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HERTFORD arrived in the
Forth on his errand of destruction on the afternoon of Saturday, May 4,
1544. The Regent Arran (son to him who led James IV.’s navy to France)
and Cardinal Beaton had got wind of the expedition a few days before, but
too late to muster forces for effective resistance, and they made little
or no use of those they had. They, however, warned all the inhabitants of
the towns on the south shore of the Forth to fortify their towns with
trenches to resist "the Englishe mennis navye," which those of
Leith did. The people of Edinburgh and Leith gathered at every point of
vantage to gaze on the great fleet of two hundred ships as they sailed up
the Firth and came to anchor above Inchkeith.
Next morning the English
army disembarked on the shore under the shadow of Wardie Tower, which had
been built in the year 1500 by the Laird of Inverleith to defend his lands
against the English; but on this occasion, like the Scottish leaders,
Wardie Tower did nothing to oppose the enemy’s landing. The English then
marched in three divisions to the Water of Leith, near Bonnington Mill,
where their passage was disputed by some Scottish troops under Arran and
Beaton. The Scots made but a feeble resistance, however, and were easily
repulsed. Crossing the stream, the English then turned their steps towards
Leith, whose early capture was necessary that they might bring their ships
into its harbour for the landing of guns and stores. They were already
bringing their larger ships into Newhaven.
John Knox, who was much
given to the use of exaggerated language, gives a graphic picture of the
English entry into Leith that suggests a sudden surprise and flight.
According to Knox the English marched into the town, where they found
"the tables covered, the dennarts prepared," and such abundance
of wine and victuals as one could not find in any other town of the same
size either in Scotland or England. Now it is hardly likely that the
Leithers would prepare their Sunday dinners with the English marching
towards their gates. In reality, save the defenders, all the inhabitants
had fled from the town before the English arrived. But these same
defenders did not allow the enemy the easy walk-over Knox would lead us to
suppose. "We captured then by force," reports Hertford to his
much gratified master, "the entry to the town of Leith, which was
stoutly defended."
The crowd of fugitives, the
stronger helping the more feeble and the sick, would make their way as
best they could to the wilderness of swamp and morass that, for the
greater part of the way, then extended between Duddingston and Gogar,
where none could find them save those who knew the straggling and perilous
paths by which their retreats alone could be reached. English invasion had
made the folk of Leith familiar with these treacherous wastes, where they
could remain in comparative safety until the enemy had taken their
departure. From the large amount of plunder the English carried away from
the town it is evident the Leithers
had fled in haste, and had had no time to take with them more than some
oatmeal, perhaps, and a few cooking utensils.
The English found two
goodly ships in the harbour —the Salamander, given to James V. by
the French king on his marriage with the ill-fated Madeleine, and the Unicorn,
which had been built in Leith or Newhaven. Whether the English found
in the town all the sumptuous fare Knox pictures for us Hertford does not
say, but that they captured a wealth of booty they had never anticipated
is certain. "The town was found fuller of riches than we expected any
Scottish town to have been," reported the English admiral. In fact,
the enemy captured booty in Leith to the value of £100,000 of our money—an
amount of wealth that seems to contradict much of what we are generally
told of Scotland’s poverty in those troublous times.
During the whole week they
were encamped in Leith the English gave themselves up to the work of
destruction. Edinburgh was given over to the torch. For three days and
nights it blazed, and, being a city set on a hill, its burning was an
awesome sight to behold. Holyrood, too, went up in flames; and with it was
destroyed Restalrig and its tower above the loch, Pilrig, Newhaven, and
the tower of the Laird of Inverleith on Wardie brow. Not a village in the
neighbourhood, not a farm steading, not even a cottage was left unscathed.
Meanwhile the English fleet had not been idle, for not a harbour, not a
ship, not even a boat was left undestroyed on either side of the Firth
from Stirling to the ocean.
The invaders now prepared
to evacuate Leith, but before doing so they indulged in the same wanton
destruction that had characterized their whole invasion.
They broke down the pier of
Leith and burnt every stick of it. They took away the two goodly ships,
the Salamander and the Unicorn, ballasting them with cannon
shot from the King’s Wark. They then sent away their ships not merely
laden but, to use their own expression, cumbered with booty, and resolved
to return homewards themselves by land. The night before their departure
from Leith they held a grand carnival of destruction by burning every
house in the town. Next morning they set off across the Links on their
homeward march, passing Restalrig, now a blackened ruin, and then marched
away eastwards by the Fishwives’ Causeway, leaving a line of smoking
towns, villages, and farms to mark their route.
Such were some of the
things Leith saw and suffered in those old unhappy days. We can only
partly realize the grief and terror of the townsfolk as they sought refuge
from the cruelties and outrages of Hertford’s savage soldiery amid the
wastes and recesses around Arthur’s Seat and the country farther west.
