280 OLD AND NEW EDINBURGH. . [High Street.
?capital already created under the last charter is
L;~OO,OOO stock, making the existing capital
I,OOO,OOO, and there still remains unexhausted
the privilege to create L500,ooo more stock
.whenever it shall appear to be expedient to coinplete
the capital to the full amount conceded in
the charter-a success that the early projectors of
the first scheme, developed in Tweeddale?s Close,
could little have anticipated.
The British Linen Company for a long series
of years has enjoyed the full corporate and other
privileges of the old chartered banks of Scotland
; and in this capacity, along with the Bank of
Scotland and the Royal Bank of Scotland, alone is
specially exempted in the Bank Regulation Act for
Scotland, from making returns of ?the proprietors?
names to the Stamp Office.
In the sixth year of the 19th century Tweeddale
House became the scene of a dark event ? which
ranks among the gossips of the Scottish capital
with the Icon Basilike, or the Man with the Iron
Mask.?
About five in the evening of the 13th of November,
I 806, or an hour after sunset, a little girl whose
family lived in the close, was .sent by her mother
with a kettle to get water for tea from the Fountain
Well, and stumbling in the dark archway over
something, found it to be, to her dismay, the body
of a man just expiring. On an alarm being raised,
the victim proved to be William Begbie, the
messenger of the British Linen Company Bank, a
residenter in the town of Leith, where that bank was
the first to establish a branch, in a house close to
the cpper drawbridge. On lights being brought,
a knife was found in his heart, thrust up to the
haft, so he bled to death without the power of
uttering a word of explanation. Though a sentinel
of the Guard was always on duty close by, yet he
saw nothing of the event.
It was found that he had been robbed of a
package of notes, amounting in value to more than
four thousand pounds, which he had been conveying
from the Leith branch to the head office. The
murder had been- accomplished with the utmost
deliberation, and the arrangements connected with
it displayed care and calculation. The weapon
used had a broad thin blade, carefully pointed,
with soft paper wrapped round the hand in such a
manner as to prevent any blood from reaching the
person of the assassin, and thus leading to his
detection.
For his discovery five hundred guineas were
offered in vain ; in vain, too, was the city searched,
while the roads were patrolled; and all the evidence
attainable amounted to this :-? That Begbie, in
proceeding up Leith Walk, had been accompanied
by a ?man,? and that about the supposed time of
the murder ?a man? had been seen by some chi\-
dren to run out of the close into the street, and
down Leith Wynd. . . . . There was also reason
to believe that the knife had been bought in a shop
about two o?clock on the day of the murder,
and that it had been afterwards ground upon a
grinding-stone and smoothed upon a hone.?
Many persons were arrested on suspicion, and
one, a desperate character, was long detained in
custody, but months passed on, and the assassination
was ceasing to occupy public -attention, when
three men, in passing through the grounds of
Eellevue (where now Drummond Place stands) in
August, 1807, found in the cavity of an old wall, a
roll of bank notes that seemed to have borne exposure
to the weather. The roll was conveyed to
Sheriff Clerk Rattray?s office, and found to ?contain
L3,ooo in large notes of the money taken from
Begbie. The three men received Lzoo from the
British Linen Company as the reward of their
honesty, but no further light was thrown upon the
murder, the actual perpetrator of which has never,
to this hour, been discovered, though strong suspicions
fell on a prisoner named Mackoull in 1822,
after he was beyond the reach of the law.
This man was tried and sentenced to death by
the High Court of Justiciary in June, 1820, for
robbery at the Paisley Union Bank, Glasgow, and
was placed in the Calton gaol, where he was respited
in August, and again in September, ?during his
majesty?s pleasure ? (according to the Edinburgh
Week(yjournal), and where he died about the end
of the year. In a work published under the title
of ?The Life and Death of James Mackoull,?
there was included a document by Mr. Denovan,
the Bow Street Runner, whose object was to prove
that Mackoull aZiis Moffat, was the assassin of
Begbie, and his statements, which are curious, have
thus been condensed by a local writer in 1865 :-
? Still, in the absence of legal proof, there is a
mystery about this daring crime which lends a sort
of romance to its daring perpetrator, Mr. Denovan
discovered a man in Leith acting as a teacher, who
in 1806 was a sailor-boy belonging to a ship then
in the harbour. On the afternoon of the murder
he was carrying up some smuggled article to a friend
in Edinburgh, when he noticed ? a tall man carrying
a yellow coloured parcel under his arm, and a genteel
man, dressed in a black coat, dogging him.?
He at once concluded that the man with the parcel
was a smuggler, and the other a custom-house
oficer. Fearful of detection himself, he watched
their manmavres with considerable interest. He lost
