Dwight Moody preached at the laying of the foundation stone in 1883, and less than one year later, he delivered the first evangelical sermon in the new Mission. This was a remarkable achievement of speed; contrast that with the time it took to construct Old St Paul’s, which was begun three years earlier, yet took fully a quarter of a century to complete! The new mission was designed by John Armstrong, and was of sturdy construction, its façade being dominated by four massive columns with flanking pilasters rising through two stories. The building continues to perform a similar function to this day.
Moody’s great co-worker here was Ira Sankey, another American evangelist, who also preached in the Mission, though he was more highly renowned as an organist and vocalist. Coincidentally, his birthplace was in the town of Edinboro in Pennsylvania (and not in Edinburg, in the same state!). These two men were so popular in Britain that they even appeared as a pair on people’s mantle-shelves, in the form of Staffordshire figurines.
This was a place of secret episcopal worship, with a particular American connection. During much of the 17th century, Stewart kings attempted to force episcopacy upon a population committed to Presbyterianism, and the eventual victory of the latter cause in 1690 left Episcopalians in a vulnerable position. Its adherents had to worship in secret, one such place being in a little chapel situated down this close (on the site now occupied by Old St Paul’s Episcopal Church). It still contains the original wooden alter, made to fold up for quick concealment. An American who worshipped secretly in the little chapel was Samuel Seabury, while he was a medical student at Edinburgh University in the 1750s. Later, after returning home, he became the first American episcopal bishop.
A century or so later, this location became the home of the highly popular Carrubber’s Close Mission in 1858. However, the little chapel proved inadequate, so the Mission was sometimes compelled to provide a street-preaching service. One of those who attended was the celebrated American evangelist Dwight Moody, and he was so impressed by what he witnessed that he determined that the Mission should be housed in an appropriate building. “You can’t run a mission on air!” he supposedly declared and set about raising £10,000 to purchase a site a little further down the High Street, there to construct a handsome Mission house, which was to retain the name of its humble predecessor (see next stopping point).
The most important American link in the life of Robert Louis Stevenson (RLS) occurred while he was visiting France in 1876, for it was there that he met an American art student, Fanny Osborne. When she moved to California two years later, he found himself unbearably unhappy without her, and so he sailed to join her in 1879. He was reunited with Fanny in California, and (despite his tuberculosis) they were married in the following year, spending their three-week honeymoon in the camp of an abandoned silver mine! Later that year, RLS came back to Edinburgh with Fanny, but the climate here was unsuited to his illness, and so, after brief stays in Europe and America, he and his family spent the rest of his life cruising the South Seas, eventually settling in Samoa.
There is no statue to RLS in Edinburgh for two reasons: one is that Stevenson himself said that he did not want one, and the other is that the principal mover in the planning of his memorial in the city of his birth, the Earl of Rosebery (who was Prime Minister at the time), had an intense dislike of statues. It was therefore decided to erect a large plaque instead. The sculptor was Augustus Saint-Gaudens, an American working in New York who was a great fan of Stevenson’s writings. The two men had met in 1887 and struck up an instant friendship. It took Saint-Gaudens several years to complete the work, which was eventually installed in 1902, eight years after Stevenson’s death.
Andrew Carnegie was a Scots-born American industrialist who earned a fortune as a steel magnate, then gave much of it away in acts of beneficence. He hailed from Dunfermline, though his mother and both of his maternal grandparents were Edinburgh folk. In 1887, he was made an honorary burgess of the city of Edinburgh, and in 1935 (the centenary of his birth) the same award was bestowed upon his American wife, Louise. This gave the Carnegies the unique distinction of being the only commoner couple to receive this honour.
One of Andrew Carnegie’s favourite projects was the building of libraries – over 3,000 of them! – including this one, which was opened in 1890, thanks in large measure to his donation of £50,000. On St Andrew’s Day in the following year, the unveiling of a fine bust of the benefactor took place here, having been commissioned by Edinburgh Corporation from a local sculptor, Charles McBride. At the unveiling ceremony, the Lord Provost is said to have expressed that the people of Edinburgh wished to show their gratitude for Carnegie’s beneficence, and shared something to the effect of “they trusted that many generations would view this bust, and would be reminded by it of the kindness of the donor to the capital of his native country, and of the gratitude of its citizens.”
