Welcome to the blog of writer and musician Andrew Martin. Here I'll post original photographs and observations as I encounter the history and culture of the San Fernando Valley, the City of the Angels, Alta California and the far-flung Pacific Rim… but mostly the Valley.
Probably the best of all the Victorian Scottish music-hall tear-jerkers this season.
Click an hairk: BUT FIRST, open a second browser window with this page. Then click the second link to open the sheet music; finally open the music in the first link, click play.
‘Twas low in a chilly November And late on a Saturday night Police Sergeant Rennie was walking his beat, A shade in the High Street lamplight. Just as he saunters by Old Paisley Close, He gets to considerin’ the life that he chose. Agaze at the spires, he crossed to Blackfriars — When Paisley expires, with a thund’rous implos-ion!
(far away:) “HEAVE AWA’ LADS, I’M NO’ DEID YET! Broke stanes and broke banes can aa be re-set! Ply lever, saw, adze, maul, pulley and net, ‘r jest HEAVE AWA’ LADS, I’M NO’ DEID YET!”
The folk of the Old Town of Embro Came running to weep o’er the heap. The tenement walls were a torture of stones, A sepulcher forty feet deep! Raw hope to think there could be a survivor, ‘Saw, rope and muscle might find some alive!’ From the rubble and soot, A bonnie wee foot, Stuck out bare and bootless — (shouted:) ”Tis Joseph McIver!” That moment is braw to remember, As out of the burying cairn Came a voice full of cheer, Courageous and clear, The cry of a half-grown-up bairn!
“HEAVE AWA’ LADS, I’M NO’ DEID YET! Broke stanes and broke banes can aa be re-set! Ply lever, saw, adze, maul, pulley and net, ‘r jest HEAVE AWA’ LADS, I’M NO’ DEID YET!“ (Then the TRIO takes up the chorus.)
Grandfathers dug gravel with shovels, Old wives shifted stones with their hands. Their worrisome toil was as silent as Doom, Save for brave Sergeant Rennie’s commands. Joey’s wee foot had gone white with the night, His holler had ceased by the dawn’s dreary light. The crew took a pause, and set down their saws, Hope lost in their cause — then heard, “RIGHT!!”
“Heave awa’ chaps, I’m no’ deid yet! Gin she’s aa re-brigg’t, oor flat’s no’ tae let! Wha’d kenn’t she’d collapse? I’ll be in yer debt, Gin ye heave awa’ chaps, I’m no’ deid, yet.”
The men felt their faint hearts grow bolder, They cut through the rotten old beam That so sorely pressed on young Joey’s shoulder, And each time they’d falter, he’d scream:
“Heave awa’ boys, I’m no’ deid yet. Me Auntie in Leith ‘d be sairlie upset. She’ll mak us aa porridge, wi’ raisins, I bet — first tho Heave Awa’ boys, I’m no’ deid yet!” (The Trio takes the finale.)
— Andrew Martin, “Heave Awa’ Lads — the Legend of Old Paisley Close.” All rights reserved.
Today I woke up HERE and NOW and in SUNNY CALIFORNIA and WOO HOO USA! Up and at ’em! First, read the news headlines …. By the end of my first cup of coffee I was ready to escape right back to Scotland — a proud country with a proud heritage. And it keeps its own songs alive, with practically no help from anyone, among the hearts of its own people. They sing these songs even today, in pubs and parties and schools all over Scotland, even when they know — BECAUSE they know — that both sides in whatever bloody battle they’re singing about were equally daft. Adaptive re-use? The Long View…?
The Toun Hoose of the Lairds of Cockpen in Castlehill, renovated by Patrick Geddes into the Outlook Tower for urban study.
First, the hilarious “Laird o’ Cockpen,” by saucy Lady Nairne, deftly done by Anne Lorne Gillies.
The laird o’ Cockpen, he’s proud an’ he’s great, His mind is ta’en up wi’ the things o’ the State; He wanted a wife, his braw house to keep, But favour wi’ wooin’ was fashious to seek.
