11 May
1685 A.D. Margaret Wilson, Scottish Covenanter, Presbyterian and
Martyr at the Hands of a Stuart King Mixed with Anglican Hubris.
From
Wikipedia
The
Wigtown Martyrs Monument in the Old Town Cemetery, Stirling, depicts
Margaret Wilson reading the Bible with her young sister Agnes, watched over by
a despairing guardian angel.
Margaret Wilson
(c. 1667 – 11 May 1685) was a young Scottish Covenanter, from Wigtown in Scotland executed
by drowning for refusing to swear an oath declaring James VII as head
of the church. She died along with Margaret McLachlan. The two
Margarets were known as the Wigtown Martyrs. Wilson became the more famous of
the two because of her youth. As a teenager, her faith unto death became celebrated
as part of the martyrology of Presbyterian
churches.
Contents
Background
and arrest
The
Covenanter movement
to maintain the reforms of the Scottish Reformation came to the fore with signing of the National Covenant
of 1638 in opposition to royal control of the church, promoting Presbyterianism
as a form of church government instead of an Episcopal polity governed by bishops appointed by the Crown. The dispute
led to the Wars of
the Three Kingdoms and the overthrow of
the monarchy. With the Restoration of the
monarchy in 1660 the Covenants
were declared treasonable and Episcopacy was restored. Particularly in the
south-west of Scotland, ministers refused to submit. Barred from their churches, they held
open air field assemblies called conventicles which the authorities suppressed
using military force.
Margaret
Wilson was born at Glenvernoch, a farm near Newton Stewart
in Wigtownshire. Her parents were dutiful Episcopalians, but her older
brothers were Covenanters. By 1684 Covenanters were hiding from the authorities
in the hills, and increasingly draconian action had ended the large
conventicles. There were still small gatherings held indoors, but now failure
to take a test of allegiance to the king, which required renouncing the
Covenant, met with the death penalty, as did even attending a conventicle
or harbouring Covenanters. Despite the risks, Margaret began attending
conventicles with her younger brother Thomas, possibly beginning when there was
an opportunity at a local conventicle to see the charismatic James
Renwick who had newly become
leader of the more extreme Covenanters known as the Cameronians.
On occasion they also took along their young sister Agnes.[1]
In
February 1685 the sixteen-year-old Thomas Wilson left to join other Covenanters
in the hills. The girls went on a secret visit to Wigtown to visit
friends, including an elderly widow Margaret McLachlan (there are various
spellings of her second name). The young sisters Margaret and Agnes were taken
prisoner, possibly after declining to drink the King's health, and put into the
"thieves' hole". They refused to take the Abjuration Oath renouncing
the Covenant. On the following Sunday Margaret McLachlan was arrested, and also
put into the "thieves' hole" with the Wilson girls, along with a
servant woman. They were taken before the "local assizes" of
the Government Commissioners for Wigtownshire.
On
13 April 1685 they were indicted as being guilty of the Rebellion of Bothwell
Bridge, Aird's Moss, 20 Field Conventicles and 20 House Conventicles. The
Assizes session took place and a guilty verdict was brought.[2] The three main protagonists were found guilty on all
charges, and sentenced to be "tied to palisades fixed in the sand, within
the floodmark of the sea, and there to stand till the flood o'erflowed
them".
The
father of the girls, Gilbert Wilson, went to Edinburgh and made
a plea to the Privy
Council of Scotland for clemency for all
three, presenting a petition which claimed that Margaret McLachlan had
recanted. Agnes was granted freedom on a bond of 100 Pounds Scots,
and "reprieves were written out for the two Margarets with a date of 30
April 1685".
Reprieve and execution
A
reprieve was granted for Margaret Wilson and Margaret McLachlan.[3] It stated, "The Lords of his Majesties Privy
Council doe hereby reprive the execution of the sentance of death pronunced by
the Justices against Margret Wilson and Margret Lauchlison until the ..... day
of ..... and discharges the magistrats of Edinburgh for putting of the said
sentence to execution against them untill the forsaid day; and recomends the
saids Margret Wilson and Margret Lauchlison to the "Lords Secretaries of
State" to interpose with his most sacred Majestie for his royall remission
to them."[4]
Urging
that Margaret Wilson and Margaret McLachlan were officially reprieved by the
Privy Council of Scotland, Mark Napier insisted that its agents should not have
dared flout the Council's decree.[5] Grierson of Lag, brother-in-law of Queensberry,
nevertheless chose to do so. G. F. Crosbie writes that "over-zeal was no
crime in 1685 - the year when Lag received his baronetcy in the pitiless
James's coronation honour's list."[6]
On
11 May 1685, 11 days after the signing of the reprieve, Margaret Wilson and
Margaret McLachlan were chained to stakes on the Solway Firth.
At the last moment, choking on the salt water, Margaret Wilson was allowed to
offer a prayer for the King, which she did, but she continued to refuse to
abjure the covenant. This was not good enough for her accusers, and she was
forcibly thrust beneath the waves. It is said that, as the tide rose, she
defiantly quoted from the psalms and the epistles and sang
until she drowned. Robert Wodrow later wrote that the killers should have been prosecuted
for ignoring the reprieve.[7]
About
18 years of age at the time of her death, Margaret Wilson was buried, together
with her friend Margaret McLachlan, in the churchyard of Wigtown.
