The Heart of Mid-Lothian - Penn State University

sent him to serve in the corps long maintained in the
service of the States of Holland, and called the Scotch
Dutch. Here he learned military discipline; and, returning
afterwards, in the course of an idle and wandering
life, to his native city, his services were required by the
magistrates of Edinburgh in the disturbed year 1715,
for disciplining their City Guard, in which he shortly
afterwards received a captain’s commission. It was only
by his military skill and an alert and resolute character
as an officer of police, that he merited this promotion,
for he is said to have been a man of profligate habits, an
unnatural son, and a brutal husband. He was, however,
useful in his station, and his harsh and fierce habits rendered
him formidable to rioters or disturbers of the public
peace.
The corps in which he held his command is, or perhaps
we should rather say was, a body of about one
hundred and twenty soldiers divided into three companies,
and regularly armed, clothed, and embodied. They
were chiefly veterans who enlisted in this cogs, having
the benefit of working at their trades when they were
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off duty. These men had the charge of preserving public
order, repressing riots and street robberies, acting, in
short, as an armed police, and attending on all public
occasions where confusion or popular disturbance might
be expected.*
Poor Fergusson, whose irregularities sometimes led
him into unpleasant rencontres with these military conservators
of public order, and who mentions them so
often that he may be termed their poet laureate,** thus
admonishes his readers, warned doubtless by his own
experience:—
“Gude folk, as ye come frae the fair,
Bide yont frae this black squad:
There’s nae sic savages elsewhere
Allowed to wear cockad.”
* The Lord Provost was ex-officio commander and colonel
of the corps, which might be increased to three hundred men
when the times required it. No other drum but theirs was
allowed to sound on the High Street between the
Luckenbooths and the Netherbow.
** Robert Fergusson, the Scottish Poet, born 1750, died 1774.