?-a --It OLD AND? NEW EDINBURGH. [High Street,
Baron of the Exchequer Court in 1748, and grandson
of James of Balumby, fourth Earl of Panmure,
who fought with much heroic valour at the battle
of Dunblane, and was attainted in 171s.
The spacious stone mansion which he occupied
at the foot of the close, and the north windows of
which overlooked the steep slope towards the
Trinity Church, and the then bare, bleak mass of
the Calton Hill beyond, was afterwards acquired
as an office and hall by the Society for the Propagation
of Christian Knowledge and the Plantation
of Schools in the Highlands ?for the rooting out
of the errors of popery and converting of foreign
nations,?? a mighty undertakiog, for which a charter
was given it by Queen Anne in 1709. Thus the
alley came to be called by its last name, Society
Close.
Such were the immediate surroundings of that
old manse, in which John Knox received the
messengers of his queen, the fierce nobles of her
turbulent Court, and the Lords of the Congregation.
It is to the credit of the Free Church of Scotland,
which has long since acquired it as a piece of
property, that the progress of decay has been
arrested, and some traces of its old magnificence
restored. A wonderfully picturesque building of
three storeys above the ground floor, it abuts on the
narrowed street, and is of substantial ashlar, terminating
in curious gables and masses of chimneys.
A long admonitory inscription, extending over
nearly the whole front, carved on a stone belt,
bears these words in bold Roman letters :-LUFE
GOD. ABOVE. AL. AND. YOVR. NICHTBOUR . A S . YI
SELF. Perched upon the corner above the
entrance door is a small and hideous effigy of the
Reformer preaching in a pulpit, and pointing with
his right hand above his head towards a rude
sculpture of the sun bursting out from amid clouds,
with the name of the Deity inscribed in three
languages on its disc, thus :-
8 E O Z
D L U S
G O D
On the decoration of the efligy the pious care of
successive generations of tenants has been expended
with a zeal not always appreciated by
people of taste. The house contains a hall, the
stuccoed ceiling of which pertains to the time of
Charles II., when perhaps the building was repaired.
M?Crie, in his Life of Knox, tells us, that the
latter, on commencing his duties in Edinburgh
in 1559, when the struggles of the Reformation
were well nigh over, was lodged in the house of
David Forrest, a citizen, after which he removed
permanently to the house previously occupied by
the exiled abbot of Dunfermline. The magisS
trates gave him a salary of Azoo Scots yearly, and
in 1561 ordered the Dean of Guild to make him B
warm study in the house built of ?? dailles ?-i.e., to
be wainscoted or panelled.
This is supposed to be the small projection,
lighted by one long window, looking westward up
the entire length of the High Street ; and adjoining
it on the first floor is a window in an angle of the
house, from which he is said to have held forth to
the people in the street below, and which is still
termed ? the preaching window.?
In this house he doubtless composed the ?? Confession
of Faith ? and the ? First Book of Discipline,?
in which, at least, he had a principal haad,
and which were duly ratified by Parliament j and
it was during the first year of his abode in this
house that he lost his first wife, Marjory Bowes
(daughter of an English border family), whom he
had married when an exile, a woman of amiable
disposition and pious deportment, but whose
portrait at Streatlam Castle, Northumberland, is
remarkable chiefly for its intense ugliness. She
was with him in all his wanderings at home and
abroad, and regarding her John Calvin thus expresses
himself in a letter to the widower:-
?? Uxu~em nactus uas cui non rgeriuntur passim
siivziZes?--?you had a wife the like of whom is not
anywhere to be found.? By her he had two sons.
Four years after her death, to this mansion,
when in his fifty-ninth year, he brought his second
Wife, Margaret Stewart, the youngest daughter of
Andrew, ?the good? Lord Ochiltree, who, after
his death, mamed Sir Andrew Kerr of Faudonside.
By his enemies it was now openly alleged that
he must have gained the young girl?s affections by
the black art and the aid of the devil, whom he
raised for that purpose in the yard behind his
house. In that curious work entitled ?? The Disputation
concerning the Controversit Headdis of
Religion,? Nicol Bume, the author, relates that
KIIOX, on the occasion of his marriage, went to the
Lord Ochiltree with many attendants, ?on a.ne
trim gelding, nocht lyk ane prophet or ane auld
decrepit priest as he was, bot lyk as had been ane
of the Elude Royal, with his bands of taffettie
feschnit With golden ringis and precious stones ;
and, as is plainlie reportit in the countrey, be
sorcerie and witchcraft did sua allure that puu
gentilwoman, that scho could not leve without
him? Another of Knox?s traducers asserts, that
not long after his marriage, ?she (his wife) lying
in bed and perceiving a blak, uglie ill-favoured man
(the devil, of course) busily talking with him in the+
High Street.] THE DEATH OF KNOX. 215
same chamber, was so sodainly amazed that she
took sickness and dyed ;I, an absurd fabrication, as
in the year after his death a pension was granted
to her and her three daughters, and she is known
to have been alive till about the end of the
sixteenth century.
