Hugh M’Kail’s faith carried him through his trial and subsequent hanging. Not only did he speak of the glory of seeing Christ face to face, but he willingly accepted the will of the Lord, saying: “’The Lord giveth life, and the Lord taketh, blessed be the name of the Lord.’” And, “Though men cut us off, God will receive us; trust in God; trust in God.” He would spend his remaining hours on earth in both prayer and conversation with other Christians. In fact, on the last evening of his life, it was reported that he spent his time preaching and comforting the saints by answering various questions. 

On December 22nd, 1666, the Market-Cross of Edinburgh was filled with a crowd of teary-eyed spectators. The cause of their lament was the young man of twenty-six-years-of-age who was being hung from the gallows before them. His name was Hugh M’Kail, a minister of the gospel, and Scottish Covenanter.

Hugh M’Kail bore all the markings of a promising ministry. In 1661, he was ordained at age twenty to gospel ministry, and licensed by the Presbytery of Edinburgh. He was, evidently, well-respected, well-learned, and well-loved by the people of Scotland. He was known to be a man of great prayer, who would spend one day each week fasting as he prayed for the Church at large, and God’s Kirk in Scotland especially.

As a Presbyterian and Covenanter, his public ministry coincided with a time of great persecution for those who practiced such things. With their adoption of Presbyterian church government, alongside a simplified worship holding to what is known as the Regulative Principle (the belief that we must worship God only as He has explicitly commanded within His Word), and their practice of extemporaneous prayers (a practice at odds with the Church of England’s own practice of having ministers pray from the Book of Common Prayer), men like M’Kail not only watched their own brothers in ministry persecuted and martyred for practicing their faith, but felt the very real cross-hairs of their enemies aimed at their heads.

M’Kail felt the very real burden of ministering faithfully in an age where faithfulness could get one quickly ejected from their pulpits, or worse. In fact, in 1640, Hugh’s father, Matthew, was forced out of his own pulpit in Bothwell. Persecution was not so much a matter of if, but when.

The Boldness of M’Kail

Despite the danger, M’Kail demonstrated that gospel boldness peculiar to genuine ministers of Christ during times of great persecution. On September 1st, 1662, he would preach his final public sermon in the High Kirk of Edinburgh on the text of Song of Songs 1:7: “Tell me, O thou whom my soul loveth, where thou feedest, where thou makest thy flock to rest at noon: for why should I be as one that turneth aside by the flocks of thy companions?”

Though the text may seem to have had little consequence to the governing authorities of M’Kail’s day, he made several comments in the sermon that would see him accused of rebellion. Concerning the severe persecution that the Covenanters and Scottish Kirk had been experiencing, M’Kail preached “that the Church and people of God had been persecuted, both by a Pharaoh upon the throne, a Haman in the state, and a Judas in the Church.”[1] Though M’Kail did not name any governing authority within this sermon as a Pharaoh, Haman, or Judas, this was nonetheless enough to earn a charge of treason and rebellion.

M’Kail managed to escape immediate arrest and would take shelter first at his father’s home, before eventually traveling away from his homeland to continue the work of his studies. But eventually, he would return home, and he would find his enemies awaiting him with chains.

The Trial of M’Kail

His trial began on December 4th, 1666. Though he had not actually committed any crime of treason or rebellion, the Council appeared to have determined to have him tortured and hung before he had ever had opportunity to stand before them. In fact, when M’Kail failed to produce any testimony against himself, swearing that he had confessed to the Council all he knew (which was not enough to bring about any sort of truly just conviction), the Council ordered the executioner to bring about a confession by way of “the boot,” which was a form of torture. Charles McCrie described the torture in this way:

the boot… being a cylinder of wood or iron into which the leg was forced, and wooden wedges then driven in with blows from a hammer or mallet. So excruciating were the agonies of the victims and so piercing their shrieks that even hardened officials hastened out of the room when these engines of torture were brought in, and it was found necessary to pass an order of Council that members keep their seats while “the question” was being thus “put.”[2]

Despite the agonizing torture put to M’Kail, his story did not change, and he continued to swear that he had nothing more to share and had hidden no details from the Council. Nonetheless, less than a week later, on December 10th, he and several others were indicted on charges of treason. He was to appear before the Council and the Justices on December 12th, but the brutal torture he had endured had thrown him into sickness and a fever, which made his appearance impossible. He requested, on December 11th, to be given more time, as the fever had incapacitated him—not to mention the fact that his leg had been crushed by the executioner as they attempted to extract a confession of treason that did not exist, and walking was not something that would come easy to him.

Not to be deterred, and despite several doctors attesting to the fact that M’Kail was now quite ill, the Council would delay no longer and ordered M’Kail to appear before them on December 18th. Perhaps it was to their astonishment that when the young minister did appear, he took the opportunity to defend his beliefs. It was reported that he said:

That he was not ashamed to avow that he was one of that afflicted and persecuted party and persuasion called Presbyterian.

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[1] The Reformed Presbyterian Vol. 3, ed. by Rev. R. M. Roney, (Newburgh: J.D. Spalding, 1839), 150.  According to an editor’s note, this entire section appears to have been taken from another work, Crookshank’s History of the state and sufferings of the Church of Scotland, from the Reformation to the Revolution.

[2] Charles McCrie, The Free Church of Scotland: Her Ancestry, Her Claims, and Her Conflicts (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1893), 50.