Seldom has Edinburgh’s Royal Mile witnessed such an open display of weeping by so many. Large crowds had gathered at Mercat Cross near St Giles and the window places along that section of the street were packed. A young man was being roughly dragged up to the scaffold to be hanged for high treason against King Charles II. Revd Hugh McKail, a 26-year-old minister of Christ, had angered the authorities, and now he must be punished as a rebel.
In September 1662, when McKail had only been a minister for less than a year, he had had the opportunity to preach in St Giles. Being a committed Covenanter, like his father, he had stood for the National Covenant. During his last recorded sermon, he made a veiled reference to Charles II, the Earl of Middleton, and Archbishop James Sharp, when he said that the Bible gave abundant ‘evidence that the people of God have been persecuted, sometimes by Pharaoh upon the throne, sometimes by a Haman in the state, and sometimes by a Judas in the church.’ The believers may have been edified, but the king’s spies reported him as a trouble-maker.
McKail was a respected, godly, and scholarly young man, whose work was partially to educate the children of the Lord Provost of Edinburgh, Sir James Stewart. Having been tipped off by friends that he would be arrested for high treason, McKail fled to Holland, just before the soldiers arrived. After lying low for some years, he made his way back to Scotland. Hearing about the injustice against the people by the government soldiers, he joined a protest march known as the Pentland Rising, which began in Ayr and continued towards Edinburgh, collecting supporters as it went. With the onset of a blasting November wind, the thousands-strong protest movement began to lose momentum. Hugh McKail was of a frail constitution, and although he was determined to walk the whole way to Edinburgh, he was forced to give up after nine miles. He never witnessed the ‘Battle’ of Rullion Green at Colinton, with its defeat at the hands of the soldiers, but he trudged on back home. When soldiers found a small sword on him, he was immediately arrested and sent to the Tolbooth prison in Edinburgh. Despite suffering the agonizing torture of the boot, which gradually crushed his knee, he refused to inform on his friends.
On 22 December 1666, he was taken to the scaffold, in great pain and with a high fever due to the maiming of his body. Despite the pain, McKail addressed the huge crowd, exhorting them to stand for Christ, the Reformation and the Covenants. ‘Now I leave off to speak any more with created beings and begin my communion with God, which shall never be broken off,’ he said. ‘Farewell, father and mother, friends and relations! Farewell, the world and all delights! Farewell meat and drink! Farewell, sun, moon and stars! Welcome, God and Father! Welcome, sweet Lord Jesus, the mediator of the New Covenant! Welcome, blessed Spirit of grace, God of all consolation! Welcome glory! Welcome eternal life! Welcome death!’ With that, the trapdoor was released, leaving his cousin Matthew to be allowed to cling to his body to speed up the death process on the hangman’s gibbet. The speech and life of McKail caused ‘such a lamentation as was never known in Scotland before, not one dry cheek upon all the street, or in all the numberless windows in the market-place.’ His body was prepared for burial in Magdalene Chapel in the Cowgate, and buried in the Covenanters’ grave at Greyfriars’ Kirk.
‘Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of His saints’ (Psalm 116:15, NKJV).
Image: The execution of Hugh McKail at the Mercat Cross, on the Royal Mile, near St Giles. Unknown author, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.