ROBERT CULLEN.
Robert Cullen, the son of the physician, made a great impression on Edinburgh society by his many delightful social qualities, and particularly his powers as a mimic of the Mathews genus. He manifested this gift in his earliest years, to the no small discomposure of his grave old father. One evening, when Dr Cullen was going to the theatre, Robert entreated to be taken along with him, but for some reason was condemned to remain at home. Some time after the departure of the doctor, Mrs Cullen heard him come along the passage, as if from his own room, and say at her door: ‘Well, after all, you may let Robert go.’ Robert was accordingly allowed to depart for the theatre, where his appearance gave no small surprise to his father. On the old gentleman coming home and remonstrating with his lady for allowing the boy to go, it was discovered that the voice which seemed to give the permission had proceeded from the young wag himself.
In maturer years, Cullen could not only mimic any voice or mode of speech, but enter so thoroughly into the nature of any man that he could supply exactly the ideas which he was likely to use. His imitations were therefore something much above mimicries—they were artistic representations of human character. He has been known in a social company, where another individual was expected, to stand up, in the character of that person, and return thanks for the proposal of his health; and this was done so happily that when the individual did arrive and got upon his legs to speak for himself, the company was convulsed with an almost exact repetition of what Cullen had previously uttered, the manner also and every inflection of the voice being precisely alike. In relating anecdotes, of which he possessed a vast store, he usually prefaced them with a sketch of the character of the person referred to, which greatly increased the effect, as the story then told characteristically. These sketches were remarked to be extremely graphic and most elegantly expressed.
When a young man, residing with his father, he was very intimate with Dr Robertson, the Principal of the university. To show that Robertson was not likely to be easily imitated, it may be mentioned, from the report of a gentleman who has often heard him making public orations, that when the students observed him pause for a word, and would themselves mentally supply it, they invariably found that the word which he did use was different from that which they had hit upon. Cullen, however, could imitate him to the life, either in his more formal speeches or in his ordinary discourse. He would often, in entering a house which the Principal was in the habit of visiting, assume his voice in the lobby and stair, and when arrived at the drawing-room door, astonish the family by turning out to be—Bob Cullen. Lord Greville, a pupil of the Principal’s, having been one night detained at a protracted debauch, where Cullen was also present, the latter gentleman next morning got admission to the bedroom of the young nobleman, where, personating Dr Robertson, he sat down by the bedside, and with all the manner of the reverend Principal, gave him a sound lecture for having been out so late last night. Greville, who had fully expected this visit, lay in remorseful silence, and allowed his supposed monitor to depart without saying a word. In the course of a quarter of an hour, however, when the real Dr Robertson entered, and commenced a harangue exactly duplicating that just concluded, he could not help exclaiming that it was too bad to give it him twice over. ‘Oh, I see how it is,’ said Robertson, rising to depart; ‘that rogue Bob Cullen must have been with you.’ The Principal became at length accustomed to Bob’s tricks, which he would seem, from the following anecdote, to have regarded in a friendly spirit. Being attended during an illness by Dr Cullen, it was found necessary to administer a liberal dose of laudanum. The physician, however, asked him, in the first place, in what manner laudanum affected him. Having received his answer, Cullen remarked, with surprise, that he had never known any one affected in the same way by laudanum besides his son Bob. ‘Ah,’ said Robertson, ‘does the rascal take me off there too?’
Mr Cullen entered at the Scottish bar in 1764, and, distinguishing himself highly as a lawyer, was raised to the bench in 1796, when he took the designation of Lord Cullen. He cultivated elegant literature, and contributed some papers of acknowledged merit to the Mirror and Lounger; but it was in conversation that he chiefly shone.
The close adjoining to the Mint contains several old-fashioned houses of a dignified appearance. In a floor of one bearing the date 1679, and having a little court in front, Alexander Wedderburn, Earl of Rosslyn and Lord Chancellor of England, resided while at the Scottish bar. This, as is well known, was a very brief interval; for a veteran barrister having one day used the term ‘presumptuous boy’ with reference to him, and his own caustic reply having drawn upon him a rebuke from the bench, he took off his gown, and making a bow, said he would never more plead where he was subjected to insult, but would seek a wider field for his exertions. His subsequent rapid rise at the English bar is matter of history. It is told that, returning to Edinburgh at the end of his life, after an absence of many years, he wished to see the house where he had lived while a Scotch advocate. Too infirm to walk, he was borne in a chair to the foot of the Mint Close to see this building. One thing he was particularly anxious about. While residing here, he had had five holes made in the little court to play at some bowling game of which he was fond. He wished, above all things, to see these holes once more, and when he found they were still there, he expressed much satisfaction. Churchill himself might have melted at such an anecdote of the old days of him who was
‘Pert at the bar, and in the senate loud.’
About midway up the close is a turreted mansion, accessible from Hyndford’s Close, and having a tolerably good garden connected with it. This was, in 1742, the residence of the Earl of Selkirk; subsequently it was occupied by Dr Daniel Rutherford, professor of botany. Sir Walter Scott, who, being a nephew of that gentleman, was often in the house in his young days, communicated to me a curious circumstance connected with it. It appears that the house immediately adjacent was not furnished with a stair wide enough to allow of a coffin being carried down in decent fashion. It had, therefore, what the Scottish law calls a servitude upon Dr Rutherford’s house, conferring the perpetual liberty of bringing the deceased inmates through a passage into that house and down its stair into the lane.
