This may be the proper place for introducing the few notices which I have collected respecting Edinburgh inns of a past date.
The oldest house known to have been used in the character of an inn is one situated in what is called Davidson’s or the White Horse Close, at the bottom of the Canongate. A sort of porte-cochère gives access to a court having mean buildings on either hand, but facing us a goodly structure of antique fashion, having two outside stairs curiously arranged, and the whole reminding us much of certain houses still numerous in the Netherlands. A date, deficient in the decimal figure (16-3), gives us assurance of the seventeenth century, and, judging from the style of the building, I would say the house belongs to an early portion of that age. The whole of the ground-floor, accessible from the street called North Back of Canongate, has been used as stables, thus reminding us of the absence of nicety in a former age, when human beings were content to sit with only a wooden floor between themselves and their horses.
This house, supposed to have been styled The White Horse Inn or White Horse Stables (for the latter was the more common word), would be conveniently situated for persons travelling to or arriving from London, as it is close to the ancient exit of the town in that direction. The adjacent Water-gate took its name from a horse-pond, which probably was an appendage of this mansion. The manner of procedure for a gentleman going to London in the days of the White Horse was to come booted to this house with saddle-bags, and here engage and mount a suitable roadster, which was to serve all the way. In 1639, when Charles I. had made his first pacification with the Covenanters, and had come temporarily to Berwick, he sent messages to the chief lords of that party, desiring some conversation with them. They were unsuspectingly mounting their horses at this inn, in order to ride to Berwick, when a mob, taught by the clergy to suspect that the king wished only to wile over the nobles to his side, came and forcibly prevented them from commencing their designed journey. Montrose alone broke through this restraint; and assuredly the result in his instance was such as to give some countenance to the suspicion, as thenceforward he was a royalist in his heart.
WHITE HORSE INN.
The White Horse has ceased to be an inn from a time which no ‘oldest inhabitant’ of my era could pretend to have any recollection of. The only remaining fact of interest connected with it is one concerning Dr Alexander Rose, the last Bishop of Edinburgh, and the last survivor of the established Episcopacy of Scotland. Bishop Keith, who had been one of his presbyters, and describes him as a sweet-natured man, of a venerable aspect, states that he died March 20, 1720, ‘in his own sister’s house in the Canongate, in which street he also lived.’ Tradition points to the floor immediately above the porte-cochère by which the stable-yard is entered from the street as the humble mansion in which the bishop breathed his last. I know at least one person who never goes past the place without an emotion of respect, remembering the self-abandoning devotion of the Scottish prelates to their engagements at the Revolution:[147]
‘Amongst the faithless, faithful only found.’