REID’S C L O S E ,
CAN ON GATE.
L UC‘EN3OOTHS AND PARLIAMENT CLOSE. 2x7
only taken when completely disabled by wounds, and the court was hastily summoned to
sit on the following morning, “ that he might not preveen the public execution by his
death.” The evidence was found insufticient to convict him of a share in the Rye House
Plot, and the king’s advocate proceeded accordingly to lead other accusations of treason
against him, among which he charged him as having been one of the masked executioners
who beheaded Charles I. He appears to have been a man of most reAolute
courage, and a determined republican ; he denied having been the king’s executioner, but
readily admitted that he was on guard at the scaffold as one of Cromwell’s troopers, and
‘th<aBt e ihneg ahsakde ds iefr vheed oaws naed litehuet epnreasnetn ti nk ihnigs’ sa ramuyth oarti tyD, uhneb acrr,a vWedo rlceeasvteer ,t oa nbde eDxucnudseede.,
seeing he need neither offend them nor grate his own conscience.” He was executed
the same afternoon, with peculiar barbarity, and his quarters sent to be exposed in
some of the chief towns of Scotland, his head being reserved to grace the West Port of
Edinburgh. But the day of retribution came at last; the Prince of Orange landed in
England, and the feeble representative of the Stuarts was the foremost to desert his own
failing cause. From the close of 1688 till March 1689, when a Convention of the
Scottish Estates was summoned to meet, Edinburgh was almost left to the government
of the rabble. The sack of Holyrood, already described, completely established the
superiority of the Presbyterian party, and they signalised their triumph by assaulting
the houses of the wealthy Catholics who resided chiefly in the Canongate, which they
‘<ra bbZed,” as the phrase wae, gutting and sometimes setting them on fire. When at length
the Convention met, the adherenta of the exiled king crowded to the capital in hopes
of yet securing a majority in his favour. Dundee openly marched into the town with a
train of sixty horse, while the Whigs with equal promptitude, but secretly, gathered an
armed body of the persecuted Presbyterians, whom they concealed in garrets and cellars,
ready to sally out at a concerted signal, and turn the scales in favour of their cause.
The aumptuous old oaken roof of the Parliament Hall then witnessed as stirring scenes
as ever occurred in the turbulent minorities of the Jameses within the more ancient
Tolbooth. Dundee arose in his place in the Convention, and demanded that all strangers
should be commanded to quit the town, declaring his own life and those of others of the
king’s friends to be endangered by the presence of banded assassins. On his demand
being rejected, he indignantly left the assembly ; and the Convention, with locked doors
and the keys on the table before them, proceeded to judge the government of King
James, and to pronounce his crown forfeited and his throne vacant, beneath the same
roof where he had so often sat in judgment on the oppressed. Meanwhile Dundee
was mustering his dragoons for the rising of the North; the affrighted citizens were
beating to arms to pursue him, and the armed Covenanters sallying from their hidingplaces
to strike for liberty against the oppressor, on the same streets where they had not
openly been seen for years, unless when dragged to torture and execution; while the
Convention sternly bent themselves to the great question at issue, expecting every moment
that the Duke of Gordon would open a fire on them from the Castle guns, and compel
A sort of compromise would seem to have been tacitly entered into with regard to tbb brave “persecutor.”
Dalziel and Mackenzie have been delivered up to unmitigated popular infamy, while the same censors still speak of the
Bluidy Clavers and the Gallant Dundee, as though they had contrived to divorce hia evil from his good qualities in
order innocently to indulge their pride in the hero of Scottish song !
2E
