Margaret Wilson

Life and Ministry

Margaret Wilson was the eldest daughter of a tenant farmer at Glenvernoch in the parish of Penninghame in Wigtownshire, in the southwest of Scotland, born about 1667. She and her younger sister Agnes were brought up in a Covenanting household — heirs of the Scottish Reformed tradition that had bound itself by the National Covenant of 1638 and the Solemn League and Covenant of 1643 to maintain Presbyterian church government in Scotland and to recognize no head of the church but Christ. After the restoration of Charles II in 1660, the Stuart crown reasserted episcopacy in Scotland by force; ministers who refused the new oath were ejected from their parishes, field conventicles were declared treasonable, and a decade of fines and imprisonment escalated, after 1684, into what came to be called the Killing Time — when soldiers under the royal commission of Lieutenant General Dalziel and Sir Robert Grierson of Lag had standing authority to execute Covenanters on the moors without trial.

Circumstances of Death

In February 1685 Margaret, aged about eighteen, her sister Agnes, aged about thirteen, and an elderly widow named Margaret McLachlan were arrested at the Wilson farm for attending field preaching and for refusing the Test Oath, which acknowledged the king as head of the church. They were imprisoned at the Wigtown tollbooth through Lent. On April 13 the three were tried under the Test Act, found guilty, and sentenced to be tied to stakes within the floodmark of the Solway tide at the mouth of the Bladnoch and drowned as the tide came in. The execution was carried out on May 11, 1685. The older Margaret McLachlan was tied to the further stake to drown first; Margaret Wilson was tied to the nearer stake so that the sight of the older woman's death might break her. When the tide reached her chest she was lifted out and asked to take the oath. She answered that she was one of Christ's children, and let her go. She was forced under and drowned. Agnes, the younger sister, had been spared the night before on payment of a hundred pounds by her father.

Legacy

Margaret Wilson is the central figure of the Wigtown Martyrs — two women whose death stands as the most read episode of the Killing Time in subsequent Scottish memory. Robert Wodrow gathered the parish records and eyewitness depositions within a generation in his History of the Sufferings of the Church of Scotland (1721), and the Millais wood-engraving of 1862 fixed the image of a girl tied to a stake in the rising water as the visual memory of the persecution. Wigtown parish church preserves a memorial slab with her name and the words of the 25th Psalm she is said to have sung as the tide rose. The National Covenant she refused to renounce became one of the founding documents of Presbyterian church order in Scotland and, through emigration, in the formation of the American Presbyterian church. Her refusal at eighteen — "I am one of Christ's children, let me go" — is the most quoted single sentence in Scottish martyrology.