The elite of old Edinburgh belonged to countless overlapping organizations serving for both entertainment and the exchange of ideas. And as an unofficial parliament. Until the electoral reforms of the 19th century, only about one Scot in a thousand could vote, so personal influence and political campaigning amounted to the same thing, as Henry Dundas exploited to the full.
The same sets of people often formed the core of several clubs or societies. Each club was usually aligned politically by party or power bloc, in much the way that a modern political party organizes social and educational functions, links with sponsors, and ties with industry and the military. Institutions of the state could be implicitly controlled by completely unofficial elite groups. There was a continuum from outright parts of the state like the regular army and the Court of Session, to self-regulating groups performing essential functions for it like the Volunteer forces or the Faculty of Advocates, through groups that the state called on for expertise like the Masons, the medical societies or the Society for Improvement in Agriculture, to clubs that had only a social purpose but still provided a space for networking and deal-making. Perhaps every association in Edinburgh had a parallel at some other city in Europe, but nowhere else had them all at once and collectively with so much power. Several of these groupings are represented in music.
The Cape Club's focus was mainly on the arts. It lasted for much of the mid-18th century and at different times, had as members the poet Robert Fergusson, the burglar Deacon William Brodie, the leatherworker and Masonic poet Gavin Wilson, and the artists Jacob More, Alexander Nasmyth and Henry Raeburn. The engineer James Watt, a frequent visitor to Edinburgh, joined in 1768. One of its drinking songs was The Carter, to the tune of Pinkie House, from a manuscript of the club's songs and poems dated 1768. The first line is a parody on the best-known words for that tune at the time, As Sylvia in a Forest Lay by David Malloch (or Mallet), about a maiden dying of a broken heart whose lover changes his mind too late to save her. If you really want to sing the original, you can find it in many 18th century Scottish song collections, starting with Allan Ramsay's Tea Table Miscellany of 1724. The tune Malloch gave it was different: The Maid's Complaint, later published by Oswald in the Caledonian Pocket Companion. The setting of Pinkie House I've used is the one from Joseph Mitchell's The Highland Fair of 1731.
The Royal Company of Archers, founded in 1676, has never been a real military force, but an elite club comprising the most powerful men in the city. Several of its members are represented by pieces elsewhere in this book: the Dukes of Buccleuch have usually been members, and the Honorable Henry Erskine introduced the pioneer psychiatrist Andrew Duncan to it. Allan Ramsay and Walter Scott both belonged; the official poet of the organization got in free. There were many songs composed for the Royal Archers, all of them dull farragoes of smugness and egomania. I've given two versions of the tune for The Archers March, which was probably composed for the Royal Company by Handel. The first is from John Dow's recorder manuscript of 1722 and the second is from the Macfarlan manuscript of 1740. Its appalling text, complete with the explanatory footnotes, is taken from Yair's The Charmer, a book of song texts published in Edinburgh in 1749. The march probably dates from the Archers' first parade from Parliament Square to Holyrood in 1714. At this point they had the Jacobite sympathies common to much of the Scottish aristocracy, which led to their marginalization in the decades after 1745. March of the Royal Company of Archers was published for the piano by Nathaniel Gow in 1822 along with his tunes to welcome King George IV. By then the Archers had again become part of the establishment and were made the honorary royal bodyguard in Scotland.
Not all of Edinburgh was intimidated by the Archers; at a ceremony to mark their adoption of a new uniform in 1834 a group of bakers attacked them with stones, smashing the windows of the Duke of Buccleuch's carriage.
The Edinburgh masons' guild was recognized in 1475; like other trades, they had craft mysteries, and these became the basis for the lodges of the modern type that began as local organizations in Scottish cities in the 17th century. The oldest was either at Kilwinning in Ayrshire or St Mary's Chapel in Edinburgh. From the time the Grand Lodge of Scotland was set up in 1736, they reached the zenith of their power in a generation; after 1753 the stoneworkers lost control and Masonry became an elite institution. No major public event in Edinburgh was complete without the Masons taking part; they took the bulk of the credit for public works like the bridges and the National Monument ("Edinburgh's Disgrace"). Usually the credit was merited; Lord Provost George Drummond was acting Grand Master of the Scottish Masons in 1763 when he presided over the laying of the foundation stone of the North Bridge, the ceremony which in effect inaugurated the New Town that he had worked for. Perhaps the biggest-ever Masonic display in Edinburgh was at the laying of the foundation stones for the Regent Bridge and Calton Jail in 1815, which included a parade of 2000 Masons. They only slowly faded from the public scene; even as late as 1896 they were billed prominently at the opening of the New North Bridge over Waverley rail station.
