secluded character of the place inust have been
destroyed. ?? Queen Mary granted the gardens of
-the Greyfriars? monastery to the citizens in the
year 1566, to be used as a cemetery, and from
that period the old burial-place seems to have
and are now said to be among the miscellaneous
collections at Holyrood. Begun in 1632, the hall
with its adjacent buildings took seven years to
erect; but subsequently the external portions of
the edifice were almost totally renewed. Howell,
the citizens forgot that their Exchange was built
over their fathers? graves.? Yet within six years
after Queen Mary?s gr.ant, Knox was interred in
the old burial-ground. ?Before the generation
had passed away that witnessed and joined in his
funeral service,? says the author of ? Memorials of
Edinburgh,? ?the churchyard in which they laid
him had been converted into a public thoroughfare !
We fear this want of veneration must be regarded
as a national Characteristic which Knox assisted
to call into existence, and to which we owe much
of the reckless demolition of those time-honoured
monuments of the past which it is sow thought a
weakness to deplore.?
As a churchyard in name it last figures in 1596
as the scene of a tumult in which John Earl of
Mar, John Bothwell, Lord Holyroodhouse, the
Lord Lindsay, and others, met in their armour,
and occasioned some trouble ere they could be
pacified. It was the scene of all manner of rows,
when club-law prevailed ; where exasperated litigants,
sick of ?the law?s delays,? ended the matter
by appeal to sword and dagger ; and craftsmen and
apprentices quarrelled with the bailies and deacons.
It has been traditionally said that many of the
tombstones were removed to the Greyfriars? churchyard;
if such was the case no inscriptions remain
built here lately,? and regretting that Charles I. did
not inaugurate it in person, he adds that ?they
did ill who advised him otherwise.? The time
had come when old Scottish raids were nearly past,
and when revolutions had their first impulse, not
in the battle-field, but in deliberative assemblies ;
thus the Parliament that transferred its meetings
from the old Tolbooth to the new House in 1639
had to vote ?? the sinews of war ? for an aymy
against England, under Sir Alexander Leslie, and
was no less unprecedented in its constitution and
powers than the place in which it assembled was a
new edifice. Outside of a wooden partition in the
hall was an oak pulpit, where a sermon was preached
at the opening of parliament; and behind was a
small gallery, where the public heard the debates
of the House.
To thousands who never saw or could have
seen it the external aspect of the old Parliament
House has been rendered familiar by Gordon?s
engravings, and more particularly by the view of it
on the bank notes of Sir William Forbes and Co.
Tradition names Inigo Jones as the architect, bit
of this there is not a vestige of proof. It was
highly picturesque, and possessed an individuality
that should have preserved it from the iconoclastic
?improvers? of 1829. ?There was a quaint
The Parliament Hall, which was finished in
1639, at the expense of the citizens, costing
A11,600 of the money of that time, occupies a
considerable portion of the old churchyard, and
possesses a kind of simple grandeur ? belonging
to an anterior age. Its noblest feature is the roof,
sixty feet in height, which rests on ornamental
brackets consisting of boldly sculptured heads,
and is formed of dark oak tie-and-hammer beams
with cross braces, producing a general effect suggestive
of the date of Westminster or of Crosby
Hall. Modern corridors that branch out from it
are in harmony with the old hall, and lead to the
various court rooms and the extensive libraries of
the Faculty of Advocates and the Society of
Writers to the Signet. The hall measures 122 feet
in length by 49 in breadth, and was hung of old
with tapestry and portraits of the kings of Scotland,
some by Sir Godfrey Kneller. These were bestowed,
in 1707, by Queen Anne, on the Earl of Mar,
?
we are told, ?and the rude elaborateness of its
decorations, that seemed to link it with the courtiers
I of Holyrood in the times of the Charleses, and its
last gala days under the Duke of York?s viceregency.
Nothing can possibly be conceived more
meaningless and utterly absurd than the thing that
superseded it ?-a square of semi-classic buildings,
supported by a narrow arcade, and surmounted by
stone sphinxes.
Above the old main entrance, which faced the
east, and is now completely blocked up and hidden,
were the royal arms of Scotland, beautifully
sculptured, supported on the right by Mercy holding
a crown wreathed with laurel, and on the
left by Justice, with a palm branch and balance,
with the inscription, Stant his feZiciin r p a , and
underneath the national arms, the motto, Uni
unionurn. Over the smaller doorway, which forms
the present access to the lofty lobby of the House,
were the arms of the city, between sculptured
THE GREAT WINCOW. ?59 Parliament Hoox.]
obelisks, with the motto Bominus cusfodif infroifurn
msfrunz. The destruction of all this was utterly
unwarrantable.
