230 OLD AND NEW EDINBURGH. [Grassmarket:
houses which were inhabited by this gang were
well chosen for the purpose to which they were
put. Burke?s dwelling, in which he has only
resided since June last, is at the end of a long
passage, and separated from every other house
except one. After going through the close from
the street there is a descent by a stair to the
passage, at the end of which is to be found this
habitation of wickedness. I t consists of one apartment,
an oblong square, at the end of which is a
miserable bed, under which may still be seen some
straw in which his murdered victims were concealed.
The house of Hare is in a more retired
situation. The passage to it is by a dark and
dirty close, in which there? are no inhabitants,
except in the tlat above. Both houses are on the
ground floor.?
Tanner?s Clme still exists, but the abodes of
those two wretches-the most cold-blooded criminals
in history-are now numbered, as we have stated,
among the things that were.
At the head of Liberton?s Wynd three reversed
stones indicate where, on this? and on other occasions,
the last sentence of the law was carried out.
CHAPTER XXX.
THE GRASSMARKET.
The Grassmarket-The Mart of 1477-Margaret Tudor-Noted Executions-?Half Hangit Maggie Dickson?4talian hlountebanks-Grey
Friary Founded by Jam- I.-Henry VI. of England a Fugitive-The Grev Friars Port-New Corn Exchanee-The White Hone Inn
-Camels-The Castle Wvnd-First Gaelic ChatKl therdurrie Close-The Cockpit-Story of Watt and Downie, ?The Friends of the
People ?-Their Trial aniSentencc-Executbn bf Watt.
THE Grassmarket occupies that part of the
southern valley which lies between the eastern
portion of the Highnggs and the ridge of the Castle
Hill and Street. It is a spacious and stately
rectangle, 230 yards in length, communicating at
its south-east corner with the ancient Candlemaker
Row and southern portion of the old town, and at
its north-east angle with the acclivitous, winding,
narrow, and more ancient alley, the West Bow, or
that fragment of it which now NOS into Victoria
Street, and the steps near the (now demolished)
Land of Weir the wizard.
The Grassmarket is darkly overhung on the
north by the precipitous side of the Castle Esplanade,
the new west approach, and the towering
masses of Johnstone Terrace and the General
Assembly Hall, but on the south is the gentler
slope, crowned by the turrets of Heriot?s Hospital
and the heavy mass of the Greyfriars churches.
The western end of this rectangle was long
closed up and encroached upon by the Corn
Market, an unsightly arcaded edifice, 80 feet long
by 45 broad, with a central belfry and clock, now
swept away, and its eastern end, where the old
Corn Market is shown in Edgar?s map, is deeply
associated with much that is sad, terrible, and
deplorable in Scottish history, as the scene of the
fervid testimony and dying supplications of many
a martyr to U the broken covenant,? in defence of
that Church, every stone of which may be said to
have been cemented by the blood of the people.
Now the Grassmarket is the chief rendezvous
of carriers and farmers, and persons of various
classes connected with the county horse and cattle
markets, and presents a remarkably airy, busy, and
imposing appearance, with its infinite variety of
architecture, crow-stepped gables, great chimneys,
turnpike stairs, old signboards, and projections of
many kinds.
The assignment of this locality as the site ot a
weekly market dates from the year 1477, when
King James 111. by his charter for the holding of
markets, ordained- that wood and timber be sold
?fra Dalrimpill yarde to the Grey Friars and
westerwart; alswa all old graith and geir to be
vsit and soldin the Friday market before the Greyfriars
lyke as is usit in uthir cuntries.?
In 1503, on the mamage of Margaret of England
to James IV., the royal party were met at the
western entrance to the city by the whole of the
Greyfriars-whose monastery was on the south side
of the Grassmarket-bearing in procession their
most valued relics, which were presented to the
royal pair to kiss ; and thereafter they were stayed
at an embattled barrier, erected for the occasion,
at the windows of which appeared angels singing
songs of welcome to the English bride, while one
presented her with the keys of Edinburgh.
In 1543 we first hear of this part of the city
having been causewayed, or paved, when the
Provost and Bailies employed Moreis Crawfurd to
mend ?the calsay,? at 26s. 8d. per rood from the
Upper Bow to the West Port
In 1560 the magistrates removed the Corn
Grassmarket.] EXECUTIONS IN THE GUSSMARKET. 231
Market, from the corner of Marlin?s Wynd (where
Blair Street is now) to the east end of the Grassmarket,
where it continued to be held until within
the last few years.
