[Footnote 77:  The music of this witch tune is unhappily lost.  But that of another, believed to have been popular on such occasions, is preserved.

“The silly bit chicken, gar cast her a pickle,
 And she will grow mickle,
         And she will do good.”]

Almost all these poor wretches were executed, nor did Euphane MacCalzean’s station in life save her from the common doom, which was strangling to death, and burning to ashes thereafter.  The majority of the jury which tried Barbara Napier having acquitted her of attendance at the North Berwick meeting, were themselves threatened with a trial for wilful error upon an assize, and could only escape from severe censure and punishment by pleading guilty, and submitting themselves to the king’s pleasure.  This rigorous and iniquitous conduct shows a sufficient reason why there should be so few acquittals from a charge of witchcraft where the juries were so much at the mercy of the crown.

It would be disgusting to follow the numerous cases in which the same uniform credulity, the same extorted confessions, the same prejudiced and exaggerated evidence, concluded in the same tragedy at the stake and the pile.  The alterations and trenching which 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.