Courtyard, Hope House.
One often finds significant voices proceeding from the builders of these old houses, generally to express humility. Sir Thomas here quotes a well-known passage in Persius, as if to tell the beholder to confine himself to a criticism of his own house; and then, with more certain humility, uses a passage of the Psalms (cxix. 19): ‘I am a stranger upon earth,’ the latter being an anagram of his own name, thus spelt: Thomas Houpe. It is impossible without a passing sensation of melancholy to behold this house, and to think how truly the obscurity of its history, and the wretchedness into which it has fallen, realise the philosophy of the anagram. Verily, the great statesman who once lived here in dignity and the respect of men was but as a stranger who tarried in the place for a night, and was gone.
The Diary of Sir Thomas Hope, printed for the Bannatyne Club (1843), is a curious record of the public duties of a great law-officer in the age to which it refers, as well as of the mixture of worldly and spiritual things in which the venerable dignitary was engaged. He is indefatigable in his religious duties and his endeavours to advance the interests of his family; at the same time full of kindly feeling about his sons’ wives and their little family matters, never failing, for one thing, to tell how much the midwife got for her attendance on these ladies. There are many passages respecting his prayers, and the ‘answers’ he obtained to them, especially during the agonies of the opening civil war. He prays, for instance, that the Lord would pity his people, and then hears the words: ‘I will preserve and saiff my people’—‘but quhither be me or some other, I dar not say.’ On another occasion, at the time when the Covenanting army was mustering for Dunse Law to oppose King Charles, Sir Thomas tells that, praying: ‘Lord, pitie thy pure [i.e. poor] kirk, for their is no help in man!’ he heard a voice saying: ‘I will pitie it;’ ‘for quhilk I blissit the Lord;’ immediately after which he goes on: ‘Lent to John my long carabin of rowet wark all indentit;’ &c.[54]
The Countess of Mar, daughter of Esme, Duke of Lennox, died of a deadly brash in Sir Thomas’s house in the Cowgate, May 11, 1644.
It is worthy of notice that the Hopes are one of several Scottish families, possessing high rank and great wealth, which trace their descent to merchants in Edinburgh. ‘The Hopes are of French extraction, from Picardy. It is said they were originally Houblon, and had their name from the plant [hop], and not from esperance [the virtue in the mind]. The first that came over was a domestic of Magdalene of France, queen of James V.; and of him are descended all the eminent families of Hopes. This John Hope set up as a merchant of Edinburgh, and his son, by Bessie or Elizabeth Cumming, is marked as a member of our first Protestant General Assembly, anno 1560.’[55]
CHIESLY OF DALRY.
The head of the Old Bank Close was the scene of the assassination of President Lockhart by Chiesly of Dalry,[56] March 1689. The murderer had no provocation besides a simple judicial act of the president, assigning an aliment or income of £93 out of his estate to his wife and children, from whom it may be presumed he had been separated. He evidently was a man abandoned to the most violent passions—perhaps not quite sane. In London, half a year before the deed, he told Mr Stuart, an advocate, that he was resolved to go to Scotland before Candlemas and kill the president; when, on Stuart remarking that the very imagination of such a thing was a sin before God, he replied: ‘Let God and me alone; we have many things to reckon betwixt us, and we will reckon this too.’ The judge was informed of the menaces of Chiesly, but despised them.
On a Sunday afternoon, the last day of March—the town being then under the excitement of the siege of the Castle by the friends of the new government—Lockhart was walking home from church to his house in this alley, when Chiesly came behind, just as he entered the close, and shot him in the back with a pistol. A Dr Hay, coming to visit the president’s lady, saw his lordship stagger and fall. The ball had gone through the body, and out at the right breast. He was taken into his house, laid down upon two chairs, and almost immediately was a dead man. Some gentlemen passing seized the murderer, who readily owned he had done the deed, which he said was ‘to learn the president to do justice.’ When immediately after informed that his victim had expired, he said ‘he was not used to do things by halves.’ He boasted of the deed as if it had been some grand exploit.