John Porteous
John Porteous (d. 1736), captain of the city guard of Edinburgh, whose name is associated with the celebrated riots of 1736, was the son of Stephen Porteous, an Edinburgh tailor. Having served in the army, he was employed in 1715 to drill the city guard for the defence of Edinburgh in anticipation of a Jacobite rising, and was promoted later to the command of the force.
In 1736 a smuggler named Wilson, who had won popularity by helping a companion escape from Edinburgh's Tolbooth prison, was hanged. At his execution there was some slight disturbance, upon which the city guard fired on the mob, wounding many people and killing some. Porteous, who was said to have fired on the people himself, was brought to trial and sentenced to death, but then reprieved. The granting of a reprieve was hotly resented by the people of Edinburgh, and on the night of the 7th of September 1736 an armed body of men in disguise broke into the prison, seized Porteous, and hanged him on a signpost in the street.
It was rumoured that persons of high position were involved in the crime; but although the government offered rewards for the apprehension of the perpetrators, and although General Moyle wrote to the duke of Newcastle that the criminals were "well-known by many of the inhabitants of the town," no one was ever convicted of participation in the murder. The sympathies of the people, and even, it is said, of the clergy, throughout Scotland, were so much on the side of the rioters that the original stringency of the bill introduced into parliament for punishing the city of Edinburgh had to be reduced to the levying of a fine of £2000 for Porteous's widow, and the disqualification of the provost for holding any public office. The incident of the Porteous riots was used by Sir Walter Scott in his novel The Heart of Midlothian.
John Porteous is buried in Greyriars Kirkyard in Edinburgh.
References
See Sir Daniel Wilson, Memorials of Edinburgh in the Olden Time (2 vols. Edinburgh, 1848): State Trials, vol. xvii.; William Coxe, Memoirs of the Life of Sir R. Walpole (4 vols. London, 1816); Alexander Carlyle, Autobiography (Edinburgh, 1860), which gives the account of an eye-witness of the execution of Wilson; pamphlets (2 vols. in British Museum) containing The Life and Death of Captain John Porteous, and other papers relating to the subject; W. E. H. Lecky, History of England in the Eighteenth Century, ii. 324, note (7 vols., London, 1892). See also Scott's notes to The Heart of Midlothian.