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Memorials of Edinburgh in the Olden Time

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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.
Volume 10 Page 252
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Volume 10 Page 253
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