On a clear day the inhabitants of Edinburgh, by merely ascending the Calton Hill or any other of the familiar heights in or around their city, can have a view of nearly the whole length of their noble estuary, the Firth of Forth. To the right or east, its entrance from the open sea, between the two shires of Fife and Haddington, is marked most conspicuously on the Haddingtonshire side by a distant conical mound, called Berwick Law, rising with peculiar distinctness from the northward curve of land which there bounds the horizon. It is thither that the eye is directed if it would watch the first appearance of steamers and ships from any part of the world that may be bound up the Firth for Edinburgh by its port of Leith. Moving thence westward, the eye can command easily the twenty miles more of the Firth which these ships and steamers have to traverse. The outlines of both shores, though the breadth between them averages twelve miles, may be traced with wonderful sharpness, pleasingly defined as they are by their little bays and promontories, and by the succession of towns and fishing villages with which they are studded. Of these, Musselburgh on the near side marks the transition from the shire of Haddington to that of Edinburgh; after which point the Firth begins to narrow. Just below Edinburgh itself, where its port of Leith confronts the Fifeshire towns of Kinghorn and Burntisland, with the island of Inchkeith a little to the right between, the breadth is about six miles. There the main maritime interest of the Firth ceases, few ships going farther up; but, for any eye that can appreciate scenic beauty, there remains the delight of observing the continued course of the Firth westward to Queensferry and beyond, a riband of flashing water between the two coasts which are known prosaically as those of Linlithgowshire and West Fifeshire, but which, in their quiet and mystic remoteness, look like a tract of some Arthurian dreamland.
While something of all this is to be seen on almost any day from any of the eminences in or near Edinburgh, it is only on rare occasions that it can be all seen to perfection. Frequently, even in sunny weather, when the sky is blue above, a haze overspreads the Firth, concealing the Fifeshire shore, or blurring it into a vague cloud-like bank. Sometimes, on the other hand, when there is little sunshine, and the day seems rather sombre in the Edinburgh streets, the view of the Firth and of the other surroundings of the city from any of the higher spots is amazingly distinct to the utmost possible distance, though with the distinctness of a drawing in pen and ink. Worst of all the atmospheric conditions for a survey of the Firth, or of the scenery generally, from Edinburgh, is that of the thick, dull, drizzling, chilling, and piercing fog or mist, called locally a haar, which the easterly wind brings up at certain seasons from the sea. Up the Firth this haar will creep or roll, converting the whole aerial gap between the opposed shores into a mere continuous trough of seething and impenetrable mist, or of rain and mist commingled, drenching the Fifeshire hills on the one side, enveloping all Edinburgh on the other, and pushing itself still westward and inland over the higher and narrower reaches of the estuary, till the aforesaid tract of gleaming Arthurian scenery is absorbed into the long foggy gloom, and even Alloa and Stirling feel the discomfort. No chance then, from any height near Edinburgh, of seeing the ships and steamers in any part of their course from the mouth of the Firth to the port of Leith. If any there be, they are down in the vast abysm of mist, at anchor for safety, or piloting their Leithward course slowly and cautiously through the opaque element, with bells ringing, horns blowing, and now and then a boom from the cannon on the deck to warn off other vessels or ascertain their own whereabouts. So even during the day; but, when the haar lasts through the night, and the opaque gray of the air is deepened into an equally opaque black or umber, the confusion is still greater. The sounds of fog-signals from the bewildered vessels are incessant; the shore-lights from the piers and landing-places can throw their yellow glare but a little way into the turbid consistency; and, if any adventurous vessel does manage to warp herself into port in such circumstances, it is with excited vociferation and stamping among those on board, and no less hurry-skurry among the men ashore who assist in the feat. Happily, an Edinburgh haar at once of such dense quality and of long duration is a rare occurrence. April and May are the likeliest months for the phenomenon, and it passes usually within twenty-four hours. It may come later in the year, however, and may last longer.
Just after the middle of August 1561, as we learn from contemporary records, there was a haar of unusual intensity and continuance over Edinburgh and all the vicinity. It began on Sunday the 17th, and it lasted, with slight intermissions, till Thursday the 21st. “Besides the surfett weat and corruptioun of the air,” writes Knox, then living in Edinburgh, “the myst was so thick and dark that skairse mycht any man espy ane other the lenth of two pair of butts.” It was the more unfortunate because it was precisely in those days of miserable fog and drizzle that Mary, Queen of Scots, on her return to Scotland after her thirteen years of residence and education in France, had to form her first real acquaintance with her native shores and the capital of her realm.
