page_title: Mercat Cross, Edinburgh
section_title: Proclamations, burnings and punishments
hierarchical_section_title: Mercat Cross, Edinburgh / Proclamations, burnings and punishments
caption_attribution_description: English: Royal Unicorn, Edinburgh Mercat Cross
context_page_description: The Mercat Cross of Edinburgh stands in Parliament Square next to St Giles' Cathedral, facing the High Street in the Old Town of Edinburgh.
context_section_description: As elsewhere in Scotland, important civic announcements were made at the mercat cross. In Edinburgh, royal and parliamentary proclamations that affected all of Scotland were publicly read. The practice of announcing successions to the monarchy and the calling of parliamentary general elections is continued to this day by heralds of the Lord Lyon King of Arms.
  The Protestant reformer John Knox relates that for one hour and four hours on two separate days in 1565 Sir James Tarbet was tied to the Cross and pelted with eggs for saying the Mass, which had been banned by the Scottish Parliament five years previously.
  After the surrender of the "Queen's Men" ended the "Lang Siege" of Edinburgh Castle William Kirkcaldy of Grange, his brother James and the two jewellers Mossman and Cokke, who had been minting coins in the Queen's name inside the castle, were hanged at the Cross on 3 August 1573.
  It is also recorded that, "Upon 2d day of December, 1584, a baxter's boy [baker's apprentice] called Robert Henderson, (no doubt, by the instigation of Satan) desperately put some powder and a candle in his father's heather-stack, standing in a close opposite to the trone of Edinburgh, and burnt the same with his fathers house, which lay next adjacent, to the imminent hazard of burning the whole town: For which, being apprehended most marvellously after his escaping out of the town, he was on the next day burnt quick [alive, not strangled first] at the cross of Edinburgh, as an example".
  In 1591, John Dickson, convicted of parricide, was "broken upoun the row [wheel]" at the Cross. This is one of only two recorded instances of this brutal form of punishment being used in Scotland, the other having also occurred at the Cross. Jean Livingstoun of Dunipace, the wife of John Kincaid, Laird of Warriston had, with the connivance of her nurse, hired Robert Weir, one of her father's servants and her reputed lover, to murder her husband, which he did by strangling him in the night. Thanks to the intercession of her kinspeople, on 5 July 1600 Lady Warriston was granted the privilege of being beheaded by the Maiden at Girth-Cross rather than executed by one of the more usual methods for females, namely drowning or strangling before burning. The nurse was burnt on the same day her mistress was beheaded. Four years later, in 1604, Weir was apprehended, tried and condemned to be "broken on ane cart wheel with ane coulter of ane pleughe in the hand of the hangman" next to the Mercat Cross.
  In 1600, after the failure of the Gowrie conspiracy the corpses of John, Earl of Gowrie and his brother Alexander Ruthven were hanged and quartered at the Mercat Cross, their heads were put on spikes at Edinburgh's Old Tolbooth and their limbs upon spikes at various locations around Perth.
  Alastair MacGregor of Glen Strae, chief of the outlawed Clan Gregor was executed at the Cross along with eleven of his kinsmen in January 1604. A contemporary recorded that "Himself being Chieff, he wes hangit his awin hicht aboune [own height above] the rest of hes freindis".
  Six days after the execution of King Charles I, the Scottish Estates proclaimed his son Charles II at the Cross on 5 February 1649, thus directly challenging the English Parliament's acceptance of the Commonwealth. The Cross was the place of execution of the Royalist leaders George Gordon, 2nd Marquis of Huntly on 22 March 1649 and James Graham, 1st Marquis of Montrose on 21 May 1650. Five of Montrose's close supporters were also beheaded there shortly thereafter.
  Following occupation by the English Parliamentary Army, the proposal to incorporate Scotland into the Commonwealth was proclaimed at the Cross on 4 February 1652, followed three days later by the symbolic act of hauling down the King's Arms and ceremonially hanging them on the public gallows. In May 1654, General George Monck, the English Military Governor of Scotland, was present for the reading of two proclamations delivered at the Cross, the first declaring Oliver Cromwell to be the Protector of England Ireland and Scotland, and the second confirm
caption: Royal Unicorn on the Cross
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