Down by the dyke-side a lady did dwell, At his table head he thocht she’d look well, M’Leish’s ae dochter o’ Clavers-ha’ Lea, A penniless lass wi’ a lang pedigree.
His wig was weel pouther’d and as gude as new, His waistcoat was white, his coat it was blue; He put on a ring, a sword, and cock’d hat, And wha could refuse the laird wi’ a’ that?
He took the grey mare, and rade cannily, And rapp’d at the yett o’ Clavers-ha’ Lea; ‘Gae tell Mistress Jean to come speedily ben, – She’s wanted to speak to the laird o’ Cockpen.’
Mistress Jean she was makin’ the elderflower wine; ‘An’ what brings the laird at sic a like time?’ She put aff her apron, and on her silk goun, Her mutch wi’ red ribbons, and gaed awa’ doun.
An’ when she cam’ ben, he bowed fu’ low, An’ what was his errand he soon let her know; Amazed was the laird when the lady said ‘Na’, And wi’ a laigh curtsie she turned awa’.
Dumfounder’d was he, nae sigh did he gie, He mounted his mare – he rade cannily; An’ aften he thought, as he gaed through the glen, She’s daft to refuse the laird o’ Cockpen!
Next the immortal Annie Laurie, sung by the immortal Jean Redpath, on Prairie Home Companion. A bit poignant: she invited the Americans to sing along, none knew it. You do, though, sing along.
Noel at his most droll. Enroll:
“There with ma honey, ma bonny Hieland laddie, in his wee-bitty kilt, of Caledonian plaidie…”
Crank up the volume for two from the Corries. First, ‘Bonnie Dundee’ takes the side of the Viscount Dundee, Lord Claverhouse (Clavers in Scots), the King’s Man, as he rides out from Edinburgh through the West Port (“the bells they ring backwards…) to put down the Jacobite uprising. [Note that the pert lassie who refused the Laird o’ Cockpen was a poor relation, who lived at Clavers-ha-Lea, the country estate.] Dundee kicked the Highlanders in the sporran that day, but Dundee himself was killed right at the moment of victory — a Cavalier martyr. Charmingly, this was first broadcast the week I arrived: September 24, 1984. I might have listened to it, unpacking. I probably did.
Sir Walter Scott wrote the poem in 1825. I add a few interesting stanzas not usually sung, about the social and class and religious geography of the City. The “godly plants of the Bow” were the smug white-lace-collar rich Presbyterians, and the Whigs in the Grassmarket were the more or less non-religious workaday artisans who just want their potholes filled. Both parties, for their own reasons, despised both the Jacobite Highlanders, and the overweening English-Dutch Sassenachs. Either way, the Toun was glad to be rid of the charming, powerful, dangerous Dundee.
Tae the lairds o’ Convention ’twas Claverhouse spoke Ere the King’s crown go down, there are crowns tae be broke; Now let each cavalier wha loves honour and me Come follow the bonnets o’ bonnie Dundee.
Chorus: Come fill up my cup, come fill up my can, Come saddle my horses and call out my men. And it’s ope the West Port and let us gae free, And we’ll follow the bonnets o’ Bonnie Dundee!
Dundee he is mounted, he rides doon the street, The bells they ring backwards, the drums they are beat, But the Provost, (douce man!), says;’ Just e’en let him be For the toon is weel rid of that de’il Dundee.’
As he rode down the sanctified bends of the Bow Ilk carline was flyting and shaking her pow; But the young plants of grace they looked couthie and slee, Thinking, ‘luck to thy bonnet, thou Bonny Dundee!’ Come fill up my cup, etc.
With sour-featured Whigs the Grassmarket was crammed, As if half the West had set tryst to be hanged; There was spite in each look, there was fear in each e’e, As they watched for the bonnets of Bonny Dundee. Come fill up my cup, etc.