She had left Calais for the homeward voyage on Thursday the 14th August, with a retinue of about 120 persons, French and Scottish, embarked in two French state galleys, attended by several transports. They were a goodly company, with rich and splendid baggage. The Queen’s two most important uncles, indeed,—the great Francis de Lorraine, Duke of Guise, and his brother, Charles de Lorraine, the Cardinal,—were not on board. They, with the Duchess of Guise and other senior lords and ladies of the French Court, had bidden Mary farewell at Calais, after having accompanied her thither from Paris, and after the Cardinal had in vain tried to persuade her not to take her costly collection of pearls and other jewels with her, but to leave them in his keeping till it should be seen how she might fare among her Scottish subjects. But on board the Queen’s own galley were three others of her Guise or Lorraine uncles,—the Duke d’Aumale, the Grand Prior, and the Marquis d’Elbeuf,—with M. Damville, son of the Constable of France, and a number of French gentlemen of lower rank, among whom one notes especially young Pierre de Bourdeilles, better known afterwards in literary history as Sieur de Brantôme, and a sprightly and poetic youth from Dauphiné, named Chastelard, one of the attendants of M. Damville. With these were mixed the Scottish contingent of the Queen’s train, her four famous “Marys” included,—Mary Fleming, Mary Livingstone, Mary Seton, and Mary Beaton. They had been her playfellows and little maids of honour long ago in her Scottish childhood; they had accompanied her when she went abroad, and had lived with her ever since in France; and they were now returning with her, Scoto-Frenchwomen like herself, and all of about her own age, to share her new fortunes.
It is to Brantôme that we owe what account we have of the voyage from Calais. He tells us how the Queen could hardly tear herself away from her beloved France, but kept gazing at the French coast hour after hour so long as it was in sight, shedding tears with every look, and exclaiming again and again, “Adieu, ma chère France! je ne vous verray jamais plus!” He tells us how, when at length they did lose sight of France, and were on the open sea northward with a fair wind, there was some anxiety lest they should be intercepted, and the Queen taken prisoner by an English fleet. In the peculiar state of the relations between England and Scotland at the time, this was not an impossibility, and would hardly have been against the law of nations. There had been some angry correspondence between Elizabeth and Mary respecting the non-ratification by Mary of a certain “Treaty of Edinburgh” of the previous year, stipulating that she would desist from her claim to Elizabeth’s throne of England. Elizabeth had consequently refused Mary’s application for a safeguard for her homeward journey; and there was actually an English squadron in the North Sea available for the capture of Mary if Elizabeth had chosen to give the word. But, though the English squadron does seem to have waylaid the French galleys, and one of the transports following the galleys was taken and detained for some reason or other, the galleys themselves, by rapid sailing or by English sufferance, threw that danger behind, and approached the Scottish coast in perfect safety. What then astonished Brantôme, and what he seems to have remembered all his life with a kind of horror in association with his first introduction to Queen Mary’s native climate and kingdom, was the extraordinary fog, the si grand brouillard, in which they suddenly found themselves. “On a Sunday morning, the day before we came to Scotland,” he says, “there rose so great a fog that we could not see from the stern to the prow, much to the discomfiture of the pilots and crews, so that we were obliged to let go the anchor in the open sea, and take soundings to know where we were.” Brantôme’s measure of time becomes a little incoherent at this point; and we hardly know from his language whether it was outside the Firth of Forth altogether, or inside of the Firth about Berwick Law, that the fog caught them, if indeed he remembered that there was such a thing as an estuary at all between the open sea and Leith. He distinctly says, however, that they were a whole day and night in the fog, and that he and the other Frenchmen were blaspheming Scotland a good deal on account of it before they did reach Leith. That, as other authorities inform us, was about ten o’clock in the morning of Tuesday the 19th.
