Essence of Edinburgh: An Eccentric Odyssey

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The Heart of Midlothian

The cruikit spell o’ her backbane,

Yon shadow-mile o’ spire and vane,

Wad ding them a’! Wad ding them a’

Lewis Spence, ‘The Prows o’ Reekie’

Yonder stands Auld Reekie… the heart of Scotland, and each throb that she gives is felt from the edge of the Solway to Duncansby Head.

Sir Walter Scott, The Abbot

IT IS EASY to miss the Heart of Midlothian. If you don’t cast your eyes down you can tramp without noticing over the heart shape set into the pavement close to the entrance of the High Kirk of St Giles. But of course it’s not the real heart. The original Heart of Midlothian is long gone, leaving the 21st century with a heart underfoot and a football team.

Edinburgh is a city of contradiction and paradox, as all who have written about the city acknowledge, and the heart underfoot is an emblem of paradox. It marks the site of the Tolbooth, a grim, multi-purpose building constructed in 1561, the year after the Flodden Wall was completed in an effort to keep out the English. Here it is as described by Walter Scott in The Heart of Midlothian (1818), the novel that takes its name from the Tolbooth itself:

Reuben Butler stood now before the Gothic entrance of the ancient prison, which… rears its ancient front in the very middle of the High Street forming… the termination to a huge pile of buildings called the Luckenbooths, which, for some inconceivable reason, our ancestors had jammed into the midst of the principal street of the town, leaving for passage a narrow street on the north, and on the south, into which the prison opens, a narrow crooked lane, winding between the high and sombre walls of the Tolbooth and the adjacent houses upon the one side, and the buttresses and projections of the old Cathedral upon the other.

According to Robert T Skinner, the heart in the street marks the approximate position of the door to the Tolbooth, and was placed there in honour of Scott.

Initially the Tolbooth housed the Scottish parliament, as well as the courts of justice and a prison, but in 1639 parliament moved to a new building just to the south of St Giles. This came about at the insistence of Charles I, who also demanded that the city pay for the construction. Charles did not otherwise take much interest in Scotland.

The Heart of Midlothian was, according to Henry Cockburn, ‘a most atrocious jail… the very breath of which almost struck down any stranger who entered its dismal door’. Its walls were ‘black and horrid’, the small dark cells ‘airless, waterless, drainless; a living grave’. It was a ‘dirty, fetid, cruel torture-house… more dreadful in its sufferings, more certain in its corruption, overwhelming the innocent with a more tremendous sense of despair, provoking the guilty to more audacious defiance’. Yet when it was eventually demolished Cockburn was sorry to see it go. In his view, nothing justified the destruction of the repository of so much history.

The Tolbooth went in 1817 – it had been in a bad state of repair for many decades which can’t have made the experience of its inmates any easier – and Scott, who was passionately interested in evidence of the past, was able to secure parts of it for Abbotsford, the splendidly eclectic house he built on the banks of the Tweed 40-odd miles away. The gateway and the door to the prison were, in Scott’s words, ‘employed in decorating the entrance of his kitchen court at Abbotsford’, and he adds:

the application of these relics of the Heart of Midlothian to serve as the postern gate to a court of modern offices, may be justly ridiculed as whimsical; but yet it is not without interest, that we see the gateway through which so much of the stormy politics of a rude age, and the vice and misery of later times, had found their passage, now occupied in the service of rural economy.

In 1817 Scott also began work on the novel, which was published the following year. The two events are clearly connected. Scott would in his fiction have quite a lot to say about stormy politics.

But let’s return to Reuben Butler. He is not the hero of Scott’s novel, who is undoubtedly Jeanie Deans, one of Scott’s most impressive creations, but he is a crucial figure. He is, in a sense, our guide to the Edinburgh of 1736, when the novel is set. Why is he standing in front of the entrance to the Tolbooth? He is hoping to visit one of the inmates, Jeanie’s sister Effie, imprisoned for infanticide for which the punishment is death. Butler is a not quite fully fledged minister, a modest and mild and, it has to be said, rather boring man, who hopes to marry Jeanie, whom he has known since childhood. Butler is denied a meeting with Effie and, disappointed, sets out to make his way home to Liberton through the city’s West Port at the west end of the Grassmarket. The gate takes him into a suburb called Portsburgh (the existing Portsburgh Square is a reminder), ‘chiefly inhabited,’ Scott tells us, ‘by the lower order of citizens and mechanics’. There he encounters ‘a considerable mass’ of people moving rapidly towards the gate he has just come through. Butler is recognised as a clergyman and his services are demanded for what is about to happen. He is swept along back to the Tolbooth. The mob now numbers several thousand. The rioters attack the door with sledge-hammers and eventually set it alight. They charge through the flames and hunt down their victim, Captain John Porteous. Butler’s role is to prepare Porteous for death.

