Lionized by campaigners and made subject to complex procedures, today’s death row inmates share much in common with those of seventeenth-century Scotland.

Explore how Jean Livingston, a Scottish woman convicted of murder and executed for her crime, vied to regain her honor in her last days through the intricate rituals of “dying well”.

“A Constant Saint of God”: Female Honor and

Death in Seventeenth Century Scotland

Julia Miglets

Washington & Lee University

The execution of Jean Livingston, the daughter of a prominent Scottish family, on Saturday, July 5, 1600 for the murder of her husband, John Kincaid of Warriston, seems to have caused quite a stir in Edinburgh.¹ On the night of July 1, 1600, Robert Weir, a servant in the household, attacked John Kincaid in his home in Warriston on the outskirts of Edinburgh at Jean Livingston’s behest, possibly due to abuse within the marriage.² According to Weir’s trial record, he:

maist crewallie with yair faldit neiffs [clenched fists] gave him ane deidlie and crewall straik on ye vane-organe [jugular vein], quhairwith he dang the said Johnne to the grund outouer his bed, and yairaftir crewallie strak him on his bellie with his feit…he yaireftir maist tirannouslie and barbaruslie, with his hand, grippit him be ye thrott or waisen…during the quhilk tyme the said Johnne Kincaid lay struggilling and fechting in the panes of daith vnder him.³

Given the close proximity to Edinburgh, the authorities quickly received notice of the crime and arrested Livingston and her accomplice, a nurse named Janet Murdo, while Weir fled and was not apprehended until four years later.⁴ Despite the connections of Livingston’s family at court and her father’s role as one of the king’s chief advisors, the court convicted both Livingston and the nurse of murder and sentenced them to death by being “burnt quick.”⁵ Livingston’s family, however, succeeded in having her sentence commuted to beheading by the Maiden.⁶

According to the account of her confession, Livingston remained reticent after her sentencing, but two days before her execution experienced a seemingly miraculous transformation, during which she admitted to her crime and her lifelong sinfulness. She begged the forgiveness of God for her actions, and continued in this penitent state until the very moment of her death. Readers of Jean Livingston’s story cannot know whether she actually acted in the way the anonymous writer of her confession depicted. Instead, the fact that he chose to portray Livingston in this way holds greater significance as a particular representation of an ideal criminal. Jean Livingston’s story fits a seventeenth century pattern of behavior through which a condemned criminal could regain honor by “dying well.” The memorial of her confession and execution, coupled with the ballads drawn from the story, expose the tension between religious and secular formulas for dying well and the disparity between these two conceptions of a death with honor.

Seventeenth century Scots intimately connected honor— religious, secular, personal, and familial— to the idea of dying well. In the Middle Ages, theologians and scholars began to elaborate upon the correct ritual for the preparations leading up to death, natural or otherwise.⁷ By the seventeenth century, dying well involved a formulaic process which focused on the complete repentance of sin. Because Protestantism did not require a spoken confession to ensure salvation a public confession, like that made by Jean Livingston, was not primarily a confession of sin but rather, a visible affirmation of the dying person’s submission to God and to the guidelines by which society assessed honor, which was the real issue at stake. Since those who witnessed the death could never know its actual effect on salvation, preserving honor remained the preeminent motive for dying a good death. The public nature of both the secular and religious rituals surrounding dying fit into a formula of honor within which the dying person could act. In both the secular and religious realms spoken confession of sinfulness at death fulfilled the formulaic requirement of a public confession as a way to restore honor.⁸ Dying well allowed the restoration of honor at death because it functioned as a final demonstration of submission to the parameters within which society judged honor.

Execution served as a public display of the state’s power and its control over individuals, who, by submitting to their execution and to God, acted in a way which allowed them to die well and to regain some of the honor lost through their crime. In the case of capital crimes, the death itself occurred publicly because the original crime had violated the control of the state and damaged the honor of the monarch. Since in theory the individual household represented a microcosm of the divinely ordained universal order, with God at the top of the social order, the king his representative on earth, and the husband the king-figure within the family, Livingston’s murder of her husband not only attacked the familial hierarchy, but also that of the kingdom and the universal hierarchy ordained by God. Therefore, although it defied the secular formula for dying well, the state had to conduct her confession and execution in a public manner, in order to demonstrate her submission to the state and to God. The state had to be careful, however, not to further impugn her family’s honor by too public an execution, thereby alienating Lord Dunipace, Livingston’s father, who served as one of the chief advisors to the king.⁹

