Return of the Maiden brings back visions of the gory years

I was horrified to read some rascal entrepreneurs were going to create a replica of the Edinburgh City guillotine, the so-called "Maiden" and use it as a visitor attraction. Horrified at the realisation we are all drawn to the macabre. It will work even better with tomato ketchup blood stains and the odd wax head laying around.

Proof we all enjoy the grim is the decision of The London Dungeon to open a branch in Edinburgh. It is to be called "The Gore Fest" and placed right next to Waverley Station so it is the first or last glimpse visitors may have of Scotland. The London Dungeon team say they are merely extending the range of Cockney horrors to us. They seem barely aware Scotland had its own separate history of torture, degradation and dismemberment.

A little pang of civic pride flashed across my mind. If Edinburgh had its burgh guillotine does that not mean Monsieur Guillotine nicked our invention for the French? It seems that his enhancement to the beheading machine was the notion of a sloping blade, making for a keener cut. Being run by Edinburgh town council meant, of course, it was run ineptly. The blade was often so blunt they had to have several goes. The Earl of Morton was the last client of the Maiden, according to the Royal Museum of Scotland. His head was lopped off in 1581 for his alleged part in the murder of Lord Darnley. The Museum admits, reluctantly, the guillotine always draws a crowd and parties of schol children linger at it and shiver in horror at what we Scots used to do to each other.

It is difficult to imagine we are the same people who used to flock to see the guilty or the innocent burned alive, hanged, drawn and quartered, drowned or garroted. Killing anyone for anything seems grotesque to modern sensibilities but making a public circus of someone's death seems to add to the horror.

Religion is a recurring presence. From the bog bodies first strangled and then offered to the gods to propitiate them up until ministers jostled to be the last to attend the final hanging. Priests have been the leading exponents of killing their rivals either in ecclesiastical matters or in matters of politics. From Joy Cameron's harrowing book on Scotland's ignominious history of cruelty, Prisons and Punishment, it seems to me the divines took a special presence in maiming their victims. Gruesome treatment before execution was part of the fun of being on God's side.

Can it really be only a few generations since we disembowelled criminals and dissidents alive, wrenching off their limbs and then distributing them around the country as tokens of the King's justice? At the heart of this terrible inventory is the specious argument - deterrance. If the punishment was beyond measure in its cruelty, everyone will desist from transgression. Much of the Islamic world still seems smitten with this illusion.

IT does seem a large proportion of those executed were innocent. Allegations of witchcraft were always fantasies but clerics loved quoting Exodus 22.v18 "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live".

The kirk enjoyed the ritual humiliations of those named as witches. They were hung up by their thumbs, lighted candles were set to the soles of their feet, hair shirts dipped in vinegar were wrapped around them to peel the skin off and needles were thrust up their fingers. No wonder they always got their confession.

The church, Roman and Reformed, seems to have cherished its role as goaler and torturer. St Giles Cathedral was, incredibly, a prison and civic torture instruments were stored there. Church steeples in parish kirks were used as jails. The breaking of a human being, petty thief or not, was a jolly end to a market day. Roast chestnuts and ale to the screams of the condemned.

Shoplifters had their ears severed and cheeks branded with red hot irons, they were whipped until raw and then hanged. Shoplifting continued. Even the threat of being shipped to Australia seems to have served as no deterrent.

Those found guilty of killing James I suffered such appalling punishments that I recoil from describing them other than perhaps to describe it as a post-mortem without the post. The contrived rumpus over Section 28 is nothing. Gays, in the 16th Century were carried naked through the city and burned alive for their "offences most unnatural".

One odd feature of early Scottish justice was if you could pay the King, burgesses or your accuser enough you could get off for most offences save treason. Gaolers were amateurs and for a few bawbees you could escape. So torture and death was a speciality for the destitute or the aristocratic. When Pope Pious II visited Scotland in 1435, he was amazed there were so many beggars as the officials were so assiduous at burying them alive or burning them to death.

The entrepreneurs who are rebuilding the guillotine for the Grassmarket are no doubt right. They will draw the crowds. At Hogmanay we can ask focus groups who we would like to see beheaded and enact it on a melon rather than a felon. The Gore Fest will make a fortune but will they awaken our sensibilities to realise how recently we were committing cruelties that now seem outlandish? In the catalogue of deaths arranged by civic authority in Scotland, crucifixion seems to have been omitted. Can it really be their brutalised imaginations did have a threshold they could not cross?

Populists always focus on punishment as part of their claim to community propriety. Hang the populists, but make them endure torture by social workers first.

Copyright 2000
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