[MISS NICKY MURRAY.]
The dancing assemblies of Edinburgh were for many years, about the middle of the last century, under the direction and dictatorship of the Honourable Miss Nicky Murray, one of the sisters of the Earl of Mansfield. Much good sense, firmness, knowledge of the world and of the histories of individuals, as well as a due share of patience and benevolence, were required for this office of unrecognised though real power; and it was generally admitted that Miss Murray possessed the needful qualifications in a remarkable degree, though rather more marked by good manners than good-nature. She and her sisters lived for many years in a floor of a large building at the head of Bailie Fife’s Close—a now unhallowed locality, where, I believe, Francis Jeffrey attended his first school. In their narrow mansion, the Miss Murrays received flights of young lady-cousins from the country, to be finished in their manners and introduced into society. No light task must theirs have been, all things considered. I find a highly significant note on the subject inserted by an old gentleman in an interleaved copy of my first edition: ‘It was from Miss Nicky Murray’s—a relation of the Gray family—that my father ran off with my mother, then not sixteen years old.’
The Assembly Room of that time was in the close where the Commercial Bank was afterwards established.[221] First there was a lobby, where chairs were disburdened of their company, and where a reduced gentleman, with pretensions to the title of Lord Kirkcudbright—descendant of the once great Maclellans of Galloway—might have been seen selling gloves; this being the person alluded to in a letter written by Goldsmith while a student in Edinburgh: ‘One day, happening to slip into Lord Kilcobry’s—don’t be surprised, his lordship is only a glover!’ The dancing-room opened directly from the lobby, and above stairs was a tea-room. The former had a railed space in the centre, within which the dancers were arranged, while the spectators sat round on the outside; and no communication was allowed between the different sides of this sacred pale. The lady-directress had a high chair or throne at one end. Before Miss Nicky Murray, Lady Elliot of Minto and Mrs Brown of Coalstoun, wives of judges, had exercised this lofty authority, which was thought honourable on account of the charitable object of the assemblies. The arrangements were of a rigid character, and certainly tending to dullness. There being but one set allowed to dance at a time, it was seldom that any person was twice on the floor in one night. The most of the time was spent in acting the part of lookers-on, which threw great duties in the way of conversation upon the gentlemen. These had to settle with a partner for the year, and were upon no account permitted to change, even for a single night. The appointment took place at the beginning of the season, usually at some private party or ball given by a person of distinction, where the fans of the ladies were all put into a gentleman’s cocked hat; the gentlemen put in their hands and took a fan, and to whomsoever the fan belonged, that was to be his partner for the season. In the general rigours of this system, which sometimes produced ludicrous combinations, there was, however, one palliative—namely, the fans being all distinguishable from each other, and the gentleman being in general as well acquainted with the fan as the face of his mistress, and the hat being open, it was possible to peep in, and exercise, to a certain extent, a principle of selection, whereby he was perhaps successful in procuring an appointment to his mind. All this is spiritedly given in a poem of Sir Alexander Boswell:
‘Then were the days of modesty of mien!
Stays for the fat, and quilting for the lean;
The ribboned stomacher, in many a plait,
Upheld the chest, and dignified the gait;
Some Venus, brightest planet of the train,
Moved in a lustering halo, propped with cane.
Then the Assembly Close received the fair—
Order and elegance presided there—
Each gay Right Honourable had her place,
To walk a minuet with becoming grace.
No racing to the dance, with rival hurry—
Such was thy sway, O famed Miss Nicky Murray!
Each lady’s fan a chosen Damon bore,
With care selected many a day before;
For, unprovided with a favourite beau,
The nymph, chagrined, the ball must needs forego;
But, previous matters to her taste arranged,
Certes, the constant couple never changed;
Through a long night, to watch fair Delia’s will,
The same dull swain was at her elbow still.’
A little before Miss Nicky’s time, it was customary for gentlemen to walk alongside the chairs of their partners, with their swords by their sides, and so escort them home. They called next afternoon upon their Dulcineas to inquire how they were and drink tea. The fashionable time for seeing company in those days was the evening, when people were all abroad upon the street, as in the forenoon now, making calls and shopping. The people who attended the assemblies were very select. Moreover, they were all known to each other; and the introduction of a stranger required nice preliminaries. It is said that Miss Murray, on hearing a young lady’s name pronounced for the first time, would say: ‘Miss ——, of what?’ If no territorial addition could be made, she manifestly cooled. Upon one occasion, seeing a man at the assembly who was born in a low situation and raised to wealth in some humble trade, she went up to him, and, without the least deference to his fine-laced coat, taxed him with presumption in coming there, and turned him out of the room.
Major Topham praises the regularity and propriety observed at the assemblies, though gently insinuating their heaviness. He says: ‘I was never at an assembly where the authority of the manager was so observed or respected. With the utmost politeness, affability, and good-humour, Miss Murray attends to every one. All petitions are heard, and demands granted, which appear reasonable. The company is so much the more obliged to Miss Murray, as the task is by no means to be envied. The crowd which immediately surrounds her on entering the room, the impetuous applications of chaperons, maiden-aunts, and the earnest entreaties of lovers to obtain a ticket in one of the first sets for the dear object, render the fatigue of the office of lady-directress almost intolerable.’[222]
Early hours were kept in those days, and the stinted time was never exceeded. When the proper hour arrived for dissolving the party, and the young people would crowd round the throne to petition for one other set, up rose Miss Nicky in unrelenting rigidity of figure, and with one wave of her hand silenced the musicians:
‘Quick from the summit of the grove they fell,
And left it inharmonious.’
