BOTHWELL BRIDGE PRISONERS.
As if there had been some destiny in the matter, the Greyfriars Churchyard became connected with another remarkable event in the religious troubles of the seventeenth century. At the south-west angle, accessible by an old gateway bearing emblems of mortality, and which is fitted with an iron-rail gate of very old workmanship, is a kind of supplement to the burying-ground—an oblong space, now having a line of sepulchral enclosures on each side, but formerly empty. On these enclosures the visitor may remark, as he passes, certain names venerable in the history of science and of letters; as, for instance, Joseph Black and Alexander Tytler. On one he sees the name of Gilbert Innes of Stow, who left a million, to take six feet of earth here. These, however, do not form the matter in point. Every lesser particular becomes trivial beside the extraordinary use to which the place was put by the Government in the year 1679. Several hundred of the prisoners taken at Bothwell Bridge were confined here in the open air, under circumstances of privation now scarcely credible. They had hardly anything either to lie upon or to cover them; their allowance of provision was four ounces of bread per day, with water derived from one of the city pipes, which passed near the place. They were guarded by day by eight and through the night by twenty-four men; and the soldiers were told that if any prisoner escaped, they should answer it life for life by cast of dice. If any prisoner rose from the ground by night, he was shot at. Women alone were permitted to commune with them, and bring them food or clothes; but these had often to stand at the entrance from morning till night without getting access, and were frequently insulted and maltreated by the soldiers, without the prisoners being able to protect them, although in many cases related by the most endearing ties. In the course of several weeks a considerable number of the prisoners had been liberated upon signing a bond, in which they promised never again to take up arms against the king or without his authority; but it appears that about four hundred, refusing mercy on such terms, were kept in this frightful bivouac for five months, being only allowed at the approach of winter to have shingle huts erected over them, which was boasted of as a great mercy. Finally, on the 15th of November, a remnant, numbering two hundred and fifty-seven, were put on board a ship to be sent to Barbadoes. The vessel was wrecked on one of the Orkney Islands, when only about forty came ashore alive.
From the gloom of this sad history there is shed one ray of romance. Amongst the charitable women of Edinburgh who came to minister to the prisoners, there was one attended by a daughter—a young and, at least by right of romance, a fair girl. Every few days they approached this iron gate with food and clothes, either from their own stores or collected among neighbours. Between the young lady and one of the juvenile prisoners an attachment sprang up. Doubtless she loved him for the dangers he had passed in so good a cause, and he loved her because she pitied them. In happier days, long after, when their constancy had been well tried by an exile which he suffered in the plantations, this pair were married, and settled in Edinburgh, where they had sons and daughters. A respectable elderly citizen tells me he is descended from them.[231]
[STORY OF MRS MACFARLANE.]
‘Let them say I am romantic; so is every one said to be that either admires a fine thing or does one. On my conscience, as the world goes, ’tis hardly worth anybody’s while to do one for the honour of it. Glory, the only pay of generous actions, is now as ill paid as other just debts; and neither Mrs Macfarlane for immolating her lover, nor you for constancy to your lord, must ever hope to be compared to Lucretia or Portia.’—Pope to Lady Mary W. Montagu.
Pope here alludes to a tragical incident which took place in Edinburgh on the 2nd of October 1716. The victim was a young Englishman, who had been sent down to Scotland as a Commissioner of Customs. It appears that Squire Cayley, or Captain Cayley, as he was alternatively called, had become the slave of a shameful passion towards Mrs Macfarlane, a woman of uncommon beauty, the wife of Mr John Macfarlane, Writer to the Signet in Edinburgh. One Saturday forenoon Mrs Macfarlane was exposed, by the treachery of Captain Cayley’s landlady, with whom she was acquainted, to an insult of the most atrocious kind on his part, in the house where he lodged, which seems to have been situated in a close in the Cowgate, opposite to what were called the Back Stairs.[232] Next Tuesday Mr Cayley waited upon Mrs Macfarlane at her own house, and was shown into the drawing-room. According to an account given out by his friends, he was anxious to apologise for his former rudeness. From another account, it would appear that he had circulated reports derogatory to the lady’s honour, which she was resolved to punish. A third story represents him as having repeated the insult which he had formerly offered; whereupon she went into another room, and presently came back with a pair of pistols in her hand. On her bidding him leave the house instantly, he said: ‘What, madam, d’ye design to act a comedy?’ To which she answered that ‘he would find it a tragedy if he did not retire.’ The infatuated man not obeying her command, she fired one of the pistols, which, however, only wounded him slightly in the left wrist, the bullet slanting down into the floor. The mere instinct, probably, of self-preservation caused him to draw his sword; but before he could use it she fired the other pistol, the shot of which penetrated his heart. ‘This dispute,’ says a letter of the day, ‘was so close that Mr Cayley’s shirt was burnt at the sleeves with the fire of one of the pistols, and his cravat and the breast of his shirt with the fire of the other.’[233] Mrs Macfarlane immediately left the room, locking the door upon the dead body, and sent a servant for her husband, who was found at a neighbouring tavern. On his coming home about an hour after, she took him by the sleeve, and leading him into the room where the corpse lay, explained the circumstances which had led to the bloody act. Mr Macfarlane said: ‘Oh, woman! what have you done?’ But soon seeing the necessity for prompt measures, he went out again to consult with some of his friends. ‘They all advised,’ says the letter just quoted, ‘that he should convey his wife away privately, to prevent her lying in jail, till a precognition should be taken of the affair, and it should appear in its true light. Accordingly [about six o’clock], she walked down the High Street, followed by her husband at a little distance, and now absconds.
‘The thing continued a profound secret to all except those concerned in the house till past ten at night, when Mr Macfarlane, having provided a safe retreat for his wife, returned and gave orders for discovering it to the magistrates, who went and viewed the body of the deceased, and secured the house and maid, and all else who may become evidence of the fact.’
Another contemporary says: ‘I saw his [Cayley’s] corpse after he was cereclothed, and saw his blood where he lay on the floor for twenty-four hours after he died, just as he fell; so it was a difficulty to straight him.’
A careful investigation was made into every circumstance connected with this fatal affair, but without demonstrating anything except the passionate rashness or magnanimity of the fair homicide. Mr Macfarlane was discharged upon his own affirmation that he knew nothing of the deed till after it had taken place. A pamphlet was published by Mrs Murray, Mr Cayley’s landlady, who seems to have kept a grocery shop in the Cowgate, vindicating herself from the imputation which Mrs Macfarlane’s tale had thrown upon her character; but to this there appeared an answer, from some friend of the other party, in which the imputation was fixed almost beyond the possibility of doubt. Mrs Murray denied that Mrs Macfarlane had been in her house on the Saturday before the murder; but evidence was given that she was seen issuing from the close in which Mrs Murray resided, and, after ascending the Back Stairs, was observed passing through the Parliament Square towards her own house.
It will surprise every one to learn that this Scottish Lucrece was a woman of only nineteen or twenty years of age, and some months enceinte, at the time when she so boldly vindicated her honour. She was a person of respectable connections, being a daughter of Colonel Charles Straiton, ‘a gentleman of great honour,’ says one of the letters already quoted, and who further appears to have been entrusted with high negotiations by the Jacobites during the reign of Queen Anne. By her mother, she was granddaughter to Sir Andrew Forrester.
Of the future history of Mrs Macfarlane we have but one glimpse, but it is of a romantic nature. Margaret Swinton, who was the aunt of Sir Walter Scott’s mother, and round whom he and his boy-brothers used to close to listen to her tales, remembered being one Sunday left by her parents at home in their house of Swinton in Berwickshire, while the rest of the family attended church. Tiring of the solitude of her little nursery, she stole quietly downstairs to the parlour, which she entered somewhat abruptly. There, to her surprise, she beheld the most beautiful woman she had ever seen, sitting at the breakfast-table making tea. She believed it could be no other than one of those enchanted queens whom she had heard of in fairy tales. The lady, after a pause of surprise, came up to her with a sweet smile, and conversed with her, concluding with a request that she would speak only to her mamma of the stranger whom she had seen. Presently after, little Margaret having turned her back for a few moments, the beautiful vision had vanished. The whole appeared like a dream. By-and-by the family returned, and Margaret took her mother aside that she might talk of this wonderful apparition. Mrs Swinton applauded her for thus observing the injunction which had been laid upon her. ‘Had you not,’ she added, ‘it might have cost that lady her life.’ Subsequent explanations made Margaret aware that she had seen the unfortunate Mrs Macfarlane, who, having some claim of kindred upon the Swinton family, had been received by them, and kept in a secret room till such time as she could venture to make her way out of the country. On Margaret looking away for a moment, the lady had glided by a sliding panel into her Patmos behind the wainscot, and thus unwittingly increased the child’s apprehension of the whole being an event out of the course of nature.