The Leith people and the Edinburgh people were quite unprepared, the last intimation from France having pointed to the end of the month as the probable time of the Queen’s arrival, if she were to be expected at all. But the cannon-shots from the galleys, as they contrived to near Leith harbour, were, doubtless, a sufficient advertisement. Soon, so far as the fog would permit, all Leith was in proper bustle, and all the political and civic dignitaries that chanced to be in Edinburgh were streaming to Leith. Not till the evening, according to one account, not till next morning, according to another, did the Queen leave her galley and set foot on shore. Then, to allow a few hours more for getting her Palace of Holyrood, and her escort thither, into tolerable readiness, she took some rest in the house in Leith deemed most suitable for her reception, the owner being Andrew Lamb, a wealthy Leith merchant. It was in the afternoon of Wednesday, the 20th of August, that there was the procession on horseback of the Queen, her French retinue, and the gathered Scottish lords and councillors, through the two miles of road which led from Leith to Holyrood. On the way the Queen was met by a deputation of the Edinburgh craftsmen and their apprentices, craving her royal pardon for the ringleaders in a recent riot, in which the Tolbooth had been broken open and the Magistrates insulted and defied. This act of grace accorded as a matter of course, the Queen was that evening in her hall of Holyrood, the most popular of sovereigns for the moment, her uncles and other chiefs of her escort with her, and the rest dispersed throughout the apartments, while outside, in spite of the fog, there were bonfires of joy in the streets and up the slopes of Arthur Seat, and a crowd of cheering loiterers moved about in the space between the palace-gate and the foot of the Canongate. Imparting some regulation to the proceedings of this crowd, for a while at least, was a special company of the most “honest” of the townsmen, “with instruments of musick and with musicians,” admitted within the gate, and tendering the Queen their salutations, instrumental and vocal, under her chamber-window. “The melody, as she alledged, lyked her weill, and she willed the same to be continewed some nightis after.” This is Knox’s account; but Brantôme tells a different story. After noting the wretchedness of the hackneys provided for the procession from Leith to Holyrood, and the poorness of their harnessings and trappings, the sight of which, he says, made the Queen weep, he goes on to mention the evening serenade under the windows of Holyrood as the very completion of the day’s disagreeables. The Abbey itself, he admits, was a fine enough building; but, just as the Queen had supped and wanted to go to sleep, “there came under her window five or six hundred rascals of the town to serenade her with vile fiddles and rebecks, such as they do not lack in that country, setting themselves to sing psalms, and singing so ill and in such bad accord that there could be nothing worse. Ah! what music, and what a lullaby for the night!” Whether Knox’s account of the Queen’s impressions of the serenade or Brantôme’s is to be accepted, there can be no doubt that the matter and intention of the performance were religious. Our authentic picture, therefore, of Queen Mary’s first night in Holyrood after her return from France is that of the Palace lit up within, the dreary fog still persistent outside, the bonfires on Arthur Seat and other vantage-grounds flickering through the fog, and the portion of the wet crowd nearest the Palace singing Protestant psalms for the Queen’s delectation to an accompaniment of violins.
Next day, Thursday the 21st, this memorable Edinburgh haar of August 1561 came to an end. Arthur Seat and the other heights and ranges of the park round Holyrood wore, we may suppose, their freshest verdure; and Edinburgh, dripping no longer, shone forth, we may hope, in her sunniest beauty. The Queen could then become more particularly acquainted with the Palace in which she had come to reside, and with the nearer aspects of the town to which the Palace was attached, and into which she had yet to make her formal entry.
Then, as now, the buildings that went by the general name of Holyrood were distinguishable into two portions. There was the Abbey, now represented only by one beautiful and spacious fragment of ruin, called the Royal Chapel, but then, despite the spoliations to which it had been subjected by recent English invasions, still tolerably preserved in its integrity as the famous edifice, in Early Norman style, which had been founded in the twelfth century by David I., and had been enlarged in the fifteenth by additions in the later and more florid Gothic. Close by this was Holyrood House, or the Palace proper, built in the earlier part of the sixteenth century, and chiefly by James IV., to form a distinct royal dwelling, and so supersede that occasional accommodation in the Abbey itself which had sufficed for Scottish sovereigns before Edinburgh was their habitual or capital residence. One block of this original Holyrood House still remains in the two-turreted projection of the present Holyrood which adjoins the ruined relic of the Abbey, and which contains the rooms now specially shown as “Queen Mary’s Apartments.” But the present Holyrood, as a whole, is a construction of the reign of Charles II., and gives little idea of the Palace in which Mary took up her abode in 1561. The two-turreted projection on the left was not balanced then, as now, by a similar two-turreted projection on the right, with a façade of less height between, but was flanked on the right by a continued chateau-like frontage, of about the same height as the turreted projection, and at a uniform depth of recess from it, but independently garnished with towers and pinnacles. The main entrance into the Palace from the great outer courtyard was through this chateau-like flank, just about the spot where there is the entrance through the present middle façade; and this entrance led, like the present, into an inner court or quadrangle, built round on all the four sides. That quadrangle of chateau, touching the Abbey to the back from its north-eastern corner, and with the two-turreted projection to its front from its north-western corner, constituted, indeed, the main bulk of the Palace. There were, however, extensive appurtenances of other buildings at the back or at the side farthest from the Abbey, forming minor inner courts, while part of that side of the great outer courtyard which faced the entrance was occupied by offices belonging to the Palace, and separating the courtyard from the adjacent purlieus of the town. For the grounds of both Palace and Abbey were encompassed by a wall, having gates at various points of its circuit, the principal and most strongly guarded of which was the Gothic porch admitting from the foot of the Canongate into the front courtyard. The grounds so enclosed were ample enough to contain gardens and spaces of plantation, besides the buildings and their courts. Altogether, what with the buildings themselves, what with the courts and gardens, and what with the natural grandeur of the site,—a level of deep and wooded park, between the Calton heights and crags on the one hand and the towering shoulders of Arthur Seat and precipitous escarpment of Salisbury Crags on the other,—Holyrood in 1561 must have seemed, even to an eye the most satiated with palatial splendours abroad, a sufficiently impressive dwelling-place to be the metropolitan home of Scottish royalty.
