Man-Midwife, Male Feminist: The Life and Times of George Macaulay, M.D., Ph.D. (1716-1766)

Chapter Two: Early life: Edinburgh: 1716-32

Ever an astute planner for the future, on 19 July 1710 Archibald Macaulay, while still "one of the bailies of Dunbarton," was enrolled as a burgess and guildsman of Edinburgh, "gratis, for good services done," by act of the Edinburgh City Council.[1] As a burgess, Archibald Macaulay gained the freedom of the city and the license to conduct business there and to enjoy the benefits of a "monopoly in commerce and manufactures" that freedom of the city conferred.[2] That he was enrolled gratis was very probably a mark of a nobleman's esteem. Gratis burgess-ships, explains Marguerite Wood, were most frequently bestowed at the request of an important person whom it was impolitic to refuse or granted to someone whom it was expedient to flatter.[3] Despite the privileges that his freedom opened for him, however, Archibald does not seem to have taken up residence in Edinburgh until after his daughter Anne's birth in 1723.

The city of Edinburgh proper did not in those days occupy the low ground at the foot of the mound nor sprawl thence toward the North Sea. The "new city" at the foot of the great rock was not begun, indeed could not begin, until 1767. Instead, a lake—the North Loch—drained the prominence rising above it and lay along what is now Princes Street. The city itself occupied the higher ground, sloping down from the castle on the west to the royal palace (Holyrood House) in the southeast, and rising from Leith Gate in the north over the city's spine, then gradually falling away to the southeast edge of the University—an area of about a square mile. The City had been Page  10designated a Royal Free Burgh in 1603 by charter of James III of Scotland (The "Golden Charter"), in which twenty-four previous charters for the city had been confirmed. Hugo Arnot in his The History of Edinburgh described Edinburgh's site this way. "The ground upon which [the city] is built is perhaps as singular, and in many respects inconvenient as can well be figured. [From] the Palace of Holyrood House to the Castle—a mile-long ridge...forms a continuous and very magnificent street. From its sides, lande and alleys...wynds and closes extend like slanting ribs."[4] As a Royal Free Burgh, Edinburgh enjoyed certain privileges, including that of treating with foreign governments on matters affecting trade. That status, however, also imposed certain limitations. One of these required an act of Parliament to enable Edinburgh to enlarge its boundaries.

As long as the military situation dictated the defensibility of the town as the principal consideration in determining the city's plan, however, no parliamentary initiatives for expansion were forthcoming. Consequently, while its citizens mistakenly believed that its walls protected the city (military action in 1745 was to prove otherwise), Edinburgh had to accommodate its growing population and burgeoning commerce by building up rather than out. Buildings of ten and twelve stories were not uncommon. These were crowded, largely un- or ill-plumbed, dimly lit, poorly ventilated, often ill-maintained by grasping landlords, and, particularly for those dwelling in the upper stories—where rents were cheaper—extraordinarily taxing physically. At least at first, Carola must have found it unnerving, after the clearer air and rural placidity of Inveresk, to rear a family in the stink and jostle of Edinburgh.

That notwithstanding, some time between 1723 and 25, Archibald moved his family from Inveresk to the capital. This move was accompanied by immediate political prominence. His allegiance to the Hanoverian succession and the established Church together with Archibald's industry, his abilities as a manager and organizer, his good service as bailiff both in Dumbarton and Inveresk, and his penchant for making friends with and accomplishing the purposes of the powerful led to his advancement in Page  11a career of public service. By 1725 we find him listed as Dean of Guild for Edinburgh.[5]

According to James Colston, The Leges Burgorum (Laws of the Town) of Edinburgh, preserved in the Berne MS, cap. 77, provided the enabling legislation for the selection of a town council. To be elected "at the first court after Michelmas, the alderman and baillies should be chosen of faithful men, and of gude fame, by the common...[advice] of the honest men of the burgh" (Colston 30-31). The "Statute of the Gild" (Statuta Gildae, cap. 33) ordained "that the common council and the community be governed by twenty-four honest men, of the best, maist discreet, and maist trustworthy" (Colston 31). Originally, the Dean of Guild and his Court had been charged with settling "all disputes between merchant and mariner, or between merchant and merchant. They likewise had charge of weights and measures and of the stability of the various houses and public buildings in the burgh" (Colston 37-38). Though in 1681 the Dean of Guild's Court lost its maritime authority, it continued to exercise its sway in mercantile matters, and the Dean of Guild's signature was sometimes necessary in approving the proper conduct of audits of town expenditures (Colston 39). In his capacity as Dean of Guild, Archibald Macaulay also served on boards overseeing provision for the poor, charities for the sick, and the University of Edinburgh, and assumed executive responsibility for the city in the event of the absence or incapacity of the Lord Provost. It is possible that the guildsmen had early on exercised the prerogatives of the town council itself before that governing body had been established.