Catering to a Protestant audience drawn in by sensationalism as well as those looking for moral guidance, writers in England and Scotland often chose crimes and executions as subjects for printing, sensationalizing events in order to attract a wider audience.¹⁰ Readers of such pamphlets in turn expected to encounter a particular, formulaic set of events: first the crime itself and the reticence of the perpetrator; next a profound conversion facilitated by the divine, in which the condemned confessed to the crime as well as to their prior life of sinfulness; lastly the culmination in execution, at which readers expected the criminal to again make a full confession and to willingly allow the execution to take place.¹¹ Readers anticipated that the condemned would act a specific way, and these expectations expose how early modern Scots viewed honor and, by connection, how they expected a condemned person to act in the time leading up to their execution in order to die well. By submitting to the will of the law, Livingston acknowledged the power of the state, the authority of the law, and the veracity of the sentence passed against her.¹² Because of the limited audience present for Livingston’s execution the state failed to fully convey its authority, thus the widely disseminated popular record of her execution served to compensate for any deficiencies in this display of power.

In the memorial account as well as one of the ballads about her, Livingston’s family’s apparent desire to make her execution as private as possible demonstrates an inherent tension both within the secular paradigm for dying well and within the religious conception of a good death. Obviously aware that the popular press would ensure the publicity of the crime and execution, Livingston’s father, the “grit Dunipace,” arranged for the authorities to carry out the execution in the early hours of the morning and for Livingston’s nurse to be “brunt [sic] at the same tyme, at 4 houres in the morning, the 5 of July,” limiting the audience as much as possible.¹³ The ballads originating from the affair chronicle Dunipace’s attempts to save Livingston, and recount that Dunipace visited Livingston in prison, telling her “Ohon, alas, my bonny Jean,/ If I had you at hame wi’ me!/ Seven daughters I ha’e left at hame,/ As fair women as fair can be;/ But I would gi’e them ane by ane,/ O bonny Jean, to borrow thee.”¹⁴ In murdering her husband, Livingston had upset the divinely ordained standard of familial hierarchy accepted by Scottish society, resulting in dishonor both for herself and for her family. While the status of Livingston’s family allowed them certain privileges, it also ensured that Dunipace could not “borrow” Livingston from her fate. The murder of her husband obliged her execution in order to mitigate the effects of her crime to the authority of the king, and to prevent the beheading would only further injure the honor of the family and likely their status at court. A private execution provided a compromise between political necessity and the demands of familial honor and prevented Livingston from further dishonoring her family by some word or action on the way to the scaffold, a particularly real concern because the scaffold gave women unprecedented freedom of speech.¹⁵ By ensuring that the state carried out Livingston’s beheading privately, her family permitted the ideological aspects of the execution to take place, but minimized the consequences to their familial honor.

The account of Jean Livingston’s conversion furthermore illustrates the tension between secular and religious ideas about honor. The author of the text, writing from a religious perspective, emphasizes the desire of Livingston’s family to have her executed as privately as possible, thus, in his opinion, violating the formula of dying well and prohibiting her from regaining personal honor. He writes:

After 3 o’clock in the morning, upon Saturday, the Magistrates wer brought into the prison by her friends, to take her furth to suffer; amongst them, some were too earnest to hast her away, that she might be execute before any should know of it…many came and said, “Will you deprive God’s people of that comfort which they might have in that poor woman’s death? and will you obstruct the honnour of it, by putting her away before the people rise out of their beds? you do wrong in so doing, for the more publick the death be, the more profitable it shall be to many, and the more gloriouse in the sight of all who shall see it, seing the shame of this death is covered and beautified with a sure mercy, which the Lord hath shewen to this poor woman who is to suffer…for that which is shamefull in her hath run abroad already, and you cannot get it layed; but her end, which is honourable, because she dies a penitent sinner, you would hide, that it be not seen nor shown.¹⁶

The author of the account quite obviously saw this quest for privacy as an affront to Livingston’s honor, depriving her of the chance to publicly and finally confess her crimes and to encourage others to consider their own sinfulness. This divergence between religious and secular honor stems from two differing ideas about making a good end. For the writer of the pamphlet, dying well involved a public confession in order to illustrate the power and mercy of God, and to provide a visible example of God’s mercy at work.

