But the interests are varied. How full of grotesque and curious horrors are the prosecutions for witchcraft! There is that one, for instance, in March 1665 at Bury St. Edmunds before Sir Matthew Hale, with stories of bewitched children, and plague-stricken women, and satanic necromancy. Again, there is the diverting exposure of Richard Hathaway in 1702, and how the rogue pretended to vomit pins and abstain from meat or drink for quite miraculous periods. But most of those things I deal with elsewhere in this volume. The trials of obscurer criminals have their own charm. Where else do you find such Dutch pictures of long-vanished interiors or exteriors? You touch the vie intime of a past age; you see how kitchen and hall lived and talked; what master and man, mistress and maid thought and felt; how they were dressed, what they ate, of what they gossiped. Again, how oft your page recalls the strange, mad, picturesque ways of old English law! Benefit of clergy meets you at every turn, the Peine Fort et Dure is explained with horrible minuteness, the lore of Ship Money as well as of Impressment of Seamen is all there. Also is an occasional touch of farce. But what phase of man’s life goes unrecorded in those musty old tomes?
Howell’s collection only comes down to 1820. Reform has since then purged our law, and the whole set is packed off to the Lumber Room. In a year’s current reports you may find the volumes quoted once or twice, but that is “but a bravery,” as Lord Bacon would say, for their law is “a creed outworn.” Yet the human interest of a story remains, however antiquated the setting, incapable of hurt from Act of Parliament. So, partly for themselves, partly as samples of the bulk, I here present in altered form two of these tragedies, a Pair of Parricides: one Scots of the seventeenth, the other English of the eighteenth century.
The first is the case of Philip Standsfield, tried at Edinburgh, in 1688, for the murder of his father, Sir James Standsfield, of New Mills, in East Lothian. To-day New Mills is called Amisfield; it lies on the south bank of the Tyne, a mile east of Haddington. There is a fine mansion-house about a century old in the midst of a well wooded park, and all round are the superbly tilled Lothian fields, as dulcia arva as ever the Mantuan sang. Amisfield got its present name thus: Colonel Charteris, infamed (in the phrase of Arbuthnot’s famous epitaph) for the “undeviating pravity of his manners” (hence lashed by Pope in many a stinging line), purchased it early in the last century and re-named it from the seat of his family in Nithsdale. Through him it passed by descent to the house of Wemyss, still its owners. Amongst its trees and its waters the place lies away from the beaten track and is now as charmingly peaceful a spot as you shall anywhere discover. Name gone and aspect changed, local tradition has but a vague memory of the two-centuries-old tragedy whereof it was the centre.
Sir James Standsfield, an Englishman by birth, had married a Scots lady and spent most of his life in Scotland. After the Restoration he had established a successful cloth factory at the place called New Mills, and there lived, a prosperous gentleman. But he had much domestic trouble chiefly from the conduct of his eldest son Philip, who, though well brought up, led a wild life. Whilst “this profligate youth” (so Wodrow, who tells the story, dubs him) was a student at the University of St. Andrews, curiosity or mischief led him to attend a conventicle where godly Mr. John Welch was holding forth. Using a chance loaf as a missile, he smote the astonished divine, who, failing to discover the culprit, was moved to prophecy. “There would be,” he thundered, “more present at the death of him who did it, than were hearing him that day; and the multitude was not small.” Graver matters than this freak stained the lad’s later career. Serving abroad in the Scots regiment, he had been condemned to death at Treves, but had escaped by flight. Certain notorious villainies had also made him familiar with the interior of the Marshalsea and the prisons of Brussels, Antwerp, and Orleans. Sir James at last was moved to disinherit him in favour of his second son John. Partly cause and partly effect of this, Philip was given to cursing his father in most extravagant terms (of itself a capital offence according to old Scots law); he affirmed his parent “girned upon him like a sheep’s head in a tongs;” on several occasions he had even attempted that parent’s life: all which is set forth at great length in the “ditty” or indictment upon which he was tried. No doubt Sir James went in considerable fear of his unnatural son. A certain Mr. Roderick Mackenzie, advocate, testifies that eight days before the end he met the old gentleman in the Parliament Close, Edinburgh, whereupon “the defunct invited him to take his morning draught.” As they partook Sir James bemoaned his domestic troubles. “Yes,” said Mackenzie, but why had he disherished his son? And the defunct answered: “Ye do not know my son, for he is the greatest debauch in the earth. And that which troubles me most is that he twice attempted my own person.”