By 1725 Archibald's name appears frequently in the Edinburgh Town Council Records, and the many responsibilities with which he was charged suggest that by that date the Macaulays certainly were and probably for a good while preceding it had been resident in the town. On 10 October 1725, Archibald filed a committee report and, as Dean of Guild, was ordered to create the previous Lord Provost a Burgess. In November we find him considering the formation of a fire brigade and the regulation of the sale of beef and mutton. Entries made the following February reveal him serving Page  12on committees for public works, for the poor, for considering tax and fees on the timber bush of Leith and auditing payment records.[6]

In the year following, 1727, Archibald Macaulay's star rose more rapidly and glowed more brightly. On 6 July 1727 a letter was sent to King George II via Archibald, Earl of Islay, informing the King that George I before his death had commissioned Archibald Macaulay to serve as Lord Conservator of the Scottish [trading] privileges at Campvere in the Netherlands. George II confirmed the appointment and the convention was so advised. Because one of the prerogatives of the Convention of the Royal Burghs of Scotland was the conduct of commercial diplomacy with foreign powers, the convention usually viewed royal appointments to such positions as encroachments on their rights. In fact it had not been long since there had been rival Lord Conservators appointed by monarch and convention. But in the matter of Archibald Macaulay's appointment, there seems to have been merely ritual murmuring, and the Royal Burghs quickly endorsed the king's appointee.[7] Perhaps one reason for their atypically gracious accession to the king's power was that the monarch had named one of their own.

Archibald Macaulay also was first elected Lord Provost of Edinburgh in 1727.[8] By virtue of that office, he served as the president of the Convention of the Royal Burghs. In any case the draft of a letter sent earlier to the Magistrate of Campvere appears in the Extracts from the Records of the convention of the Royal Burghs of Scotland naming Macaulay the appointee of the king and the convention and expressing the convention's confidence in Macaulay's qualifications for the task (4 April 1728, 470-71).

Even Macaulay's executive abilities appear to have been stretched thin, however, by the convergence of the responsibilities of so many offices in so short a time, and the Convention of Royal Burghs found it expedient to explain to the Town Council of Campvere that, owing to the press of business in connection with his duties as Lord Provost of Edinburgh, he had been delayed in presenting his credentials to them in person. The Page  13letter (dated 10 July 1727) repeated the convention's confidence in their appointee.[9]

Undoubtedly at Macaulay's instance, the Convention of Royal Burghs formed a committee to study the organization and emoluments of the Conservator's Office and both raised the salary of the Lord Conservator and authorized him to appoint and maintain a deputy. The committee concluded that a sum of £300 sterling was necessary to support the dignity of the office and imposed a modest duty on the staple goods to help raise the sum. Macaulay also applied for and was granted additional sums to cover his travel expenses (Extracts 475-76). His predecessor as Lord Conservator had been Sir Andrew Kennedy of Cloburn. Both to augment his own salary and to liquidate the deceased Kennedy's debts and relieve the financial distress of Kennedy's impoverished daughters, Beatrix and Mary, in 1726 Macaulay had petitioned the king for an additional £200, half of which he would use to pay the debts of the Kennedy sisters.[10] Both his essential humanity and his self-interest appear in these arrangements.

The staple contract between the Convention of Royal Burghs and the port city of Veere in the Netherlands had existed since 1541 and in theory was supposed to establish a virtual monopoly that required Scottish merchants to trade through Veere with the continent. Changing economic conditions and trading patterns had, by the mid-eighteenth century, largely outmoded the trade arrangements that the contract specified, and Scottish exporters honored the agreement principally in the breach rather than the observance. This fact caused the most thorough chroniclers of the history of the staple contract, John Davidson and Alexander Gray, to conclude that the treaty continued in force with periodic renegotiation largely as a result of the momentum of precedent. In their opinion, by the era of Archibald Macaulay's conservatorship, as a viable trade agreement the contract was an essentially useless anachronism.[11] While from a strictly economic point of view this was probably true, the Scottish cantonment at Veere and the office there of the Lord Conservator had great value as a continental listening post from Page  14which intelligence concerning the troop movements of Jacobites and their French allies could regularly be monitored. With matters such as these Archibald Macaulay's surviving correspondence regularly concerns itself. The following letter is typical:

In his role as Lord Conservator, Archibald's responsibilities included overseeing the gathering of intelligence concerning subversive and treasonable activities. Not only, however, did affairs of city and nation demand Archibald's attention. Domestic issues had to be dealt with as well.

