After Queen Mary’s flight to England, Edinburgh was in a state of civil war; and Kirkaldy of Grange, who held the Castle for the Queen for three years, garrisoned St. Giles’s as a fort, hoisted cannon and soldiers up into the steeple, and loopholed the gables for arquebuses, and John Knox once again fled for his life.
Until 1585 Edinburgh citizens had contentedly, and perhaps with sufficient punctuality, regulated their doings by the bells of St. Giles’s; but in that year the Town Council bought, for the sum of fifty-five pounds Scots, a clock from the Abbey Church of Lindores, and hung it up in the steeple. Stormy hours were the hands of that clock from the quiet Fifeshire Abbey destined to mark!
In King James VI.’s reign, stirring events happened in the Church of St. Giles. The King often used the Church for conferences, which sometimes ended in disputes between the King and representatives of early Presbyterian zeal, not conducted with due regard to kingly dignity on either side. In 1596 it was the scene of a difference of opinion of this nature, and James had to take refuge from it in the adjacent Tolbooth, and thence, when the Tolbooth was attacked by an armed mob, to hurry home to Holyrood. It was after this incident that the King, instead of carrying out his original intention of razing Edinburgh to the ground and salting its site, contented himself with ordering the four ministers of St. Giles’s to live in different and distant parts of the town, instead of all four together in “ain clois,” hatching treason at their ease.
It was in St. Giles’s Church, in 1603, that King James bade farewell to his Scottish subjects, and that he was preached to by the Rev. Mr. Hall, a Presbyterian divine, and wept over and exhorted,—and in his turn wept, and promised, and took leave. It was at St. Giles’s Church, in 1617, that King James attended a service immediately on his entry into Edinburgh on his first visit home from England. He had promised to return to his Scottish capital every third year; but the years had extended to fifteen, during which he had been able, as the powerful sovereign of all Britain, to complete his long-cherished plan for the establishment of Episcopacy in Scotland. It was therefore not now a Presbyterian minister who preached, but the Bishop of St. Andrews.
In 1628 the “Krames” were first erected,—wooden booths with lean-to roofs, sticking like barnacles on to the sides of the church, and filling up the angles between the buttresses. The church then, rising out of a huddledom of booths and goldsmiths’ shops and open markets and stalls and jostling crowds, all closely hemmed in by the tall houses of the narrow street, must have resembled many of the foreign Cathedrals of the present day.
In 1633 Edinburgh became an Episcopal See, the diocese being formed out of that of St. Andrews; and St. Giles’s, which during its long Roman Catholic existence had been first a parochial church and then a collegiate church, was converted into a cathedral church. It is still very commonly called “St. Giles’s Cathedral,” the designation dating from this short period of its life. The first Bishop of Edinburgh was William Forbes, who died in the same year that he was appointed, 1634, and was succeeded by five others, the fifth being Bishop Abernethy Rose, the last of the Established Episcopalian Bishops of Edinburgh. He was deprived on the abolition of Episcopacy in 1688, and became Primus of the Scottish Episcopal Church, and died in 1720 in Whitehorse Close. “I know at least one person,” writes Mr. Robert Chambers in his Traditions of Edinburgh, “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.”
It was on the 23rd of July 1637 that the folly and obstinacy of Charles I. brought about the riot in the Cathedral during which the celebrated Jenny Geddes threw her stool at the Dean.