Upon the last Saturday of November 1687, the elder Standsfield travelled from Edinburgh to New Mills in company with Mr. John Bell, minister of the Gospel, who was to officiate the next day in Morham Church (Morham is a secluded parish on the lower slope of the Lammermoors, some three miles south-west of New Mills; the church plays an important part in what follows). Arrived at New Mills the pair supped together, thereafter the host accompanied his guest to his chamber, where he sat talking “pertinently and to good purpose” till about ten o’clock. Left alone, our divine gat him to bed, but had scarce fallen asleep when he awoke in terror, for a terrible cry rang through the silence of the winter night. A confused murmur of voices and a noise of folk moving about succeeded. Mr. Bell incontinently set all down to “evil wicked spirits,” so having seen to the bolts of his chamber door, and having fortified his timid soul with prayers, he huddled in bed again; but the voices and noises continuing outside the house he crept to the window, where peering out he perceived nought in the darkness. The noises died away across the garden towards the river, and Bell lay quaking till the morning. An hour after day Philip came to his chamber to ask if his father had been there, for he had been seeking him upon the banks of the water. “Why on the banks of that water?” queried Bell in natural amazement. Without answer Philip hurriedly left the room. Later that same Sunday morning a certain John Topping coming from Monkrig to New Mills, along the bank of the Tyne, saw a man’s body floating on the water. Philip, drawn to the spot by some terrible fascination, was looking on (you picture his face). “Whose body was it?” asked the horror-struck Topping, but Philip replied not. Well he knew it was his father’s corpse. It was noted that, though a hard frosty morning, the bank was “all beaten to mash with feet and the ground very open and mellow.” The dead man being presently dragged forth and carried home was refused entry by Philip into the house so late his own, “for he had not died like a man but like a beast,”—the suggestion being that his father had drowned himself,—and so the poor remains must rest in the woollen mill, and then in a cellar “where there was very little light.” The gossips retailed unseemly fragments of scandal, as “within an hour after his father’s body was brought from the water, he got the buckles from his father’s shoes and put them in his;” and again, there is note of a hideous and sordid quarrel between Lady Standsfield and Janet Johnstoun, “who was his own concubine,” so the prosecution averred, “about some remains of the Holland of the woonding-sheet,” with some incriminating words of Philip that accompanied.
I now take up the story as given by Umphrey Spurway, described as an Englishman and clothier at New Mills. His suspicions caused him to write to Edinburgh that the Lord Advocate might be warned. Philip lost no time in trying to prevent an inquiry. At three or four of the clock on Monday morning Spurway, coming out of his house, saw “great lights at Sir James’ Gate;” grouped round were men and horses. He was told they were taking away the body to be buried at Morham, whereat honest Umphrey, much disturbed at this suspicious haste, sighed for the “crowner’s quest law” of his fatherland. But on the next Tuesday night after he had gone to bed a party of five men, two of them surgeons, came post haste to his house from Edinburgh, and showing him an order “from my Lord Advocat for the taking up again the body of Sir James Standsfield,” bid him rise and come. Philip also must go with the party to Morham. Here the grave was opened, the body taken out and carried into the church, where the surgeons made their examination, which clearly pointed to death by strangulation not by drowning (possibly it struck Spurway as an odd use for a church; it had not seemed so to a presbyterian Scot of the period). The dead being re-dressed in his grave clothes must now be set back in his coffin. A terrible thing happened. According to Scots custom the nearest relative must lift the body, and so Philip took the head, when lo! the corpse gushed forth blood on his hands! He dropped the head—the “considerable noise” it made in falling is noted by one of the surgeons—frantically essayed to wipe off the blood on his clothes, and with frenzied cries of “Lord have mercy upon me, Lord have mercy upon us!” fell half swooning across a seat. Strong cordials were administered, and in time he regained his sullen composure.
A strange scene to ponder over, but how terrible to witness! Think of it! The lonely church on the Lammermoors, the dead vast and middle of the dreary night (November 30, 1687), the murdered man, and the Parricide’s confession (it is so set forth in the “ditty”) wrung from him (as all believed) by the direct interposition of Providence. What fiction ever equalled this gruesome horror? Even his mother, who had sided with him against the father, scarce professed to believe his innocence. “What if they should put her bairn in prison?” she wailed. “Her bairn” was soon hard and fast in the gloomy old Tolbooth of Edinburgh, to which, as the Heart of Midlothian, Scott’s novel was in future days to give a world-wide fame.
