Margaret Wilson (Scottish martyr)

Margaret Wilson (c. 1667 – 11 May 1685) was a young Scottish Covenanter from Wigtown in Scotland who was executed by drowning for refusing to abandon her support for the National Covenant.

There were still small gatherings held indoors, but now failure to take a test of allegiance to the king, which required renouncing the Covenant, met with the death penalty, as did even attending a conventicle or harbouring Covenanters.

The young sisters Margaret and Agnes were taken prisoner, possibly after declining to drink the King's health, and put into the "thieves' hole".

[4] The three main protagonists were found guilty on all charges, and sentenced to be "tied to palisades fixed in the sand, within the floodmark of the sea, and there to stand till the flood o'erflowed them".

The father of the girls, Gilbert Wilson, went to Edinburgh and made a plea to the Privy Council of Scotland for clemency for all three, presenting a petition which claimed that Margaret McLachlan had recanted.

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,[9] and the records of the Penninghame Kirk Session included a statement referring to[10] Wilson's brother Thomas, that he "lives to certifie the truth of these things, with many others who knew them too weel.

"[3][11] 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.

[11] 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.

The story of Wilson's death is discussed in Josephine Tey's 1951 novel The Daughter of Time, in which a modern detective criticises versions of historical events created to serve political agendas.

Following Mark Napier, Tey portrays the death of Wilson as a myth, referring to the existence of the reprieve, held by the Scottish Privy Council "to this day".

She claims that "the original collector of the material, canvassing the Wigtown district only forty years after the supposed martyrdom and at the height of the Presbyterian triumph, complains that 'many deny that this happened'; and couldn't find any eyewitnesses at all".