[225] Lord Lindsay’s Lives of the Lindsays, iii. 190.
[226] ‘During this peaceable time [1668-1675], he [John, Earl of Tweeddale] built the park of Yester of stone and lime, near seven miles about, in seven years’ time, at the expense of 20,000 pound; bought a house in Edinburgh from Sir William Bruce for 1000 pound sterling, and ane other house within the same court, which, being rebuilt from the foundation, the price of it and reparations of both stood him 1000 sterling.’—Father Hay’s Genealogie of the Hayes of Tweeddale (Edinburgh, 1835), p. 32.
[227] The notes are thus described in the Hue and Cry: £1300 in twenty-pound notes of Sir W. Forbes and Company; £1000 in twenty-pound notes of the Leith Banking Company; £1400 in twenty, ten, and five pound notes of different banks; 240 guinea and 440 pound notes of different banks—in all, £4392.
[228] It was in this part of the High Street also that Robert Lekprevick, the Scottish printer, lived before he removed to St Andrews in 1571.
[229] ‘—— deliure a Jacques le tailleur deux chanteaux de damas gris broches dor pour faire vne robbe a vne poupine;’ also ‘trois quartz et demi de toille dargent et de soze blanche pour faire vne cotte et aultre chose a des poupines.’—Catalogues of the Jewels, Dresses, Furniture, &c. of Mary Queen of Scots, edited by Joseph Robertson. Edinburgh, 1863, p. 139.
[230] A skull represented as Buchanan’s has long been shown in the College of Edinburgh. It is extremely thin, and being long ago shown in company with that of a known idiot, which was, on the contrary, very thick, it seemed to form a commentary upon the popular expression which sets forth density of bone as an invariable accompaniment of paucity of brain. The author of a diatribe called Scotland Characterised, which was published in 1701, and may be found in the Harleian Miscellany, tells us that he had seen the skull in question, and that it bore ‘a very pretty distich upon it [the composition of Principal Adamson, who had caused the skull to be lifted]—the first line I have forgot, but the second was:
“Et decus es tumulo jam, Buchanane, tuo.”’
[231] [Dr David Hay Fleming has shown that the contemporary evidence is all in favour of the Covenant’s having been signed in the Greyfriars’ Church, and not in the churchyard; see a chapter by him in Mr Moir Bryce’s Old Greyfriars’ Church, Edinburgh (1912). And in the same book Mr Moir Bryce has proved that the small strip of ground long erroneously believed to be the Covenanters’ prison was not separated off till 1703-4, and that the Covenanters were interned on a much larger area to the east, now built over.]
[232] The Back Stairs, built on the site of St Giles’ Churchyard, gave direct communication between the Cowgate and Old Parliament Square. It was by this way that Robertson the smuggler escaped from the Tolbooth Church, where he and his accomplice Wilson had been taken, as was usual with condemned prisoners, the Sunday before their execution. It was Porteous’s behaviour at the execution of Wilson that led to the riot and his own death in the Grassmarket.
[233] The pistols belonged to Mr Cayley himself, having been borrowed a few days before by Mr Macfarlane.