The trial came on February 6 ensuing. In Scotland there is no inquest or public magisterial examination to discount the interest of the story, and the crowd that listened in the Parliament House to the evidence already detailed had their bellyful of surprises and horrors. The Crown had still in reserve this testimony, sensational and deadly. The prosecution proposed to call James Thomson, a boy of thirteen, and Anna Mark, a girl of ten. Their tender years were objected. My Lords, declining to receive them as witnesses, oddly enough consented at the request of the jury to take their declaration. The boy told how Philip came to his father’s house on the night of the murder. The lad was hurried off to bed, but listened whilst the panel, Janet Johnstoun, already mentioned, and his father and mother softly whispered together for a long time, until Philip’s rage got the better of his discretion, and he loudly cursed his father and threatened his life. Next Philip and Janet left the house, and in the dead of night his father and mother followed. After two hours they crept back again; and the boy, supposed to be sleeping, heard them whisper to each other the story of the murder, how Philip guarded the chamber door “with a drawn sword and a bendit pistol,” how it was strange a man should die so soon, how they carried the body to the water and threw it in, and how his mother ever since was afraid to stay alone in the house after nightfall. The evidence of Anna Mark was as to certain criminating words used by her mother Janet Johnstoun.
Up to this time the panel had been defended by four eminent advocates mercifully appointed thereto by the Privy Council; there had been the usual Allegations, Replyes, and Duplies, with frequent citations from Mattheus, Carpzovius, Muscard, and the other fossils, as to the matters contained in the “ditty” (indictment), and they had strenuously fought for him till now, but after the statement of the children they retired. Then Sir George Mackenzie rose to reply for the Crown. Famous in his own day, his name is not yet forgotten. He was “the bluidy advocate Mackenzie” of Covenanting legend and tradition, one of the figures in Wandering Willie’s tale in Redgauntlet (“who for his worldly wit and wisdom had been to the rest as a god”). He had been Lord Advocate already, and was presently to be Lord Advocate again. Nominally but second counsel he seems to have conducted the whole prosecution. He had a strong case, and he made the most of it. Passionate invective and prejudicial matter were mixed with legal argument. Cultured politician and jurist as he was, he dwelt with terrible emphasis on the scene in Morham kirk. “God Almighty Himself was pleased to bear a share in the testimonies which we produce.” Nor was the children’s testimony forgotten. “I need not fortifie so pregnant a probation.” No! yet he omitted not to protest for “an Assize of Error against the inquest in the case they should assoilzie the pannal”—a plain intimation to jury that if they found Philip Standsfield “not guilty” they were liable to be prosecuted for an unjust verdict. But how to doubt after such evidence? The jury straightway declared the panel guilty, and my lords pronounced a sentence of picturesque barbarity. Standsfield was to be hanged at the Mercat Cross of Edinburgh, his tongue cut out and burned upon the scaffold, his right hand fixed above the east port of Haddington, and his dead body hung in chains upon the Gallow Lee betwixt Leith and Edinburgh, his name disgraced for ever, and all his property forfeited to the Crown. According to the old Scots custom the sentence was given “by the mouth of John Leslie, dempster of court”—an office held along with that of hangman. “Which is pronounced for doom” was the formula wherewith he concluded.
On February 15 Standsfield though led to the scaffold was reprieved for eight days “at the priest’s desire, who had been tampering to turn Papist” (one remembers these were the last days of James II., or as they called him in Scotland, James VII.’s reign). Nothing came of the delay, and when finally brought out on the 24th “he called for Presbyterian ministers.” Through some slipping of the rope, the execution was bungled; finally the hangman strangled his patient. The “near resemblance of his father’s death” is noted by an eye-witness. “Yet Edmund was beloved.” Leave was asked to bury the remains. One fancies this was on the part of Lady Standsfield, regarding whose complicity and doting fondness, strange stories were current. The prayer was refused, but the body was found lying in a ditch a few days after, and again the gossips (with a truly impious desire to “force the hand” of Providence) saw a likeness to the father’s end. Once more the body was taken down and presently vanished.