Witness
statements
Twenty
years after the date of the execution, Kirkinner and Penninghame Kirk Session
prepared two accounts that drew on stories collected from individuals who
claimed to have witnessed the events: McLachlan's daughter's own account about
the drowning of her mother was employed,[8] and the records of the Penninghame Kirk Session included
a statement referring to[9] Wilson's brother Thomas, that he "lives to certifie
the truth of these things, with many others who knew them too weel."[1][10]
The
story of the Wigtown Martyrs was among those collected by Robert Wodrow
and published in his History of the Sufferings of the Church of Scotland
from the Restoration to the Revolution.[10] The Church of Scotland synod had decided in the year of the attempted Jacobite
invasion, 1708, to collect accounts of persecution under the Stuart monarchs,
and commissioned Wodrow to take on the research. He wrote that Thomas Wilson
"lives now in his father's room, and is ready to attest all I am
writing."[11] The account was published in 1721, and had a
considerable effect on public perception despite being attacked by royalists
and supporters of the Scottish
Episcopal Church.[12]
Scottish
lawyer and historian Mark
Napier in his three-volume Memorials of Graham of Claverhouse, Viscount Dundee, 1859–62, included letters of Claverhouse and other documents not previously in print. Its
publication led to a small storm of controversy about the supposed drowning of
the "Wigtown Martyrs". Napier raised doubts as to whether the
executions as depicted ever took place, and critiqued the writings of Robert
Wodrow and his defenders. Napier replied in detail to his objectors in the Case
for the Crown in re the Wigtown Martyrs proved to be Myths versus Wodrow and
Lord Macaulay, Patrick the Pedlar and Principal Tulloch, 1863; and once
more in History Rescued, in Reply to History Vindicated (by the Rev. Archibald Stewart), 1870.
The
Knight Errant by Millais, 1870.
The
death of Margaret Wilson was depicted in 1862 by the Pre-Raphaelite
artist John Everett Millais in an illustration (shown above) for the magazine Once A
Week. The magazine also
reproduced the verses describing her death which are inscribed on her grave in
Wigtown.
Some
years later Millais revisited the subject in his painting The Martyr of
Solway (1871) (shown at the left), which hangs in the Walker Gallery
in Liverpool.
Although the painting today shows Margaret wearing an open-neck blouse, when
conservators x-rayed the piece, they found that the figure had once been a
nude looking sharply to the right.[13]
In
fact the head and torso had originally formed part of Millais' 1870 painting The
Knight Errant, which portrayed a naked rape victim tied to a tree. A medieval
knight is depicted cutting her free, having killed her attacker. The painting
received negative reviews, leading Millais to cut away the head and torso
section and add a fresh piece of canvas to paint it anew, with the woman's head
turned distinctly away to the left. The original figure section was added to a
new canvas for the 1871 Martyr painting and was repainted with chains and the
more modest blouse.[14]
The
story of Wilson's death is discussed in Josephine Tey's
1951 novel The
Daughter of Time, in
which a modern detective criticises versions of historical events created to
serve political agendas. Following Mark Napier, Tey portrays the death of
Wilson as a myth, referring to the existence of the reprieve, held by the
Scottish Privy Council "to this day". She claims that "the
original collector of the material, canvassing the Wigtown district only forty
years after the supposed martyrdom and at the height of the Presbyterian
triumph, complains that 'many deny that this happened'; and couldn't find any
eyewitnesses at all".[15] In fact, Robert Wodrow, the original collector of the
material published in The History and Sufferings of the Church 36 years
after the event, wrote that "our jacobites have the impudence, some of
them to deny, and others to extenuate this matter of fact which can be fully
evinced by many living witnesses"[7] Kirk Session records written out twenty years after the
events provide detailed accounts compiled from the narratives of individuals
who claimed to have witnessed the events.[1][10]
See also
Barbara Gilmour -
fellow Scottish Covenanter.
External links
References
^ Jump up to: a b c Elizabeth Robertson (14 June 1997). "Sacrificed to the cruel flood". The Herald. Retrieved 21
December 2009.
Jump up ^ A History of Dumfries and
Galloway. by Sir Herbert Maxwell. p. 282. http://archive.org/stream/ahistorydumfrie00unkngoog#page/n302/mode/2up
Jump up ^ Register of the Privy Council
of Scotland. Third Series. Vol. XI. 1685–1686. Acta, February 1685 - December
1685, p. 33. (P.56)
Jump up ^ Register of the Privy Council
of Scotland. Third Series. Vol. XI. 1685–1686, p. 33. Acta, February 1685 -
December 1685 (P.56)
Jump up ^ Sir Herbert Maxwell, A
History of Dumfries and Galloway, p. 282. http://archive.org/stream/ahistorydumfrie00unkngoog#page/n302/mode/2up
Jump up ^ G. F. Crosbie, "Sir
Robert Redgauntlet", The Glasgow Herald, 1934, 6 January, p. 4.
^ Jump up to: a b Robert Wodrow, The History and Sufferings of the Church
of Scotland, Book III, Chap. XI, pp. 248–9.
Jump up ^ Kirkinner Session minutes,
1702-1714, Ms CH2/228/1, National Archive of Scotland
Jump up ^ Penninghame Session minutes,
1696-1729, Ms CH2/1387/1, National Archive of Scotland
^ Jump up to: a b c Robert Wodrow; Robert Burns (1836). "The History of the Sufferings of the Church of
Scotland from the Restoration to the Revolution". 2nd Edition (Glasgow: Blackie and Son Limited). pp. 246–249. Retrieved 21
December 2009.
Jump up ^ Galloway and the Covenanters.
p. 409 Wodrow's narrative. http://archive.org/stream/cu31924029476003#page/n411/mode/2up
Jump up ^ A. M. Starkey (1974). "Robert
Wodrow and the History of the Sufferings of the Church of Scotland". 2nd Edition.
Church History, Vol. 43, No. 4. pp. 488–498. Retrieved 21
December 2009.
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