The London Dead: The sad abode of the dead; Greyfriars Kirkyard, Edinburgh

Setting aside the tombs of Roubiliac, which belong to the heroic order of graveyard art, we Scotch stand, to my fancy, highest among nations in the matter of grimly illustrating death. We seem to love for their own sake the emblems of time and the great change; and even around country churches you will find a wonderful exhibition of skulls, and crossbones, and noseless angels, and trumpets pealing for the Judgment Day. Every mason was a pedestrian Holbein: he had a deep consciousness of death, and loved to put its terrors pithily before the churchyard loiterer; he was brimful of rough hints upon mortality, and any dead farmer was seized upon to be a text. The classical examples of this art are in Greyfriars. In their time, these were doubtless costly monuments, and reckoned of a very elegant proportion by contemporaries; and now, when the elegance is not so apparent, the significance remains.

Robert Louis Stevenson ‘Edinburgh; Picturesque Notes’ (1878)

There is nothing like them anywhere else in the UK; the grand monuments of the 17th century in Greyfriars are unique in their scale, their craftmanship, and their inimitable style. The individual elements of the memorials are to be found in churchyards and cemeteries all over Europe and North America; the hourglasses, grinning skeletons, skull and crossbones, chubby putti resting casual elbows on craniums, columns, urns, flaming torches, scythes, serpents and skulls (skulls and more skulls), are executed with such exuberant vigour that their counterparts elsewhere seem pale imitations. It is ironic that death is represented as so teeming with life and vitality. As Robert Louis Stevenson observed, “every mason was a pedestrian Holbein”, and Scottish churchyards are ballrooms for a never-ending dance of death, none more so than Greyfriars.

Greyfriars officially dates from 1562 but at least some part of the grounds may have been used for burials before then by the Franciscan monks whose monastery occupied the site until the reformation. The collapse of papal authority in Scotland in 1560, the belated dissolution of the monasteries there, and the destruction of the abbey buildings by the radically protestant local population of Edinburgh all coincided with the need to find an alternative burial ground for the city. Up until this point the principal site for burials had been the ground surrounding St Giles Cathedral but after three centuries of constant use this had become overcrowded. In 1562 Mary Queen of Scots granted the land that had belonged to the Franciscans to the town for use as a burial ground. Unusually Greyfriars was in all but name a cemetery, a place dedicated to the burial of the dead. The church that turned the burial ground into a kirkyard was not built until 1620. Burials continued until the late 1800’s.

Edinburgh has become the premier tourist trap of Scotland and Greyfriars, even on a dull, cold, January weekday afternoon was full of visitors, many drawn by the story of the faithful dog Bobby who kept watch over his masters grave for 16 years or the Harry Potter associations (long time Edinburgh resident JK Rowling allegedly used the names on gravestones at Greyfriars to name her characters though some of the supposed borrowings strike me as being slightly tenuous – there are Potters named on the Giles memorial but every cemetery England probably has a Potter somewhere or other. There are also Scrymgeours, a Mrs Moodie, a Thomas Riddell and a McGonagall, amongst others.) Visitors to the kirkyard weren’t always made as welcome as they are now. In August 1833, an early tourist to the Scottish capital who preferred to keep himself anonymous and therefore went by the non de plume of Viator, wrote a long letter to the editor of the Caledonian Mercury detailing his experiences at the Kirkyard;

Walking the other day at a leisure hour into the Greyfriars' kirkyard, I happened to step aside to look at a grave which was just dug. I was instantly accosted in the rudest manner by a surlv semi-barbarous Celt, who demanded, in a sort of bark, and threatening aspect, if I knew the consequences of standing there? Not exactly sure what the consequences might be, I instantly stepped to the footpath, which was about a yard off. He told me, however, I had no right to stand upon the footpath, nor to be within the kirkyard at all, except on business; that his instructions were to that effect, and that such was written on the gate.

