310 OLD AND NEW EDINBURGH [The West Bow.
by Victoria Terrace, replaced in one part by a
flight of stairs, in another by the Free Church 01
St John, and sloping away eastward into Victoria
Street, it is impossible to realise what the old Wed
Bow, which served as a connecting link between
the High and the Low Town, the Lawnmarket and
the Grassmarket, really was. The pencil of the
artist alone may reproduce its features.
At its lower end were the houses that belonged
to the Knights of the Temple, whereon, to mark
them as beyond the reach of corporation enactments,
the iron cross of St. John was placed sc
lately as the eighteenth century, by the Bailie oj
Lord Torphichen, as proprietor of the !ands of St.
John of Jerusalem ; and there flows, as of old, the
Bowfoot Well, built by Robert Mylne in 1681, jus1
where it is shown in Edgar?s map of the city when
the Bow was then, as it had been centuries before,
the principal entrance to the city from the west.
One of the chief relics in the West Bow wa:
an enormous rustyiron hook, on which hung an
ancient gate of the city wall, the upper Bow Port
built in 1450. It stood in the wall of a house a1
the first angle on the east side, about four feet-from
the ground. When Maitland wrote his history ir
1753, two of these hooks were visible; but by tht
time that Chambers wrote his ? Traditions,? ir
1824, the lower one had been buried by the leve
of the street having been raised.
Among those slain at the Battle of Pinkey, ir
1547, we find the name of John Hamilton (of tht
house of Innerwick), a merchant in the West Bow
This John Hamilton was a gallant gentleman
whose eldest son was ancestor of the Earls 0,
Haddington, and whose second son was a seculai
priest, Rector of the University of Paris, and one
of the Council of the League that offered thc
crown of France to the King of Spain in 1591.
Qpposite St John?s Free. Church and the
General Assembly Hall there stood, till the spring
of I 878 that wonderfully picturesque old tenement,
with a description of which we commenced? the
story of the houses on the south side of the Lawn.
market; and lower down the Bow was another,
demolished about the same time.
The latter was a stone land, without any timbe1
additions, having a dark grey front of polished
ashlar, supposed to have been built in the days
of Charles I. String-courses of moulded stone
decorated it, and on the bed-corbel of its crowstepped
gable was a shield with the lettersI. O.,I. B.,
with a merchant?s mark between them, doubtless
the initials of the first proprietor and of his wife.
From its gloomy history and better architecture,
the next tenement, which stood a little way back
-for every house in the Bow was built without the
slightest reference to the site of its neighbouris
more worthy of note, as the alleged abode of the
temble wizard, and bearing the name of Major
Weir?s Land-but in reality the dwelling of the
major stood behind it.
The city motto appeared on a CU~~OLIS dormer
window over the staircase, and above the elaborately
moulded entrance door, which was only five
feet six inches in height by three feet six i l l
breadth, were the legend and date,
SOLI. DEO. HONOR. ET
CLORIA. D.W. 1604.
In the centre were the arms of David Williamson,
a wealthy citizen, to whom the house belonged.
This legend, so common over the old doorways of
the city, was the fashionable grace before dinner
at the tables of the Scottish noblesse during the
reigns of Mary and James VI., and like others
noted here, was deemed to act as a charm, and to
bar the entrance of evil. But the turnpike stair
within, says Chambers, ?was said to possess a
strange peculiarity-namely, that people who ascended
it felt as if going down, and not up a stair.?
A passage, low-browed, dark, and heavily vaulted,
led, until February, 1878, through this tall tenement
into a narrow court eastward thereof, a
gloomy, dark, and most desolate-looking place,
and there abode of old with his sister, Grizel, the
notorious wizard whose memory is so inseparably
woven up with the superstitions of old Edinburgh.
Major Thomas Weir of Kirktown was a native
of Lanarkshire, where the people believed that his
mother had taught him the art of sorcery, before he
joined (as Lieutenant) the Scottish army, sent by
the Covenanters in 1641 for the protection of the
Ulster colonists, and with which he probably
served at the storming of Carrickfergus and the
battle of Benburb; and from this force he had
been appointed, when Major in the Earl of Lanark?s
Regiment, and Captain-Lieutenant of Home?s
Regiment, to the command of that ancient
gendarmerie, the Guard of Edinburgh, in which
capacity he attended the execution of the great
Montrose in 1650.
He wasa grim-featured man, with a large nose,
and always wore a black cloak of ample dimensions.
He usually carried a staff, the supposed magical
powers of which made it a terror to the community.
He pretended to be a religious man, but was in
reality a detestable hypocrite ; and the frightful
story of his secret life is said to have furnished
Lord Byron with the plot of his tragedy Manfreed;
md his evil reputation, which does not rest on
ibscure allusions in legendary superstition, has left,
The West BOW.] MAJOR WEIR.
even to this day, a deep-rooted impression on the
popular mind.
