She Stands Accused

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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'!''

[4] Men convicted of certain crimes were also subject to the same
form of execution adulterating and uttering base coins (Alan
Napier, cutler in Glasgow, was strangled and burned at the stake
in December 1602) sorcery, witchcraft, incantation, poisoning
(Bailie Paterson suffered a like fate in December 1607). For
bestiality John Jack was strangled on the Castle Hill (September
1605), and the innocent animal participator in his crime burned
with him.

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was almost immediately rescinded.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.

[5] The Memorial is fully entitled: A Worthy and Notable
Memorial of the Great Work of Mercy which God wrought in the
Conversion of Jean Livingstone Lady Warristoun, who was
apprehended for the Vile and Horrible Murder of her own Husband,
John Kincaid, committed on Tuesday, July 1, 1600, for which she
was execute on Saturday following; Containing an Account of her
Obstinacy, Earnest Repentance, and her Turning to God; of the Odd
Speeches she used during her Imprisonment; of her Great and
Marvellous Constancy; and of her Behaviour and Manner of Death:
Observed by One who was both a Seer and Hearer of what was
spoken.

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.

% III

``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.

% IV

On the 26th of June, 1604, Robert Weir, ``sumtyme servande to the
Laird of Dynniepace,'' was brought to knowledge of an assize. He
was ``Dilaitit of airt and pairt of the crewall Murthour of umqle
Johnne Kincaid of Wariestoune; committit the first of Julij, 1600
yeiris.''

Verdict. The Assyse, all in ane voce, be the mouth of the said
Thomas Galloway, chanceller, chosen be thame, ffand, pronouncet
and declairit the said Robert Weir to be ffylit, culpable and
convict of the crymes above specifiet, mentionat in the said
Dittay; and that in respect of his Confessioun maid thairof, in
Judgement.

Sentence. The said Justice-depute, be the mouth of James
Sterling, dempster of the Court, decernit and ordainit the said
Robert Weir to be tane to ane skaffold to be fixt beside the
Croce of Edinburgh, and there to be brokin upoune ane Row,[6]
quhill he be deid; and to ly thairat, during the space of xxiiij
houris. And thaireftir, his body to be tane upon the said Row,
and set up, in ane publict place, betwix the place of Wariestoune
and the toun of Leyth; and to remain thairupoune, ay and quhill
command be gevin for the buriall thairof. Quhilk was pronouncet
for dome.

[6] A `row' is a wheel. This is one of the very few instances on
which the terrible and vicious punishment of `breaking on a
wheel' was employed in Scotland. Jean Livingstone's accomplice
was, according to Birrell's Diary, broken on a cartwheel, with
the coulter of a plough in the hand of the hangman. The exotic
method of execution suggests experiment by King Jamie.

% V

The Memorial before mentioned is, in the original, a manuscript
belonging to the Advocates' Library of Edinburgh. A printed copy
was made in 1828, under the editorship of J. Sharpe, in the same
city. This edition contains, among other more relative matter, a
reprint of a newspaper account of an execution by strangling and
burning at the stake. The woman concerned was not the last
victim in Britain of this form of execution. The honour, I
believe, belongs to one Anne Cruttenden. The account is full of
gruesome and graphic detail, but the observer preserves quite an
air of detachment:

IVELCHESTER: 9th May, 1765. Yesterday Mary Norwood, for
poisoning her husband, Joseph Norwood, of Axbridge, in this
county [Somerset], was burnt here pursuant to her sentence. She
was brought out of the prison about three o'clock in the
afternoon, barefoot; she was covered with a tarred cloth, made
like a shift, and a tarred bonnet over her head; and her legs,
feet, and arms had likewise tar on them; the heat of the weather
melting the tar, it ran over her face, so that she made a
shocking appearance. She was put on a hurdle, and drawn on a
sledge to the place of execution, which was very near the
gallows. After spending some time in prayer, and singing a hymn,
the executioner placed her on a tar barrel, about three feet
high; a rope (which was in a pulley through the stake) was fixed
about her neck, she placing it properly with her hands; this rope
being drawn extremely tight with the pulley, the tar barrel was
then pushed away, and three irons were then fastened around her
body, to confine it to the stake, that it might not drop when the
rope should be burnt. As soon as this was done the fire was
immediately kindled; but in all probability she was quite dead
before the fire reached her, as the executioner pulled her body
several times whilst the irons were fixing, which was about five
minutes. There being a good quantity of tar, and the wood in the
pile being quite dry, the fire burnt with amazing fury;
notwithstanding which great part of her could be discerned for
near half an hour. Nothing could be more affecting than to
behold, after her bowels fell out, the fire flaming between her
ribs, issuing out of her ears, mouth, eyeholes, etc. In short,
it was so terrible a sight that great numbers turned their backs
and screamed out, not being able to look at it.

