II

Lady Warriston was found guilty, and four days after the murder, on the

5th of July, was taken to the Girth Cross of Holyrood, at the foot

of the Canongate, and there decapitated by that machine which rather

anticipated the inventiveness of Dr Guillotin--"the Maiden." At the same

time, four o'clock in the morning, Janet Murdo, the nurse, and one of

the serving-women accused with her as accomplices were burned on the

Castle Hill of the city.

There is something odd about the early hour at which the executions took

place. The usual time for these affairs was much later in the day, and

it is probable that the sentence against Jean ran that she should be

executed towards dusk on the 4th of the month. The family of Dunipace,

however, having exerted no influence towards saving the daughter of the

house from her fate, did everything they could to have her disposed of

as secretly and as expeditiously as possible. In their zeal to have done

with the hapless girl who, they conceived, had blotted the family honour

indelibly they were in the prison with the magistrates soon after three

o'clock, quite indecent in their haste to see her on her way to the

scaffold. In the first place they had applied to have her executed at

nine o'clock on the evening of the 3rd, another unusual hour, but the

application was turned down. The main idea with them was to have Jean

done away with at some hour when the populace would not be expecting the

execution. Part of the plan for privacy is revealed in the fact of the

burning of the nurse and the "hyred woman" at four o'clock at the Castle

Hill, nearly a mile away from the Girth Cross, so--as the Pitcairn

Trials footnote says-"that the populace, who might be so early astir,

should have their attentions distracted at two opposite stations... and

thus, in some measure, lessen the disgrace of the public execution."

If Jean had any reason to thank her family it was for securing, probably

as much on their own behalf as hers, that the usual way of execution

for women murderers should be altered in her case to beheading by "the

Maiden." Had she been of lesser rank she would certainly have been

burned, after being strangled at a stake, as were her nurse and the

serving-woman. This was the appalling fate reserved for convicted

women[4] in such cases, and on conviction even of smaller crimes.

The process was even crueller in instances where the crime had been

particularly atrocious. "The criminal," says the Pitcairn account of

such punishment, "was 'brunt quick'!"

Altogether, the Dunipace family do not exactly shine with a good light

as concerns their treatment of the condemned girl. Her father stood

coldly aside. The quoted footnote remarks:

It is recorded that the Laird of Dunipace behaved with much apathy

towards his daughter, whom he would not so much as see previous to her

execution; nor yet would he intercede for her, through whose delinquency

he reckoned his blood to be for ever dishonoured.

Jean herself was in no mind to be hurried to the scaffold as early as

her relatives would have had her conveyed. She wanted (poor girl!) to

see the sunrise, and to begin with the magistrates granted her request.

It would appear, however, that Jean's blood-relations opposed the

concession so strongly that it was almost immediately rescinded. The

culprit had to die in the grey dark of the morning, before anyone was

likely to be astir.

In certain directions there was not a little heart-burning about the

untimely hour at which it was manoeuvred the execution should be carried

out. The writer of a Memorial, from which this piece of information is

drawn, refrains very cautiously from mentioning the objectors by name.

But it is not difficult, from the colour of their objections, to decide

that these people belonged to the type still known in Scotland as the

'unco guid.' They saw in the execution of this fair malefactor a moral

lesson and a solemn warning which would have a salutary and uplifting

effect upon the spectators.

"Will you," they asked the presiding dignitaries, and the

blood-relations of the hapless Jean, "deprive God's people of that

comfort which they might have in that poor woman's death? And will you

obstruct the honour of it by putting her away before the people rise out

of their beds? You do wrong in so doing; for the more public the death

be, the more profitable it shall be to many; and the more glorious, in

the sight of all who shall see it."

But perhaps one does those worthies an injustice in attributing cant

motives to their desire that as many people as possible should see Jean

die. It had probably reached them that the Lady Warriston's repentance

had been complete, and that after conviction of her sin had come to her

her conduct had been sweet and seemly. They were of their day and

age, those people, accustomed almost daily to beheadings, stranglings,

burnings, hangings, and dismemberings. With that dour, bitter,

fire-and-brimstone religious conception which they had through Knox from

Calvin, they were probably quite sincere in their belief that the public

repentance Jean Livingstone was due to make from the scaffold would

be for the "comfort of God's people." It was not so often that justice

exacted the extreme penalty from a young woman of rank and beauty. With

"dreadful objects so familiar" in the way of public executions, it was

likely enough that pity in the commonalty was "choked with custom

of fell deeds." Something out of the way in the nature of a dreadful

object-lesson might stir the hearts of the populace and make them

conscious of the Wrath to Come.

And Jean Livingstone did die a good death.

