vessel by charms and enchantments. Margaret disdainfully denied the charge from beginning to end: Isobel said she had never seen the spaeman in her life before; but Stewart “clearly and pounktallie confessit” all the charges brought against him, and also said that the women had applied to him to be taught his magic arts, and that once he had found them both modelling ships and figures in clay for the destruction of the men and vessel aforesaid. And as it was proved that Stewart had spoken of the wreck before he could have known it by ordinary means, suspicion of sorcery fell upon him, and he was taken: and made his confession. He said that he had visited Margaret to help her to her will, when a black dog, breathing fire from his nostrils, had formed part of the conclave; and Isobel’s own child, a little girl of eight, added to this, a black man as well. Isobel, after denying all and sundry of the charges brought against her, under torture admitted their truth. In the night time she found means to escape from her prison, bruised and maimed with the torture as she was; but in scrambling over the roof she fell to the ground, and was so much injured that she died five days afterwards. Margaret was then tortured: the spaeman had strangled himself, which was the best thing he could do, only it was a pity he did not do it before; and poor Margaret was the last of the trio. The torture they used, said the Lords Commissioners, was “safe and gentle.” They put her bare legs into a pair of stocks, and laid on them iron bars, augmenting their weight one by one, till Margaret, unable to bear the pain, cried out to be released, promising to confess the truth as they wished to have it. But when released she only denied the charges with fresh passion; so they had recourse to the iron bars again. After a time, pain and weakness overcame her again, and she shrieked aloud, “Tak off! tak off! and befoir God I will show ye the whole form!” She then confessed—whatever they chose to ask her; but unfortunately, in her ravings, included one Isobel Crawford, who when arrested—as she was on the instant—attempted no defence, but, paralyzed and stupefied, admitted everything with which she was charged. Margaret’s trial proceeded: sullen and despairing, she assented to the most monstrous counts: she knew there was no hope, and she seemed to take a bitter pride in suffering her tormentors to befool themselves to the utmost. In the midst of her anguish her husband, Alexander Dein, entered the court, accompanied by a lawyer. And then her despair passed, and she thought she saw a glimmer of life and salvation. She asked to be defended. “All that I have confessed,” she said, “was in an agony of torture; and before God all that I have spoken is false and untrue. But,” she added pathetically, turning to her husband, “ye have been owre lang in coming!” Her defence did her no good; she was condemned, and at the stake entreated that no harm might befall Isobel Crawford, who was utterly and entirely innocent. To whom did she make this prayer? to hearts turned wild and wolfish by superstition; to hearts made fiendish by fear; to men with nothing of humanity save its form—with nothing of religion save its terrors. She might as well have prayed to the fierce winds blowing round the court-house, or the rough waves lashing the barren shore! She was taken to the stake, there strangled and burnt: bearing herself bravely to the last. Poor, brave, beautiful, young Margaret! we, at this long lapse of time, cannot even read of her fate without tears; it needed all the savageness of superstition to harden the hearts of the living against the actual presence of her beauty, her courage, and her despair!
Isobel Crawford was now tried; “after the assistant minister, Mr. David Dickson, had made earnest prayer to God for opening her obdurate and closed heart, she was subjected to the torture of the iron bars laid upon her bare shins, her feet being in the stocks, as in the case of Margaret Barclay.” She endured this torture “admirably,” without any kind of din or exclamation, suffering above thirty stone of iron to be laid on her legs, never shrinking thereat in any sort, but remaining steady and constant. But when they shifted the iron bars, and removed them to another part of her legs, her constancy gave way, as Margaret’s had done, and she too broke out into horrible cries of “Tak off! tak off!” She then confessed—anything—everything—and was sentenced: but on the way to her execution she denied all that she had admitted, interrupted the minister in his prayer, and refused to pardon the executioner, according to form. Her brain had given way, and they fastened to the stake a bewildered, raving maniac. God rest their weary souls!
