II.—PLAN AND FABRIC OF THE TOWN IN 1561
Then, as now, the buildings that went by the general name of Holyrood were distinguishable into two portions. There was the Abbey, now represented only by one beautiful and spacious fragment of ruin, called the Royal Chapel, but then, despite the spoliations to which it had been subjected by recent English invasions, still tolerably preserved in its integrity as the famous edifice, in Early Norman style, which had been founded in the twelfth century by David I., and had been enlarged in the fifteenth by additions in the later and more florid Gothic. Close by this was Holyrood House, or the Palace proper, built in the earlier part of the sixteenth century, and chiefly by James IV., to form a distinct royal dwelling, and so supersede that occasional accommodation in the Abbey itself which had sufficed for Scottish sovereigns before Edinburgh was their habitual or capital residence. One block of this original Holyrood House still remains in the two-turreted projection of the present Holyrood which adjoins the ruined relic of the Abbey, and which contains the rooms now specially shown as “Queen Mary’s Apartments.” But the present Holyrood, as a whole, is a construction of the reign of Charles II., and gives little idea of the Palace in which Mary took up her abode in 1561. The two-turreted projection on the left was not balanced then, as now, by a similar two-turreted projection on the right, with a façade of less height between, but was flanked on the right by a continued chateau-like frontage, of about the same height as the turreted projection, and at a uniform depth of recess from it, but independently garnished with towers and pinnacles. The main entrance into the Palace from the great outer courtyard was through this chateau-like flank, just about the spot where there is the entrance through the present middle façade; and this entrance led, like the present, into an inner court or quadrangle, built round on all the four sides. That quadrangle of chateau, touching the Abbey to the back from its north-eastern corner, and with the two-turreted projection to its front from its north-western corner, constituted, indeed, the main bulk of the Palace. There were, however, extensive appurtenances of other buildings at the back or at the side farthest from the Abbey, forming minor inner courts, while part of that side of the great outer courtyard which faced the entrance was occupied by offices belonging to the Palace, and separating the courtyard from the adjacent purlieus of the town. For the grounds of both Palace and Abbey were encompassed by a wall, having gates at various points of its circuit, the principal and most strongly guarded of which was the Gothic porch admitting from the foot of the Canongate into the front courtyard. The grounds so enclosed were ample enough to contain gardens and spaces of plantation, besides the buildings and their courts. Altogether, what with the buildings themselves, what with the courts and gardens, and what with the natural grandeur of the site,—a level of deep and wooded park, between the Calton heights and crags on the one hand and the towering shoulders of Arthur Seat and precipitous escarpment of Salisbury Crags on the other,—Holyrood in 1561 must have seemed, even to an eye the most satiated with palatial splendours abroad, a sufficiently impressive dwelling-place to be the metropolitan home of Scottish royalty.
The town itself, of which Holyrood was but the eastward terminus, corresponded singularly well. Edinburgh even now is, more than almost any other city in Europe, a city of heights and hollows, and owes its characteristic and indestructible beauty to that fact. But the peculiarity of Old Edinburgh was that it consisted mainly of that one continuous ridge of street which rises, by gradual ascent for a whole mile, from the deeply-ensconced Holyrood at one end to the high Castle Rock at the other, sending off on both sides a multiplicity of narrow foot-passages, called closes, with a few wider and more street-like cuttings, called wynds, all of which slope downward from the main ridge in some degree, while many descend from it with the steepness of mountain gullies into the parallel ravines. Whoever walks now from Holyrood to the Castle, up the Canongate, the High Street, and the Lawnmarket, walks through that portion of the present “Old Town” which figures to us the main Edinburgh of Queen Mary’s time, and is in fact its residue. But imagination and some study of old maps and records are necessary to divest this residue of its acquired irrelevancies, and so to reconvert it into the actual Edinburgh of three hundred years ago. The divisions of the great ridge of street from Holyrood to the Castle were the same as now, with the same names; but objects once conspicuous in each have disappeared, and the features of each have been otherwise altered.
The first part of the long ascent from Holyrood was the Canongate. Though occupying nearly half of the whole, and in complete junction with the Edinburgh proper up to which it led, it was a separate “burgh of regality,” which had formed itself, as its name implies, under the protection of the abbots and canons of Holyrood. By virtue of that original, it was not yet included in the municipal jurisdiction of the Edinburgh Magistrates and Town Council, but held out under a magistracy of its own. Hence some characteristics distinguishing this lower part of the ascent from the rest. The old Canongate was by no means the dense exhibition of dingy picturesqueness now known as the Canongate of Edinburgh, with repulsive entries and closes on both sides, leading to cages of crammed humanity of the poorer sort, or to inner recesses of bone-yards, pipe-clay yards, and the like. It had the sparseness and airiness of a suburb of the Court. The houses, whether of stone or partly of wood, were pretty thickly put together, indeed, along the immediate street-margins, with the inevitable access to many of them by entries and closes, but did not go so deeply back on either side as not to leave room for pleasant gardens and tracts of vacant ground behind. A paved and causewayed street, ascending continuously between two rows of houses, of irregular forms and varying heights, but few of them of more than three storeys; other houses at the backs of these to some little depth all the way, reached by closes from the street, and generally set gablewise to those in front; and, behind these again, garden grounds and grassy slopes and hollows: such was the ancient Canongate. In token of its claims to be a separate burgh, it had its own market cross, and, near this, its own Tolbooth or prison and council-house. The present Canongate Tolbooth, though an antique object, is only the successor of the older Canongate Tolbooth of Queen Mary’s time.