The town itself, of which Holyrood was but the eastward terminus, corresponded singularly well. Edinburgh even now is, more than almost any other city in Europe, a city of heights and hollows, and owes its characteristic and indestructible beauty to that fact. But the peculiarity of Old Edinburgh was that it consisted mainly of that one continuous ridge of street which rises, by gradual ascent for a whole mile, from the deeply-ensconced Holyrood at one end to the high Castle Rock at the other, sending off on both sides a multiplicity of narrow foot-passages, called closes, with a few wider and more street-like cuttings, called wynds, all of which slope downward from the main ridge in some degree, while many descend from it with the steepness of mountain gullies into the parallel ravines. Whoever walks now from Holyrood to the Castle, up the Canongate, the High Street, and the Lawnmarket, walks through that portion of the present “Old Town” which figures to us the main Edinburgh of Queen Mary’s time, and is in fact its residue. But imagination and some study of old maps and records are necessary to divest this residue of its acquired irrelevancies, and so to reconvert it into the actual Edinburgh of three hundred years ago. The divisions of the great ridge of street from Holyrood to the Castle were the same as now, with the same names; but objects once conspicuous in each have disappeared, and the features of each have been otherwise altered.
The first part of the long ascent from Holyrood was the Canongate. Though occupying nearly half of the whole, and in complete junction with the Edinburgh proper up to which it led, it was a separate “burgh of regality,” which had formed itself, as its name implies, under the protection of the abbots and canons of Holyrood. By virtue of that original, it was not yet included in the municipal jurisdiction of the Edinburgh Magistrates and Town Council, but held out under a magistracy of its own. Hence some characteristics distinguishing this lower part of the ascent from the rest. The old Canongate was by no means the dense exhibition of dingy picturesqueness now known as the Canongate of Edinburgh, with repulsive entries and closes on both sides, leading to cages of crammed humanity of the poorer sort, or to inner recesses of bone-yards, pipe-clay yards, and the like. It had the sparseness and airiness of a suburb of the Court. The houses, whether of stone or partly of wood, were pretty thickly put together, indeed, along the immediate street-margins, with the inevitable access to many of them by entries and closes, but did not go so deeply back on either side as not to leave room for pleasant gardens and tracts of vacant ground behind. A paved and causewayed street, ascending continuously between two rows of houses, of irregular forms and varying heights, but few of them of more than three storeys; other houses at the backs of these to some little depth all the way, reached by closes from the street, and generally set gablewise to those in front; and, behind these again, garden grounds and grassy slopes and hollows: such was the ancient Canongate. In token of its claims to be a separate burgh, it had its own market cross, and, near this, its own Tolbooth or prison and council-house. The present Canongate Tolbooth, though an antique object, is only the successor of the older Canongate Tolbooth of Queen Mary’s time.
The ending of the Canongate and beginning of the High Street of Edinburgh proper was at a cross street, the left arm of which, descending from the ridge into the ravine on that side, was called St. Mary’s Wynd, while the arm to the right was called Leith Wynd. Here, to mark more emphatically the transition from the smaller burgh into the greater, one encountered the separating barrier of the Nether Bow Port. It has left no trace of itself now, but was a battlemented stone structure, spanning the entire breadth of the thoroughfare, with an arched gateway in the middle and gates for admission or exclusion. That passed, one was in the lower portion of the High Street, called specifically the Nether Bow. Here, it was not merely the increasing breadth of the thoroughfare and the increasing height of the houses that showed one had come within the boundaries of the real civic and commercial Edinburgh. No such sparseness of building now as in the Canongate; no mere double fringe of houses to a short depth, with entries and closes ending in gardens and vacant ground; but a sense of being between two masses of densely-peopled habitations, clothing the declivities from the ridge to their lowest depths on both sides, and penetrable only by those courts and wynds of which one saw the mouths, but the labyrinthine intricacy of which in the course of their descent baffled conception.
