On Sunday, March 31, 1689, Sir George Lockhart came forth from church in Edinburgh. John Chislie dogged his steps into the close where the Lord President of the Court of Session had his lodging. There, he shot him in the back. The ball passed clean through his body, coming out beneath his right breast. Lockhart reeled and fell. A physician, who had come thither to attend upon his lady, perceived blood issuing from the President's mouth. They bore him into the house and laid him upon two chairs; there he expired almost instantly. Chislie made no attempt at flight: to those who laid hands upon him, he declared that he had done the deed to teach the President how to do justice.
On the morrow, the city sat in judgment upon the presumed assassin. Chislie acknowledged having fired the shot, but refused before the court to expound upon the decree which had kindled his fury. The cause intertwined a domestic grievance, threats repeated in London, an extraordinary warrant for torture, and a verdict to which the jury annexed the finding of premeditation. The issue was not confined to a mere confession: all were bent upon discovering whether Chislie had acted alone.
Sir George Lockhart was no ordinary magistrate; he presided over the Court of Session and sat upon the King’s Privy Council. His violent end befell at the very moment when the Estates of the realm were assembled in Edinburgh. On April 1, Lockhart’s brother and nephew appeared on behalf of the kin, including the dead man’s fatherless children. They presented a supplication praying that the magistrates might put Chislie and another man, one William Calderwood suspected of complicity, to the question by torture. The Estates granted the warrant, yet expressly stipulated that this extraordinary case should not be drawn into precedent.
This very dispensation provoked another contention before the trial could even open. The Lord Provost protested that it must work no prejudice against the ancient privileges of the good town of Edinburgh. The depute of the High Constable refused to sit unless the Earl of Errol or his deputies were sole judges of the crime. Matters of judicial jurisdiction thus clashed with the inquest: Lockhart’s murder demanded a swift reckoning, yet the magistrates could not agree into whose hands that reckoning fell.
Chislie was put to the torture. He declared that no man living had advised him to the slaughter. He admitted that while in London, he had told Mr. James Stewart, an advocate, that if the President gave him not justice, he would kill him. He had spoken in like terms to a man named Callender and to his own uncle, William. The threat had been no single, fleeting outburst of passion. Chislie further confessed that he had lain in wait for Lockhart in London with a pistol concealed beneath his coat, pacing up and down Pall Mall.
On the morning of the murder, he primed his pistol, repaired to the New Kirk, and watched Lockhart set out for home. He tracked him into the close of his lodging, came upon him from behind, and discharged the piece. When the President lay dead, Chislie avowed that he was satisfied, adding that he was not wont to do things by halves. The proceedings brought to light no instigator whatever. Chislie denied having been counseled by any soul, though the warrant for torture had been granted to the express end of seeking out his accomplices.
Before the jury, he judicially confessed the slaughter and set forth the ground of his resentment: he held that Lockhart had pronounced an unjust sentence against him. The witnesses laid bare the true nature of this grievance. Some months prior, a decreet-arbitral pronounced by Lockhart and Lord Kemney had appointed an alimentary pension to Chislie’s wife and ten children. The annual sum amounted to 1,700 merks. Chislie had told Stewart that he would go to Scotland before Candlemas on purpose to shoot the President. The lawyer had replied that such an imagination came from the devil; Chislie had retorted that he would one day settle accounts with God as he would with the judge.
William Chislie, a Writer to the Signet and the prisoner’s uncle, deposed to a similar threat uttered the preceding spring. He had warned Lockhart, who made light of the danger. Thus the motive showed two irreconcilable faces: Chislie pleaded an alleged wrong done to his person, whereas the President's decree had merely secured sustenance for his abandoned household. Interrogated directly upon this paradox, the prisoner remained mute. Borrow’s record gives no particulars of the dispute that had preceded the arbitration; it suffices to measure the gulf between the assassin’s grudge and the actual consequence of the decree.
Two witnesses, David Lockhart and Alexander Walker, had seen the shot fired. They seized Chislie upon the spot; Walker helped convey him to the town guard-house. To their depositions was joined that of David Hay, the physician who had arrived to visit the President’s lady only to find the husband in the agonies of death. John Bailie, surgeon, viewed the wound: the bullet had entered at the back and passed out on the right side of the breast. Thus, regarding the fatal act, the prisoner’s words tallied exactly with the testimony of the eyewitnesses and the wound probed within the house. The court preserved these three distinct streams of proof, even though the man at the bar had already confessed the deed.
The jury was composed of ten landed gentlemen and five merchants of Edinburgh. With one voice, they found Chislie guilty of the murder, as well upon his own judicial confession as upon the proof adduced. They likewise affirmed the crime to have been committed with premeditation. The sentence was fashioned as a solemn public spectacle: on April 3, Chislie was to be drawn upon a hurdle from the tolbooth to the Cross. There, his right hand was to be struck off while he yet lived; then he was to be hanged until dead, with the fatal pistol hung about his neck. His body was thereafter to be hung in chains between Leith and Edinburgh, his severed hand affixed to the West Port, and his lands and goods forfeit to the Crown.
The slain President left behind children, in whose name his brother and nephew had come forward to crave justice. The condemned man had ten, the provision for whose bread had provoked his deadly rancor. The record names the men who pled, testified, or sat in judgment; it gives no voice to Lockhart’s widow, nor to Chislie’s wife. Yet they stand at the two opposing thresholds of this tragedy: the one was receiving her physician when her husband was struck down; the other was the recipient of that arbitration which the assassin deemed an outrage.
The pistol Chislie had carried beneath his cloak in London was now to hang from his neck at the gibbet. The sentence required that his very flesh bear witness to the instrument of his crime. And in both houses—that of the judge and that of the condemned—remained the children in whose name men had demanded justice.