It was not until about a century later that this
great market place began to acquire an interest of
a gloomy and peculiar character, as the scene of
the public execution of many victims of religious
intolerance, who died heroically here, and also as
the spot where niany criminals met their doom.
Prior to the adoption of this place for public
executions, the Castle Hill and Market Cross had
been the spots chosen j and a sword, as in France
and elsewhere on the Continent, was used, before
the introduction of the Maiden, for beheading.
, Thus we find that in 1564, the magistrates, because
the old beheading sword had become worn out, reteived
from William Macartnay ? his tua-handit
sword, to be usit for ane heidmg sword,? and
gave him the sum of five pounds therefor.
Among some of the most noted eFecutions in the
Grassmarket were those of the fanatic Mitchel in
1676, for attempting to shoot Archbishop Sharp in
1668; of Sergeant John Nisbett, of Hardhill, in
1685, who had received seventeen wounds at the
battle of Pentland, and fought at Drumclog, according
to the Wodrow Biographies ; of Isabel Alison
and Marion Harvey-the latter only twenty years of
age-two young women, for merely having heard
Donald Cargill preach. The human shambles in
this place of wailing witnessed executions of this
kind almost daily till the 17th of February, 1688,
when James Renwick, the celebrated field preacher,
and the last martyr of the Covenant, was found
guilty, on his own confession, of disowning an uncovenanted
king, and executed in the twenty-sixth
yearof his age. Most of the hundred and odd
pious persons who suffered for the same cause in
Edinburgh breathed their last prayers on this spot.
Hence arose the Duke of Rothes? remark, when a
covenanting prisoner proved obdurate, ? Then let
him glorify God in the Grassmarket?-the death
of that class of victinis always being accompanied
by much psalm-singing on the scaffold. In the time
of Charles II., Alexander Cockburn, the city hangman,
having murdered a King?s Bluegown, died here
the death he had so often meted out to others.
In 1724 the same place was the scene of the
partial execution of a woman, long remembered in
Edinburgh, as ?? Half-hangit Maggie Dickson.? She
was a native of Inveresk, and was tried under
the Act of 1690 for concealment of pregnancy, in
the case of a dead child ; and the defence that she
was a married woman, though living apart from her
husband, who was working in the keels at New-
?
castle, proved of no avail, and a broadside of the
day details her execution with homble minuteness ;
how the hangman did his usual office of dragging
down her legs, and how the ?body, after hanging
the allotted time, was put into a coffin, thecooms
of which were nailed firmly to the gibbet-foot.
After a scuffle with some surgeon-apprentices
who wished to possess themselves of the body, her
friends conveyed it away by the Society Port, but
the jolting of the cart in which the coffin lay had
stirred vitality and set the blood in motion. Thus
she was found to be alive when passing Peffermiln,
and was completely restored at Musselburgh, where
flocks of people came daily to see her. She had
several children after this event, and lived long as
the keeper of an ale-house and as a crier of salt in
the streets of Edinburgh. (? Dom Ann.? III., StaL
Acct., Vol XVI).
In the account of the Porteous Mob eo1 I.,
pp. I 28-13 I), we have referred to the executions of
Wilson and of Porteous, in 1736, in this placethe
street ?crowded with rioters, crimson with
torchlight, spectators filling every window of the
tall houses-the Castle standing high above the
tumult amidst the blue midnight and the stars.?
It Continued to be the scene of such events till
1784; and in a central situation at the east end
of the market there remained until 1823 a qoassive
block of sandstone, having in its c h t r ~ a quadrangular
hole, which served as the socket of the
gallows-tree ; but instead of the stone there is now
only a St. Andrew?s Cross in the causeway to
indicate the exact spot.
The last person who suffered in the Grassmarket
was James Andrews, hanged there on the 4th of
February, 1784, for a robbery committed in Hope
Park ; and the first person executed at the west end
of the old city gaol, was Alexander Stewart, a youth
pf only fifteen, who had committed many depredations,
and at last had been convicted of breaking
into the house of Captain Hugh Dalrymple, of Fordell
in the Potterrow, and NeidpathCastle, the seat of
the Duke of Queensberry, from which he carried off
many articles of value. It was expressly mentioned
by the judge in his sentence, that he was to be
hanged in the Grassmarket, ?or any other place
the magistrates might appoint,? thus indicating that
a change was in contemplation ; and accordingly,
the west end of the old Tolbooth was fitted up for
his execution, which took place on the 20th of
April, 1785.
In 1733 the Grassmarket was the scene of some
remarkable feats, performed by a couple of Italian
mountebanks, a father and his son, A rope being
fixed between the half-moon battery of the Castle,