The same sensation accompanied one on advancing still upwards into the middle and broadest part of the High Street. Here the street had much the same striking appearance as now. One saw a spacious incline of oblong piazza, rather than a street, lined by buildings, some of solid stone throughout and very tall, others lower and timber-fronted, all of quaint architecture from their basements to their peaked roofs and chimneys, and not a few with “fore-stairs,” or projecting flights of steps from doors on the first floor down to the causeway. It was here, too, that the lateral fringes of habitation down the steep alleys were of greatest width. That on the right was stopped only at the bottom of the ravine on that side by a lake called the North Loch, while that on the left, after reaching the bottom of the other ravine, mingled itself there with an independent and very aristocratic suburb that had grown up in the ravine itself, under the name of the Cowgate, as a southern parallel of relief to the main Edinburgh of the ridge above. This low-lying, aristocratic suburb, though accessible from the piazza of the High Street by the wynds and closes on the southern side, did not come easily into the cognisance of a stranger that might be exploring the piazza itself. He had enough to arrest his attention where he was. One difference between the old High Street and the present, despite their general resemblance, consisted in a huge obstruction, now removed, which interrupted the old High Street at its very midmost point, immediately above the Town Cross. Just above the spot now marked in the causeway as the site of this Town Cross, and beginning exactly where the great church of St. Giles protrudes its complex pile on the left and raises into the sky its remarkable tower and open octagonal crown of stonework, there stood in the old High Street a stack of lofty masonry, stretching up the centre of the street for a considerable way, and leaving only a gloomy and tortuous lane for pedestrians along the buttresses of the church on one side, and a somewhat wider channel,—called the Luckenbooths,—for shops and traffic, on the other. The lower portion of this obstructive stack of masonry belonged to the Luckenbooths, and was included in the name, the basement being let out in shops or stalls for goods, while the upper floors were parcelled out as dwellings. The higher and larger portion, separated from the lower by a narrow suture called “The Kirk Stile,” was nothing less than the famous Heart of Midlothian itself, or Old Tolbooth, which had served hitherto as the prætorium burgi, at once the jail of Edinburgh, its Town Council House, the seat of the Supreme Courts of Justice for Scotland, and the occasional meeting-place of a Scottish Parliament. Little wonder if one lingered round this core of the High Street and of the whole town. The channel of the Luckenbooths on one side of the street, the lane between the Tolbooth and St. Giles’s on the other, and the cross passage or Kirk Stile, were worth more than one perambulation, if only on account of their amusing interconnection; at the back of St. Giles’s Church, overhanging the Cowgate, was St. Giles’s Churchyard, the chief cemetery of the town; and the Tolbooth alone might well detain one by its look and the interest of its associations. In 1561 they were voting it to be too old and decayed, if not too unsightly, for the various and important purposes which it had hitherto served; and within a few months from our present date there was to be an order for its demolition, and for the erection of another building more suitable for those purposes, and especially for the accommodation of the Lords of Council and Session. But, though they did then begin to take it down, and though a “New Tolbooth” or “Council House” was built near it in the same part of the High Street, the old or original Tolbooth escaped its doom, and was left standing after all. A little re-edified, it was to survive its more modern substitute, and to be known till 1817 as at least the Jail of Edinburgh and real old Heart of Midlothian. Some persons still alive can remember it.
The Tolbooth having been passed, one was again in an open piazza of tall or tallish houses, nearly as broad as the former piazza, but farther up the incline, and known indifferently as the High Street above the Tolbooth or as the Lawnmarket. Here, also, one could not but note the number of the closes and wynds on both sides, plunging down the house-laden slopes with break-neck precipitancy from the vertebral street. At the head of this piazza, however, where it began to narrow, and where there was an obstruction across it in the form of a clumsy building called the Butter Tron or Weigh-House, there was one offshoot to the left of greater consequence than any mere wynd or close. This was the West Bow, a steep zigzag or spiral kind of street of antique houses, bringing one down to the deeply-sunk Grassmarket or Horsemarket, i.e. to a large square space opening out from the end of the Cowgate, and convenient for the country people coming into the town with cattle. Refraining from this descent by the West Bow, and keeping still to the vertebral street, one reached the last portion of the long causewayed and inhabited ridge. This was the Castle Hill, a narrowish continuation of the High Street, so steep as to require climbing rather than walking, but up which, nevertheless, there was still a plentiful straggling of houses, perched anyhow, with closes and paved yards reticulating what lateral depth of earth they could cling to, and with views of dizzying profundity from their back windows.
