Francis Watt

“ Fate tried the mother of James and the son of James far more severely than it ever tried James himself, and Mary Stuart and Charles the First managed things so ill that each in the end had to lay the head on the block, but no one ever spoke to them like that, and they never made themselves ridiculous. Mary was never less than Queen and Charles was never less than King, and each played the last scene so superbly as to turn defeat and ruin into victory and honour, and if you say it was birth and breeding and the heritage of their race how are you to account for the odd figure in between? ”

“ Edinburgh has never been a rich town. In the old days, it was as poor as poor might be, and so was its college; they had nothing in the way of plate to show visitors, or to parade on great occasions. Their only exhibits were the college mace and George Buchanan’s skull! There was a legend about the mace. In 1683 the tomb of Bishop Kennedy at St. Andrews was opened: it contained five silver maces—quite a providential arrangement, one for each of the Scots Universities, and one to spare! But there was a mace in Edinburgh before this. ”

“ And there was the usual monastic legend, to which, as far as it concerns Edinburgh, I make elsewhere sufficient reference. Between the Reformation and the end of the eighteenth century, or even later, the supernatural had a stronger grip on the Scots than on any other race in Europe. The unseen world beckoned and made its presence known by continual signs; portents and omens were of daily occurrence; men like Peden, the prophet, read the book of the future, every Covenanter lived a spiritual life whose interest far exceeded that of the material life present to his senses. ”

“ One constantly recurring street scene in old Edinburgh was the execution of criminals. Not a mere case of decorous hanging, but a man, as like as not, dismembered in sight of the gaping crowd, and that man was often one who had been within the memory of all a great personage in the State, to whom every knee had been bowed, and every cap doffed. ”

“ One of those, “an unwieldy old woman,” had fallen down one of those steep outside stairs abundant in old Edinburgh, but she crashed on a passing baker and escaped unhurt by what seemed to Mrs. Stevenson a special interposition of Providence. “I would like to know what kind of Providence the baker thought it,” exclaimed her husband.
R.L.S. had certain flirtations with the Edinburgh underworld of his time, for the dreary respectability and precise formalism which has settled like a cloud on the once jovial Auld Reekie was abhorrent to the soul of the bright youth. ”

“ Of much the same class were the caddies, whose name still lingers as the attendants on golf-players; the caddie was the man-of-all-work of old Edinburgh, for various indeed were his functions. Even to-day, if you look at some of the high houses, you remember how much time inhabitants must have spent in going up and down stairs; load the climber with burdens and life were scarce worth living. The chief burden was water, and the caddies were the class who bore the stoups containing it up and down. ”

“ When he visited Scotland he went climbing the interminable High Street stairs, visiting poor old ladies that he had known in the days of his youth. Those returns of famous Scotsmen have furnished a host of anecdotes. I will only give one for its dramatic contrasts. Wedderburn was not thought a tender-hearted or high-principled man, yet when he returned old, ill and famous he was carried in a sedan chair to a dingy nook in old Edinburgh, the haunt of early years, and there he picked out some holes in the paved court that he had used in his childish sports, and was moved well-nigh to tears. ”

“ PARLIAMENT HOUSE & LAWYERS The Parliament House has always had a reputation for good anecdote. There are solid reasons for this. It is the haunt of men, clever, highly educated, well off, and the majority of them with an all too abundant leisure. The tyranny of custom forces them to pace day after day that ancient hall, remarkable even in Edinburgh for august memories, as their predecessors have done for generations. ”

“ Rather tall, a handsome man, a powerful voice, a graceful manner, and more than all, a kindly, courteous gentleman, what figure so well known on that ancient Edinburgh street, walking or driving his conspicuous yellow chariot with its black horses? Everybody loved and praised Harry Erskine, friends and foes, rich and poor alike. ”

“ She played the fiddle, fought the stable boys, swore like a trooper, dressed in a jockey coat, walked like a man, sang in a voice that seemed a man’s, and was believed by half Edinburgh to be a man in disguise. She had strong affections and strong hates, she had great talent for mimicry, which made her many enemies, was inclined to be sceptical though not without misgivings and fears. She came to pay a visit to Balcarres, and stayed there for thirteen years. She had a choice collection of old Scots songs. One lingered in Sir Walter Scott’s memory ”

