“The dumbe girl, Jennet Douglas, now speaks well, and knows Latine, which she never learned, and discovers things past!” says Sinclair. But she still followed her old trade. She had mesmeric visions, and was evidently a “sensitive;” and some of the people believed in her, as inspired and divine, and some came, perhaps mockingly, to test her. But they generally got the worst off, and were glad to leave her alone again. One woman came and asked her “‘how she came to the knowledge of so many things,’ but the young wench shifted her, by asking the woman’s name. She told her name. Says the other, ‘Are there any other in Glasgow of that name?’ ‘No!’ sayes the woman. ‘Then,’ said the girle, ‘you are a witch!’ Says the other, ‘Then are you a devil!’ The girl answers ‘The devil doth not reveal witches; but I know you to be one, and I know your practices too.’ On which the poor woman ran away in great confusion;” as, indeed, she might—such an accusation as this being quite sufficient to sign her death-warrant. To another woman who came to see and question her, she said the same thing; taking her arm, and showing the landlord a secret mark which she told him the woman had got from the devil. “The poor woman much ashamed ran home, and a little while after she came out and told her neighbours that what Jennet Douglas had said of her was true, and earnestly entreated that they might show so much to the magistrates, that she might be apprehended, otherwise the devil says she will make me kill myself.” The neighbours were wise enough to think her mad, as she was, and took her home; but the next day she was found drowned in the Clyde; fear and despair had killed her before the stake-wood had had time to root and ripen. The dumb girl herself was afterwards carried before the great council at Edinburgh, imprisoned, scourged through the town, and then banished to “some forraigne Plantation,” whence she reappears no more to vex her generation. God forgive her! She has passed long years ago to her account, and may her guilty soul be saved, and all its burning blood-stains cleansed and assoilzed!
LIZZIE MUDIE AND HER VICTIMS.[59]
The year after Sir George Maxwell’s affair there was another case at Haddington which gave full employment to the authorities. Margaret Kirkwood, a woman of some means, hanged herself one Sunday morning during church time. Her servant, Lizzie Mudie, who was at kirk like a good Christian, suddenly called out, to the great disturbance of the congregation. She began repeating all the numbers—one, two, three, four, &c.—till she came to fifty-nine; then she stopped and cried, “The turn is done!” When it was afterwards found that Margaret Kirkwood had hung herself just about that moment, and that her age was fifty-nine, Lizzie Mudie was taken up and searched. She was found a witch by her marks, and soon after confessed, delating five women and one man as her accomplices. But the five women and the one man were obstinate, and would not say that they were guilty, though they were pricked and searched and marks found on them. Lord Fountainhall was present at the searching of the man, and he gives an account of it: “I did see the man’s body searched and pricked in two sundry places, one at the ribs and the other at his shoulder. He seemed to find no pain, but no blood followed. The marks were blewish, very small, and had no protuberancy above the skin. The pricker said there were three sorts of witches’ marks: the horn mark, it was very hard; the breiff mark, it was very little; and the feeling mark, in which they had sense and pain.” “I remained very dissatisfied with this way of trial,” says my Lord farther on, “as most fallacious; and the fellow could give me no account of the principles of his art, but seemed to be a drunken, foolish rogue.” One of Lizzie Mudie’s five victims was an old woman of eighty, named Marion Phinn, who had always borne a good character, “never being stained with the least ignominy, far less with the abominable crime of witchcraft.” But though she petitioned the council to free her on her own caution, she was kept hand-fast and foot-bound in gaol, being far too dangerous in the helplessness and feebleness of her eighty years to be let out with the chance of bewitching mankind to death. This she could do, and work all other miracles; but she could not help herself to sunlight and liberty.
BRAVE OLD KATHERINE LIDDELL.[60]
In 1678 two old women of Prestonpans were burnt. They made a voluntary confession, and accused a few more of their craft. These in their turn accusing others, in a very short time seventeen unhappy creatures were collected together, all charged with the sin of witchcraft, intercommuning with the devil, voluntary transformation into ravens, cats, crows, &c., with all the other stock pieces of the hallucination. The judges seemed inclined to favour them, and Sir John Clerk of Pennycuik, when desired to sit on the commission appointed to try the seven given up by the parish of Loanhead, declined, “alleging drily that he did not feel himself warlock (that is, conjuror) enough to be judge upon such an inquisition.” These poor creatures had deep sleeps, during which no pinching would awake them; but though the judges saw them when in these sleeps, and heard their confessions as to where they had been and what they had been doing during the time, they were regarded as diabolical trances, and dealt with accordingly. Nine of the East Lothian women were burnt, and the “seven of Loanhead were reserved for future procedure.” Among the accused was one Katherine Liddell, a strong-minded, stout-hearted, old widow, who feared no man, spoke her mind freely, and had a body with nerves like cart ropes and muscles of iron. The bailie of Prestonpans, John Rutherford, had caused her to be seized in the late panic, and, though there was nothing against her, he had her pricked in various parts of her body “to the great effusion of her blood, and whereby her skin is raised and her body highly swelled, and she is in danger of life.” A drummer, two salt-makers, and others, assisted him in this torture; for John Kincaid had found zealous followers: and any man with a peculiar temperament, and a heart hardened by superstition against suffering, might take on himself the office of pricker to his own soul’s satisfaction, and the torture and murder of his fellow-creatures. Katherine Liddell, besides being actively tortured, was kept without sleep for six days and nights, but the stout old woman would confess nothing. On the contrary, she presented a petition to the Council, charging John Rutherford and the rest with “defamation, false imprisonment, and open and manifest oppression,” and demanded vengeance and restitution in loud and vigorous terms. The Council, unaccustomed to this sort of thing, and used only to victims as tame as they were considered powerful, soon released her, dropping her like hot iron, and condemning Rutherford and his associates as too hasty and ill-advised: then, somewhat further redeemed themselves by an unusual act of justice and common sense, in sentencing David Cowan, “pricker”—the one who had been the most active of her tormentors—to be confined during pleasure in the Tolbooth.