Noted Masons were not just the rich and powerful, but also the intellectual elite. Burns was an active member of the Canongate Kilwinning Lodge no 2, an offshoot approved by the Ayrshire group, and met one of his musical collaborators there: J.G.C. Schetky (1740-1824), a cellist and composer who also belonged to the Royal Edinburgh Volunteers and wrote marches for them. Like so many musicians of the time, Schetky went bankrupt, with his assets seized in 1800; being a lodge brother was not much help against insolvency.
There are many Masonic tunes and songs; few of the texts are interesting to anyone else, since any esoteric content is hidden beneath numbingly dull poetry, and their main message to the rest of us is usually a sneer at non-Masons ("cowans" in Masonic jargon) and that not even in stylish invective. A typical piece of self-congratulation is this from John Blair's Masonic Songs of the late 19th century, to the tune of Auld Lang Syne:
Now be the song in echo strong
And spend the night in glee;
To Brotherhood great powers belong,
For Masonry is free!
The ties that bind, the grand old Craft,
The Password, Grip, and Sign,
Shall o'er each Lodge its blessings waft,
For auld lang syne.
The more ritualistic pieces are better. Come All Ye Freemasons, sung on rare high ceremonial occasions, uses a variant of Good Night and Joy Be With You All. It was noted in the mid-19th century and was first printed in the Miscellanea of the Rymour Club (a short-lived organization devoted to near-contemporary folklore) in the 1900s. Only one verse was preserved, and even part of that was a hazy fudge from the collector's distant memory. The Royal Arch, mentioned in the song, is one of the higher "degrees" of Masonry; it was invented by Andrew Michael Ramsay (1686-1743), a Scot who converted to Catholicism, spent much of his life in France and ended up in Rome employed by James the Pretender as tutor to the young Bonnie Prince Charlie. The story behind it is that the builders of Solomon's Temple discovered an arched vault nine levels deep that had been built by the prophet Enoch to survive the Flood, which he had foreseen; earlier mediaeval legends made Enoch an important figure, saying that he was taken up to heaven by the Lord while still alive, perhaps becoming the avenging angel Metatron. An engraved plate and two pillars in this vault recorded Enoch's knowledge. (Ramsay also suggested the revival of the Knights Templar, thereby starting 300 years of occult fakery that has been a steady money-spinner for the writers of occult potboilers). As far as I know the Royal Arch has no official link to the Royal Archers, but many of the same men must have been initiated into both.
The song Free and Accepted Mason, also known as The Fellow Crafts Song or (from its opening line) Come let us prepare, was often attributed to Matthew Birkhead, who published it in 1722; in fact the tune at least is much older, first published by Thomas D'Urfey in 1702. So the song is probably English, but it must have been the most-performed Masonic song in Edinburgh, and more performed there than anywhere else. The text was in the smug-superiority genre and can't have been much sung except by Masons; I've taken it from Yair's The Charmer, a book of song texts published in Edinburgh in 1749. It can still be found on Masonic websites.
The tune stayed popular for many decades, and I've given two versions of it: one is from James Gillespie's fiddle manuscript of 1768 and the other from Neil Stewart's A New Collection of Scots & English Tunes Adapted to the Guittar of the late 18th century. Both Yair and Stewart have a series of songs for different positions in the Masonic order, but the only other one where they overlap is The Fellow Crafts Song by Brother Charles de la Fay, Esq., about whom I know nothing. The other tune I include from Stewart's book is The Stewards Song. Another of Yair's Masonic songs is included among the material relating to the Porteous Riot.
James Oswald was Scotland's most talented composer-Mason. I have included three Masonic anthems from his Curious Collection of Scots Tunes of 1740: The Master Mason's Musick, Anthem for three Voices, and The free Masons Anthem. There is nothing explicitly Masonic about the middle one, but its position in the book and its use of religious ideas while carefully avoiding any mention of Christianity suggest a Masonic significance. No author is given for the texts, so they are most likely by Oswald himself. The first is for two voices and a bass; perhaps Oswald had his own cello in mind. The third has figured bass indications on the bass line; it was meant to have keyboard accompaniment doubling or replacing the voice in that rather unvocal part. (The GIF of the score is as it appears in the book; the sound files have some editorial accidentals, and the ABC has it both ways). The Masons Anthem is a version of The free Masons Anthem from the Brysson/Sharpe manuscript which makes it sound more like a minuet.