Grassmarket. Alan Daiches. Courtesy National Library of Scotland.

Scott’s description of the Porteous Riots of 1736 is vivid, detailed and precise. He makes it clear that he has drawn on contemporary evidence and takes pains to assure his readers that his narrative is as authentic as it can be. He knows the streets and buildings intimately. Captain Porteous is dragged from the Tolbooth and taken to the Grassmarket where he is hanged from a dyer’s pole. Butler, whose attempts to restrain the mob are ineffectual, slips away through the crowd but glances back to see:

by the red and dusky light of the torches… a figure wavering and struggling as it hung suspended above the heads of the multitude… The sight was of a nature to double his horror and to add wings to his flight.

According to Alexander Carlyle, the hanging was carried out in silence.

I walk from the heart under my feet west up the High Street. As always, at any time of the year, it is busy. There are tourists, a crocodile of schoolchildren, researchers heading for the National Library, council employees heading for the City Chambers, lawyers, mothers with buggies, dogs on strings. The lights at George IV Bridge pause the traffic only briefly and plenty of pedestrians ignore the red. I wait, and then follow the route of the rioters who made their way along the High Street and down the steep curve of the West Bow into the Grassmarket, an ominous torch-lit procession. Behind the doors and windows of the tall buildings on either side, people must have heard voices and the tramp of feet and known what was about to happen.

The Porteous Riots were an extraordinary episode in Edinburgh’s history, which had seen plenty of mob protest – notably 30 years earlier at the time when the Union of Parliaments was being debated – and would see more. John Porteous was a captain of the Town Guard who had been convicted of causing the deaths of spectators at the execution of a smuggler for whom there was considerable public sympathy. The place of execution was the Grassmarket, where a gallows was erected. These events drew enormous crowds. Porteous and his men were nervous, suspecting an attempt to rescue the convicted man, and when the crowd grew hostile they opened fire, leaving six or seven dead and many wounded. Porteous was found to be responsible for the deaths, but on the appointed day of his execution a reprieve arrived from Queen Caroline – the king, George II, was abroad at the time. The Edinburgh mob responded by taking matters into their own hands. They wanted justice, but they also resented interference from London.

Public executions had at one time taken place beside the Tolbooth, virtually on the doorstep of St Giles, and for a while these were carried out by a specially designed beheading machine built in 1564. Known as ‘the Maiden’, it despatched around one hundred men and women. The heads of those designated ‘traitors’ were displayed over the building’s north gable, uncomfortably close to the crowds who passed in the narrow street below. Among the heads was that of James Douglas, Earl of Morton, regent on behalf of the young James VI after the death of his mother Mary, Queen of Scots. Morton, who had been instrumental in the introduction of the Maiden, was convicted of complicity in the death of Mary’s husband Darnley. He was executed on 2 June 1581 by means that he himself regarded as clean and efficient.

Over a hundred years later the Maiden despatched Archibald Campbell, 9th Earl of Argyll, a prominent political figure in the 1640s who had been a leader of the Covenanting rebellion against Charles I but later supported the king. He had been tried for treason in 1681 but escaped to Holland. Four years later he returned, led an attempt to displace James VII and II and put the Duke of Monmouth on the throne. He was captured on the island of Inchinnan in the Clyde. Twelve days later, on 30 June 1685, the Maiden claimed his head. He met his end with ‘much calmness and serenity of soul’, according to Robert Wodrow, author of The History of the Sufferings of the Church of Scotland. His head was also displayed on the Tolbooth, on the same spike, it is said, occupied 30 years earlier by the head of his rival and critic James Graham, Marquis of Montrose, who had also changed sides. Montrose, however, escaped the Maiden – he was hanged. In James Robertson’s novel The Fanatic (2000) James Mitchel, in 1656, stands in the High Street and looks up at a skull picked clean by the gulls, the ‘stripped bone’ looking more ‘like part of the stonework, a defective gargoyle, than something human’. It is Montrose, ‘the empty head of a vain and prideful villain’ according to a neighbour who stops to speak to Mitchell. The neighbour is Major Weir who might have been described in the same terms. His was ‘a life characterised externally by all the graces of devotion, but polluted in secret by crimes of the most revolting nature’. These revolting crimes, according to Sir John Lauder, included witchcraft, bestiality and incest. Major Weir admitted his guilt and was ‘brunt’. His sister, also implicated, ‘a very lamentable object’, was hanged. Major Weir has both a solid and a phantom presence in Robertson’s novel.

