Margaret was a young, beautiful, high-spirited woman, wife of Archibald
Dein, burgess of Irvine, and not on the best of terms with John Dein, her
husband's brother. Indeed, she had had him and his wife before the Kirk
session for slander, and things had not gone quite smoothly with them ever
since. When, therefore, the ship, The Grace of God, in which John Dein was
sailing, sank in sight of land, drowning him and all his men, the old
quarrel was remembered, and Margaret, together with Isobel Insh and John
Stewart, a wandering "spaeman," was accused of having sunk the vessel by
charms and enchantments. Margaret disdainfully denied the charge from
beginning to end: Isobel said she had never seen the spaeman in her life
before; but Stewart "clearly and pounktallie confessit" all the charges
brought against him, and also said that the women had applied to him to be
taught his magic arts, and that once he had found them both modelling
ships and figures in clay for the destruction of the men and vessel
aforesaid. And as it was proved that Stewart had spoken of the wreck
before he could have known it by ordinary means, suspicion of sorcery fell
upon him, and he was taken: and made his confession. He said that he had
visited Margaret to help her to her will, when a black dog, breathing fire
from his nostrils, had formed part of the conclave; and Isobel's own
child, a little girl of eight, added to this, a black man as well.
Isobel, after denying all and sundry of the charges brought against her,
under torture admitted their truth. In the night time she found means to
escape from her prison, bruised and maimed with the torture as she was;
but in scrambling over the roof she fell to the ground, and was so much
injured that she died five days afterwards. Margaret was then tortured:
the spaeman had strangled himself, which was the best thing he could do,
only it was a pity he did not do it before; and poor Margaret was the last
of the trio. The torture they used, said the Lords Commissioners, was
"safe and gentle." They put her bare legs into a pair of stocks, and laid
on them iron bars, augmenting their weight one by one, till Margaret,
unable to bear the pain, cried out to be released, promising to confess
the truth as they wished to have it. But when released she only denied the
charges with fresh passion; so they had recourse to the iron bars again.
After a time, pain and weakness overcame her again, and she shrieked
aloud, "Tak off! tak off! and befoir God I will show ye the whole form!"
She then confessed--whatever they chose to ask her; but unfortunately, in
her ravings, included one Isobel Crawford, who when arrested--as she was
on the instant--attempted no defence, but, paralyzed and stupefied,
admitted everything with which she was charged. Margaret's trial
proceeded: sullen and despairing, she assented to the most monstrous
counts: she knew there was no hope, and she seemed to take a bitter pride
in suffering her tormentors to befool themselves to the utmost. In the
midst of her anguish her husband, Alexander Dein, entered the court,
accompanied by a lawyer. And then her despair passed, and she thought she
saw a glimmer of life and salvation. She asked to be defended. "All that
I have confessed," she said, "was in an agony of torture; and before God
all that I have spoken is false and untrue. But," she added pathetically,
turning to her husband, "ye have been owre lang in coming!" Her defence
did her no good; she was condemned, and at the stake entreated that no
harm might befall Isobel Crawford, who was utterly and entirely innocent.
To whom did she make this prayer? to hearts turned wild and wolfish by
superstition; to hearts made fiendish by fear; to men with nothing of
humanity save its form--with nothing of religion save its terrors. She
might as well have prayed to the fierce winds blowing round the
court-house, or the rough waves lashing the barren shore! She was taken to
the stake, there strangled and burnt: bearing herself bravely to the last.
Poor, brave, beautiful, young Margaret! we, at this long lapse of time,
cannot even read of her fate without tears; it needed all the savageness
of superstition to harden the hearts of the living against the actual
presence of her beauty, her courage, and her despair!
Isobel Crawford was now tried; "after the assistant minister, Mr. David
Dickson, had made earnest prayer to God for opening her obdurate and
closed heart, she was subjected to the torture of the iron bars laid upon
her bare shins, her feet being in the stocks, as in the case of Margaret
Barclay." She endured this torture "admirably," without any kind of din or
exclamation, suffering above thirty stone of iron to be laid on her legs,
never shrinking thereat in any sort, but remaining steady and constant.
But when they shifted the iron bars, and removed them to another part of
her legs, her constancy gave way, as Margaret's had done, and she too
broke out into horrible cries of "Tak off! tak off!" She then
confessed--anything--everything--and was sentenced: but on the way to her
execution she denied all that she had admitted, interrupted the minister
in his prayer, and refused to pardon the executioner, according to form.
Her brain had given way, and they fastened to the stake a bewildered,
raving maniac. God rest their weary souls!