Allan Ramsay: Makar of Edinburgh

By Sian Mackay

This first biography of the poet Allan Ramsay (1684-1758) takes the form of a historical novel set in the tumultuous world of early eighteenth-century Edinburgh. All the known facts of the Makar's shapeshifting life are here, interwoven with the author's original research and imaginative passages based on her extensive knowledge of the locations

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sancho Press
• Release date: May 2, 2024
• ISBN: 9780952883753

Book preview

PART 1

True ease of writing comes from Art, not Chance

And those move easiest who have learn’d to Dance

Alexander Pope

PROLOGUE

During wig fittings, clients often ask why I left my Borders home. I reply that poverty drove me to seek improvement of my family’s condition. To that end, in the year of our Lord 1715, I became apprenticed to Allan Ramsay, a distant kinsman and established perruquier in Edinburgh.

If clients show further interest, I elaborate, saying that I, Tobias Little, am not a political man, but anger over government betrayals in my village howff forced me to realise why our bread lay stale and unbuttered. Where is the economic assistance promised by the Act of Union, the villagers lamented? In vain, they swilled ale to drown their sorrows, as if that would put food on their plates. In desperation, my aged parents urged me to play my cards in Edinburgh, saying that a portion of my wages might save them from the poorhouse.

The wages of an apprentice are meagre enough, yet I was their only hope. They sang my praises in a begging letter to Mr Ramsay, who replied that he was ready to indenture me at his premises in Niddrie Wynd, Edinburgh. The village soutar cobbled my stout boots, and, shouldering a knapsack, I bade my parents, sister, and village, a forlorn farewell.

Day after day, I trudged through the Borderlands and slept in barns and hedges under the moon and stars. The autumn fields lay wasted by another poor harvest; hamlets were filled with half-starved souls ill-mooded to blether wi’ a passing stranger. In truth, I was sore affrighted by my adventure and content to steer clear of company.

I recalled as I went my father saying that Allan Ramsay had also journeyed to Edinburgh as a youth. The story goes that from a young age, he had been put to farm work by his bonnet laird stepfather. Then, after Allan Ramsay’s mother Alice died in 1701, his stepfather drove him out of their Leadhills home and sent him to become a wigmaker’s apprentice in the capital. Thus, did I, Tobias Little, follow in his footsteps.

But wiggery was not Allan Ramsay’s only art, for he has a poetical gift born of his passion for nature, history, and folklore. Allan Ramsay’s way with words was famed even in my remote village and came to us by way of the chapmen. Some of his published rhymes I had learned by heart, and trudging north towards the capital, their cheery rhythms kept time to my booted feet:

Behold the hills and vales around,

With lowing herds and flocks abound,

The wanton kids and frisking lambs,

Gambol and dance about their dams.

The busy bees with humming noise,

And all the reptile kind rejoice:

Let us, like them, then sing and play

About the birks of Invermay.

Weary and famished, the distant sight of the craggy city struck me near dumb. It was beast-like with the mighty castle at its head, the High Street its meandering spine, and its tail the Canongate. Running off this monstrous pre-eminence were many precipitous ribs I have come to know as pends, wynds, closes, and entries.

One of these I ascended, dark, narrow, and foul as a barnyard. I staggered into the High Street, where my senses spun at the sight of the brawling and perambulating throng: mendicants, hawkers, pipers, cadies, barefoot children, and lords and ladies in rich attire hailing sedans. Animals wandered and japed with fearful din: feral dogs and cats, hairy hogs and squawking fowls. Horsemen geed-up their mounts, and carriages rattled over the cobblestones.

Overwhelmed by this circus, I fainted away at the foot of the Mercat Cross. How long I lay there I will never know, but a tinker wife revived me. Slap, slap on my cheeks, she went, and dripped whisky down my throat. Cackle, cackle, went she, saying, ‘Ye’r pale as a ghost wi’ lang dark locks.’ And cackled again and vanished after she supplied me with directions to Niddrie Wynd.

