CREECH’S SHOP.
The building at the east end of the Luckenbooths proper had a front facing down the High Street, and commanding not only a view of the busy scene there presented, but a prospect of Aberlady Bay, Gosford House, and other objects in Haddingtonshire. The shop in the east front was that of Mr Creech, a bookseller of facete memory, who had published many books by the principal literary men of his day, to all of whom he was known as a friend and equal. From this place had issued works by Kames, Smith, Hume, Mackenzie, and finally the poems of Burns. It might have been called the Lounger’s Observatory, for seldom was the doorway free of some group of idlers, engaged in surveying and commenting on the crowd in front; Creech himself, with his black silk breeches and powdered head, being ever a conspicuous member of the corps. The flat above had been the shop of Allan Ramsay, and the place where, in 1725, he set up the first example of a circulating library known in Scotland.
ST GILES, WEST WINDOW.
[SOME MEMORANDA OF THE OLD KIRK OF ST GILES.]
The central portion or transept of St Giles’s Church, opening from the south, formed a distinct place of worship, under the name of the Old Church, and this seems to have been the first arranged for Protestant worship after the Reformation. It was the scene of the prelections of John Knox (who, it will be remembered, was the first minister of the city under the reformed religion), until a month before his death, when it appears that another portion of the building—styled the Tolbooth Kirk—was fitted up for his use.
John Knox’s Pulpit.
It also happened to be in the Old Kirk that the celebrated riot of the 23rd of July 1637 took place, when, on the opening of the new Episcopal service-book, Jenny Geddes, of worthy memory, threw her cutty-stool at the dean who read it—the first weapon, and a formidable one it was, employed in the great civil war.[72]
Jenny Geddes’s Stool.
Jenny Geddes was an herbwoman—Scottice, a greenwife—at the Tron Church, where, in former as well as in recent times, that class of merchants kept their stalls. It seems that, in the midst of the hubbub, Jenny, hearing the bishop call upon the dean to read the collect of the day, cried out, with unintentional wit: ‘Deil colic the wame o’ ye!’[73] and threw at the dean’s head the small stool on which she sat; ‘a ticket of remembrance,’ as a Presbyterian annalist merrily terms it, so well aimed that the clergyman only escaped it by jouking;[74] that is, by [ducking or] suddenly bending his person.
Jenny, like the originators of many other insurrections, appears to have afterwards repented of her exertions on this occasion. We learn from the simple diarist, Andrew Nichol, that when Charles II. was known, in June 1650, to have arrived in the north of Scotland, amidst other rejoicings, ‘the pure [q.d. poor] kaill-wyves at the Trone [Jenny Geddes, no doubt, among the number] war sae overjoyed, that they sacrificed their standis and creellis, yea, the verie stoollis they sat on, in ane fyre.’ What will give, however, a still more unequivocal proof of the repentance of honest Jenny (after whom, by the way, Burns named a favourite mare), is the conduct expressly attributed to herself on the occasion of the king’s coronation in 1661 by the Mercurius Caledonius:
‘But among all our bontados and caprices,’ says that curious register of events,[75] ‘that of the immortal Jenet Geddis, Princesse of the Trone adventurers, was most pleasant; for she was not only content to assemble all her Creels, Basquets, Creepies,[76] Furmes, and other ingredients that composed the Shope of her Sallets, Radishes, Turnips, Carrots, Spinage, Cabbage, with all other sorts of Pot Merchandise that belongs to the garden, but even her Leather Chair of State, where she used to dispense Justice to the rest of her Langkale Vassals, were all very orderly burned; she herself countenancing the action with a high-flown flourish and vermilion majesty.’
The Scottish Society of Antiquaries nevertheless exhibit in their museum a clasp-stool, for which there is good evidence that it was the actual stool thrown by Mrs Geddes at the dean.
In the southern aisle of this church, the Regent Murray, three weeks after his assassination at Linlithgow, February 14, 1569-70, was interred: ‘his head placed south, contrair the ordour usit; the sepulchre laid with hewin wark maist curiously, and on the head ane plate of brass.’ John Knox preached a funeral-sermon over the remains of his friend, and drew tears from the eyes of all present. In the Tolbooth Church, immediately adjoining to the west, sat the convention which chose the Earl of Lennox as his successor in the regency. Murray’s monument was not inelegant for the time; and its inscription, written by Buchanan, is remarkable for emphatic brevity.
Modern Monument to the Marquis of Montrose (see [p. 108]).
This part of the church appears to have formerly been an open lounge. French Paris, Queen Mary’s servant, in his confession respecting the murder of Darnley, mentions that, during the communings which took place before that deed was determined on, he one day ‘took his mantle and sword, and went to walk (promener) in the High Church.’ Probably, in consequence of the veneration entertained for the memory of ‘the Good Regent,’ or else, perhaps, from some simple motive of conveniency, the Earl of Murray’s tomb was a place frequently assigned in bills for the payment of the money. It also appears to have been the subject of a similar jest to that respecting the tomb of Duke Humphrey. Robert Sempill, in his Banishment of Poverty, a poem referring to the year 1680 or 1681, thus expresses himself:
‘Then I knew no way how to fen’;
My guts rumbled like a hurle-barrow;
I dined with saints and noblemen,
Even sweet Saint Giles and Earl of Murray.’
In the immediate neighbourhood of the Earl of Murray’s tomb, to the east, is the sepulchre of the Marquis of Montrose, executed in 1650, and here interred most sumptuously, June 1661, after the various parts of his body had been dispersed for eleven years in different directions, according to his sentence.[77]
[THE PARLIAMENT CLOSE.]
Ancient Churchyard—Booths attached to the High Church—Goldsmiths—George Heriot—The Deid-Chack.
Previous to the seventeenth century, the ground now occupied by the Parliament House, and the buildings adjacent to the south and west, was the churchyard of St Giles’s, from the south side of which edifice it extended down a steep declivity to the Cowgate. This might formerly be considered the metropolitan cemetery of Scotland; as, together with the internal space of the church, it contained the ashes of many noble and remarkable personages, John Knox amongst the number. After the Reformation, when Queen Mary conferred the gardens of the Greyfriars upon the town, the churchyard of St Giles’s ceased to be much used as a burying-ground; and that extensive and more appropriate place of sepulture succeeded to this in being made the Westminster Abbey of Scotland.
The west side of the cemetery of St Giles’s was bounded by the house of the provost of the church, who, in 1469, granted part of the same to the citizens for the augmentation of the burying-ground. From the charter accompanying the grant, it appears that the provost’s house then also contained the public school of Edinburgh.
In the lower part of the churchyard[78] there was a small place of worship denominated the Chapel of Holyrood. Walter Chapman, the first printer in Edinburgh, in 1528 endowed an altar in this chapel with his tenement in the Cowgate; and, by the tenor of the charter, I am enabled to point out very nearly the residence of this interesting person, who, besides being a printer, was a respectable merchant in Edinburgh, and, it would appear, a very pious man. The tenement is thus described: ‘All and haill this tenement of land, back and foir, with houses, biggings, yards, and well[79] thereof, lying in the Cowgate of Edinburgh, on the south side thereof, near the said chapel, betwixt the lands of James Lamb on the east, and the lands of John Aber on the west, the arable lands called Wairam’s Croft on the south, and the said street on the north part.’