第13章 A FAIR NECK FOR THE MAIDEN(5)
It is from internal evidences such as this that one may conclude the repentance of Jean Livingstone, as shown in her confession, to have been sincere.There was, we are informed by the memorialist, nothing maudlin in her conduct after condemnation.Once she got over her first obduracy, induced, one would imagine, by the shock of seeing the realization of what she had planned but never pictured, the murder itself, and probably by the desertion of her by her father and kindred, her repentance was cheerful'' and unfeigned.'' They were tough-minded men, those Scots divines who ministered to her at the last, too stern in their theology to be misled by any pretence at finding grace.And no pretty ways of Jean's would have deceived them.The constancy of behaviour which is vouched for, not only by the memorialist but by other writers, stayed with her until the axe fell.
She was but a woman and a bairn, being the age of twenty-oneyears,'' says the Memorial.But, in the whole way, as she went to the place of execution, she behaved herself so cheerfully as if she had been going to her wedding, and not to her death.When she came to the scaffold, and was carried up upon it, she looked up to the Maiden'' with two longsome looks, for she had never seen it before.''
The minister-memorialist, who attended her on the scaffold, says that all who saw Jean would bear record with himself that her countenance alone would have aroused emotion, even if she had never spoken a word.
For there appeared such majesty in her countenance and visage, and such a heavenly courage in her gesture, that many said, `That woman is ravished by a higher spirit than a man or woman's!' ''
As for the Declaration and Confession which, according to custom, Jean made from the four corners of the scaffold, the memorialist does not pretend to give it verbatim.It was, he says, almost in a form of words, and he gives the sum of it thus:
The occasion of my coming here is to show that I am, and have been, a great sinner, and hath offended the Lord's Majesty; especially, of the cruel murdering of mine own husband, which, albeit I did not with mine own hands, for I never laid mine hands upon him all the time that he was murdering, yet I was the deviser of it, and so the committer.But my God hath been always merciful to me, and hath given me repentance for my sins; and I hope for mercy and grace at his Majesty's hands, for his dear son Jesus Christ's sake.And the Lord hath brought me hither to be an example to you, that you may not fall into the like sin as I have done.And I pray God, for his mercy, to keep all his faithful people from falling into the like inconvenient as I have done! And therefore I desire you all to pray to God for me, that he would be merciful to me!
One wonders just how much of Jean's own words the minister- memorialist got into this, his sum of her confession.Her speech would be coloured inevitably by the phrasing she had caught from her spiritual advisers, and the sum of it would almost unavoidably have something of the memorialist's own fashion of thought.I would give a good deal to know if Jean did actually refer to the Almighty as the Lord's Majesty,'' and hope for grace at his Majesty's hands.'' I do not think I am beingoversubtle when I fancy that, if Jean did use those words, I see an element of confusion in her scaffold confession--the trembling confusion remaining from a lost hope.As a Scot, I have no recollection of ever hearing the Almighty referred to as the Lord's Majesty'' or as his Majesty.'' It does not ring naturally to my ear.Nor, at the long distance from which I recollect reading works of early Scottish divines, can I think of these forms being used in such a context.I may be--I very probably am--all wrong, but I have a feeling that up to the last Jean Livingstone believed royal clemency would be shown to her, and that this belief appears in the use of these unwonted phrases.