High Street.] PHILIP STANFIELD. 281
(presumed) Custom House of ice^ running out of it,
with something under his coat. There can be no
doubt that this was the murderer, and the description
given coincided exactly with the appearance
of Mackoull, Although the boy heard of the murder
before he lkft Leith, he never thought of communicating
what he had seen to the authorities ; he was
shortly after captured and carried to a French prison,
where he remained for many years. Mackoull resided
in Edinburgh from September, 1805, till the
end of 1806, lodging very near the scene of the
murder, and was a frequent visitor at the coffee-
It was raised from the grave, after it had lain
there two days, and the surgeons having made an
incision near the neck, became convinced that
death had been caused by strangulation, so all
supposition of suicide was abandoned. This examination
took place in a church. After the cut
had been sewn up, the body was washed, wrapped
in fresh linen, and James Row, merchant in Edini
burgh, and Philip Stanfield, the disinherited son,
lifted it for deposition in the coffin, when 10 ! on
the side sustained by Philip an effusion of blood
took place, and so ample as to defile both his hands.
printers and publishers.
The World?s End Close was the curious and
appropriate name bestowed upon the last gloomy,
and mysterious-looking alley on the south side of
the High Street, adjacent to the Netherbow Port,
when it lost its oXer name of Sir John Stanfield?s
Close.
At the foot of it an ancient tenement, has a shield
of arms on its lintel, .with the common Edinburgh
legend-?Praisze. the. Lord. for.all.His.giftis,M.S. ;I?
but save this, and a rich Gothic niche, built into a
modern ?land ? of uninteresting aspect, nothing remains
of Stanfield?s Close save the memory of the
dark tragedy connected with the name of the knight.
Sir Jaines Stanfield was one of those English manufacturers
who, by permission of the Scottish Government,
had settled at Newmills, in East Lothian.
He was a respectable man, but the profligacy of
Philip, his eldest son, so greatly afflicted him that
he became melancholy, and he disinherited his heir
by a will. On a day in the November of 1687 he
was found drowned, it wafi alleged, in a pool of
water near his country house at Newmills. Doubts
were started as to whether he had committed
suicide, in consequence of domestic troubles, or had
been murdered. The circumstances of his being
hastily interred, and that Lady Stanfield had a suit
of graveclothes all ready for him before his death,
?seemed to point to the latter; and two surgeons
? Tiditions and Antiquities of Leith.?
36
November, 1806, Mackoull was seized with convulsions,
and threw himself back on his bed and
began to rave.
Tweeddale House, after being quitted by the
British Linen Company for their new office in St.
after handled by the murtherar, it will ;ushe out of
blood, as if the blood were crying to heaven for
revenge of the murtherar.?
Accordingly, on the 7th of February, 1688,
Philip was brought to trial at Edinburgh, and after
the household servants had been put to torture
without eliciting anything on the strength of the
mysterious bleeding, according to Fountainhall, save
that he was known to have cursed his father, drunk
to the king?s confusion, and linked the royal name
with those of the Pope, the devil, and Lord Chancellor,
he was sentenced to death. He protested
his innocence to the last, and urged in vain that
his father was a melancholy man, subject to fits;
that once he set out for England, but because his
horse stopped at a certain place, he thought he saw
the finger of God, and returned home ; and that he
once tried to throw himself over a window at the
Nether Bow, probably at his house in the World?s
End Close.
Philip Stanfield was hanged at the Market Cross
on the 24th of February. In consequence of a slip
of the rope, he came down on his knees, and it was
necessary to use more horrible means of strangulation
His tongue was cut out for cursing his
father ; his right hand was struck off for parricide ;
his head was spiked on the East Port of.Haddington,
and his mutilated body was hung in chains
between L.eith and the city. After a few days the
body was stolen fiom the gibbet, and found lying
in a ditch among water. It was chained up again,
time groaning in great anguish, and refusing to
touch the corpse again, while all looked on with
dismay. The incident was at once accepted by
the then Scottish mind in the light of a revelation
of Philip?s guilt as his father?s murderer. ?In a
Andrew Square, became, and is still, the establish- 3 I ment of Messrs. Oliver and Boyd, t!ie well-known
secret niurther,? says King James in his ? Damonology?-?
if the dead carkasse be at any time there
