Captain Porteous

  On a street that I have known all my life there is a tiny bronze statue of a wee dog, a Skye terrier, sitting in a regal pose on his granite plinth.
  Thousands of tourists every day stop and take pictures, every child wants to pat him on the head. "Bobby", it says, on a brass plaque set beneath him.
  "Greyfriar's Bobby"; his reputation and popularity precedes him from every corner of the world, and from all walks of life. This loyal little dog has captured the hearts of millions and Eleanor Atkinson's brilliant book, when I read it as a boy, captured mine too.
  But the story of his inspiring and loyal vigil is for another time and another blog.

The entrance approaching the Kirk.

  Standing next to his likeness out on the street there is barely visible from this position the route of Bobby's genitive first name: Greyfriars. Just two seconds away and behind the pub named after the dog, through an almost hidden and unremarkable cobbled lane lays Greyfriars Kirk; a great, low church that rests heavily as if collapsed there from exhaustion under its own weight on a rising, grassy knoll.
  Over time I shall come to write a great deal about this place - Bobby would just be any old dog without it; I dare anyone to approach his resting place under the shadows of the great hulk of this kirk, walking up that secretive alley and not feel spider legs of an unknown something crawl up the nape of your necks.
  Standing where you are you have an awe inspiring view of Edinburgh's old town - a rabbit-warren of sloping rooftops, wobbly, ramshackle tenements and rising chimney stacks and spires, lanes, closes, secret staircases and spiral streets, tunnels, bridges and cellars. Rising above you, glimpsed through the maze of gravestones, tombs and crypts protruding up from the graveyard like so many blackened and scarred teeth jutting out the earth, standing eternal guard on her craggy vantage point are the grim battlements of Edinburgh Castle, bristling with cannon.
  By some well-informed estimates you are stood in an ancient necropolis reckoned to be the most haunted graveyard in the world.
  In this kirkyard, by a feat of acoustics I have pondered for years, the busy street you have just left behind is all but completely silenced. Even the birdsong has a reluctance to it, a respectable hush lies over the tombstones and crucifixes like a mantle heavy above the massed ranks of the dead before you.

View to the North of the Kirkyard, Edinburgh Castle sits high over the old town.

  So take a walk, explore. And I hope the curious amongst you will not ignore the thing on the ground just to your left as you take your first steps down the hill into the kirkyard's depths. Above the plot of sanctified earth marking someone's eternal resting place, set into the ground is a solid, heavy iron cage. It has a latch, rusted with age and is locked by a padlock the size of a fist. The first time I saw this sinister looking contraption it made my skin crawl: If the man under there was dead - why would they sink prison bars over him?
  To your right you might have noticed (though this time I forgive you for ignoring) a pair of legs protruding from the entrance to a walled crypt. He, or, indeed, she - is a tramp. Now, of course, there mightn't be anyone there at all when you go, but the discarded cigarette ends and beer cans will tell of someone's presence whether absent or real. If there is someone there (and I have learned from my mistakes) try not to scream too loudly, especially if you find them, half hidden in the gloom, staring at you with hungry eyes.

  But all this about Bobby the loyal Skye terrier; that strange prison cage set into the ground and about which you're still frightened; all that stuff about this place being haunted, and the possibility of there being a tramp lurking behind the corner is material enough for so many tales, stories, secrets and mysteries. I shall leave it as such: for another time, and another blog.

  For now I want to concentrate on one of the kirkyard's mysteries I first stumbled upon when I was young. I would often roam around this infamous place, filtering through the markers and gravestones, reading the names and seeking inspiration. Every time I went, like returning to read a great book, I discovered something new I'd missed before. One day, on my lunch break from my classes at the university near-by, I found John Porteous.
  Rounding on the grave marker it wasn't his name that caught my attention; then just one of the faceless thousands inscribed in this place - it was the date chiselled into the stone beneath. It said "1973". It made this tombstone only thirty-odd years old, nestled amongst the countless thousands stretching back hundreds of years. It even looked out of place, in the shadows of blackened and crumbling mausoleums too ancient to understand. I read on, the full inscription reads:

  John Porteous, Captain of the city guard of Edinburgh

Murdered September 7, 1736

All Passion Spent, 1973

John Porteous' grave marker, the inscription can just be
made out. 

  "1973" stopped me in my tracks. "Murdered", had me routed to the spot.