Events took an even more disturbing turn when Viator suddenly realised that the gravedigger was not, as he initially assumed, a man but a woman (a female sexton rare but not a unique phenomenon; see the story of Hester Hammerton of Kingston-upon-Thames);

On my replying, that I did not call in question his instructions, but that I thought he ought to deliver them with more temper and civility, her nainsell, instead of mitigating, became still more ferocious, and, walking close up to me, not much unlike one of the wild cats of her native mountains, she gave me an unequivocal hint, that she was ready to fight me any day, and absolutely said, that if I was not satisfied, I might just turn aside a little, and she would give me satisfaction immediately.

Understandably put out by his encounter with the doughty female gravedigger, Viator (a Sassenach to be sure) asks “Now, Sir, passing by the ludicrous conduct of the poor crazy grave-digger, I should like to know by what authority the churchyard is thus shut up. I thought it was a species of public property, or at least that it belonged to the inhabitants of the parish.” He goes on the lament;

Whatever the object may be, I know not, but I am sure a great moral lesson is thus prevented from being communicated. In former times, one used to visit Les triste sejour des Morts -the place of coffins, epitaphs, and worms- the appointed rendezvous of all travellers, and to meditate upon his own destiny; or he felt a melancholy pleasure, and learned how to estimate human enjoyments, in reading the memorial of departed worth, of titled greatness, or of kindred blood; or, at all events, he gratified an innocent curiosity. The wise authorities, however, from whom this order emanates, see no occasion, it would appear. for this mode of instruction. The good old motto, "Memento Mori” it is to be feared, is a figure of speech becoming fast obsolete, and the more fashionable expression, "Memento Vivere," or as the old Epicurean maxim has it, "Carpe Diem," substituted in its place.

The Kirkyard has long associations with the Covenantors; the National Covenant, opposing the proposed church reforms of Charles I, was signed here in 1638 (though probably not on a tomb as is commonly depicted.) Militant Presbyterian Covenanters were held prisoner on the churchyard following the battle of Bothwell Brig in 1679. The area they were held in is now known as the Covenanters prison and is gated off from the rest of the cemetery because its relative seclusion made it a preferred location for local drug users in search of a quiet spot to shoot up. The mausoleums which flank the prison were not yet built at the time the covenanters were held here. There was no damp mausoleum or indeed any other shelter for them; they were held in the open air for several months until they could be transported to the colonies. The association with radical Protestantism continued to draw visitors to the kirkyard until relatively recently. In May 1981 the Reverand Ian Paisley came to Edinburgh to lead a religious ceremony to commemorate the 300 year anniversary of the execution of the Covenantor Donald Cargill. He was not entirely welcome, a few Republican sympathisers in the crowd yelled ‘bigot’ and ‘What about Bobby Sands’ as Paisley led a band of several hundred supporters around central Edinburgh, laying wreaths at the Covenantor’s Memorial in Grassmarket and on the railings at Greyfriars, the gates of which remained firmly closed against him by order of the Environmental Committee of Edinburgh District Council, who feared unrest if he was allowed to lay his wreath at the memorial within the grounds of the church. Then, according to the Scotsmen of 30 May 1981;

At a 35-minute service in the High-Street, before a-gathering of several hundred — about 150 of whom had come with him from Ulster for the occasion —- he condemned those who had. tried to disrupt the plans for the commemoration, including Lothian Regional Council. He said: “If their ban had continued, we would still have gone ahead. We do not intend to allow anyone to take from us our inalienable right to practise our religion and to enjoy our religious liberty that has been fought for in this United Kingdom.”

Mr Paisley then took a swipe at the former Labour MP, Mrs Shirley Williams, who he said had been one of those to condemn his visit. He said: “She herself is a Roman Catholic. I would advise Shirley Williams that she does not live in a Roman Catholic nation but in a Protestant nation. We have still a Protestant constitution, a Protestant throne and, thank God, Prince Charles is marrying a Protestant. This is a Protestant land and we intend to retain this heritage and to maintain it. Mrs Williams has no objection to a ‘foreign monarch’ the King of the Vatican, coming to this land but she objects to me, a member of the British House of Commons, from declaring my witness here in Edinburgh. I would remind her that I retained my seat at the General Election. She lost hers."