[THE BISHOP’S LAND.]
On the north side of the High Street, a hundred yards or so below the North Bridge, there existed previous to 1813 an unusually large and handsome old land or building named the Bishop’s Land. It rested upon an arcade or piazza, as it is called, and the entry in the first floor bore the ordinary legend:
BLISSIT BE ZE LORD FOR ALL HIS GIFTIS,
together with the date 1578, and a shield impaled with two coats of arms. Along the front of this floor was a balcony composed of brass, a thing unique in the ancient city. The house had been the Edinburgh residence of Archbishop John Spottiswood. Most unfortunately the whole line of building towards the street was burned down in the year 1813.
In the latter part of the last century the Bishop’s Land was regarded as a very handsome residence, and it was occupied accordingly by persons of consideration. The dictum of an old citizen to me many years ago was: ‘Nobody without livery-servants lived in the Bishop’s Land.’ Sir Stuart Threipland of Fingask occupied the first floor. His estate, forfeited by his father in 1716, was purchased back by him, with money obtained through his wife, in 1784; and the title, which was always given to him by courtesy, was restored as a reality to his descendants by George IV. He had himself been engaged in the affair of 1745-6, and had accompanied ‘the Prince’ in some part of his wanderings. In the hands of this ‘fine old Scottish gentleman,’ for such he was, his house in the Bishop’s Land was elegantly furnished, there being in particular some well-painted portraits of royal personages—not of the reigning house. These had all been sent to his father and himself by the persons represented in them, who thus showed their gratitude for efforts made and sufferings incurred in their behalf. There were five windows to the street, three of them lighting the drawing-room; the remaining two lighted the eldest son’s room. A dining-room, Sir Stuart’s bedroom, his sister Janet’s (who kept house for him) room, and other apartments were in the rear, some lighted from the adjacent close—and these still exist, having been spared by the fire. The kitchen and servants’ rooms were below.
In the next floor above lived the Hamiltons of Pencaitland; in the next again, the Aytouns of Inchdairnie. Mrs Aytoun, who was a daughter of Lord Rollo, would sometimes come down the stair in a winter evening, lighting herself with a little wax-taper, to drink tea with Mrs Janet Threipland, for so she called herself, though unmarried. In the uppermost floor of all lived a reputable tailor and his family. All the various tenants, including the tailor, were on good neighbourly terms with each other; a pleasant thing to tell of this bit of the old world, which has left nothing of the same kind behind it in these later days, when we all live at a greater distance, physical and moral, from each other.]
[JOHN KNOX’S MANSE.]
The lower portion of the High Street, including the Netherbow, was, till a recent time, remarkable for the antiquity of the greater number of the buildings, insomuch that no equal portion of the city was more distinctly a memorial of the general appearance of the whole as it was in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. On the north side of the High Street, immediately adjacent to the Netherbow, there was a nest of tall wooden-fronted houses of one character, and the age of which generally might be guessed from the date existing upon one—1562. This formed a perfect example of the High Gait as it appeared to Queen Mary, excepting that the open booths below had been converted into close shops. The fore-stairs—that is, outside stairs ascending to the first floor (technically so called), from which the women of Edinburgh reviled the hapless queen as she rode along the street after her surrender at Carberry—were unchanged in this little district.
The popular story regarding houses of this kind is that they took their origin in an inconvenience which was felt in having the Boroughmoor covered with wood, as it proved from that circumstance a harbour for robbers. To banish the robbers, it was necessary to extirpate the wood. To get this done, the magistrates granted leave to the citizens to project their house-fronts seven feet into the street, provided they should execute the work with timber cut from the Boroughmoor. Robert Fergusson follows up this story in a burlesque poem by relating how, consequently,
‘Edina’s mansions with lignarian art
Were piled and fronted. Like an ark she seemed
To lie on mountain’s top, with shapes replete,
Clean and unclean——
To Jove the Dryads prayed, nor prayed in vain,
For vengeance on her sons. At midnight drear
Black showers descend, and teeming myriads rise
Of bugs abhorrent’——
The only authentic information to be obtained on the point is presented by Maitland, when he tells us that the clearing of the Boroughmoor of timber took place in consequence of a charter from James IV. in 1508. He says nothing of robbers, but attributes the permission granted by the magistrates for the making of wooden projections merely to their desire of getting sale for their timber. After all, I am inclined to trace this fashion to taste. The wooden fronts appear to have originated in open galleries—an arrangement often spoken of in early writings. These, being closed up or formed into a range of windows, would produce the wooden-fronted house. It is remarkable that the wooden fronts do not in many instances bear the appearance of afterthoughts, as the stone structure within often shows such an arrangement of the fore wall as seems designed to connect the projecting part with the chambers within, or to give these chambers as much as possible of the borrowed light. At the same time, it is somewhat puzzling to find, in the closes below the buildings, gateways with hooks for hinges seven feet or so from the present street-front—an arrangement which does not appear necessary on the supposition that the houses were built designedly with a stone interior and a wooden projection.