The clergyman who composed the narrative of Livingston’s final days did so with didactic motives, intending to teach a moral lesson to his readers. Seventeenth century Scottish society did not clearly distinguish between church and state authority; thus, confession and repentance held both divine and political implications.¹⁷ The process of confession, contrition, and spiritual exercises in preparation for the execution required active participation by the condemned in order to convincingly demonstrate the offender’s newfound godliness and divine mercy.¹⁸ Jean Livingston’s story shows a clerical criticism of the aristocratic emphasis on familial honor over that of the individual, and therefore a distortion of the divine hierarchy with God at its head, to whom every person must submit. The author of the narrative clearly illustrates his point in the last lines of the epitaph at the end of the account, which reads “by the example of God, mortals learn to live, but by our example, learn how to die.”¹⁹

For the clergyman writing Livingston’s tale, the consequences of her original reticence and the lack of audience for her confession went far beyond simply a subordination of divine authority. The struggle for Livingston’s conversion extended past honor and represented a tangible struggle against evil. In admonishing Livingston to reconsider her reticence after the court passed the sentence of death against her, the author of the memorial reminds her that only by bowing down before God and “craving grace” could she be freed “of thir [sic] bands of Satan, and dispossesse this evil spirit by his more mighty spirit.”²⁰ The minister’s ardor to draw repentance and a confession from Livingston stems in part from his perception of what comprises dying well, but also demonstrates his belief in the power of the Devil and the ability of God’s mercy to conquer the evil influence holding sway over Livingston and to win her for God. Later in the narrative, the author explains that “the Devil’s purpose is not only to draw to the offence of God’s majesty, but when he hath got entry that way…he bends his whole force and sybstance to poyson us…for this maliciouse wretch still intends the destruction of the creature.”²¹

The story of Jean Livingston’s execution and the confession which preceded it exposes the divergence between religious and secular ideas of how to die well and by connection, the two differing conceptions of honor in seventeenth century Scotland. Livingston’s contemporaries connected honor to the process of dying well which involved a set formula of actions, performed to some extent publicly, by which an individual secured the condition of their honor at death. The state used public execution to demonstrate its power and assert its authority. The adamance displayed by Livingston’s family to have her execution carried out in private reveals that the tension underlying the idea of dying well existed not only between the secular and religious realms, but also within the secular conception of a good end. The religious formulation of dying well involved redemption of personal honor as well as setting an example for others in avoiding sin. Dying well also involved submission to a higher authority, and the narrative of Jean Livingston’s execution fits a pattern designed to control which elements of her final speech reached the wider audience of the pamphlet.

Endnotes

1 Unfortunately, the trial record no longer survives, so the reconstruction of the events surrounding the murder, trial, and execution of those involved relies upon a number of sources. The diary of Robert Birrel, a burgess in Edinburgh whose diary covers the years 1532 to 1605 and the manuscript of Calderwood’s History contain brief mentions of the murder and execution. In 1827, Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe reprinted and prefaced the extensive A Worthy and Notable Memorial of the Great Work of Mercy Which God Wrought in the Conversion of Jean Livingston, Lady Waristoun, written by an anonymous minister who claimed that he spent the time from Jean’s sentencing to her execution with her. The pamphlet does not contain a specific date of authorship, but the language and style fits that of the early seventeenth century. Additionally, two ballads based on the crime survive, both of unknown authorship, but in a style consistent with the mid-seventeenth century. Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe, preface to A Worthy and Notable Memorial of the Great Work of Mercy Which God Wrought in the Conversion of Jean Livingston, Lady Waristoun, (Edinburgh: 1827); Records of Justiciary, (Edinburgh), in Sharpe, A M; Calderwood’s MS. History, in Sharpe; Diary of Robert Birrel, Burgess, (Edinburgh), in Sharpe.

2 The Curia Justiciarie records from Robert Weir’s trial note that Jean consented to the murder after John’s “allegit byting of hir in ye arme and strking hir dyuerse tymes.” The popular ballads regarding the case note that John had variously hit Jean in the mouth or thrown a dish at her face, drawing blood. Records of the Justiciary cited by Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe, preface to A Worthy and Notable Memorial.

3 “Most cruelly with his clenched fists gave him a deadly and cruel strike on the jugular vein, wherewith he drug the said John to the ground out of his bed, and thereafter cruelly struck him on his belly with his fist…he thereafter most tyrannously and barbarously, with his hand, gripped him by the throat or waist…during the which time the said John Kincaid lay struggling and fetching in the pains of death under him.” trans. by Julia Miglets, Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe, preface to A Worthy and Notable Memorial, iii-iv.

4 Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe, preface to A Worthy and Notable Memorial, iii-iv.

5 Ibid.; John Charles Gibson, The Lands and Lairds of Dunipace, (1903), 46-48.

6 Strangulation followed by burning constituted the typical punishment for women convicted of murder, but the king could commute the sentence to beheading, a favor typically granted to aristocratic women. The Maiden was essentially a Scottish version of the guillotine and came into widespread use in the seventeenth century.