The best of all Scottish masonic pieces is Burns's bawdy Masonic Song in The Merry Muses of Caledonia, but he wrote it long after leaving Edinburgh.
A great cloud of fantastic speculation has grown up about one particular great Masonic family of Midlothian, the Sinclairs (or St. Clairs) of Roslin, and especially about their bizarrely carved Templar-influenced chapel. It was built in the 1460s by William Sinclair, who styled himself:
Prince of Orkney, Duke of Holdenbourg, Earl of Caithness and Strathern, Lord St Clare, Lord Nithsdale, Lord Admiral of the Scots Seas, Lord Chief Justice of Scotland, Lord Warden of the three marches between Berwick and Whithorne, Baron of Roslin, Baron of Pentland and Pentland Moor in Free Forrestrie, Baron of Cousland, Baron of Cardain St Clare, Baron of Herbertshire, Baron of Hectford, Baron of Graham Shaws, Baron of Kirktone, Baron of Cavers, Baron of Newborough, Baron of Roxburgh, &c. Knight of the Cockle after the order of France, and Knight of the Garter after the order of England, Great Chancellor, Chamberlain and Lieutenant of Scotland.
"Enough titles to weary a Spaniard" as the 18th century magazine I got that from put it. On the evidence of some carvings of plants in the chapel that to me look like any generic mediaeval foliage, but which Sinclair tradition says are American cacti, the displays in the chapel assert that the Sinclairs discovered America before Columbus. Twentieth-century myth-mongers have generally preferred to claim that the Holy Grail is buried in the cellar. A 1998 conspiracy book says that this is of course nonsense: what they've got down there is actually the severed head of Jesus Christ. If you're really interested, the local occult-tourism industry has regular seminars on the links between the chapel and ancient Egypt, megalithic alignments, the Templars, space aliens and the usual cast of incarnated Hindu divinities, but it'll cost you.
The adjacent Roslin Castle, the ancestral home of the Earls of Rosslyn, is an often-burned building, the final and most destructive fires being at its siege by Cromwell's troops in 1650 and when looted in 1688 by a Williamite mob made up of the Sinclairs' own tenants and sympathizers from Edinburgh. James Oswald gave the tune Roslin Castle its name, and he was often believed to be its composer, but he never claimed to have written it; it had already been published by McGibbon as The House of Glams, and an older tune, The Posie, might be its original. I've given both Oswald's version, with a variation and jig, and the setting from John Clark's Flores Musicae of 1773, which also has a variation. The tune became hugely popular. Oswald gave no words for it; instead, Richard Hewitt of Carlisle wrote a truly awful text, the bogus pastoral at its most cringe-inducing. I have included it here, but hereby disclaim all responsibility for the audience reaction if you sing it in public. The other text I've included, albeit not greatly inspired, is at least dignified and unpretentious, and the best one I've found; it's a Masonic hymn written for the funeral of William Sinclair of Roslin on 14 February 1778. Sinclair, as well as being one of the leading Masons of his time, had been prominent in the Royal Archers and had won their most prestigious trophy, the Musselburgh Arrow, twice. He was the main force behind the reinvention of the Archers as a politically reliable elite organization during George III's reign. Burns's 1786 collection used Roslin Castle for one of his dullest adaptations, The gloomy night is gath'ring fast, written when he was intending to emigrate to Jamaica, and that seems to be last time anybody tried to write a text for it. After 250 years, this still remains a great song tune with no very singable words.
The original spelling of the placename is probably Roskelyn, and it is known locally both as Roslin and Rosslyn. Publishers or copiers of the tune and other writers mentioning the place have spelt it as Rosland, Roseland, Rossland, Ross Linn, Rosline, Roselen, Roslyne, Roselana and Rosaline. So if you want to call the tune Rosalie-Anne Castle when you play it next, just go ahead, centuries of tradition are right behind you.