The Macaulays' earliest known Edinburgh address was in one of the middle stories of "a Lodging belonging to...Henry Hepburn lying opposite to the head of Forresters Wynd" in Gavinlock's Land—a location due east of the castle and north of the Tollbooth.[13] For at least a portion of their occupancy in Hepburn's house, conditions were very unsatisfactory—so much so that Archibald, his patience exhausted by his landlord's unfulfilled promises to effect repairs, sued the landlord for redress. Almost immediately after becoming Lord Provost, Macaulay complained to the Dean of Guild's Council about rain and gray water from a sewer that came from the stories above and served both his and the adjacent tenement. It overflowed and stained his kitchen walls. He alleges that his flagstones are so "chattered and broken" that they permitted the overflow from the sewer and the Macaulay family's gray water to inundate the apartments below. He faulted the height of the lintel of the entryway and also complained that his neighbors to the west have made his "coall fold" unusable by throwing into it all Manner of "nastieness" (SRO, MS 6165).

The Dean of Guild's council appointed an investigating committee which confirmed all the particulars of Macaulay's complaint and required the landlord either to effect the repairs himself by the Monday following or to permit Macaulay to do so and withhold the cost from his future rent. The family's discomfort with the condition of their lodging was apparently ameliorated, for in a letter of 1738, Ann Riddell addresses him at what is apparently the same residence by the land's popular designation "Goudilock's (Goldylock's) Land" and asks him for a letter of reference.[14] Nearby addresses, from west to east, included Morocco Close, Galloway's Close, Penston Letter's Land, then Goudilock's [Gavinlock's] land itself, followed by Brown's Land and Byre's Close. One wonders if the Dean of Guild's Council would have responded Page  16with the same gratifying dispatch to the complaint of a person who had not himself just been Dean of Guild and was now Lord Provost.

Later on, perhaps when the children were grown, Archibald and Carola did move. J. Gilhooley gives Archibald's address in 1752 as World's End Close between Tweedale's Court and Erskine's Land, at the foot of the high street and right against the town wall, directly across from the present World's Inn Pub, with Cowgate on the south and Netherbow on the north.[15] This latter address was likely more fashionable since it was near the home of the Marquis of Tweedale with its 56 windowpanes taxed annually at a shilling each (Gilhooley ix and 67).

No account of life in early eighteenth-century Edinburgh would be complete without a sketch of the sanitary arrangements the city's high and rocky site imposed upon its residents. Although the houses had provision, as we have seen, for the disposal of some of the liquid waste, each night the householders living in the lofty stone dwellings, with the famous warning cry of "Gardee Loo" (regardez l'eau—Watch out for the water [a euphemism]!) unceremoniously dumped the accumulated ordure of their chamber pots from their windows into the streets below, often to the curses and complaints of hapless pedestrians. The liquid waste drained away into the North Loch below, and in the early morning (except on Sundays!) cleaners came to shovel into carts the more offensive matter. This the cleaners then carted to neighboring farmers who used it as fertilizer—a profitable arrangement for all concerned.[16] A preoccupied leit-motif concerning the contractual arrangements for this haulage punctuates the Records of the Town Council.

Despite the picture we have thus far drawn, the Edinburgh in which the young George Macaulay lived was far from unremittingly grim. Social life was lively and democratic. Although hereditary rank and wealth enjoyed their privileges, and though, as Gilhooley suggests, everyone knew precisely his or her station in the social order, the city's crowded conditions meant that rich and poor, high-born and low, lived, loved, played and worked Page  17cheek by jowl, often occupying different floors in the same building—by and large with a civility that a twentieth-century North American city might well envy (Gilhooley, vii).

Then too, there were entertainments. Though the theologues of Edinburgh tolerated no resident theater (they closed down one that Allan Ramsay opened in 1736), itinerant players from England occasionally produced plays despite protests from the pulpit.[17] The same Allan Ramsay began operating a circulating library in 1725—as usual to the horror of the clergy: "all the villanous, profane, and obscene books and plays printed at London by Curle and others are got down by Allan Ramsay and lent out for an easy price to young boys, servant girls of the better sort, and gentlemen, and vice and obscenity are dreadfully propagated" (Woodrow Analecta, iii, 515; cited in Graham 97).

Dancing and concerts were also popular pastimes. So, despite legislation aimed at limiting it, was gambling at dice and at cards. Above all, even for children, there was a very great deal to drink. Even the Lords Provost imbibed deeply according to Graham, though generally "in taverns [where] the Lord Provost had his guests to dinner and to supper, [and] they could drink deeper and longer than in his private house" (103).

Intellectually gifted and morally high-minded as he was, however, and coming as he did from the town's gentry, the rougher pleasures of Edinburgh surely did not engage young George's time and attention. Rather, he profited mightily from the educational opportunities with which the city presented him.