The Memorial[5] which I have mentioned is upon Jean's 'conversion' in

prison. It is written by one "who was both a seer and hearer of what

was spoken [by the Lady Warriston]." The editor of the Pitcairn Trials

believes, from internal evidence, that it was written by Mr James

Balfour, colleague of Mr Robert Bruce, that minister of the Kirk who

was so contumacious about preaching what was practically a plea of the

King's innocence in the matter of the Gowrie mystery. It tells how Jean,

from being completely apathetic and callous with regard to religion or

to the dreadful situation in which she found herself through her crime,

under the patient and tender ministrations of her spiritual advisers,

arrived at complete resignation to her fate and genuine repentance for

her misdeeds.

Her confession, as filleted from the Memorial by the Pitcairn Trials, is

as follows:

I think I shall hear presently the pitiful and fearful cries which

he gave when he was strangled! And that vile sin which I committed

in murdering my own husband is yet before me. When that horrible and

fearful sin was done I desired the unhappy man who did it (for my own

part, the Lord knoweth I laid never my hands upon him to do him evil;

but as soon as that man gripped him and began his evil turn, so soon as

my husband cried so fearfully, I leapt out over my bed and went to the

Hall, where I sat all the time, till that unhappy man came to me and

reported that mine husband was dead), I desired him, I say, to take me

away with him; for I feared trial; albeit flesh and blood made me think

my father's moen [interest] at Court would have saved me!

Well, we know what the Laird of Dunipace did about it.

"As to these women who was challenged with me," the confession goes on,

I will also tell my mind concerning them. God forgive the nurse, for

she helped me too well in mine evil purpose; for when I told her I was

minded to do so she consented to the doing of it; and upon Tuesday, when

the turn was done, when I sent her to seek the man who would do it,

she said, "I shall go and seek him; and if I get him not I shall seek

another! And if I get none I shall do it myself!"

Here the writer of the Memorial interpolates the remark, "This the nurse

also confessed, being asked of it before her death." It is a misfortune,

equalling that of the lack of information regarding the character of

Jean's husband, that there is so little about the character of the

nurse. She was, it is to be presumed, an older woman than her mistress,

probably nurse to Jean in her infancy. One can imagine her (the stupid

creature!) up in arms against Kincaid for his treatment of her "bonny

lamb," without the sense to see whither she was urging her young

mistress; blind to the consequences, but "nursing her wrath" and

striding purposefully from Warriston to Holyroodhouse on her strong

plebeian legs, not once but several times, in search of Weir! What is

known in Scotland as a 'limmer,' obviously.

"As for the two other women," Jean continues,

I request that you neither put them to death nor any torture, because I

testify they are both innocent, and knew nothing of this deed before it

was done, and the mean time of doing it; and that they knew they durst

not tell, for fear; for I compelled them to dissemble. As for mine own

part, I thank my God a thousand times that I am so touched with the

sense of that sin now: for I confess this also to you, that when that

horrible murder was committed first, that I might seem to be innocent, I

laboured to counterfeit weeping; but, do what I could, I could not find

a tear.

Of the whole confession that last is the most revealing touch. It is

hardly just to fall into pity for Jean simply because she was young and

lovely. Her crime was a bad one, much more deliberate than many that, in

the same age, took women of lower rank in life than Jean to the crueller

end of the stake. In the several days during which she was sending for

Weir, but failing to have speech with him, she had time to review her

intention of having her husband murdered. If the nurse was the prime

mover in the plot Jean was an unrelenting abettor. It may have been

in her calculations before, as well as after, the deed itself that the

interest of her father and family at Court would save her, should the

deed have come to light as murder. Even in these days, when justice is

so much more seasoned with mercy to women murderers, a woman in Jean's

case, with such strong evidence of premeditation against her, would

only narrowly escape the hangman, if she escaped him at all. But that

confession of trying to pretend weeping and being unable to find tears

is a revelation. I can think of nothing more indicative of terror and

misery in a woman than that she should want to cry and be unable to.

Your genuinely hypocritical murderer, male as well as female, can always

work up self-pity easily and induce the streaming eye.

It is from internal evidences such as this that one may conclude the

repentance of Jean Livingstone, as shown in her confession, to have been

sincere. There was, we are informed by the memorialist, nothing maudlin

in her conduct after condemnation. Once she got over her first obduracy,

induced, one would imagine, by the shock of seeing the realization of

what she had planned but never pictured, the murder itself, and probably

by the desertion of her by her father and kindred, her repentance was

"cheerful" and "unfeigned." They were tough-minded men, those Scots

divines who ministered to her at the last, too stern in their theology

to be misled by any pretence at finding grace. And no pretty ways of

Jean's would have deceived them. The constancy of behaviour which is

vouched for, not only by the memorialist but by other writers, stayed

with her until the axe fell.