Death
However, public resentment at a possible reprieve was such that a plot to murder Captain Porteous was hatched, and when the authorities heard of this it was decided to increase the guard at the Tolbooth prison. However, on the evening before this was due to happen, a large crowd of over four thousand gathered at Portsburgh, west of the city.
Making their way across the Grassmarket to the Cowgate and up the High Street, the mob converged on the Tolbooth, where they were eventually able to overpower the guards. Porteous was dragged from his cell and up the Lawnmarket towards the West Bow and the Grassmarket, where he was lynched from a dyer's pole, using a rope taken from a local draper's shop.
After a short while he was dragged down and stripped of his nightgown and shirt, which was then wrapped around his head before he was hauled up again. However, the mob had not tied his hands and, as he struggled free, they broke his arm and shoulder, while another attempted to set light to his naked foot. He was taken down a further time and cruelly beaten before being hung up again, and died a short while later, just before midnight on 7 September 1736. The spot where Porteous died is today marked by a memorial plate in the Grassmarket. The site of the Tolbooth is marked by paving stones arranged in the form of a heart, 'The Heart of Midlothian'. Tour guides will assure you that, even today, passers-by will spit on the spot, a tradition originally intended to demonstrate their contempt for the hated Tolbooth.
Porteous was buried in Greyfriars Kirkyard, Edinburgh, the following day, near the westmost wall of the original graveyard. For more than two hundred years the grave was marked by a small square stone with the single letter P and the date 1736. In the 1930s this was replaced with a headstone of Craigleith stone, bearing the inscription John Porteous, a captain of the City Guard of Edinburgh, murdered September 7, 1736. All Passion Spent, 1973.
Read more about this topic: John Porteous (soldier)
Famous quotes containing the word death:
“Perhaps it is nothingness which is real and our dream which is non-existent, but then we feel think that these musical phrases, and the notions related to the dream, are nothing too. We will die, but our hostages are the divine captives who will follow our chance. And death with them is somewhat less bitter, less inglorious, perhaps less probable.”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)
“We should stop looking to law to provide the final answer.... Law cannot save us from ourselves.... We have to go out and try to accomplish our goals and resolve disagreements by doing what we think is right. That energy and resourcefulness, not millions of legal cubicles, is what was great about America. Let judgment and personal conviction be important again.”
—Philip K. Howard, U.S. lawyer. The Death of Common Sense: How Law Is Suffocating America, pp. 186-87, Random House (1994)
“The death ... of a beautiful woman, is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world.”
—Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)