Lovely Rosabelle is a setting of a poem from Walter Scott's Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805) in which a Sinclair family tradition, that Roslin Chapel appears to be on fire shortly before a Sinclair dies, is embedded in a story which I suspect Scott himself made up in its entirety. The Schubertian tune is the vocal line of a piano-accompanied setting by William Clarke, organist of the Edinburgh Episcopal Chapel in the Cowgate in the first quarter of the nineteenth century. His father Stephen Clarke had had the same position and is better known as the arranger of the tunes in the first five books of Burns and Johnson's Scots Musical Museum - William did the last book after his father died. I have also heard this poem sung to a more folk-like tune. Rosabell doesn't seem to fit the text, and must be purely an evocative tune relating to the same poem. It's by Miss Murray of Auchtertyre and was published in Niel Gow's Fifth Collection of 1809. The opening is an obvious echo of The Flowers of the Forest.
Some music associated with Roslin has no occult or conspiratorial pretensions. Mild Beam'd the Sun on the Grey Tow'rs of Roslin is a song from the end of the 18th century published as a single sheet by John Hamilton, to the old tune of Bonnie Dundee. The jig Fitzmaurice's Trip to Roslin Castle is by Maurice Fitzmaurice, an Irish Uillean piper who was in Edinburgh to play at the Annual Competition in 1806. The tune was published the year before by Rochead & Sons in Fitzmaurice's New Collection of Irish Tunes. Roslin Chapel is a hymn tune from 1850 published by Adam Ramage.
The Roslin Castle Strathspey and the Roslin Castle Reel are variants of the same tune. Both are for the Highland pipes, the first from Donald MacDonald's A Collection of Quicksteps, Strathspeys, Reels & Jigs and the second from a manuscript tunebook dated 1863 by John Clyde and R. McKenzie, preserved among the papers of G.S. MacLennan. The only explanation I can think of for the castle inspiring a pipe tune so early is that it might have been used for military exercises during the war panic of 1860.
Many of the social clubs of old Edinburgh are little documented; a few never existed but were made up by later writers; none left minutes detailed enough to show what it was like to be a member of one. The Ruffians, or Belzebubians, are one of these almost unknown groups. The novelist Henry Mackenzie wrote:
Colonel Edmonstone was a member of what was called the Ruffian Club; men whose hearts were milder than their manners, and their principles more correct than their habits of life.
This was a comment on a letter from the dying David Hume:
Poor Edmonstone and I parted to-day, with a plentiful effusion of tears; all those Belzebubians have not hearts of iron.
And those two enigmatic assertions are all you get. I'm guessing that The Ruffians' Rant was adopted by them, or given the name since somebody thought the tune fitted; it was first given that title by Bremner in 1759. It was first printed by Walsh in 1742 as Lady Frances Weemys Reel, was used by Burns, and is known now as the tune for Roy's wife of Aldivalloch. It was first written down in the Macfarlan Manuscript with the Gaelic title Cog na Scalan (The battle of Scalan); this must mark the Battle of Glenlivet in 1594, so the dance tune might be based on a song or pipe pune dating back to that time. This four-part version comes from Aird's collection of the 1780s.
The Crochallan Fencibles was a literary club which included among its members the printer William Smellie, the social scientist Adam Ferguson, the novelist Henry Mackenzie, and Robert Burns. Several songs by Burns are in one way or another related to this club; it was where he met James Johnson (c.1750-1811), who got Burns to collaborate on the later volumes of the Scots Musical Museum. It met at a pub in Anchor Close whose host, Dawney Douglas, would often sing the Gaelic song, Colin's Cattle, or Crodh Chailein; hence the name of the club, a sendup of the amateur military posturing of the time. This version is from Mull in the nineteenth century, published by Keith Norman Macdonald. The story is not very clear from any of the translations; there are at least three alternative traditions. One says that it was sung by a fairy milking her hinds on the hillside:
Crodh Chailein, mo cridhe,
Crodh Iain, mo ghaoil,
Gun tugadh, crodh Chailein,
Am bainn air an fraoch.
A second tradition has the song as a monologue sung by the returning spirit of a dead woman come back to milk her husband's cows. The third says a man sung it as a lament over his dead wife to her orphaned children, as her brothers were outside the house waiting to kill him, believing he had murdered her; on hearing the song, they decided he could not have done so, and went home.
