying anger. He exclaims (for, though a lettered inscription, one feels it as an exclamation): UT TU LINGUÆ TUÆ, SIC EGO MEAR. AURIUM, DOMINUS SUM (‘As thou of thy tongue, so I of my ears, am lord’); thus quoting, in his rage on this petty occasion, an expression said to have been used in the Roman senate by Titus Tacitus when repelling the charges of Lucius Metellus.[245] Afterwards he seems to have cooled into a religious view of the predicament, and in a third legend along the front he tells the world: CONSTANTI PECTORI RES MORTALIUM UMBRA; ending a little farther on with an emblem of the Christian hope of the Resurrection, ears of wheat springing from a handful of bones. It is a great pity that we should not know who was the builder and owner of this house, since he has amused us so much with the history of his feelings during the process of its erection. A friend at my elbow suggests—a schoolmaster! But who ever heard of a schoolmaster so handsomely remunerated by his profession as to be able to build a house?

Nothing else is known of the early history of this house beyond the fact of the Canongate magistrates granting a charter for it to the Hammermen of that burgh, September 10, 1647.[246] It was, however, in 1753 occupied by a person of no less distinction than the Dowager Duchess of Gordon.[247]

In the alley passing under this mansion there is a goodly building of more modern structure, forming two sides of a quadrangle, with a small court in front divided from the lane by a wall in which there is a large gateway. Amidst filthiness indescribable, one discerns traces of former elegance: a crest over the doorway—namely, a cock mounted on a trumpet, with the motto ‘VIGILANTIBUS,’ and the date 1633; over two upper windows, the letters ‘S. A. A.’ and ‘D. M. H.’ These memorials, with certain references in the charter before mentioned, leave no room for doubt that this was the house of Sir Archibald Acheson of Abercairny, Secretary of State for Scotland in the reign of Charles I., and ancestor to the Earl of Gosford in Ireland, who to this day bears the same crest and motto. The letters are the initials of Sir Archibald and his wife, Dame Margaret Hamilton. Here of course was the _court_ of Scotland for a certain time, the Secretary of State being the grand dispenser of patronage in our country at that period—_here_, where nothing but the extremest wretchedness is now to be seen! That boastful bird, too, still seeming to assert the family dignity, two hundred years after it ceased to have any connection with the spot! Verily there are some moral preachments in these dark old closes if modern refinement could go to hear the sermon!

Sir Archibald Acheson acquired extensive lands in Ireland,[248] which have ever since been in the possession of his family. It was a descendant of his, and of the same name, who had the gratification of becoming the landlord of Swift at Market-hill, and whom the dean was consequently led to celebrate in many of his poems. Swift seems to have been on the most familiar terms with this worthy knight and his lady; the latter he was accustomed to call _Skinnibonia_, _Lean_, or _Snipe_, as the humour inclined him. The inimitable comic painting of her ladyship’s maid Hannah, in the debate whether Hamilton’s Bawn should be turned into a malt-house or a barrack, can never perish from our literature. In like humour, the dean asserts the superiority of himself and his brother-tenant Colonel Leslie, who had served much in Spain, over the knight:

‘Proud baronet of Nova Scotia, The dean and Spaniard much reproach ye. Of their two fames the world enough rings; Where are thy services and sufferings? What if for nothing once you kissed, Against the grain, a monarch’s fist? What if among the courtly tribe, You lost a place and saved a bribe? And then in surly mood came here To fifteen hundred pounds a year, And fierce against the Whigs harangued? You never ventured to be hanged. How dare you treat your betters thus? Are you to be compared to us?’

Speaking also of a celebrated thorn at Market-hill, which had long been a resort of merry-making parties, he reverts to the Scottish Secretary of former days:

‘Sir Archibald, that valorous knight, The lord of all the fruitful plain, Would come and listen with delight, For he was fond of rural strain:

Sir Archibald, whose favourite name Shall stand for ages on record, By Scottish bards of highest fame, Wise Hawthornden and Stirling’s lord.’

The following letter to Sir Archibald from his friend Sir James Balfour, Lord Lyon, occurs amongst the manuscript stores of the latter gentleman in the Advocates’ Library:

‘To Sir ARCHIBALD ACHESONE, one of the Secretaries of Staite.

‘WORTHY SIR—Your letters, full of Spartanical brevity to the first view, bot, againe overlooked, Demosthenicall longe; stuffed full of exaggerations and complaints; the yeast of your enteirest affections, sent to quicken a slumbring friend as you imagine, quho nevertheless remains vigilant of you and of the smallest matters, which may aney wayes adde the least rill of content to the ocean of your happiness; quherfor you may show your comerad, and intreat him from me, as from one that trewly loves and honors his best pairts, that now he vold refraine, both his tonge and pen, from these quhirkis and obloquies, quherwith he so often uses to stain the name of grate personages, for hardly can he live so reteiredly, in so voluble ane age, without becoming at one tyme or uther obnoxious to the blow of some courtier. So begging God to bless you, I am your—

JA. BALFOUR. ‘_LONDON, 9 Apryll 1631._’

Twenty years before the Duchess of Gordon lived in the venerable house at the head of the close, a preceding dowager resided in another part of the town. This was the distinguished Lady Elizabeth Howard (daughter of the Duke of Norfolk, by Lady Anne Somerset, daughter of the Marquis of Worcester), who occasioned so much disturbance in the end of Queen Anne’s reign by the Jacobite medal which she sent to the Faculty of Advocates. Her grace lived in a house at the Abbeyhill, where, as we are informed by Wodrow, in a tone of pious horror,[249] she openly kept a kind of college for instructing young people in Jesuitism and Jacobitism together. In this labour she seems to have been assisted by the Duchess of Perth, a kindred soul, whose enthusiasm afterwards caused the ruin of her family, by sending her son into the insurrection of 1745.[250] The Duchess of Gordon died here in 1732. I should suppose the house to have been that respectable old villa, at the extremity of the suburb of Abbeyhill, in which the late Baron Norton, of the Court of Exchequer, lived for many years. It was formerly possessed by Baron Mure, who, during the administration of the Earl of Bute, exercised the duties and dispensed the patronage of the _sous-ministre_ for Scotland, under the Hon. Stuart Mackenzie, younger brother of the Premier. This was of course in its turn the _court_ of Scotland; and from the description of a gentleman old enough to remember attending the levees (Sir W. M. Bannatyne), I should suppose that it was as much haunted by suitors of all kinds as ever were the more elegant halls of Holyrood House. Baron Mure, who was the personal friend of Earl Bute, died in 1774.

FOOTNOTES