(This continues my previous post on the Martyrs’ Stake monument at Wigtown.)
This rather crude image is the earliest depiction I’ve found of the notorious drowning incident. It comes from the title page to a work published anonymously in the Netherlands in 1687 by Alexander Shields: A Hind Let Loose, or An Historical Representation of the Testimonies, of the Church of Scotland, for the Interest of Christ, with the true State thereof in all its Periods.
Detail from Shields, A Hind Let Loose (1687), title page
Though Alexander Shields would later join the Church of Scotland (in its post-Revolution, presbyterian form), in 1687 he was a ‘preacher’ or candidate for ordination who belonged to the radical Cameronian faction. A Hind Let Loose was a vindication of their position, including their successive renunciations of allegiance to Charles II and James VII. Shields justified this stance by arguing that both monarchs had broken their obligations to their subjects and thus had lost all legitimate authority. To demonstrate the royal guilt, a middle section listed examples of government repression, often without giving the victims’ names. Here we find a brief allusion to the two Margarets – half a sentence in more than 700 pages of polemic. The faithful in general, Shields says earlier in the same paragraph, refused, when arrested, to ‘give the Tyrant & his Complices any acknowledgement: yea not so much as to say, God save the King, which was offered as the price of their life, and Test of their acknowledgment’. He goes on:
Which so enraged the Tygrish Truculency of these Persecuters, that they spared neither age, sexe, nor Profession: the tenderness of youth did not move them to any relenting, in murdering very boyes upon this head, nor the gray hairs of the aged; neither were women spared, but some were hanged, some drouned, tied to Stakes within the Sea-mark, to be devoured gradually with the growing waves, and some of them of a very young, some of an old age.
This vague statement (plus the visual reference on the title page) can be fairly safely identified with the Wigtown incident because Shields later revised this section of A Hind Let Loose and re-used it in a pithier publication called A Short Memorial of the Sufferings and Grievances Past and Present of the Presbyterians in Scotland: Particularly of those of them called by Nick-name Cameronians (Edinburgh, 1690).
By 1690 the Williamite religious settlement had returned control of the national church to the presbyterians – but to the larger, mainstream group rather than to Shields’ radical associates. Shields and his two colleagues Thomas Linning and William Boyd attended the 1690 General Assembly in order to negotiate the terms on which they might be reconciled to the new establishment. The Short Memorial, published for this occasion, sought to remind more moderate presbyterians of the cumulative grievances that remained unaddressed. The Cameronians’ (or more properly, United Societies’) first efforts toward memorializing their martyrs were reflected in this pamphlet, where Shields’ previous, rather generic list of examples reappeared in a slightly longer form with many of the names and dates inserted. The Wigtown drownings incident was one of those that had been expanded and took the following form:
Item, the said Col: or Lieu: Gen: James Dowglas, together with the Laird of Lag, and Capt: Winram, most illegally condemned, and most inhumanely drowned at Stakes within the Sea mark, two Women at Wigtoun; viz: Margaret Lauchlan, upward of 60: years and Margaret Wilson, about 20: years of age, the foresaid fatal year, 1685.
It is still not particularly emphasized, though perhaps Shields felt it would draw enough attention without his special effort.
In these early writings by Shields, the two Margarets are part of an explicitly radical pantheon. As it happened, however, he and Linning and Boyd did allow themselves to be wooed into fellowship with the national church in 1690 – thus opening the door for the appropriation of their more suitable martyrs by the Church of Scotland.
In 1707 there was already at least one hint of such a process. Daniel Defoe alluded to the drowning story in one of his efforts to lubricate the passage of the Treaty of Union – in this case, by refurbishing the image of Scots presbyterianism for doubtful English readers. Like Shields in A Hind Let Loose, Defoe did not name names. One could speculate that he did not consider the details important … or that he had not taken the trouble to inquire … or that he was not working on oral information at all, but merely cribbing from whatever printed material happened to be at hand. It is also possible that the southwestern and radical provenance of the story would have made it difficult for him to check, had he thought it necessary. His casual reference seems to imply, in any case, that the basic motif would be familiar to an audience who had been following the episcopalian-presbyterian controversy since 1689/90.
And if they did not Pistol in cold Blood; If they did not Ty the Women to Stakes in the Sea, and let the Tide Flow over them; If they did not Drag you out of your Houses, and Shoot you, without giving you Time to Commend your Souls to GOD’s Mercy; If these Things were not done, you [i.e. Scots episcopalians] ought to believe … that you had more Mercy from their Hands, than you had Reason to expect.
[Defoe], An Historical Account of the Bitter Sufferings, and Melancholly Circumstances of the Episcopal Church in Scotland, Under the Barbarous Usage and Bloody Persecution of the Presbyterian Church Government (Edinburgh, 1707). (Ironic titles were, of course, one of Defoe’s journalistic trademarks.)