— Sir Walter Scott, ‘Bonny Dundee’
The Corries then get our blood all fired up for the other side in the same war! That’s Scotland for you. Robbie Burns puts our sympathy with the Jacobite Highlanders, who don’t want the Protestant Dutchman William of Orange for their king. The POV is as of a defeated Highlander with PTSD, angered by the cocky tavern antics of a young man who hasn’t seen blood. “I saw the Devil and Dundee on the braes o’ Killiecrankie-o.”
My Kodak snapshots can’t compete for beauty with old postcards and lithographs. But I wanted to see them posted. I took only a few pictures of the city itself that year — I was very busy studying in Embro,. But mine are a record of the place in the 1980s, the height (or bite?) of the Thatcher Years.
JUNIOR YEAR ABROAD DEPT.
Castle Rock is an extinct volcano. It’s the sibling of Arthur’s Seat, a mile east, in Holyrood Park.
Arthur’s Seat, and Salisbury Crags, taken on an after-class hike through Holyrood Park. (It looks maybe, 4:30 pm.) Auld Reekie got her nickname from Scots “reek,” smoke — the smoke from her breweries — more breweries, ’tis said, per capita, than any place aye in Airth. This picturesque, tangy malty smog was the 1984 remnant of that reek. Today I think the breweries were forced from the Canongate, in anticipation of Parliament moving in there. (Joke)
When the glacier came, it hit Castle Rock and split: The leading edge of each flow turned inwards, dropping mud and gravel symmetrically behind the rock. The overflow shaped it all into the classic “crag-and-tail” geologic formation.
Then the glacier melted, leaving a long sloping tail, and marshy lochs in the suppressed ground at the base of the rock and tailings.
Already in the Iron Age, people lived on the rock. It, and the mile-long earth ramp, and the swampy lochs at its feet, and the fertile meadows stretching to the seafood-rich coastline of the Firth, was a territory, a contiguous oikos, anchored around whomever was momentary King of Hill, for thousands of years.
Spires and domes from Castle Esplanade: northeast to the Scott Monument, Calton Hill, and the Firth of Forth; 1984.Artwork by A. van Anrooy. Every day at 1:00, in an ancient ceremony, one of these guns would fire a salute. (Cheaper than 12, eh?) Milne’s Court is not far from the Castle, and the shot would resound sharply in our granite canyon, shaking the windies. I loved it, and always looked out the window to the harbor, imagining that Granton was getting the percussion wave just…about…now.
History finds the rock held by the Picts, who called it Maidan; possibly meaning “cut off rock, snub-nose rock.” This got Angled into Maiden-castle, which folks at court four centuries later, garbled into Latin as Castrum Puellarum, the Castle of Maidens. The report that “it’s where the Pictish kings stashed their young princesses” seems to be fantasy folk-etymology provoked by the alluring label on some old maps.
Alexander Nasmyth’s 1824 nostalgic look back at what had already gone, the Nor Loch. Note the rough space, almost an escarpment, between Castle and Toun. That no-man’s land was already, by 1824, leveled and filled in by the Esplanade, the parade ground for the pipes and drums of the Military Tattoo, and the Mound, leading down (or up) hill. Poet Allan Ramsay was born (by tradition) in that first house on Castlehill, with its close running behind it. This had been the ancient townhouse of the Lairds of Cockpen. When the Mound was built Ramsay moved next door, building the NEW first house on Castlehill, atop the new Mound. This, so he could say he still rubbed shoulders with the Castle. The Esplanade, a lonely but convenient car-park in 1984. Now I believe it holds a state-of-the-art arena and bleachers for the Tattoo.
Dun is a Celtic word for castle rock town. Burgh is an Anglo-Saxon word for castle rock town. Thus Dunedin and Edinburgh mean the same thing; so who’s Edin? Eiddyn, Etin, Edin may have been a Pictish king of the land of Gododdin, which may have been southern Scotland. (The source is a Welsh legendary poem, Y Gododdin). The Anglish Kingdom of Bernicia is known to have overrun Lothian in 603, defeating the local Pictish king Aedan, who might be that namesake. Thereafter, Dun-Aedan, or Dun-Maidan swallowing the m behind the n….(cf. ‘Dun-barton’ v. ‘Dumbarton’) was what the Anglish called the castle fortress of Lothian.
