The Fourth of June in Edinburgh

While George III reigned, his birthday on the fourth of June was kept as a real holiday across the kingdom, with bonfires, loyal toasts and boys firing toy cannon from morning to night. In Edinburgh boys saved their Saturday halfpence for months, dressed up stair-foots and bits of wall as bowers, fetched whins from the Braid and Pentland hills to busk the lamp-posts, and decked the public wells with evergreens and effigies. Former boys of Heriot’s Hospital dressed the statue of King Charles in Parliament Square with flowers, and in the evening the mob pelted the Town Guard as the magistrates drank the king’s health. A Fourth of June Club in Edinburgh went on meeting to dine in his memory long after his death.