All civic Edinburgh thus left behind, and a military portal having been passed, one entered the precincts of the Castle itself,—the high, rocky stronghold which was more ancient than anything recognisable as most ancient in the Edinburgh beneath, which indeed had fostered that Edinburgh into its first existence and growth, and in which there were relics of days older than those of Malcolm Canmore and David I., older than the infancy of Holyrood Abbey. After the long walk upwards between the two lines of close-packed houses, with perpetual mouths of mere wynds and closes for a whole mile, it was something to emerge into the open air, even in the battlemented exterior esplanade or courtyard of this Castle, slanting up the hillside to the moat and drawbridge. It was more to be allowed to pass the drawbridge and the other defences, and so to pursue the winding, rock-hewn track by which one mounted to the fortified aggregate of guard-houses, store-rooms, and royal towers, heaved together on the cliff-bound summit. What a platform then to stand on, beside the cannon, in any of the ledges of the embrasured parapet! The feeling for scenery, they say, had not been much developed in the sixteenth century; but no more in that century than in this could any human eye have gazed with indifference on the vast panorama of Scottish land and water that burst into the vision from Edinburgh’s Castle Rock. To the north there were villages and farmsteads dotting the range of fields towards the Firth which is now covered with the streets of the New Town, and beyond these always the unwearying loveliness of the face of the Firth, with the boundary of the Fifeshire hills; to the west, the near Corstorphines, and over these also a tract of varied country, fading away up the course of the Firth into a purple suggestion of Stirling and the first spurs of the Highlands; to the south, the Braids and the Pentlands, hiding the pastoral territory of the Esks and the Upper Tweed, with its sleepy stretch towards the Borders and England. Scores of castles and keeps, each the residence of some nobleman or laird of distinction, could be counted within this sweep of the eye, north, west, and south, over the immediate vicinity of Edinburgh. But, if one’s interest were still rather in the town itself, it was the eastward glance that would help most to complete and define the previous impressions. The whole sea-approach to Edinburgh by the Firth was now splendidly visible, with the already described curve of the hither coast from Berwick Law to Leith; the road from Leith to Holyrood was plainly discernible; and the Canongate and Edinburgh could be looked down upon together, and seen in connected shape and ground-plan.
However slight the defences of the Canongate and Holyrood, Edinburgh proper, it could now be seen, was carefully enclosed and bastioned. On the north side, the North Loch, washing the base of the Castle Rock and filling the valley through which the railway now runs, was sufficient protection; but all the rest of the town was bounded in by a wall, called the Flodden Wall. It had been constructed mainly in the panic after the battle of Flodden in 1513 to supersede an older and less perfect circumvallation, but had been much repaired and modified since. It started from the east end of the North Loch and ran thence along Leith Wynd and St. Mary’s Wynd, crossing the High Street at the Nether Bow Port, and so shutting out the Canongate; it then went so far south as to include the whole of the Cowgate and some space of the heights beyond the ravine of the Cowgate; and the west bend of its irregular rectangle, after recrossing this ravine a little beyond the Grassmarket, riveted itself to the Castle Rock, on its most precipitous side, at the head of the High Street. There were several gates in the circuit of the wall besides the Nether Bow Port, the chief being the Cowgate Port, which was also to the east, the Kirk of Field Port (afterwards Potter Row Port) and Greyfriars Port (afterwards Bristo Port), both to the south, and the West Port, just beyond the Grassmarket and the sole inlet from the west. When these gates were closed, Edinburgh could rest within herself, tolerably secure from external attack, and conscious of a reserve of strength in the cannon and garrison of the dominating Castle. Even if the town itself should yield to a siege, the Castle could hold out as a separate affair, impregnable, or almost impregnable, within her own fortifications. Successful assaults on Edinburgh Castle were among the rarest and most memorable accidents of Scottish history.
Such having been the fabric or shell of Edinburgh in 1561, what was the contained life?