Wait — Lothian? Yes; the place is also anciently “Leugh-dunnan”, the castle rock town of Leugh, or “Lothian.” It may derive from the Scots, the Irish-speaking folk who came in from the west and conquered / merged with the Picts. Pictish and Scottish and Anglish royal clans duked, thaned, and lairded it out over Lothian. In 638 Oswiu conquered Lothian and Edinburgh, and founded the Kingdom of Northumbria. From now on it’s mainly Edinburgh, and mainly an Anglish place.
But hang on to your huids, for here come the Vikings, then the Danes to overrun basically all of England, Scotland, and Ireland. The Scots and Picts retreated to the Highlands, but periodically returned to Dunedin to renew their claims for 1,500 years.
Challenging the Dane-cowed Anglish hegemony, every possible alliance and double-cross played out between the ancient Picts, the confederating Scots, the grasping English petty kings, the Scandis, and the parvenu Norman and French; and right bloodily too (the Macbeth years). Then came the even more bloody Norman Conquest. Both Northumbria and Lothian were pummeled in the “harrowing of the North” by William the Conqueror, who installed Norman vassals all the way up to the Firth.
THE TWO ROYAL BURGHS:
Finally, in 1124, a King of Scots arose who had both Scots and English blood, and the right kind of (Anglo-Norman) education. King David I, Dauid I Mac Mail Choluim, the son of Malcolm III of Scots, and his pious English wife Margaret of Wessex, took control with a modernizing program of feudalizing the land, Norman-style; and supporting Roman clergy and monks trained Canterbury-style (not Irish Lindisfarne-style.) David made the whole thing pay by studding the kingdom with “Royal Burghs,” specialized market-towns with clearly-defined trading monopolies.
The two Burghs, Edinburgh to serve the Castle up top, Canongate below to serve the Abbey (and Royal Palace). Edinburgh quickly became very dense and urban. Canongate remained sleepier, more suburban; though it still played an outsized role in Scottish history.
David acually founded two Royal Burghs along the mile-long tail: Edinburgh up top; and the “regality” of Holyrood Abbey, which he also founded, down at the bottom. Because of the comings and goings of the monks, the lower burgh eventually got named “Canongate,” gate being Old Scots for street (cognate with German “gasse.”) Both Edinburgh and Canongate had the right to set up a Mercat Cross, i.e., a regulated, bandit-free marketplace where produce could be brought in from the countryside to feed the soldiers, and wine and fine silky undergarments could be sold to the monks. Each municipality later built a Tobooth as administrative center.
The traders would buy from the peasants and the monks, and then sell back to the monks and soldiers, who tendered coins of salary for supplies — a new-ish idea. Out of those coins, taxes and tolls could be easily collected on the King’s behalf. The traders also had to pay the King rents on their tofts — their town lots around the marketplace, keeping up on rent gave them exclusive rights to trade there, and even to subdivide, according to strict survey lines. These “burgages” gave the Old Toun its plan to this day.
“Stone above storms, you rear upon the ridge: we live on your back, its crag-and-tail,
spires and tenements stacked on your spine, the castle and the palace linked by one rope.
A spatchcock town, the ribcage split open like a skellie, a kipper, a guttit haddie…
— from “To Edinburgh” by Valerie Gilles
The dividing line between the Burghs is the Netherbow Port, well fortified. After the national disaster at Flodden, 1513, Edinburgh built itself city walls.
Burghers had to build on their toft within a year and a day. They were laid out just below the Castle gates, fish-bone fashion with their front doors around the Lawnmarket, and their back gardens running down either side of the hill in walled “closes.” The two Bows, the West Bow and Netherbow, were curved streets running up and down the sides of the hill. The town’s water supply was piped down from a spring on Castle Rock.
