The magistrates fled for shelter to a house in
the Grassmarket, and the mob carried all before
it. Captain Porteous, the commander of the Guard,
was an active officer, who had seen some service
with the Scots Brigade in Holland; but he was a
harsh, proud man, of profligate character, who, it
has been alleged, rendered himself odious to the
people by the seventy with which he punished the
excesses of the poor, compared with his leniency to
the wealthy. His fierce pride was roused to boiling
heat. He had resented the escape of Robertson
as an imputation upon the City Guard ; and also
resented, as an insult, the presence of the Welsh
Fusiliers in the city, where no drums were permitted
to be beaten save his own and those of
the 25th or Edinburgh Regiment, and he was
therefore well inclined tb vent his wrath on Wilson,
as the cause of all these affronts. It would seem that
on the morning of the execution, he appeared, by
those who saw him, to be possessed by an evil spirit.
It is alleged that he treated Wilson with brutal
severity before leaving the prison ; and when the
riot began, after the execution, and the City Guard
was slowly returning up the steep West Bow, anti
facing about from time to time under showers of
missiles, which broke some bones and dashed the
drums to pieces, it is said that he not only ordered
his soldiers to I? level their pieces and be d-d !?
but snatched a musket from one and shot a ringleader
dead (Charles Husband, the man who cut
down Wilson) ; then a ragged volley followed, and
six or seven more fell killed or wounded.
An Edinburgh crowd never has been easily intimidated
; the blood of the people was fairly up
now, and they closed in upon the soldiers with
louder imprecations and heavier volleys of stones.
A second time the Guard faced about and fired,
filling the steep narrow street with smoke, and
producing the most fatal results; and as all who
were killed or wounded belonged to the better
class of citizens-some of whom were viewing the
tumult from their own windows-public indignation
became irrepressible. Captain John Porteous
was therefore brought to trial for murder, and
sentenced to die in the usual manner on the 8th of
September, 1736. His defence was that his men
fired without orders; that his own fusil when shown
to the magistrates was clean ; and that the fact of
their issuing ball ammunition amounted ?? to no less
than an order to fire when it became necessary.?
GeorgeII. was then on the Continent, and Queen
Caroline, who acted as regent of a country of which
she knew not even the language, took a more favourable
view of the affair of Porteous than the Edinburgh
mob had done, and from the Home Office
a six weeks? reprieve, preparatory to granting a full
pardon, was sent down. ?The tidings that a reprieve
had been obtained by Porteous created
great indignation among the citizens of the capital ;
they regarded the royal intervention in his behalf
as a proof that the unjust English Government were
disposed to treat the slaughter of Scotsmen by a
military officer as a very venial offence, and a resolution
was formed that Porteous should not escape
the punishment which his crime deserved.?
On the night of the 7th September, according te
a carefully-arranged plan, a small party of citizens,
apparently of the lower class, preceded by a drum,
appeared in the suburb called Portsburgh. At the
sound of the drum the fast-swelling mob assembled
from all quarters ; the West Port was seized, nailed,
and bamczded. Marching rapidly along the Cowgate,
with numbers increasing at every step, and all
more or less well-armed, they poured into the
High Street, and seized the Nether Bow Port, to
cut off all communication with the Welsh Fusiliers,
then quartered in the Canongate. While a strong
band held this important post, the City Guardsmen
were seized and disarmed in detail ; their armoury
was captured, and all their muskets, bayonets, halberts,
and Lochaber axes, distributed to the crowd,
which with cheers of triumph now assailed the Tolbooth,
while strong bands held the street to the
eastward and westward, to frighten all who might
come either from the Castle or Canongate. Thus
no one would dare convey a written order to the
officers commanding in these quarters from the
magistrates, and Colonel Moyle, of the 23rd, very
properly declined to move upon the verbal message
of Mr. Lindsay, M.P. for the city.
Meanwhile the din of sledge-hammers, bars, and
axes, resounded on the ponderous outer gate of the
Tolbooth. Its vast strength defied al! efforts, till a
voice cried, IITry it with fire !? Tar-barrels and
other combustibles were brought ; the red flames
shot .upward, and the gate was gradually reduced to
cinders, and through these and smoke the mob
rushed in with shouts of triumph. The keys of the
cells were torn from the trembling warder. The
apartment in which Porteous was confined was
searched in vain, as it seemed at first, till the
unhappy creature was found? to have crept up the
chimney. This he had done at the risk of suffocation,
but his upward progress was stopped by an
iron grating, which is often placed across the vents
of such edifices for the sake of security, and tu
this he clung by his fingers, with a tenacity
bordering on despair, and the fear of a dreadful
death-a death in what form and at whose hands
he knew not. He was dragged down, and though
The TolbOoth.1 PORTEOUS EXECUTED. 131
some proposed to slay hini on the spot, was told
by others to prepare for that death .elsewhere
which justice had awarded him ; but amid all their
fury, the rioters conducted themselves generally with
grim and mature deliberation. Porteous was allowed
to entrust his money and papers with a person who
was in prison for debt, and one of the rioters kindly
and humanely offered him the last consolation religion
can afford. The dreadful procession, seen
by thousands of eyes fiom the crowded windows,
was then begun, and amid the gleam of links and
;torches, that tipped with fire the blades of hundreds
of weapons, the crowd poured down the
West Bow to the Grassmarket. So coolly and
deliberately did they proceed, that when one 01
Porteous? slippers dropped from his foot, as he was
borne sobbing and praying along, they halted, and
replaced it In the Bow the shop of a dealer in
cordage (over whose door there hung a grotesque
figure, still preserved) was broken open, a rope
taken therefrom, and a guinea left in its stead.
