Canongate Kirkyard

      If the dead could rise again, what a distinguished crowd of people would find themselves together in the burying ground of the Canongate church in Edinburgh.

    Poor David Rizzio lies there, hastily buried after being slaughtered in front of Mary Queen of Scots in her private rooms at Holyrood Palace, a short distance down the road from the churchyard.

   Italian born musician, Rizzio was killed by the Queen's foppish husband, Darnley, egged on by disaffected Scottish lords who hoped that the shock of seeing her friend killed in front of her, might make the pregnant Queen die of shock.  But Mary was too tough for that and lived on to be executed twenty years later in England.
    Another charismatic woman was buried in the kirkyard two hundred years later. Glasgow born Mrs Agnes Maclehose, who the poet Robert Burns called "Clarinda", was a beauty and wit whose silhouette portrait can be seen in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in Queen Street.   It shows her to have been a lovely woman.
    Burns fell in love with her when they met in Edinburgh and they exchanged passionate verses, but Clarinda was already married though living as a widow because her husband, with whom she was unhappy, spent his time in his estates on Jamaica.

     Clarinda was fiercely jealous when Burns married Jean Armour however, and their association ended, though she yearned after him for the rest of her life.  Aged  82, she was buried in Canongate kirkyard in 1841, having outlived the poet by 45 years.

      More internationally famous than Clarinda is Adam Smith, the philosopher and economist, who was laid to rest in the kirkyard in 1790.  He was the author of "The Nature and Economy of the Wealth of Nations", which influences economic thinking to this day.

     Sharing the burying ground with him are James and John Ballantyne, the brothers who published Scott's Waverley novels, and Robert Fergusson, a witty poet and author of an acclaimed poem called "Auld Reekie" which gave Edinburgh its most  commonly known nickname.

    In this poem, Fergusson drew a vivid pen portrait of the city and its society.  Altogether, he wrote over 80 poems, many of them in the Scots tongue, and enjoyed great acclaim, but died in the madhouse in 1774 and was buried in an unmarked grave.  Robert Burns however, who admired his work, paid for a gravestone to be erected over his grave.

    In the churchyard is also the ancient Canongate Cross, which originally stood outside the Canongate Tolbooth.