The book of Scottish story

by Various

Sometimes a place for jades and thieves,

And honest men among.

The historical recollections connected with “the hall” ought not to be passed over. Here Mary delivered what Lindsay and other old historians call her “painted orations.” Here Murray wheedled, and Morton frowned. This was the scene of Charles’s ill-omened attempts to revoke the possessions of the Church; and here, when his commissioner, Nithsdale, was deputed to urge that measure, did the Presbyterian nobles prepare to set active violence in opposition to the claims of right and the royal will. On that occasion, old Belhaven, under pretence of infirmity, took hold of his neighbour, the Earl of Dumfries, with one hand, while with the other he grasped a dagger beneath his clothes, ready, in case the act of revocation were passed, to plunge it into his bosom.

From the hall a lobby extended to the bottom of the central staircase already mentioned, which led to the different apartments—about twelve in number—appropriated to the use of the debtors. This stair was narrow, spiral, and steep—three bad qualities, which the stranger found but imperfectly obviated by the use of a greasy rope that served by way of balustrade. This nasty convenience was not rendered one whit more comfortable by the intelligence, usually communicated by some of the inmates, that it had hanged a man! In the apartments to which this stair led, there was nothing remarkable, except that in one of them part of the wall seemed badly plastered. This was the temporary covering of the square hole through which the gallows-tree was planted. We remember communing with a person who lodged in this room at the time of an execution. He had had the curiosity, in the impossibility of seeing the execution, to try if he could feel it. At the time when he heard the psalms and other devotions of the culprit concluded, and when he knew, from the awful silence of the crowd, that the signal was just about to be given, he sat down upon the end of the beam, and soon after distinctly felt the motion occasioned by the fall of the unfortunate person, and thus, as it were, played at “see-saw” with the criminal.

The annals of crime are of greater value than is generally supposed. Criminals form an interesting portion of mankind. They are entirely different from us—divided from us by a pale which we will not, dare not overleap, but from the safe side of which we may survey, with curious eyes, the strange proceedings which go on beyond. They are interesting, often, on account of their courage—on account of their having dared something which we timorously and anxiously avoid. A murderer or a robber is quite as remarkable a person, for this reason, as a soldier who has braved some flesh-shaking danger. He must have given way to some excessive passion; and all who have ever been transported beyond the bounds of reason by the violence of any passion whatever, are entitled to the wonder, if not the admiration, of the rest of the species. Among the inmates of the Old Tolbooth, some of whom had inhabited it for many years, there were preserved a few legendary particulars respecting criminals of distinction, who had formerly been within its walls. Some of these I have been fortunate enough to pick up.

One of the most distinguished traits in the character of the Old Tolbooth was, that it had no power of retention over people of quality. It had something like that faculty which Falstaff attributes to the lion and himself—of knowing men who ought to be respected on account of their rank. Almost every criminal of more than the ordinary rank ever yet confined in it, somehow or other contrived to get free. An insane peer, who, about the time of the Union, assassinated a schoolmaster that had married a girl to whom he had paid improper addresses, escaped while under sentence of death. We are uncertain whether the following curious fact relates to that nobleman, or to some other titled offender. It was contrived that the prisoner should be conveyed out of the Tolbooth in a trunk, and carried by a porter to Leith, where some sailors were to be ready with a boat to take him aboard a vessel about to leave Scotland. The plot succeeded so far as the escape from jail was concerned, but was knocked on the head by an unlucky and most ridiculous contretemps. It so happened that the porter, in arranging the trunk upon his back, placed the end which corresponded with the feet of the prisoner uppermost. The head of the unfortunate nobleman was therefore pressed against the lower end of the box, and had to sustain the weight of the whole body. The posture was the most uneasy imaginable. Yet life was preferable to ease. He permitted himself to be taken away. The porter trudged along the Krames with the trunk, quite unconscious of its contents, and soon reached the High Street, which he also traversed. On reaching the Netherbow, he met an acquaintance, who asked him where he was going with that large burden. To Leith, was the answer. The other enquired if the job was good enough to afford a potation before proceeding farther upon so long a journey. This being replied to in the affirmative, and the carrier of the box feeling in his throat the philosophy of his friend’s enquiry, it was agreed that they should adjourn to a neighbouring tavern. Meanwhile, the third party, whose inclinations had not been consulted in this arrangement, felt in his neck the agony of ten thousand decapitations, and almost wished that it were at once well over with him in the Grassmarket. But his agonies were not destined to be of long duration. The porter, in depositing him upon the causeway, happened to make the end of the trunk come down with such precipitation, that, unable to bear it any longer, the prisoner fairly roared out, and immediately after fainted. The consternation of the porter, on hearing a noise from his burden, was of course excessive; but he soon acquired presence of mind enough to conceive the occasion. He proceeded to unloose and to burst open the trunk, when the hapless nobleman was discovered in a state of insensibility; and as a crowd collected immediately, and the City Guard were not long in coming forward, there was of course no farther chance of escape. The prisoner did not revive from his swoon till he had been safely deposited in his old quarters. But, if we recollect aright, he eventually escaped in another way.