[THE CANONGATE.]
Distinguished Inhabitants in Former Times—Story of a Burning—Morocco’s Land—New Street.
The Canongate, which takes its name from the Augustine canons of Holyrood (who were permitted to build it by the charter of David I. in 1128, and afterwards ruled it as a burgh of regality), was formerly the court end of the town. As the main avenue from the palace into the city, it has borne upon its pavement the burden of all that was beautiful, all that was gallant, all that has become historically interesting in Scotland for the last six or seven hundred years. It still presents an antique appearance, although many of the houses are modernised. There is one with a date from Queen Mary’s reign,[234] and many may be guessed, from their appearance, to be of even an earlier era. Previously to the Union, when the palace ceased to be occasionally inhabited, as it had formerly been, by at least the vicar of majesty in the person of the Commissioner to the Parliament, the place was densely inhabited by persons of distinction. Allan Ramsay, in lamenting the death of Lucky Wood, says:
‘Oh, Canigate, puir elrich hole,
What loss, what crosses does thou thole!
London and death gars thee look droll,
And hing thy head;
Wow but thou has e’en a cauld coal
To blaw indeed;’
and mentions in a note that this place was ‘the greatest sufferer by the loss of our members of parliament, which London now enjoys, many of them having had their houses there;’ a fact which Maitland confirms. Innumerable traces are to be found, in old songs and ballads, of the elegant population of the Canongate in a former day. In the piteous tale of Marie Hamilton—one of the Queen’s Maries—occurs this simple but picturesque stanza:
‘As she cam’ doun the Cannogait,
The Cannogait sae free,
Mony a lady looked owre her window,
Weeping for this ladye.’
An old popular rhyme expresses the hauteur of these Canongate dames towards their city neighbours of the male sex:
‘The lasses o’ the Canongate,
Oh they are wondrous nice;
They winna gi’e a single kiss
But for a double price.
Gar hang them, gar hang them,
Hich upon a tree;
For we’ll get better up the gate
For a bawbee!’
Weir’s Close, Canongate—wretchedly squalid.
Even in times comparatively modern, this faubourg was inhabited by persons of very great consideration.[235] Within the memory of a lady living in 1830, it used to be a common thing to hear, among other matters of gossip, ‘that there was to be a braw flitting[236] in the Canongate to-morrow;’ and parties of young people were made up to go and see the fine furniture brought out, sitting perhaps for hours in the windows of some friend on the opposite side of the street, while cart after cart was laden with magnificence.[237] Many of the houses to this day are fit for the residence of a first-rate family in every respect but vicinage and access. The last grand blow was given to the place by the opening of the road along the Calton Hill in 1817, which rendered it no longer the avenue of approach to the city from the east. Instead of profiting by the comparative retirement which it acquired on that occasion, it seemed to become the more wretchedly squalid from its being the less under notice—as a gentleman dresses the least carefully when not expecting visitors. It is now a secluded and, in general, meanly inhabited suburb, only accessible by ways which, however lightly our fathers and grandfathers might regard them, are hardly now pervious to a lady or gentleman without shocking more of the senses than one, besides the difficulty of steering one’s way through the herds of the idle and the wretched who encumber the street.
One of the houses near the head of the Canongate, on the north side of the street, was indicated to me by an old lady a few years ago as that which tradition in her young days pointed to in connection with a wild story related in the notes to Rokeby. She had often heard the tale told, nearly in the same manner as it has been given by Scott, and the site of the house concerned in the tragedy was pointed out to her by her seniors. Perhaps the reader will again excuse a quotation from the writings of our late gifted fellow-townsman: if to be related at all—and surely in a work devoted to Edinburgh popular legends it could not rightly be overlooked—it may as well be given in the language of the prince of modern conteurs:
‘About the beginning of the eighteenth century, when the large castles of the Scottish nobles, and even the secluded hotels, like those of the French noblesse, which they possessed in Edinburgh, were sometimes the scenes of strange and mysterious transactions, a divine of singular sanctity was called up at midnight to pray with a person at the point of death. This was no unusual summons; but what followed was alarming. He was put into a sedan-chair, and after he had been transported to a remote part of the town, the bearers insisted upon his being blindfolded. The request was enforced by a cocked pistol, and submitted to; but in the course of the discussion, he conjectured, from the phrases employed by the chairmen, and from some part of their dress, not completely concealed by their cloaks, that they were greatly above the menial station they assumed. After many turns and windings, the chair was carried upstairs into a lodging, where his eyes were uncovered, and he was introduced into a bedroom, where he found a lady, newly delivered of an infant. He was commanded by his attendants to say such prayers by her bedside as were fitting for a person not expected to survive a mortal disorder. He ventured to remonstrate, and observe that her safe delivery warranted better hopes. But he was sternly commanded to obey the orders first given, and with difficulty recollected himself sufficiently to acquit himself of the task imposed on him. He was then again hurried into the chair; but as they conducted him downstairs he heard the report of a pistol. He was safely conducted home; a purse of gold was forced upon him; but he was warned, at the same time, that the least allusion to this dark transaction would cost him his life. He betook himself to rest, and after long and broken musing, fell into a deep sleep. From this he was awakened by his servant, with the dismal news that a fire of uncommon fury had broken out in the house of ——, near the head of the Canongate, and that it was totally consumed; with the shocking addition that the daughter of the proprietor, a young lady eminent for beauty and accomplishments, had perished in the flames. The clergyman had his suspicions, but to have made them public would have availed nothing. He was timid; the family was of the first distinction; above all, the deed was done, and could not be amended. Time wore away, however, and with it his terrors. He became unhappy at being the solitary depositary of this fearful mystery, and mentioned it to some of his brethren, through whom the anecdote acquired a sort of publicity. The divine, however, had been long dead, and the story in some degree forgotten, when a fire broke out again on the very same spot where the house of —— had formerly stood, and which was now occupied by buildings of an inferior description. When the flames were at their height, the tumult which usually attends such a scene was suddenly suspended by an unexpected apparition. A beautiful female, in a nightdress extremely rich, but at least half a century old, appeared in the very midst of the fire, and uttered these tremendous words in her vernacular idiom: “Anes burned, twice burned; the third time I’ll scare you all!” The belief in this story was formerly so strong that on a fire breaking out, and seeming to approach the fatal spot, there was a good deal of anxiety testified, lest the apparition should make good her denunciation.’
A little way farther down the Canongate, on the same side, is an old-fashioned house called Morocco’s Land, having an alley passing under it, over which is this inscription[238]—a strange cry of the spirit of man to be heard in a street:
MISERERE MEI, DOMINE: A PECCATO, PROBRO,
DEBITO, ET MORTE SUBITA, LIBERA ME.
From whom this exclamation proceeded I have never learned; but the house, which is of more modern date than the legend, has a story connected with it. It is said that a young woman belonging to Edinburgh, having been taken upon a voyage by an African rover, was sold to the harem of the Emperor of Morocco, with whom she became a favourite. Mindful, like her countrymen in general, of her native land and her relations, she held such a correspondence with home as led to a brother of hers entering into merchandise, and conducting commercial transactions with Morocco. He was successful, and realised a little fortune, out of which he built this stately mansion. From gratitude, or out of a feeling of vanity regarding his imperial brother-in-law, he erected a statue of that personage in front of his house—a black, naked figure, with a turban and a necklace of beads; such being the notion which a Scottish artist of those days entertained of the personal aspect of the chief of one of the Mohammedan states of Africa. And this figure, perched in a little stone pulpit, still exists. As to the name bestowed upon the house, it would most probably arise from the man being in the first place called Morocco by way of sobriquet, as is common when any one becomes possessed by a particular subject, and often speaks of it.
