234 OLD AND NEW EDINBURGH. [Grassmarket.
Some English writers have denied that Henry
was ever in Edinburgh at any time; and that
the Queen alone came, while he remained at
Kikcudbright. But Sir Walter Scott, in a note to
Mannion,? records, that he had seen in possession
of Lord Napier, ? a grant by Henry of forty merks
to his lordship?s ancestor, John Napier (of Merchiston),
subscribed by the King himself at
Edinburgh, the 28th August, in the thirty-ninth
year of his reign, which exactly corresponds with
the year of God, 1461.?
Abercrombie, in his Martial Achievements,?
after detailing some negociations between the
Scottish ministry of James 111. (then a minor) and
Henry VI., says, that after they were complete,
?? the indefatigable Queen of England left the King,
her husband, at his lodgings in the Greyfriars of
Edinburgh, where his own inclinations to devotion
and solitude made him choose to reside, and went
with her son into France, not doubting but that by
the mediation of the King of Sicily, her father, she
should be able to purchase both men and money
in that kingdom.?
That a church would naturally form a most
nedessary appendage to such a foundation as this
monastery can scarcely be doubted, and Wilson
says that he is inclined to infer the existence of
one, and of a churchyard, long before Queen
Mary?s grant of the gardens to the city, and of this
three proofs can be given at least.
A portion of the treaty of peace between James
111. and Edward IV. included a proposal of the
latter that his youngest daughter, the Princess
Cecilia, then in her fourth year, should be betrothed
to the Crown Prince of Scotland, then an
infant of two years old, and that her dowry 01
zo,ooo merks should be paid by annual instalments
commencing from the date of the contract.
Os this basis a peace was concluded, the ceremony
of its ratification being performed, along with the be
trothal, 44in the church of the Grey Friars, at
Edinburgh, where the Earl of Lindsay and Lord
Scrope appeared as the representatives of theiI
respective sovereigns.?
The ? Diurnal of Occurrents records that on the
7th July, 1571, the armed craftsmen made their
musters ?4in the Gray Friere Kirk Yaird,? and,
though the date of the modem church, to which we
shall refer, is 1613, Birrel, in his diary, under date
26th April, 1598, refers to works in progress by
In 1559, when the storm of the Reformation
broke forth, the Earl of Argyle entered Edinburgh
with his followers, and ? the work of purification ?I
began with a vengeance. The Trinity College
the Societie at the Gray Friar Kirke.?
Church, St Giles?s, St. Mary-in-the-Field, the monasteries
of the Black and Grey Friars, were pillaged
of everything they contained Of the two iatter
establishments the bare walls alone were left standing.
In 1560 the stones of these two edifices were
ordered to be used for the bigging of dykes j? and
other works connected with the Good Town j and
in 1562 we are told that a good crop of corn
was sown in the Grey Friars? Yard by ?Rowye
Gairdner, fleschour,? so that it could not have
been a place for interment at that time.
The Greyfriars? Port was a gate which led to
an unenclosed common, skirting the north side of
the Burgh Muir, and which was only included in
the precincts of the city by the last extension of
the walls in 1618, when the land, ten acres in
extent, was purchased by the city from Towers of
Inverleith.
In 1530 a woman named Katharine Heriot,
accused of theft and bringing contagious sickness
from Leith into the city, was ordered to be drowned
in the, Quarry Holes at the Greyfriars? Port. In
the same year, Janet Gowane, accused of haiffand
the pestilens apone hir,? was branded on both
cheeks at the same place, and expelled the city.
This gate was afterwards called the Society and
also the Bristo Port.
Among the edifices removed in the Grassmarket
was a very quaint one, immediately westward of
Heriot?s Bridge, which exhibited a very perfect
specimen of a remarkably antique style of window,
with folding shutters and transom of oak entire
below, and glass in the upper part set in ornamental
patterns of lead.
Near this is the New Corn Exchange, designed
by David Cousin, and erected in 1849 at the
cost of Azo,ooo, measuring 160feet long by 120
broad ; it is in the Italian style, with a handsome
front of three storeys, and a campanile or belfry
at the north end. It is fitted up with desks and
stalls for the purpose of mercantile transactions,
and has been, from its great size and space
internally, the scene of many public festivals, the
chief of which were perhaps the great Crimean
banquet, given there on the 31st of October, 1856,
to the soldiers of the 34th Foot, 5th Dragoon
Guards, and Royal Artillery j and that other given
after the close of the Indian Mutiny to the soldiers
of the Rossshire Buffs, which elicited a very
striking display of high national enthusiasm.
On the north side of the Market Place there yet
stands the old White Hart Inn, an edifice of considerable
antiquity. It was a place of entertainment
as far back perhaps as the days when the Highland
drovers cage to market armed with sword and