“ No man in Edinburgh can for a moment forget that he is in Scotland.” It is almost startling to look up from the grime of the Canongate to the solitary nooks of Arthur’s Seat, though the sea of houses spreads miles around. Whatever scenic effects remain, the historical effects of the landscape are vanished. With what various emotions the crowd from every point of vantage must have watched Dundee’s progress along the Lang Gate to his interview with the Duke of Gordon on the Castle rock! ”

“ Johnson and she said some nice things to one another when he was in Scotland. She was a devoted Jacobite, had a portrait of Charles Edward so placed in her bedroom as to be the first thing she saw when she wakened in the morning. Her last place in Edinburgh was in Jack’s Land in the Canongate. We have ceased to think it remarkable, that noble ladies dwelt in those now grimy ways. She had a long innings of fashion and power, for it was not till 1780, at the ripe age of ninety-one, that she passed away. She kept her looks even in age. ”

“ To-day the prospect is a little spoilt by encroaching houses and too many people, but Scotland has few choicer views than that placid water, the old church at the edge, the quaint village, and the mighty Lion Hill that broods over all. Thomson is said to have diligently attended to his clerical duties, but he was hard put to it sometimes, for you believe he was more artist than theologian. He built himself a studio in the manse garden down by the loch. This he called Edinburgh, so that too importunate callers might be warded off with the remark that he was at Edinburgh. ”

“ Chief of them was that High Commissioner who presided over the Union debates, he whom the Edinburgh mob hated with all the bitter hatred of their ferocious souls. They loved to tell how when he was strangling the liberties of his country in the Parliament House, his idiot son and heir was strangling the poor boy that turned the spit in Queensberry House, and was roasting him upon his own fire so that when the family returned to their mansion a cannibal orgie was already in progress. You are glad that history enables you to doubt the story just as you are sorry you must doubt the others. ”

“ I have read, I trust not without profit, Mr. Hume Brown’s two careful volumes upon this great Scot, but he has not solved my doubts. The old scholar was too learned, too travelled, too cultured to be in harmony with the Scotland of his day; a certain aloofness marks him, a stern and heroic rather than a human and sympathetic figure. You remember how consistently the British Solomon hated his sometime schoolmaster. Certain quaint anecdotes remain of their relations, but they have not to do with Edinburgh ”

“ His interest is as a ghost from the Edinburgh underworld, you catch a glimpse of a more vicious Grub Street. There must have been a circle of broken professional men of all sorts, more or less clever, all needy, all drunken and ready to do anything for a dram. What a crop of anecdotes there was! But no one gathered, and the memory of it passed away with the actors. Local history that chronicled the oddities of Kames or Monboddo refused to chronicle the pranks of lewd fellows of the baser sort. Only when the wastrel happened to be a genius do we piece together in some sort his career. ”

“ Barclay’s lectures were flavoured with pungent doses of caustic old Edinburgh wit. He warned his students to beware of discoveries of anatomy. “In a field so well wrought, what remained to discover? As at harvest, first come the reapers to the uncut grain and then the gleaners, and finally the geese, idly poking among the rubbish. Gentlemen, we are the geese!” It was not rarely the habit of professors in former times to give free tickets for their courses. The kindness was sometimes abused. Barclay applied a humorous but sufficient corrective. ”

“ Every dark close held the possibility of an exciting adventure. Once she was caught by the heels, and passed the night in the guard-house which, as Scott tells us, “like a huge snail stretched along the High Street near the Tron Kirk for many a long day.” She wrote society verses, light or otherwise. She fancied herself or pretended to be in love with Sir Peter Murray—at least he was a favourite subject for her muse. Your Edinburgh fine lady could be high and mighty when she chose, witness Susanna Countess of Eglinton, wife of Alexander the ninth Earl, and a Kennedy of the house of Colzean. ”

“ No, for after all she was a Queen and a Stuart, and it is mere commonplace to say that she never failed to confront her fate.
It were easy and useless to dwell on the glaring contrasts in character between Mary and her son James, between the most tragically unfortunate and the most prosaically fortunate of the Stuarts. Such contrasts between the character and fate of parent and child are not uncommon in daily life. The first day of James on earth was memorable for the dramatic meeting of his father and mother. ”

