340 MEMORIALS OF EDINBURGH,
as an industrious burgher. He was imported from Holland, it is believed, near the beginning
of last century, and first did duty with Rpade in hand at a seedsman’s door in the
Canongate ; from thence he passed to a grocer in the High Street, and soon after he made
his appearance in the Bow, where his antiquated costume consorted well with the oldfashioned
neighbourhood. Since the destruction of this, his last retreat, he has found a fit
refuge in the lobby of the Antiquarian Museum. On the opposite side of the street, the
last tenement on the east side of the first turning, and situated, as its titles express, “without
the place where the old Bow stood,” was popularly known as the Clockmaker’s Land.
It had been occupied in the reign of Charles 11. by Paul Romieu,’ an ingenious knockmaker,
who is believed to have been one of the French refugees, compelled to forsake his
native land on the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. In 1675, as appears from the
records of the Corporation of Hammermen, a watch was, for the fist time, added to the
knockmaker’s essay, previous to which date it is probable that watches were entirely imported.
There remained on the front of this ancient tenement, till its demolition, some
portions of a curious piece of mechanism which had formed the sign of its ingenious tenant.
This was a gilt ball representing the moon, originally made to revolve by clockwork, and
which enjoyed to the last a share of the admiration bestowed on the wonders of the Bow.
Other and more curious erections than those we have described had occupied the ground along
this steep descent at a still earlier period, when the secular clergy shared with the Templars
the dwellings in the Bow. In the “ Inventar of Pious Donations,” to which we have
already frequently referred, a charter is recorded, bearing date February 15, 1541, whereby
6‘ Sir Thomas Ewing mortifies to a chaplain in St Giles Kirk, an annual rent of twentysix
shillings out of Henry Spittal’s Land, at the Upper Bow, on the east side of ye transse
y’of, betwixt Bartil Kairn’s Land on the south, St James Altar Land on the north, and
the King’s Street on the west.” Below the Clockmaker’s Land, the tortuous thoroughfare
turned suddenly at an acute angle, and presented along its devious steep a strange assemblage
of fantastic timber and stone gables; several of them being among those strange
relics ’of a forgotten order of things, the Temple Lands, and one of them, with its timber
ceilings curiously adorned with paintings2 in the style already described in the Guise
Palace, bearing the quaint legend over its antique lintel, in ornamental characters of a very
early date :-
HE YT a THOLIS * OVERCVMMIS.
Behind these lay several steep, narrow, and gloomy closes, containing the most singular
groups of huge, irregular, and diversxed tenements that could well be conceived. Here
a crazy stunted little timber dwelling, black with age, and beyond it a pile of masonry rising
story above story from some murky profound beyond, that left its chimneys scarcely rivalling
those of its dwarfish neighbour after climbing thus far from their foundation. in the
depths below. One of these, which we have engraved under the name of ‘‘ The Haunted
CZose,” is the same in which the worthy gentlewoman, the neighbour of Major Weir, beheld
the spectral giantess vanish in a blaze of fire, as she returned down the West Bow at
the witching hour of night. The close, for all its wretched degradation, which had won
Minor Antiquitiea Information derived fifty years ago (1833) from a man who WM then eighty years of age.
a Some curious fragments of this ceiling are now in the collection of C. K. Sharpe, Esq.
THE WEST BOW AND SUBURBS. 341
for it the savoury title it retained to the last, still preserved some remains of ancient
grandeur, as appears in our view, where an ornamental building is introduced, which had
probably formed the summer house of some neighbouring patrician’s pleasure-grounds
ere the locality acquired its unenviable distinction. The inventory of the tenants who
were at length ejected by the inexorable commissioners, forms, we think, as strange a
medley as ever congregated together in one locality. It is thus described ;-‘4 All
and hail these laigh houses lying in the said West Bow, in that close commonly
called the Stinking Close of Edinburgh, some time possessed, the one thereof by John
Edward, cobbler; another by Widow Mitchell; another by John Park, ballad crier;
another by Christian Glass, eggwife ; another by Duncan M‘Lachlan, waterman ; and
another by Alexander Anderson, bluegown; . . . and with shops, cellars, &c.,
are part of that tenement acquired by Sir William Menzies of Gladstanes, 29th April
1696.”
Beyond the singular group of buildings thus huddled together, the Bow turned abruptly
to the south, completing the Z like form of the ancient thoroughfare. Here again, and
scattered among the antique tenements that surround the area of the Grassmarket, we
find the gables and bartizans surmounted with the stone or iron cross that marks the
privileged Templar Lancls. These powerful soldier-priests possessed at one time lands
in every county, and nearly in every parish, of Scotland ; and wherever they permitted
houses to be erected thereon, they were required to bear the badge of their order, and
to submit to the jurisdiction of no local court but that of their spiritual lords. When
their possessions passed into secular hands at the Reformation, they still retained their
peculiar privileges and burdens, and their exemption from the exclusive burghal restrictions
was long a subject of heart-burning and discontent to the chartered corporations
and the magistrates of Edinburgh. The Earl of Haddington is still Lord Superior of
the Temple Lands, and his representative used to hold Baron’s Courts in them occasionally,
until this imperium in imperio was aboliclhed by the Act of 1746, which extinguished the
ancient privileges of pit and gallows, and swept away a host of independent baronies all
over the kingdom. We cannot leave the West Bow, however, once the principal entry
into the town, without glancing at the magnificent pageants which it witnessed through
successive centuries. Up this steep and narrow way have ridden James IV. and V., his
Queen, Mary of Guise, and their fair and ill-fated daughter Queen Mary. Here, too, the
latter rode in no joyous ceremonial, with Bothwell at her side, and his rude border spearmen
closing around her ; though they had thrown away their weapons as they approached
the capital, that the ravished Queen might appear to her subjects as the arbiter of her
own fate. To those who read aright the history of this calumniated and cruelly wronged
Queen, few incidents in her life are more touching than when she rode up the Bow on this
occasion, and turning her horse’s head, was about to proceed towards her own Palace of
Holyrood. It is the very culminating point of her existence ; but the die was already cast..
Bothwell, who had assumed for the occasion the air of an obsequious courtier, now seized
her horse’s bridle, and she entered the Castle a captive, and in his power. By the same
street her son, James VI., and his Queen, Anne of Denmark, made their ceremonious
entries to the capital ; and in like manner, Charles I., Oliver Cromwell, and James VIL,
while Duke of York, accompanied by his Queen and daughter, afterwards Queen Anne.
