The Edinburgh Dead

Burke’s Last Day

A bloodlust had hold of Edinburgh such as it had not felt in centuries. Perhaps ever. It was in ferment, so bloated with outrage and accusation that it trembled upon the brink of riot. There was but one thing that might stay the mob’s fury, for a while at least, and that very thing was about to be delivered unto them.

It had rained prodigiously in the early hours of the morning, cataracts spilling from the countless jostling rooftops of the Old Town. The rainwater had run in a myriad little rivers down the length of the High Street, gushing down the closes, sending even the rats scurrying for shelter and making the scavengers retreat with their barrows to the watch-houses to wait out the storm.

The rain did pass, but it left every eave dripping, every crease and crevice in the cobbled streets a pool. None of which did anything to deter the assembly of the greatest crowd the city had ever seen. They filled the Lawn Market, that highest part of the High Street, at which it approached the last narrow run up to the castle. Thousands upon thousands of them, standing shoulder to shoulder, all waiting; and all manoeuvring, as best they could in such a close-pressed throng, for a better sight of the gallows.

The most fortunate ones were those leaning from every window in every high tenement around the place of execution. They hung dangerously far out over the ledges, jeering at those confined to the street below. Some, unable to force a place at a window, or dissatisfied with the view thence, had taken leave of their senses and climbed up on to the very rooftops themselves. They perched there upon the ridges, or clung to the chimney stacks, slipping and slithering on the wet tiles, promising at any moment to go sliding down and pitch themselves into the heaving, swaying mass of their fellow townsfolk on the street below. Such was the hunger to see William Burke die.

Only St. Giles’ Cathedral, brooding in all its sombre stateliness just a short way from the gallows, was spared the indignity of having onlookers scattered about amongst its spires and buttresses. It would, in truth, have offered some of the very finest views, but there were none willing to trespass upon its holy territory.

For all the fervent anticipation attendant upon his death, when they brought Burke out from the lock-up in Libberton’s Wynd where he had spent his last night it was not only his name the crowd roared, nor only his blood it bayed for.

“Where’s Knox?” some cried, and others: “Bring us Hare!”

The guards surrounding the gallows struggled to hold back the enlivened crowd. Such was the tumult that arose as he emerged on to the street that Burke quailed at it, and hesitated, and then seemed overcome with a longing for all of this to be over, and went quickly to the foot of the steps. Some in the mob tried to reach him as he passed them, but the guards pushed them back.

Burke went up the steps on to the platform so hurriedly that he almost stumbled. Abuse teemed around him, coming from every quarter, raining down upon him like a storm of stones.

There was no ceremony to it, little by way of preamble. Burke stood there, staring fixedly ahead, as the executioner prepared him for the moment to come, adjusting his collar, turning his neckerchief, so that the rope would fit about his neck clean and snug.

And the noose was settled over his head. For a breath or two a hush descended, broken only by the distant screech of seagulls circling far overhead. The executioner pulled the lever, the trapdoor sprang and Burke dropped down and passed beyond any mortal concerns. His feet gave two sharp, vigorous twitches, and he was gone.

The twenty thousand or more who had come to see it done erupted in fierce joy, so violent their cries that the windows shook and the walls rang and rang with the echoes of them. And many of them did not depart, unwilling to concede that the momentous event was over, merely because its principal player was dead. They waited, and milled about in the High Street. For so long as Burke hung there, they waited.

It was not for another hour that they finally took his body down, and nailed it into a coffin and carried it off. Then began the scramble for pieces of the gallows, and sections of the hangman’s rope. As the workers who had built it moved in to dismantle the lethal contraption, so a host of the most stubborn spectators closed about them, and fought and argued over who might salvage what little scrap by way of memento for this extraordinary day.

Adam Quire and Catherine Heron did not watch William Burke’s execution. They climbed up, instead, to the crest of Salisbury Crags, and walked along the top of those long, curving cliffs, looking over the city laid out beneath them.

They walked hand in hand much of the way, and had the hill to themselves. The grass was wet and slippery, the air still damp from the downpour that had come before dawn; half the population of the Old Town was gathered about a single gallows. It all made for a near-deserted hill, and an eerie calm to the place.

They heard, though, when the time came, the great tumult rising from the Old Town, muted a little by distance, but unmistakable. The crying out of thousands of voices, all at once. The collective yearning of a city. They could tell, from the sound, the moment when Burke died.

They were at the highest point of the Crags by then, and stood in silence, holding one another’s hand, while the single voice of the city rolled around them.

William Burke might be dead, but he was not yet done as the centre of the city’s attention. The sentence passed upon him did not end with his execution.

The day after the hanging, the coffin into which his corpse had been nailed was taken to the University of Edinburgh’s huge college, close by the Royal Infirmary and Surgeon’s Square. It was the largest building in the city by some way, unless the whole complicated castle was accounted a single structure. It contained within it a broad quadrangle, surrounded by balustraded terraces. The four sides of the huge rectangular edifice that enclosed that quadrangle held, amongst many other riches, the university’s Medical School.

It was to there that Burke’s body was conveyed; specifically, to the largest of its lecture theatres. In that great bowl of an arena, the lid of the coffin was prised up and Burke’s corpse removed. His clothes were taken from him and he was laid out upon the slab at the heart of the amphitheatre. Shortly after noon, Professor Alexander Monro, the incumbent of the university’s Chair of Anatomy, applied a saw to the late William Burke’s cranium, cutting in a neat ring around the whole circumference of the head. With a little difficulty, he then removed the entire top of his skull, and in a great gush of thick and foul blood exposed his brain to the huge crowd of students and other curious spectators assembled in the theatre.

It took close to two hours for Monro to complete his dissection of William Burke, for the edification of those who had succeeded in obtaining a ticket for the much-anticipated event. Those who had been unsuccessful rioted in the quadrangle of the college, so aggrieved were they at their exclusion from the drama. They broke windows and tore up paving stones, and fought off the gang of baton-wielding police that was dispatched from Old Stamp Office Close.

The disorder did not end until Professor Christison brokered an agreement with the ringleaders of the mob whereby Burke’s corpse, returned to something approaching its natural state, would be put on public display for two days.

So the people of Edinburgh, in their thousands, filed past the corpse of the wretch whose vile deeds had fouled their city and comforted themselves with the knowledge that, upon this one man at least, the most perfect justice had been done.

And with the execution of that justice, the need to hold William Hare a prisoner in Calton Jail came to an end.