Their suffering and misery are to a certain extent suggested to us in that
dispatch of Hertford’s detailing his fell work, which proved such
pleasant reading to Henry VIII. In this document Hertford tells us how,
standing with his officers upon the Calton Hill to view the burning city,
he heard the women and children in the valley beyond, as they witnessed
the destruction of their homes, bewailing their woeful state. On the
departure of the invader those from Leith stole back again to the ruined
town. Until their houses were repaired they found shelter in St. Mary’s
Church, which, strangely enough, had escaped the flames.
The Leith sailormen knew
all along of the mighty fleet Hertford was assembling in the Tyne and,
guessing its purpose, had discreetly kept themselves and their ships out
of harm’s way. They now returned, however, and determined that England
should pay towards repairing the great loss the Port had sustained at her
hands. Hertford’s fleet had now sailed to the Channel, where it was
sorely needed for service against France, and was not likely to return
until peace was made. Led by John Barton with the Mary Willoughby, the
Lion, and other ships, the Leith mariners hung along the English
coast for the next four or five months and worked their will upon the
English, Dutch, and Flemish shipping—for the latter countries, under the
rule of Mary of Hungary, were for the time being Henry’s allies against
France. The Leith seamen during the war were thus shut out from trading
with the Netherlands, and were now voyaging to Hamburg and other Hansard
ports instead. "It would be an easy thing to lighten them by the way,
either going or coming," wrote one of Henry’s numerous spies; but
the English king had his hands full in France, and so the Leithers, for
the time at least, had command of the North Sea.
Newcastle was sorely
stricken with plague, and could send neither ship, boat, nor mariner to
oppose the Leithers. Hull, Yarmouth, and other east coast ports sent
urgent appeals to Henry. "If we might have help here," they
lamented, "the Scots should not long keep the seas. No man that sails
by the coast can escape them, for they cannot be meddled with." Their
only consolation was a message to help themselves as the Channel ports
did. But their desire for revenge made those east coast towns importunate,
and so another appeal was made to their sovereign lord. "They are
desperate merchants of Leith and Edinburgh, who, having lost almost their
whole substance at the army’s late being
in Scotland, seek adventures to recover something. They have taken many
Hollanders, and with such as they take of ours wax wealthy again. Six of
your Majesty’s ships are a match for sixteen of them. Sorry are we that
they route after this sort upon the seas." But his Majesty told his
loving subjects that if the Scots could be so easily beaten that was all
the more reason why they should attempt it themselves. And so the
"desperate Leith and Edinburgh merchants" continued to
"route" upon the English seas because no mariner of the
"auld enemy" dared say them nay.
Henry VIII. died early in
1547; but his death brought no change in the English policy towards
Scotland, except for the worse, if that were possible, for Hertford, now
Duke of Somerset, in his endeavours to compel the Scots to marry their
little Queen Mary to Edward VI., surpassed even Henry VIII. in merciless
and savage cruelty, as Leith was soon to know. He invaded Scotland once
more, this time by land. The bale-fires blazed forth the news of his
having crossed the Border. At Pinkie, near Musselburgh, he inflicted on
the Scots army under Arran such an overwhelming defeat that for long years
after the name of Black Saturday, given to the anniversary of the fight,
reminded Scotland of one of the most disastrous days in her annals.
The craftsmen and merchant
burgesses of Edinburgh, "the sons of heroes slain at Flodden,"
had again nobly come forward in defence of queen and country, and nearly
four hundred widows were left to mourn their husbands sent to their long
last home at Pinkie Cleuch. There, too, fell Robert Monypenny, the Laird
of Pilrig; but who else from Leith, save the Laird of Restairig, took part
with Monypenny in this most disastrous fight we cannot tell. Luckily for
the Leith sailormen, they had set out on the autumn voyaging before the
invasion took place, for Somerset was accompanied by a fleet of transports
and war vessels that came to anchor off the mouth of the harbour.
The day after the battle
the English marched straight along the shore to Leith, "the which we
found all desolate, for not a soul did we find in the town." The
Leithers, like the other inhabitants of the district, had been ordered to
betake themselves and their gear within the shelter of the walls of
Edinburgh. If the English had anticipated again enriching themselves with
stores of loot from Leith they were to be hugely disappointed. Except some
thirteen odd vessels, most of which were old and ruinous, there was little
else to be found, "for as much of other things as could well be
carried the inhabitants overnight had carried off with them," writes
one who accompanied the expedition. What a strange procession they must
have formed—the men, women, and children of Leith—as they toiled
towards Edinburgh, bent and perspiring under their load of household gear.
"My Lord Somerset and most of our horsemen were lodged in the
town," while the rest of the army, in full view of their fleet riding
at anchor in the Roads, lay encamped on the Links and on the stubble
fields stretching away towards Lochend and Holyrood.