Morocco’s Land.
A little farther along is the opening of New Street, a modern offshoot of the ancient city, dating from a time immediately before the rise of the New Town. Many persons of consequence lived here: Lord Kames, in a neat house at the top, on the east side—an edifice once thought so fine that people used to bring their country cousins to see it; Lord Hailes, in a house more than half-way down, afterwards occupied by Mr Ruthven, mechanist; Sir Philip Ainslie, in another house in the same row. The passers-by were often arrested by the sight of Sir Philip’s preparations for a dinner-party through the open windows, the show of plate being particularly great. Now all these mansions are left to become workshops. Sic transit.[239] Opposite to Kames’s house is a small circular arrangement of causeway, indicating where St John’s Cross formerly stood. Charles I., at his ceremonial entry into Edinburgh in 1633, knighted the provost at St John’s Cross.[240]
[ST JOHN STREET.]
Lord Monboddo’s Suppers—The Sister of Smollett—Anecdote of Henry Dundas.
St John Street, so named with reference to St John’s Cross above mentioned, was one of the heralds of the New Town. In the latter half of the last century it was occupied solely by persons of distinction—nobles, judges, and country gentleman; now it is possessed as exclusively by persons of the middle rank. In No. 13 lived that eccentric genius, Lord Monboddo, whose supper-parties, conducted in classic taste, frequented by the literati, and for a time presided over by an angel in the form of a daughter of his lordship, were of immense attraction in their day. In a stair at the head of this street lived the sister of the author of Roderick Random.
Smollett’s life as a literary adventurer in London, and the full participation he had in the woes of authors by profession, have perhaps conveyed an erroneous idea of his birth and connections. The Smolletts of Dumbartonshire were in reality what was called in Scotland a good old family. The novelist’s own grandfather had been one of the commissioners for the Union between England and Scotland. And it is an undoubted fact that Tobias himself, if he had lived two or three years longer, would have become the owner of the family estate, worth about a thousand a year. All this, to any one conversant with the condition of the Scottish gentry in the early part of the last century, will appear quite consistent with his having been brought up as a druggist’s apprentice in Glasgow—‘the bubbly-nosed callant, wi’ the stane in his pouch,’ as his master affectionately described him, with reference to his notorious qualities as a Pickle.
The sister of Smollett—she who, failing him, did succeed to the family property—was a Mrs Telfer, domiciled as a gentle widow in a common stair at the head of St John Street (west side), first door up. She is described as a somewhat stern-looking specimen of her sex, with a high cast of features, but in reality a good-enough-natured woman, and extremely shrewd and intelligent. One passion of her genus possessed her—whist. A relative tells me that one of the city magistrates, who was a tallow-chandler, calling upon her one evening, she said: ‘Come awa, bailie, and take a trick at the cartes.’
‘Troth, ma’am,’ said he, ‘I hav’na a bawbee in my pouch.’
‘Tut, man, ne’er mind that,’ replied the lady; ‘let’s e’en play for a pund o’ candles!’
During his last visit to Edinburgh (1766)—the visit which occasioned Humphry Clinker—Smollett lived in his sister’s house. A person who recollects seeing him there describes him as dressed in black clothes, tall, and extremely handsome, but quite unlike the portraits at the front of his works, all of which are disclaimed by his relations. The unfortunate truth appears to be that the world is in possession of no genuine likeness of Smollett! He was very peevish, on account of the ill-health to which he had been so long a martyr, and used to complain much of a severe ulcerous disorder in his arm.
His wife, according to the same authority, was a Creole, with a dark complexion, though, upon the whole, rather pretty—a fine lady, but a silly woman. Yet she had been the Narcissa of Roderick Random.[241]
In Humphry Clinker, Smollett works up many observations of things and persons which he had made in his recent visit to Scotland. His relative Commissary Smollett, and the family seat near Loch Lomond, receive ample notice. The story in the family is that while Matthew Bramble was undoubtedly himself, he meant in the gay and sprightly Jerry Melford to describe his sister’s son, Major Telfer, and in Liddy to depict his own daughter, who was destined to be the wife of the major, but, to the inexpressible and ineffaceable grief of her father, died before the scheme could be accomplished. Jerry, it will be recollected, ‘got some damage from the bright eyes of the charming Miss R——n, whom he had the honour to dance with at the ball.’ Liddy contracted an intimate friendship with the same person. This young beauty was Eleonora Renton, charming by the true right divine, for she was daughter of Mr Renton of Lamerton, by Lady Susan Montgomery, one of the fair offshoots of the house of Eglintoune, described in a preceding article. A sister of hers was married to Smollett’s eldest nephew, Telfer, who became inheritor of the family estate, and on account of it took the surname of Smollett: a large modern village in Dumbartonshire takes its name from this lady. It seems to have been this connection which brought the charming Eleonora under the novelist’s attention. She afterwards married Charles Sharpe of Hoddam, and became the mother of Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe, the well-known antiquary. Strange to say, the lady whose bright eyes had flamed upon poor Smollett’s soul in the middle of the last century, was living so lately as 1836.
ST JOHN’S CLOSE.
Entrance to Canongate Kilwinning Mason Lodge.
When Smollett was confined in the King’s Bench Prison for the libel upon Admiral Knowles, he formed an intimacy with the celebrated Tenducci. This melodious singing-bird had recently got his wings clipped by his creditors, and was mewed up in the same cage with the novelist. Smollett’s friendship proceeded to such a height that he paid the vocalist’s debts from his own purse, and procured him his liberty. Tenducci afterwards visited Scotland, and was one night singing in a private circle, when somebody told him that a lady present was a near relation of his benefactor; upon which the grateful Italian prostrated himself before her, kissed her hands, and acted so many fantastic extravagances, after the foreign fashion, that she was put extremely out of countenance.
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.
[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.
[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.
BAKEHOUSE CLOSE.
Back of ‘Speaking House.’
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!
Acheson House.
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.
[PANMURE HOUSE—ADAM SMITH.]
At the bottom of a close a little way below the Canongate Church, there is a house which a few years ago bore the appearance of one of those small semi-quadrangular manor-houses which were prevalent in the country about the middle of the seventeenth century. It is now altered, and brought into juxtaposition with the coarse details of an ironfoundry, yet still is not without some traits of its original style. The name of Panmure House takes the mind back to the Earls of Panmure, the fourth of whom lost title and estates for his concern in the affair of 1715; but I am not certain of any earlier proprietor of this family than William Maule, nephew of the attainted earl, created Earl of Panmure as an Irish title in 1743. He possessed the house in the middle of the last century.
Back of Canongate Tolbooth—Tolbooth Wynd.
All reference to rank in connection with this house appears trivial in comparison with the fact that it was the residence of Adam Smith from 1778, when he came to live in Edinburgh as a commissioner of the customs, till his death in 1790, when he was interred in a somewhat obscure situation at the back of the Canongate Tolbooth. In his time the house must have seen the most intellectual company to be had in Scotland; but it had not the honour of being the birthplace of any of Smith’s great works. His last and greatest—the book which has undoubtedly done more for the good of the community than any other ever produced in Scotland—was the work of ten quiet, studious years previous to 1778, during which the philosopher lived in his mother’s house in Kirkcaldy.
The gentle, virtuous character of Smith has left little for the anecdotist. The utmost simplicity marked the externals of the man. He said very truly (being in possession of a handsome library) that ‘he was only a beau in his books.’ Leading an abstracted, scholarly life, he was ill-fitted for common worldly affairs. Some one remarked to a friend of mine while Smith still lived: ‘How strange to think of one who has written so well on the principles of exchange and barter—he is obliged to get a friend to buy his horse-corn for him!’ The author of the Wealth of Nations never thought of marrying. His household affairs were managed to his perfect contentment by a female cousin, a Miss Jeanie Douglas, who almost necessarily acquired a great control over him. It is said that the amiable philosopher, being fond of a bit sugar, and chid by her for taking it, would sometimes, in sauntering backwards and forwards along the parlour, watch till Miss Jeanie’s back was turned in order to supply himself with his favourite morsel. Such things are not derogatory to greatness like Smith’s: they link it to human nature, and secure for it the love, as it had previously possessed the admiration, of common men.
