In the Canongate there is a house which has had the fortune to be connected with more than one of the most interesting points in our history. It is usually styled Moray House, being the entailed property of the noble family of Moray. The large proportions and elegant appearance of this mansion distinguish it from all the surrounding buildings, and in the rear (1847) there is a fine garden, descending in the old fashion by a series of terraces. Though long deserted by the Earls of Moray, it has been till a recent time kept in the best order, being occupied by families of respectable character.[242]

This house was built in the early part of the reign of Charles I. (about 1628) by Mary, Countess of Home, then a widow. Her ladyship’s initials, M. H., appear, in cipher fashion, underneath her coronet upon various parts of the exterior; and over one of the principal windows towards the street there is a lozenge shield, containing the two lions rampant which form the coat armorial of the Home family. Lady Home was an English lady, being the daughter of Edward Sutton, Lord Dudley. She seems to have been unusually wealthy for the dowager of a Scottish earl, for in 1644 the English Parliament repaid seventy thousand pounds which she had lent to the Scottish Covenanting Government; and she is found in the same year lending seven thousand to aid in paying the detachment of troops which that Government had sent to Ireland. She was also a sufferer, however, by the civil war, in as far as Dunglass House, which was blown up in 1640, by accident, when in the hands of the Covenanters, belonged to her in liferent. To her affluent circumstances, and the taste which she probably brought with her from her native country, may be ascribed the superior style of this mansion, which not only displays in the outside many traces of the elegant architecture which prevailed in England in the reign of James I., but contains two state apartments, decorated in the most elaborate manner, both in the walls and ceilings, with the favourite stucco-work of that reign. On the death of Lady Home the house passed (her ladyship having no surviving male issue) to her daughters and co-heiresses, Margaret, Countess of Moray, and Anne, Countess (afterwards Duchess) of Lauderdale, between whom the entire property of their father, the first Earl of Home, appears to have been divided, his title going into another line. By an arrangement between the two sisters, the house became, in 1645, the property of the Countess of Moray and her son James, Lord Doune.

It stood in this condition as to ownership, though still popularly called ‘Lady Home’s Lodging,’ when, in the summer of 1648, Oliver Cromwell paid his first visit to Edinburgh. Cromwell had then just completed the overthrow of the army of the Engagement—a gallant body of troops which had been sent into England by the more Cavalier party of the Scottish Covenanters, in the hope of rescuing the king from the hands of the sectaries. The victorious general, with his companion Lambert, took up his quarters in this house, and here received the visits of some of the leaders of the less loyal party of the Covenanters—the Marquis of Argyll, the Chancellor Loudoun, the Earl of Lothian, the Lords Arbuthnot, Elcho, and Burleigh, and the Reverend Messrs David Dickson, Robert Blair, and James Guthrie. ‘What passed among them,’ says Bishop Henry Guthrie in his Memoirs, ‘came not to be known infallibly; but it was talked very loud that he did communicate to them his design in reference to the king, and had their assent thereto.’ It is scarcely necessary to remark that this was probably no more than a piece of Cavalier scandal, for there is no reason to believe that Cromwell, if he yet contemplated the death of the king, would have disclosed his views to men still so far tinctured with loyalty as those enumerated. Cromwell’s object in visiting Edinburgh on this occasion and in holding these conferences, was probably limited to the reinstatement of the ultra-Presbyterian party in the government, from which the Duke of Hamilton and other loyalists had lately displaced it.

When, in 1650, the Lord Lorn, eldest son of the Marquis of Argyll, was married to Lady Mary Stuart, eldest daughter of the Earl of Moray, the wedding feast ‘stood,’ as contemporary writers express it, at the Earl of Moray’s house in the Canongate. The event so auspicious to these great families was signalised by a circumstance of a very remarkable kind. A whole week had been passed in festivity by the wedded pair and their relations, when, on Saturday the 18th of May, the Marquis of Montrose was brought to Edinburgh, an excommunicated and already condemned captive, having been taken in the north in an unsuccessful attempt to raise a Cavalier party for his young and exiled prince. When the former relative circumstances of Argyll and Montrose are called to mind—when it is recollected that they had some years before struggled for an ascendancy in the civil affairs of Scotland, that Montrose had afterwards chased Argyll round and round the Highlands, burned and plundered his country undisturbed, and on one occasion overthrown his forces in a sanguinary action, while Argyll looked on from a safe distance at sea—the present relative circumstances of the two chiefs become a striking illustration of the vicissitudes in personal fortune that characterise a time of civil commotion. Montrose, after riding from Leith on a sorry horse, was led into the Canongate by the Watergate, and there placed upon a low cart, driven by the common executioner. In this ignominious fashion he was conducted up the street towards the prison, in which he was to have only two days to live, and in passing along was necessarily brought under the walls and windows of Moray House. On his approach to that mansion, the Marquis of Argyll, his lady, and children, together with the whole of the marriage-party, left their banqueting, and stepping out to a balcony which overhangs the street, there planted themselves to gaze on the prostrated enemy of their house and cause. Here, indeed, they had the pleasure of seeing Montrose in all external circumstances reduced beneath their feet; but they had not calculated on the strength of nature which enabled that extraordinary man to overcome so much of the bitterness of humiliation and of death. He is said to have gazed upon them with so much serenity that they shrank back with some degree of discomposure, though not till the marchioness had expressed her spite at the fallen hero by spitting at him—an act which in the present age will scarcely be credible, though any one well acquainted with the history of the seventeenth century will have too little reason to doubt it.