The English lay around
Leith for a week. They struck their camp on the following Saturday, but
Somerset, "mynding before with recompence sumwhat to reward one
Barton, that had plaid an untrue part, commanded that overnight his house
should be set afyr." This was John Barton, whom we have already seen
achieving so much fame with his ships, the Lion and the Mary
Willoughby. His "untrue part" was that he bad been devotedly
loyal in serving his country, as all the Leith sailormen were in those
days, when the shiftiness and double-dealing of the nobles who favoured
the English cause had made the name of Scot a byword in England.
We do not know where John
Barton’s house was situated in Leith. As he was now the chief member of
his family residing in the town, he had in all likelihood heired that of
his grandfather, who had built his house in the Sheriff Brae, close by the
residence of his old friend and fellow mariner, John Lawson of Lawson’s
Wynd, which was almost opposite the Old Brigend. In setting the torch to
Barton’s house the English soldiers, in their mischievous zeal, fired
all the town besides. "Six great ships lying in the haven
there," says the chronicler who accompanied the army, "that for
age and decay were not so apt for use, were then also set on fire, which
all the night with great flame did burn very solemnly." Leaving the
ships and the town in flames behind them, the English left Leith early
next morning. The Castle gave them a few parting shots as they crossed the
Links towards Lochend and Restalrig on their way to the Border. The
English fleet continued in the Roads for some time longer, to complete
their work of destroying the harbours and shipping along the coast. Then,
leaving garrisons behind them on Inchkeith and Inchcolm, the English ships
sailed away to the south.
Hertford gained nothing by
the slaughter of Pinkie and outrages like the burnings of Leith, for the
little Queen Mary was sent to France, where she eventually married the
Dauphin, who became king as Francis II. Leith suffered as she did because
Scotland was divided into factions, and thus no effective resistance could
be made against the enemy. There were two great parties— the party
favourable to France, which included the great mass of the people, and
held strongly to the Catholic Church; and the party desirous of closer
relations with England, and which, as England was now a Protestant
country, became more and more identified with the doctrines of the
Reformation.
But as yet those who
favoured Protestantism in Scotland ran great risk of persecution and even
death. Leith was not only destined to be the scene of the final triumph of
the Reformers over their opponents, but was also to aid largely in
spreading the new doctrines that were to overthrow the ancient Church. The
converts to the new teaching were at first known in Scotland as Lutherans.
Leith sailormen and Edinburgh merchants sailing to the Baltic ports, and
especially to Danzig, an early centre of the Lutheran Church, were among
the first to become familiar with its teaching. It was chiefly through the
traders of Leith and St. Andrews that Luther’s books and copies of
Tyndale’s New Testament, carefully concealed in bales of merchandise,
were imported into Scotland in spite of all the prohibitions against them.
In this way Leith and Edinburgh made early acquaintance with Protestant
doctrines.
The spread of the new
teaching among the seafaring folk of Leith is shown in 1534, the year when
David Straitoun and Norman Gourlay were executed as heretics at the Cross
of Greenside, opposite Picardy Place. In that year Adam Deas, shipwright
in North Leith, and Henry Cairns, a skipper, are cited to appear before
the Archbishop of St. Andrews. What became of Deas does not appear, but
Henry Cairns prudently went off to sea, and was denounced as fugitive and
heretic with blast of trumpet on the Shore, the chief place of public
resort both for townsmen and foreign traders, who would carry the news
overseas.
The most noted sufferer for
the Protestant faith having association with Leith at this time was the
celebrated George Wishart, the most powerful and eloquent preacher of his
day. On a Sunday in the middle of December 1545 he preached in Leith on
the Parable of the Sower. No memory of Wishart’s friends, or of their
place of abode, has survived in Leith, but this gathering of sympathizers,
so desirous to hear him discourse to them, and their assurance that
nothing was to be feared from the inhabitants, suggest that the new
religion had numerous supporters in the town.
Every year, as June and
July came round, companies of pilgrims had for long centuries been
accustomed to embark at the Shore to voyage by way of Bruges to the shrine
of that most popular of saints in Western Europe, St. James of Compostella,
in Spain, and to return in September with their clam shells in token of
their pilgrimage. Of these pilgrimages there is still a memorial over the
doorway numbered 150 High Street, Edinburgh, marking where once stood the
Clam Shell Turnpike. But now men like Patrick Hamilton, the first Scottish
martyr, whose father had been Provost of Edinburgh in 1515, began to
voyage to Danzig and other Baltic ports to see and hear Martin Luther at
Wittenberg.
The Old Brigend was left in
ruins by Hertford’s troops after their victory at Pinkie. With that
woeful battle may be associated the weird story of Bessie Dunlop, who met
the ghost of Tom Reid, slain in Pinkie fight, by the waters of Lochend.
Tom’s ghost conferred upon Bessie the magic power which brought her to
the stake as a witch in 1576. During Bessie’s uncanny interview a great
cavalcade of the fairies swept past, with loud jingle of bridle bells.
They seemed to ride into the loch and so disappear.
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