"Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John
The bed be blest that I ly on."
And when the butter was slow in coming, it was enough if she chanted
slowly--
"Come, butter, come!
Come, butter, come!
Peter stands at the gate.
Waiting for a buttered cake,
Come, butter, come,"
said with faith and unction, she was sure to have at once a lucky
churn-full.
These queer bits of half-papistical, half-nonsensical doggerel were
considered tremendous sins in those days, and the use of them was quite
sufficient to bring any one to the scaffold; as their application would,
for a certainty, destroy health, and gear, and life, if it were so willed.
And for all these crimes--storm-raising, cat-baptizing, and the
rest--Agnes Sampson, the grave, matronlike, well-educated grace wife of
Keith, was bound to a stake, strangled, and burnt on the Castle Hill, with
no one to seek to save her, and no one to bid her weary soul God-speed!
Barbara Napier, wife to a burgess of Edinburgh, and sister-in-law to the
Laird of Carschoggill, was then seized--accused of consorting with Agnes
Simpson, and consulting with Richard Grahame, a notorious necromancer, to
whom she gave "3 ells of bombezie for his paynes," all that she might gain
the love and gifts of Dame Jeane Lyon, Lady Angus; also of having procured
the witch's help to keep the said Dame Jeane "fra wometing quhen she was
in bredin of barne." She was accused of other and more malicious things;
but acquitted of these: indeed the "assisa" which tried her was
contumacious and humane, and pronounced no doom; whereon King James wrote
a letter demanding that she be strangled, then burnt at the stake, and all
her goods escheated to himself. But Barbara pleaded that she was with
child; so her execution was delayed until she was delivered, when "nobody
insisting in the persute of her, she was set at libertie." The
contumacious majority was tried for "wilful error on assize--acquitting a
witch," but got off with more luck than usual.[8]
Euphemia Macalzean,[9] or as we should say, Maclean, was even higher game.
She was the daughter of Lord Cliftonhall, and wife of Patrick Moscrop, a
man of wealth and standing; a firm, passionate, heroic woman, whom no
tortures could weaken into confession, no threats terrify into submission.
She fought her way, inch by inch, but she was "convict" at last, and
condemned to be burnt alive: the severest sentence ever pronounced against
a witch. In general they were "wirreit" or strangled before being burnt.
There is good reason to believe that her witchcraft was made merely the
pretence, while her political predilections, her friendship for the Earl
of Bothwell, and her Catholic religion, were the real grounds of the
king's enmity to her, and the causes of the severity with which she was
treated. Her indictment contains the ordinary list of witch-crimes,
diversified with the additional charge of bewitching a certain young
Joseph Douglas, whose love she craved and found impossible to obtain, or
rather, to retain. She was accused of giving him, for unlawful purposes,
"ane craig cheinzie (neck chain), twa belt cheinzies, ane ring, ane
emiraut," and other jewels; trying also to prevent his marriage with Marie
Sandilands, and making Agnes Simpson get back the jewels, when her spells
had failed. The young wife whom Douglas married, and the two children she
bore him, also came in for part of her alleged maleficent enchantments.
She "did the barnes to death," and struck the wife with deadly sickness.
She was also accused of casting her own childbirth pains, once on a dog,
and once on the "wantoune cat;" whereupon the poor beasts ran distractedly
out of the house, as well they might, and were never seen again. She
managed this marvellous piece of sleight-of-hand by getting a bored stone
from Agnes Sampson, and rolling "enchanted mwildis"--earth from dead men's
graves--in her hair. Another time she got her husband's shirt, and caused
it to be "woumplit" (folded up) and put under her bolster, whereby she
sought to throw her labour pains upon him, but without effect; as is not
to be wondered at. She bewitched John M'Gillie's wife by sending her the
vision of a naked man, with only a white sheet about him; and Jonett
Aitcheson saw him with the sleeves of his shirt "vpoune leggis, and taile
about his heid." She was also accused of endeavouring to poison her
husband; and it was manifest that their union was not happy--he being for
the most part away from home, and she perhaps thinking of the other
husband promised her, Archibald Ruthven; which promise, broken and set
aside, had made such a slander and scandal of her marriage with Patrick
Moscrop. And it was proved--or what went for proof in those days--that
Agnes Sampson, the wise wife, had made a clay image of John Moscrop, the
father-in-law, who should thereupon have pined away and died, according to
the law of these enchantments, but, failing in this obedience, lived
instead, to the grief and confusion of his daughter-in-law. All these
crimes, and others like unto them, were quite sufficient legal causes of
death; and James could gratify his superstitious fears and political
animosity at the same time, while Euphemia Maclean--the fine, brave,
handsome Euphemia--writhed in agony at the stake to which she was bound
when burned alive in the flames: "brunt in assis quick to the deid," says
the Record--the severest sentence ever passed on a witch. This murder was
done on the 25th July, 1591.
"The last of Februarie, 1592, Richard Grahame wes brant at y{e} Cross of
Edinburghe for vitchcrafte and sorcery," says succinctly Robert Birrel,
"burges of Edinburghe," in his "Diarey containing divers Passages of
Staite and uthers memorable Accidents, from y{e} 1532 zeir of our
Redemption, till y{e} beginning of the zeir 1605." "And in 1593, Katherine
Muirhead was brunt for vitchcrafte, quha confest sundrie poynts yrof."
Richard Graham was the "Rychie Graham, ane necromancer," consulted by
Barbara Napier; the same who gave the Earl of Bothwell some drug to make
the king's majesty "lyke weill of him," if he could but touch king's
majesty on the face therewith; it was he also who raised the devil for Sir
Lewis Ballantyne, in his own yard in the Canongate, whereby Sir Lewis was
so terrified that he took sickness and died. Even in the presence of the
king himself, Rychie boasted that "he had a familiar spirit which showed
him many things;" but which somehow forgot to show him the stake and the
rope and the faggot, which yet were the bold necromancer's end, little as
the poor cozening wretch merited such an awful doom.