Jane Seton; or, The King's Advocate: A Scottish Historical Romance
Jane or the bereaved king, for remorse grew side by side with his
anger.
Those sentiments of generosity, of pity, and of lingering love, which
ever and anon dawned in the arid desert of his heart, and impelled
him to free her, to sue for pardon, or to fly his country, were
invariably stifled under a torrent of jealousy and hate when he
thought of Roland Vipont; and then his half-healed wounds would sting
him anew, as if probed by poniards; the perspiration would burst from
his temples, and he writhed on his sick bed in an agony indescribable.
"She is indeed a sorceress!" he would exclaim; upon which his nurse
and housekeeper, an old and wrinkled dame who attended him, and who
never left his bedside, would make signs of the cross, and feel for
the reliques which were sewed in the lining of her long piked stays,
which, with her ruff and coif, made her resemble those quaint figures
which still live in the pictures of Holbein.
Credulity has existed in every age of the world; and thus chiromancy,
astrology, physiognomy, and the wildest theories of abstruse science,
have risen and flourished on the ignorance and folly of the human
mind; but there were none that equalled the _witch-mania_, which,
strange to say, grew in Scotland, and flourished side by side with
religious freedom and reform.
It is a curious fact, that before the epoch of Knox sorcery was
almost unknown among us. In our earliest record of criminal trials,
that comprehending the years 1493-1504, there is not one prosecution
for sorcery. In the days of James V. it began to be much spoken of,
and rapidly became a source of terror. Lady Jane's was nearly the
first indictment; but the earliest statute against it was passed in
1563, by the first reformed parliament, and that portion of the law
which refers to consultations "with sorcerers and witches" was not
enacted until 1594--fully thirty years after the Reformation had been
established by the law of Scotland.
Then, indeed, from that period, kirk sessions and presbyteries,
ministers, elders, sheriffs, and justiciars, went with heart and hand
into the matter; for in the _witch-mania_, that atrocious madness
which spread over Europe, though Scotland was the last to catch the
contagion, she was in no way behind neighbouring countries in the
cruelty of her prosecutions.
According to Barrington, thirty thousand witches were burned in
England, five hundred perished in three months at Geneva, and a
thousand at Como in one year. The number committed to the flames in
Scotland is incalculable, but no less than six hundred witches were
indicted during the sitting of one parliament at Edinburgh.
Suspicion, abhorrence, accusation, trial, and death followed each
other with appalling rapidity.
Thus we find in history, that the savage spirit of ignorance and
credulity which impelled the great Cardinal Beaton to burn six men at
the stake, on the charge of heresy, was out-Heroded by the still
greater ignorance and credulity of his successors, who, for each of
these six, sacrificed more than thousands for the imaginary crime of
witchcraft.
CHAPTER XXXV.
THE COLLEGE OF JUSTICE.
"No! in an accursed spot--our magic tree,
Where devils from of yore their sabbath keep--
Has all this been contrived; there did she sell
Her soul to the eternal fiend, to be
With brief vain-glory honoured in this world.
Bid her stretch forth her arm, and ye will see
The puncture, by which hell hath marked its own."
SCHILLER'S _Maid of Orleans_
The summer solstice was passed.
Heavily and louringly the 15th of July dawned over Edinburgh; and one
hour after the portes were unclosed, the Right Honourable Knight, Sir
Simon Preston of Craigmillar, the new Lord Provost of the city and
Admiral of the Forth, entered by the Kirk-of-field Wynd, sheathed in
full armour, with a party of horse; when, conformably to the orders
of his eminence the cardinal, John Muckleheid, senior bailie, joined
him with three hundred archers--the same burgher-archers who had
lined the streets exactly two months before, on the entrance of Queen
Magdalene.
A tumult was expected; very few merchants or chapmen opened their
booths on this morning; and those between the Bell-house and the Tron
remained closed. Sir John Forrester's guards were doubled at the
palace, the Mint, the castle-gate, and elsewhere; and after arming
themselves with more than usual care, vast crowds of burghers poured
towards the Exchequer Chambers, or _'Checquer Chalmers_, as they then
named them. The stacks of heather, broom, whins, and of other fuel,
which were then permitted to encumber the street, either as being the
property of householders, or for sale, bore each on their summit a
load of urchins, whose yells and outcries served to increase the
general clamour.
A flag was flying on the steeple of the Tolbooth, which had been
built fifty years before, by John Mercer, master mason; and thirteen
shops (formed at the same period), in the vaults below the edifice,
remained closed and barricaded.
The respect his garb ensured him, and the liberal manner in which he
said "Pax vobiscum" to all, enabled the anxious and excited Father
St. Bernard, on leaving his dormitory in the house of the
prebendaries, to force a passage through the dense crowd which
occupied the High-street, around the Exchequer, the Tolbooth, and
Council-house, spreading even down the steep churchyard of St. Giles.
The provost's kinsman, Sir Andrew Preston, of Quhite-hill and
Gourtown, with a squadron of horsemen, overawed the crowd. Clad in a
suit of rich armour, he rode up and down the thoroughfare with his
long lance, ordering and threatening some, or courteously giving
admittance to others. The priest procured a place within the large
hall of the Exchequer, where, for some reason now unknown, the trial
of his unhappy penitent was to take place. A strong guard of archers
occupied the hall-door and the turnpike-stair below, permitting none
to enter without the closest scrutiny, lest armed Setons or Douglases
might penetrate into the heart of the place; for rumours of rescue
were abroad in the city.
