Many who remember the Town-guard, with their rusty brown uniform, their Lochaber axes, and fierce Highland faces, as a curiosity of the streets of Edinburgh in their young days, will be perhaps unpleasingly surprised to learn that the corps was originally an engine of the government of the last Stuarts. Captain Graham, who was a sincere loyalist by blood, being descended from the Inchbrakie who sheltered Montrose on his commencing the insurrection of 1644, figured with his guards on various occasions during the remainder of the Stuart reigns, particularly at the bringing in of the Earl of Argyle to be executed in 1685, when he and the hangman received the unhappy Maccallummore at the Watergate, and conducted him along the street to prison.
1682.
The Town-guard was disbanded in November 1817, by which time it had been reduced to twenty-five privates, two sergeants, two corporals, and two drummers.
May 6.
The Gloucester frigate, on her voyage from London to Edinburgh with the Duke of York and his friends, and attended by some smaller vessels, was by a blunder wrecked on Yarmouth Sands. A signal-gun brought boats from the other vessels to the rescue of the distressed party, and the duke and several other men of importance were taken from the vessel, just before she went to pieces. A hundred and fifty persons, of whom eighty were men of quality, including the Earl of Roxburgh, the Laird of Hopetoun, Sir Joseph Douglas of Pumpherston, and Lord O’Brian of the Irish peerage, were drowned. Sir George Gordon of Haddo, president of the Court of Session, and who had just received the high appointment of Chancellor of Scotland, escaped by leaping into the water, whence he was drawn by the hair of the head into a boat. The Earl of Roxburgh had been heard crying for a boat, and offering twenty thousand guineas for one. His servant in the water took him on his back, and was swimming with him to a boat, when a drowning person clutched at them, and the unfortunate earl fell off and perished, his servant barely escaping for the moment, and dying an hour after. The duke and the rest of the survivors arrived in Leith next day, without further accident.
‘The pilot, one Aird, of Borrowstounness, was threatened with hanging for going to sleep and giving wrong directions ... he was condemned to perpetual imprisonment.’—Foun.
It is remarkable that the widow of the Earl of Roxburgh survived him in widowhood for seventy-one years, dying in 1753.
June 13.