| 1. | Kirk o’ Field Church | 6. | St. Giles’s Church | |
| 2. | Holyrood | 7. | Cowgate | |
| 3. | Canongate | 8. | Wynd leading to Kirk o’ Field | |
| 4. | Netherbow Port | 9. | Castle | |
| 5. | Netherbow | 10. | Calton Hill |
Far to the left of the town, on a wooded height, the highest and central point of the landscape, we mark a tall rectangular church tower, crowned with a crow-stepped high-pitched roof. It is the church of Kirk o’ Field, soon to be so famous as the scene of Darnley’s death.
The blocks of buildings are intersected, we said, by narrow wynds, not yet black, though, from Dunbar’s poem, we know that Edinburgh was conspicuously dirty and insanitary. But the narrow, compact, bright little town running down the spine of rock from the Castle to Holyrood, was on every side surrounded by green fields, and there were still trout in the Norloch beneath the base of the Castle cliff, where now the railway runs. New town, of course, there was none. Most of the town of Mary’s age was embraced by the ruinous wall, hastily constructed after the defeat and death of James IV. Such was the city: of the houses we may gain an idea from the fine old building traditionally called John Knox’s house: if we suppose it neat, clean, its roof scarlet, its walls not grimy with centuries of reek. The houses stood among green gardens, hedges, and trees, and on the grassy hills between the city and the sea, and to the east and west, were châteaux and peel-towers of lords and lairds.
Such was Queen Mary’s Edinburgh: long, narrow, and mightily unlike the picturesque but stony, and begrimed, and smoke-hidden capital of to-day.[14]
‘There were fertile soil, pleasant meadows, woods, lakes, and burns, all around,’ where now is nothing but stone, noisy pavement, and slate. The monasteries of the Franciscans and Dominicans lay on either side of St. Mary in the Fields, or Kirk of Field, with its college quadrangle and wide gardens.[15] But, in Mary’s day, the monastic buildings and several churches lay in ruins, owing to the recent reform of the Christian religion, and to English invaders.
The palaces of the Cowgate and of the Canongate were the homes of the nobles; the wynds were crowded with burgesses, tradesmen, prentices, and the throng of artisans. These were less godly than the burgesses, were a fickle and fiery mob, ready to run for spears, or use their tools to defend their May-day sport of Robin Hood against the preachers and the Bible-loving middle classes. Brawls were common, the artisans besieging the magistrates in the Tolbooth, or the rival followings of two lairds or lords coming to pistol-shots and sword-strokes on the causeway, while burgesses handed spears to their friends from the windows. Among popular pleasures were the stake, at which witches and murderesses of masters or husbands were burned; and the pillory, where every one might throw what came handy at a Catholic priest, and the pits in the Norloch where fornicators were ducked. The town gates were adorned with spikes, on which were impaled the heads of sinners against the Law.
Mary rode through a land of new-made ruins, black with fire, not yet green with ivy. On every side, wherever monks had lived, and laboured, and dealt alms, and written manuscripts, desolation met Mary’s eyes. The altars were desecrated, the illumined manuscripts were burned, the religious skulked in lay dress, or had fled to France, or stood under the showers of missiles on the pillory. It was a land of fallen fanes, and of stubborn blind keeps with scarce a window, that she passed through, with horse and litter, lace, and gold, and velvet, and troops of gallants and girls. In the black tall Tolbooth lurked the engines of torture, that were to strain or crush the limbs of Bothwell’s Lambs. Often must Mary have seen, on the skyline, the gallows tree, and the fruits which that tree bore, and the flocking ravens; one of that company followed Darnley and her from Glasgow, and perched ominous on the roof of Kirk o’ Field, croaking loudly on the day of the murder. So writes Nau, Mary’s secretary, informed, probably, by one of her attendants.