ich lately took place for the
purpose of improving the Castlehill of Edinburgh displayed the ashes of
the numbers who had perished in this manner, of whom a large proportion
must have been executed between 1590, when the great discovery was made
concerning Euphane MacCalzean and the Wise Wife of Keith and their
accomplices, and the union of the crowns.

Nor did King James's removal to England soften this horrible
persecution. In Sir Thomas Hamilton's Minutes of Proceedings in the
Privy Council, there occurs a singular entry, evincing plainly that the
Earl of Mar, and others of James's Council, were becoming fully sensible
of the desperate iniquity and inhumanity of these proceedings. I have
modernized the spelling that this appalling record may be legible to all
my readers.

"1608, December 1. The Earl of Mar declared to the Council that some
women were taken in Broughton as witches, and being put to an assize and
convicted, albeit they persevered constant in their denial to the end,
yet they were burned quick [_alive_] after such a cruel manner that some
of them died in despair, renouncing and blaspheming [God]; and others,
half burned, brak out of the fire,[78] and were cast quick in it again,
till they were burned to the death."

[Footnote 78: I am obliged to the kindness of Mr. Pitcairn for this
singular extract. The southern reader must be informed that the
jurisdiction or regality of Broughton embraced Holyrood, Canongate,
Leith, and other suburban parts of Edinburgh, and bore the same relation
to that city as the borough of Southwark to London.]

This singular document shows that even in the reign of James, so soon as
his own august person was removed from Edinburgh, his dutiful Privy
Council began to think that they had supt full with horrors, and were
satiated with the excess of cruelty which dashed half-consumed wretches
back into the flames from which they were striving to escape.

But the picture, however much it may have been disgusting and terrifying
to the Council at the time, and though the intention of the entry upon
the records was obviously for the purpose of preventing such horrid
cruelties in future, had no lasting effect on the course of justice, as
the severities against witches were most unhappily still considered
necessary. Through the whole of the sixteenth, and the greater part of
the seventeenth century, little abatement in the persecution of this
metaphysical crime of witchcraft can be