  He never left my mind, Captain Porteous. I soon learned a great deal about this man, an officer, murdered at the age of 41, two-hundred and seventy-six years ago. When I returned to his gravestone I knew that if I craned my neck and looked over the kirk wall from here, over at the old town, I could actually see the place where, indeed, "John Porteous, Captain" was murdered on "September 7, 1736", and horrendously, violently, at the angry hands of a murderous mob. I knew, also, that this stone was the replacement (made in '73) of the original, which had been a lonely cobble stone, no bigger than a house brick and with the simple inscription: "P. 1736".

  Why such a niggardly memorial to an officer in an important position in the city at the time, and one who was murdered? Surely a captain was a man of some standing in society and could afford something more lasting than a miserable brick - all that remains of his existence?

  But the murder of John Porteous is a tale of retribution and justice; he was himself a murderer. When he met his gruesome death at the end of a rope swung from a dyer's pole, where he was hanged naked, repeatedly, three times between being intermittently and savagely beaten with clubs, stones and boot kicks - the angry mob at whose hands his fate was sealed were not merely out to cause wanton destruction: they were thirsty for bloody revenge on the hated Captain of the city guard. Their final cruelty was to throw him unceremoniously into a miserable, shallow grave - within sight and earshot of where it all happened. Where you can still stand today, the screams, shouts and leers of that bloody night nearly three hundred years ago remembered by the fabric of the Gothic surroundings all about you. 

  Cruel and a bully, the captain's victims lie scattered throughout the graveyard, undoubtedly in their several tens and for the most part in unmarked, forgotten graves.

  The date 1736 is carved in a good many headstones, of course. But there are six amongst them whose significance still taunts the captain and are the lasting memory of why "Murdered" and not "died" is on his grave. The last order that John Porteous ever gave to his men was to raise their muskets and open fire into the massed ranks of a crowd that had come to witness the hanging of a young smuggler named Andrew Wilson. 

  The remains of the man beneath your feet, dressed, then, in his scarlet livery, the image of authority personally drew his pistol and shot dead the young man before him attempting to rush the gallows on that fateful day. Witnesses at the captain's trial told of how they heard the hated man shout "fire and be damned!" as the musket volley tore through the crowd. 

  He was condemned to hang, in public, a murderer. But the mob got to him first, his victims. He was dragged screaming from his prison cell which had been breached by the crowd and by the hair pulled through the streets and lynched. 

John Porteous being carried by the
mob to his ad-hoc execution.

  Everything is connected, the tendrils of its association, of its history winds and tangles in a creeping, growing web of intrigue. 

  Marking the spot where once stood the entrance to the tollbooth prison, next to St. Giles' cathedral on the high street (whose huge spire can be seen, close, from the graveyard.), inlaid into the cobbles is a curious design resembling a heart. "the heart of Midlothian", locals still spit on the thing for its hated association with authority and prison. It lies where the great, oaken door stood that was hammered down three-hundred years ago, the same broken door out of which the screaming Porteous was dragged towards his fate at the end of a rope.

  Sir Walter Scott, that most excellent author, and one of Edinburgh's most cherished children, took the name for one of his novels The Heart of Midlothian from this inlaid pattern in the cobbles. In this book there is no better description of the events that saw the gruesome demise of Captain John Porteous, and it comes highly recommended. I will come back to this brilliant epic time and again as the strands of fate and the connections of history take us deeper into the mysteries of hidden Edinburgh.

  The young man hanged by Porteous, Andrew Wilson, had a co-accused sentenced to hang beside him; but George Robertson escaped his prison cell by widening the bars on his window using his belt as a tourniquet. Walter Scott's prose would have us follow the mysterious Robertson, now an outlaw, through the events of the riot that would see the end of the Captain and would take us up to a lonely and abandoned ruin of what once was an important church hidden, crumbling into nothing, high upon Arthur's seat - Edinburgh's second great promontory which guards the city like a watchful Lion.

  St. Anthony's has it's own mysteries and secrets which further entwine with the myriad that saturate the city. We shall see, soon enough, how one of its associated stories will bring us back to Greyfriar's kirkyard - and will reveal to us the nature of that strange iron cage set into the ground not far from where John Porteous lies.

  As for the despised figure of the captain of the city guard, be sure to stop and say hello; you know exactly who he is and what he done. Don't let the seeming obscurity of his paltry little memorial deceive you in thinking he was a nobody, as so many people have, blind to history. 

  For now we shall say farewell to the captain; but like everything about Edinburgh, he's sure to bump into us along our travels sooner rather than later.