THE history of Edinburgh is for long
the history of its Castle. During another period it is the history of
Scotland, so much are all the events concentrated here. The incidents are
usually connected with some famous spot, thus Holyrood, St Giles’s, the
Parliament House, Old Greyfriars have each an impressive story which will
be set forth in due course.
It will be serviceable to connect
our beads by a string, and without attempting to write the history of
Scotland, to say a few words on the history of Edinburgh.
The ground which it now covers is
profoundly interesting to the geologist, and many authorities have
described how it came to have that peculiar conformation.
To a plain man it is something like
this :—On the north, some two miles away, is the Fifth of Forth; the
ground is fairly level when you turn your back on that arm of the sea and
walk southward towards the city, then it swells upward till you reach
George Street in the New Town. Now you begin another descent, and
presently come to Princes Street. This was the first of the New Town
building scheme. In the valley below, where is now garden and railway,
there once lay the Nor’ Loch. Before you rises the Old Town on the other
side of the Loch, and that is simply the Castle Hill on the west sloping
down towards Holyrood on the east. Two other hills must be noted. Blocking
up the east end of Princes Street is the Calton Hill, and away to the
south and east of Holyrood is Arthur’s Seat. To the south of the Old Town
the ground falls rapidly down to the Cowgate, and then there is a short
rise until you come to the College, beyond which all is fairly level for
some two or three miles, where you have the Braid Hills to the south, then
to the south-west is the huge mass of the Pentlands.
A city of hills in truth is this same Edinburgh!
Not merely is she built on the
heights, but other heights, as Arthur’s Seat and the Calton Hill, are
close at hand, tower right over the streets. And in the further distance
the Braids and the Pentlands affect you in a remoter and different way.
All these you see from many points, but you must go to places like the
Castle Rock to catch the finer influences of hill scenery, to see not
merely the Lomonds of Fife, but beyond Fife itself the great rampart of
the Highland hills, concealing within their depths more mystery to the old
inhabitants than Africa or the Poles do for you to-day.
Mine own romantic town,
so Scott in one nappy phrase described Edinburgh. The
site is picturesque, the history exciting and adventurous, but happy is
the nation that has no history. Edinburgh has bought its glory at a
terrible price: she has many a story of heroism and bravery, but there is
always the confused noise of battle and garments rolled in blood. The
stones have been washed again and again with tears.
It was not an easy life those old
Edinburgh folk lived, their career was short and touched with ill-fortune;
it was tragic, interesting, pathetic, before all emphatic; they lived much
if not long, and their heroic, extravagant souls had not changed their
crowded hour of glorious strife for the dull commonplace tedium of to-day.
It strikes you rather oddly how the
name of the city and its great hill smacks of English earth. Edwin and
Arthur are of the south. The early annals are misty and uncertain. Stow
places its origin at 989 B.C., but that is a part of the mediæval romance
which links the history of Britain with the history of Troy. You jump over
a thousand years and find the Castle emerging as (possibly) taken from the
Picts in 452 A.D., and then with Edwin, King of Northumbria (585-633), you
reach something like firm ground.
The Castle Rock made an almost
unparalleled natural fortress. To-day, as then, you gain access to it by a
narrow ledge. Draw a barrier across that, and up to our own time you were
safe from everything but trick or famine, and in fact it was only thus it
fell.
