In Edinburgh, John Porteous had been granted a scarlet coat and the authority to disperse the mob. Borrow’s chronicle recounts how this place fell to him: an act of patronage before it became his doom. The son of indigent parents, he had learned the tailor’s trade and worked as a journeyman. A former provost, wishing to put away his mistress without casting her into destitution, proposed that she marry Porteous, promising her a dowry of five hundred pounds. She at first declined marriage with a labouring mechanic; the sum altered her resolution. Porteous was thus enabled to set up shop, but he was overfond of company and by degrees lost his custom. His wife returned to seek relief from her former protector.
A vacancy had just arisen among the captains of the City Guard. Each company numbered five-and-twenty men; the captain received an annual stipend and a scarlet uniform. The provost installed Porteous in the post. The tailor who had hitherto subsisted by the labor of his hands was henceforth the man dispatched against the rioters. Borrow depicts him as bold, yet ever prone to outrun his orders: he struck suspects with the butt of his musket, and the affrays he broke up not infrequently left behind broken arms and legs. The chronicle further reproaches him with heaping indignities upon women taken in brothels, though he had himself maintained commerce with some among them.
The quarrel destined to conduct him to the gibbet began far from Edinburgh, in Fife, over a seizure of contraband goods. Collector Stark assembled his men and seized a parcel concealed on the premises of Andrew Wilson. Wilson, persuaded that he had been robbed, returned to the warehouse with Robertson and several associates. They broke the doors of the custom-house, recovered the bales, and carried them off in a cart. News of this insolence was carried up to the Barons of the Exchequer; the Lord Justice-Clerk commanded the sheriff to raise the shire to secure the culprits and reclaim the goods.
Several men were arrested and subsequently discharged for lack of proof. Wilson and Robertson were both condemned to death. On the Sunday preceding their execution, guards conducted the two prisoners to church, pursuant to the custom recorded by Borrow. Wilson, though pinioned, seized a soldier with his teeth and held him long enough to cry out to Robertson to run. The latter sprang through the streets crowded with worshippers, cleared a city gate before it could be barred, and found a confederate who struck off his irons and provided him with a horse. That very evening he took ship at Dunbar for Holland. Porteous had been dispatched in his pursuit; he proved unable to prevent the escape.
On Wednesday, a temporary gibbet was erected in the Grassmarket for Wilson. Fifty guards marched with the condemned man under Porteous’s command. The captain harboured keen apprehensions of an attempted rescue; at his petition, regular troops were posted under arms near at hand. The crowd made no essay to deliver Wilson. They watched him pray, ascend the ladder, and expire. When the executioner stepped up in turn to cut down the corpse, a stone struck him full in the face. Other missiles followed. Porteous, seized with fury, commanded his men to fire, and discharged his own piece.
According to Borrow’s relation, a young confectioner’s apprentice was slain upon the spot. Certain soldiers aimed above the heads of the press; several onlookers gazing from high windows were struck. Other guardsmen fired into the legs of the multitude, inflicting wounds that later required amputation. Porteous endeavoured to march his men back to the guardhouse, yet turned about with two of them to fire yet again. The volley had left dead in its wake and a multitude of wounded. The printed trial record preserved in the Wellcome Collection enumerates six dead, whereas Borrow accounts for nine. A detachment of the Welsh Regiment arrived at length to escort the guard to their quarters. The provost ordered Porteous to be examined; he was committed to prison to stand his trial for murder.
At the bar, Porteous acknowledged that the discharges had caused the deaths set forth in the indictments, but pleaded self-defence and obedience to the magistrates. His counsel enquired whether an officer set upon by the mob might command his men to fire without acting unlawfully. The lords commissioners of justiciary replied that if the captain had fired, or commanded his men to fire, without the order of a competent magistrate, the resulting deaths might constitute murder. Four-and-forty witnesses were examined, Borrow states. The defence maintained that the authorities had armed the soldiers to ensure the execution, that Porteous intended merely to overawe the crowd, and that he had struck down one of his own men who had levelled his musket. They added that he had sought to draw off the guard and made no attempt to flee. He was even said to have forbidden the cleaning of the weapons, that an inspection might determine which pieces had been discharged. His advocates thus contended that the captain had sought to discover the marksmen, rather than erase their traces.
The prosecutors rejoined that the officer’s commission was determined with the execution of Wilson. At that juncture, in their submission, he no longer exercised the authority for which the arms had been loaded. Only the formal reading of the Riot Act could have warranted the firing, had the populace attempted a rescue. Porteous’s counsel retorted that the magistrates, rather than reading the proclamation, had taken shelter within a dwelling, leaving the soldiers exposed to the shower of stones. The controversy thus turned upon the selfsame moments viewed from opposite sides: a man appointed to guard the gibbet maintained he had repelled an assault; his accusers demanded at what precise instant his authority had ceased.
The jury returned a verdict of guilty, and the court passed sentence of death. The King was then in Hanover. Petitions were set on foot to preserve Porteous, and the Queen granted him a respite until the Sovereign’s return. The reprieve arrived but a single week before the appointed day of execution. Throughout the city, the intelligence was received as an outrage. The blood spilled in the Grassmarket had not been forgotten; the suspension of the sentence appeared nothing less than a pledge that the officer would never answer for his shots.
On 7 September 1736, a body of men entered Edinburgh and possessed themselves of the weapons of the City Guard. They traversed the wynds, calling upon all who would avenge what they held to be innocent blood. Then they secured the city gates and set a watch upon them. Another company marched upon the Tolbooth. The assailants beat upon the outer gate with sledgehammers; when the timber resisted, they set it on fire, taking good care, Borrow notes, to confine the flames.
Within, they commanded the turnkey to open Porteous’s chamber. When he demanded what they sought, they replied that they would carry him down to the Grassmarket, where he had shed blood. They seized him by the arms and legs and dragged him from the prison. Lacking a halter of their own, they broke open a shop to secure one fit for their purpose. They hanged him upon the very ground where Wilson had died. Porteous had been condemned by a court of law; those who dragged him forth acted as a mob, sweeping away the respite which the royal prerogative had just conferred upon him.
Porteous struggled to slip his hands between his neck and the noose; one of the assailants struck him with an axe, and the crowd melted away. A royal proclamation subsequently offered two hundred pounds for the discovery of an accomplice, but such men as were apprehended were set at liberty for want of evidence.