In a Latin manuscript of this period, the gardens connected with the house of the Earl of Moray are spoken of as ‘of such elegance, and cultivated with so much care, as to vie with those of warmer countries, and perhaps even of England itself. And here,’ pursues the writer, ‘you may see how much the art and industry of man may avail in supplying the defects of nature. Scarcely any one would believe it possible to give so much beauty to a garden in this frigid clime.’ One reason for the excellence of the garden may have been its southern exposure. On the uppermost of its terraces there is a large and beautiful thorn, with pensile leaves; on the second there are some fruit-trees, the branches of which have been caused to spread out in a particular way, so as to form a kind of cup, possibly for the reception of a pleasure-party, for such fantastic twistings of nature were not uncommon among our ancestors. In the lowest level of the garden there is a little receptacle for water, beside which is the statue of a fishing-boy, having a basket of fish at his feet, and a clam-shell inverted upon his head.[243] Here is also a small building, surmounted by two lions holding female shields, and which may therefore be supposed contemporaneous with the house: this was formerly a summer-house, but has latterly been expanded into the character of a conservatory. Tradition vaguely reports it as the place where the Union between England and Scotland was signed; though there is also a popular story of that fact having been accomplished in a laigh shop of the High Street (marked No. 117), at one time a tavern, and known as the Union Cellar.[244] Probably the rumour, in at least the first instance, refers only to private arrangements connected with the passing of the celebrated statute in question. The Chancellor Earl of Seafield inhabited Moray House at that time on lease, and nothing could be more likely than that he should there have after-dinner consultations on the pending measure, which might in the evening be adjourned to this garden retreat.

It would appear that about this period the garden attached to the house was a sort of a public promenade or lounging-place; as was also the garden connected with Heriot’s Hospital. In this character it forms a scene in the licentious play called The Assembly, written in 1692 by Dr Pitcairn. Will, ‘a discreet smart gentleman,’ as he is termed in the prefixed list of dramatis personÆ, but in reality a perfect debauchee, first makes an appointment with Violetta, his mistress, to meet her in this place; and as she is under the charge of a sourly devout aunt, he has to propound the matter in metaphorical language. Pretending to expound a particular passage in the Song of Solomon for the benefit of the dame, he thus gives the hint to her young protÉgÉe:

‘Will. “Come, my beloved, let us walk in the fields, let us lodge in the villages.” The same metaphor still. The kirk not having the liberty of bringing her servant to her mother’s house, resolveth to meet him in the villages, such as the Canongate, in respect of Edinburgh; and the vineyard, such as my Lady Murray’s Yards, to use a homely comparison.

‘Old Lady. A wondrous young man this!

****

‘Will. The eighth chapter towards the close: “Thou that dwellest in the gardens, cause me to hear thy voice.”

‘Violetta. That’s still alluding to the metaphor of a gallant, who, by some signs, warns his mistress to make haste—a whistle or so. The same with early in the former chapter; that is to say, to-morrow by six o’clock. Make haste to accomplish our loves.

‘Old L. Thou art a hopeful girl; I hope God has blest my pains on thee.’

In terms of this curious assignation, the third act opens in a walk in Lady Murray’s Yards, where Will meets his beloved Violetta. After a great deal of badinage, in the style of Dryden’s comedies, which were probably Dr Pitcairn’s favourite models, the dialogue proceeds in the following style:

‘Will. I’ll marry you at the rights, if you can find in your heart to give yourself to an honest fellow of no great fortune.

‘Vio. In truth, sir, methinks it were fully as much for my future comfort to bestow myself, and any little fortune I have, upon you, as some reverend spark in a band and short cloak, with the patrimony of a good gift of prayer, and as little sense as his father, who was hanged in the Grassmarket for murdering the king’s officers, had of honesty.

‘Will. Then I must acknowledge, my dear madam, I am most damnably in love with you, and must have you by foul or fair means; choose you whether.

‘Vio. I’ll give you fair-play in an honest way.

‘Will. Then, madam, I can command a parson when I please; and if you be half so kind as I could wish, we’ll take a hackney, and trot up to some honest curate’s house: besides, a guinea or so will be a charity to him perhaps.

‘Vio. Hold a little; I am hardly ready for that yet,’ &c.

After the departure of this hopeful couple, Lord Huffy and Lord Whigriddin, who are understood to have been intended for Lord Leven (son of the Earl of Melville) and the Earl of Crawford, enter the gardens, and hold some discourse of a different kind.