My knapsack of worldly goods vanished with her – brush and comb, penny whistle, apples from Father’s orchard, and, most lamentable, Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe. I had read and reread that book for enlightenment about the world. I am not what you might cry an educated man, but I did learn reading, writing, and arithmetic, at my village school in Berwickshire.

Down the dark cavern of Niddrie Wynd I staggered until I came upon a bow-window displaying on wooden blocks all manner of periwigs.

Seeing my fretful face peering in, out rushed Allan Ramsay crying, ‘At last, Tobias Little!’ He drew me into the dark bowels of the shop wherein hung diverse skeins of human hair, horsehair, and wool, and all the tools of the perruquier’s trade. On the stove steamed a cauldron of Scotch broth, and he poured some into a china bowl and gave me a spoon. I felt I had been delivered into a heavenly, though queer-smelling, place run by a genial magician. It was from this master that I learned the neat art of wiggery, and to this day I look up to him from my lowly station, though he be but a small man and I tall and lanky.

Allan Ramsay is comfortably proportioned from top to toe, with golden skin and an incisive brown gaze. In those days, he wore a natty pink turban and a long apron from whose kangaroo pocket peeked tools of his trade. The trials of my journey slipped away at the hands of this convivial wigmaker, who lived with his family above the shop and found me lodgings at Candlemaker Row. At that time, Allan and Christy Ramsay had a wee boy, Ally, and they lived under the shadow of several other weans untimely taken at birth or in infancy.

From the outset, my master’s poetical soul was evident. Words fall from his mouth in jingles, and although he’s on the portly side, he’s as light of foot as a dancer. In these early days, I blushed at his bawdy rhymes, such as the one about his fruitfulness with Christy: Thus heartily I graze and beau it/And keep my wife ay great wi’ poet. He kept his rude rhymes under lock and key and sold them to select clients for a ha’penny with backslapping and loud hilarity. Innocent verses he pinned on the wiggery walls for all to see, and some I also learned by heart, such as, Gi’e me a lass wi’ a lump o’ land/And we for life shall gang thegither and, My Peggy’s but a young thing/Just entered in her teens/Fair as the day/And sweet as May… My master has the habit of drawing eldritch faces in the margins of his poems. Doodles, he cries them, but I call them arty.

At apprenticeship’s end, I went with my master to a new shop cried The Flying Mercury, opposite the Mercat Cross on the High Street. There we plied our trade, the foremost of Edinburgh’s wigmakers with a list of worthy clients as lang’s my airm. In this new wiggery, my master sold books and pamphlets as a profitable sideline, and folk cried him Makar Ramsay.

Some say disappointment with the Union leads Mr Ramsay to write in Scots, but he writes in English too, if the mood takes him. He was proud of his wee book titled The Evergreen: Being a collection of Scots Poems wrote by the Ingenious before 1600, copies of which lay about the wiggery in great demand by clients and pirated as far away as London and Dublin. His poems and some old Scots verses and rhymes by other poets are to be published soon in what he’s calling The Tea-Table Miscellany. They are verses, says he, for folk to sing or recite at the hour set aside for tea and bread and butter. He’s undertaking a revival of Scots verse, he explains to all who will listen, and says that his stanzas are often composed in standard Habbie, or Habbie stanzas, whose earliest known use was a century ago in a poem cried ‘Habbie Simpson, the Piper o’ Kilbarchan’.

After his bestselling pastoral ballad, The Gentle Shepherd, was published last year, Anno Domini 1725, the wiggery coffers overflowed with coins. Literature and poetry had become the way of the future for Allan Ramsay, Makar of Edinburgh, who had risen and risen to stand in the top rank of the city’s ingenious sons.

‘What larks,’ cried he one day. ‘I’m in a position to quit wiggery and dedicate myself to the arts.’ He performed his queer wee jig and said: ‘I have secured a bookshop at the Luckenbooths, Tobias. Are you ready to become the proprietor of the Mercury?’

Thus I, too, rose in the world. Allan Ramsay was no longer my master, though I continue to cry him that.