After laying the final wreath at the Mercat Cross, Mr Paisley spoke to a number of well-wishers and signed some autographs before being driven off to a city hotel where he was staying the night.

By one of those ironies that are so common in graveyards where the dead are buried unheeding of their station or role in life, the kirkyard houses the magnificent mausoleum, designed by the renowned architect James Smith, of one of the Covenantors great enemies, Sir George MacKenzie of Rosehaugh. MacKenzie was Lord Advocate for Charles II and responsible for seeing the monarch’s anti-covenanter policies put into practice. He is held responsible for using the kirkyard as a prison for mercilessly persecuting the covenanters following the debacle at Bothwell Brig. When he wasn’t persecuting radical protestants Mackenzie was defending witches; whilst he didn’t deny that witchcraft existed he felt that they were far fewer than common belief held out. The Judge became something of a bogeyman to local children as reported by the Shields Daily Gazette of 09 October 1882;

In the Greyfriar's Kirkyard the Mausoleum of Sir Geo. Mackenzie, the King's Advocate, known from savage deeds to the children of today as Bloody Mackenzie, who pride themselves on their prowess in knocking at the mausoleum and singing out the challenge “Bluidy Mackenzie, come oot if ye daur!" The bairns shake their clenched little fists, spit on the Judges grave, and, when startled, run terrified as for their mortal lives. This childish hatred renders criticism unnecessary; his name soon makes a restless bairn fall asleep with its head happed among the blankets.

Today MacKenzie’s mausoleum is said to be haunted by a poltergeist which, according to the Scotsman on 14 Bebruary 2015, was said to have been loosed upon an unsuspecting city when a homeless man chose to bed down in the Mausoleum;

IT MUST have seemed like a good idea at the time. The homeless man was without a bed and the night was chilly. When he found the door to the mausoleum open it could have looked inviting but quite why he decided to open a coffin and snuggle down beside the skeleton is less easy to explain. He may have been fine had the entire coffin not crumbled on top of him, showering him with the dust of a 400-year-old corpse. He let out a rather loud scream, which was heard by a passing dog-walker, who let out an even louder scream when he saw what looked like a zombie coming straight for him. There followed a Scooby-doo moment when they, and the dog, ran around the graveyard screaming before running off in opposite directions.

Since this undated and farcical incident, the article claims that “there have been 350 documented attacks. 170 people have collapsed. Tourists have reported hot spots, cold spots, somewhere in the middle spots. They have been bloodied and bruised, pushed and pulled, by an unseen and altogether unwanted visitor to the Black Mausoleum.” Entrance to the mausoleum is the highlight on ghost tours of the churchyard; “night after night visitors spook themselves. Most leave entertained, some leave a little frightened and others walk away from the Black Mausoleum convinced that they have had a close brush with something very nasty indeed,” says the newspaper.

And finally, an even more improbable story, of premature burial this time, from the Edinburgh Evening News of Saturday 28 November 1925;

Truth was vouched for in the recital of the gruesome stories of the body-snatchers, who at one time in Edinburgh plied a lucrative trade, and I can still remember the story told by my revered "granny" of an incident that happened in the Greyfriars Kirkyard. Despite the vigilance of the watchers, who were ever on the alert, and whose duty it was at certain hours of the night to fire their muskets to scare away the resurrectionists, the ghoulish work was begun ot opening a newly-made grave. The body of a wealthy lady had been interred that day, and a couple of expert body-snatchers were losing no time in prising open the coffin. Their eyes were soon dazzled by the sight of a number of valuable rings on the fingers of one of the hands. A small saw was quickly taken from their bag, and the act of severing the finger begun. To their horror, however, the "dead" woman sprang from her coffin, and her shrieks of pain re-echoing as far as the Candlemaker Row, the sacrilegious pair took to their heels and managed to escape. As was afterwards explained, the old lady, had been buried in a trance, an occurrence said to be very common at a time when a doctor's certificate of death was not to essential as now.