seeing
her husband, answered, 'As you please; but all I have confessed
was in agony of torture; and, before God, all I have spoken is
false and untrue.' She was found guilty; sentenced to be
strangled at the stake; her body to be burned to ashes. Isabel
Crawford, after a short interval, was subjected to the same sort
of examination: a new commission having been granted for the
prosecution, and 'after the assistant-minister of Irvine, Mr.
David Dickson, had made earnest prayers to God for opening her
obdurate and closed heart, she was subjected to the torture of
iron bars laid upon her bare shins, her feet being in the stocks.
She endured this torture with incredible firmness, since she did
"admirably, without any kind of din or exclamation, suffer above
thirty stone of iron to be laid on her legs, never shrinking
thereat in any sort, but remaining, as it were, steady." But in
shifting the situation of the iron bars, and removing them to
another part of her shins, her constancy gave way; she broke out
into horrible cries of "Take off! take off!" On being relieved
from the torture she made the usual confession of all that she
was charged with, and of a connection with the devil which had
subsisted for several years. Sentence was given against her
accordingly. After this had been denounced she openly denied all
her former confessions, and died without any sign of repentance;
offering repeated interruptions to the minister in his prayers,
and absolutely refusing to pardon the executioner.'[133] It might
be possible to form an imperfect estimate of how many thousands
were sacrificed in the Jacobian persecution in Scotland alone
from existing historical records, which would express, however,
but a small proportion of the actual number: and parish registers
may still attest the quantity of fuel provided at a considerable
expense, and the number of the fires. By a moderate computation
an average number of two hundred annually, making a total of
eight thousand, are reckoned to have been burned in the last
forty years of the sixteenth century.[134]

[133] _Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft_, ix.

The Scotch trials and tortures, of which the above cases are
but one or two out of a hundred similar ones, are perhaps the
more extraordinary as being the result of _mere_
superstition: religious or political heresy being seldom an
excuse for the punishment and an aggravation of the offence.

[134] A larger propor