Roofed with beams of oak, painted and gilded, the hall was lighted by
two rows of windows, lozenged and stained with brilliant coats of
arms. Those on the east faced the dark buildings of a narrow close;
those on the west overlooked the churchyard of St. Giles; thus, as
the sun could not (until mid-day) penetrate its recesses, the light
within the hall, at the early hour of eight, when the court began to
assemble, was of the most subdued and sombre kind.
At the upper end were fifteen chairs, behind a bench, all covered
with scarlet cloth, whereon sat Walter Mylne, abbot of Cambuskenneth,
lord president of the recently instituted, and then eminently
obnoxious court of judicature, with his fourteen lords--viz., the
abbot of Kinloss, the rector of Ashkirk, the provosts of Dunglass and
of the Holy Trinity; the deans of Brechin, Restalrig, and Dunbar, who
sat on his right hand; while the remaining seven, who were
laymen--the knights of Balwearie, Lundie, Easter-Wemyss, Oxengangs,
and of the Highriggs, Sir Francis Bothwell, and Otterburn of Auldhame
(a cousin of Redhall)--sat upon his left. These were the first
fifteen senators of the College of Justice in Scotland; and, save the
churchmen, few of them could sign their names. They were all men
advanced in life; and, with their black caps and scarlet gowns,
looked grimly over the half circular bench, which was raised on a
dais several feet above the floor of the hall.
Headed by Lord David Hamilton (a son of the Earl of Arran), their
chancellor, or, as we would now turn him, their foreman, the jury,
which was principally composed of Hamiltons, occupied a recess on one
side of the hall; while the ten advocates, in gowns of Paris black,
with a number of sworn notaries, had the privilege of occupying the
other. A tall wax candle, painted over with religious emblems,
burned on the right hand of the president; and coldly its light fell
upon his pinched and stern features and the gold crucifix which
glittered upon his breast.
Before him, on one hand, was a table where the clerks of court sat,
intrenched up to their ears in papers; on the other stood an uncouth
machine, covered by a black cloth. There was something in its aspect
that made the blood run cold; it was the rack, with other instruments
of torture. They were then in full use by the new court, but were
last applied in Edinburgh by order of William III., whom the Scottish
people will ever remember as the assassin-king--the butcher of
Glencoe.
Near this, in a large arm-chair, hidden from the view of all save the
lords, sat Redhall, buried in thought.
Macers in black gowns, and archers in steel caps, were visible here
and there; but everywhere behind the bar was a dense crowd, whose
heads were overlooking each other in close rows, like piles of
cannon-shot. The whole court sat in the form of a horseshoe; and
every lord's mouth, and every juryman's too, bore some resemblance to
the same figure; for gloom, anger, and severity were impressed upon
them all.
The bar enclosed the ends of this great horseshoe; and there, between
two arquebusiers of the king's guards, sat Lady Jane Seton.
Destitute of every ornament save an amber rosary, she was plainly
attired in a deep-skirted and close-bodied dress of blue silk, with
hanging sleeves, each of which, from the elbow, had three rows of
broad lace; and beneath these, from elbow to wrist, her round white
arms were bare. A simple angular cap, of that graceful fashion which
we see in the old portraits of Anne Boleyn, covered her head. She
was pale as death, and the plain braids of her dark, almost
black-brown hair, made her seem paler still. She had become
fearfully thin and hollow-cheeked, but the character of her beauty
was rather increased than impaired by this attenuation.
There was an expression of intense sadness in her quiet and limpid
eye, and of sorrow on her lip; but there were times when her eyes
flashed and her lip quivered with surprise and contempt, or a cloud
of horror would descend upon her brow at the various proceedings of
this new court, and the bitter humiliation to which it subjected her.
But now, nearly broken in spirit, crushed, and feeling that she was
for ever degraded by the frightful accusation brought against her, in
general she was careless of what was done, or said, or thought of her.
There was something antique in her beauty; but nothing could be
softer, purer, or more delicate than its aspect.
In silence she heard the low muttered revilings and exclamations
around her; when harassed by the stern questions of the hardhearted
and the credulous, or confounded by their energy and ferocity, their
determination and their sophistry, she became utterly silent, and
sought to bend all her thoughts on inward prayer.
A maze was before her eyes, and amid the maze were fifteen scarlet
spots, her fifteen judges; a confused murmur was in her ears, but
amid that murmur she could hear the beating of her own heart. In its
inner recesses there was but one thought--_Roland_; and her heart
only shrunk when her chain rattled; for they had chained her.
She was a witch!.....
Many a familiar face was in the crowd, yet not one deigned to look on
her with kindness or with friendship. The terrible accusation had
frozen the hearts of all; thus she saw less perhaps of sorrow than of
indignation in every face; while, generally, a silence the most
profound reigned throughout the whole assembly.
In Scotland trials for sorcery were mere formalities; the same blind
terror and insane credulity which brought forward the accusation and