On January 8th 1697 Thomas Aikenhead was executed in Edinburgh.
So who was oor Thomas, a villain?, a murderer?, a smuggler?, or some enemy of the state? No Thomas's crime was blasphemy who took the lord's name in vain.......this would be comic if it wasn't for the tragic fact that he was executed, unlike the man in Life of Brian, who uttered the words Jehova, Thomas complained that he wished he was warming himself in hell rather than that chilly night walking past the recently built Tron Kirk on Edinburgh's Royal Mile. Well that's the simple story that the tour guides that take you round the Old Town will tell you, there is a bit more to it so I will bore you with a bit more of the detail.
Thomas Aikenhead came from a well-to-do family in Edinburgh, his father being listed as a surgeon but more probably an apothecary, a dispenser of herbs and potions. Both his parents were dead by the time he became a student at Edinburgh University at the age of 16 or 17.
His mother had been a daughter of the manse, and you would think that would have made Aikenhead wary of challenging the established religion of the time, namely the all-powerful Church of Scotland, especially while still a student and under the constant gaze of professors, lecturers and, as it turned out, his fellow students.
These were the dying days of a curious period in Scottish history. Aikenhead would have been four when the ‘Wizard of the West Bow’ Major Thomas Weir was executed in 1670. Weir was by day an extreme Calvinist but by night an incestuous Satanist and it takes no great leap of reason to see that an impressionable young boy might well have been affected by the trial and execution of a local celebrity that lived not far from him.
The 1680s was also the ‘killing time’ for the Covenanters when many died because of they worshipped their same god in differing ways!
Thomas was a keen student and an avid reader, he may or may not have known and Edinburgh bookseller, John Frazer, who had been prosecuted after admitting either reading, or being in possession of Charles Blount’s Oracles of Reason a book I know nothing about but gather it relates to Deism, which questioned the existence or more importanyly, non-existence of God or Satan, Frazer had repented ad as it was a first offence was sackclothed and jailed in the old Tolbooth for a number of months.
Anyway, Thomas had a friend, well he thought he had a friend, Murdo Craig, but Murdo, on the sly had been keeping notes on Aitkenhead, and his dalliances with blasphemous ideals, we know that because they formed a large part of the indictment against Aikenhead.
“Nevertheless it is of verity, that you Thomas Aikenhead, shakeing off all fear of God and regaird to his majesties lawes, have now for more than a twelvemoneth by past, and upon severall of the dayes within the said space, and ane or other of the same, made it as it were your endeavour and work in severall compainies to vent your wicked blasphemies against God and our Saviour Jesus Christ, and against the holy Scriptures, and all revealled religione, in soe far as upon ane or other of the dayes forsaid, you said and affirmed, that divinity or the doctrine of theologie was a rapsidie of faigned and ill-invented nonsense, patched up partly of the morall doctrine of philosophers, and pairtly of poeticall fictions and extravagant chimeras, or words to this effect or purpose, with severall other such reproachfull expressions.”
That was just for starters. Sir James Stewart of Goodtrees, the Lord Advocate of the day, had taken a personal interest in the case and he decided to throw the whole lot of Craig’s testimony at Aikenhead who was arrested in November, 1696, and charged under the Blasphemy Act of 1661 which carried the death penalty. He also charged Aikenhead under a more recent act, which made it a criminal offence to ‘deny, impugn or quarrel’ about the existence of God.
The prosecution papers go on to record “You have lykwayes in discourse preferred Mahomet to the blessed Jesus, and you have said that you hoped to see Christianity greatly weakened, and that you are confident that in a short tyme it will be utterly extirpate.” For Mahomet, read Muhammad, could young Thomas be an Islam convert in 17th century Edinburgh, I very much doubt it, they just needed to make an example of the young student, and he knew by now knew that he was in very great trouble and protested in effect that he was guilty only of the sin of being youthful and had been led astray by the books he had read. He claimed to have repented of his anti-Christian beliefs and was once again a good Presbyterian.
In this way he seems to have thrown himself upon the mercy of the court. There was none. On Christmas Eve, 1696, a jury found him guilty. Sir James Stewart asked for the death penalty and it was granted and “pronounced for doom,” as Scottish judges were still saying well into the 20th century in capital punishment cases.
Aikenhead pleaded for his life to the Privy Council emphasising his youth, his dire circumstances, and the fact that he was reconciled to the Protestant religion. There was some support for the death sentence to be commuted from at least two councillors and two Church of Scotland ministers, but the General Assembly of the Kirk intervened, demanding that Aikenhead suffer “vigorous execution to curb the abounding of impiety and profanity in this land”.
In his last letter to friends, written in the Tolbooth prison in Edinburgh as he awaited execution, Aikenhead at last gave a plausible explanation for his conduct – that he had been a disappointed seeker after truth.
He wrote: “It is a principle innate and co-natural to every man to have an insatiable inclination to the truth and to seek for it as for hid treasure. So I proceeded until the more I thought thereon, the further I was from finding the verity I desired.”
In truth, in a repressed society the student had just gone too far in rejecting the doctrines of Christianity calling it “feigned and ill-invented nonsense”
Aikenhead went to his death on January 8, 1697, hanged on the scaffold at Shrubhill between Edinburgh and Leith. It is said that before he died he proclaimed that moral laws were the work of governments and men.
In his hand as the noose was placed around his neck was the Holy Bible.
The execution angered many people for many years afterwards. The great English historian Thomas Babington Macaulay wrote an account of the hanging and called the execution “a crime such has never since polluted the island.”
He continued: “The preachers who were the boy’s murderers crowded round him at the gallows, and, while he was struggling in the last agony, insulted Heaven with prayers more blasphemous than any thing that he had ever uttered.”
There was other evidence of church authorities being present as Aikenhead died. He was the last man in Britain to be hanged for blasphemy.
According to Arthur Herman in his book How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe’s Poorest Nation Created Our World and Everything in It the execution of Aikenhead was “the last hurrah of Scotland’s Calvinist ayatollahs” before the dawning of the age of reason in the Enlightenment.
Now we can all rejoice in The Enlightenment but a full 30 years later in the small town of Dornoch in Sutherland, Janet Horne was put on trial for the “crime” of having a daughter whose feet and hands were misshapen and who had herself given birth to a son with disabilities. She was the last woman in Britain to be burned at the stake for being a witch, her death bringing to an end the “burning time” when perhaps 4000 Scottish women were executed for the crime of witchcraft.
