of the Earl of Argyll.
After several years had elapsed, this man sought to pass the limits
of friendship, and had the baseness to seek to draw her away from the
path of honor. Her contemptuous and indignant rebuff rankled in his
mind, and led him to lay a deep plot tending to bring Lady Glamis
under suspicion of attempting to poison the king. Her former
indictment as a poisoner was counted upon to give probability to the
charge. She, with all other persons under suspicion as parties to the
plot, was arrested and immured in Edinburgh Castle.

So much of political matter entered into the testimony, and so
skilfully was it wrought, that the jury found her guilty of the crimes
charged, namely, treasonable communication with her relatives, the
enemies of the king, and of conspiring to poison her monarch. The
sentence was that she should be burned at the stake, and the same
day of its delivery it was executed. "She seemed to be the only
unconcerned person there, and her beauty and charms never appeared
with greater advantage than when she was led to the flames; and her
soul being fortified with support from Heaven, and the sense of her
own innocence, she outbraved death, and her courage was equal in the
fire to what it was before her judges. She suffered those torments
without the least noise: only she prayed devoutly for Divine
assistance to support her under her sufferings." She died as a burnt
offering to the hate which was engendered against her line, but which
could be visited only upon her, as all others of her house were out of
reach of the royal anger.

Returning to Ireland and leaving behind the atmosphere of political
machinations and persecutions, it is pleasant to take up the
characters of some women of the fifteenth and the sixteenth centuries
who for different reasons have written their names lastingly in the
memories of their race. To be hailed as the best woman of her times
was the happy privilege of Margaret O'Carroll, who died in 1461.
McFirbis, the antiquary of Lecan, her contemporary, says of her: "She
was the one woman that made most of preparing highways, and erecting
bridges, churches and mass-books, and of all manner of things
profitable to serve God and her soul." Her life was most celebrated
for her pilgrimage to the shrine of Saint James of Compostella in
Spain, and her unbounded charity. The pilgrimage followed upon a great
revival of religion which seems to have swept over Ireland in 1445.
The