The council of the Cockburn Association followed up the letter of Lord Napier with a memorial to the Marquis of Hartington, then Secretary of State for War, complaining of the misappropriation and defacement of the ancient hall, and urging its restoration. But the wonted formalities and circumlocution of official correspondence ensued, with little prospect of any satisfactory result, “when,” as Mr. Scott Moncrieff writes, “we were still hoping that the building might be rendered available for uses more in harmony with its history and associations; and while the matter was still under the consideration of the authorities, Mr. Nelson, knowing the well-nigh insurmountable obstacles in the way of Government dealing effectively, timeously, and reasonably, in affairs of the kind, in the most generous and patriotic way offered at his sole expense to undertake the restoration, not only of the old Parliament Hall, but also of two other most interesting and picturesque features of the Castle, the Argyle Tower and St. Margaret’s Chapel.” The little oratory of St. Margaret had been a subject of interest to him from the time when it was anew brought under notice, in 1845, as a long-forgotten historical relic; and as for the Argyle Tower, it was associated in his mind with the reverence due to the martyrs of the Covenant. The fine old Edinburgh cemetery, the Greyfriars’ Churchyard, was only separated from the West Bow by the Grassmarket, where in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the public gallows was erected, for the execution not only of degraded criminals, but of many of the victims of intolerance in Covenanting times, to whom a common grave was assigned in the neighbouring cemetery. There, accordingly, in happier days the Martyrs’ Monument was erected, with its tribute to the memory of “about a hundred noblemen and gentlemen, ministers, and others, noble martyrs for Jesus Christ,” all executed at Edinburgh, “from May 27th, 1661, that the most noble Marquis of Argyle was beheaded, to the 17th February 1688, that Mr. James Renwick suffered.” It was but a step from the early home in the West Bow to the Greyfriars’ Churchyard, where the Martyrs’ Monument had been an object of veneration to William Nelson from his youth. The same spirit of reverent piety which led to the erection of the Martyrs’ Monument on the spot selected, as a mark of ignominy, for the graves of the victims of Stuart persecution, associates the name of Argyle with the tower in the neighbouring fortress in which Archibald, Earl of Argyle, was imprisoned before his execution in 1685. He had gone up to London to pay his homage to Charles II., relying on the indemnity which had been granted, as far as England was concerned. But Scotland was still a separate kingdom; and as a prominent leader of the Scottish Covenanters, Argyle was regarded with special antipathy. He was accordingly arrested, cast into the Tower, and from thence transferred