The one personal circumstance regarding Smith which has made the greatest impression on his fellow-citizens is the rather too well-known anecdote of the two fishwomen. He was walking along the streets one day, deeply abstracted, and speaking in a low tone to himself, when he caught the attention of two of these many-petticoated ladies, engaged in selling their fish. They exchanged significant looks, bearing strong reference to the restraints of a well-managed lunatic asylum, and then sighed one to the other: ‘Aih, sirs; and he’s weel put on too!’—that is, well dressed; his gentleman-like condition making the case appear so much the more piteous.
[JOHN PATERSON THE GOLFER.]
In the Canongate, nearly opposite to Queensberry House, is a narrow, old-fashioned mansion, of peculiar form, having a coat-armorial conspicuously placed at the top, and a plain slab over the doorway containing the following inscriptions:
‘Cum victor ludo, Scotis qui proprius, esset,
Ter tres victores post redimitus avos,
Patersonus, humo tunc educebat in altum
Hanc, quæ victores tot tulit una, domum.’
‘I hate no person.’
It appears that this quatrain was the production of Dr Pitcairn, while the sentence below is an anagram upon the name of John Patersone. The stanza expresses that ‘when Paterson had been crowned victor in a game peculiar to Scotland, in which his ancestors had also been often victorious, he then built this mansion, which one conquest raised him above all his predecessors.’ We must resort to tradition for an explanation of this obscure hint.
Golfers’ Land.
Till a recent period, golfing had long been conducted upon the Links of Leith.[251] It had even been the sport of princes on that field. We are told by Mr William Tytler of Woodhouselee that Charles I. and the Duke of York (afterwards James II.) played at golf on Leith Links, in succession, during the brief periods of their residence in Holyrood. Though there is an improbability in this tale as far as Charles is concerned, seeing that he spent too short a time in Edinburgh to have been able to play at a game notorious for the time necessary in acquiring it, I may quote the anecdote related by Mr Tytler: ‘That while he was engaged in a party at golf on the green or Links of Leith, a letter was delivered into his hands, which gave him the first account of the insurrection and rebellion in Ireland; on reading which, he suddenly called for his coach, and leaning on one of his attendants, and in great agitation, drove to the palace of Holyrood House, from whence next day he set out for London.’ Mr Tytler says, regarding the Duke of York, that he ‘was frequently seen in a party at golf on the Links of Leith with some of the nobility and gentry. I remember in my youth to have often conversed with an old man named Andrew Dickson, a golf-club maker, who said that, when a boy, he used to carry the duke’s golf-clubs, and run before him, and announce where the balls fell.’[252]
GOLFERS ON LEITH LINKS.
Tradition reports that when the duke lived in Holyrood House he had on one occasion a discussion with two English noblemen as to the native country of golf; his Royal Highness asserting that it was peculiar to Scotland, while they as pertinaciously insisted that it was an English game as well. Assuredly, whatever may have been the case in those days, it is not now an English game in the proper sense of the words, seeing that it is only played to the south of the Tweed by a few fraternities of Scotsmen, who have acquired it in their own country in youth. However this may be, the two English nobles proposed, good-humouredly, to prove its English character by taking up the duke in a match to be played on Leith Links. James, glad of an opportunity to make popularity in Scotland, in however small a way, accepted the challenge, and sought for the best partner he could find. By an association not at this day surprising to those who practise the game, the heir-presumptive of the British throne played in concert with a poor shoemaker named John Paterson, the worthy descendant of a long line of illustrious golfers. If the two southrons were, as might be expected, inexperienced in the game, they had no chance against a pair, one member of which was a good player. So the duke got the best of the practical argument; and Paterson’s merits were rewarded by a gift of the sum played for. The story goes on to say that John was thus enabled to build a somewhat stylish house for himself in the Canongate, on the top of which, being a Scotsman, and having of course a pedigree, he clapped the Paterson arms—three pelicans vulned; on a chief three mullets; crest, a dexter hand grasping a golf-club; together with the motto—dear to all golfers—Far and Sure.
It must be admitted there is some uncertainty about this tale. The house, the inscriptions, and arms only indicate that Paterson built the house after being a victor at golf, and that Pitcairn had a hand in decorating it. One might even see, in the fact of the epigram, as if a gentleman wit were indulging in a jest at the expense of some simple plebeian, who held all notoriety honourable. It might have been expected that if Paterson had been enriched by a match in which he was connected with the Duke of York, a Jacobite like Pitcairn would have made distinct allusion to the circumstance. The tradition, nevertheless, seems too curious to be entirely overlooked, and the reader may therefore take it at its worth.
[LOTHIAN HUT.]
The noble family of Lothian had a mansion in Edinburgh, though of but a moderate dignity. It was a small house situated in a spare piece of ground at the bottom of the Canongate, on the south side. Latterly it was leased to Professor Dugald Stewart, who, about the end of the last century, here entertained several English pupils of noble rank—among others, the Hon. the Henry Temple, afterwards Lord Palmerston.[253] About 1825 building was taken down to make room for a brewery.
About the middle of the last century, Lothian Hut was occupied by the wife of the fourth marquis, a lady of great lineage, being the only daughter of Robert, Earl of Holderness, and great-granddaughter of Charles Louis, Elector Palatine. Her ladyship was a person of grand character, while yet admittedly very amiable. As a piece of very old gossip, the Lady Marchioness, on first coming to live in the Hut, found herself in want of a few trifling articles from a milliner, and sent for one who was reputed to be the first of the class then in Edinburgh—namely, Miss Ramsay. But there were two Miss Ramsays. They had a shop on the east side of the Old Lyon Close, on the south side of the High Street, and there made ultimately a little fortune, which enabled them to build the villa of Marionville, near Restalrig (called Lappet Hall by the vulgar). The Misses Ramsay, receiving a message from so grand a lady, instead of obeying the order implicitly, came together, dressed out in a very splendid style, and told the marchioness that every article they wore was ‘at the very top of the fashion.’ The marchioness, disgusted with their forwardness and affectation, said she would take their specimens into consideration, and wished them a good-morning. According to our gossiping authority, she then sent for Mrs Sellar, who carried on the millinery business in a less pretentious style at a place in the Lawnmarket where Bank Street now stands. (I like the localities, for they bring the Old Town of a past age so clearly before us.) Mrs Sellar made her appearance at Lothian Hut in a plain, decorous manner. Her head-dress consisted of a mob-cap of the finest lawn, tied under her chin; over which there was a hood of the same stuff. She wore a cloak of plain black silk without any lace, and had no bonnet, the use of which was supplied by the hood. Mrs Sellar’s manners were elegant and pleasing. When she entered, the marchioness rose to receive her. On being asked for her patterns, she stepped to the door and brought in two large boxes, which had been carried behind her by two women. The articles, being produced, gave great satisfaction, and her ladyship never afterwards employed any other milliner. So the story ends, in the manner of the good-boy books, in establishing that milliners ought not to be too prone to exhibit their patterns upon their own persons.]
[HENRY PRENTICE AND POTATOES.]
No doubt is entertained on any hand that the field-culture of the potato was first practised in Scotland by a man of humble condition, originally a pedlar, by name Henry Prentice. He was an eccentric person, as many have been who stepped out of the common walk to do things afterwards discovered to be great. A story is told that while the potatoes were growing in certain little fields which he leased near our city, Lord Minto came from time to time to inquire about the crop. Prentice at length told his lordship that the experiment was entirely successful, and all he wanted was a horse and cart to drive his potatoes to Edinburgh that they might be sold. ‘I’ll give you a horse and cart,’ said his lordship. Prentice then took his crop to market, cart by cart, till it was all sold, after which he disposed of the horse and cart, which he affected to believe Lord Minto had given him as a present.
Having towards the close of his days realised a small sum of money, he sunk £140 in the hands of the Canongate magistrates, as managers of the poorhouse of that parish, receiving in return seven shillings a week, upon which he lived for several years. Occasionally he made little donations to the charity. During his last years he was an object of no small curiosity in Edinburgh, partly on account of his connection with potato culture and partly by reason of his oddities. It was said of him that he would never shake hands with any human being above two years of age. In his bargain with the Canongate dignitaries, it was agreed that he should have a good grave in their churchyard, and one was selected according to his own choice. Over this, thinking it as well, perhaps, that he should enjoy a little quasi-posthumous notoriety during his life, he caused a monument to be erected, bearing this inscription:
‘Be not anxious to know how I lived,
But rather how you yourself should die.’