The tapestries with which the hall was hung
were all removed about the end of the last century,
and now its pictnres, statues, and decorations of
Scotland?s elder and latter days replace them.
Of the statues of the distinguished Scottish
statesmen and lawyers, the most noticeable are a
colossal one of Henry first Viscount Melville in
his robes as a peer, by Chantrey ; on his left is Lord
Cockburn, by Brodie ; Duncan Forbes of Culloden,
in his judicial costume as President of the Court,
by Roubiliac (a fine example) ; the Lord President
Boyle, and Lord Jeffrey, by Steel ; the Lord President
Blair (son of the author of ?The Grave?),
by Chantrey.. .
On the opposite or eastern side of the hall
(which stands north and south) is the statue
of Robert Dundas of Arniston, Lord Chief Baron
of the Scottish Exchequer, also by Chautrey;
portraits, many of them of considerable antiquity,
some by Jameson, a Scottish painter who studied
under Rubens at Antwerp. But the most remarkable
among the modern portraits are those of
Lord Broiigham, by Sir Daniel Macnee, P.R.S.A. ;
Lord Colonsay, formerly President of the Court,
and the Lord Justice-clerk Hope, both by the
same artist. Thete are also two very tine pQrtraits
of Lord Abercrombie and Professor Bell, by Sir
Henry Raeburn.
Light is given to this interestihg hall by fouI
windows on the side, and the great window on the
south. It is of stained glass, and trulymagnificent.
It was erected in 1868 at a cost of Az,ooo, and
was the work of two German artists, having been
designed by Wilhelm von Kaulbach, and executed
by the Chevalier Ainmiller of Munich. It repre.
sents the inauguration of the College of Justice, 01:
the Supreme Court of Scotland, by King Tames V.,
in 1532. The opening of the court is supposed by
the artist to have been the. occasion of a grand
state ceremonial, and the moment chosen for
representation is that in which the young king,
surrounded by his nobles and great officers
of state, is depicted in the ,act of presenting
the charter of institution and of confirniation by
Pope Clement VII. to Alexander Mylne, Abbot
of Cambuskenneth, the first Lord President, wha
kneels before him to receive it, surrounded by the
other judges in their robes, while the then Lord
Chancellor of Scotland, Gavin Dunbar, ArchbishoF
of Glasgow, and afterwards of St. Andrews, with
upraised hand invokes a.blessing on the act.
In 1870 the four side windows on the west of the
la11 were filled in with stained glass Qf a heraldic
:haracter, under the superintendence of the late
Sir George Harvey, president of the Royal Scottish
kcadeniy. Each window is twenty feet high
~y nine wide, divided by a central mullion, the
:racery between being occupied by the armorial
learings and crests of the various Lord Justice-
Zlerks, the great legal writers of the Faculty of
Advocates, those of the Deans of Faculty, and the
Lords Advocate.
This old hall has been the scene of many a
;reat event and many a strange debate, and most
Df the proceedings that took place here belong
to the history of the country j for with the exception
of the Castle and the ancient portion of Holyrood,
no edifice in the city is so rich in historic
memories.
Beneath the old roof consecrated to these, says
one of its latest chroniclers, ? the first ?great movements
of the Civil War took place, and the successive
steps in that eventful crisis were debated
with a zeal commensurate to the important results
involved in them. Here Montrose united with
Rothes, Lindsay, Loudon, and others of the
covenanting leaders, in maturing the bold measures
that formed the basis of our national liberties ; and
within the same hall, only a few years later, he sat
with the calmness of despair, to receive from the
lips of his old compatriot, Loudon, the barbarous
sentence, which was executed with such savage
rigour.?
After his victory at Dunbar, some of Cromwell?s
troopers in their falling bands, buff coats, and steel
morions, spent their time alternately in preaching to
the people in the Parliament Hall and guarding a
number of Scottish prisoners of war who were confined
in ? the laigh Parliament House ? below it
On the 17th of May, 1654, some of these contrived
to cut a hole in the floor of the great hall, and all
effected their escape save two; but when peace
was established between Croniwell and the Scots,
and the Courts of Law resumed their sittings,
the hall was restored to somewhat of its legitimate
uses, and there, in 1655, the leaders of the Commonwealth,
including General Monk, were feasted
with a lavish hospitality.
In 1660, under the auspices of the same republican
general, came to pass ? the - glorious
Restoration,? when the magistrates had a banquet
Ft the cross, and gave _~;I,OOO sterling to the king;
and his brother, the Duke of Albany and York, who
came as Koyal Commissioner, was feasted in the
same hall with his Princess Mary d?Este and his
daughter, the future Queen Anne, surrounded by all
the high-born and beautiful in Scotland. But dark