In the Netherbow the street receives a contraction from the advance of the houses on the north side, thus closing a species of parallelogram, of which the Luckenbooths formed the upper extremity—the market-place of our ancient city. The uppermost of the prominent houses—having of course two fronts meeting in a right angle, one fronting to the line of street, the other looking up the High Street—is pointed to by tradition as the residence or manse of John Knox during his incumbency as minister of Edinburgh, from 1560 till (with few interruptions) his death in 1572. It is a picturesque building of three above-ground floors, constructed of substantial ashlar masonry, but on a somewhat small scale, and terminating in curious gables and masses of chimneys. A narrow door, right in the angle, gives access to a small room, lighted by one long window presented to the westward, and apparently the hall of the mansion in former times. Over the window and door is this legend, in an unusually old kind of lettering:
LVFE·GOD·ABVFE·AL·AND·YI·NYCHTBOVR·[AS·]YI·SELF·
The word ‘as’ is obliterated. The words are, in modern English, simply the well-known scriptural command: ‘Love God above all, and thy neighbour as thyself.’ Perched upon the corner above the door is a small effigy of the Reformer, preaching in a pulpit, and pointing with his right hand to a stone above his head in that direction, which presents in rude sculpture the sun bursting from clouds, with the name of the Deity inscribed on his disc in three languages:
ΘΕΟΣ
DEUS
GOD
Dr M’Crie, in his Life of John Knox, states that the Reformer, on commencing duty in Edinburgh at the conclusion of the struggles with the queen-regent, ‘lodged in the house of David Forrest, a burgess of Edinburgh, from which he removed to the lodging which had belonged to Durie, Abbot of Dunfermline.’ The magistrates acted liberally towards their minister, giving him a salary of two hundred pounds Scottish money, and paying his house-rent for him, at the rate of fifteen merks yearly. In October 1561 they ordained the Dean of Guild, ‘with al diligence, to mak ane warm studye of dailles to the minister, Johne Knox, within his hous, aboue the hall of the same, with lyht and wyndokis thereunto, and all uther necessaris.’ This study is generally supposed to have been a very small wooden projection, of the kind described a few pages back, still seen on the front of the first floor. Close to it is a window in the angle of the building, from which Knox is said by tradition to have occasionally held forth to multitudes below.
The second floor, which is accessible by two narrow spiral stairs, one to the south, another to the west, contains a tolerably spacious room, with a ceiling ornamented by stucco mouldings, and a window presented to the westward. A partition has at one time divided this room from a narrow one towards the north, the ceiling of which is composed of the beams and flooring of the attic flat, all curiously painted with flower-work in an ancient taste. Two inferior rooms extend still farther to the northward. It is to be remarked that the wooden projection already spoken of extends up to this floor, so that there is here likewise a small room in front; it contains a fireplace, and a recess which might have been a cupboard or a library, besides two small windows. That this fireplace, this recess, and also the door by which the wooden chamber is entered from the decorated room should all be formed in the front wall of the house, and with a necessary relation to the wooden projection, strikes one as difficult to reconcile with the idea of that projection being an afterthought; the appearances rather indicate the whole having been formed at once, as parts of one design. The attic floor exhibits strong oaken beams, but the flooring is in bad order.
In the lower part of the house there is a small room, said by tradition to have been used in times of difficulty for the purpose of baptising children; there is also a well to supply the house with water, besides a secret stair, represented as communicating subterraneously with a neighbouring alley.
From the size of this house, and the variety of accesses to it, it becomes tolerably certain that Knox could have occupied only a portion of it. The question arises, which part did he occupy? Probability seems decidedly in favour of the first floor—that containing the window from which he is traditionally said to have preached, and where his effigy appears. An authentic fact in the Reformer’s life favours this supposition. When under danger from the hostility of the queen’s party in the castle—in the spring of 1571—‘one evening a musket-ball was fired in at his window, and lodged in the roof of the apartment in which he was sitting. It happened that he sat at the time in a different part of the room from that which he had been accustomed to occupy, otherwise the ball, from the direction it took, must have struck him’ (M’Crie). The second floor is too high to have admitted of a musket being fired in at one of the windows. A ball fired in at the ground-floor would not have struck the ceiling. The only feasible supposition in the case is that the Reformer dwelt in the first floor, which was not beyond an assassin’s aim, and yet at such a height that a ball fired from the street would hit the ceiling.[223]
JOHN KNOX’S MANSE.
[HYNDFORD’S CLOSE.]
At the bottom of the High Street, on the south side, there is an uncommonly huge and dense mass of stone buildings or lands, penetrated only by a few narrow closes. One of these is Hyndford’s Close, a name indicating the noble family which once had lodgment in it. This was a Scotch peerage not without its glories—witness particularly the third earl, who acted as ambassador in succession to Prussia, to Russia, and to Vienna. It is now extinct: its bijouterie, its pictures, including portraits of Maria Theresa, and other royal and imperial personages, which had been presented as friendly memorials to the ambassador, have all been dispersed by the salesman’s hammer, and Hyndford’s Close, on my trying to get into it lately (1868), was inaccessible (literally) from filth.
Hyndford’s Close.
The entry and stair at the head of the close on the west side was a favourite residence, on account of the ready access to it from the street. In the second floor of this house lived, about the beginning of the reign of George III., Lady Maxwell of Monreith, and there brought up her beautiful daughters, one of whom became Duchess of Gordon. The house had a dark passage, and the kitchen door was passed in going to the dining-room, according to an agreeable old practice in Scotch houses, which lets the guests know on entering what they have to expect. The fineries of Lady Maxwell’s daughters were usually hung up, after washing, on a screen in this passage to dry; while the coarser articles of dress, such as shifts and petticoats, were slung decently out of sight at the window, upon a projecting contrivance similar to a dyer’s pole, of which numerous specimens still exist at windows in the Old Town for the convenience of the poorer inhabitants.
