Porteous Riots

The crisis began at the Edinburgh execution of the smuggler Andrew Wilson in April 1736. When the crowd protested, the City Guard fired and killed or wounded several people. Captain John Porteous was accused of ordering or participating in the shooting.

Porteous was convicted of murder and sentenced to death, but a royal reprieve postponed the execution. On the night of 7 September, an organised crowd seized him from the Old Tolbooth and hanged him in the Grassmarket. The perpetrators were never conclusively identified.

The riots exposed conflict between Edinburgh’s civic population, local justice and royal authority. They form the opening historical event of Walter Scott’s The Heart of Midlothian and support fiction about the Old Tolbooth, smuggling, crowd action and eighteenth-century Scottish law.