The Maiden still exists and you can see it in the Scottish galleries of the National Museum of Scotland. It came to the Museum through the Society of Antiquaries, of which Walter Scott was a member. He was present when the beheading machine was handed over to the Society by the Lord Provost in 1797. It was a time of revolution in France and radicalism at home, and the ceremony may have caused a certain frisson among the Society’s members. Scott himself in Rob Roy (1817) invokes the Maiden as a means of bringing Highland feuding to an end: ‘it will be a time to sharp the maiden for shearing o’ craigs and thrapples. I hope to see the auld rusty lass linking at a bluidy harst again.’ This is the comment of an associate of Baillie Nichol Jarvie, the canny Glasgow merchant with a keen eye for commercial possibilities.

A bloody harvest. Midlothian’s heart is unequivocally associated with misery and violence. Standing among the throng of tourists moving up and down the High Street, with the sun shining (it often does) and pubs and cafés and tartanry beckoning, it is hard to recreate the intimacy of life and death that characterised so much of the city’s past. For most of its history the smell of death was inescapable. More so than in other cities? It is the particular concentration of Edinburgh’s Old Town that suggests this may have been so. From a dwelling high up in an Old Town tenement, built high because of the lack of space, you might find yourself eyeball to eyeball with a dead head. The intimacy is held in the stone. That intimacy between life and death, light and dark, openness and secrecy, pleasure and suffering, will be a recurrent theme of this book.

I have not been able to discover at what point the Tolbooth, or the site of the Tolbooth, began to be called the Heart of Midlothian, or why. It is a roughly central point between the city ports, the gates in the city wall: Bristo and Potterrow Ports to the south, the West Port, Netherbow and Cowgate Ports to the east, and the New Port, just to the east of where Waverley Station now is. It is perhaps the approximate centre of the old county of Midlothian. Was the name intended to signify the pulse of the burgh? Was it an ironic comment on crime and the dispensing of justice? Or on the close proximity between sin and the church? For us today the heart embedded in the High Street may seem to be saying ‘I heart Midlothian’, or suggest football rather than punishment, or be nothing more than a bit of quirky street decoration. In fact, its resonance is profound.

In the introductory chapter to The Heart of Midlothian some of this is explored by two Edinburgh lawyers in conversation with a character called Peter Pattieson, a conversation that acts as a conduit to the narrative that is to follow. The lawyers reflect on the fact that the Tolbooth is about to be demolished. On learning that it is known as ‘the Heart of Midlothian’, Peter Pattieson comments, ‘it could be said to have a sad heart’. ‘And a close heart, and a hard heart… a wicked heart and a poor heart’ add the lawyers. But also ‘a strong heart, and a high heart’. One of the lawyers suggests that as the Tolbooth is a condemned building it should be granted its ‘Last Speech, Confession, and Dying Words’. It would be a tale ‘of unvaried sorrow and guilt,’ says Pattieson. But the lawyer disagrees, pointing out that a prison is ‘a world within itself, and has its own business, griefs, and joys, peculiar to its circle’. It is a world of infinite incident and emotion, and crammed full of stories. ‘The true thing will triumph over the brightest inventions of the most ardent imagination.’ So the heart of Midlothian contains all of human life, the engine, perhaps, of the city’s, as well as the novel’s pulse. Perhaps we can push the metaphor further, and suggest that the sad, hard, wicked, poor, strong and high heart is an emblem of much of Scotland’s past.

Whatever its origins, the designation in Scott’s narrative has, I think, another meaning. Effie Deans is a beautiful and vulnerable young woman who has been taken advantage of by a man she will not name. She may or may not be guilty, but in the town there is sympathy for her predicament. The justice system may be relentless, but Edinburgh has a heart. Perhaps it is the town’s populace who are Edinburgh’s beating heart. Or perhaps it is Jeanie Deans herself, who refuses to lie to save her sister, but sets off to walk barefoot to London to plead for Effie’s life – barefoot, because she needs to keep her shoes and stockings decent for her audience with the Duke of Argyll.

The metaphorical resonance of the Heart of Midlothian has another dimension. The novel is set nearly 30 years after the 1707 Union of the Scottish and English Parliaments. Scott believed that the Union was good for Scotland, though his views were not without ambivalence, and that ambivalence is expressed in this novel and elsewhere. When Jeanie tells Effie that she is going to London to plead for her, Effie is disbelieving – how can she possibly go to London, so far away and across the ocean? Jeanie points out that you can get there by land. But 400 miles was still a great distance, and Effie’s disbelief reflects that sense of the British capital occupying an alien world. London, the centre of government and the usual home of the royal family, was not easy to reach, especially on foot. And it was not easy to bridge the gulf of understanding between south and north. The Duke of Argyll is the essential bridge between Jeanie and justice. Argyll, Scott says, was seen by his countrymen as their defender and advocate. Jeannie’s simple trust in his role and his authority both cuts through and highlights the murkier complications of the post-Union relationship between Edinburgh and London. That the two capitals could be brought together by a barefoot lass from the edge of Edinburgh defined by her simple integrity has resonance for the politics of the 21st century.