So easy and familiar were the manners of the great in those times, fabled to be so stiff and decorous, that Miss Eglintoune, afterwards Lady Wallace, used to be sent with the tea-kettle across the street to the Fountain Well for water to make tea. Lady Maxwell’s daughters were the wildest romps imaginable. An old gentleman, who was their relation, told me that the first time he saw these beautiful girls was in the High Street, where Miss Jane, afterwards Duchess of Gordon, was riding upon a sow, which Miss Eglintoune thumped lustily behind with a stick. It must be understood that in the middle of the eighteenth century vagrant swine went as commonly about the streets of Edinburgh as dogs do in our own day, and were more generally fondled as pets by the children of the last generation.[224] It may, however, be remarked that the sows upon which the Duchess of Gordon and her witty sister rode, when children, were not the common vagrants of the High Street, but belonged to Peter Ramsay, of the inn in St Mary’s Wynd, and were among the last that were permitted to roam abroad. The two romps used to watch the animals as they were let loose in the forenoon from the stable-yard (where they lived among the horse-litter), and get upon their backs the moment they issued from the close.
The extraordinary cleverness, the genuine wit, and the delightful abandon of Lady Wallace made an extraordinary impression on Scottish society in her day. It almost seemed as if some faculty divine had inspired her. A milliner bringing home a cap to her when she was just about to set off to the Leith races was so unlucky as to tear it against the buckle of a porter’s knee in the street. ‘No matter,’ said her ladyship; and instantly putting it on, restored all to grace by a single pin. The cap thus misarranged was found so perfectly exquisite that ladies tore their caps on nails, and pinned them on in the hope of imitating it. It was, however, a grace beyond the reach of art.
Of the many bon mots attributed to her, one alone seems worthy, from its being unhackneyed, of appearing here. The son of Mr Kincaid, king’s printer—a great Macaroni, as the phrase went; that is, dandy—was nicknamed, from his father’s lucrative patent, Young Bibles. This beau entering a ballroom one evening, some of the company asked who was that extraordinary-looking young man. ‘Only Young Bibles,’ quoth Lady Wallace, ‘bound in calf, and gilt, but not lettered!’
[In the same stair in Hyndford’s Close lived another lady of rank, and one who, for several reasons, filled in her time a broad space in society. This was Anne, Countess of Balcarres, the progenitrix of perhaps as many persons as ever any woman was in the same space of time. Her eldest daughter, Anne, authoress of the ballad of Auld Robin Gray, was, of all her eleven children, the one whose name is most likely to continue in remembrance—yea, though another of them put down the Maroon war in the West Indies. When in Hyndford’s Close, Lady Balcarres had for a neighbour in the same alley Dr Rutherford, the uncle of Sir Walter Scott; and young Walter, often at his uncle’s, occasionally accompanied his aunt ‘Jeanie’ to Lady Balcarres’s. Forty years after, having occasion to correspond with Lady Anne Barnard, née Lindsay, he told her: ‘I remember all the locale of Hyndford’s Close perfectly, even to the Indian screen with Harlequin and Columbine, and the harpsichord, though I never had the pleasure of hearing Lady Anne play upon it. I suppose the close, once too clean to soil the hem of your ladyship’s garment, is now a resort for the lowest mechanics—and so wears the world away.... It is, to be sure, more picturesque to lament the desolation of towers on hills and haughs, than the degradation of an Edinburgh close; but I cannot help thinking on the simple and cosie retreats where worth and talent, and elegance to boot, were often nestled, and which now are the resort of misery, filth, poverty, and vice.’[225]
The late Mrs Meetham, a younger sister of Miss Spence Yeaman, of Murie, in the Carse of Gowrie, had often heard her grand-aunt, Miss Molly Yeaman, describe, from her own recollection, the tea-drinkings of the Countess of Balcarres in Hyndford’s Close. The family was not rich, and it still retained something of its ancient Jacobitism. The tea-drinkings, as was not uncommon, took place in my lady’s bedroom. At the foot of a four-posted bed, exhibiting a finely worked coverlet, stood John, an elderly man-servant, and a character, in full Balcarres livery, an immense quantity of worsted lace on his coat. Resting with his arm round a bedpost, he was ready to hand the kettle when required. As the ladies went chattering on, there would sometimes occur a difficulty about a date or a point in genealogy, and then John was appealed to to settle the question. For example, it came to be debated how many of the Scotch baronetcies were real; for, as is still the case, many of them were known to be fictitious, or assumed without legal grounds. Here John was known to be not only learned, but eloquent. He began: ‘Sir James Kinloch, Sir Stuart Threipland, Sir John Wedderburn, Sir —— Ogilvy, Sir James Steuart of Coltness’ [all of them forfeited baronets, be it observed]: ‘these, leddies, are the only real baronets. For the rest, I do believe, the Deil’——then a figurative declaration not fit for modern print, but which made the Balcarres party only laugh, and declare to John that they thought him not far wrong.]
[HOUSE OF THE MARQUISES OF TWEEDDALE—THE BEGBIE TRAGEDY.]
