XXXV
A grim old town, Edinburgh, dominated by the ancient castle from its rock, bodeful with the story of a thousand years. Newer new towns have sprung up around it to south and west, and hem the old fortress in with a bordure of unhistoric suburbs, so that from the topmost battlements you see how small the original Edinburgh is, compared with its surroundings. Places of pilgrimage are not lacking in the old streets. There are John Knox’s house, one of the queerest, three-storied, and gabled, the very ideal of rugged strength; and the Parliament Square, once St. Giles’s churchyard, where “I K 1572,” on a stone in the pavement, marks the site of Knox’s grave. Passers-by walk over it, curiously fulfilling Johnson’s aspiration, made years before the churchyard was destroyed, by which he hoped that the dour Presbyterian was buried on a highway. While we are on the subject of tombs, let us mention that other place of pilgrimage, Greyfriars churchyard, that grisly place where Robert Louis Stevenson was accustomed in his youth to make assignations with parlour-maids. Few places so grim as a Scottish burial-ground, and Greyfriars is of these the grimmest. Dishevelled backs of houses look down upon the mouldering tombs, and kitchens and living-rooms open into the houses of the dead. Rusty iron railings, bolts and bars, guard the blackened and broken mausoleums and give the pilgrim the weird idea that the living have taken extraordinary precautions to imprison those who are never likely to break out. The only living things here are the foul grass that grows within the sepulchral enclosures, and the demon cats of an heraldic slimness that haunt the churchyard in incredible numbers, and stealing victuals from the neighbouring houses, gnaw them within the tombs. Many martyrs for religion have their resting-place here, together with those who martyred them. Persecutors and persecuted alike rest here now.
Sympathies will ever be divided between the Covenanters and their oppressors. As you read how they upheld their faith and signed their names to the Covenant in this gruesome yard of Greyfriars, so ominously on that flat tombstone which even now remains, you are fired with an enthusiasm for those rejecters of a liturgy alien from their convictions, and can curse “Claverse” with the best of those who do not forget the heavy ways of “bonnie Dundee” with them. But the Covenanters were as intolerant with those when they came to rule. The men of both sides were men of blood. The strain of intolerance remains, and the tomb of that other persecutor of the Covenanters, Sir George Mackenzie, has always been, and still is, with the people “bloody Mackenzie’s.”
Old Edinburgh life centred at the Market Cross, happily restored in 1885 by Mr. Gladstone. The Cross has had a troubled history. Reconstructed from a much older one in 1617, it remained here until 1756, when the “improving” fanatics of that time swept the historic structure away, without a thought of the associations belonging to it. They were associations of every kind. Kings had been proclaimed at it by heralds with fanfare of trumpet; patriots and traitors with equal contumely had been done to death beside it; and the continual round of punishments which gave the common hangman a busy time were inflicted here. In fact, were a rogue to be pilloried or a king’s birthday to be kept with becoming ceremony, the Cross was the place. Let us see what those punishments were like, from one example illustrative of the general run of them. Here is what they did in 1655 to “Mr. Patrik Maxwell, ane arrant decevar.” They brought him here “quhair a pillorie was erectit, gairdit and convoyed with a company of sodgeris; and their, eftir ane full houris standing on that pillorie, with his heid and handis lyand out and hoilis cuttit out for that end, his rycht lug was cuttit of; and thaireftir careyit over to the town of St. Johnnestoun, quhair ane uther pillorie wes erectit, on the quhilk the uther left lug wes cuttit af him. The caus heirof wes this; that he haid gevin out fals calumneis and leyis aganes Collonell Daniell, governour of Peirth. Bot the treuth is, he was ane notorious decevar and ane intelligencer, sumtyme for the Englesches, uther tymes for the Scottis, and decevand both of thame: besyde mony prankis quhilk wer tedious to writt.” Quite so; but if all deceivers had their ears cut off, how few would retain them! A ferocious folk, those old Scots, and petty delinquents supped sorrow at their hands with a big spoon. Sorry the lot of scandal-mongers and the like, seated on a wooden horse with hands and legs tied, and permission freely accorded to all for the throwing of missiles. Ferocity, however, should go hand in hand with courage—a quality apparently not possessed by the citizens of Edinburgh when Prince Charlie and his Highlanders came, in 1745. Incredulous of the wild clansmen ever daring to attack the town, they laughed at the very idea; but when they heard of his small force having eluded the force of Johnny Cope, sent to intercept them, and advancing in earnest, things took a very different colour. Those who were loyal to the House of Hanover were quaking in their shoes, and the Jacobites rejoicing. The city armed, even to the clergymen, who, on the Sunday before the surrender, preached in the churches with swords and daggers buckled on under their gowns. Bands of volunteers were raised, and on the report that the Pretender was near, were marched outside the walls to dispute his entry, despite their murmurs that they had volunteered to defend the city from the inside, and were not prepared to go out to be cut to pieces with the invaders’ claymores. Captain ex-Provost Drummond marched with his company down the West Bow towards the West Port. Looking round when he had reached it, he to his astonishment found himself alone. The volunteers had vanished down the back lanes or closes! But the dragoons were as bad. Coming near the enemy at Corstorphine, two miles out, they bolted without firing a shot, and so back into Edinburgh and through it and out at the other end. It was the ferocious appearance of the Highlanders that caused this terror. They were comparatively few; ill-armed, ragged, and ill-fed. But their strange dress, their wild looks, shaggy locks, and generally outlandish appearance, frightened the good Lowlanders, who knew almost as little of these Gaelic tribes as Londoners themselves. The old-time warfare of the Japanese and the Chinese, with their hideous masks; the dismal tom-toming of the African savage; the war-paint of the Red Indian, are justified of their existence, for the strange and hideous in warfare is very effective in striking a paralysing terror into an enemy. Accordingly, the tartans, the naked legs and arms, and the uncombed locks of the lairds’ uncivilised levies captured Edinburgh for Prince Charlie, who, a few days later, September 17, caused his father, the Old Pretender, to be proclaimed king, by the title of James the Third, at the Cross.