MARGARET WALLACE AND HER DEAR BURD.[22]
Margaret Wallace (1622), spous to John Dynning, merchant and citizen of Glasgow, hated Cuthbert Greg. She had sent Cristiane Grahame to him, wanting his dog; but he would not give it, saying, “I rather ye and my hussie (cummer, gossip) baith was brunt or ye get my dog.” Margaret, coming to the knowledge of this speech, went to him angrily, and said, “Ffals land-loupper loun that thow art, sayis thow that Cristiane Grahame and I sall be brunt for witches? I vow to God I sall doe ye ane evill turne.” So she did, by means of a cake of bread, casting on him the most strange, unnatural, and unknown disease, such as none could mend or understand. Suspecting that he was bewitched, his friends got her to come and undo the mischief she had done: so she went into the house, took him by the “schaikill bane” (shoulder-blade) with one hand, and laid the other on his breast, but spoke no word, only moved her lips; then passed from him on the instant. The next day she went again to his house, and took him up out of bed, leading him to the kitchen and three or four times across the floor, though he had been bedridden for fifteen days, unable to put his foot to the ground. And if all that was not done by devilish art and craft, how was it done? asked the judges and the jury. Another time she went to the house of one Alexander Vallange, where she was taken with a sudden “brasch” of sickness, and was so hardly holden that they thought she would have “ryved” herself to fits. She cried out piteously for her “dear burd,” and the bystanders thought she meant her husband: but it turned out to be the witch Cristiane Grahame that she wanted—whom they immediately sent for. Cristiane came at once, and took Margaret tenderly in her arms, saying “no one should hurt her dear burd, no one;” then carried her down stairs into the kitchen, and so home to her own house. The little daughter of the house ran after them; on the threshold, she was seized with a sudden pain, and falling down cried and screamed most sorely. Her mother went to lift her up crossly, but she called out, “Mother, mother, ding me nocht, for there is ane preyne (pin) raschet throw my fute.” She “grat” all the night, and was very ill; her parents watching by her through the long hours: but when Margaret wanted the mother to let her be cured by Cristiane’s aid, she said sternly, no, “scho wad commit her bairne to God, and nocht mell with the devill or ony of his instrumentis.” However, Margaret Wallace healed the little one unbidden; by leaping over some bits of green cloth scattered in the midst of the floor, and then taking her out of bed and laying her in Cristiane Grahame’s lap—which double sorcery cured her instantly. Cristiane Grahame had been burnt for a witch some time before this trial; and now Margaret Wallace, in this year of our Lord 1622, was doomed to the same fate: bound to a stake, strangled, burnt, her ashes cast to the wind, and all her worldly gear forfeit to king’s majesty, because she was a tender-hearted, loving woman, with a strong will and large mesmeric power, and did her best for the sick folk about her.
THOM REID AGAIN.[23]
Isobell Haldane confessed before the Session of Perth, May 15, 1623, that she had cured Andro Duncan’s bairn by washing it and its sark in water brought from the Turret Port, then casting the water into a burn; but in the going “scho skaillit (spilt) swm quhilk scho rewis ane evill rew, becaus that if onye had gone ower it they had gottyn the ill.” She confessed, too, that about ten years since, she, lying in her bed, was taken forth, whether by God or the devil she knows not, and carried to a hill: the hill-side opened, and she went in and stayed there from Thursday to Sunday at eleven o’clock, when an old man with a gray beard brought her forth. The old man with the gray beard, who seems to have been poor Bessie Dunlop’s old acquaintance, told her many things after this visit. He told her that John Roch, who came to the wright’s shop for a cradle, need not be so hasty, for his wife would not be lighter for five weeks, and then the bairn should never lie in the cradle, but would die when baptized: as it proved, and as John Roch deposed on her trial. Also, he told her that Margaret Buchanan, then in good health, should prepare herself for death before Fastings Even, which was a few days hence; and Margaret died as she predicted. And Patrick Ruthven deposed that he, being sick—bewitched by one Margaret Hornscleugh—Isobell