In that old house, the abode of plebeians now,
have sat and debated again and again such men
as the Regent Murray, the cruel and crafty
Morton, the Lords Boyd, Ruthven, Ochiltree, and
the half-savage Lindsay-
? He whose iron eye
Oft saw fair Mary weep in vain; ?
Johnstone of Elphinstone, Fairiie, Campbell of
Kinyeoncleugh, Douglas of Drumlanrig, and all
who were the intimates of Knox ; and its old walls
have witnessed much and heard much that history
may never unravel.
It was while resident here that Knox?s enemies
are said-for there is little proof of the statement
-to have put a price upon his head, and that his
most faithful friends were under the necessity of
keeping watch around it during the night, and of
appointing a guard for the protection of his person
at times when he went abroad. When under
danger of hostility from the queen?s garrison in
the Castle, in the spring of 1571, M?Crie tells us
that ?one evening a musket-ball was fired in at
his window and lodged in the roof of the apartment
in which he was sitting. It happened that
he sat at the time in a different part of the room
from that which he had been accustomed to
occupy, otherwise the ball, from the direction it
took, must have struck him.?
It was probably after this that he retreated for a
time to St. Andrews, but he returned to his manse
in the end of August, 1572, while Kirkaldy was
still vigorously defending the fortress for his exiled
queen.
His bodily infirmities now increased daily, and
on the 11th of November he was attacked with a
cough which confined him to bed.
Two days before that he had conducted the
services at the induction of his colleague, Mr.
James Lawson, in St. Giles?s, and though he was
greatly debilitated, he performed the important
duties that devolved upon him with something of
his wonted fire and energy to those who heard
him for the last time. He then came down from
the pulpit, and leaning on his staff, and supported
by his faithful secretary, Richard Bannatyne (one
account says by his wife), he walked slowly down
the street to his own house, accompanied by the
whole congregation, watching, for the last time, his
feeble steps.
During his last illness, which endured about a
fortnight, he was visited by many of the principal
nobles and reformed preachers, to all of whom he
gave much advice; and on Monday, the 24th of
November, 1572, he expired in his sixty-seventh
year, having been born in 1505, during the reign
of James IV.
From this house his body was conveyed to its
last resting-place, on the south side of St. Gileo?s,
accompanied by a mighty multitude of all ranks,
where the newly-appointed Regent Morton pronounced
over the closing grave his well-known
eulogiuni.
That eastern nook of the old city, known as the
Nether Eow has many associations connected with
it besides the manse of Knox
Therein was the abode of Robert Lekprevik,
one of the earliest of Scottish printers, to whose
business it is supposed Bassandyne succeeded on
his removal to St. Andrews in 1570; and there, in
16 13, the authorities discovered that a residenter
named James Stewart, ? commonly called James of
Jerusalem, a noted Papist, and re-setter of seminary
prints,? was wont to have mass celebrated in his
house by Robert Philip, a priest returned from
Rome. Both men were arrested and tried on this
charge, together with a third, John Logan, portioner,
of Restalrig, who had formed one of the
small and secret congregation in Stewart?s house
in the Nether Bow. ?One cannot, in these days
of tolerance,? says Dr. Chambers, ? read without a
strange sense of uncouthness the solemn expressions
of horror employed in the dittays of the king?s advocates
against the offenders, being precisely the
same expressions that were used against heinous
offences of a more tangible nature.?
Logan was fined LI,OOO, and compelled to express
public penitence; and Philip and Stewart
were condemned to banishment from the realm of
Scotland.
In the Nether Bow was the residence of James
Sharp, who had been consecrated with great pomp
at Westminster, as Archbishop of St. Andrews, on
the 15th of November, 1661-a prelate famous for
his unrelenting persecution of the faithful adherents
of the Covenant which followed his elevation, and
justly increased the general odium of his character,
and who perished under the hands of pitiless assassins
on Magus Muir, in 1679.
Nicoll, the diarist, tells us, that on the 8th of
May, 1662, all the newly consecrated bishops were
convened in their gowns at the house of the Archbishop,
in the Nether Bow, from whence they proceeded
in state to the Parliament House, conducted
by two peers, the Earl of Kellie (who had been
