Page:A biographical dictionary of eminent Scotsmen, vol 4.djvu/219

Rh second examination by the council, he was handed over to the court of justiciary, with instructions from the former to the latter, to proceed against him with the utmost severity. On the 29th of July he was brought to trial as an accessory to the murder of the primate, for publishing two seditious papers, and for having carried arms against his sovereign. Rathillet declined the jurisdiction of the court, and refused to plead. This, however, of course, availed him nothing. On the day following he was again brought to the bar, and in obedience to the injunctions of the council, sentenced to suffer a death unsurpassed in cruelty by any upon record, and which had been dictated by the council previous to his trial by the justiciary court, in the certain anticipation of his condemnation. After receiving sentence, the unfortunate man was carried directly from the bar and placed upon a hurdle, on which he was drawn to the place of execution at the cross of Edinburgh. On his ascending the scaffold, where none were permitted to be with him but two magistrates and the executioner, and his attendants, the cruelties to which he had been condemned were begun. His right hand was struck off; but the hangman performing the operation in a tardy and bungling manner, Rathillet, when he came to take off the left hand also, desired him to strike on the joint. This done, he was drawn up to the top of the gallows with a pulley, and allowed to fall again with a sudden and violent jerk. Having been three times subjected to this barbarous proceeding, he was hoisted again to the top of the gibbet, when the executioner with a large knife laid open his breast, before he Avas yet dead, and pulled out his heart. This he now stuck on the point of a knife, and showed it on all sides to the spectators, crying, " Here is the heart of a traitor." It was then thrown into a fire prepared for the purpose. His body was afterwards quartered. One quarter, together with his hands, were sent to St Andrews, another to Glasgow, a third to Leith, and a fourth to Burntisland ; his head being fixed upon the Netherbow. Thus perished Hackston of Rathillet, a man in whose life, and in the manner of whose death, we find at once a remarkable but faithful specimen of the courage and fortitude of the persecuted of the seventeenth century, and of the inhuman and relentless spirit of their persecutors.

HALKET, (, whose extensive learning and voluminous theological writings, place her in the first rank of female authors, was the daughter of Mr Robert Murray, of the family of Tullibardine, and was born at London, January 4th, 1622. She may be said to have been trained up in habits of scholastic study from her very infancy, her father being preceptor to Charles I., (and afterwards provost of Eton college,) and her mother, who was allied to the noble family of Perth, acting as sub-governess to the duke of Gloucester and the princess Elizabeth. Lady Anne was instructed by her parents in every polite and liberal science; but theology and physic were her favourite subjects; and she became so proficient in the latter, and in the more unfeminine science of surgery, that the most eminent professional men, as well as invalids of the first rank, both in Britain and on the continent, sought her advice. Being, as might have been expected, a staunch royalist, her family and herself suffered with the misfortunes of Charles. She was married on March 2d, 1656, to Sir James Halket, to whom she bore four children, all of whom died young, with the exception of her eldest son Robert. During her pregnancy with the latter, she wrote an admirable tract, " The Mother's Will to the Unborn Child," under the impression of her not surviving her delivery. Her husband died in the year 1670; but she survived till April 22d, 1699, and left no less than twenty-one volumes behind her, chiefly on religious subjects, one of which, her "Meditations," was printed at Edinburgh in 1701. She is said to have been a woman of singular but unaffected piety, and of the sweetest simplicity of manners; and these quali-