Cha till mo bhean chomain,
Cha till mo bhen ghaoil,
Cha till mo bhean chomain,
Bean thogail nan laogh.
All the traditions agreed that the song soothed cows and made them produce more milk.
Intellectual clubs like this formed the original core of the Scottish Enlightenment. The Poker Club, originally set up to help promote a Scots militia, included Joseph Black, Adam Ferguson, Henry Mackenzie John Playfair, and Dugald Stewart; all five were later members of the Oyster Club, an even stronger grouping that also included Robert Adam, the elder John Clerk of Eldin, and James Hutton. Both were exclusive; James Boswell never forgave the Poker Club for rejecting him as insufficiently talented, and the Oyster Club took this further, meeting at ever-changing locations in the seediest pubs of the Grassmarket and Cowgate to avoid hangers-on. Celebratory music for a group like that would have been about as useful as a bodysnatching shanty, and there isn't any.
At the frivolous end of the spectrum was the Capillaire Club, founded by Thomas Alexander Erskine, 6th Earl of Kelly (1732 - 1781). Kelly studied with Stamitz on the Continent and became the most talented composer of art music in 18th century Scotland, but had an aristocratic attitude that made him see publishing or preserving his scores as beneath him. As Robertson put it in his Inquiry into the Fine Arts:
What appears to have been singularly peculiar to this musician, is what may be called the velocity of his talents; by which he composed whole pieces of the most excellent music, in one night's time. Being always remarkably fond of a concert of wind instruments, whenever he met with a good band of them, he was seized with a fit of composition, and wrote pieces in the moment, which he gave away to the performers, and never saw again; and these, in his judgment, were the best he ever composed.
The ground rule of his club was that Capillaire was the only wine its members were allowed to drink. I have given two versions of his Capillaire Minuet, one for solo flute and the other for two flutes. The Earl of Kelly's Reel, or Lord Kelly's Reel became one of the most celebrated and influential tunes of the time. It set a fashion for fiddle reels in flat minor keys which has persisted to the present day. I've taken it from McGlashan's first collection. It was also played as a strathspey: Lord Kelly's Strathspey is the basis of an elaborate set of variations for harp or piano, published as a separate sheet by Robert Mackintosh. It isn't clear who wrote it; the index to Aird's first volume describes it as being by "Mr Greg", but it is more often attributed to Kelly himself.
A startling number of Georgian Edinburgh's male elite belonged to two clubs that today would be shut down by the police to the accompaniment of weeks of tabloid headlines: the Beggars Benison of Anstruther and its offshoot the Wig Club. The Beggars Benison, started in 1732 by a clergyman in Fife but with an equally active branch organization set up in Edinburgh in 1766, built a whimsical set of mock-Masonic rituals around pornographic sexuality. The minute of a meeting on St Andrew's Day 1735:
24 present. Every Penis exhibited and compared by erection and frig-discharge. 3 Novices were tested. A girl of 15 appeared nude for a few minutes: she shewed herself satisfactorily and was engaged for next Assembly.
Sperm produced during this ritual was collected on a silver platter (a photograph of it survives) and the average quantity measured. The girl was paid well - five shillings - and the amount of pornographic silver and glassware the society used made membership expensive.
The Wig Club was formed in 1775 when some members of the Beggars Benison took one of its talismans, a wig made from the pubic hair of Charles II's mistresses, and started a rival group. Both were remarkably open about their membership and activities; they lasted until about the beginning of Queen Victoria's reign. The "Bible" of the Beggars Benison - a pornographic commonplace book donated by Thomas, Earl of Kellie, presumably the composer's father - was endorsed by 29 coats of arms of members from the nobility. The Wig Club included the Dukes of Hamilton, Roxburgh and Buccleuch; the Earls of Crawford, Eglinton, Hopetoun, Lauderdale, Moray and Haddington; Lord Balcarres; and most astonishingly Henry Dundas himself. (Politics entered even here: the Beggars tended to be Tories and Jacobites, the Wig Club members Whigs). Andrew Duncan was a lifelong member of the Beggars Benison, joining it in the same year, 1771, as he did the Royal Archers; Sir Walter Scott joined in 1815; and its honorary members included the balloonist Vincent Lunardi (the charter awarding it to him makes broad hints that he'd well earned it) and, at Scott's instigation, King George IV, who in return for his charter of membership presented them with a replacement talisman: a locket holding the pubic hair of his own mistress. He was made a member during his visit to Edinburgh in 1822. The induction ritual of the Beggars Benison was described as follows:
The Remembrancer produced the Testing-Platter which was placed upon a high Stool or Altar in the centre of the room. The Recorder and two Remembrancers prepared the Novice in a closet, by causing him to propel his Penis until full erection. When thus ready he was escorted with four puffs of the Breath-Horn before the Brethren or Knighthood, and was ordered by the Sovereign to place his Genitals upon the Testing-platter, which was covered with a folded white napkin. The Members and Knights two and two came round in a state of erection and touched the Novice Penis to Penis.