The Castle reservoir is the hip-roofed blockhouse, center. The crenelated tower above it, with the white turret, is the Outlook Tower, or Camera Obscura, built as a tourist trap in 1852 atop that ancient townhouse of the Lairds of Cockpen (where Ramsay was born). In 1892, facing demolition, its fine views were repurposed by the pioneer of urban-studies, Patrick Geddes, as the perfect place to educate the public on civics and the built environment. Geddes would lecture, rotating the View for students or citizens observing patterns in Old Toun and New.in the 1890s, city planner Patrick Geddes bought Allan Ramsay’s 18th century octagon house on the Mound, and enlarged it by his own designs, into Ramsay Gardens — the terraced white townhouses above. They were a (successful) experiment in building upscale, co-op garden townhouses right downtown, to lure “the classes” back to the heart of the city. Geddes, no dunderheid, lived there too. UPDATE: I did catch a shot of Old College dome! It’s that silver flash in front of the Crags.The View southeast from Castle Hill. Most of this is today the University, though I somehow missed Old College dome.The Conongate Viewed in 1984 from Calton Hill., with the ruins of Holyrood Abbey and the Palace of Holyroodhouse set against the dramatic sweep of Salisbury Crags and Arthur’s Seat behind.. Look at all the breweries! Though even then, some were going to lofts and redevelopment schemes. Today this same view would be dominated by the new Scottish House of Parliament, which modern structure strikes some as jarring.
Fascinatingly, the early colonists were only a few Englishmen and maybe a few Scots, but preponderantly, were recruited from Flanders –the richly-urbanized textile powerhouse. It was a canny royal move; Flemings had a long history of civic self-regulation, and could find easy markets for Scottish wool. With the founding of the Royal Burghs, Scotland jumped into the mainstream of European civilization, and Castle Rock was set to be the centerpiece of one of the world’s most beautiful cities.
The three happy peasants are on top of Calton Hill, exactly where the ordnance sits in the previous (breathtaking) shot. The meadows at right are where the New Town was sited in the 1760’s; The Nor Loch was drained for Princes Street Gardens beginning in 1771; and the muck was piled up against the rock to build The Mound and level out the Esplanade — all finished by about 1830. In 1846 they began putting in the railways and Waverley Station, right between Old Toun and New.View of the Gardens, the Nat’l Academy, the Castle and the spires of New College, from the roof of Waverley Station. This photo, including the bus queue, was taken from about where the crease is, in the postcard below from 30 years earlier. View of Princes Street and Gardens from the Mound; the Castle at left.Calton Hill, site of picturesque monuments, including the tower of the Governor’s House, all that remains of grim Calton Prison, built in the 1820s to replace the grim Tolbooth.
In late October of 1984, on a really fine day, I was walking home with some of my new friends from Milne’s Court, up the Edinburgh High Street, past St. Giles. Just a few paces past the kirk, right as the Lawnmarket begins, we passed a beautiful sett in the street, with the saltire St. Andrew’s cross:
The Heart of Mid-Lothian. Lothian is an ancient Celtic kingdom named for the god Lugh: Lugh-dunnan, “Castle of Lugh.” This is cognate with Caesar’s Lugdunum, capital of Gaul: in French, Lyon. After the Union, administrative districts were made of East, Mid, and West Lothian, hence Edinburgh’s Tolbooth was the [decrepit] “Heart of Mid-Lothian.”
Chaim and I were shocked when Angus, from Aberdeen, suddenly spat into the heart, then sauntered on, blithe and nimble in his Doc Martens, painter’s pants rolled to the ankles, t-shirt sleeves rolled to the shoulder with Marlboro reds stashed in, puffing coolly at his fag, as we preppy Americans gasped. Spitting in the main square of the capital of Scotland! Was this some Aberdeen boorishness?
The foundations of the Tolbooth go back to 1386. This was the Mary, Q. of Scots version. Seat of the City Guard and Court of Session and the Lord Provost, it was also the seat of religious persecution, of political repression, and for generations, the debtors’ prison. Much dilapidated and scorned in the Enlightenment, as was the Bastille, it was finally razed in 1817.
