The Highwayman's Curse (22 page)

A
ll my historical novels are sparked by true events which grab me so strongly that they demand to be told. In
The Highwayman's Curse
, the real events are from one of Scotland's most brutal periods, the Killing Times, when men, women and children were killed for their religion. One of the final and most cruel episodes was the execution of the Wigtown Martyrs, in 1685. But
The Highwayman's Curse
is the sequel to
The Highwayman's Footsteps
, which was set in 1761, seventy-six years too late. How could the Killing Times be relevant?

The problem with hatred, especially religious hatred, is that it goes on and on. It passes through generations, fanned in the hearts of vengeful people. Look at the religious conflict in the Middle East, and other wars, both past and present, between Jews and Arabs, Christians and Muslims, Protestants and Catholics. Even, in the case of the Killing Times, between Protestants and Protestants.

This is the true story of the Wigtown Martyrs: on 11 May 1685, two women were executed by drowning in Wigtown Bay in Galloway, south-west Scotland. Margaret McLaughlan was sixty-three; Margaret Wilson was eighteen. Their crime? They worshipped the “right” God in the “wrong” way. In Scotland, the Protestant church was divided mainly into two groups: Presbyterians believed that ordinary people should choose their ministers, who would help them understand the word of God; there were no bishops. Episcopalians believed that God chose the king and the bishops, who in turn chose the clergy, and that these powerful people interpreted God's word to the worshippers. There were other differences too, but this was the main disagreement that sparked the Killing Times.

Although
The Highwayman's Curse
is partly about smuggling, it's about much more: it's about hatred carried through generations, especially by an old woman, Old Maggie, a woman teetering between dementia and obsession, traumatized by having seen her mother drowned in the rising tide by soldiers. (Old Maggie's mother was not, by the way, one of the real Wigtown Martyrs – neither the eighteen-year-old nor the sixty-three-year-old would have had a seven-year-old child; Old Maggie's mother is a fictional character, from an imaginary identical execution.)

What exactly was the crime these women committed? They were Covenanters, Presbyterians who had signed the National Covenant of 1638, refusing to accept the king's authority above God's, or to use a prayer book forced on them by the Government.

The rise and fall of the Covenanters is a complicated and tragic story. It is tangled with the “English” Civil War between Oliver Cromwell and Charles I – a war which very much involved the Scots – but the Killing Times took place under Charles II, after Cromwell's death. And nowhere did the Covenanters suffer more terrible punishment than in Galloway.

Covenanters could be executed for worshipping in their way – so they hid in the moors for open-air services called Conventicles. (Curlews are supposed to have betrayed their hiding places, and there are apparently still people in Galloway who would stamp on a curlew nest – though I never met one!) Torture, beatings and transportations were widespread. When hundreds of Covenanters were captured at the Battle of Bothwell Bridge, they were imprisoned in tiny pens in Greyfriars churchyard in Edinburgh – you can see their prison there today, a haunting reminder of the Killing Times.

By 1685, the Covenanters were nearly destroyed. Margaret Wilson, Margaret McLaughlan and three men who were hanged at the same time were almost the last to die.

Since then and before then, in various parts of Britain, Catholics, Protestants, Presbyterians and Episcopalians have brutalized and degraded each other for the way they choose to worship their God – the same God. No one side is blameless, and measuring who suffered more simply fuels the hatred.

In
The Highwayman's Curse
, as in many true stories of our own times, hatred and anger breed only hatred and anger. In the end someone has to break the circle. Someone has to find a way to forgive. When you see what religious hatred and anger do, how suffering spirals pointlessly through the generations, what solution is there other than forgiveness? Hatred between two countries is bad enough, but when the hatred is within our own boundaries, where people are despised only for how they live their lives or worship their God, as happens in our country – in Scotland and in other parts of Britain – that is an outrage.

In the parish churchyard in Wigtown, a short walk from the lonely, windswept martyrs' stake, the Wigtown Martyrs are buried. There, one suitably cold and miserable day, I read these words of hurt, hate and anger roughly carved into a gravestone:

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or, if real, used fictitiously.

First published 2007 by Walker Books Ltd
87 Vauxhall Walk, London SE11 5HJ

Text © 2007 Nicola Morgan
Cover illustration © 2007 Christian Birmingham

The right of Nicola Morgan to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, transmitted or stored in an information retrieval system in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, taping and recording, without prior written permission from the publisher.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data: a catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-4063-4245-1 (ePub)

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