178 OLD AND NEW EDINBURGH. [Parliament Close.
their money brought on horseback to the Parliament
Close, where r the company?s business was
thenceforward wholly restricted for a time to
lending money, and all transactions to be in
Edinburgh.
In the fire we have mentioned as occumng in
1700 the bank perished. Assisted by the Earl of
Leven, Governor of the Castle and also of the
bank, with a party of soldiers, and by David Lord
Futhven, a director, who stood in the turnpike
stair all night, keeping the passage free, the cash,
bank-notes, books, and papers, were saved. Thus,
though every other kind of property perished, the
struggling bank was able to open an office higher
up in the city.
In that fire the Scottish Treasury Room perished,
with the Exchequer and Exchange, and the Parliament
Square was afterwards rebuilt (in the picturesqae
style, the destruction of which was so
much regretted), in conformity with an Act passed
in 1698, regulating the mode of building in Edinburgh
with regard to height, Convenience, strength,
and security from fire. The altitude of the houses
was greatly reduced. Previous to the event of
1700, the tenements on the south side of the
Parliament Close, as viewed from the Rirkheugh,
were fifteen storeys in height, and till the
erection of the new town were deemed the most
splendid of which the city could boast.
Occurring after ? King William?s seven years of
famine,? which the Jacobites believed to be a curse
sent from heaven upon Scotland, this calamity
was felt with double force; and in 1702 the Town
Council passed an Act for ?? suppressing immoralities,?
in which, among the tokens of God?s wrath,
?the great fire of the 3d February? is specially
referred to.
Notwithstanding the local depression, we find
in 1700 none of the heartless inertia that charac.
terised the city for sixty years after the Union.
Not an hour was lost in coinmencing the work
of restoration, and many of the sites were bought
by Robert Mylne, the king?s master-mason. The
new Royal Exchange, which had its name and the
date 1700 cut boldly above its doorway, rose tc
the height of twelve storeys on the south-deemed
a moderate altitude in those days. On its eastern
side was an open arcade, with Doric pilasters and
entablature, as a covered walk for pedestrians,
and the effect of the whole was stately and im.
posing. Many aristocratic families who had been
burned out, came flocking back to the vast tene
ments of the Parliament Close, among others tht
Countess of Wemyss, who was resident there in 2
fashionablz flat at the time of the Porteous mob
(?Hist: of Bank of Scot.,? 1728.)
.
and whose footman was accused of being one of
the rioters, and who very nearly had a terrible
tragedy acted in her own house, the outcome of
the great one in the Grassmarket.
It is related that the close connection into
which the noble family of Wemyss were thus
brought to the Porteous mob, as well as their
near vicinity to the chief line of action, naturallj
produced a strong impression on the younger
members of the family. They had probably been
aroused from bed by the shouts of the rioters
assembling beneath their windows, and the din of
their sledge-hammers thundering on the old Tolbooth
door. Thus, not long after the Earl of
Wemyss-the Hon. Francis Charteris was born
in 1723, and was then a boy-proceeded, along
with his sisters, to get up a game, or representation
of the Porteous mob, and having duly
forced his prison, and dragged forth the supposed
culprit, ?the romps got so thoroughly into the
spirit of their dramatic sports that they actually
hung up their brother above a door, and had weli
nigh finished their play in real tragedy.,?
The first coffee-house opened in Edinburgh was
John Row?s, in Robertson?s Land, a tall tenement
near the Parliament House. This was in 1673.
It was shut up in 1677, in consequence of a
brawl, reported to the Privy Council by the
Town Major, who had authority to see into such
matters.
The north-east corner of the Parliament Close
was occupied by John?s coffee-house. There, as
Defoe, the historian of the Union, tells us, the
opponents of this measure met daily, to discuss
the proceedings that were going on in the Parliament
House close by, and to form schemes of
opposition thereto; and there, no doubt, were
sung fiercely and emphatically the doggerel rhymes
known as ?? Belhaven?s Vision,? of which the only
copies extant are those printed at Edinburgh in
1729, at the Glasgow Arms, opposite the Corn
Market; and that other old song, which was
todched by the master-hand of Burns :-
?I What force or guile could not subdue,
Through many warlike ages,
Is now wrought by a coward few
For hireling traitor?s wages ;
The Englishsteel we could disdain,
Secure in valour?s station ;
But England?s gold has been our bane-
Such a parcel of rogues in a nation ! ?