Adele, a beautifully sharp and ruddy second-year from Belfast, hastened to explain it was a custom here, at the site of the Old Tolbooth, Sir Walter Scott’s famous ‘Heart of Mid-Lothian,’ to dishonor the pavement with Scots exuberance. Thereafter, all year, Chaim and I, given liberty to express Philadelphian contempt for the clammy hand of British Imperialism, dutifully expressed it, Embro-style. I can’t imagine they let people spit on the street now. But it was a thing then. It struck me as a strange custom — to pridefully deface a memorial — but as I learned more about the history of Scotland, and Edinburgh’s in particular, I saw that keeping alive this memorial to the hated Tolbooth as a “pain-body” in the body politic, served a vital unifying function; it even helped forge the city’s modern identity, at least, that’s how my young student friends understood it. Today, our own country is being roiled by citizen protests against police brutality. When there is so much anger at injustice, the Mob becomes a powerful and purging instrument to revive an ailing nation.
The two spots that played a part in the grim Porteous affair were the Tolbooth, the ancient city guardhouse, city council chambers, courthouse, etc., and the Grassmarket, which since 1660 was the official place for public executions. It’s worth paying attention to the geography too — the Lawnmarket was the seat of the old Scottish aristocracy. The Bowhead was the seat of the middle-class, the Protestant merchants and lawyers. The Grassmarket was working class. All these classes supported the lynching, a rare example of solidarity in Scotland’s history. This is the point of the story about the guinea “found” in the West Bow Butter Trone — that the wealthy classes contributed to the effort.
The Tolbooth, seen down the Lawnmarket from Milne’s Court Passage, at the Bowhead. The crown of St. Giles is behind it.
The common people and city leaders alike reviled the old Tolbooth as the town’s dank, garbage-piled prison. Great religious and political prisoners over the years gave it an air of treason and oppression, while the sadistic incarceration of ordinary debtors in dungeon-like conditions provoked general citizen outrage. This was made even worse by the fact that over the years, the ordinary criminals, including the dangerous ones — murderers, cheats, frauds, rapists, etc. — seemed to have no trouble escaping while harmless bankrupts languished. Still, the Tolbooth was Capt. Porteous’s post, and when he rode out with his cohort of Redcoats to the Grassmarket to oversee the execution of a smuggling sailor, and then ordered his troops to open fire on the peaceful mob, the Tolbooth became his prison.
The Grassmarket livestock fountain, looking north. It was designed by Robert Milne, Royal Master Mason, and was built about the same time and in the same vernacular Neo-classical style, as he built Milne’s Court (up and around the Bow.) Here by the fountain was set the gallows for Andrew Wilson; here too, Porteous was carried by the Mob and lynched.
The Grassmarket was the horse and cattle market (thus always strewn with hay and straw.) Here since the earliest time converged the common folk from the rural hamlets around Edinburgh, to service the royal troops in the King’s Stables; later in the Renaissance the carousing Frenchified households of the lairds up in the Lawnmarket were added to their clientele, later still the dour but wealthy Protestant merchants of the Bowhead. Thus by the 18th Century it was the general working-class, i.e., the animal-handling class, neighborhood of the city. But also, as the economy diversified, the storefronts filled in with carters, wheelwrights, drapers, cordage and twiners, leatherworkers, bakers etc. Its adoption as the site of public hangings seems almost accidental — it was, and is, the widest open square in famously strait Edinburgh.
The Grassmarket seen looking east from the fountain at the Bowfoot. The West Port,, the gate out of town, is on the left. and at right, the Cowgate leads along the foot of the hill to Holyrood Palace.The Grassmarket aglow with Mob torches; looking east from the Cowgate Head.
“The year 1736 is rendered memorable in the annals of the city by the most celebrated of all its popular revolts–the famous Porteous mob….the cool and determined manner in which popular vengeance was effected [in the Porteous affair] has probably never been surpassed. The memorials of Edinburgh would be incomplete without some notice of it; but its incidents have been rendered so familiar by the striking narrative of Scott…that a very brief sketch will suffice…
— Sir Daniel Wilson, Memorials of Edinburgh in the Olden Times, 1881
The Sir Walter Scott Monument, looking back at the Auld Toun. He played as imporant a role in the formation of Scottish identity as any King or Covenanter; The Heart of Mid-Lothian was one of his most popular works.
