L UCKENBOOTHS AND PARLIAMENT CLOSE. I93
from prison; but the detection of its forgery involved her more deeply in crime. She
was found guilty, and executed on the 8th of March following. If Mrs Macleod had shown
art in contriving and executing this fraud, she displayed no less fortitude in meeting her
fate. She went to the place of execution dressed in a black robe and petticoat with 8
large hoop, a white fan in her hand, and a white sarsenet hood on her head, according to
the fashion of the times. When she came upon the scaffold, she put off the ornamental
parts of her attire, pinned a handkerchief over her breast, and put the fatal cord about her
neck with ber own hands. She maintained the same courageous deportment to the last,
and died denying her guilt.’
No prisoner incarcerated within the Old Tolbooth ever excited a greater degree of
interest in the minds of contemporaries than the one whom we present in contrast to
the last,-Katharine Nairn, the daughter of Sir Robert Nairn, Bart., of Dunsinnane, who
was brought to trial on the 5th of August 1765. She was accused and convicted of
poisoning her husband, with the aid of his own brother, her associate in other crimes.
The marriage appears to have been one of those unequal matches by which the happiness
of woman is so often sacrificed to schemes of worldly policy. The victim, to whom she
had been married in her nineteenth year, was a man of property, and advanced in life.
Popular indignation was so strongly excited at the report of the deeds she had perpetrated,
that she was with difficulty rescued from the mob on being fist brought to
Edinburgh ; yet her presence so wrought on the fickle populace, that her guilt was soon
forgot in the sympathy excited by her youthful appearance. Both she and her paramour,
who was an oscer in the army, were condemned; and the latter was executed in the
Grassmarket, in accordance with his sentence, after he had been three times respited
through the interest of his friends. Neanwhile the fair partner of his guilt obtained a
reprieve in consequence of her pregnancy ; and only two days after her accouchement, she
composedly walked out of the Tolbooth, disguised in the garments of Mrs Shields, the
well-known midwife who had attended on her during her confinement, and added to her
other favours this extra-professional delivery. In her confusion she knocked at Lord Alva’s
door in James’s Court, mistaking it for that of her father’s agent; but the footboy, who
opened the door with a candle in his hand, had been present at the trial, and immediately
raised the hue and cry, while she took to her heels down a neighbouring close. She was
concealed for some time in the immediate neighbourhood of the prison, in a cellar about halfway
down the old back stairs of the Parliament Close, attached to the house of her uncle,
who was afterwards promoted to the Bench under the title of Lord Dunsinnane. Our
informant, an elderly gentleman, added, when relating it, that he was himself indebted
to Mrs Shields for his first entrance on “ the stage of life; ” and the old lady
when narrating her successful jail delivery, used to hint, with a very knowing look, “that
there were other folk besides her could tell the same tale,” meaning, as was surmised, that
neither the turnkey nor the Lord Advocate were quite ignorant of the exchange of midwives
at the time. Katharine Nairn at length effected a safe &ght to the Continent,
dispised in an oEcer’s unifarm ; a from thence she escaped to America, where she is said
Amot’s Criminal Trials, 8v0, p. 317.
* She waa conduded to Dover in a post-chaise, under care of one of her uncle’s clerks. This person wam kept in
2 B
conatant dread of discovery during the journey from the extreme frivolity of her conduct.