CHAPTER 1

A MAN OF DISTINCTION

The Flying Mercury is given over to wigs and printed matter – half to one, half to the other. Allan Ramsay and Tobias Little bustle about, dismantling the shop. They pack wooden crates with books and pamphlets, and climb the ladder in convivial mood to bring down more of these items from the high shelves. Now and then, Allan voices the snatch of an old Scots song and Tobias whistles along, for the great day has come when Allan is to quit wiggery and leave the shop to Tobias, who has earned it. By the close of day, Allan will have removed all his printed matter to his newly acquired premises, The Two Heads in the Luckenbooths beside St Giles Cathedral.

The morning passes and much has been achieved before St Giles’ bells sound midday. They repair to John’s Coffee House in Parliament Square for a meat pie washed down with ale and a read of the newspapers.

‘The papers are all biased,’ Allan tells Tobias not for the first time. ‘The Caledonian Mercury in particular,’ he says. ‘That’s censored by the town council, which is censored in turn by the Westminster government. A man must make up his own mind about Scottish affairs by way of pamphlets expressing individual views, Tobias. Those published anonymously with the purpose of avoiding litigation are most likely to contain nuggets of truth, in my opinion.’

After dinner, the well-heeled of the town descend their dingy turnpike stairs and issue forth from closes, pends, and wynds, to promenade near the Mercat Cross: women in wide hooped dresses with jewelled stomachers, silk hooded cloaks, and high headdresses, their men in embroidered coats, knee breeches, tye wigs, and tricornes. The fabulous mingle with the mob: workers, the destitute, women of the middling sort in dyed linen dresses and long tartan shawls, legal devils in swirling black gowns.

Allan and Tobias push through the throng, back to The Flying Mercury, and by mid-afternoon all of Allan’s books and printed matter have been crated so that Tobias can set about organising the wiggery to his liking.

‘The one thing left to accomplish,’ says Allan, ‘is the removal of the sign of The Flying Mercury that I’ll consign to the nearest skip.’ He sets off down the High Street to the premises of James Norie, landskip painter, to borrow a tall ladder.

The business of the Norie studio is to create small-scale Arcadian landscapes in emulation of paintings by Claude Lorrain brought home by rich young men to prove they have accomplished a Grand Tour of Italy. Overdoor landskips created by James Norie and his sons, Robert and James, are all the rage to embellish the interiors of the grandest houses in Edinburgh that are mostly in the Canongate.

Norie the Elder and Allan trundle back up the hill with the ladder and dodge the rabble gathered at Old Stamp Office Close to gawp at the seasonal arrival in several sedans of Susanna Montgomerie, Countess of Eglintoun, and her eight lovely daughters. Allan longs to greet this paragon of all that is lovely, his friend to whom he has dedicated The Gentle Shepherd, but Norie, feeing Allan’s tug on the ladder, urges him to press on with the job in hand.

Further uphill, Allan’s teenaged son, also named Allan and known familiarly as Ally, waits outside the timber-fronted Mercury. Like a young god of Parnassus, the proud father thinks. Although he himself is poorly educated and largely self-taught, his handsome offspring is proficient in French, Latin, and Greek, intends to learn Italian and German, and treasures above all his God-given talents his ability to draw.

Ally starts up the ladder to remove the sign, but his father checks him. He wants the satisfaction of removing the sign of Mercury himself.

Not one to protest at parental directives, Ally concedes and grasps the ladder for safety’s sake when his father mounts the rungs. Ally can’t bear to watch his father’s foolishness and turns to blether with Norie about pigments for landskip painting, though his own forte is portraiture.

High above their heads, Allan steadies himself on the ladder and unhooks one side of the sign. A mere board of pine after all, painted by James Norie some years ago to depict Mercury wearing nothing but his wee winged helmet. Loath to let the sign go, since Mercury also reflects Allan Ramsay’s mantra for his new bookshop – As one thinks, so one becomes – nevertheless he must, to make way for Tobias’s new sign.