He also had a coffin prepared at the price of two guineas, taking the undertaker bound to screw it down gratis with his own hands. In addition to all this, his friends the magistrates were under covenant to bury him with a hearse and four coaches. But even the designs of mortals respecting the grave itself are liable to disappointment. Owing to the mischief done by the boys to the premature monument, Prentice saw fit to have it removed to a quieter cemetery, that of Restalrig, where, at his death in 1788, he was accordingly interred.
Such was the originator of that extensive culture of the potato which has since borne so conspicuous a place in the economics of our country, for good and for evil.
It is curious that this plant, although the sole support of millions of our population, should now again (1846) have fallen under suspicion. At its first introduction, and for several ages thereafter, it was regarded as a vegetable of by no means good character, though for a totally different reason from any which affect its reputation in our day. Its supposed tendency to inflame some of the sensual feelings of human nature is frequently adverted to by Shakespeare and his contemporaries; and this long remained a popular impression in the north.[254]
[THE DUCHESS OF BUCCLEUCH AND MONMOUTH.]
It is rather curious that one of my informants in this article should have dined with a lady who had dined with a peeress married in the year 1662.
This peeress was Anne, Duchess of Buccleuch and Monmouth, the wife of the unfortunate son of Charles II. As is well known, she was early deserted by her husband, who represented, not without justice, that a marriage into which he had been tempted for reasons of policy by his relations, when he was only thirteen years of age, could hardly be binding.
The young duchess, naturally plain in features, was so unfortunate in early womanhood as to become lame in consequence of some feats in dancing. For her want of personal graces there is negative evidence in a dedication of Dryden, where he speaks abundantly of her wit, but not a word of beauty, which shows that the case must have been desperate. [This, by the way, was the remark made to me on the subject by Sir Walter Scott, who, in the Lay of the Last Minstrel, has done what Dryden could not do—flattered the duchess:
‘She had known adversity,
Though born in such a high degree;
In pride of power and beauty’s bloom,
Had wept o’er Monmouth’s bloody tomb.’]
Were any further proof wanting, it might be found in the regard in which she was held by James II., who, as is well known, had such a tendency to plain women as induced a suspicion in his witty brother that they were prescribed to him by his confessor by way of penance. This friendship, in which there was nothing improper, was the means of saving her grace’s estates at the tragical close of her husband’s life.
It is curious to learn that the duchess, notwithstanding the terms on which she had been with her husband, and the sad stamp put upon his pretensions to legitimacy, acted throughout the remainder of her somewhat protracted life as if she had been the widow of a true prince of the blood-royal. In her state-rooms she had a canopy erected, beneath which was the only seat in the apartment, everybody standing besides herself. When Lady Margaret Montgomery, one of the beautiful Countess of Eglintoune’s daughters, was at a boarding-school near London—previous to the year Thirty—she was frequently invited by the duchess to her house; and because her great-grandmother, Lady Mary Leslie, was sister to her grace’s mother, she was allowed a chair; but this was an extraordinary mark of grace. The duchess was the last person of quality in Scotland who kept pages, in the proper acceptation of the term—that is, young gentlemen of good birth, who acquired manners and knowledge of the world in attending upon persons of exalted rank. The last of her grace’s pages rose to be a general. When a letter was brought for the duchess, the domestic gave it to the page, the page to the waiting-gentlewoman (always a person of birth also), and she at length to her grace. The duchess kept a tight hand over her clan and tenants, but was upon the whole beloved.
She was buried (1732) on the same day with the too-much-celebrated Colonel Charteris. At the funeral of Henry, Duke of Buccleuch, in the year 1812, in the aisle of the church at Dalkeith, my informant (Sir Walter Scott) was shown an old man who had been at the funeral of both her grace and Colonel Charteris. He said that the day was dreadfully stormy, which all the world agreed was owing to the devil carrying off Charteris. The mob broke in upon the mourners who followed this personage to the grave, and threw cats, dogs, and a pack of cards upon the coffin; whereupon the gentlemen drew their swords, and cut away among the rioters. In the confusion one little old man was pushed into the grave; and the sextons, somewhat prompt in the discharge of their duty, began to shovel in the earth upon the quick and the dead. The grandfather of my informant (Dr Rutherford), who was one of the mourners, was much hurt in the affray; and my informant has heard his mother describe the terror of the family on his coming home with his clothes bloody and his sword broken.
As to pages—a custom existed among old ladies till a later day of keeping such attendants, rather superior to the little polybuttoned personages who are now so universal. It was not, however, to be expected that a pranksome youth would behave with consistent respect to an aged female of the stiff manners then prevalent. Accordingly, ridiculous circumstances took place. An old lady of the name of Plenderleith, of very stately aspect and grave carriage, used to walk to Leith by the Easter Road with her little foot-page behind her. For the whole way, the young rogue would be seen projecting burs at her dress, laughing immoderately, but silently, when one stuck. An old lady and her sequel of a page was very much like a tragedy followed by a farce. The keeping of the rascals in order at home used also to be a sad problem to a quiet old lady. The only expedient which Miss —— could hit upon to preserve her page from the corruption of the streets was, in her own phrase, to lock up his breeks, which she did almost every evening. The youth, being then only presentable at a window, had to content himself with such chat as he could indulge in with his companions and such mischief as he could execute from that loophole of retreat. So much for the parade of keeping pages.
[CLAUDERO.]
Edinburgh, which now smiles complacently upon the gravities of her reviews and the flippancies of her magazines, formerly laughed outright at the coarse lampoons of her favourite poet and pamphleteer, Claudero. The distinct publications of this witty and eccentric personage (whose real name was James Wilson) are well known to collectors; and his occasional pieces must be fresh in the remembrance of those who, forty or fifty years ago (1824), were in the habit of perusing the Scots Magazine, amidst the general gravity of which they appeared, like the bright and giddy eyes of a satyr, staring through the sere leaves of a sober forest scene.
Claudero was a native of Cumbernauld, in Dumbartonshire, and at an early period of his life showed such marks of a mischief-loving disposition as procured him general odium. The occasion of his lameness was a pebble thrown from a tree at the minister, who, having been previously exasperated by his tricks, chased him to the end of a closed lane, and with his cane inflicted such personal chastisement as rendered him a cripple, and a hater of the clergy, for the rest of his life.
In Edinburgh, where he lived for upwards of thirty years previous to his death in 1789, his livelihood was at first ostensibly gained by keeping a little school, latterly by celebrating what were called half-mark marriages—a business resembling that of the Gretna blacksmith. It is said that he, who made himself the terror of so many by his wit, was in his turn held in fear by his wife, who was as complete a shrew as ever fell to the lot of poet or philosopher.
He was a satirist by profession; and when any person wished to have a squib played off upon his neighbours, he had nothing to do but call upon Claudero, who, for half a crown, would produce the desired effusion, composed, and copied off in a fair hand, in a given time. He liked this species of employment better than writing upon speculation, the profit being more certain and immediate. When in want of money, it was his custom to write a sly satire on some opulent public personage, upon whom he called with it, desiring to have his opinion of the work, and his countenance in favour of a subscription for its publication. The object of his ridicule, conscious-struck by his own portrait, would wince and be civil, advise him to give up thoughts of publishing so hasty a production, and conclude by offering a guinea or two to keep the poet alive till better times should come round. At that time there lived in Edinburgh a number of rich old men who had made fortunes in questionable ways abroad, and whose characters, labouring under strange suspicions, were wonderfully susceptible of Claudero’s satire. These the wag used to bleed profusely and frequently by working upon their fears of public notice.