A fellow native of Inveresk and slightly junior contemporary of George, the redoubtable autobiographer Alexander Carlyle (1722-1805) praises the outstanding educational opportunities that Edinburgh afforded its boys, particularly with respect to the study of English and Latin.[18] Although the pre-1737 records of student enrollment at the High School of Edinburgh have not survived, George Macaulay's attendance there is a virtual certainty. Private instruction was available in Edinburgh, but by the 1720s the Town Council Page  18considered such instruction inferior to that available in the high school—so much so that the council was at some pains to regulate private teachers, prescribing their methods of teaching and requiring them to be licensed by council, to keep the same hours as the high school, and to schedule vacation periods at the same time. The council opined that "private schools [were]...under bad management...wanting order and discipline [and not only]...prejudicial to public masters and public teaching, but also hurtful to the manners and education of the youth of this city."[19]

Presumably Archibald, already or soon to be a council member by virtue of his office of Dean of Guild, would have shared the prevailing view and opted to enroll his own sons in the high school. Children as young as six attended the classes there, paying four shillings a quarter for attending the rector's classes and one shilling in the classes of the four masters. The Edinburgh Grammar School had burned in 1696, and apparently the high school had assumed some of its teaching responsibilities. At the same meeting (5 August 1724) the council fixed the number of masters at the high school at five and the number of private teachers to be licensed in the city at the same level. These ten, the council decided, would be sufficient to the educational needs of the community. Clearly, the kind of classical education that the high school offered was thought appropriate only for a relatively few privileged scholars, and the council enjoined the masters to "Observe and regulate the manners of youth under their care...and exercise discipline and correction with prudence and discretion" (Edinburgh Town Council Records, 5 August 1724; Steven 91).

This last caveat most of the masters took to heart. Of those who served during the years that George was probably a scholar (sometime between 1722 and 32), only one, John Rae, had a reputation as a frequent flogger, though he may in fact have retired before George reached the third class. The rector who served throughout the period of George Macaulay's probable attendance was George Arbuthnot (served 1717-35), a dignified person described as "treating the other masters somewhat de haut en bas" and "severe and rather too intolerant of dulness, but kind to more promis- Page  19ing talents" (Steven 103). The first class's master was Alexander Findlater (served 1718-35). Robert Spence (served 1717-42) conducted the second. James Gibb (served 1719-1759) is variously remembered as teaching the third and fourth classes. A scholar who attended his classes late in the master's career describes him thus:

Happily, George would have studied under Gibb in his prime. Several masters conducted the fourth class during this period: James Paterson, the translator of Patroculus, served from 1716-22; James Wingate, from 1722 until his death in 1731; and John Lees 1731-35, when he was appointed rector (Steven 116-118). A Robert Godskirk also taught writing and bookkeeping.

Classes numbering from 18 to 40 students met from seven to nine in the morning, adjourned an hour for breakfast, and resumed from ten to noon. After a two-hour break for dinner, they met for another two hours in the afternoon. Students studied Latin until they became competent to read Virgil, Horace, Sallust, and some Cicero and Livy. These last they studied under the tutelage of Rector Arbuthnot himself. They wrote out versions of the Roman writers in Latin, translated the authors into English, and at the annual August examinations they recited extracts from the Roman poets (Steven 104). Though Greek instruction was supposed to be the exclusive province of university professors and, until the 1730s, the law prohibited public and private masters from providing that instruction, this prohibition was apparently widely ignored, and George Macaulay was in all likelihood reasonably advanced in his study of Greek before he enrolled in university. We know that by then he was an excellent Latinist because both at Edinburgh and later at Padua, the language of instruction was often Page  20Latin, as it was for the examinations he was obliged to take in qualifying for his doctoral degrees.

Then as now, teachers did not grow wealthy from their emoluments. The rector's salary was 300 Scotch marks, and the masters' 250 marks plus 4 shillings per student per quarter. In addition to these fixed amounts, however, the masters of the school received "bleis-silver." This Steven defines as "a gratuity presented to the teachers by their scholars at Candlemas, when the pupil that gave the most was pronounced 'king' (66)."

Though Candlemas (February 2, originally the feast celebrating the ascension of the Virgin) was technically a holiday, children attended school in the afternoon, and after the requisite speechifying:

The boy with the highest offering was pronounced victor and named the "king." Sometimes a bidding competition occurred among the fathers of the boys who were competing to be named "king," with the fathers upping the ante with supplementary offerings until the stakes rose as high as 25 guineas. George's teachers did manage to eke out a living. Given what we know of Archibald's circumstances, however, it seems unlikely that George's father would have been among those competing to see his son named king.