1909 edition of the 1818 classic, inspired by, and true to, the facts of the Porteous Affair. “The Heart of Mid-Lothian is the seventh of Sir Walter Scott‘s Waverley Novels. It was originally published in four volumes on 25 July 1818, under the title of Tales of My Landlord, 2nd series, and the author was given as “Jedediah Cleishbotham, Schoolmaster and Parish-clerk of Gandercleugh”. Although the identity of the author of the Waverley Novels was well known by this time, Scott still chose to write under a pseudonym.” — Wikipedia
Capt. Porteous, carried to the Grassmarket without sedan chair
“Captain John Porteous, the commander of the city guard, having occasion to quell some disturbances at the execution of one Andrew Wilson, a smuggler, rashly ordered his soldiers to fire among the crown, by which six were killed and eleven wounded, including females, some of them spectators from neighboring windows. Porteous was tried and condemned for murder, but reprieved by Queen Caroline, who was then acting as Regent, in the absence of her husband, George II, at Hanover. The people, who had regarded Wilson in the light of a victim to the oppressive excise laws and other fruits of the hated Union [with England, from 1707], were exasperated at the pardon of one who had murdered so many of their fellow-citizens, and determined that he should not escape. Many people, it is said, assembled from the country to join in the enterprise.”
— Sir Daniel Wilson, Memorials of Edinburgh in the Olden Times, 1881
When Andrew Wilson’s partners, including Robertson, escaped from the Tolbooth, he was the only one in the gang left to hang.
The Indictment of Capt. Porteous:
“John Porteous, lately one of the Captain Lieutennants of the City Guard of Edinburgh present Prisoner in the Tolbooth of Edinburgh, Pannel. INDICTED and ACCUSED at the Instance of Duncan Forbes, Esquire, his Majesty’s Advocat for His Highness Interest, for the Crimes of Murder and Slaughter, and others, as is more fully mentioned in the Indictment raised against him there annext. Setting forth, THAT WHERE, by the Law of God, the Common Law, the Municipal Law and Practice of this Kingdom, and the Laws of all other well-governed Realms, Murder and Slaughter, maiming and wounding with mortal Weapons, any of the Subjects of such Realms, and the ordering, commanding, and causing any Band, or Number of Men, armed with Firelocks, and other mortal Weapons, to fall upon, wound, murder, and destroy Numbers of His Majesty’s Subjects, innocently and lawfully assembled, by firing sharp shot amongst them, whereby Multitudes are, or may be endangered, and many Men, Women, and innocent Children are, or may be killed or wounded, without just Cause or Occasion, and without lawful Warrant, more especially when committed in the public Streets of a City, by a Person lawfully commissioned by the Magistrates thereof to command such Band of armed Men, for the Preservation of Peace and Order, and for the Defence of the Inhabitants, and others resorting thereto, are Crimes of a high Nature, and severely punishable:
— From the indictment: “Authentick Extracts of the Proceedings in the Trial of Capt. John Porteous;” 1737.