In 1766 appeared Miscellanies in Prose and Verse, by Claudero, Son of Nimrod the Mighty Hunter, &c., &c., opening with this preface: ‘Christian Reader—The following miscellany is published at the desire of many gentlemen, who have all been my very good friends; if there be anything in it amusing or entertaining, I shall be very glad I have contributed to your diversion, and will laugh as heartily at your money as you do at my works. Several of my pieces may need explanation; but I am too cunning for that: what is not understood, like Presbyterian preaching, will at least be admired. I am regardless of critics; perhaps some of my lines want a foot; but then, if the critic look sharp out, he will find that loss sufficiently supplied in other places, where they have a foot too much: and besides, men’s works generally resemble themselves; if the poems are lame, so is the author—Claudero.’
The most remarkable poems in this volume are: ‘The Echo of the Royal Porch of the Palace of Holyrood House, which fell under Military Execution, anno 1753;’ ‘The Last Speech and Dying Words of the Cross, which was Hanged, Drawn, and Quartered on Monday the 15th of March 1756, for the horrid crime of being an Incumbrance to the Street;’ ‘Scotland in Tears for the horrid Treatment of the Kings’ Sepulchres;’ ‘An Elegy on the much-lamented Death of Quaker Erskine;’[255] ‘A Sermon on the Condemnation of the Netherbow;’ ‘Humphry Colquhoun’s Last Farewell,’ &c. Claudero seems to have been the only man of his time who remonstrated against the destruction of the venerable edifices then removed from the streets which they ornamented, to the disappointment and indignation of all future antiquaries. There is much wit in his sermon upon the destruction of the Netherbow. ‘What was too hard,’ he says, ‘for the great ones of the earth, yea, even queens, to effect, is now accomplished. No patriot duke opposeth the scheme, as did the great Argyll in the grand senate of our nation; therefore the project shall go into execution, and down shall Edina’s lofty porches be hurled with a vengeance. Streets shall be extended to the east, regular and beautiful, as far as the Frigate Whins; and Portobello[256] shall be a lodge for the captors of tea and brandy. The city shall be joined to Leith on the north, and a procession of wise masons shall there lay the foundations of a spacious harbour. Pequin or Nanquin shall not be able to compare with Edinburgh for magnificence. Our city shall be the greatest wonder of the world, and the fame of its glory shall reach the distant ends of the earth.[257] But lament, O thou descendant of the royal Dane, and chief of the tribe of Wilson; for thy shop, contiguous to the porch, shall be dashed to pieces, and its place will know thee no more! No more shall the melodious voice of the loyalist Grant[258] be heard in the morning, nor shall he any more shake the bending wand towards the triumphal arch. Let all who angle in deep waters lament, for Tom had not his equal. The Netherbow Coffee-house of the loyal Smeiton can now no longer enjoy its ancient name with propriety; and from henceforth The Revolution Coffee-house shall its name be called. Our gates must be extended wide for accommodating the gilded chariots, which, from the luxury of the age, are become numerous. With an impetuous career, they jostle against one another in our streets, and the unwary foot-passenger is in danger of being crushed to pieces. The loaded cart itself cannot withstand their fury, and the hideous yells of Coal Johnie resound through the vaulted sky. The sour-milk barrels are overturned, and deluges of Corstorphin cream run down our strands, while the poor unhappy milkmaid wrings her hands with sorrow.’ To the sermon are appended the ‘Last Speech and Dying Words of the Netherbow,’ in which the following laughable declaration occurs: ‘May my clock be struck dumb in the other world, if I lie in this! and may Mack, the reformer of Edina’s lofty spires, never bestride my weathercock on high, if I deviate from truth in these my last words! Though my fabric shall be levelled with the dust of the earth, yet I fall in hope that my weathercock shall be exalted on some more modern dome, where it shall shine like the burnished gold, reflecting the rays of the sun to the eye of ages unborn. The daring Mack shall yet look down from my cock, high in the airy region, to the brandy-shops below, where large graybeards shall appear to him no bigger than mutchkin-bottles, and mutchkin-bottles shall be in his sight like the spark of a diamond.’ One of Claudero’s versified compositions, ‘Humphry Colquhoun’s Farewell,’ is remarkable as a kind of coarse prototype of the beautiful lyric entitled ‘Mary,’ sung in The Pirate by Claud Halcro. One wonders to find the genius of Scott refining upon such materials:
‘Farewell to Auld Reekie,
Farewell to lewd Kate,
Farewell to each ——,
And farewell to cursed debt;
With light heart and thin breeches,
Humph crosses the main;
All worn out to stitches,
He’ll ne’er come again.
Farewell to old Dido,
Who sold him good ale;
Her charms, like her drink,
For poor Humph were too stale;
Though closely she urged him
To marry and stay,
Her Trojan, quite cloyed,
From her sailed away.
Farewell to James Campbell,
Who played many tricks;
Humph’s ghost and Lochmoidart’s[259]
Will chase him to Styx;
Where in Charon’s wherry
He’ll be ferried o’er
To Pluto’s dominions,
’Mongst rascals great store.
Farewell, pot-companions,
Farewell, all good fellows;
Farewell to my anvil,
Files, pliers, and bellows;
Sails, fly to Jamaica,
Where I mean long to dwell,
Change manners with climate—
Dear Drummond, farewell.’
Netherbow.
It is not unworthy of notice that the publication of Dr Blair’s Lectures on Rhetoric and the Belles-lettres was hastened by Claudero, who, having procured notes taken by some of the students, avowed an intention of giving these to the world. The reverend author states in his preface that he was induced to publish the lectures in consequence of some surreptitious and incorrect copies finding their way to the public; but it has not hitherto been told that this doggerel-monger was the person chiefly concerned in bringing about that result.
Claudero occasionally dealt in whitewash as well as blackball, and sometimes wrote regular panegyrics. An address of this kind to a writer named Walter Fergusson, who built St James’s Square, concludes with a strange association of ideas:
‘May Pentland Hills pour forth their springs,
To water all thy square!
May Fergussons still bless the place,
Both gay and debonnair!’
When the said square was in progress, however, the water seemed in no hurry to obey the bard’s invocation; and an attempt was made to procure this useful element by sinking wells for it, despite the elevation of the ground. Mr Walter Scott, W.S., happened one day to pass when Captain Fergusson of the Royal Navy—a good officer, but a sort of Commodore Trunnion in his manners—was sinking a well of vast depth. Upon Mr Scott expressing a doubt if water could be got there, ‘I will get it,’ quoth the captain, ‘though I sink to hell for it!’ ‘A bad place for water,’ was the dry remark of the doubter.
[QUEENSBERRY HOUSE.]
In the Canongate, on the south side, is a large, gloomy building, enclosed in a court, and now used as a refuge for destitute persons. This was formerly the town mansion of the Dukes of Queensberry, and a scene, of course, of stately life and high political affairs. It was built by the first duke, the willing minister of the last two Stuarts—he who also built Drumlanrig Castle in Dumfriesshire, which he never slept in but one night, and with regard to which it is told that he left the accounts for the building tied up with this inscription: ‘The deil pyke out his een that looks herein!’ Duke William was a noted money-maker and land-acquirer. No little laird of his neighbourhood had any chance with him for the retention of his family property. He was something still worse in the eyes of the common people—a persecutor; that is, one siding against the Presbyterian cause. There is a story in one of their favourite books of his having died of the morbus pediculosus, by way of a judgment upon him for his wickedness. In reality, he died of some ordinary fever. It is also stated, from the same authority, that about the time when his grace died, a Scotch skipper, being in Sicily, saw one day a coach-and-six driving to Mount Etna, while a diabolic voice exclaimed: ‘Open to the Duke of Drumlanrig!’—‘which proves, by the way,’ says Mr Sharpe, ‘that the devil’s porter is no herald. In fact,’ adds this acute critic, ‘the legend is borrowed from the story of Antonio the Rich, in George Sandys’s Travels.’[260]
It appears, from family letters, that the first duchess often resided in the Canongate mansion, while her husband occupied Sanquhar Castle. The lady was unfortunately given to drink, and there is a letter of hers in which she pathetically describes her situation to a country friend, left alone in Queensberry House with only a few bottles of wine, one of which, having been drawn, had turned out sour. Sour wine being prejudicial to her health, it was fearful to think of what might prove the quality of the remaining bottles.
