page_title: Margaret Wilson (Scottish martyr)
section_title: Witness statements
hierarchical_section_title: Margaret Wilson (Scottish martyr) / Witness statements
caption_attribution_description: English: Page of the Kirk Session records of Kirkinner, Wigton (1711), giving on Account of the Martyrdom of Margaret Lauchlison — one of the Wigtown Martyrs
context_page_description: Margaret Wilson was a young Scottish Covenanter, from Wigtown in Scotland executed by drowning for refusing to swear an oath declaring James VII as head of the church. She died along with Margaret McLachlan. The two Margarets were known as the Wigtown Martyrs. Wilson became the more famous of the two because of her youth. As a teenager, her faith unto death became celebrated as part of the martyrology of Presbyterian churches.
context_section_description: Twenty years after the date of the execution, Kirkinner and Penninghame Kirk Session prepared two accounts that drew on stories collected from individuals who claimed to have witnessed the events: McLachlan's daughter's own account about the drowning of her mother was employed, and the records of the Penninghame Kirk Session included a statement referring to Wilson's brother Thomas, that he "lives to certifie the truth of these things, with many others who knew them too weel."
  The story of the Wigtown Martyrs was among those collected by Robert Wodrow and published in his History of the Sufferings of the Church of Scotland from the Restoration to the Revolution. The Church of Scotland synod had decided in the year of the attempted Jacobite invasion, 1708, to collect accounts of persecution under the Stuart monarchs, and commissioned Wodrow to take on the research. He wrote that Thomas Wilson "lives now in his father's room, and is ready to attest all I am writing."   The account was published in 1721, and had a considerable effect on public perception despite being attacked by royalists and supporters of the Scottish Episcopal Church.
  Scottish lawyer and historian Mark Napier in his three-volume Memorials of Graham of Claverhouse, Viscount Dundee, 1859–62, included letters of Claverhouse and other documents not previously in print. Its publication led to a small storm of controversy about the supposed drowning of the "Wigtown Martyrs". Napier raised doubts as to whether the executions as depicted ever took place, and critiqued the writings of Robert Wodrow and his defenders. Napier replied in detail to his objectors in the Case for the Crown in re the Wigtown Martyrs proved to be Myths versus Wodrow and Lord Macaulay, Patrick the Pedlar and Principal Tulloch, 1863; and once more in History Rescued, in Reply to History Vindicated (by the Rev. Archibald Stewart), 1870.
caption: Kirkinner Kirk Session record
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