When taken before the sheriff of Edinburgh, she confessed her crime, and, although she told the court in the most pathetic manner how basely she had been wronged by one who should have supported rather than ruined her, sentence of death was passed upon her.  She managed, writes Sir Bernard Burke,[56] to postpone the execution of her sentence by declaring that she was with child by her seducer, and during her imprisonment succeeded in escaping in the disguise of a young man.  But she was captured, and on the 12th November, 1679, paid the penalty of her rash act, appearing at her execution attired in deep mourning, covered with a large veil.

Radcliffe to this day possesses the tradition of a terrible tragedy of which there are several versions.  It appears that one Sir William de Radclyffe had a very beautiful daughter whose mother died in giving her birth.  After a time he married again, and the step-mother, actuated by feeling of jealousy, conceived a violent hatred to the girl, which ere long prompted her to be guilty of the most insane cruelty.  One day, runs the story, when Sir William was out hunting, she sent the unsuspecting girl into the kitchen with a message to the cook that he was to dress the white doe.  But the cook professing ignorance of the particular white doe he was to dress, asserted, to the young lady’s intense horror, that he had received orders to kill her, which there and then he did, afterwards making her into a pie.

On Sir William’s return from hunting, he made inquiries for his daughter, but his wife informed him that she had taken the opportunity in his absence of going into a nunnery.  Suspicious, however, of the truth of her story—­for her jealous hatred of his daughter had not escaped his notice—­he flew into a passion, and demanded in the most peremptory manner where his daughter was, whereupon the scullion boy denounced the step-mother, and warned Sir William against eating the pie.

The whole truth was soon revealed, and the diabolic wickedness of Lady William did not pass unpunished, for she was burnt, and the cook was condemned to stand in boiling lead.  A ballad in the Pepys’ collection, entitled, “The Lady Isabella’s Tragedy, or the Step-mother’s Cruelty,” records this horrible barbarity; and in a Lancashire ballad, called “Fair Ellen of Radcliffe”, it is thus graphically told:—­

    She straighte into the kitchen went,
      Her message for to tell;
    And then she spied the master cook,
      Who did with malice swell.

    “Nowe, master cooke, it must be soe,
      Do that which I thee tell;
    You needs must dress the milk-white doe,
      You which do knowe full well.”

    Then straight his cruel, bloody hands,
      He on the ladye laid,
    Who, quivering and ghastly, stands
      While thus to her he sayd: 

    “Thou art the doe that I must dress;
      See here! behold, my knife! 
    For it is pointed, presentli
      To rid thee of thy life.”