The entire population, the Canongate included, was probably less than 30,000; but, confined as this population was within such strait limits, obliged to accommodate itself to one such ridgy backbone of principal street, with off-going wynds and closes and but one considerable and low-lying parallel, and having to make up, therefore, by the vertical height of the houses for the impossibility of spreading them out, its compression of itself within the houses must have been exceedingly dense. As the political capital of the nation, the seat of Government and of the Central Law Courts, Edinburgh not only counted a number of families of rank among its habitual residents, but drew into it, for part of every year at least, representatives of the Scottish nobility, and of the lairds of mark and substance, from all the Lowland shires. Only a few of the greatest of these, however, had town mansions of their own, with any semblance of sequestered approaches and adjuncts, whether in the Canongate or the Cowgate. The majority of the nobles and lairds from the country, as well as of the habitual residents of highest rank and means, such as the Senators of the College of Justice, had to be content with the better portions of those several-flatted or many-flatted tenements,—insulæ they would have been called in ancient Rome, but “lands” was and is the special Edinburgh word for them,—which rose at the sides of the High Street or in the wynds and closes that ran thence down the slopes. Distributed through the same “lands” were the families of the “merchants” and the “craftsmen,” the two denominations that composed between them the whole body of the burghers proper. There was a chronic rivalry between these two denominations in the elections to the Town Council and in the management of affairs generally. The “merchants,” whose business was ship-owning, the export and import of goods, and the sale of the imported goods at first hand, affected the superiority on the whole. There were individuals among the “craftsmen,” however, as opulent as any of the “merchants.” This was particularly the case with the craft of the goldsmiths, always a prominent craft in Edinburgh, and there, as in London, combining the trade of money-lending with the more especial arts of gold-working, silver-working, and jewellery, and so allying itself with the merchants and their transactions. Among the other “crafts,” all regularly incorporated in brotherhoods, and each with its annually elected head, called the “deacon” of that craft, were the skinners or leather-dressers, the furriers, the wobsters or weavers, the tailors, the bonnet-makers, the hammermen or smiths and armourers, the waulkers or cloth-dressers, the cordiners or shoemakers, the wrights, the masons, the coopers, the fleshers or butchers, the baxters or bakers, the candle-makers, and the barbers or barber-surgeons. Printing had been introduced into Edinburgh in 1507; and there had been a lingering of the craft in the town ever since by patents or permissions, but on the very smallest scale. To the “merchants” and “craftsmen” and their families there have to be added, of course, the numerous dependents of both these classes of the burghers, called in the simple language of that time their “servandis.” Under that name were included not only the domestic servants of the wealthier merchants, but also their clerks and business assistants, and the journeymen and apprentices of the master-craftsmen, the last a very unruly portion of the community and known collectively as “the crafts-childer.” Imagine all these domiciled, as was then the habit, with their masters, and stowed away somehow, “up and down in hole and bore,” as one old document phrases the fact, in the workshops and “lands.” Even then there remains to be taken into account the miscellany of small retail traders, in shops and stalls, which such a town required, with the peripatetic hucksters of fish and other provisions, and the rabble of nondescripts, living by erratic and hand-to-mouth occupations, and hanging on about the hostelries. All these too were “indwellers” in Edinburgh, and housed in the wynds and closes in some inconceivable manner. Moreover, as we learn too abundantly from the old burgh records, actual vagrants and beggars, whether of the able-bodied and turbulent variety, or of the cripple, diseased, and blind, soliciting alms by obstreperous whining and by the exhibition of their deformities, swarmed in Old Edinburgh with a persistency which all the police efforts of the authorities, with examples of scourgings and hangings for several generations, had been unable to repress or diminish. Where they lived in overcrowded Edinburgh only St. Giles’s steeple could now tell.
The overcrowding had its natural consequences. The sanitary condition of most European towns in the sixteenth century, the best English towns included, was incredibly bad; Scottish towns generally were behind most English towns in this respect; but Old Edinburgh had a character all her own for perfume and sluttishness. It could hardly be helped. Impressively picturesque though the town was by site and architecture, its populousness and its structural arrangement were hardly compatible with each other on terms of cleanliness. Individual families, within their own domiciles in the various “lands,” might be as tidy as their cramped accommodations would permit; but the state of the common stair in each “land,”—and in the taller lands it was a dark stone “turnpike” ascending in corkscrew fashion from flat to flat,—depended on the united tastes and habits of all the families using it, and therefore on the habits and tastes of the least fastidious. It was worse in the wynds and closes. Not only did all the refuse from the habitations on both sides find its way into these, generally by the easy method of being flung down from the windows overnight; but the occupations of some of the ground-floor tenants, butchers, candle-makers, etc.,—added contributions heterogeneously offensive. Hardly a close that had not its “midding” or “middings” at its foot or in its angles. For generations the civic authorities had been contending with this state of things and uttering periodical rebukes and edicts for cleansing. There were two kinds of occasions on which these cleansing-edicts were apt to be most stringent and peremptory. One was the expected arrival of some illustrious stranger, or company of strangers, from England or from abroad. Then the inhabitants were reminded of the chief causes of offence among them, and put on the alert for their removal, so as not to shame the town. More strenuous still were the exertions made on any of those periodical outbreaks of the Plague, or alarms of its approach, of which we hear so frequently in the annals of Edinburgh, as of other towns, from the fourteenth century to the seventeenth. Then the authorities did bestir themselves, and the inhabitants too. But, after such occasions of spasmodic sanitary effort, there always came the relapse; and, though there was a standing order obliging each householder to see to the tidiness of his own little bit of precinct, the general apathy and obtuseness prevailed. It was providential when the heavens themselves interfered, and some extraordinary deluge of rain sent torrents down the closes.