Tweeddale Court.
The town mansion of the Marquises of Tweeddale was one of large extent and dimensions, in a court which still bears the title of that family, nearly opposite to the mansion of John Knox.[226] When John, the fourth marquis, was Secretary of State for Scotland, in the reign of George II., this must have been a dwelling of considerable importance in the eyes of his countrymen. It had a good garden in the rear, with a yard and coach entry from the Cowgate. Now all the buildings and ‘pertinents’ are in the occupation of Messrs Oliver & Boyd, the well-known publishers.
Scene of the Begbie Murder.
The passage from the street into Tweeddale Court is narrow and dark, and about fifteen yards in length. Here, in 1806, when the mansion was possessed as a banking-house by the British Linen Company, there took place an extraordinary tragedy. About five o’clock of the evening of the 13th of November, when the short midwinter day had just closed, a child, who lived in a house accessible from the close, was sent by her mother with a kettle to obtain a supply of water for tea from the neighbouring well. The little girl, stepping with the kettle in her hand out of the public stair into the close, stumbled in the dark over something which lay there, and which proved to be the body of a man just expiring. On an alarm being given, it was discovered that this was William Begbie, a porter connected with the bank, in whose heart a knife was stuck up to the haft, so that he bled to death before uttering a word which might tend to explain the dismal transaction. He was at the same time found to have been robbed of a package of notes to the value of above four thousand pounds, which he had been entrusted, in the course of his ordinary duty, to carry from the branch of the bank at Leith to the head-office.[227] The blow had been given with an accuracy and a calculation of consequences showing the most appalling deliberation in the assassin; for not only was the knife directed straight into the most vital part, but its handle had been muffled in a bunch of soft paper, so as to prevent, as was thought, any sprinkling of blood from reaching the person of the murderer, by which he might have been by some chance detected. The knife was one of those with broad thin blades and wooden handles which are used for cutting bread, and its rounded front had been ground to a point, apparently for the execution of this horrible deed. The unfortunate man left a wife and four children to bewail his loss.
The singular nature and circumstances of Begbie’s murder occasioned much excitement in the public mind, and every effort was of course made to discover the guilty party. No house of a suspicious character in the city was left unsearched, and parties were despatched to watch and patrol all the various roads leading out into the country. The bank offered a reward of five hundred pounds for such information as might lead to the conviction of the offender or offenders; and the government further promised the king’s pardon to any except the actual murderer who, having been concerned in the deed, might discover their accomplices. The sheriff of Edinburgh, Mr Clerk Rattray, displayed the greatest zeal in his endeavours to ascertain the circumstances of the murder, and to detect and seize the murderer, but with surprisingly little success. All that could be ascertained was that Begbie, in proceeding up Leith Walk on his fatal mission, had been accompanied by ‘a man;’ and that about the supposed time of the murder ‘a man’ had been seen by some children to run out of the close into the street and down Leith Wynd, a lane leading off from the Netherbow at a point nearly opposite to the close. There was also reason to believe that the knife had been bought in a shop about two o’clock on the day of the murder, and that it had been afterwards ground upon a grinding-stone and smoothed on a hone. A number of suspicious characters were apprehended and examined; but all, with one exception, produced satisfactory proofs of their innocence. The exception was a carrier between Perth and Edinburgh, a man of dissolute and irregular habits, of great bodily strength, and known to be a dangerous and desperate character. He was kept in custody for a considerable time on suspicion, having been seen in the Canongate, near the scene of the murder, a very short time after it was committed. It has since been ascertained that he was then going about a different business, the disclosure of which would have subjected him to a capital punishment. It was in consequence of the mystery he felt himself impelled to preserve on this subject that he was kept so long in custody; but at length facts and circumstances came out to warrant his discharge, and he was discharged accordingly.
Months rolled on without eliciting any evidence respecting the murder, and, like other wonders, it had ceased in a great measure to engage public attention, when, on the 10th of August 1807, a journeyman mason, in company with two other men, passing through the Bellevue grounds in the neighbourhood of the city, found, in a hole in a stone enclosure by the side of a hedge, a parcel containing a large quantity of bank-notes, bearing the appearance of having been a good while exposed to the weather. After consulting a little, the men carried the package to the sheriff’s office, where it was found to contain about £3000 in large notes, being those which had been taken from Begbie. The British Linen Company rewarded the men with two hundred pounds for their honesty; but the circumstance passed without throwing any light on the murder itself.
Up to the present day the murderer of Begbie has not been discovered; nor is it probable, after the space of time which has elapsed, that he will ever be so. It is most likely that the grave has long closed upon him. The only person on whom public suspicion alighted with any force during the sixteen years ensuing upon the transaction was a medical practitioner in Leith, a dissolute man and a gambler, who put an end to his own existence not long after the murder. But I am not acquainted with any particular circumstances on which this suspicion was grounded beyond the suicide, which might spring from other causes. It was not till 1822 that any further light was thrown on this mysterious case. In a work then published under the title of The Life and Trial of James Mackoull, there was included a paper by Mr Denovan, the Bow Street officer, the object of which was to prove that Mackoull was the murderer, and which contained at least one very curious statement.