From his high perch, he steals a look back towards Old Stamp Office Close, where the crowd is dispersing uphill to observe the drama at the Mercury, and, joy, oh joy, Lady Susanna emerges. Followed by a retinue of her dainty offspring, she processes uphill, lifting dazzling hooped skirts above the ordure of the pavement. Her bewigged head, adorned with roses and butterflies, turns this way and that to greet so-and-so and such-and-such, and lord and lady this and that. Street urchins gather with hands outstretched for farthings until a baton-wielding policeman shoos them away with fearsome cries.

Allan muses over the approach of the tallest woman in Scotland, his charmer whose head resembles a stupendous flag above a six-foot-high staff. In normal circumstances, Allan’s small stature means that he must crane his neck to converse with Susanna, the secret, though impossible, love of his life. But now, as she draws nearer, he descends a few rungs and stands eye to eye with the countess.

‘Mr Ramsay,’ Susanna cries, ‘for why do you risk life and limb? Why is not your boy atop the ladder and you down here on the sidewalk?’

Allan muses upon eyes blue as cornflowers, and before he can reply, the countess says: ‘We know all about your removal to the Luckenbooths, don’t we, girls?’

And when she turns to appreciate her daughters’ chorus of, ‘Yes, Mama,’ Allan worships the mole on her left cheek and the cupid mouth that says: ‘I had hoped, dear makar, to purchase John Macky’s A Journey Through Scotland and scoundrel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe to amuse us during the coming winter months in Edinburgh.’

‘Come down now, Faither,’ Ally shouts.

Allan’s descent to the pavement brings him eye level with the nosegay of lavender secreted in Susanna’s fichu. Scots is his tongue of choice when excited, and Susanna wouldn’t object to Scots, but he opts for English and says: ‘My books are crated for the flitting to my bookshop, ma’am, but I’ll fish out the volumes you require.’ He has had no need of the elocution lessons that are all the rage since Ally speaks English to perfection and he has learned it from him and other ingenious friends.

He turns to his watchful son. ‘Have you greeted the countess, Ally?’ he says, and the youth doffs his wide-brimmed hat to reveal a tumble of chestnut curls.

Susanna jests: ‘Well, well, father and son, a noble pair. Poet and painter engaged in some spurious adventure, no doubt.’

Ally blushes to be the focus of beauty’s attention and says: ‘Nay, ma’am, ’tis a necessary ploy to remove the sign of Mercury so that Tobias Little can replace it with a sign of his own. Let me bring it down, Faither,’ he adds, and without waiting for an answer, he shimmies up the ladder, unhooks the sign in a jiffy, and fetches it down.

The watching crowd cheers, and the poet ushers Susanna into the Mercury that is no longer his.

From Tobias she orders a new wig in the London style whilst Allan finds the books she requires in a crate. ‘She is my Dulcinea,’ the poet thinks, writing out an invoice and handing her the McKay and Defoe before presenting her with a favourite book of his own, The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote de La Mancha.

Meanwhile, James Norie has found a neighbour to help him carry back the ladder. Ally crosses the High Street to John’s Tavern, trailed by four of Susanna’s lovely daughters – the Ladies Elizabeth, Helen, Margaret, and Charlotte. They squeeze into a booth with much nudging and naughtiness, and Ally wonders which of the girls he might paint, or better still marry, though his lack of social standing makes that prospect unlikely.

‘And now, my rabble of deliciousness,’ Ally quips, ‘ye shall have tea and buns in exchange for stories to delight me.’ Thus, he spends a happy hour hearing about life at Eglintoun Castle, the Montgomerie estate in Ayrshire.

Lady Helen says: ‘We grow Toadback pears in our walled garden, the sweetest and most luscious in the land, and I will bring one to your painting room at the earliest opportunity.’

Lady Charlotte adds: ‘They have horrible warty skins.’