The son of this couple, James, second duke, must ever be memorable as the main instrument in carrying through the Union. His character has been variously depicted. By Defoe, in his History of the Union, it is liberally panegyrised. ‘I think I have,’ says he, ‘given demonstrations to the world that I will flatter no man.’ Yet he could not refrain from extolling the ‘prudence, calmness, and temper’ which the duke showed during that difficult crisis. Unfortunately the author of Robinson Crusoe, though not a flatterer, could not insure himself against the usual prepossessions of a partisan. Boldness the duke must certainly have possessed, for during the ferments attending the parliamentary proceedings on that occasion, he continued daily to drive between his lodgings in Holyrood and the Parliament House, notwithstanding several intimations that his life was threatened. His grace’s eldest son, James, was an idiot of the most unhappy sort—rabid and gluttonous, and early grew to an immense height, which is testified by his coffin in the family vault at Durisdeer, still to be seen, of great length and unornamented with the heraldic follies which bedizen the violated remains of his relatives. A tale of mystery and horror is preserved by tradition respecting this monstrous being. While the family resided in Edinburgh, he was always kept confined in a ground apartment, in the western wing of the house, upon the windows of which, till within these few years, the boards still remained by which the dreadful receptacle was darkened to prevent the idiot from looking out or being seen. On the day the Union was passed, all Edinburgh crowded to the Parliament Close to await the issue of the debate, and to mob the chief promoters of the detested measure on their leaving the House. The whole household of the commissioner went en masse, with perhaps a somewhat different object, and among the rest was the man whose duty it was to watch and attend Lord Drumlanrig. Two members of the family alone were left behind—the madman himself, and a little kitchen-boy who turned the spit. The insane being, hearing everything unusually still around, the house being deserted, and the Canongate like a city of the dead, and observing his keeper to be absent, broke loose from his confinement, and roamed wildly through the house. It is supposed that the savoury odour of the preparations for dinner led him to the kitchen, where he found the little turnspit quietly seated by the fire. He seized the boy, killed him, took the meat from the fire, and spitted the body of his victim, which he half-roasted, and was found devouring when the duke, with his domestics, returned from his triumph. The idiot survived his father many years, though he did not succeed him upon his death in 1711, when the titles devolved upon Charles, the younger brother. He is known to have died in England. This horrid act of his child was, according to the common sort of people, the judgment of God upon him for his wicked concern in the Union—the greatest blessing, as it has happened, that ever was conferred upon Scotland by any statesman.
Allan Ramsay’s Shop, High Street.
Charles, third Duke of Queensberry, who was born in Queensberry House, resided occasionally in it when he visited Scotland; but as he was much engaged in attending the court during the earlier part of his life, his stay here was seldom of long continuance. After his grace and the duchess embroiled themselves with the court (1729), on account of the support which they gave to the poet Gay, they came to Scotland, and resided for some time here. The author of the Beggar’s Opera accompanied them, and remained about a month, part of which was given to Dumfriesshire. Tradition in Edinburgh used to point out an attic in an old house opposite to Queensberry House, where, as an appropriate abode for a poet, his patrons are said to have stowed him. It was said he wrote the Beggar’s Opera there—an entirely gratuitous assumption. In the progress of the history of his writings, nothing of consequence occurs at this time. He had finished the second part of the opera a short while before. After his return to the south, he is found engaged in ‘new writing a damned play, which he wrote several years before, called The Wife of Bath; a task which he accomplished while living with the Duke of Queensberry in Oxfordshire, during the ensuing months of August, September, and October.’[261] It is known, however, that while in Edinburgh, he haunted the shop of Allan Ramsay, in the Luckenbooths—the flat above that well-remembered and classical shop so long kept by Mr Creech, from which issued the Mirror, Lounger, and other works of name, and where for a long course of years all the literati of Edinburgh used to assemble every day, like merchants at an Exchange. Here Ramsay amused Gay by pointing out to him the chief public characters of the city as they met in the forenoon at the Cross. Here, too, Gay read the Gentle Shepherd, and studied the Scottish language, so that upon his return to England he was enabled to make Pope appreciate the beauties of that delightful pastoral. He is said also to have spent some of his time with the sons of mirth and humour in an alehouse opposite to Queensberry House, kept by one Janet Hall. Jenny Ha’s, as the place was called, was a noted house for drinking claret from the butt within the recollection of old gentlemen living in my time.
Jenny Ha’s Ale-House.
While Gay was at Drumlanrig, he employed himself in picking out a great number of the best books from the library, which were sent to England, whether for his own use or the duke’s is not known.
Duchess Catherine was a most extraordinary lady, eccentric to a degree undoubtedly bordering on madness. Her beauty has been celebrated by Pope not in very elegant terms:
‘Since Queensberry to strip there’s no compelling,
’Tis from a handmaid we must take a Helen.’
Prior had, at an early period of her life, depainted her irrepressible temper:
‘Thus Kitty, beautiful and young,
And wild as colt untamed,
Bespoke the fair from whom she sprang,
By little rage inflamed;
Inflamed with rage at sad restraint,
Which wise mamma ordained;
And sorely vexed to play the saint,
Whilst wit and beauty reigned.
“Shall I thumb holy books, confined
With Abigails forsaken?
Kitty’s for other things designed,
Or I am much mistaken.
Must Lady Jenny frisk about,
And visit with her cousins?
At balls must she make all the rout,
And bring home hearts by dozens?
What has she better, pray, than I?
What hidden charms to boast,
That all mankind for her should die,
Whilst I am scarce a toast?
Dearest mamma, for once let me,
Unchained, my fortune try;
I’ll have my earl as well as she,
Or know the reason why.
I’ll soon with Jenny’s pride quit score,
Make all her lovers fall;
They’ll grieve I was not loosed before,
She, I was loosed at all.”
Fondness prevailed, mamma gave way;
Kitty, at heart’s desire,
Obtained the chariot for a day,
And set the world on fire!’
It is an undoubted fact that, before her marriage, she had been confined in a strait-jacket on account of mental derangement; and her conduct in married life was frequently such as to entitle her to a repetition of the same treatment. She was, in reality, at all times to a certain extent insane, though the politeness of fashionable society and the flattery of her poetical friends seem to have succeeded in passing off her extravagances as owing to an agreeable freedom of carriage and vivacity of mind. Her brother was as clever and as mad as herself, and used to amuse himself by hiding a book in his library, and hunting for it after he had forgot where it was deposited.
Her grace was no admirer of Scottish manners. One of their habits she particularly detested—the custom of eating off the end of a knife. When people dined with her at Drumlanrig, and began to lift their food in this manner, she used to scream out and beseech them not to cut their throats; and then she would confound the offending persons by sending them a silver spoon or fork upon a salver.[262]
When in Scotland her grace always dressed herself in the garb of a peasant-girl. Her object seems to have been to ridicule and put out of countenance the stately dresses and demeanour of the Scottish gentlewomen who visited her. One evening some country ladies paid her a visit, dressed in their best brocades, as for some state occasion. Her grace proposed a walk, and they were of course under the necessity of trooping off, to the utter discomfiture of their starched-up frills and flounces. Her grace at last pretended to be tired, sat down upon the dirtiest dunghill she could find, at the end of a farmhouse, and saying, ‘Pray, ladies, be seated,’ invited her poor draggled companions to plant themselves round about her. They stood so much in awe of her that they durst not refuse; and of course her grace had the satisfaction of afterwards laughing at the destruction of their silks.
When she went out to an evening entertainment, and found a tea-equipage paraded which she thought too fine for the rank of the owner, she would contrive to overset the table and break the china. The forced politeness of her hosts on such occasions, and the assurances which they made her grace that no harm was done, &c., delighted her exceedingly.
Her custom of dressing like a paysanne once occasioned her grace a disagreeable adventure at a review. On her attempting to approach the duke, the guard, not knowing her rank or relation to him, pushed her rudely back. This threw her into such a passion that she could not be appeased till his grace assured her that the men had all been soundly flogged for their insolence.
An anecdote scarcely less laughable is told of her grace as occurring at court, where she carried to the same extreme her attachment to plain-dealing and plain-dressing. An edict had been issued forbidding the ladies to appear at the drawing-room in aprons. This was disregarded by the duchess, whose rustic costume would not have been complete without that piece of dress. On approaching the door she was stopped by the lord in waiting, who told her that he could not possibly give her grace admission in that guise, when she, without a moment’s hesitation, stripped off her apron, threw it in his lordship’s face, and walked on, in her brown gown and petticoat, into the brilliant circle!