Mr Denovan had discovered in Leith a man, then acting as a teacher, but who in 1806 was a sailor-boy, and who had witnessed some circumstances immediately connected with the murder. The man’s statement was as follows: ‘I was at that time (November 1806) a boy of fourteen years of age. The vessel to which I belonged had made a voyage to Lisbon, and was then lying in Leith harbour. I had brought a small present from Portugal for my mother and sister, who resided in the Netherbow, Edinburgh, immediately opposite to Tweeddale’s Close, leading to the British Linen Company’s Bank. I left the vessel late in the afternoon, and as the articles I had brought were contraband, I put them under my jacket, and was proceeding up Leith Walk, when I perceived a tall man carrying a yellow-coloured parcel under his arm, and a genteel man, dressed in a black coat, dogging him. I was a little afraid: I conceived the man who carried the parcel to be a smuggler, and the gentleman who followed him to be a custom-house or excise officer. In dogging the man, the supposed officer went from one side of the Walk to the other [the Walk is a broad street], as if afraid of being noticed, but still kept about the same distance behind him. I was afraid of losing what I carried, and shortened sail a little, keeping my eyes fixed on the person I supposed to be an officer, until I came to the head of Leith Street, when I saw the smuggler take the North Bridge, and the custom-house officer go in front of the Register Office; here he looked round him, and imagining he was looking for me, I hove to, and watched him. He then looked up the North Bridge, and, as I conceive, followed the smuggler, for he went the same way. I stood a minute or two where I was, and then went forward, walking slowly up the North Bridge. I did not, however, see either of the men before me; and when I came to the south end or head of the Bridge, supposing that they might have gone up the High Street or along the South Bridge, I turned to the left, and reached the Netherbow, without again seeing either the smuggler or the officer. Just, however, as I came opposite to Tweeddale’s Close, I saw the custom-house officer come running out of it with something under his coat: I think he ran down the street. Being much alarmed, and supposing that the officer had also seen me and knew what I carried, I deposited my little present in my mother’s with all possible speed, and made the best of my way to Leith, without hearing anything of the murder of Begbie until next day. On coming on board the vessel, I told the mate what a narrow escape I conceived I had made: he seemed somewhat alarmed (having probably, like myself, smuggled some trifling article from Portugal), and told me in a peremptory tone that I should not go ashore again without first acquainting him. I certainly heard of the murder before I left Leith, and concluded that the man I saw was the murderer; but the idea of waiting on a magistrate and communicating what I had seen never struck me. We sailed in a few days thereafter from Leith; and the vessel to which I belonged having been captured by a privateer, I was carried to a French prison, and only regained my liberty at the last peace. I can now recollect distinctly the figure of the man I saw; he was well dressed, had a genteel appearance, and wore a black coat. I never saw his face properly, for he was before me the whole way up the Walk; I think, however, he was a stout big man, but not so tall as the man I then conceived to be a smuggler.’
This description of the supposed custom-house officer coincides exactly with that of the appearance of Mackoull; and other circumstances are given which almost make it certain that he was the murderer. This Mackoull was a London rogue of unparalleled effrontery and dexterity, who for years haunted Scotland, and effected some daring robberies. He resided in Edinburgh from September 1805 till the close of 1806, and during that time frequented a coffee-house in the Ship Tavern at Leith. He professed to be a merchant expelled by the threats of the French from Hamburg, and to live by a new mode of dyeing skins, but in reality he practised the arts of a gambler and a pickpocket. He had a mean lodging at the bottom of New Street in the Canongate, near the scene of the murder of Begbie, to which it is remarkable that Leith Wynd was the readiest as well as most private access from that spot. No suspicion, however, fell upon Mackoull at this period, and he left the country for a number of years, at the end of which time he visited Glasgow, and there effected a robbery of one of the banks. For this crime he did not escape the law. He was brought to trial at Edinburgh in 1820, was condemned to be executed, but died in jail while under reprieve from his sentence.
The most striking part of the evidence which Mr Denovan adduces against Mackoull is the report of a conversation which he had with that person in the condemned cell of the Edinburgh jail in July 1820, when Mackoull was very doubtful of being reprieved. To pursue his own narrative, which is in the third person: ‘He told Captain Sibbald [the superior of the prison] that he intended to ask Mackoull a single question relative to the murder of Begbie, but would first humour him by a few jokes, so as to throw him off his guard, and prevent him from thinking he had called for any particular purpose [it is to be observed that Mr Denovan had a professional acquaintance with the condemned man]; but desired Captain Sibbald to watch the features of the prisoner when he (Denovan) put his hand to his chin, for he would then put the question he meant. After talking some time on different topics, Mr Denovan put this very simple question to the prisoner: “By the way, Mackoull, if I am correct, you resided at the foot of New Street, Canongate, in November 1806—did you not?” He stared—he rolled his eyes, and, as if falling into a convulsion, threw himself back upon his bed. In this condition he continued for a few moments, when, as if recollecting himself, he started up, exclaiming wildly: “No, —— ——! I was then in the East Indies—in the West Indies. What do you mean?” “I mean no harm, Mackoull,” he replied; “I merely asked the question for my own curiosity; for I think when you left these lodgings you went to Dublin. Is it not so?” “Yes, yes, I went to Dublin,” he replied; “and I wish I had remained there still. I won £10,000 there at the tables, and never knew what it was to want cash, although you wished the folks here to believe that they locked me up in Old Start (Newgate), and brought down your friend Adkins to swear he saw me there: this was more than your duty.” He now seemed to rave, and lose all temper, and his visitor bade him good-night, and left him.’
