Margaret Wilson and Margaret MacLachlan
Between the 1660s and 1680s, an era now known as “The Killing Times,” tens of thousands of Scottish Presbyterians were imprisoned, exiled, or even killed for their beliefs. While their descendants visit the graves and recount the stories of many of these martyrs to this day, few are remembered with more feeling than “the two Margarets,” a 70-year-old woman and an 18-year-old girl, who were drowned in the sea in 1685.
For decades, Presbyterians had resisted Parliament’s attempts to impose episcopal church governance and the Book of Common Prayer upon Scotland. Important documents called the National Covenant, first signed in Edinburgh in 1638, and the Solemn League and Covenant, first signed in 1643, were part of an effort to resist such impositions and to affirm that Jesus Christ is the only Head of the church. Those who refused to worship in government-approved parish churches and maintained the ongoing validity of these Covenants became known as Covenanters.
By the time Margaret Wilson was a young woman in the early 1660s, under King Charles II, tensions had reached a deadly pitch. Under Charles, the government violently suppressed Covenanter gatherings, calling them “rendezvouses of rebellion.” It wasn’t uncommon for soldiers to imprison or even kill suspected “rebels” for answering their questions the wrong way. Sometimes, people were killed simply for reading the Bible in the open. They were assumed to be associated with the Covenanters because, ejected from established churches, the Covenanters often resorted to worshiping outdoors.
In November 1684, a group of particularly staunch Covenanters, led by a young minister named James Renwick, published a document called the Apologetical Declaration. This declaration disowned King Charles’s authority, vowing to punish those who sought to repress the Covenanters or inform against them. They believed that the National Covenants were still binding on the Church and nation of Scotland, even though the King had by now repudiated the covenants, had them burned, and declared them treasonable. They believed this because, unlike other laws, the Covenants had been made with God. So, when Scotland accepted Charles as its King in 1660, that made the entire nation guilty of covenant-breaking. It was illegal for ministers to preach these claims in Scotland’s parish churches, so those who remained loyal to the Covenants had to meet in “conventicles,” hearing sermons and singing the Psalms in private homes or in Scotland’s wild hills and moors.
These Covenanters also believed that Christ has sole headship over the church and that any encroachments upon that authority must be resisted. Simply put, Covenanters believed that it was blasphemous for King Charles to call himself the head of the church. This is also why many Covenanters would not pray for the King (except for his salvation), because they regarded it as praying for the preservation of his tyrannical reign. In the mind of an ordinary Covenanter who risked her life to worship in the fields, then, it was no minor matter to be ordered to renounce certain documents or to say certain words about the King. It was not just a matter of worshipping as she saw fit. God’s prerogative over the nation and the church was at stake. Conversely, though it does not make it easier to understand the cruelty of some of the soldiers, those who supported Charles saw Covenanters of all walks of life as rebels and traitors, bent on stirring up revolution. Therefore, they and their movement were to be snuffed out as thoroughly as possible.
Accordingly, the government responded to the Apologetical Declaration by ordering that anyone who would not renounce it by swearing an Oath of Abjuration be put to death immediately as a traitor. Some noblemen and military officers were granted judicial power to carry out these sentences.
Two such ordinary Covenanters were named Margaret MacLachlan and Margaret Wilson. Both lived near Wigtown, on Scotland’s southwestern coast. Margaret MacLachlan was an elderly carpenter’s widow and probably not very well off. She had attended forbidden sermons for some time and offered shelter to wandering Covenanters threatened with persecution. She was arrested on the Lord’s Day while worshipping in her own home.
More is known about the other Margaret, who was still a teenager when she was martyred. Along with her 16-year-old brother, Tom, and 13-year-old sister, Agnes, Margaret was passionately attached to the Covenanter cause. Interestingly, their parents loyally attended the local Episcopal church, and history doesn’t record how this theological rift occurred between the parents and children. But just because the Wilson parents weren’t Covenanters didn’t mean they avoided persecution. The Wilsons were forbidden from housing or feeding their children or even seeing them. Gilbert Wilson had a successful farm called Glenvernoch, about 15 miles from Wigtown. But Wilson and his wife were forced to shelter many soldiers on the farm, who disrespected the property and their hosts. Wilson ultimately died in poverty, due to the heavy fines he was forced to pay on his children’s behalf and the necessity of frequently traveling to court not only in Wigtown, but all the way in Edinburgh—a journey that can take well over three hours today, and back then would have been much longer and more laborious.
In February 1685, Margaret and little sister Agnes snuck out of the wilderness, where they had been worshipping with other Covenanters, and into Wigtown to visit some friends. Someone—possibly an acquaintance trying to lay a trap for them—invited them to drink the King’s health, which they rejected as an unbiblical practice. Subsequently, the sisters were recognized and arrested. Margaret Wilson and Margaret MacLachlan were tried together at Wigtown on April 13th. Some of the charges against them, like being present at the Battle of Bothwell Bridge six years earlier, were baseless and absurd. Others, like attending dozens of indoor and outdoor conventicles, may have been more or less accurate, but they were not proven at trial. When asked, both women refused to swear the Oath of Abjuration renouncing the Apologetical Declaration. Then, they were forced to kneel during sentencing, whereupon they were pronounced guilty of rebellion. The two Margarets were sentenced to death; however, 13-year-old Agnes was spared, provided that her father paid a £100-bond for her freedom.
After Gilbert Wilson paid the bond for his younger daughter, he set off for Edinburgh to make an appeal for Margaret’s release. In a distressing irony, the privy council at Edinburgh granted both Margarets a reprieve on April 30th, but the sentence was carried out nevertheless. Sadly, by the time Wilson returned home, his daughter had already been killed.
On May 11th, the two women were taken to the River Blednoch, which flows into the Solway Firth, a large inlet on Scotland’s southwestern coast. The sea flooded this river at high tide. Two wooden stakes had been driven into the riverbed. The elder Margaret was tied to the one farther out, closer to the waves. The soldiers probably thought that witnessing her older friend’s death would prompt the younger Margaret to recant her position. The traditional story goes that, as Margaret MacLachlan struggled against the frigid water, one of the hostile onlookers asked Margaret Wilson what she thought of her friend now. Margaret is said to have replied that she saw “Christ, in one of his members, wrestling there.” Margaret MacLachlan soon perished.
As the water began to close around the younger Margaret, she started singing verses from Psalm 25. The 1650 Scottish Psalter phrases them like this:
My sins and faults of youth
do thou, O Lord, forget:
After thy mercy think on me,
and for thy goodness great.
She also quoted from Romans 8, “that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers […] shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
Lifting her from the river, the soldiers gave her another chance to pray for the King, as head of both church and civil matters. But even when sympathetic onlookers pleaded with Margaret to simply say the words so that her life might be spared, even if she didn’t mean them, Margaret would only say that she desired everyone’s salvation and the King’s repentance, if God willed it. When she refused once again to take any oaths,
the soldiers threw her into the water, where she drowned.
Today, the two Margarets are memorialized in several spots around Wigtown, and Margaret and her sister Agnes are remembered in a marble monument, erected in 1859 in Stirling’s Old Town Cemetery. The statue depicts Margaret reading the Bible to her younger sister, as an angel watches over them and a lamb rests at their feet.
Mrs. Sarah White
Presbyterian Church in America