The mansion on which I venture to confer this title is an old one of imposing appearance, a little below Moray House. It is conspicuous by three gables presented to the street, and by the unusual space of linear ground which it occupies. Originally, it has had no door to the street. A porte-cochÈre gives admittance to a close behind, from which every part of the house had been admissible, and when this gateway was closed the inhabitants would be in a tolerably defensible position. In this feature the house gives a striking idea of the insecurity which marked the domestic life of three hundred years ago.
BAKEHOUSE CLOSE.
Back of ‘Speaking House.’
Page 313.
It was built in the year of the assassination of the Regent Moray, and one is somewhat surprised to think that, at so dark a crisis of our national history, a mansion of so costly a character should have taken its rise. The owner, whatever grade he held, seems to have felt an apprehension of the popular talk on the subject of his raising so elegant a mansion; and he took a curious mode of deprecating its expression. On a tablet over the ground-floor he inscribes: HODIE MIHI: CRAS TIBI. CUR IGITUR CURAS? along with the year of the erection, 1570. This is as much as to say: ‘I am the happy man to-day; your turn may come to-morrow. Why, then, should you repine?’ One can imagine from a second tablet, a little way farther along the front, that as the building proceeded, the storm of public remark and outcry had come to be more and more bitter, so that the soul of the owner got stirred up into a firm and defying anger. He exclaims (for, though a lettered inscription, one feels it as an exclamation): Ut Tu LinguÆ tuÆ, sic Ego Mear. aurium, Dominus sum (‘As thou of thy tongue, so I of my ears, am lord’); thus quoting, in his rage on this petty occasion, an expression said to have been used in the Roman senate by Titus Tacitus when repelling the charges of Lucius Metellus.[245] Afterwards he seems to have cooled into a religious view of the predicament, and in a third legend along the front he tells the world: Constanti pectori res mortalium umbra; ending a little farther on with an emblem of the Christian hope of the Resurrection, ears of wheat springing from a handful of bones. It is a great pity that we should not know who was the builder and owner of this house, since he has amused us so much with the history of his feelings during the process of its erection. A friend at my elbow suggests—a schoolmaster! But who ever heard of a schoolmaster so handsomely remunerated by his profession as to be able to build a house?
Nothing else is known of the early history of this house beyond the fact of the Canongate magistrates granting a charter for it to the Hammermen of that burgh, September 10, 1647.[246] It was, however, in 1753 occupied by a person of no less distinction than the Dowager Duchess of Gordon.[247]
In the alley passing under this mansion there is a goodly building of more modern structure, forming two sides of a quadrangle, with a small court in front divided from the lane by a wall in which there is a large gateway. Amidst filthiness indescribable, one discerns traces of former elegance: a crest over the doorway—namely, a cock mounted on a trumpet, with the motto ‘Vigilantibus,’ and the date 1633; over two upper windows, the letters ‘S. A. A.’ and ‘D. M. H.’ These memorials, with certain references in the charter before mentioned, leave no room for doubt that this was the house of Sir Archibald Acheson of Abercairny, Secretary of State for Scotland in the reign of Charles I., and ancestor to the Earl of Gosford in Ireland, who to this day bears the same crest and motto. The letters are the initials of Sir Archibald and his wife, Dame Margaret Hamilton. Here of course was the court of Scotland for a certain time, the Secretary of State being the grand dispenser of patronage in our country at that period—here, where nothing but the extremest wretchedness is now to be seen! That boastful bird, too, still seeming to assert the family dignity, two hundred years after it ceased to have any connection with the spot! Verily there are some moral preachments in these dark old closes if modern refinement could go to hear the sermon!