One of Edinburgh’s execution sites, known as the Gallowlee, was on the road between Edinburgh and Leith, which in the seventeenth century were separate towns. Its in-between location was typical for execution sites, which were often on borders or boundaries. It was on a small hill, Shrubhill. The T-shaped gallows is visible on this map from 1682. Witches who were convicted in Edinburgh were sometimes executed at the Gallowlee. Witches were burned on a pyre rather than being hanged on the gallows itself.
This order by the Edinburgh court of justiciary, 13 September 1678, specifies the Gallowlee as the place of execution for five convicted witches: ‘The Lords Commissioners of justiciary by the mouth of Adam Auld dempster of court decerned and adjudged Margaret Lowes, Isobel Shanks, Margaret Douglas, Helen Forrester and Margaret Smaill to be taken to the Gallowlee of Edinburgh upon Wednesday the eighteenth day of September instant betwixt two and four o’clock in the afternoon and there to be strangled at a stake till they be dead and thereafter to have their bodies burnt to ashes.’ A similar sentence was then passed, 6 November 1678, on Bessie Gourlay, Agnes Somerville and Margaret Souness.
Sources:
Survey of Scottish Witchcraft, Julian Goodare, Lauren Martin, Joyce Miller and Louise Yeoman, January 2003.
Agnes Finnie was one of Edinburgh’s best-documented accused witches. She was a widow who worked as a shopkeeper and moneylender. She sold consumer goods, such as fish and cakes, and made loans to her customers. Potterrow Port, where Finnie’s shop was, continued from where you are standing now down present-day West College Street.
Finnie had a reputation for quarrelsomeness and for cursing people. Some curses were thought to be just angry words, but if the person who had been cursed then suffered a misfortune, they could decide that it was the curse taking effect. For instance, Finnie quarrelled with John Buchanan, a carpenter who was one of her customers. Each of them made threats to the other one – but Buchanan then suffered a fever overnight. In the morning, he came to Finnie’s house, ordered a pint of ale, and told her that if he suffered another night’s illness ‘he sould mak all the toun to heir tell of it’. He then recovered his health. At the time such reconciliations were supposed to put an end to the matter – but there were 20 charges against Finnie, all of which told stories like Buchanan’s.
Importantly, we don’t always know the ages of the accused witches in Scotland but we do know Agnes Finnie was older (likely around 65) and her age seems to have been a central part of her accusation in particular and her story after some 25 years quarrelling with her neighbours. She was pursued for witchcraft once she was older and widowed which may have made her seem a better target for a witch accusation to her adversaries.
Age was an important factor in witchcraft accusations across Europe not just Scotland. According to the Survey of Scottish Witchcraft, and where we know the recorded age, 64% were aged over 40 years old. Finnie’s case speaks also to community interactions in a culture of honour (where people have to hit back against insults) and about ways in which women’s angry words are perceived in such a culture.
Finnie was arrested in June 1644, brought to trial in December, and executed on Castle Hill on 6 March 1645.
Survey of Scottish Witchcraft, Julian Goodare, Lauren Martin, Joyce Miller and Louise Yeoman, January 2003.
Elizabeth Ewan, Rose Pipes, Jane Rendall and Siân Reynolds (eds.), New Biographical Dictionary of Scottish Women (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018), p. 142.
Calls for legal pardons for witches have recently gathered pace in Scotland. In March 2022 Scotland’s First Minister at the time, Nicola Sturgeon, issued a formal apology to those executed under the Witchcraft Act. The act, which was in effect from 1563 to 1736, made the crime of witchcraft punishable by death. “Today on International Women’s Day, as first minister on behalf of the Scottish government, I am choosing to acknowledge that egregious historic injustice and extend a formal posthumous apology to all of those accused, convicted, vilified or executed under the Witchcraft Act of 1563.” Sturgeon said.
