For three days the capital was in the power of a mad and lawless rabble, who, rendered furious by bigotry and intoxication, committed the most dreadful atrocities.
The houses of all who were obnoxious to them were plundered and given to the flames, and all effects of value were scattered in the streets. There were episodes of horror ensued such as Edinburgh had never witnessed before. The streets were filled with the smoke of burning houses; the air was sheeted with flame; the shrieks of the perishing inmates, the howls of their destroyers, and the crash of falling masonry, rang night and day. The college of the Jesuits was levelled to the dust; crosses, and reliques, statues, pictures, and vestments were borne aloft through the streets, and consigned to the flames amid yells of derision.
The ale and wine found in the cellars of the cavaliers, inflamed the inborn savagism of the multitude, who were urged by their ministers to commit a thousand nameless atrocities. For three days they continued in a state of perfect intoxication (says Lord Balcarris in his _Memoirs_), and in open daylight, in the crowded streets of the city, committed upon the persons of many Catholic ladies such outrages as cannot be written, and "without any attempt being made by the authorities to restrain such brutality." (pp. 22, 27.)
Of all the members of the old government none was more obnoxious to the people than Sir George Mackenzie, of Rosehaugh, the celebrated lawyer and essayist, who had rendered himself an object of intense hatred, by the severity with which he had stretched the criminal laws to answer the views of the Government; and who, in his office of Public Prosecutor, had obtained the unenviable soubriquet of "the persecutor of God's saints," "the blood-thirsty advocate," "bluidy Mackenzie;" and to this hour his vaulted mausoleum at Edinburgh is regarded with hatred and loathing by the old Cameronians and "true blue" Presbyterians.
His mansion in Rosehaugh Close was soon made the object of attack. The night of the third day had closed over the city, and still the scene of tumult and frenzy, the din and the flames of destruction, loaded the air with sounds of horror and outrage.
In great anxiety for his personal safety, the unhappy statesman heard with no ordinary perturbation the increasing roar of sounds, like the chafing of a distant sea; the mingling of a myriad human voices, and the rush of feet, which betokened the approach of a vast mob.