John?s coffee-house was also the resort of the
judges and lawyers of the eighteenth century for
consultations, and for their ?? meridian,? or twelve
o?clock dram ; for in those days every citizen had
Parlient Close.] JOHN OSW.4LD. I79
his peculiar hze& or place of resort by day or
night, where merchants, traders, and men of every
station, met for consultation, or good-fellowship,
and to hear the items of news that came by the
mail or stage from distant parts; and Wilson,
writing in 1847, says, ? Currie?s Tavern, in Craig?s
Close, ?once the scene of meeting of various clubs,
and a favourite resort of merchants, still retains
.a reputation among certain antiquarian bibbers for
an old-fashioned luxury, known by the name
of jaj-in, a strange compound of small-beer and
whiskey, curried, as the phrase is, with a little
aatmeal.?
Gossiping Wodrow tells us in his ?I Analecta,?
that, on the 10th of June, 1712, ?The birthday of
the Pretender, I hear there has been great outrages
.at Edinburgh by his friends. His health was drunk
early in the morning in the Parliament Close j and
at night, when the magistrates were going through
the streets to keep th: peace, several were
taken up in disguise, and the King?s health (ie.,
James VIII.) was drunk out of several windows,
and the glasses thrown over the windows when
the magistrates passed by, and many windows
were illuminated. At Leith there was a standard
:set upon the pier, with a thistle and Nemo me
imjune Zaessit, and J ?R. VI11 ; and beneath,
Noe Abjuration. This stood a great part of the
-day.? Had the old historian lived till the close
.of the century or the beginning of the present,
he might have seen, as Chambers tells us, ?Singing
Jamie Balfour ?-a noted convivialist, of whom
a portrait used to hang in the Leith Golf-housewith
other topers in the Parliament Close, all bareheaded,
on their knees, and hand-in-hand, around
.the statute of Charles II., chorusing vigorously,
?T. King s h d enjoy his own again.? Jamie
Balfour was well known to Sir Walter Scott.
About the year 1760 John?s coffee-house was
kept by a man named Oswald, whose son John,
born there, and better known under his assumed
name of Sylvester Otway, was one of the most
extraordinary characters of that century as a poet
.and politician. He served an apprenticeship to a
jeweller in the Close, till a relation left him a
legacy, with which he purchased a commission in
the Black Watch, and in 1780 he was the third
lieutenant in seniority in the 2nd battalion when
serving in India. Already master of Latin and
Greek, he then taught himself Arabic, and, quitting
the army in 1783, became a violent Radical, and
published in London a pamphlet on the British
Constitution, setting forth his views (crude as they
were) and principles. His amatory poems received
she dpprobation of Bums; and, after publishing
various farces, effusions, and fiery political papers,
he joined the French Revolutionists in 1792, when
his pamphlets obtained for him admission into
the Jacobite Club, and his experiences in the
qznd procured him command of a regiment composed
of the masses of Paris, with which he
marched against the royalists in La Vendie, on
which occasion his men mutinied, and shot him,
together with his two sons-whom, in the spirit of
quality, he had made drummers-and an English
Zentleman, who had the misfortune to be serving
in the same battalion.
John third Earl, of Bute, a statesman and a
patron of literature, who procured a pension for
Dr. Johnson, and who became so unpopular as
a minister through the attacks of Wilkes, was
born in the Parliament Close on the 25th of May,
1713.
Near to John?s coffee-house, and on the south
side ,of the Parliament Close, was the banking-house
of Sir William Forbes, Bart., who was born at Edinburgh
in 1739. He was favourably known as the
author of the ?Life of Beattie,? and other works,
and as being one of the most benevolent and highspirited
of citizens. The bank was in reality established
by the father of Thomas Coutts, the eminent
London banker, and young Forbes, in October,
1753, was introduced to the former as an apprentice
for a term of seven years. He became a copartner
in 1761, and on the death of one of the
Messrs. Coutts, and retirement of another on
account of ill-health, while two others were settled
in London, a new company was formed, comprising
Sir William Forbes, Sir James Hunter Blair,
and Sir Robert Hemes, who, at first, carried on
business in the name of the old firm.
In 1773, however, Sir Robert formed a separate
establishment in London, when the name was
changed to Forbes, Hunter, and Co., of which
firm Sir William continued to be the head till his
death, in 1806.
Kin&id tells us that, when their first bankinghouse
was building, great quantities of human
bones-relics of St. Giles?s Churchyard-were dug
up, which were again buried at the south-east
corner, between the wall of the edifice and the
Parliament Stairs that led to the Cowgate; and
that, ? not many years ago, numbers were also dug
up in the Parliament Close, which were carefully
put in casks, and buried in the Greyfriars? Churchyard?
In accordance with a longcherished desire of
restoring his family-which had been attainted for
loyalty to the house of StuartLSir William Forbes
embraced a favourable opportunity for purchasing