Fortunately, the population did not need to remain within doors, or in the obscurities of the wynds and closes, more than it liked. It could pour itself out of doors into the main street; and it did so daily with a profusion beyond all modern custom. Any morning or afternoon about the year 1561 the High Street of Edinburgh, from the Castle to the Canongate, must have been one of the liveliest and most bustling thoroughfares in Europe. Need we cite, for witness, that chapter in The Abbot in which Scott takes occasion to describe it, just about this date, when he brings young Roland Græme for the first time into Edinburgh under the convoy of Adam Woodcock the falconer? Scott is so excellent an authority in such matters that his account may pass as hardly less authentic than that of a contemporary. We can see, with Roland Græme, the populace “absolutely swarming like bees on the wide and stately street”; we can see the “open booths projecting on the street,” with commodities of all sorts for sale, and especially Flanders cloths, tapestry, and cutlery; we can pick out in the crowd its most representative figures, such as the “gay lady, in her muffler or silken veil,” stepping daintily after her “gentleman usher,” or the group of burghers standing together, “with their short Flemish cloaks, wide trousers, and high-caped doublets.” Nor are we much surprised when there come upon the scene the two parties of richly dressed aristocratic gallants, with their armed retinues of serving-men, meeting each other with frowns in the middle of the causeway, and immediately falling upon each other in a desperate tulzie or street fight, in vindication of their right of way, and of the hereditary feud between their families. Scott required such a tulzie for his story, and therefore brought it in where it suited him best. But, though Edinburgh was famous for its tulzies or causeway-fights between noblemen and lairds at feud, they were hardly everyday occurrences. Once a week or once a month was about the rate in real history. For greater authenticity, therefore, we may seek glimpses of the High Street of Old Edinburgh in Scottish literature of earlier date than the Waverley Novels.
The Scottish poet Dunbar has left us two pieces picturing very distinctly the Edinburgh of 1500–1513, which he knew so well. He calls it “our nobill toun,” as if patriotically proud of it all in all; but it chances that in both the poems he is more sarcastic than complimentary. One is an express address of objurgation to the merchants of Edinburgh for their disgraceful neglect of the “nobill toun” and its capabilities. Why, he asks, do they let its streets be overrun by beggars, so that “nane may mak progress” through them; why do they let the fairest parts be given up to “tailyouris, soutteris, and craftis vyle”; why do they let the vendors “of haddocks and of scaittis,” and minstrels with but two wearisome tunes, which they repeat eternally, go everywhere bawling up and down? He complains more particularly of the High Street. He speaks of the projecting fore-stairs there as making “the houssis mirk”; he declares that at the Cross, where one should see “gold and silk,” one sees nothing but “crudis and milk,” and that nothing is sold in all the rest of that lower piazza but poor shellfish or common tripe and pudding; and he is positively savage on the state of the blocked isthmus between the two piazzas beside St. Giles’s Church and the Tolbooth. There, where the merchants themselves most resort, and where the light is held from their Parish Kirk by the stupid obstructions which they permit, they are hampered in a malodorous honeycomb of lanes, which may suit their tastes for exchange purposes, but is hardly to their credit! To these particulars about the High Street from one of the poems we may add, from the other, linen hung out to dry on poles from the windows, cadgers of coals with wheeled carts, cadgers of other articles with creels only slung over their horses, and dogs and boys in any number running in and out among the carts and horses. All in all, Dunbar’s descriptions of Edinburgh are satirical in mood, and sum themselves up in this general rebuke to the Edinburgh merchants in the first of the two poems—
This is hardly the Edinburgh of subsequent romance, as we see it in Scott’s Abbot; but that Scott had good warrant for what he wrote there, other than his own imagination, appears from a supplement to Dunbar furnished by Sir David Lindsay. The Edinburgh which Sir David Lindsay knew was the Edinburgh of a later generation than Dunbar’s, say from 1513 to 1555; and, whether from this lapse of time or from difference in the tempers of the two poets, Sir David Lindsay’s Edinburgh is liker Scott’s than Dunbar’s. Thus, in one poem of Lindsay’s,—
In another of his poems he describes Edinburgh on a gala day, when there was a procession through its High Street, such as he himself, as Lyon King of Arms, might have marshalled. The occasion was the entry into Edinburgh in May 1537 of Magdalene, daughter of Francis I. of France, the young bride of James V.; and the dirge-like form of the description,—that of an indignant address to Death,—is accounted for by the fact that the poet is looking back on the splendours of her welcome into the Scottish capital when the too swift close of her fair young life, only a few weeks afterwards, had turned them into matter of mournful recollection,—