It seems that Edwin, having got as
far north, fortified the place, and extended into the beginning of a town
the huts that must always have gathered outside the Castle. Thus from him
it derived its name, unless in this, as in some other cases, an old Celtic
root has been twisted into an English form. Other terms have been claimed
for it. It was Mynyd Agned in the "Language of the ancient Britons," the
Hill of Agned, whoever this was. Some have explained it as the Christian
St Agnes, and again these same curious words have been translated
Castrum Puellarum or Maiden Castle, because the Pictish Kings here
stored away as in a place of safety the Princesses of the blood royal. The
legend is not improbable, and it is worth noting that some excavations in
1853 on the summit of the Castle Rock discovered a huge quantity of human
bones, all of which were the bones of women. But Buchanan, who was as
sceptical in one way as he was credulous in another will have this "Maiden
Castle" an invention of romance, and to the same untrustworthy origin he
traces the term Dolorous Valley, which at least has a highly romantic
sound. In our own day affectation describes it as the Modem Athens, but
its quaint and familiar title of Auld Reekie is that wherein those who
love it delight most. It smokes like a tall chimney. Far off, in Fife or
the Lothians, you note its murky crown, or rather flag, for according to
the airt of the wind it sends out a long line in one particular direction.
Not that its reek was worse than that of other big towns, but it was more
obvious, and perhaps in the old days of peat and wood fires it even
brought an agreeable odour to distant fields.
Thus the balance of evidence is in
favour of Edwin as name giver, and Dunedin is, you observe, a Celtic
version of the same thing. As for Arthur’s Seat, here conjecture is again
let loose. The Dictionary of National Biography is by no means sure
that Arthur ever existed, and with considerable hesitation it gives a
shadowy biography.
Then, was he a King of Cornwall or
Lowland Scotland? If he were the latter, and you take Mynyd as a name for
Edinburgh you can place one of his battles hereabouts. And so you account
for Arthur’s Seat.
As you slip down the centuries the
light grows more and more, though it does not reach Edinburgh as the
city of Scotland even after the Picts and Scots were united, nay, even
after the boundaries of the kingdom were delimited as they practically
exist to-day. Your early Scots monarch was of a peripatetic turn of mind;
he skipped hither and thither with wondrous agility,— Dunfermline,
Stirling, Perth, Scone came as natural to him as Edinburgh. Nay, William
the Lion showed a remarkable and what might seem—for we have not the key
of the mystery — an inexplicable fondness for Haddington, where he spent
all the time he could. It was not till David I. (1084-1158) founded the
Abbey of Holyrood, and Alexander II. (1214-1249) endowed the
growing town with the Blackfriars Monastery, of which Blackfriars Street
between the High Street and the Cowgate still preserves the memory, and
the church of St Mary in the Field, afterwards to acquire such an evil
repute as Kirk o’ Field, that things began to turn decidedly in favour of
Edinburgh as the Scots capital - nor does it bulk large in the War of
Independence. In 1291 Edward I. took it after a siege of fifteen days, but
in 1312 it fell, like many other fortresses, again into the possession of
the Scots.
In the previous century the Treaty of Falaise (1174),
by which William the Lion, to save his own skin, confessed the English
King as overlord, surrendered it to England, but it was peacefully
recovered twelve years later.
By the time of the James’s, which began in 1406, it was
fairly acknowledged as the Scots capital. Up to then English annalists had
sneered at it as a village, and Froissart tells us it had only four
hundred houses. James I. seems linked with Perth, because there he met his
tragic end, but his chief murderers were executed, with hideous tortures,
in Edinburgh, and there the boy prince was crowned as James II. In his
reign Edinburgh was enclosed by a wall
(temp. 1456) that took in little more than the High Street, as
starting from the Castle Rock it ran east between that and the Cowgate,
turned north by the Netherbow and ended at the Nor’ Loch, its length was
but a mile or so. The Wellhouse Tower in Princes Street Gardens, right
under the Castle, is the only substantial remaining part.
James III. (1460-1483) was peculiarly the patron of
Edinburgh. He granted its "Golden Charter," making the Provost and
Bailies, Sheriffs in their own territories, giving them jurisdiction over
Leith, a jurisdiction not shaken off till the middle of last century. And
the Queen and the ladies of her court knitted with their own fair hands a
gorgeous flag for special Edinburgh use. This was the famous Blue Blanket,
for centuries the burgher standard.