“YET TRUE IT IS, and of Verity, That he the said John Porteous had presumed to commit, and was guilt and accessory, of art and part of all and every, or one or other of the foresaid Crimes aggravated as aforesaid; IN SO FAR AS, upon the Fourteenth Day of Aprile last…when the deceas’t Andrew Wilson…was to be executed at the Grassmarket of the City of Edinburgh…in the ordinary Course of Rotation…being ordered to attend to the said execution, to preserve the Peace, and support the Executioner in the discharge of his duty, having under his command a Detachment of about Seventy Men…after the said Wilson had hung upon the Gallows, until he was dead, at least for a considerable time, he the said John Porteous, shaking off all Fear of God, and respect to His Majesty’s Laws, and conceiving a most wicked and malicious Purpose of destroying, wounding, and maiming Numbers of His Majesty’s Subjects, the Inhabitants of the said City of Edinburgh…without any just cause or necessary Occasion, ordered the Guard to fire on the people…and the Men, at least severall of them having fired over the Heads of the Multitude, so as to avoid doing them harm, he with Threats and Imprecations repeated his Commands to fire, calling out to them, to level their Pieces or be damn’d, or words to that Purpose: and…he leveled the Firelock that was in his own Hand, taking Aim at Charles Husband Servant to Paul Husband, Confectioner in the Abbay of Holyrood-house, and most wickedly and murderously fired at him, whereupon he immediately droped to the Ground, having received a Wound by a Bullet or large Drop of Lead on the left Side of his Head, which pierced into his Brain…[here commences a list of the slaughtered[]…AND HE WAS GUILTY, art and part of the Slaughter, Murder, and wounding of all…ALL WHICH, or any Part thereof being found proven by the Verdict of an Assize…he ought to be most exemplarily punished with the Pains of Law, to the Terror of others to commit the like in time coming.”
— From the indictment: “Authentick Extracts of the Proceedings in the Trial of Capt. John Porteous;” 1737.
“The leaders were disguised in various ways, some of them in female attire; but Charles Kilpatrick Sharpe…rejected with scorn the idea that it was an ordinary Edinburgh mob: “From many old persons I have heard that people of high rank were among those who took part in the affair…Lord Haddington for one, in his cook-maid’s dress. My great-grandfather, Sir Thomas Kilpatrick, had a hand in it, as other people of quality unquestionably had.” Mr. Sharpe also maintained the truth of the familiar tradition that a guinea was left in the booth of the West Bow [the old Butter Tron] from whence the rioters procured the halter; and ridiculed the idea that an ordinary Edinburgh mob could have found among the entire rabble a guinea to spare. [A guinea was one pound plus one shilling — nearly a year’s rent.] “More like a pund Scots, or twal’ pennies sterling!”‘
Sir Daniel Wilson, Memorials of Edinburgh
“”The mob, thus reinforced [with cash] armed themselves with their weapons, and then forcing the door of the Tolbooth by setting it on fire, they dragged from thence the object of their vengeance, and led him to the scene of his crime, the ordinary place of execution in the Grassmarket. It was intended at first to have erected the gallows and executed him there with greater formality; but the ringleaders found this…too serious a loss of time, and Porteous was hastily suspended from a dyer’s pole, over the entrance to Hunter’s Close, in the south-east corner of the Grassmarket. As soon as their purpose was effected, the rioters threw away their weapons and quietly dispersed…”
— Sir Daniel Wilson
The talk of money has to do with controversies over Lords paying lowlives to do their dirty work, bribing the guards, etc., but a big question among Scots seems to have been the moral question: was the rope [the halter] used to hang Porteous looted from the Grassmarket, or was it properly paid for by the Mob? All indications are there was no looting during the riot, and the actual act of walking into the twiners, buying the rope, and stringing Porteous up, was as orderly and polite as you could imagine. This suggests full complicity among all classes of Edinburgh society for Porteous’s lynching. (The controversial patriotic rope and twine business in the Grassmarket remained in the family for another 250 years, and only in the last few years, was reported in the Scotsman as closed up.)
So how did the Queen Regent respond?
“Queen Caroline was highly exasperated on learning of this act of contempt for her exercise of the royal prerogative. The Lord Provost (mayor) was imprisoned, and not admitted to bail for three weeks. A Bill was brought through Parliament, and carried through the House of Lords, for incapacitating him from ever holding any magisterial office in Great Britain, and for confining him in prison for a full year. This bill also enacted the demolition of the Nether Bow Port, and the disbanding of the city guard. The Scottish members, however, exerted themselves effectually in opposing this unjust measure when it was sent down to the House of Commons…the whole was commuted to a fine of 2,000 pounds imposed on the city, for behalf of the captain’s widow [who finally settled for 1,500 pounds.] From this period until the eventful year of 1745 nothing remarkable occurs in the history of Edinburgh.”
The Valley Village View 