The ending of the Canongate and beginning of the High Street of Edinburgh proper was at a cross street, the left arm of which, descending from the ridge into the ravine on that side, was called St. Mary’s Wynd, while the arm to the right was called Leith Wynd. Here, to mark more emphatically the transition from the smaller burgh into the greater, one encountered the separating barrier of the Nether Bow Port. It has left no trace of itself now, but was a battlemented stone structure, spanning the entire breadth of the thoroughfare, with an arched gateway in the middle and gates for admission or exclusion. That passed, one was in the lower portion of the High Street, called specifically the Nether Bow. Here, it was not merely the increasing breadth of the thoroughfare and the increasing height of the houses that showed one had come within the boundaries of the real civic and commercial Edinburgh. No such sparseness of building now as in the Canongate; no mere double fringe of houses to a short depth, with entries and closes ending in gardens and vacant ground; but a sense of being between two masses of densely-peopled habitations, clothing the declivities from the ridge to their lowest depths on both sides, and penetrable only by those courts and wynds of which one saw the mouths, but the labyrinthine intricacy of which in the course of their descent baffled conception.
The same sensation accompanied one on advancing still upwards into the middle and broadest part of the High Street. Here the street had much the same striking appearance as now. One saw a spacious incline of oblong piazza, rather than a street, lined by buildings, some of solid stone throughout and very tall, others lower and timber-fronted, all of quaint architecture from their basements to their peaked roofs and chimneys, and not a few with “fore-stairs,” or projecting flights of steps from doors on the first floor down to the causeway. It was here, too, that the lateral fringes of habitation down the steep alleys were of greatest width. That on the right was stopped only at the bottom of the ravine on that side by a lake called the North Loch, while that on the left, after reaching the bottom of the other ravine, mingled itself there with an independent and very aristocratic suburb that had grown up in the ravine itself, under the name of the Cowgate, as a southern parallel of relief to the main Edinburgh of the ridge above. This low-lying, aristocratic suburb, though accessible from the piazza of the High Street by the wynds and closes on the southern side, did not come easily into the cognisance of a stranger that might be exploring the piazza itself. He had enough to arrest his attention where he was. One difference between the old High Street and the present, despite their general resemblance, consisted in a huge obstruction, now removed, which interrupted the old High Street at its very midmost point, immediately above the Town Cross. Just above the spot now marked in the causeway as the site of this Town Cross, and beginning exactly where the great church of St. Giles protrudes its complex pile on the left and raises into the sky its remarkable tower and open octagonal crown of stonework, there stood in the old High Street a stack of lofty masonry, stretching up the centre of the street for a considerable way, and leaving only a gloomy and tortuous lane for pedestrians along the buttresses of the church on one side, and a somewhat wider channel,—called the Luckenbooths,—for shops and traffic, on the other. The lower portion of this obstructive stack of masonry belonged to the Luckenbooths, and was included in the name, the basement being let out in shops or stalls for goods, while the upper floors were parcelled out as dwellings. The higher and larger portion, separated from the lower by a narrow suture called “The Kirk Stile,” was nothing less than the famous Heart of Midlothian itself, or Old Tolbooth, which had served hitherto as the prætorium burgi, at once the jail of Edinburgh, its Town Council House, the seat of the Supreme Courts of Justice for Scotland, and the occasional meeting-place of a Scottish Parliament. Little wonder if one lingered round this core of the High Street and of the whole town. The channel of the Luckenbooths on one side of the street, the lane between the Tolbooth and St. Giles’s on the other, and the cross passage or Kirk Stile, were worth more than one perambulation, if only on account of their amusing interconnection; at the back of St. Giles’s Church, overhanging the Cowgate, was St. Giles’s Churchyard, the chief cemetery of the town; and the Tolbooth alone might well detain one by its look and the interest of its associations. In 1561 they were voting it to be too old and decayed, if not too unsightly, for the various and important purposes which it had hitherto served; and within a few months from our present date there was to be an order for its demolition, and for the erection of another building more suitable for those purposes, and especially for the accommodation of the Lords of Council and Session. But, though they did then begin to take it down, and though a “New Tolbooth” or “Council House” was built near it in the same part of the High Street, the old or original Tolbooth escaped its doom, and was left standing after all. A little re-edified, it was to survive its more modern substitute, and to be known till 1817 as at least the Jail of Edinburgh and real old Heart of Midlothian. Some persons still alive can remember it.