It doesn't seem likely that George had time to fit this ritual into the tight schedule of his visit, and he was probably exempted from it, but the scene of Europe's leading novelist, Scotland's leading doctor and the King all comparing erect penises would have made a fine historical painting.
The Beggars Benison even had a chaplain. In the 19th century this was David Low, Bishop of Ross, who late in his life asked the club to delete any mention of his 40 years' service from their records; they agreed, but failed to delete his request to be deleted. Most surviving information like this about the activities of the Beggars Benison is in a scrapbook published in a small edition in 1892 and reprinted in 1982. The library of C.K. Sharpe contained a New Description of Merryland and Other Tracts, which, since "Merryland" was an alternative name for the Beggars Benison, could have related to them; but I have no idea what happened to it.
One of the Beggars Benison's founder members was nicknamed "Fiddler Tam"; there is no record of music being played at their meetings from the surviving minutes, but there is a tune dedicated to them, The Beggars Bennison, from a late 18th century collection by Angus Cumming. Its rhythm is a bit strange - a mixture of reel, strathspey and hornpipe - but the kind of rhythmic activity the composer might have imagined the members of the club doing to it wasn't dancing. There were also songs sung at the meetings, mostly tedious exercises in double-entendre. One suggestion about the "Merryland" name is that it came from the anti-semitic ballad The Rain Rins Doun Through Merryland Toune, found in Child's collection, but since nothing in the records of the Beggars Benison suggests they were interested in mediaeval blood libels, and the ballad has nothing about sex, this makes no apparent sense. The Beggars Benison adopted the Fife ballad Maggie Lauder as a sort of anthem, and would sing these lines to its tune in chorus:
Bonnie Maggie, braw Maggie, bonnie Maggie Lauder!
She pish'd upon the puir folk and farted on her faither!
This was because of a bogus tradition that its male character "Rob the Ranter" was really James V, who was the subject of a not much less bogus tradition, taken as a founding myth by the Beggars, that he had been piggybacked across the stream at Dreel outside Anstruther by a local woman he promptly bonked by way of payment. The tune for that is included here with the 1872 policeman's monologue Inspector. No music directly associated with the Wig Club has survived, and neither have any of its documents apart from a few membership lists.
Both of those were innocuous compared with the earlier Misogynean Club. As a pamphlet of 1728, The Misogynean Club Expos'd, put it:
I'm inform'd that the first rise of this mortifyed Club, was their having seen the Body of a dead Woman dissected in the College; which gave them such loathing, that they cannot look upon a Woman dead or alive since that time, without conceiving great hatred at them. Very well argued my bony Bairns, it seems these squeamish tenderlings make no distinction betwixt living Creatures and dead Creatures.
Nobody could join unless he smoked:
One of the Members informs me, that after they have used their Tobacco-guns for a Night, they commonly break the Barrels of them into pieces, which they unmercifully throw at the Faces of innocent Women in the Streets under cloud of Night, without regarding either Station or Age.
Doubtless they had jolly songs about this pastime. Nobody felt like preserving them.
The Royal Celtic Society of Scotland, based in Edinburgh, was a spinoff from the Highland Society of London. It was responsible, under Walter Scott's orders, for creating the bogus Highland image that the city adopted in 1822 for the benefit of the most important tourist it ever had, King George IV. Edinburgh's tourist trade has never quite managed to shake this off; next time you see a made-in-China tartan kewpie doll in a shop window in the High Street, blame them for it. The Royal Celtic Society of Scotland's Quickstep is by William Mackay, one of the pipers at George IV's visit. If he composed it in 1822, it is one of the earliest pipe marches ever written. I've taken it from David Glen's collection.
Embro, Embro Copyright © 2001, Jack Campin
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