married. From a grateful
sense of her services, as well as from a conviction of Porteous's ability
for the office, the lord provost proposed that John Porteous should be
elected one of the captains of the city-guard, and it was agreed to.

This was a situation of trust and respectability, and would have enabled
the young couple to live in comfort and ease if the husband had conducted
himself properly. The gentlewoman was a person of virtue and merit, but was
unlucky in her choice of a husband--Porteous was no better a husband than
he had been a son. They were not long married when he began to ill-use her.
He dragged her out of bed by the hair of the head, and beat her to the
effusion of blood. The whole neighbourhood were alarmed sometimes at
midnight by her shrieks and cries; so much so, indeed, that a lady living
above them was obliged, between terms, to take a lodging elsewhere for her
own quiet. Mrs Porteous was obliged to separate from her husband, and this
was her requital for having been the occasion of his advancement.

His command of the city-guard gave him great opportunities of displaying
his evil temper, and manifesting his ungovernable passions. Seldom a day
passed but some of his men experienced his severity. The mob on all public
occasions excited his naturally bad temper; and on all days of rejoicing,
when there was a multitude from the country as well as from the town, the
people were sure to experience offensive and tyrannical treatment from him.
The hatred and terror of him increased every year, and his character as an
immoral man was known to everybody, so that he was universally hated and
feared by the lower orders both in town and country.

This was the position in which Captain Porteous stood with the people when
he was called upon to take charge of the execution of the law in reference
to Andrew Wilson, whose case it has been thought proper to detail before
proceeding to narrate the extraordinary events that followed, and which,
indeed, partly serves to explain the cause of these events.

We have stated that Andrew Wilson, George Robertson, and William Hall, were
condemned by the High Court of Justiciary to die on Wednesday the 14th of
April 1736. Hall was reprieved, but Wilson and Robertson were left to
suffer the extreme penalty of the law. A plan was concocted to enable them
to escape out of the Tolbooth, by sawing the iron bars of the window; but
Wilson, who is described as a "round, squat