7 J.A. Sharpe, “‘Last Dying Speeches’: Religion, Ideology and Public Execution in Seventeenth-Century England,” Past and Present 107 (May 1985): 160.

8 “Public” here is not meant to imply a large audience or even a setting outside of the dying person’s home. I mean to imply a confession which was spoken aloud as opposed to a private confession, perhaps offered in prayer, by the individual to God.

9 John Charles Gibson, The Lands and Lairds of Dunipace, (1903), 46-48.

10 While writers often embellished the events of trials and executions, many of the factual details in surviving pamphlets can be corroborated against outside sources. This holds true in Jean Livingston’s case. The dates of the crime and execution backed up by the two surviving anecdotal references to the events, and the extent of the crime outlined in the proceedings from the trial of Robert Weir. J.A. Sharpe, “Last Dying Speeches,” 147.

11 Sharpe, “Last Dying Speeches.”

12 Ibid., 148; Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, (New York: Vintage, 1977), 47.

13 According to Pitcairn, Jean’s family had originally applied for the highly unusual time of 9 pm on Friday evening. Birrel’s Diary, in Robert Pitcairn, Criminal Trials in Scotland, (Edinburgh: 1833), 446-47. Both Jean’s family and that of her husband figured amongst the prominent aristocracy of seventeenth century Scotland, and Dunipace in particular held significant influence with the king. Jean’s grandfather, Adam Livingstone of Dunipace, had been appointed an Extraordinary Lord of Session to the Court of Session, the highest court in Scotland, in 1542 by James V, shortly before his death. John Charles Gibson, The Lands and Lairds of Dunipace, (1903), 47.

14 “The Death of Lord Warriston” in James Kinsely, ed., The Oxford Book of Ballads, (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1969), 605.

15 The construction of the narrative of Livingston’s execution itself served to control her. At the scaffold women were able to push the normal boundaries of submission and possessed an unusual amount of agency and freedom in what they could say. Unlike the accounts of the executions of men, where the suffering and breaking of the body played into the story at least as centrally as their final words, writers downplayed the bodily aspect of execution in narratives of female executions. Instead, pamphleteers portrayed women as rising above the bodily aspects of the execution and death, paying the high price for the opportunity to speak publicly with the sacrifice of their bodies. The narrative, while recording Livingston’s last words, also controls them by documenting only that which society considered acceptable for a woman to say. Our perception of Livingston’s death is based completely upon her words and actions as recorded by her writer who might have been completely faithful to the minutes before her death or, more likely, reshaped them based upon his own conceptions of feminine propriety. Thus the picture of Livingston at her execution is a better representation of male ideals of the ideal comportment of a condemned woman than a factual account. Frances E. Dolan, “‘Gentlemen, I have one thing more to say’: Women on Scaffolds in England, 1563-`680,” Modern Philology 92, no. 2, (Nov. 1994), 157-59, 175.

16 Sharpe, preface to A Worthy and Notable Memorial XXX.

17 J.A. Sharpe, “Last Dying Speaches,” 159.

18 Ibid., 160.

19 The epitaph contains fourteen lines, written in elegiac couplets. It reads: An unwilling girl joined to an unwilling boy,/And all sadness was in my life./ And nothing in the marriage except quarrels, arguments, and fights,/ There was no hope to flee the hated marriage./ The daring deeds of sin, at last, having been despised so many times, the husband/ Unaware is incautiously killed./ If I am punished too much, I fall down dead, with the favorable spirit of God/ Now my life, having been defiled by crime, perishes;/ I was seized from the rabid jaws of death/ Having been restored to Heaven./ No miserable girl was ever brought into Heaven,/ And not for a long time did she come to know God./ By the example of God, mortals learn/ To live, but by our example, learn how to die. (Invita invito subjuncta puella puello,/ Tristiaque in vita cuncta fuere mea./ Et nihil in thalamo nisi rixae, jurgia, lites,/ Nec fugere invisum spes fuit ulla torum./ Ausa nefas tandem toties despecta, maritus/ Incaute incautus tollitur e medio./ Vindice si nimis occumbo, cum numine amico/ Jam periunt vitae con[sceleratoa] meae;/ Fortunateque ereptam rabidis ex faucibus orci/ Incolumem patrio restituere polo./ Nullae unquam miserae affulsit praesentior aether,/ Nec magis ulla diu noverat esse Deum./ Exemplo alterius mortals discite cuncti/ Vivere, sed nostro discite posse mori.) Trans. by Julia Miglets. I am indebted to Professor Bryce Walker for his help with the translation.

20 Sharpe, preface to A Worthy and Notable Memorial, III.

21 Ibid., V.