Then Lady Elizabeth pipes up: ‘Will you credit it, Master Ramsay? When Mother was brushing my hair the other day, she asked me what I would give to be as pretty as her. To which I replied, not half as much as you would give to be as young as me, Mama.’

Ally joins in the merriment, and the two youngest Montgomerie girls shriek: ‘Rats, rats! Tell him about the rats.’

Elizabeth attempts to hush them, but Helen presses on: ‘Mother keeps at least a dozen pet rats, Master Ramsay. When visitors come, she knocks on a tiny door set into the wood panelling, and out they scurry, fat and sleek, and disgusting to my mind, but Mama says they reward her with more gratitude than any human and deserve every crumb she feeds them.’

Lady Margaret shrieks: ‘She means her daughters are an ungrateful lot!’

A chorus of agreement goes up before Ally takes his leave with the excuse that he’s wanted at his painting room.

The Ramsay family’s Luckenbooths house is situated above the new bookshop, which the poet has christened ‘Hawthornden’s and Ben Jonson’s Heads’, to be commonly known as ‘The Two Heads’. The day after the flitting, Allan the Elder breakfasts in the kitchen with his family; their Irish maid, Jessie, whom the Ramsays count as one of them; and their enormous ginger cat, Mouser, whose job is to catch vermin embedded in the Luckenbooths walls. The poet has enjoyed being slapped on the buttocks many times during the night by Christian Ross, his sonsie wife, who is a head taller than him. He likes his women big. Since Christy is a lady, when the mood comes on him, Allan must beg permission to beau her. Last night she agreed but had to slap him when he overdid his ardour. ‘Once, my wee bullock,’ she protested, ‘not thrice, for I maun get sleep before daybreak.’

In the early days of their marriage, when two, or maybe it was three, of their infants had been untimely taken, Christy often let Mr Ramsay beau her out of desperation to build a family. The results of this raunchy time are Janet and Anne, aged seven and six, eating their porridge at the table; their two-year-old sister Catherine, asleep in her cot; and Ally, thirteen, working in his painting room. Everyone declares that the Ramsay children resemble their comely, dark-haired mother, except Anne who is slight and fair. Ally is already a head taller than his father and, although his broad jaw and tilted nose suggest stubborn independence, he is, by and large, obedient.

The well-equipped kitchen boasts the latest blackened range, a scrubbed table displaying a central sugar cone, many copper pans and implements, shelves gleaming with Christy’s chutneys, jams, and bottled fruits, and pottery jars labelled sultanas, nuts, and assorted spices. In the sparse parlour opposite the kitchen, a handsome wall clock, given as a wedding present by Christy’s father, ticks above the fireplace, and the poet’s old lug chair waits beside the fire that’s always lit in winter. A curious collection of prints, plate, jewels, medals, and musical instruments bought for a song at auction is hidden from view in an old seagoing chest which Allan calls his insurance against a rainy day. Off the narrow dark hall are several narrow rooms with fold-away beds and chamber pots, and Ally’s painting room.

The family’s removal from Niddrie Wynd to the Luckenbooths is a triumph Janet and Anne celebrate with high spirits this morning, until their mother cries: ‘Wheesht, or you’ll wake wee Cathy in her crib.’

Makar Ramsay carries his empty porridge bowl to the sink, shaking crumbs from the creases of the brown dress coat he wears fastened over a linen shirt and knee-length breeches. White silk stockings and buckled shoes further denote his new status as bookseller, whereas his perruquier attire had been but an enveloping hopsack apron such as Tobias Little now wears.

He gives Jessie a playful pat on her backside. Jessie is no taller than Janet, so small indeed that she reaches the sink by way of a slatted standing board. Allan recoils in mock alarm from her wall-eyed look of disdain, and, just then, the burly, bearded water carrier heaves in the daily barrel for the family’s cleaning needs, both personal and domestic. Allan finds the man a sixpence, ardently embraces his wife, and says he’s off to The Two Heads.

When Christy calls after him: ‘Is the bookshop sign up yet?’ he pauses at the door to say that Ally hung the sign before the paint