“The Lords of Justice by a trick

Have Lately hang’d the [most] blest prick was ever born

…

Now Pluto tye thy garters fast

Else thou must wear the horns at last if Daniel mingle

With Proserpine[1] [an]d let her know

But half the vigour he did show to Mistress Pringle” 

- ‘Ane Satyrick Epitaph [a satirical memorial] on Daniel Nicolson

who was hang’d for making use of a forged paper. And for adulterie

with Mistriss Pringle’ (c.1694), NLS, Adv. MSS. 23.3.24 f.95v. 

There were some ‘fun’ things I wanted to check out in the archives this past summer, and Daniel Nicolson and ‘Mistress Pringle’ were at the top of my list. They are absolutely not relevant to anything I’m currently writing about, but I have been desperate to find out more about them since I first discovered this intriguing rhyme last year in the National Library of Scotland.

Then, teasingly, I stumbled across an old medical history article that noted the archival records of Nicolson and Pringle’s trial: “beautifully legible, almost verbatim report of the trial from which was traced the path ‘of Poison, Pills and Apothecaries’ or otherwise ‘of Passion, Poison and Pills’ which led to the ultimate punishment”.[2]

Pringle, whose real name was Marion Maxwell, was executed on 2 February 1694 in Edinburgh’s Grassmarket by ‘the Maiden’, the Scottish version of the guillotine that you can see on display in the National Museum of Scotland. Her lover, lawyer Daniel Nicolson, was hanged the same day. R. A. Houston discusses the case in relation to the pair’s “notorious” adulterous affair, which had lasted since at least 1688.[3] But, beheading seems an extremely harsh punishment for adultery even by the moralistic standards of seventeenth-century Edinburgh, but that is precisely what Houston uses it as evidence for. Other writers, however, have written that they were tried for forgery and the attempted murder of Nicolson’s wife, Jean Sands. Then, in a complicated plot twist, when this scheme failed, the pair allegedly resolved instead to frame her and her sister, Margaret, for the attempted poison of Nicolson himself.[4] An Edinburgh doctor named John Elliot was also tried, convicted, and executed for his involvement with the scheme. In the hours before his death on 9 March, Elliot lamented how the duplicitous Pringle “Entertained me kindly”, but “designed another thing at that time; which I could not then fathom; the truth of this I find now to my own Ruine”.[5]

Frustratingly, because of the pandemic (anyone else fed up of hearing those words?), I can’t actually get to Nicolson and Pringle’s original trial records in the National Records of Scotland just now, but in many ways that doesn’t actually matter because what intrigues me most is their celebrity, folklore-like status. Forgery and murder - achieved or otherwise - are serious criminal matters, but contemporaries’ attention repeatedly falls on the pair’s perceived promiscuity, as illustrated by lines that open this post. There is something very ‘Bonnie and Clyde-esque’ about the way the pair’s “scandalous carriage” became immortalised in rhyme.

Popular interest in Nicolson and Pringle was crude and irreverent in what feels like a very uncomfortable but also familiar way. The poem above sits uneasily alongside the moralistic image most people have of 1690s Edinburgh and for which Houston and others have used their deaths to illustrate. Yet the satire also chimes with today’s continuing fascination with scandal and criminality. As ever with early modern executions, I am brought back to the paradoxical ways in which they seem simultaneously both so far more removed from life today and yet also so recognisable. As I miss my chance to chase up Nicolson and Pringle’s misdeeds and final moments (for now, at least) I can’t help but picture very relatable faces.

[1] Proserpine was the wife of Pluto, god of the Underworld. In early modern culture horns symbolised a ‘cuckold’, which was the term given to a man with an adulterous wife.

[2] Anon., ‘Administration’, Pharmaceutical Historian, vol. 3, no. 1 (1973), p.1.

[3] R. A. Houston, Social Change in the Age of Enlightenment: Edinburgh 1660-1760 (Oxford, 1994), pp.175-176. This claim also appears in many older works.

[4] Archibald Alison, Principles of the Criminal Law of Scotland (Edinburgh, 1832), pp.368-369.

[5] John Elliot, Mr John Eliot, Called, Doctor of Medicine, His last Speech and Advice to the World (Edinburgh, 1684), p.5.