"She was but a woman and a bairn, being the age of twenty-one years,"
says the Memorial. But, "in the whole way, as she went to the place of
execution, she behaved herself so cheerfully as if she had been going
to her wedding, and not to her death. When she came to the scaffold, and
was carried up upon it, she looked up to 'the Maiden' with two longsome
looks, for she had never seen it before."
The minister-memorialist, who attended her on the scaffold, says that
all who saw Jean would bear record with himself that her countenance
alone would have aroused emotion, even if she had never spoken a word.
"For there appeared such majesty in her countenance and visage, and
such a heavenly courage in her gesture, that many said, 'That woman is
ravished by a higher spirit than a man or woman's!'"
As for the Declaration and Confession which, according to custom, Jean
made from the four corners of the scaffold, the memorialist does not
pretend to give it verbatim. It was, he says, almost in a form of words,
and he gives the sum of it thus:
The occasion of my coming here is to show that I am, and have been, a
great sinner, and hath offended the Lord's Majesty; especially, of the
cruel murdering of mine own husband, which, albeit I did not with mine
own hands, for I never laid mine hands upon him all the time that he was
murdering, yet I was the deviser of it, and so the committer. But my
God hath been always merciful to me, and hath given me repentance for
my sins; and I hope for mercy and grace at his Majesty's hands, for his
dear son Jesus Christ's sake. And the Lord hath brought me hither to
be an example to you, that you may not fall into the like sin as I have
done. And I pray God, for his mercy, to keep all his faithful people
from falling into the like inconvenient as I have done! And therefore I
desire you all to pray to God for me, that he would be merciful to me!
One wonders just how much of Jean's own words the minister-memorialist
got into this, his sum of her confession. Her speech would be coloured
inevitably by the phrasing she had caught from her spiritual advisers,
and the sum of it would almost unavoidably have something of the
memorialist's own fashion of thought. I would give a good deal to know
if Jean did actually refer to the Almighty as "the Lord's Majesty,"
and hope for "grace at his Majesty's hands." I do not think I am being
oversubtle when I fancy that, if Jean did use those words, I see an
element of confusion in her scaffold confession--the trembling confusion
remaining from a lost hope. As a Scot, I have no recollection of ever
hearing the Almighty referred to as "the Lord's Majesty" or as "his
Majesty." It does not ring naturally to my ear. Nor, at the long
distance from which I recollect reading works of early Scottish divines,
can I think of these forms being used in such a context. I may be--I
very probably am--all wrong, but I have a feeling that up to the last
Jean Livingstone believed royal clemency would be shown to her, and that
this belief appears in the use of these unwonted phrases.
However that may be, Jean's conduct seems to have been heroic and
unfaltering. She prayed, and one of her relations or friends brought "a
clean cloath" to tie over her eyes. Jean herself had prepared for this
operation, for she took a pin out of her mouth and gave it into the
friend's hand to help the fastening. The minister-memorialist, having
taken farewell of her for the last time, could not bear the prospect of
what was about to happen. He descended from the scaffold and went away.
"But she," he says, as a constant saint of God, humbled herself on her
knees, and offered her neck to the axe, laying her neck, sweetly and
graciously, in the place appointed, moving to and fro, till she got a
rest for her neck to lay in. When her head was now made fast to "the
Maiden" the executioner came behind her and pulled out her feet, that
her neck might be stretched out longer, and so made more meet for the
stroke of the axe; but she, as it was reported to me by him who saw
it and held her by the hands at this time, drew her legs twice to her
again, labouring to sit on her knees, till she should give up her spirit
to the Lord! During this time, which was long, for the axe was but
slowly loosed, and fell not down hastily, after laying of her head, her
tongue was not idle, but she continued crying to the Lord, and uttered
with a loud voice those her wonted words, "Lord Jesus, receive my
spirit! O Lamb of God, that taketh away the sins of the world, have
mercy upon me! Into thy hand, Lord, I commend my soul!" When she came to
the middle of this last sentence, and had said, "Into thy hand, Lord,"
at the pronouncing of the word "Lord" the axe fell; which was diligently
marked by one of her friends, who still held her by the hand, and
reported this to me.