232 MEMORIALS OF EDINBURGH.
of a royal order that every one should give him that title. He was succeeded in the old
mansion by his son, Sir Lewis Craig, and had the satisfaction of pleading as advocate while
he presided on the bench under the title of Lord Wrightslands. The house in Warriston’s
Close was subsequently occupied by Sir George Urquhart, of Cromarty, and still later by
Sir Robert Baird, of Sauchton Hall. But the most celebrated residenter in this ancient
alley is the eminent lawyer and statesman, Sir Archibald Johnston, of Warriston, the
nephew of its older inhabitant, Sir Thomas Craig. He appears from the titles to have
purchased from his cousin, Sir Lewis Craig, the house adjoining his own, and which is
entered by a plain doorway on the west side of the close, immediately below the one last
described. Johnston of Warriston took an early and very prominent share in the resistance
offered to the schemes of Charles I., and in 1638, on the royal edict being proclaimed
from the Cross of Edinburgh, which set at defiance the popular opposition to the hated
Service Book, he boldly appeared on a scaffold erected near it, and read aloud the celebrated
protest drawn up in name of the Tables, while the mob compelled the royal heralds
to abide the reading of this counter-defiance. It is unnecessary to sketch out very minutely
the incidents in a life already familiar to the students of Scottish history. He was
knighted by Charles I., on his secondvisit to Scotland in 1641, and assumed the designation
of Lord Warriston on his promotion to the bench. He was one of the Scottish Commissioners
sent to mediate between Charles I. and the English Parliament ; and after filling
many important offices he sat by the same title as a peer in Cromwell’s abortive House of
Lords ; and, on the death of the Protector, he displayed his keen opposition to the restoration
of the Stuarts by acting as President of the Committee of Safety under Richard Cromwell.
On the restoration of Charles 11. he became an object of special animosity, and having
boldly refused to concur in the treaty of Breda, he escaped to Hamburgh, from whence he
afterwards retired to Rouen in France. There he was delivered up to Charles by the French
King, and after a tedious imprisonment, both in the Tower of London and the old Tolbooth
of Edinburgh, he was executed with peculiar marks of indignity, on the spot where
he had so courageously defied the royal proclamation twenty-five years before. His own
nephew, Bishop Burnet, has furnished a very characteristic picture of the hardy and politic
statesman, in which he informs us he was a man of such energetic zeal that he rarely allowed
himself more than three hours sleep in the twenty-four. When we consider the leading
share he took in all the events of that memorable period, and his intimate’intercourse with
the most eminent men of his time, we cannot but view with lively interest the decayed and
deserted mansion where he has probably entertained such men as Henderson, Argyle,
Rothes, Lesley, Monck, and even Cromwell ; and the steep and straitened alley that still
associates his name with the crowded lands of the Old Town.’
The following quaint and biting epitaph, penned by some zealous cavalier on the death
The importance which waa attached to this close 88 one of the most fahionable localities of Edinburgh during the
last century appears from a propoaitiou addressed by the Earl of Morton to the Lord Provost in 1767, in which,
among other conditions which he demands, under the threat of opposing the extension of the royalty to the
grounda on which the New Town is built, he requires that a timber bridge shall be thrown over the North Loch,
from the foot of Warriston’s Close to Bereford‘s Parks, and the public Register Offices of Scotland, built at the coat of
the town, “on the highest level ground of Robertson’s and Wood‘e farms.” To this the magistrates reply by stating,
among other objections, that the value of the property in the close alone is f,ZO,OOO !-Proposition by the Earl of
Yorton, fol. 5 pp.
