Glimpses of Three Coasts

by Helen Hunt Jackson

To me, the castle is Edinburgh. Looking from the sunny south windows of Prince's Street across at its hoary front is like a wizard's miracle, by which dead centuries are rolled back, compressed into minutes. At the foot of its north precipices, where lay the lake in which, in the seventeenth century, royal swans floated and plebeian courtesans were ducked, now stretches a gay gardened meadow, through which flash daily railway trains. Their columns of blue smoke scale the rocks, coil after coil, but never reach the citadel summit, being tangled, spent, and lost in the tops of trees, which in their turn seem also to be green-plumed besiegers, ever climbing, climbing. For five days I looked out on this picture etched against a summer sky: in black, by night; in the morning, of soft sepia tints, or gray,—tower, battlement, wall, and roof, all in sky lines; below these the wild crags and precipices, a mosaic of grays, two hundred feet down, to a bright greensward dotted with white daisies. Set steadily to the sunrise, by a west wind which never stopped blowing for the whole five days, streamed out the flag. To have read on its folds, "Castelh-Mynyd-Agned," or "Castrum Puellarum," would not have seemed at any hour a surprise. There is nowhere a relic of antiquity which so dominates its whole environment as does this rock fortress. Its actuality is sovereign; its personality majestic. The thousands of modern people thronging up and down Prince's Street seem perpetrating an impertinent anachronism. The times are the castle's times still; all this nineteenth-century haberdashery and chatter is an inexplicable and insolent freak of interruption. Sitting at one's Prince's Street windows, one sees it not; overlooks it as meaningless and of no consequence. Instead, he sees the constable's son, in Bruce's day, coming down that two hundred feet of precipice, hand over hand, on a bit of rope ladder, to visit the "wench in town" with whom he was in love; and anon turning this love-lore of his to patriotic account, by leading Earl Douglas, with his thirty picked Scots, up the same precipices, in the same perilous fashion, to surprise the English garrison, which they did to such good purpose that in a few hours they retook the castle, the only one then left which Bruce had not recovered. Or, when morning and evening mists rise slowly up from the meadow, veil the hill, and float off in hazy wreaths from its summit, he fancies fagots and tar-barrels ablaze on the esplanade, and the beauteous Lady Glammis, with her white arms crossed on her breast, burning to death there, with eyes fixed on the windows of her husband's prison. Scores of other women with "fayre bodies" were burned alive there; men, too, their lovers and sons,—all for a crime of which no human soul ever was or could be guilty. Poor, blinded, superstitious earth, which heard and saw and permitted such things! Even to-day, when the ground is dug up on that accursed esplanade, there are found the ashes of these martyrs to the witchcraft madness.

That grand old master-gunner, too, of Cromwell's first following,—each sunset gun from the castle seemed to me in honor of his memory, and recalled his name. "May the devil blaw me into the air, if I lowse a cannon this day!" said he, when Charles's men bade him fire a salute in honor of the Restoration. Every other one of Cromwell's men in the garrison had turned false, and done ready service to the king's officers; but not so Browne. It was only by main force that he was dragged to his gun, and forced to fire it. Whether the gun were old, and its time had come to burst, or whether the splendid old Puritan slyly overweighed his charge, it is open to each man's preference to believe; but burst the gun did, and, taking the hero at his word, "shuites his bellie from him, and blew him quyte over the castle wall," says the old record. I make no doubt myself that it was just what the master-gunner intended.

Thirty years later there were many gunners in Edinburgh Castle as brave as he, or braver,—men who stood by their guns month after month, starving by inches and freezing; the snow lying knee-deep on the shattered bastions; every roof shelter blown to fragments; no fuel; their last well so low that the water was putrid; raw salt herrings the only food for the men, and for the officers oatmeal, stirred in the putrid water. This was the Duke of Gordon's doing, when he vowed to hold Edinburgh Castle for King James, if every other fortress in Scotland went over to William. When his last hope failed, and he gave his men permission to abandon the castle and go out to the enemy, if they chose, not a man would go. "Three cheers for his grace," they raised, with their poor starved voices, and swore they would stay as long as he did. From December to June they held out, and then surrendered, a handful of fifty ghastly, emaciated, tottering men. Pity they could not have known how much grander than victories such defeats as theirs would read by and by!

Hard by the castle was the duke's house, in Blair's Close; in this he was shut up prisoner, under strict guard. The steps up which he walked that day, for the first time in his life without his sword, are still there; his coronet, with a deer-hound on either side, in dingy stone carving, above the low door. It is one of the doorways worth haunting, in Edinburgh. Generations of Dukes of Gordon have trodden its threshold, from the swordless hero of 1689 down to the young lover who, in George the Third's day, went courting his duchess, over in Hyndford's Close, at the bottom of High Street. She was a famous beauty, daughter of Lady Maxwell; and thanks to one gossip and another, we know a good deal about her bringing-up. There was still living in Edinburgh, sixty years ago, an aged and courtly gentleman, who recollected well having seen her riding a sow in High Street; her sister running behind and thumping the beast with a stick. Duchesses are not made of such stuff in these days. It almost passes belief what one reads in old records of the ways and manners of Scottish nobility in the first half of the eighteenth century. These Maxwells' fine laces were always drying in the narrow passage from their front stair to their drawing-room; and their undergear hanging out on a pole from an upper window in full sight of passers-by, as is still the custom with the poverty-stricken people who live in Hyndford's Close.