Sir Archibald Acheson acquired extensive lands in Ireland,[248] which have ever since been in the possession of his family. It was a descendant of his, and of the same name, who had the gratification of becoming the landlord of Swift at Market-hill, and whom the dean was consequently led to celebrate in many of his poems. Swift seems to have been on the most familiar terms with this worthy knight and his lady; the latter he was accustomed to call Skinnibonia, Lean, or Snipe, as the humour inclined him. The inimitable comic painting of her ladyship’s maid Hannah, in the debate whether Hamilton’s Bawn should be turned into a malt-house or a barrack, can never perish from our literature. In like humour, the dean asserts the superiority of himself and his brother-tenant Colonel Leslie, who had served much in Spain, over the knight:
‘Proud baronet of Nova Scotia,
The dean and Spaniard much reproach ye.
Of their two fames the world enough rings;
Where are thy services and sufferings?
What if for nothing once you kissed,
Against the grain, a monarch’s fist?
What if among the courtly tribe,
You lost a place and saved a bribe?
And then in surly mood came here
To fifteen hundred pounds a year,
And fierce against the Whigs harangued?
You never ventured to be hanged.
How dare you treat your betters thus?
Are you to be compared to us?’
Speaking also of a celebrated thorn at Market-hill, which had long been a resort of merry-making parties, he reverts to the Scottish Secretary of former days:
‘Sir Archibald, that valorous knight,
The lord of all the fruitful plain,
Would come and listen with delight,
For he was fond of rural strain:
Sir Archibald, whose favourite name
Shall stand for ages on record,
By Scottish bards of highest fame,
Wise Hawthornden and Stirling’s lord.’
The following letter to Sir Archibald from his friend Sir James Balfour, Lord Lyon, occurs amongst the manuscript stores of the latter gentleman in the Advocates’ Library:
‘To Sir Archibald Achesone,
one of the Secretaries of Staite.
‘Worthy Sir—Your letters, full of Spartanical brevity to the first view, bot, againe overlooked, Demosthenicall longe; stuffed full of exaggerations and complaints; the yeast of your enteirest affections, sent to quicken a slumbring friend as you imagine, quho nevertheless remains vigilant of you and of the smallest matters, which may aney wayes adde the least rill of content to the ocean of your happiness; quherfor you may show your comerad, and intreat him from me, as from one that trewly loves and honors his best pairts, that now he vold refraine, both his tonge and pen, from these quhirkis and obloquies, quherwith he so often uses to stain the name of grate personages, for hardly can he live so reteiredly, in so voluble ane age, without becoming at one tyme or uther obnoxious to the blow of some courtier. So begging God to bless you, I am your—
Ja. Balfour.
‘London, 9 Apryll 1631.’
Twenty years before the Duchess of Gordon lived in the venerable house at the head of the close, a preceding dowager resided in another part of the town. This was the distinguished Lady Elizabeth Howard (daughter of the Duke of Norfolk, by Lady Anne Somerset, daughter of the Marquis of Worcester), who occasioned so much disturbance in the end of Queen Anne’s reign by the Jacobite medal which she sent to the Faculty of Advocates. Her grace lived in a house at the Abbeyhill, where, as we are informed by Wodrow, in a tone of pious horror,[249] she openly kept a kind of college for instructing young people in Jesuitism and Jacobitism together. In this labour she seems to have been assisted by the Duchess of Perth, a kindred soul, whose enthusiasm afterwards caused the ruin of her family, by sending her son into the insurrection of 1745.[250] The Duchess of Gordon died here in 1732. I should suppose the house to have been that respectable old villa, at the extremity of the suburb of Abbeyhill, in which the late Baron Norton, of the Court of Exchequer, lived for many years. It was formerly possessed by Baron Mure, who, during the administration of the Earl of Bute, exercised the duties and dispensed the patronage of the sous-ministre for Scotland, under the Hon. Stuart Mackenzie, younger brother of the Premier. This was of course in its turn the court of Scotland; and from the description of a gentleman old enough to remember attending the levees (Sir W. M. Bannatyne), I should suppose that it was as much haunted by suitors of all kinds as ever were the more elegant halls of Holyrood House. Baron Mure, who was the personal friend of Earl Bute, died in 1774.
