At 2am on Sunday 4 February 1700, Scotland’s privy council held an emergency meeting. A huge fire had broken out late the previous evening in the city’s Meal Market on the north side of the Cowgate, spreading rapidly up the hill to Parliament Close. As the principal organ of Scotland’s government, the privy council sat in Edinburgh and was responsible for implementing the orders of crown and parliament. The fire represented an immediate risk not only to the physical safety of people, their homes and livelihoods, but also to the very business of government. Some of the council’s registers and papers were kept in Parliament House, where it met regularly; various council members also had lodgings in the area, which would have held further papers and correspondence. All of this was now at risk of being lost.
The council gave urgent orders to pull down timber buildings on the south side of the High Street to help abate the flames. Orders were sent to the guard stationed at Holyrood Abbey to deploy 200 soldiers to prevent looting. Finally, the council sent for barrels of gunpowder from Edinburgh Castle ‘for blowing up some of the houses betwixt the Fire and the Parliament house, if the same shall seem to be in hazard by the Fyres Entring thereon’.
The fire was not extinguished until almost midday on Sunday 4 February. Although no deaths were reported, the turmoil caused to residents was considerable. Several eyewitnesses commented on the pathos of seeing the one-legged judge David Hume of Crossrig hopping naked from his lodgings in Parliament Close carrying a child as his home was engulfed by the blaze.
Contemporaries were horrified at the scale of the destruction. The servant Elizabeth West recalled in her memoirs that the fire ‘burned so vehemently that it was thought the most Part of the City
