“The last time I came owre the muir.”’[156]
The half-serious pathos of Scott regarding this corps becomes wholly so when we learn that a couple of members survived to make an actual last public appearance in the procession which consecrated his richly deserved monument, August 15, 1846.
[EDINBURGH MOBS.]
The Blue Blanket—Mobs of the Seventeenth Century—Bowed Joseph.
The Edinburgh populace was noted, during many ages, for its readiness to rise in tumultuary fashion, whether under the prompting of religious zeal or from inferior motives. At an early time they became an impromptu army, each citizen possessing weapons which he was ready and willing to use. Thus they are understood to have risen in 1482 to redeem James III. from restraint in the Castle; for which service, besides certain privileges, ‘he granted them,’ says Maitland, ‘a banner or standard, with a power to display the same in defence of their king, country, and their own right.’ The historian adds: ‘This flag, at present denominated the Blue Blanket, is kept by the Convener of the Trades; at whose appearance therewith, ’tis said that not only the artificers of Edinburgh are obliged to repair to it, but all the artisans or craftsmen within Scotland are bound to follow it, and fight under the Convener of Edinburgh, as aforesaid.’ The Blue Blanket, I may mention, has become a sort of myth in Edinburgh, being magnified by the popular imagination into a banner which the citizens carried with them to the Holy Land in one of the Crusades—expeditions which took place before Edinburgh had become a town fit to furnish any distinct corps of armed men.[157]
When the Protestant faith came to stir up men’s minds, the lower order of citizens became a formidable body indeed. James VI., who had more than once experienced their violence, and consequently knew them well, says very naïvely in his Basilicon Doron, or ‘Book of Instruction’ to his son: ‘They think we should be content with their work, how bad and dear soever it be; and if they be in anything controuled, up goeth the Blue Blanket!’
The tumults at the introduction of the Service-book, in 1637, need only be alluded to. So late as the Revolution there appears a military spirit of great boldness in the Edinburgh populace, reminding us of that of Paris in our own times: witness the bloody contests which took place in accomplishing the destruction of the papistical arrangements at the Abbey, December 1688. The Union mobs were of unexampled violence; and Edinburgh was only kept in some degree of quiet, during the greater part of that crisis, by a great assemblage of troops. Finally, in the Porteous mob we have a singular example of popular vengeance, wreaked out in the most cool but determined manner. Men seem to have been habitually under an impression in those days that the law was at once an imperfect and a partial power. They seem to have felt themselves constantly liable to be called upon to supplement its energy, or control or compensate for its errors. The mob had at that time a part in the state.