On reaching the place of execution, still marked
byan arrangement of the stones, they were at a loss
for a gibbet, till they discovered a dyer?s pole in it:
immediate vicinity. They tied tbe rope round the
neck of their victim, and slinging it over the cross
beam, swung him up, and speedily put an end tc
his sufferings and his life ; then the roar of voicez
that swept over the vast place and re-echoed up the
Castle rocks, announced that all was over ! BUI
ere this was achieved Porteous had been twice le1
down and strung up again, while many struck him
with their Lochaber axes, and tried to cut off hi:
ears.
Among those who witnessed this scene, and nevei
forgot it, was the learned Lord Monboddo, who had
that morning come for the first time to Edinburgh.
When about retiring to rest (according to ? Kafi
Portraits ?) his curiosity was excited by the noise and
tumult in the streets, and in place of going to bed:
he slipped to the door, half-dressed, with a nightcap
on his head. He speedily got entangled in
the crowd of passers-by, and was hurried along with
them to the Grassmarket, where he became an
involuntary witness of the last act of the tragedy.
This scene made so deep an impression on his
lordship, that it not only deprived him of sleep foi
the remainder of the night, but induced him to
think of leaving the city altogether, as a place unfit
for a civilised being to live in. His lordship
frequently related fhis incident in after life, and
on these occasions described with much force the
effect it had upon him.? Lord Monboddo died
in 1799.
As soon as the rioters had satiated their venzeance,
they tossed away their weapons, and quietly
dispersed; and when the morning of the 8th September
stole in nothing remained of the event but
the fire-blackened cinders of the Tolbooth door, the
muskets and Lochaber axes scattered in the streets,
and the dead body of Porteous swinging in the
breeze from the dyer?s pole. According to the
Caledonian Mercury of 9th September, 1736, the
body of Porteous was interred on the second day
in the Greyfriars. The Government was exasperated,
and resolved to inflict summary vengeance
on the city. Alexander Wilson, the Lord Provost,
was arrested, but admitted to bail after three weeks?
incarceration. A Bill was introduced into Parliament
materially affecting the city, but the clauses for
the further imprisonment of the innocent Provost,
abolishing the City Guard, and dismantling the
gates, were left out when amended by the Commons,
and in place of these a small fine of Az,ooo
in favour of Captain Porteous? widow was imposed
upon Edinburgh. Thus terminated this extraordinary
conspiracy, which to this day remains a
mystery. Large rewards were offered in vain for
the ringleaders, many of whom had been disguised
as females. One of them is said to have been
the Earl of Haddington, clad in his cook-maid?s
dress. The Act of Parliament enjoined the proclamation
for the discovery of the rioters should be
read from the parish pulpits on Sunday, but many
clergymen refused to do so, and there was no power
to compel them ; and the people remembered with
much bitterness that a certain Captain Lind, of the
Town Guard, who had given evidence in Edinburgh
tending to incriminate the magistrates, was rewarded
by a commission in Lord Tyrawley?s South British
Fusiliers, now 7th Foot.
The next prisoner in the Tolbooth who created
an intensity of interest in the minds of contemporaries
was Katharine Nairn, the young and
beautiful daughter of Sir Robert Nairn, Bart, a
lady allied by blood and marriage to many families
of the best position. Her crime was a double
one-that of poisoning her husband, Ogilvie of
Eastmilne, and of having an intrigue with his
youngest brother Patrick, a lieutenant of the Old
Gordon Highlanders, disbanded, as we elsewhere
stated, in 1765. The victim, to whom she had
been mamed in her nineteenth year, was a man
of property, but far advanced in life, and her
marriage appears to have been one of those unequal
matches by which the happiness of a girl is sacnficed
to worldly policy. On her arrival at? Leith in
an open boat in 1766, her whole bearing betrayed
so much levity, and was so different from what
was expected by a somewhat pitying crowd, that a