The connection between Jeanie and the Duke is crucial to the comment Scott is making on the legacy of the Union. The Porteous Riots were a response to the interference of government with Scottish law – the reprieve of Captain Porteous is seen as an offence to the Scottish people. When parliament proposed vindictive measures to punish Edinburgh for allowing the Riots to occur, Argyll vehemently objected, describing the measures as cruel and unjust and counter to both the articles and the spirit of the Treaty of Union. The bill, which proposed abolishing the city guard and destroying the city gates – ‘rather a Hibernian mode of enabling them better to keep the peace’ was Scott’s heavily ironic comment – was amended and the gates and the guard escaped destruction.

A few hundred yards from Edinburgh’s stone heart, as the ubiquitous pigeons fly, is the spot where in 1771 Walter Scott was born. I retrace my steps from the Grassmarket (to which I will return) and then walk south along George IV Bridge, past the Elephant House café where JK Rowling is said to have written parts of her first Harry Potter novel. Perhaps the ghost of Scott, the ‘Wizard of the North’, was hovering at her elbow as she conjured Harry into existence. I turn into Chambers Street. The houses in College Wynd were pulled down – or ‘unbuilt’ to use Lord Cockburn’s word – to make way for the University of Edinburgh’s Old College, which looms dark and solid beyond the imposing Venetian façade of the National Museum. Cockburn got a half holiday from school to see the College’s foundation stone laid, ‘which was done with great civic and masonic pomp’. He watched from the original Royal Infirmary building in Infirmary Street, and pointed out in his memoir that the space between was empty of all but ‘grass fields and gardens’. The university was founded by James VI in 1582, 21 years before James’s departure from Scotland to become James I of a united kingdom depleted the country of much of its cultural life. Founded but not paid for by James, who left it to the town to provide funds for the ‘the Tounis College’. This was to become a Stewart habit.

The scheme for a new university complex was designed by Robert Adam. The foundation stone was laid in 1789, but work came to a halt four years later with the outbreak of the French wars. Robert Adam died and there was a long hiatus before it was agreed to proceed with a revised plan supervised by William Playfair. The Scott family had earlier moved to the newly built George Square, much of which would in due course be unbuilt to make way for more university expansion. The nearest you can get now to Scott’s birthplace is the narrow and uninviting cavern of South College Street which divides the Museum from Old College. At the corner of Chambers Street and Guthrie Street, opposite Old College, a plaque marks the spot ‘near which’ Scott was born.

Scott’s early experience of disappearing Edinburgh may have sparked his life-long interest in preserving the evidence of the past. He was growing up at a time when the town was changing and expanding. The school he attended, the Royal High School, was a new building at the end of Infirmary Street, a stone’s throw from College Wynd and no distance from George Square. Every new building brought the destruction of something old, but sometimes it brought discovery. The last decades of the 18th century and early decades of the 19th saw an unprecedented degree of disturbance of the earth, as the city expanded, canals dug, roads and railways built. The past was uncovered in a way it had never been before. Scott was a keen member of the Society of Antiquaries, founded in 1780 with the object of preserving the evidence. Scott’s novels also aimed to recover and explain Scotland’s past.

I walk down Chambers Street past the Museum, a building once very familiar to me as I worked there for 23 years. For the first 20 or so of those years I entered each day up the broad steps and crossed the lofty, light-filled main hall to my office at the back of the building. It was a good way to start the working day. But with the completion of the new Museum of Scotland, staff were required to enter at the back and could spend the whole day without setting foot in the Museum’s most inspiring space. Today I don’t go into the building, but continue my walk, up South College Street and through the underpass to the newer part of the university. I am heading for George Square, and the house at number 25 where the Scott family moved shortly after Walter’s birth.

George Square, what is left of it, marks Edinburgh’s first Georgian expansion, begun in 1766 when George III was on the throne, although the square was named for George Brown, brother of its architect James Brown. But you can’t go far in the centre of Edinburgh without encountering reminders of the Hanoverian monarchs and their families. We’ll meet them all over the New Town, the second and hugely ambitious phase of Georgian development. Scott would eventually live in the New Town, in Castle Street, while he worked energetically to preserve the past in