Of Porteous, whose crime—if crime existed—was so sufficiently atoned for by the mode of his death, an anecdote which has the additional merit of being connected with the Old Tolbooth, may here be acceptable. One day, some years before his trial, as he was walking up Liberton’s Wynd, he encountered one of the numerous hens, which, along with swine, then haunted the streets of the Scottish capital. For some reason which has not been recorded, he struck this hen with his cane, so that it immediately died. The affair caused the neighbours to gather round, and it was universally thought that the case was peculiarly hard, inasmuch as the bird was a “clocker,” and left behind it a numerous brood of orphan chickens. Before the captain had left the spot, the proprietrix of the hen, an old woman who lived in the upper flat of a house close by, looked over her window, and poured down upon the slayer’s head a whole “gardeloo” of obloquy and reproach, saying, among other things, that “she wished he might have as many witnesses present at his hinder-end as there were feathers in that hen.”[^[3]]

[3]. It is but charity to suppose Porteous might, in this case, be only endeavouring to introduce a better system of street police than had formerly prevailed. It is not many years since the magistrates of a southern burgh drew down the unqualified wrath of all the good women there by attempting to confiscate and remove the filth which had been privileged to grace the causeway from time immemorial.

Porteous went away, not unaffected, as it would appear, by these idle words. On the night destined to be his last on earth, he told the story of the hen to the friends who then met in the jail to celebrate his reprieve from the execution which was to have taken place that day; and the prophetess of Liberton’s Wynd was honoured with general ridicule for the failure of her imprecation. Before the merry-meeting, however, was over, the sound of the “deaddrum,” beat by the approaching rioters, fell upon their ears, and Porteous, as if struck all at once with the certainty of death, exclaimed, “D——n the wife! she is right yet!” Some of his friends suggested that it might be the firedrum; but he would not give ear to such consolations, and fairly abandoned all hope of life. Before another hour had passed, he was in eternity.

Nicol Brown, a butcher, executed in 1753 for the murder of his wife, was not the least remarkable tenant of the Tolbooth during the last century. A singular story is told of this wretched man. One evening, long before his death, as he was drinking with some other butchers in a tavern somewhere about the Grassmarket, a dispute arose about how long it might be allowable to keep flesh before it was eaten. From less to more, the argument proceeded to bets; and Brown offered to eat a pound of the oldest and “worst” flesh that could be produced, under the penalty of a guinea. A regular bet was taken, and a deputation of the company went away to fetch the stuff which should put Nicol’s stomach to the test. It so happened that a criminal—generally affirmed to have been the celebrated Nicol Muschat—had been recently hung in chains at the Gallowlee, and it entered into the heads of these monsters that they would apply in that quarter for the required flesh. They accordingly provided themselves with a ladder and other necessary articles, and, though it was now near midnight, had the courage to go down that still and solitary road which led towards the gallows, and violate the terrible remains of the dead, by cutting a large collop from the culprit’s hip. This they brought away, and presented to Brown, who was not a little shocked to find himself so tasked. Nevertheless, getting the dreadful “pound of flesh” roasted after the manner of a beefsteak, and adopting a very strong and drunken resolution, he set himself down to his horrid mess, which, it is said, he actually succeeded in devouring. This story, not being very effectually concealed, was recollected when he afterwards came to the same end with Nicol Muschat. He lived in the Fleshmarket Close, as appears from the evidence on his trial. He made away with his wife by burning her, and said that she had caught fire by accident. But, as the door was found locked by the neighbours who came on hearing her cries, and he was notorious for abusing her, besides the circumstance of his not appearing to have attempted to extinguish the flames, he was found guilty and executed. He was also hung in chains at the Gallowlee, where Muschat had hung thirty years before. He did not, however, hang long. A few mornings after having been put up, it was found that he had been taken away during the night. This was supposed to have been done by the butchers of the Edinburgh market, who considered that a general disgrace was thrown upon their fraternity by his ignominious exhibition there. They were said to have thrown his body into the Quarry Holes.