The Witches of Scotland group has been petitioning the Scottish Parliament to pardon those convicted under the act, with Claire Mitchell KC saying it would correct as far as possible a “terrible miscarriage of justice”. A bill proposed in the Scottish Parliament is trying to set the record straight. It could allow for posthumous pardons to thousands of women and men who faced convictions hundreds of years ago.
During the North Berwick witchcraft panic of 1590-92, some of the interrogations of suspects were carried out in Holyrood Palace, the principal royal residence and also the venue for privy council meetings. King James VI himself took part in some of these interrogations, and even claimed personal credit for having discovered the witches’ guilt. In a speech on 7 June 1591 he boasted: ‘And for these witches, whatsoever hath bene gotten from them hath bene done by me my self’.
The most important suspect to be interrogated at Holyrood Palace was Agnes Sampson, a ‘wise wife’ and healer from Nether Keith in East Lothian. When she was first brought before the king and his councillors she refused to confess to witchcraft. They ordered her to be taken away and tortured, probably in the Old Tolbooth. There a rope was placed round her head and twisted tightly to cause pain. She also had all her body hair shaved off and was searched for the Devil’s mark; she was told that a mark had been found on her genitals. Broken by this treatment, she was brought back to the palace, where she confessed to everything that she was asked. She was tried, convicted, and executed by burning at Castlehill on 28 January 1591.
Sources:
Lawrence Normand and Gareth Roberts (eds), Witchcraft in Early Modern Scotland : James VI’s Demonology and the North Berwick Witches (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2000).
Elizabeth Ewan, Rose Pipes, Jane Rendall and Siân Reynolds (eds.), New Biographical Dictionary of Scottish Women (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018), p. 376.
Sir John Nisbet, Lord Dirleton (1610–1688), was a Scottish lawyer and judge who, as Lord Advocate, led the prosecution of Thomas and Jean Weir in 1670. His Edinburgh townhouse was on the Canongate at the head of Reid’s Close, distinguished by a projecting square turret.
In 1663, Nisbet purchased the estate of Dirleton, including Dirleton Castle, in East Lothian. Between 1649 and 1650, in Dirleton, six witches had been accused of dancing upon the green with the Devil and had been imprisoned in the castle dungeon.
Located next to the Canongate Kirk, Canongate Tolbooth was where accused Edinburgh witches could be imprisoned and tried but sometimes notorious people from outside Edinburgh were also held here.
One of these was Janet Douglas, a witch-finder and accuser who claimed to have second sight. Janet was aged 12 or 13 and was thought to have come from the Highlands. She gained credibility by posing as mute, playing on beliefs about non-speaking people having supernatural powers. Five people were executed in Paisley in 1677 as a result of her accusations. She created a sensation by claiming to know if people were bewitched and who had bewitched them. That was why she was brought to Edinburgh and incarcerated in the Canongate Tolbooth in March 1679 accused of being ’ane imposter’ alleged to have a ‘familiar’ and to consult with ‘evil spirits’.
Sadly, women weren’t only the victims of witch-hunts, sometimes they were perpetrators. They believed in witchcraft just as men did, so they gave evidence against other women (and men) accused of the crime and some were witch-finders (there was even a female witch-pricker). Janet was investigated by the Privy Council between 11 March and 30 March 1679. Eventually she was banished from Scotland. We don’t know where she went next but her witch-accusing career in Scotland was over.
Sources:
R. L. Harris, ‘Janet Douglas and the Witches of Pollock: The Background of Scepticism in Scotland in the 1670s’, in S. R. McKenna (ed.), Selected Essays on Scottish Language and Literature: A Festschrift in Honor of Allan H. MacLaine (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Melllen, 1992), pp. 97-124.
Survey of Scottish Witchcraft, Julian Goodare, Lauren Martin, Joyce Miller and Louise Yeoman, January 2003.