It appears extremely probable, from the strong circumstantial evidence which has been offered by Mr Denovan, that Mackoull was the murderer of Begbie.
One remaining fact regarding the Netherbow will be listened to with some interest. It was the home—perhaps the native spot—of William Falconer, the author of The Shipwreck, whose father was a wigmaker in this street.[228]
[THE LADIES OF TRAQUAIR.]
Lady Lovat was at the head of a genus of old ladies of quality, who, during the last century, resided in third and fourth flats of Old Town houses, wore pattens when they went abroad, had miniatures of the Pretender next their hearts, and gave tea and card parties regularly every fortnight. Almost every generation of a Scottish family of rank, besides throwing off its swarm of male cadets, who went abroad in quest of fortune, used to produce a corresponding number of daughters, who stayed at home, and for the most part became old maids. These gentlewomen, after the death of their parents, when, of course, a brother or nephew succeeded to the family seat and estate, were compelled to leave home, and make room for the new laird to bring up a new generation, destined in time to experience the same fate. Many of these ladies, who in Catholic countries would have found protection in nunneries, resorted to Edinburgh, where, with the moderate family provision assigned them, they passed inoffensive and sometimes useful lives, the peace of which was seldom broken otherwise than by irruptions of their grand-nephews, who came with the hunger of High School boys, or by the more stately calls of their landed cousins and brothers, who rendered their visits the more auspicious by a pound of hyson for the caddy, or a replenishment of rappee for the snuff-box. The leddies, as they were called, were at once the terror and the admiration of their neighbours in the stair, who looked up to them as the patronesses of the land, and as shedding a light of gentility over the flats below.
In the best days of the Old Town, people of all ranks lived very closely and cordially together, and the whole world were in a manner next-door neighbours. The population being dense, and the town small, the distance between the houses of friends was seldom considerable. When a hundred friends lived within the space of so many yards, the company was easily collected, and consequently meetings took place more frequently, and upon more trivial occasions, than in these latter days of stately dinners and fantastic balls. Tea—simple tea—was then almost the only meal to which invitations were given. Tea-parties, assembling at four o’clock, were resorted to by all who wished for elegant social intercourse. There was much careful ceremonial in the dispensation of those pretty, small china cups, individualised by the numbers marked on each of the miniature spoons which circulated with them, and of which four or five returns were not uncommon. The spoon in the saucer indicated a wish for more—in the cup the reverse. A few tunes on the spinnet, a Scotch song from some young lady (solo), and the unfailing whist-table furnished the entertainment. At eight o’clock to a minute would arrive the sedan, or the lass with the lantern and pattens, and the whole company would be at home before the eight o’clock drum of the Town-guard had ceased to beat.
In a house at the head of the Canongate, but having its entrance from St Mary’s Wynd, and several stairs up, lived two old maiden ladies of the house of Traquair—the Ladies Barbara and Margaret Stuart. They were twins, the children of Charles, the fourth earl, and their birth on the 3rd of September, the anniversary of the death of Cromwell, brought a Latin epigram from Dr Pitcairn—of course previous to 1713, which was the year of his own death. The learned doctor anticipated for them ‘timid wooers,’ but they nevertheless came to old age unmarried. They drew out their innocent, retired lives in this place, where, latterly, one of their favourite amusements was to make dolls, and little beds for them to lie on—a practice not quite uncommon in days long gone by, being to some degree followed by Queen Mary.[229]
I may give, in the words of a long-deceased correspondent, an anecdote of the ladies of Traquair, referring to the days when potatoes had as yet an equivocal reputation, and illustrative of the frugal scale by which our ‘leddies’ were in use to measure the luxuries of their table. ‘Upon the return one day of their weekly ambassador to the market, and the anxious investigation by the old ladies of the contents of Jenny’s basket, the little morsel of mutton, with a portion of accompanying off-falls, was duly approved of. “But, Jenny, what’s this in the bottom of the basket?” “Oo, mem, just a dozen o’ ’taties that Lucky, the green-wife, wad ha’e me to tak’—they wad eat sae fine wi’ the mutton.” “Na, na, Jenny; tak’ back the ’taties—we need nae provocatives in this house.”’
The latest survivor of these Traquair ladies died in 1794.]
[GREYFRIARS CHURCHYARD.]
Signing of the Covenant—Henderson’s Monument—Bothwell Bridge Prisoners—A Romance.
Henderson’s Monument, Greyfriars.
This old cemetery—the burial-place of Buchanan,[230] George Jameson the painter, Principal Robertson, Dr Blair, Allan Ramsay, Henry Mackenzie, and many other men of note—whose walls are a circle of aristocratic sepulchres, will ever be memorable as the scene of the Signing of the Covenant; the document having first been produced in the church, after a sermon by Alexander Henderson, and signed by all the congregation, from the Earl of Sutherland downward, after which it was handed out to the multitudes assembled in the kirkyard, and signed on the flat monuments, amidst tears, prayers, and aspirations which could find no words; some writing with their blood! Near by, resting well from all these struggles, lies the preacher under a square obelisk-like monument; near also rests, in equal peace, the Covenant’s enemy, Sir George Mackenzie. The inscriptions on Henderson’s stone were ordered by Parliament to be erased at the Restoration; and small depressions are pointed out in it as having been inflicted by bullets from the soldiery when executing this order. With the ’88 came a new order of things, and the inscriptions were then quietly reinstated.
GREYFRIARS’ CHURCHYARD.