Jenny Geddes’s Stool.
Jenny Geddes was an herbwoman—Scottice, a greenwife—at the Tron Church, where, in former as well as in recent times, that class of merchants kept their stalls. It seems that, in the midst of the hubbub, Jenny, hearing the bishop call upon the dean to read the collect of the day, cried out, with unintentional wit: ‘Deil colic the wame o’ ye!’[73] and threw at the dean’s head the small stool on which she sat; ‘a ticket of remembrance,’ as a Presbyterian annalist merrily terms it, so well aimed that the clergyman only escaped it by jouking;[74] that is, by [ducking or] suddenly bending his person.
Jenny, like the originators of many other insurrections, appears to have afterwards repented of her exertions on this occasion. We learn from the simple diarist, Andrew Nichol, that when Charles II. was known, in June 1650, to have arrived in the north of Scotland, amidst other rejoicings, ‘the pure [q.d. poor] kaill-wyves at the Trone [Jenny Geddes, no doubt, among the number] war sae overjoyed, that they sacrificed their standis and creellis, yea, the verie stoollis they sat on, in ane fyre.’ What will give, however, a still more unequivocal proof of the repentance of honest Jenny (after whom, by the way, Burns named a favourite mare), is the conduct expressly attributed to herself on the occasion of the king’s coronation in 1661 by the Mercurius Caledonius:
‘But among all our bontados and caprices,’ says that curious register of events,[75] ‘that of the immortal Jenet Geddis, Princesse of the Trone adventurers, was most pleasant; for she was not only content to assemble all her Creels, Basquets, Creepies,[76] Furmes, and other ingredients that composed the Shope of her Sallets, Radishes, Turnips, Carrots, Spinage, Cabbage, with all other sorts of Pot Merchandise that belongs to the garden, but even her Leather Chair of State, where she used to dispense Justice to the rest of her Langkale Vassals, were all very orderly burned; she herself countenancing the action with a high-flown flourish and vermilion majesty.’
The Scottish Society of Antiquaries nevertheless exhibit in their museum a clasp-stool, for which there is good evidence that it was the actual stool thrown by Mrs Geddes at the dean.
In the southern aisle of this church, the Regent Murray, three weeks after his assassination at Linlithgow, February 14, 1569-70, was interred: ‘his head placed south, contrair the ordour usit; the sepulchre laid with hewin wark maist curiously, and on the head ane plate of brass.’ John Knox preached a funeral-sermon over the remains of his friend, and drew tears from the eyes of all present. In the Tolbooth Church, immediately adjoining to the west, sat the convention which chose the Earl of Lennox as his successor in the regency. Murray’s monument was not inelegant for the time; and its inscription, written by Buchanan, is remarkable for emphatic brevity.
Modern Monument to the Marquis of Montrose (see [p. 108]).
This part of the church appears to have formerly been an open lounge. French Paris, Queen Mary’s servant, in his confession respecting the murder of Darnley, mentions that, during the communings which took place before that deed was determined on, he one day ‘took his mantle and sword, and went to walk (promener) in the High Church.’ Probably, in consequence of the veneration entertained for the memory of ‘the Good Regent,’ or else, perhaps, from some simple motive of conveniency, the Earl of Murray’s tomb was a place frequently assigned in bills for the payment of the money. It also appears to have been the subject of a similar jest to that respecting the tomb of Duke Humphrey. Robert Sempill, in his Banishment of Poverty, a poem referring to the year 1680 or 1681, thus expresses himself: