Chapter 29

Strangled for Beating His Wife 1600

The annals of the British Isles in the sixteenth century are peppered with examples of strong, fearless women, but they also indicate a society in which domestic violence was commonplace and one where some men treated their wives as mere chattels, to be physically beaten without fearing redress. Most of these female victims suffered in silence, though there are occasional glimpses from the records of what some had to endure. In the 1530s, Elizabeth Howard, Duchess of Norfolk, wrote to Thomas Cromwell about the abuse that she had been forced to suffer at the hands of her own husband, Thomas Howard, 3rd Duke of Norfolk. An immensely powerful man in the court of Henry VIII, the Duke was also notoriously cruel. Elizabeth claimed that as she had been recovering from the birth of her daughter Mary, he had grabbed her while she was still in bed, pulled her on to the floor and proceeded to drag her through the house by her hair. He had also wounded her in the head with a dagger. The Duke denied everything. He maintained, somewhat unconvincingly, that Elizabeth had got the new scar on her head from a surgeon in London – while he had been taking out two of her teeth. Norfolk was never made to answer for the treatment of his wife.

Some sixty years later a Scottish woman called Jean Kincaid also alleged that she had been the victim of a violent husband. While Elizabeth Howard had eventually moved out of Norfolk’s home in order to escape his behaviour, Jean was driven to seek bloody revenge. Born Jean Livingston of Dunipace in 1579, she came from a prosperous family. Interestingly, her gentleman father, John Livingston, had got himself into plenty of trouble over the years and there is a suggestion that in 1595 he was implicated in the slaughter of a man called David Forrestier in a ‘deidlie feud.’ Despite his chequered past, by the turn of the century he was in such favour with the king, James VI, that he was attending on him at the royal palace of Holyrood.

Jean was just 15 or 16 years old in 1594, the year she was married to John Kincaid of Warriston. He was a considerably older man who may have been married before. Kincaid was also extremely wealthy, possessing a great deal of land around Edinburgh and was descended from the influential Kincaid clan originally from Stirlingshire. No doubt Kincaid’s moneyed background was an attraction for Jean’s family when they arranged her nuptials. Jean became known as Lady Warriston and took up residence at Kincaid’s home, that ‘gloomy house hanging over a deep black pool’ which was located about a mile from Edinburgh. Over the next few years, Jean blossomed into a great beauty, at least according to the balladeers who would later chart the story of her sad life in verse. Married life with the laird, however, was anything but pretty. According to one account Kincaid subjected Jean to vile attacks, biting her arm and striking her ‘divers times’. In one rage, at dinnertime, he threw a plate in Jean’s face, splitting her lip. Some insight into the extent of the abuse comes from her later claim that ‘Many dayes have I lived in this vail of misery.’ Unsurprisingly, thanks to his terrifying outbursts, Jean ‘conceived ane deadly rancour’ against her spouse.

In the year 1600, Jean would have been just twenty-one, but she was already a mother with a young baby. She despaired of spending more years with the sadistic Kincaid, confiding to her nurse, Janet Murdo, that she felt like killing him. The nurse took up the idea and they agreed to find a man prepared to carry out the deed on Jean’s behalf. Murdo said, ‘I shall go and seek him and, if I find him not, I shall seek another and, if I get none, I shall do it myself.’ The man they identified for the job was Robert Weir, a servant of Jean’s father, who worked as a groom. There’s little doubt that Jean already knew Weir. There may even have been some kind of romantic dalliance between them. Certainly she felt like she could count on him to save her from the monster she had married.

On 1 July, Murdo brought Weir to the house in secret to meet Jean and began feverishly plotting how to murder Kincaid. No time was then lost in executing their plan. Weir was hidden in a cellar until nightfall and, that evening, Jean made sure that her husband’s wine glass was always kept topped up at dinner. Jean and Kincaid did not share a room and once her husband was safely asleep Jean crept down to get Weir up from the cellar. She led him to Kincaid’s bedroom and they crept in. Kincaid began to stir but before he became fully conscious Weir ran over to the bed and began punching him, aiming for the jugular vein in his neck. He then continued to rain down more savage blows. Pulling his victim out of bed, Weir then began kicking Kincaid in the belly as he lay on the floor. Finally, to silence Kincaid’s screams, Weir took Kincaid by the neck and strangled him. It was the kind of frenzied attack that suggested the perpetrator had as much hatred for Kincaid as had his wife.