The reign of James IV. has one impressive memory for
Edinburgh, for in 1513 the King, and for some time it was thought the
Kingdom, fell at Flodden. Even yet the memory of that memorable field—a
calamity it has been said, rather than a disgrace—stirs within you as you
move through the town. At the Cross the ghostly herald appeared at
midnight and announced well-nigh every famous name in Scotland to appear
before his Master within forty days, and all those named fell at Flodden
save a certain Mr Robert Lawson who, ill and sleepless, paced uneasily the
wooden gallery of his house near by, at the dread hour. How his hair stood
on end when the ghostly voice rang through the silent street! How terrible
to hear his own name among those proclaimed; yet lost he not his presence
of mind. Hastily procuring a coin, he dashed it on the pavement, and
appealed to his Maker against the powers of darkness and destruction. A
strange legend truly, with its exact observance of Scots legal forms mixed
with classic imagery and mediæval superstition! A summons and proclamation
at the Cross was a sight and sound of all others the most familiar to an
Edinburgh citizen, and the tabling of a coin as a sign of protest and
appeal is still in use in grave Scots’ assemblies.
In the Flodden Wall Edinburgh has one material sign of
this terrible year. The rulers rose to the occasion; vain lamentation was
sternly put down, the women went to quiet prayers and the men to the sword
and the trowel, and in desperate haste—a haste of which it is said you can
still see traces in the wall itself—a huge buttress, so to speak, was run
round the whole city. It began at the Castle Rock, went south to the west
end of the Grassmarket and up the Vennel to where is now George Heriot’s
Hospital—indeed the west wall of the Hospital grounds contains the chief
existing part of that great wall. It then ran east to the College, thence
north by the Pleasance and like the old wall, which no doubt it used when
available, entered the High Street at the Netherbow, and making a loop to
include Trinity College, ended at the Nor’ Loch. And for centuries it
determined the peculiar conditions of Edinburgh life.
In those times of stress and turmoil, when an English
invasion was a possibility or a probability for many a long day, and when
all sorts of forces from the unknown might suddenly rise up against the
hard-working burgher, it made all the difference in the world on which
side of the wall he lived. Until that wall was finished no citizen on the
height scanned the horizon without dread and terror. And afterwards he
gazed on the fair prospect of hill and dale and sea with anything but
longing, nay, rather you fancy he hugged himself in his cosy though
malodorous den, in the recesses of some dark close, for was he not safe
within the circuit of the Flodden Wall? Yet the town needs must grow in
wealth and folk, and as it could not widen it lengthened, hence those tall
lands, where storey rose on storey in endless succession; those narrow
passes between them, known as closes, that careful economy of space
everywhere, so that the centre of the very High Street was seized upon for
houses and shops in the Luckenbooths and parliament chamber and law
courts, and afterwards prison in the Tolbooth. It has been well said that
every Edinburgh land was a street, not flat but perpendicular! Flodden was
not a subject that poets were like to leave alone. In its own time we have
Sir David Lyndsay and the balladists of whatever era; and a later age,
almost our own in fact, gave us Scott’s Marmion and Aytoun’s
Edinburgh after Flodden—to name but these.
Of James V.’s reign nothing need here be said. He died
in 1542, and immediately began around his infant daughter, the new Queen
Mary, those intrigues and movements of war and politics that were to hang
about her whole life. First was the rough wooing by which Henry VIII.
tried to win her for his son Edward. In 1544 Hertford came north. Spite of
the wall he took and destroyed Edinburgh, and that so thoroughly, that it
is said that nothing private of that day remains. Three years afterwards
he was here again, won the Battle of Pinkie on Black Saturday, 10th
September 1547, and for spoil loaded himself with the leaden roof of
Holyrood, the only available thing it would appear left for booty. Then
follow the troubles of the Reformation time. Mary of Guise made a brave
fight for the old faith. As Regent for her infant daughter she proved
herself a woman of uncommon ability; she lived much in Edinburgh—indeed
her splendid palace on the Castle Hill lasted until it was made the site
of the Free Kirk College. The new forces were too much for her, however,
and when she died in
enduring than the others, for it was then that men like
David Hume and Adam Smith did work that was to last for all time; and if
Principal Robertson as an historian has now lost his vogue it was at least
great enough in his own day. It was then also that the town refused to be
chained any longer within the Flodden Wall; it crept a little way to the
south, and to-day George Square is the most expressive mark of that
extension. But in 1767 the New town, to the north of the ravine, was
planned, and its first house was built in
1769, and in time
Princes Street succeeded to the whins and pasture and rock of the Lang
Dykes.
