Her windows looked down across the city toward Holyrood. Almost she must have heard John Knox thunder in the pulpit of St. Giles, and thunder against her. And, directly beneath far down she saw the Grassmarket. Sometimes it flashed with gay tournament folk; for before and during Mary's time all the world came to measure lances in Edinburgh. Sometimes it swarmed with folk come to watch an execution; in the next century it was filled in the "Killing Time," with Covenanter mob applauding the execution of Royalists, with Royalist mob applauding the execution of Covenanters; Mary's time was not the one "to glorify God in the Grassmarket."
At the top of the market, near where the West Bow leads up to the castle, was the house of Claverhouse, who watched the killings. At the bottom of the market was the West Port through which Bonnie Dundee rode away.
"To the Lords of Convention, 'twas Claverhouse spoke,
Ere the king's crown go down there are crowns to be broke,
So each cavalier who loves honour and me,
Let him follow the bonnet of Bonnie Dundee.
Come fill up my cup, come fill up my can,
Come saddle my horses and call up my men,
Fling all your gates open, and let me gae free,
For 'tis up with the bonnets of Bonnie Dundee."
And to-day, but especially on Saturday nights, if you care to take your life, or your peace in hand, you can join a strange and rather awful multitude as it swarms through the Grassmarket, more and more drunken as midnight comes on, and not less or more drunken than the mob which hanged Captain Porteous.
It is a decided relief to look down and find the White Hart Inn, still an inn, where Dorothy and William Wordsworth lodged, on Thursday night, September 15, 1803—"It was not noisy, and tolerably cheap. Drank tea, and walked up to the Castle."
The Cowgate was a fashionable suburb in Mary's time. A canon of St. Andrews wrote in 1530, "nothing is humble or lowly, everything magnificent." On a certain golden gray afternoon I had climbed to Arthur's Seat to see the city through the veil of mist—
"I saw rain falling and the rainbow drawn
On Lammermuir. Harkening I heard again
In my precipitous city beaten bells
Winnow the keen sea wind."
It was late, gathering dusk and rain, when I reached the level and thinking to make a short cut—this was once the short cut to St. Cuthbert's from Holyrood—I ventured into the Cowgate, and wondered at my own temerity. Stevenson reports, "One night I went along the Cowgate after every one was a-bed but the policeman." Well, if Scott liked to "put a cocked hat on a story," Stevenson liked to put it on his own adventures. The Cowgate, in dusk rain, is adventure enough.
Across the height lies Greyfriar's. The church is negligible, the view from there superb, the place historic. One year after Jenny Geddes threw her stool in St. Giles and started the Reformation—doesn't it sound like Mrs. O'Leary's cow?—the Covenant was signed (Feb. 28, 1638) on top of a tomb still shown, hundreds pressing to the signing, some signing with their blood. The Reformation was on, not to be stopped until all Scotland was harried and remade.
