Signing of the Covenant—Henderson’s Monument—Bothwell Bridge Prisoners—A Romance.
Henderson’s Monument, Greyfriars.
This old cemetery—the burial-place of Buchanan,[230] George Jameson the painter, Principal Robertson, Dr Blair, Allan Ramsay, Henry Mackenzie, and many other men of note—whose walls are a circle of aristocratic sepulchres, will ever be memorable as the scene of the Signing of the Covenant; the document having first been produced in the church, after a sermon by Alexander Henderson, and signed by all the congregation, from the Earl of Sutherland downward, after which it was handed out to the multitudes assembled in the kirkyard, and signed on the flat monuments, amidst tears, prayers, and aspirations which could find no words; some writing with their blood! Near by, resting well from all these struggles, lies the preacher under a square obelisk-like monument; near also rests, in equal peace, the Covenant’s enemy, Sir George Mackenzie. The inscriptions on Henderson’s stone were ordered by Parliament to be erased at the Restoration; and small depressions are pointed out in it as having been inflicted by bullets from the soldiery when executing this order. With the ’88 came a new order of things, and the inscriptions were then quietly reinstated.
GREYFRIARS’ CHURCHYARD.