This version was taken down by Sir Walter Scott from his mother’s
recitation, for Jamieson’s book of ballads. Jamieson later quarrelled
bitterly with Sir Walter, as letters at Abbotsford prove. A variant is
given by Kinloch, and a longer, less poetical, but more historically
accurate version is given by Buchan. The House of Waristoun is, or
lately was, a melancholy place hanging above a narrow lake, in the
northern suburbs of Edinburgh, near the Water of Leith. Kincaid was the
name of the Laird; according to Chambers, the more famous lairds of
Covenanting times were Johnstons. Kincaid is said to have treated his
wife cruelly, wherefore she, or her nurse, engaged one Robert Weir, an
old servant of her father (Livingstone of Dunipace), to strangle the
unhappy man in his own bedroom (July 2, 1600). The lady was beheaded,
the nurse was burned, and, later, Weir was also executed. The line
“I wish that ye may sink for sin”
occurs in an earlier ballad on Edinburgh Castle—
“And that all for the black dinner
Earl Douglas got therein.”