298 MEMORIALS OF EDINBURGH.
They are said to be the work of a foreign artist, and are executed with great spirit.
From the style of the landscapes more especially, we feel little hesitation in ascribing the
whole to the pencil of Francesco Zuccherelli, who had a high reputation in England
during the earlier part of the eighteenth century, Interspersed among the ornamental
borders there are various grotesque figures, which have the appearance of being copies
from an illuminated missal of the fourteenth century. They represent a cardinal, a monk,
a priest, and other churchmen, painted with great humour and extreme drollery of
attitude and expression. They so entirely differ from the general character of the composition,
that their insertion may be conjectured to have originated in a whim of Lord
Milton, which the artist has contrived to execute without sacrificing the harmony of his
design. An elegant cornice, finished with painting and gilding, and a richly stuccoed
ceiling, complete the decorations of this fine apartment.
The house was occupied for some time as a Roman Catholic School, under the care of
the Sisters of Charity of St Margaret’s Convent. The pupils particularly attracted the
attention of her Majesty Queen Victoria on her visit to the capital in 1842, as they
strewed flowers in her path on her approach from the palace of her ancestors by the
ancient royal thoroughfare of the Canongate. It has since been used as a Deaf and
Dumb School, and was afterwards appropriated to the benevolent objects of the Royal
Maternity Hospital, but is now the property of a large engineering firm.
The fine open grounds which surround Milton House, with the site on which it is
built, formed a large and beautiful garden attached to the mansion of the Earls of
Roxburghe. Lord Fountainhall reports a dispute, in 1694, between the Trades of
Canongate and the Earl of Roxburghe, in which the Lords declared his house in the
Canongate free, and himself empowered, by right of certain clauses in a contract between
the Earl, the Town of Edinburgh, and Heriot’s Hospital, to employ artificers on his
house who were not freemen of the burgh.’ Such contentions, originating in the jealousy
of the Corporations of the Canongate, are of frequent occurrence at the period, and show
with how despotic a spirit they were prepared to guard their exclusive rights. On the
2d June 1681, a complaint was laid before the P r i v Council by the celebrated
Lord Halton, afterwards Earl of Lauderdale,’ stating that he was then building a
lodging for himself in the Canongate, and having employed some country masons,
the craftsmen of the burgh assaulted them, and carried off their tools. In the evidence,
it is shown that even a freeman of the capital dared not encroach on the bounds of the
Canongate; and that, “in 1671, the Privy Council fined David Pringle, chirurgeon,
for employing one Wood, an unfree barber, to exerce his calling in polling the
. children’s heads in Heriot’s In this case Lord Halton seems also to
have been left free to employ his own workmen; but the craftsmen were declared
warranted in their interference, and therefore free from the charge of rioting. The
Earl of Roxburghe’s mansion appears, from Edgar’s map, to have stood on the west
side of the garden, and to have been afterwards occupied by his brother John, the fifth
I Fountainhall’s Decisions, vol. i. p. 614.
Queenaberry House having been built on ground purchased from the Lauderdale family (Traditions, vol. i. p. 280),
Fountainhall’s Decisions, 801. i. p, 135-9.
it seems probable that that ducal mansion occupies the site of Lord Halton’s house.