The Tolbooth having been passed, one was again in an open piazza of tall or tallish houses, nearly as broad as the former piazza, but farther up the incline, and known indifferently as the High Street above the Tolbooth or as the Lawnmarket. Here, also, one could not but note the number of the closes and wynds on both sides, plunging down the house-laden slopes with break-neck precipitancy from the vertebral street. At the head of this piazza, however, where it began to narrow, and where there was an obstruction across it in the form of a clumsy building called the Butter Tron or Weigh-House, there was one offshoot to the left of greater consequence than any mere wynd or close. This was the West Bow, a steep zigzag or spiral kind of street of antique houses, bringing one down to the deeply-sunk Grassmarket or Horsemarket, i.e. to a large square space opening out from the end of the Cowgate, and convenient for the country people coming into the town with cattle. Refraining from this descent by the West Bow, and keeping still to the vertebral street, one reached the last portion of the long causewayed and inhabited ridge. This was the Castle Hill, a narrowish continuation of the High Street, so steep as to require climbing rather than walking, but up which, nevertheless, there was still a plentiful straggling of houses, perched anyhow, with closes and paved yards reticulating what lateral depth of earth they could cling to, and with views of dizzying profundity from their back windows.
All civic Edinburgh thus left behind, and a military portal having been passed, one entered the precincts of the Castle itself,—the high, rocky stronghold which was more ancient than anything recognisable as most ancient in the Edinburgh beneath, which indeed had fostered that Edinburgh into its first existence and growth, and in which there were relics of days older than those of Malcolm Canmore and David I., older than the infancy of Holyrood Abbey. After the long walk upwards between the two lines of close-packed houses, with perpetual mouths of mere wynds and closes for a whole mile, it was something to emerge into the open air, even in the battlemented exterior esplanade or courtyard of this Castle, slanting up the hillside to the moat and drawbridge. It was more to be allowed to pass the drawbridge and the other defences, and so to pursue the winding, rock-hewn track by which one mounted to the fortified aggregate of guard-houses, store-rooms, and royal towers, heaved together on the cliff-bound summit. What a platform then to stand on, beside the cannon, in any of the ledges of the embrasured parapet! The feeling for scenery, they say, had not been much developed in the sixteenth century; but no more in that century than in this could any human eye have gazed with indifference on the vast panorama of Scottish land and water that burst into the vision from Edinburgh’s Castle Rock. To the north there were villages and farmsteads dotting the range of fields towards the Firth which is now covered with the streets of the New Town, and beyond these always the unwearying loveliness of the face of the Firth, with the boundary of the Fifeshire hills; to the west, the near Corstorphines, and over these also a tract of varied country, fading away up the course of the Firth into a purple suggestion of Stirling and the first spurs of the Highlands; to the south, the Braids and the Pentlands, hiding the pastoral territory of the Esks and the Upper Tweed, with its sleepy stretch towards the Borders and England. Scores of castles and keeps, each the residence of some nobleman or laird of distinction, could be counted within this sweep of the eye, north, west, and south, over the immediate vicinity of Edinburgh. But, if one’s interest were still rather in the town itself, it was the eastward glance that would help most to complete and define the previous impressions. The whole sea-approach to Edinburgh by the Firth was now splendidly visible, with the already described curve of the hither coast from Berwick Law to Leith; the road from Leith to Holyrood was plainly discernible; and the Canongate and Edinburgh could be looked down upon together, and seen in connected shape and ground-plan.
However slight the defences of the Canongate and Holyrood, Edinburgh proper, it could now be seen, was carefully enclosed and bastioned. On the north side, the North Loch, washing the base of the Castle Rock and filling the valley through which the railway now runs, was sufficient protection; but all the rest of the town was bounded in by a wall, called the Flodden Wall. It had been constructed mainly in the panic after the battle of Flodden in 1513 to supersede an older and less perfect circumvallation, but had been much repaired and modified since. It started from the east end of the North Loch and ran thence along Leith Wynd and St. Mary’s Wynd, crossing the High Street at the Nether Bow Port, and so shutting out the Canongate; it then went so far south as to include the whole of the Cowgate and some space of the heights beyond the ravine of the Cowgate; and the west bend of its irregular rectangle, after recrossing this ravine a little beyond the Grassmarket, riveted itself to the Castle Rock, on its most precipitous side, at the head of the High Street. There were several gates in the circuit of the wall besides the Nether Bow Port, the chief being the Cowgate Port, which was also to the east, the Kirk of Field Port (afterwards Potter Row Port) and Greyfriars Port (afterwards Bristo Port), both to the south, and the West Port, just beyond the Grassmarket and the sole inlet from the west. When these gates were closed, Edinburgh could rest within herself, tolerably secure from external attack, and conscious of a reserve of strength in the cannon and garrison of the dominating Castle. Even if the town itself should yield to a siege, the Castle could hold out as a separate affair, impregnable, or almost impregnable, within her own fortifications. Successful assaults on Edinburgh Castle were among the rarest and most memorable accidents of Scottish history.