III: THE COUNTESS AND THE COZENER

It is hardly likely when that comely but penniless young Scot
Robert Carr, of Ferniehurst, fell from his horse and broke his
leg that any of the spectators of the accident foresaw how
far-reaching it would be in its consequences. It was an
accident, none the less, which in its ultimate results was to put
several of the necks craned to see it in peril of the hangman's
noose.

That divinely appointed monarch King James the Sixth of Scotland
and First of England had an eye for manly beauty. Though he
could contrive the direst of cruelties to be committed out of his
sight, the actual spectacle of physical suffering in the human
made him squeamish. Add the two facts of the King's nature
together and it may be understood how Robert Carr, in falling
from his horse that September day in the tilt-yard of Whitehall,
fell straight into his Majesty's favour. King James himself gave
orders for the disposition of the sufferer, found lodgings for
him, sent his own surgeon, and was constant in his visits to the
convalescent. Thereafter the rise of Robert Carr was meteoric.
Knighted, he became Viscount Rochester, a member of the Privy
Council, then Earl of Somerset, Knight of the Garter, all in a
very few years. It was in 1607 that he fell from his horse,
under the King's nose. In 1613 he was at the height of his power
in England.

Return we for a moment, however, to that day in the Whitehall
tilt-yard. It is related that one woman whose life and fate were
to be bound with Carr's was in the ladies' gallery. It is very
probable that a second woman, whose association with the first
did much to seal Carr's doom, was also a spectator. If Frances
Howard, as we read, showed distress over the painful mishap to
the handsome Scots youth it is almost certain that Anne Turner,
with the quick eye she had for male comeliness and her less need
for Court-bred restraint, would exhibit a sympathetic volubility.

Frances Howard was the daughter of that famous Elizabethan seaman
Thomas Howard, Earl of Suffolk. On that day in September she
would be just over fifteen years of age. It is said that she was
singularly lovely. At that early age she was already a wife,
victim of a political marriage which, in the exercise of the
ponderous cunning he called kingcraft, King James had been at
some pains to arrange. At the age of thirteen Frances had been
married to Robert Devereux, third Earl of Essex, then but a year
older than herself. The young couple had been parted at the
altar, the groom being sent travelling to complete his growth and
education, and Frances being returned to her mother and the
semi-seclusion of the Suffolk mansion at Audley End.

Of the two women, so closely linked in fate, the second is
perhaps the more interesting study. Anne Turner was something
older than the Countess of Essex. In the various records of the
strange piece of history which is here to be dealt with there are
many allusions to a long association between the two. Almost a
foster-sister relationship seems to be implied, but actual detail
is irritatingly absent. Nor is it clear whether Mrs Turner at
the time of the tilt-yard incident had embarked on the business
activities which were to make her a much sought-after person in
King James's Court. It is not to be ascertained whether she was
not already a widow at that time. We can only judge from
circumstantial evidence brought forward later.

In 1610, at all events, Mrs Turner was well known about the
Court, and was quite certainly a widow. Her husband had been a
well-known medical man, one George Turner, a graduate of St
John's College, Cambridge. He had been a protege of Queen
Elizabeth. Dying, this elderly husband of Mistress Turner had
left her but little in the way of worldly goods, but that little
the fair young widow had all the wit to turn to good account.
There was a house in Paternoster Row and a series of notebooks.
Like many another physician of his time, George Turner had been a
dabbler in more arts than that of medicine, an investigator in
sciences other than pathology. His notebooks would appear to
have contained more than remedial prescriptions for agues,
fevers, and rheums. There was, for example, a recipe for a
yellow starch which, says Rafael Sabatini, in his fine romance
The Minion,[7] ``she dispensed as her own invention. This had
become so widely fashionable for ruffs and pickadills that of
itself it had rendered her famous.'' One may believe, also, that
most of the recipes for those ``perfumes, cosmetics, unguents and
mysterious powders, liniments and lotions asserted to preserve
beauty where it existed, and even to summon it where it was
lacking,'' were derived from the same sources.

[7] Hutchinson, 1930.

There is a temptation to write of Mistress Turner as forerunner
of that notorious Mme Rachel of whom, in his volume Bad
Companions,[8] Mr Roughead has said the final and pawky word.
Mme Rachel, in the middle of the nineteenth century, founded her
fortunes as a beauty specialist (?) on a prescription for a
hair-restorer given her by a kindly doctor. She also `invented'
many a lotion and unguent for the preservation and creation of
beauty. But at about this point analogy stops. Both Rachel and
her forerunner, Anne Turner, were scamps, and both got into
serious trouble--Anne into deeper and deadlier hot water than
Rachel--but between the two women there is only superficial
comparison. Rachel was a botcher and a bungler, a very cobbler,
beside Anne Turner.

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