A powerful hand at praying and expounding,
46 ? he became so notoriously regarded among the
Presbyterian sect, that if four met together, be sure
Major Weir was one,?? says Chambers, quoting
Fraser?s MS. in the Advocate?s Library ; ? ?at private
meetings he prayed to admiration, which
He
never married, but lived in a private lodging with
his sister Grizel Weir. Many resorted to his
house to join with him, and hear him pray; but it
was observed that he could not officiate in any
holy duty without the black staff, or rod, in his
hand, and leaning upon it, which made those who
heard him pray, admire his flood in prayer, his
ready extemporary expression, his heavenly gesture,
so that he was thought more an angel than a
man, and was termed by some of the holy sisters,
ordinarily Angelid Tho?nas.? ??
? Holy sisters,? in those days abounded in the
major?s quarter ; and, indeed, during all the latter
part of the 17th century the inhabitants of the Bow
enjoyed a peculiar fame for piety and zeal in the
cause of the National Covenant, and were frequently
subjected to the wit of the Cavalier faction;
Dr. Pitcairn, Pennycook, the burgess bard, stigmatised
them as the (? Bow-head Saints,? the ? godly
plants of the Bow-head,? &c. ; and even Sir Walter
Scott, in describing the departure of Dundee,
sings :-
? As he rode down the sanctified bends of the Bow,
Ilka carline was flyting and shaking her POW i?
and it was in this quarter that many of the polemical
pamphlets and sermons of Presbyterian
divines have since been published.
after a life characterised externally
by all the graces of devotion, but polluted in secret
by crimes of the most revolting nature, and which
little needed the addition of wizardry to excite the
horror of living men, fell into a severe sickness,
which affected his mind so much that he made
open and voluntary confession of all his wickedness.?
According to Professor Sinclair, the major had
made a compact with the devil, who of course outwitted
his victim. The fiend had promised, it was
said, to keep him scatheless from all peril, but a
single ? burn ; hence the accidental naming of a
man named Bum, by the sentinels at the NetheI
Bow Port, when he visited them as commande1
of the Guard, cast him into a fit of terror; and
on another occasion, finding Libberton Burn
?before him, was sufficient to make him turn back
trembling.
. made many of that stamp court his converse.
.
Major Weir,
____ ~~~ ~~~ ~~ ~
His sick-bed confession, when he was now
verging on his seventieth year, seemed at first so
incredible that Sir Andrew Ramsay of Abbotshall,
who was Lord Provost from 1662 to 1673, refused
for a time to order his arrest. Eventually, however,
the major, his sister (the partner of one of his
crimes), and the black magical staff, were all taken
into custody and lodged in the Tolbooth.
The staff was secured by the express request of
his sister, and local superstition still records how it
was wont to perform all the major?s errands for any
article he wanted from the neighbouring shops ;
that it answered the door when ?the pin was
tirled,? and preceded him in the capacity of a linkboy
at night in the Lawnmarket. In his house
several sums of money in dollars were found
wrapped up in pieces of cloth. A fragment of the
latter, on being thrown on the fire by the bailie in
charge, went up the wide chimney with an explosion
like a cannon, while the dollars, when the
magistrate took them home, flew about in such a
fashion that the demolition of his house seemed
imminent.
While in prison he confessed, without scruple,
that he had been guilty of crimes alike possible
and impossible. Stung to madness by conscience,
the unfortunate wretch seemed to feel some comfort
in sharing his misdeeds with the devil, yet he
refused to address himself to Heaven for pardon.
To all who urged him to pray, he answered by
wild screams. ?Torment me no m o r e 1 am tortured
enough already !?, was his constant cry ; and
he declined to see a clergyman of any creed, saying,
acdording to ? Law?s Memorials,? that ?? his
condemnation was sealed; and since he was to go
to the devil, he did not wish to anger him !?
When asked by the minister of Ormiston if he
had ever seen the devil, he answered, (? that any
fealling he ever hade of him was in the dark.?
He and his sister were tried on the 9th of April,
1670, before the Justiciary Court; he was sentenced
to be strangled and burned, between Edinburgh
and Leith, and his sister Grizel (called Jean
by some), to be hanged in the Grassmarket.
When hi?s neck was encircled by the fatal rope
at the place of execution, and the fire that was to
consume his body-the ?burn to which, as the
people said the devil had lured him-he was bid
to say, ?Lord, be merciful to me!? but he only
replied fiercely and mournfully, ? Let me alone-
I will not ; I have lived as a beast and must die
like a beast.? When his lifeless body fell from the
stake into the flaming pyre beneath, his favourite
stick, which (according to RavaiZZm Rediuivus)
?? was all of one piece of thornwood, with a crooked
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