Meanwhile, Lady Warriston had retreated to the hall, listening with horror to the ‘pitifull and fearfull cryes’ coming from her husband’s room. Eventually they stopped and Weir emerged to inform her that Kincaid was dead. Jean pleaded with Weir to take her with him and flee from the city. He refused saying, ‘You shall tarry still and, if this matter not come to light, you shall say he dyed in the gallery, and I shall return to my master’s service … but if it be known I shall fly and take the crime on me; and none dare pursue you.’ With that Weir disappeared.

Were John Kincaid’s screams heard by others? Or did someone else discover his dead body before it could be disposed of? All we know is that officers of the law arrived on the scene shortly afterwards, finding the laird’s dead body. They caught Lady Warriston ‘red-handed’ along with Murdo – the ‘fause noursie’. At first, Jean attempted to play the grieving wife, but it seems her inability to pretend she was sorry for Kincaid’s death may, in part, have given her away. She would later admit that she ‘laboured to counterfeit weeping’ …‘but do what I would, I could not find a tear.’ Jean and the nurse were arrested and, along with two other servants, Barbara Barton and Agnes Johnston were placed in the city’s Tolbooth prison.

On Thursday 3 July both Jean and Janet were found guilty of murdering Kincaid and sentenced to be strangled, then burned at the stake. What evidence was brought to prove their guilt we do not know but an eye-witness at the court said of Anne, ‘it was a wonder to see how little she was moved in so far that when the sentence of death – that she should be hanged at a stock and afterwards burned to ashes – was pronounced against her, she never spoke one word, nor altered her countenance.’ Barton and Johnston were acquitted, with Jean claiming they knew nothing of the crime.

During Jean’s incarceration, a minister, the Reverend James Balfour, visited and asked her to repent for her crime. At first it had little effect. She raged at him saying: ‘Pray for yourselves, and let me be’. Undaunted Balfour spent the next thirty-seven hours trying to persuade Jean to seek God’s mercy. Eventually she did consent to pray with him and, according to him, made her peace with the Lord. She was also allowed to see her baby son one last time, kissing him on the head and asking God to bless him.

Balfour later wrote an account of his time spent with Jean Kincaid and in A memorial of the conversion of Jean Livingston we also learn that she was not told the hour at which she was to be executed, but while she waited she could hear the crowds baying for her blood from outside in the streets. Jean also confessed that although she had been afraid of facing trial for the murder, she indicated that she had hoped that her father’s position at court might have got her some kind of pardon.

In fact Jean’s father and relatives seemed to have simply wanted to save their own repuations, lobbying to get the embarrassing Jean out of the way as quietly and quickly as possible. None of them visited her while she was waiting to be executed and, if any plea for mercy was made, it fell on deaf ears, though her sentence was reduced from burning to beheading. Her death was scheduled for the early hours of the morning when most of Edinburgh’s inhabitants would still be in bed, presumably so as to limit the shame for John Livingston and his family.

At around 3am on Saturday 5 July, Jean was taken from her cell for execution at the Girth Cross of Holyrood in Canongate. The device to be used was the Maiden, a kind of gruesome guillotine which, while delivering a kinder death than being strangled and burnt, must have made a chilling sight, its blade glistening in the gloom as Jean stepped up to meet her fate. From the scaffold Jean delivered a repentant speech to the few who had managed to turn out to see the spectacle. She admitted ‘the cruell murdering of mine own husband; which, although I did not with mine own hands, for I never laid mine hands upon him all the time that he was in murdering, yet I was the deviser of it and so the commiter!’ Jean then lay her neck, ‘sweetly and graciously in the place appointed, moving to and fro until she got a rest for her neck to lie in.’ The executioner ‘came behind her, and pulled out her feet, that her neck might be stretched out longer and so made more meet’ for the stroke of the axe. At 4am her head was ‘struck fra her bodie’. Meanwhile Janet Murdo who had, herself, confessed to her part in the murder, was burnt at the same time on the city’s Castle Hill.

When news of the murder and arrests had first arrived in Edinburgh Robert Weir had fled just as he had promised to do, though his plan to deflect guilt from Jean backfired. He managed to stay at large for four years before eventually being apprehended and brought to trial on 26 June 1604. Jean’s testimony had presumably helped frame a case against him or at least helped elicit the confession on which his guilt was pronounced. Weir’s crime was considered so grave that a rare punishment was called for. He would be ‘broken on the wheel’ (see page 22). Weir was lashed to a wooden wheel and then his arms and legs smashed with the coulter of a plough until he was dead. After this hideous punishment was carried out, Weir’s body was left to hang on the wheel, which was placed between Warriston and the town of Leith, as a grim warning to others who might think of transgressing in a similar fashion.

Killer Robert Weir suffered a terrible form of punishment – being broken on the wheel. The practice is shown here from an illustration for the Terrific Register, 1825. (Copyright Look and Learn)