You shall not get a lodging there
Except ye court a Kennedy.”
One more river and we have done. The BLADENOCH is a small stream which passes by the town of Wigtown, and falls into Wigtown Bay, the broad estuary of the Cree river. In 1685 it was the scene of the greatest of the Covenanting tragedies, known in history as the death of the Wigtown martyrs. Woodrow, in his “History of the Sufferings of the Church of Scotland,” tells the story. In the year noted there lived in the parish of Penninghame a substantial farmer named Gilbert Wilson, a law-abiding person who submitted to all the orders of the Government. He had three children: Gilbert sixteen, Margaret eighteen, and Agnes thirteen years of age. These, unlike their parents, would “by no means conform or hear the Episcopalian incumbent, but fled to the hills, bogs, and caves.” The son went abroad, fought as a soldier in the Low Countries, and returned long after the Revolution. The daughters had come to Wigtown, where they were living with an old woman of the name of Margaret McLachlin. All three, being apprehended, were tried at Wigtown on various charges of nonconformity, the chief being their presence at twenty field conventicles. The facts were patent, the law clear, and it was adjudged that “all the three should be tied to stakes fixed within the floodmark in the water of Blednoch, near Wigtown, where the sea flows at high water, there to be drowned.” (Drowning, one ought to explain, was the ordinary method of execution for women.) Gilbert Wilson hastened to Edinburgh, and procured, probably bought, a pardon for his younger daughter; then Margaret McLachlin was persuaded to sign a petition in which she promised to conform and besought the Lords of Privy Council to have mercy on her. But the passionate words of field preaching heard in lonely glens had sunk deep into Margaret Wilson’s mind; she refused, as she would have said, “to bow the knee to Baal.” She wrote a letter from prison to her friends “full of a deep and affecting sense of God’s love to her soul, and in entire resignation to the Lord’s disposal. She likewise added a vindication of her refusing to save her life by taking the abjuration and engaging conformity; against both she gave arguments with a solidity and judgment far above one of her years and education.”
Photo: Poulton & Son, London.
THE DEE AT DOUGLAS TONGUELAND (p. [322]).
But the brave child’s constancy found admirers, and her respite was procured; it was drawn up in a somewhat loose form, and sent off to Wigtown. Either it did not arrive in time, or (more likely) those in authority determined to ignore it; at any rate, the sentence was carried out. The chief actors were Grierson of Lag, the central figure of “Wandering Willie’s Tale” in “Redgauntlet”; and David Graham, brother to Dundee. On the fated eleventh of May the two women, being brought from prison, were tied to stakes on the Solway shore. A horror-struck multitude lined the banks, but a force of soldiery rendered any chance of rescue impossible. The women sang psalms; then the fierce tide rushed in, and Margaret McLachlin’s sufferings were over. Margaret Wilson had been placed close to the bank of set purpose, and before the Solway had done its fell work there ensued the most moving incident in the martyrology of the Covenant. “While at prayer the water covered her; but before she was quite dead, they pulled her up, and held her out of the water till she was recovered and able to speak; and then, by Major Windram’s orders, she was asked if she would pray for the king. She answered that she wished the salvation of all men and the damnation of none. One deeply affected with the death of the other and her case, said, ‘Dear Margaret, say “God save the king!” say “God save the king!”’ She answered with the greatest steadiness and composure, ‘God save him if He will, for it is his salvation I desire.’ Whereupon some of her relations near by, desirous to have her life spared if possible, called out to Major Windram, ‘Sir, she hath said it; she hath said it.’ Whereupon the Major came near and offered her the abjuration, charging her instantly to swear it or else return to the water. Most deliberately she refused, and said, ‘I will not; I am one of Christ’s children; let me go!’ Upon which she was thrust down again into the water, where she finished her course with joy.”
And so we bid the Solway farewell!
FRANCIS WATT.