The next century showed that a new
era of literary splendour was still reserved for Edinburgh. In 1802 the
Edinburgh Review was founded, and in 1817 Blackwoods Magazine,
still controlled and managed at any-rate from the north and so more
faithful to its traditions than the Review or even the
Encylopadia Britannica, since both once smacking so strongly of
Edinburgh, are now altogether London. Then in 1843 came the Disruption,
which rent, not for the first tithe, the national church in twain, and
produced the Free, now with additions, the United Free Church. It was a
genuinely Scots movement produced by a condition of things impossible to
recur. It was impressive and noble. It was really the end of an auld
sang, to use a phrase of the Union time. Edinburgh has not since been
the theatre of an historic event. It is less and less likely that she will
be so, and thus the great interest of this unique and remarkable town lies
in its past. You must know what those stones mean as you
tread them.
This is the narrow theatre on which
so many great and memorable tragedies were played. Everything happened in
the Castle or Holyrood or in the short historic mile between the two
faithful friend and devoted foe jostled each other daily in that crowded
street. From near the very confines they could have shouted to restless
wind, that o’ winter nights wails and moans and sobs round the tall lands
of old Edinburgh as if it tried to utter the secrets of past years. Spite
its grime and: squalor, you accept the Old Town as the finest bit of
Edinburgh. It is not now quite so squalid as it was some
thirty years ago;
changes in the manners of the people, stricter sanitary laws, a return of
better class business to it, have all worked in this direction.
As regards the New Town, a stranger
once remarked to me that it seemed built of rather small houses. We stood
beside the Bank of Scotland in Bank Street, and were preparing to descend
the Mound. When it was built, Scotland was richer than it had been, and
not at all so rich as it is now. Standards of living rise, and houses are
the most sensitive to the change, and the change in Edinburgh seems to go
ever faster. Middle-aged men remember when the town terminated at
Newington and Morningside on the south. There was still a piece of country
between it and Leith, and it scarcely stretched beyond Abbeyhill on the
east and the Haymarket to the west of Princes Street. There are miles of
new streets now in all directions, the Braid Hills are terraced, the
Pentlands are threatened. Leith is one with the capital, the two miles
between Edinburgh and the sea are rapidly filling in, and the building and
growing keeps steadily on and on. And the old changes: poverty and
inaction, are the only things that keep a nation or a town as it is. You
have that in Spain and in remoter parts of Italy; you have an almost
perfect example in Bruges, but how to find it in the capital of bustling,
eager, active Scotland? Here is no longer a political capital, here is the
wealthy city. The town seems to dislimn and change before your very eyes.
You scarce know what will be left. The great historic monuments, the
Castle, Holyrood, St Giles, and so forth are safe, but what shall we say
of the old historic lands and closes? You sometimes get a glimpse sideways
as it were of an old close, or yard, or street-corner that brings before
you the Edinburgh of other days, but how long even that will be I know
not. Also the New Town has suffered change. Princes Street is not as it
was first built; an edifice like the North British Hotel foreshadows a
more mammoth style of architecture. Here the changes, notably on the
slopes of the Calton and in the ravine, have been improvements, nor do
they disturb august associations as every stroke of the pick does in the
Old Town: there so memorable is the history that the bare theatre, though
stripped of all its furnishings, would still command our attention; yes,
restore those hills to their first desolation, mighty ghosts would abide
amid the solitude, the history of the ruin would ever hold our attention.