Her caprices were endless. At one time when a ball had been announced at Drumlanrig, after the company were all assembled her grace took a headache, declared that she could bear no noise, and sat in a chair in the dancing-room, uttering a thousand peevish complaints. Lord Drumlanrig, who understood her humour, said: ‘Madam, I know how to cure you;’ and taking hold of her immense elbow-chair, which moved on castors, rolled her several times backwards and forwards across the saloon, till she began to laugh heartily—after which the festivities were allowed to commence.
The duchess certainly, both in her conversation and letters, displayed a great degree of wit and quickness of mind. Yet nobody perhaps, saving Gay, ever loved her. She seems to have been one of those beings who are too much feared, admired, or envied, to be loved.
The duke, on the contrary, who was a man of ordinary mind, had the affection and esteem of all. His temper and dispositions were sweet and amiable in the extreme. His benevolence, extending beyond his fellow-creatures, was exercised even upon his old horses, none of which he would ever permit to be killed or sold. He allowed the veterans of his stud free range in some parks near Drumlanrig, where, retired from active life, they got leave to die decent and natural deaths. Upon his grace’s decease, however, in 1778, these luckless pensioners were all put up to sale by his heartless successor; and it was a painful sight to see the feeble and pampered animals forced by their new masters to drag carts, &c., till they broke down and died on the roads and in the ditches.
Duke Charles’s eldest son, Lord Drumlanrig, was altogether mad. He had contracted himself to one lady when he married another. The lady who became his wife was a daughter of the Earl of Hopetoun, and a most amiable woman. He loved her tenderly, as she deserved; but owing to the unfortunate contract which he had engaged in, they were never happy. They were often observed in the beautiful pleasure-grounds at Drumlanrig weeping bitterly together. These hapless circumstances had such a fatal effect upon him that during a journey to London in 1754 he rode on before the coach in which the duchess travelled, and shot himself with one of his own pistols. It was given out that the pistol had gone off by chance.
There is just one other tradition of Drumlanrig to be noticed. The castle, being a very large and roomy mansion, had of course a ghost, said to be the spirit of a Lady Anne Douglas. This unhappy phantom used to walk about the house, terrifying everybody, with her head in one hand and her fan in the other—are we to suppose, fanning her face?
On the death of the Good Duke, as he was called, in 1778, the title and estates devolved on his cousin, the Earl of March, so well remembered as a sporting character and debauchee of the old school by the name of Old Q. In his time Queensberry House was occupied by other persons, for he had little inclination to spend his time in Scotland. And this brings to mind an anecdote highly illustrative of the wretchedness of such a life as his. When professing, towards the close of his days, to be eaten up with ennui, and incapable of any longer taking an interest in anything, it was suggested that he might go down to his Scotch estates and live among his tenantry. ‘I’ve tried that,’ said the blasé aristocrat; ‘it is not amusing.’ In 1801 he caused Queensberry House to be stripped of its ornaments and sold. With fifty-eight fire-rooms, and a gallery seventy feet long, besides a garden, it was offered at the surprisingly low upset price of £900. The Government purchased it for a barrack. Thus has passed away the [home of the] Douglas of Queensberry from its old place in Edinburgh, where doubtless the money-making duke thought it would stand for ever.
[TENNIS COURT.]
Early Theatricals—The Canongate Theatre—Digges and Mrs Bellamy—A Theatrical Riot.
‘Just without the Water-gate,’ says Maitland, ‘on the eastern side of the street, was the Royal Tennis Court, anciently called the Catchpel [from Cache, a game since called Fives, and a favourite amusement in Scotland so early as the reign of James IV.].’ The house—a long, narrow building with a court—was burned down in modern times, and rebuilt for workshops. Yet the place continues to possess some interest as connected with the early and obscure history of the stage in Scotland, not to speak of the tennis itself, which was a fashionable amusement in Scotland in the seventeenth century, and here played by the Duke of York, Law the financial schemer, and other remarkable persons.
The first known appearance of the post-reformation theatre in Edinburgh was in the reign of King James VI., when several companies came from London, chiefly for the amusement of the Court, including one to which Shakespeare is known to have belonged, though his personal attendance cannot be substantiated. There was no such thing, probably, as a play acted in Edinburgh from the departure of James in 1603 till the arrival of his grandson, the Duke of York, in 1680.
Threatened by the Whig party in the House of Commons with an exclusion from the throne of England on account of his adherence to popery, this prince made use of his exile in Scotland to conciliate the nobles, and attach them to his person. His beautiful young wife, Mary of Modena, and his second daughter, the Lady Anne, assisted by giving parties at the palace—where, by the bye, tea was now first introduced into Scotland. Easy and obliging in their manners, these ladies revived the entertainment of the masque, and took parts themselves in the performance. At length, for his own amusement and that of his friends, James had some of his own company of players brought down to Holyrood and established in a little theatre, which was fitted up in the Tennis Court. On this occasion the remainder of the company playing at Oxford apologised for the diminution of their strength in the following lines written by Dryden:
‘Discord and plots, which have undone our age,
With the same ruin have o’erwhelmed the stage.
Our house has suffered in the common woe;
We have been troubled with Scots rebels too.
Our brethren have from Thames to Tweed departed,
And of our sisters, all the kinder-hearted
To Edinburgh gone, or coached or carted.
With bonny Blew cap there they act all night,
For Scotch half-crowns—in English threepence hight.
One nymph to whom fat Sir John Falstaff’s lean,
There, with her single person, fills the scene.
Another, with long use and age decayed,
Died here old woman, and there rose a maid.
Our trusty door-keeper, of former time,
There struts and swaggers in heroic rhyme.
Tack but a copper lace to drugget suit,
And there’s a hero made without dispute;
And that which was a capon’s tail before,
Becomes a plume for Indian emperor.
But all his subjects, to express the care
Of imitation, go like Indians bare.
Laced linen there would be a dangerous thing,
It might perhaps a new rebellion bring;
The Scot who wore it would be chosen king.’
We learn from Fountainhall’s Diary that on the celebration of the king’s birthday, 1681, the duke honoured the magistrates of the city with his presence in the theatre—namely, this theatre in the Tennis Court.
No further glimpse of our city’s theatrical history is obtained till 1705, when we find a Mr Abel announcing a concert in the Tennis Court, under the patronage of the Duke of Argyll, then acting as the queen’s commissioner to the Parliament. It is probable that the concert was only a cloak to some theatrical representation. This is the more likely from a tradition already mentioned of some old members of the Spendthrift Club who once frequented the tavern of a Mrs Hamilton, whose husband recollected having attended the theatre in the Tennis Court at Holyrood House, when the play was The Spanish Friar, and many members of the Union Parliament were present in the house.
Theatrical amusements appear to have been continued at the Tennis Court in the year 1710, if we are to place any reliance upon the following anecdote: When Mrs Siddons came to Edinburgh in 1784, the late Mr Alexander Campbell, author of the History of Scottish Poetry, asked Miss Pitcairn, daughter of Dr Pitcairn, to accompany him to one of the representations. The old lady refused, saying with coquettish vivacity: ‘Laddie, wad ye ha’e an auld lass like me to be running after the play-actors—me that hasna been at a theatre since I gaed wi’ papa to the Canongate in the year ten?’ The theatre was in those days encouraged chiefly by such Jacobites as Dr Pitcairn. It was denounced by the clergy as a hotbed of vice and profanity.
After this we hear no more of the theatre in the Tennis Court. The next place where the drama set up its head was in a house in Carrubber’s Close, under the management of an Italian lady styled Signora Violante, who paid two visits to Edinburgh. After her came, in 1726, one Tony Alston, who set up his scenes in the same house, and whose first prologue was written by Ramsay: it may be found in the works of that poet. In 1727 the Society of High Constables, of which Ramsay was then a member, endeavoured to ‘suppress the abominable stage-plays lately set up by Anthony Alston.’[263] Mr Alston played for a season or two, under the fulminations of the clergy and a prosecution on their part in the Court of Session.