She maun pe see our guard.
Out spak the warlike corporal,
‘Pring in ta drunken sot!’
They trail’d him ben, an’ by my saul
He paid his drucken groat
For that neist day.”
Once in the year, at any rate, the populace got their own back again—that was the King’s birthday, when the authorities assembled in the Parliament House to honour the occasion. Thereafter the mob went with one accord for the Guard, and always routed them after a desperate resistance. Scott jocosely laments the disappearance of those picturesque figures, with their uniform of rusty red, their Lochaber axes, their huge cocked hats. But two survived to be present at the inauguration of his monument on 15th August 1846. Their pay was sixpence a day. The Gaelic poet, Duncan Macintyre, was once asked if anything could be done to improve his worldly prospects. He confessed a modest ambition to be enrolled in the Edinburgh Town Guard! After this Burns’s post as a Dumfries exciseman might seem princely. All competent critics agree that Macintyre was the sweetest of singers, a poet of true genius, and that his laudatory epitaph in old Greyfriars was justly earned. Captain James Burnet, who died on the 24th August 1814, was the last commander of this ancient corps. If not so famous as some of his predecessors, Major Weir or Captain Porteous, for instance, he was still a prominent Edinburgh character. He weighed nineteen stones, yet, for a wager, climbed Arthur’s Seat in a quarter of an hour. You do not wonder that he lay panting on the earth “like an expiring porpoise.” He was one of the “Turners,” as those were scornfully called who assembled on Sunday afternoons, not to go to church, but to take a walk or turn. At an earlier day he and his fellows had been promptly pounced upon by the seizers, who were officials appointed to promenade the streets during the hours of divine service. These would apprehend the ungodly wanderer and even joints of mutton frizzling and turning with indecent levity on the roasting-jacks. In or about 1735 the blackbird of a Jacobite barber, in horrid defiance of the powers that were, civil and ecclesiastical, and to the utter subversion of Kirk and State, touched “the trembling ears” of the seizers with “The King shall enjoy his own again,” most audaciously whistled. The songster was forthwith taken into custody and transported to the guard-house.
Once the “seizers” got emphatically the worst of it. Dr. Archibald Pitcairne, poet, scholar, Jacobite, latitudinarian, was not in sympathy in many points with the Edinburgh of Queen Anne’s day, but he loved his glass as well as any of them. He had sent for some claret one Sunday forenoon, which the seizers had confiscated ere it reached his thirsty palate. The wit was furious, but he had his revenge. He doctored a few bottles of the wine with some strong drug of disagreeable operation, and then he procured its capture by the seizers. As he expected, the stuff went speedily down their throats; the result was all he could have wished. But Burnet came too late for all this, and a nickname was the only punishment for him and his fellows. He was also a prominent member of the Lawnmarket Club—the popular name for certain residents who met every morning about seven to discuss the news of the day, and to take their morning draught of brandy together. Nothing was done in old Edinburgh without the accompaniment of a dram; the “meridian” followed the “morning” (the very bells of St. Giles that chime the hour were known as the “gill” bells), as a matter of course, and both only sustained the citizen for the serious business of the evening. True, a great deal of the drinking was claret, indeed, huge pewter jugs or stoups of that wine were to be seen moving up and down the streets of Edinburgh in all directions, as ale jugs in London. When a ship arrived from Bordeaux the claret hogsheads were carted through the streets, and vessels were filled from the spigot at a very cheap rate. There was always a native-brewed “tippeny.” The curtain was already falling on old Edinburgh ere whisky was introduced as a regular article of consumption. A thin veil of decency was thrown over the dissipation; it was made a matter of aggravation in the charge against a gentleman of rank that he had allowed his company to get drunk in his house before it was dark in the month of July. The peculiar little separate boxes wherein the guests revelled in the Edinburgh taverns threw an air of secrecy and mystery over the proceedings. One of the most famous taverns was Johnny Dowie’s, in Libberton’s Wynd, where George IV. Bridge now stands. Its memories of Burns and Fergusson and a hundred other still famous names make it the Mermaid of Edinburgh. It had many baser clients. A visitor opens a door and finds a room, the floor covered with snoring lads. “Oh,” explains mine host with a tolerant grin, “just twa-three o’ Sir Wullie’s drucken clerks!” (Sir William Forbes the banker is meant). “The clartier the cosier,” says a wicked old Scots apothegm. Wolfe, the hero of Quebec, says that it was not till after Christmas, when the better folk had come into it from the country, that Edinburgh was “in all its perfection of dirt and gaiety.” There could not have been anything like sufficient water wherewith to wash, and all sorts of filth were hurled from the lofty houses into the street, “Gardy loo” was the conventional word of warning, uttered not seldom after and not before the event. Whether it was from the French “Gare à l’eau” may or may not be true. The delightful Mrs. Winifred Jenkins aptly translates it as: “May the Lord have mercy on your souls.”
Until imprisonment for debt was abolished the precincts of Holyrood were inhabited by fugitive debtors, for there these had the privilege of sanctuary. They were called Abbey lairds, and many were the stories told of the dodges to get them out of the bounds or to remain after Sunday was finished, for that was a free day for them. Two anecdotes may be quoted. On a certain Sunday in July 1709, Patrick Haliburton, one of those Abbey lairds, was induced to visit a creditor, by whom he was received with the utmost geniality. The bottle was produced and Patrick quaffed to his heart’s content; as he staggered from the door after midnight, a messenger seized him under a Writ of Caption and haled him off to prison. In 1724 Mrs. Dilkes, a debtor, had an invitation to a tavern within the verge, but to enter it she had to go a few paces beyond the Girth Cross. The moment she was outside she was nabbed; but this was too much for the women of the place, who rose in their might and rescued her.
The wit of old Edinburgh was satirical, bitter, scornful, and the practical jokes not in the best of taste. The Union, we know, was intensely unpopular, nowhere more than in the Canongate.