Katherine Liddell did not do much good to her afflicted sisterhood, though she had helped herself: for that same year, in August,[61] “the devil had a great meeting of witches in Loudian, where, among others, was a warlock who formerly had been admitted to the ministrie in the Presbyterian tymes, and when the bishops came in conformed with them.” This warlock minister was Mr. Gideon Penman, minister of Crighton, and a man of notoriously loose life; but whether he carried his defiance of good so far as to dance with the hags at the Sabbath, and “beat up those that were slow,” and preach damnable doctrines and blasphemous travesties of the Christian faith in the devil’s services, or whether he was only an immoral man—better out of the ministry than in it—remains for each reader’s private judgment to determine. Ten of the accused stoutly affirmed that Mr. Gideon Penman was their devil’s parson; but as he as stoutly denied it, he was liberated on his own security, while nine out of the ten were condemned to be strangled and burnt, which was done accordingly. They gave some curious details, as, that, when they renounced their baptism and gave themselves over to Satan by laying one hand on their head and the other on their feet he kissed them, and that he was cold to the touch, and his breath like a damp air; that he scourged them oft, and was a most “wicked and barbarous master;” and that when he administered the sacrament to them the bread was like wafers, and the drink like blood or black moss-water: that he transformed them to the likeness of bees, and crows, and ravens, when they flew about from place to place as he ordered.
THE DEVIL IN HIS CUPS.[62]
On December 19, 1679, the parish of Borrowstonness was again in an uproar concerning the evil doings of witches and wizards, the chief of whom was Annaple Thomson, once a widow, but now a wife. She was charged with having one day met the devil on her way between Linlithgow and Borrowstonness, when he “in the lyknes of ane black man told yow that yow wis ane poore puddled bodie, and had ane evill lyiff, and difficultie to win throw the warld; and promised that iff ye wald followe him, and go alongst with him, yow should never want, but have ane better lyiff; and abowt fyve wekes therafter, the Devill appeired to yow, when yow wis goeing to the coal-hill, about sevin o’clock in the morning. Having renewed his former tentatiowne yow did condescend thereto, and declared yowrselff content to follow him, and becwm his servant;”—which was bad of Annaple Thomson, and sure to bring her to ineffectual grief. Then some others, men and women both, were further informed of their misdeeds. They were told that “ye, and each person of yow, wis at several mettings with the Devill in the linkes of Borrowstownes, and in the howse of yow, Bessie Vickar, and ye did eatt and drinke with the Devill, and with on another, and with witches in hir howss in the nycht tyme; and the Devill and the said William Craw browght the ale which ye drank, extending to about sevin gallons, from the howss of Elisabeth Hamilton.” So did the rest. Margaret Pringle, whose right wrist the devil had grievously pained, “but having it twitched of new againe, it immediatelie becam haill;” Margaret Hamilton, with whom the devil had at sundry times “drank several choppens of ale with yow,” when they met at the town-well at Borrowstonness and talked together like two old gossips; also, another Margaret Hamilton, relict of James Pullwart, with whom the devil conversed in the likeness of a black man, but afterwards removed from her as a dog—they all committed abominable sins with the devil, and entertained him familiarly like any other cummer. And were they not all at the meeting with the “Devill and other witches at the croce of Murestaine,” above Kinneil, upon “the threttin of October last, where yow all danced, and the Devill acted the pyiper, and where yow endevored to have destroyed Andrew Mitchell, sone to John Mitchell, elder in Dean of Kinneil?” The case was considered clear enough for all rational men in Borrowstonness; so Annabel Thomson, Margaret Pringle, the two Margaret Hamiltons, William Craw, and Bessie Vickar, were “found guiltie be ane assyse of the abominable cryme of Witchcraft,” and were ordered to be taken to the west end of Borrowstonness, “the ordinar place of execution,” betwixt two and four in the afternoon, and “there be wirried at a steack till they be dead, and thereafter to have their bodies burnt to ashes.”
THE GHOST OF THE BLACK-BROWED MAID.[63]
If bodies were safe after death, characters were not. Isabel Heriot was maid of all work to the minister at Preston. “She was of a low Stature, small and slender of Body, of a Black Complexion. Her Head stood somewhat awry upon her Neck. She was of a droll and jeering Humour, and would have spoken to Persons of Honour with great Confidence.” After some short time of service, her master the minister began to dislike her, because she was not eager in her religious duties; so he discharged her: and in 1680 she died—and “about the time of her death her face became extreamly black.” Two or three nights after her burial, one Isabel Murray saw her, in her white grave-clothes, walk from the chapel to the minister’s louping-on stone (horse-block). Here she halted, leaning her elbow on the stone, then went in at the back gate, and so towards the stable. A few nights after this stones were flung at the minister’s house, over the roof, and in at the doors and windows; but they fell softly for the most part, and did no especial damage. Yet one night, just as the minister was coming in at the hall door, a great stone was flung after him, which hit the door very smartly and marked it. Isabel Murray was also hit with stones, and the serving-man who looked to the horses was gripped at the heel by something which made him cry out lustily. So it went on. Stones and clods, and lighted coals, and even an old horse-comb long since lost, were perpetually flying about, and only by severe prayer was the minister able to lay the devil who molested them.