“ Perhaps his praises of her beauty ought thus to suffer some discount; but Prior was as warm; and Pope’s couplet is classic:
“If Queensberry to strip there’s no compelling,
’Tis from a handmaid we must take a Helen.”
A little coarse, perhaps, but it was “the tune o’ the time.” “Wild as colt untamed,” no doubt; and she got herself into some more or less laughable scrapes; but what would not be pardoned to a beautiful Duchess? Her pranks were nothing to those of Lady Maxwell of Monreith’s daughters. They lived in Hyndford’s Close, just above the Netherbow. ”

“ The early days of Jeffrey and Cockburn have a delightful flavour of old Edinburgh. The last years are within living memory. Jeffrey’s accent was peculiar. It was rather the mode in old Edinburgh to despise the south, the last kick, as it were, at the “auld enemy”; Jeffrey declared, “The only part of a Scotsman I mean to abandon is the language, and language is all I expect to learn in England.” The authorities affirm his linguistic experience unfortunate. Lord Holland said that “though he had lost the broad Scots at Oxford, he had only gained the narrow English.” ”

“ Before a year had passed away, to wit, in June 1538, James had brought another mate to Scotland, a very different character, known in our history as Mary of Guise, the famous mother of a still more famous daughter, Mary Queen of Scots. James V.’s widow was Queen Regent during most of the minority of her child, and she held her own with unfailing courage and ability. If she tricked and dodged she was like everybody else. ”

“ There has ever been something homely and unconventional about the college. It was opened on the 14th October 1583; the students were to wear gowns, they were to speak Latin, none was to soil his mouth with common Scots, and none was to go to taverns, or (it was later ordained) to funerals—a serious form of entertainment for which old Scotland evinced a peculiar zest.
Ah, those counsels of perfection! how the years set them at naught! Why they alone of all men in Edinburgh should not go to taverns or funerals was not a question wherewith they troubled themselves ”

“ If you go down that same street till it becomes the Canongate, on the same side, you have Morocco Land with its romantic legend of young Gray, who showed a clean pair of heels to the hangman, only to turn up a few years after as a bold bad corsair. But he came to bless and not to rob, for by his eastern charms or what not he cured the Provost’s daughter, sick well-nigh to death of the plague, and then married her. They lived very happily together in Morocco Land, outside the Netherbow be it noted, and so outside old Edinburgh, for Gray had vowed he would never again enter the city. ”

“ Cockburn, his friend and biographer, the keenest of wits, and a patron of progress, stuck to the accent. “When I was a boy no Englishman could have addressed the Edinburgh populace without making them stare and probably laugh; we looked upon an English boy at the High School as a ludicrous and incomprehensible monster:” and then he goes on to say that Burns is already a sealed book, and he would have it taught in the school as a classic. “In losing it we lose ourselves,” says the old judge emphatically. ”

“ The place was assuredly not chosen with a view to effect, yet the theatre had a fitness which often marks the sacred spots of Scots history. The graveyard was the resting-place of the most famous of their ancestors; the Castle, the great centrepiece of the national annals, rose in their view. The aged Earl of Sutherland signed first, Henderson prayed, the Earl of Loudoun spoke to his fellow-countrymen, and Johnston of Warriston read the scroll, which he had done so much to frame. Endless sufferings were in store for those who adhered to the national cause. ”

“ An Italian magician had shown him, as in a glass darkly, the face of his second spouse. He identified the figure as that of Lady Mary Stuart of the Lennox family, who would have none of him; for the Drummond baby would be Earl of Mar, whilst hers would only be Mr. Erskine. Jock o’ the Sclates was so mortified at the refusal that he took to his bed, and seemed like to make a mortal though ridiculous exit; but the King came to encourage him. “By God, ye shanna dee, Jock, for ony lass in a’ the land!” In due course James brought about the marriage, which turned out well for all concerned. ”

“ In truth, the ghost must have been rather a trouble to Edinburgh landlords; it was easy for a story to arise, and immediately it arose the house was deserted. An old soldier and his wife were persuaded to take up their abode there, but the very first night the candle burned blue, and the head, without the body, though with wicked, selfish eyes, was present, suspended in mid air, and the inmates fled and Mary King’s Close was given over as an entirely bad business. ”