Sep. 13.
1678.
At Prestonpans dwelt a respectable old widow named Katharine Liddell, or Keddie. During the late panic in East Lothian regarding witches, she had been seized by John Rutherford, bailie of Prestonpans, as one liable to suspicion of that crime. With the assistance of a drummer, two salt-makers, and other persons, he barbarously tormented her in prison in order to extort a confession, ‘by pricking of pins in several 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 her life.’ She had also been kept from sleep for several nights and days. It was not till she had undergone this treatment for six weeks, that on her petition an order was obtained from the Privy Council for her liberation.
There must have been some unusual force of character about Katharine Liddell, for not only had she stood her tortures without confessing falsehood, as most of her sister unfortunates did, but she turned upon her tormentors by presenting a petition to the Council, in which she charged them with defamation, false imprisonment, and open and manifest oppression, and demanded that they should be exemplarily punished in their persons and goods. After hearing the accused in answer, the Council declared Liddell entirely innocent and free, and condemned Rutherford and his associates for their unwarrantable proceedings. In respect, however, of ‘the common error and vulgar practice of others in the like station and capacity,’ they let him off without any punishment. ‘David Cowan, pricker,’ the most active of the tormentors, they sentenced to be confined during pleasure in the Tolbooth.—P. C. R.
Oct.
At this time, eighty persons were detained in prison in Edinburgh, on account of matters of religion, waiting till they should be transported as slaves to Barbadoes.[263]—Foun. Dec.
In connection with this distressing fact may be placed one of a different complexion, which Fountainhall states elsewhere. The magistrates, he tells us, were sensible of the inadequacy of their Old Tolbooth for the purposes of justice in these days of pious zeal. Consequently, one Thomas Moodie leaving them twenty thousand merks to build a church, they—declaring ‘they have no use for a church’—offered to build with the money a new Tolbooth, above the West Port, ‘and to put Thomas Moodie’s name and arms thereon!‘—Foun.
1678.