On the same stair with the Maxwells lived the Countess Anne of Balcarres, mother of eleven children, the eldest of whom wrote "Auld Robin Gray." She was poor and proud, and a fierce Jacobite to the last. To be asked to drink tea in Countess Anne's bedchamber was great honor. The room was so small that the man-servant, John, gorgeous in the Balcarres livery, had to stand snugged up to the bedpost. Here, with one arm around the post, he stood like a statue, ready to hand the teakettle as it was needed. When the noble ladies differed about a date or a point of genealogy, John was appealed to, and often so far forgot his manners as to swear at the mention of assumers and pretenders to baronetcies.

There is an endless fascination in going from house to house, in their old wynds and closes, now. A price has to be paid for it,—bad smells, filth underfoot, and, very likely, volleys of ribald abuse from gin-loosened tongues right and left and high up overhead; but all this only emphasizes the picture, and makes one's mental processions of earls and countesses all the livelier and more vivid.

Some of these wynds are so narrow and dark that one hesitates about plunging into them. They seem little more than rifts between dungeons: seven, eight, and nine stories high, the black walls stretch up. If there is a tiny courtyard, it is like the bottom of a foul well; and looking to the hand's-breadth of sky visible above, it seems so far up and so dark blue, one half expects to see its stars glimmering at noonday. A single narrow winding stone stair is the only means of going up and down; and each floor being swarming full of wretched human beings, each room a tenement house in itself, of course this common stairway becomes a highway of contentions, the very battle-ground of the house. Progress up or down can be stopped at a second's notice; a single pair of elbows is a blockade. How sedan chairs were managed in these corkscrew crevices is a puzzle; yet we read that the ladies of quality went always in sedan chairs to balls and assemblies.

In the Stamp Office Close, now the refuge of soot-venders, old-clothes dealers, and hucksters of lowest degree, tramps, beggars, and skulkers of all sorts, still is locked tight every night a big carved door, at foot of the stair down which used to come stately Lady Eglintoune, the third, with her seven daughters, in fine array. It was one of the sights of the town to see the procession of their eight sedan chairs on the way to a dance. The countess herself was six feet tall, and her daughters not much below her; all strikingly handsome, and of such fine bearing that it went into the traditions of the century as the "Eglintoune air." There also went into the traditions of the century some details of the earl's wooing, which might better have been kept a secret between him and his father-in-law. The second Lady Eglintoune was ailing, and like to die, when Sir Archibald Kennedy arrived in Edinburgh, with his stalwart but beautiful daughter Susanna. She was much sought immediately; and Sir Archibald, in his perplexity among the many suitors, one day consulted his old friend Eglintoune. "Bide a wee, Sir Archy," replied the earl,—"bide a wee; my wife's very sickly." And so, by waiting, the fair Susanna became Countess of Eglintoune. It would seem as if Nature had some intent to punish the earl's impatient faithlessness to his sickly wife; for, year after year, seven years running, came a daughter, and no son, to the house of Eglintoune. At last the earl, with a readiness to ignore marital obligations at which his third countess need not have been surprised, bluntly threatened to divorce her if she bore him no heir. Promptly the spirited Susanna replied that nothing would please her better, provided he would give her back all she brought him. "Every penny of it, and welcome!" retorted the earl, supposing she referred to her fortune. "Na, na, my lord," replied the lady, "that winna do. Return me my youth, beauty, and virginity, and dismiss me when you please;" upon which the matter dropped. In the end, the earl fared better than he deserved, three sons being given him within the next five years.

For half a century Lady Eglintoune was a prominent figure in Scottish social life. Her comings and goings and doings were all chronicled, and handed down. It is even told that when Johnson and Boswell visited her at her country-place, she was so delighted with Johnson's conversation that she kissed him on parting,—from which we can argue her ladyship's liking for long words. She lived to be ninety-one, and amused herself in her last days by taming rats, of which she had a dozen or more in such subjection that at a tap on the oak wainscoting of her dining-room they came forth, joined her at her meal, and at a word of command retired again into the wainscot.

When twenty-first-century travellers go speiring among the dingy ruins of cities which are gay and fine now, they will not find relics and traces of such individualities as these. The eighteenth century left a most entertaining budget, which we of to-day are too busy and too well educated to equal. No chiel among us all has the time to take gossip notes of this century; and even if he did, they would be dull enough in comparison with those of the last.