Why the Martyrs Still Matter
Part 24 — Margaret Wilson: The Girl Who Would Not Deny Her King
Part of an ongoing 52-week Thursday noon essay series exploring the lives, deaths, convictions, and witness of Christian martyrs throughout church history.
She was eighteen years old.
Her executioners tied her to a stake in the tidal waters of Scotland’s Solway Firth.
Then they waited for the sea.
Margaret Wilson lived during Scotland’s “Killing Times,” the brutal final years of the Covenanter persecutions under the Stuart monarchy.
The issue at the center of the conflict was the lordship of Christ over His Church.
The Covenanters refused to acknowledge the king’s claimed authority over matters they believed belonged to Christ alone.
For that refusal, some worshiped secretly in fields and hills.
Some fled their homes.
Some were imprisoned.
Some died.
Margaret’s family became caught in that persecution.
She and her younger sister Agnes were arrested in 1685 along with an older widow, Margaret McLachlan.
The sisters were accused of refusing the required oaths and maintaining sympathy with the persecuted Covenanters.
Agnes was eventually released after a bond was paid.
Margaret Wilson and Margaret McLachlan remained condemned.
The sentence was horrifying.
Drowning.
According to the traditional accounts, the women were taken to the tidal flats near Wigtown and tied to stakes positioned at different distances from shore.
The older Margaret was placed farther out.
The younger Margaret was positioned where she could watch.
The cruelty was deliberate.
Authorities hoped that seeing another woman drown would terrify the eighteen-year-old into submission.
The tide began to rise.
Water surrounded the older woman.
Higher.
Higher.
Until she disappeared beneath it.
Then the water approached Margaret Wilson.
She was given another opportunity to save herself.
Submit.
Take the oath.
Recognize the king’s claimed supremacy.
Live.
Margaret refused.
Traditional accounts remember her singing from the Psalms and reciting Scripture as the water rose.
At one point she was reportedly pulled from the water and offered another chance to yield.
She would pray for the king, she said, but she would not give him what belonged to Christ.
She was returned to the water.
The tide closed over her.
Margaret Wilson drowned.
Eighteen years old.
No theological degree.
No pulpit.
No ecclesiastical office.
Only conviction.
Her story has been debated in some historical details, as martyr accounts sometimes are. But the Wigtown martyrs became deeply embedded in Scottish Presbyterian memory because they embodied the terrible cost paid during the Covenanter persecutions.
And Margaret’s age makes her testimony particularly uncomfortable.
We often excuse young people from serious Christian conviction.
We expect entertainment.
We expect immaturity.
We assume theological seriousness can come later.
Church history refuses to cooperate with that assumption.
Young Christians have suffered for Christ.
Young Christians have defended doctrine.
Young Christians have faced governments.
Young Christians have died.
Margaret Wilson did not possess a childish faith.
She possessed the faith of a young woman convinced that Jesus Christ was actually King.
That word—King—has become so familiar in Christian speech that we sometimes forget its meaning.
A king possesses authority.
A king commands allegiance.
A king has subjects.
When Christians confess “Jesus is Lord,” we are not reciting a religious slogan.
We are declaring the existence of an authority higher than every government on earth.
That confession has political consequences whenever rulers demand what belongs to God.
The early Christians discovered that under Rome.
The Reformers discovered it under kings and councils.
The Covenanters discovered it under the Stuarts.
And Christians throughout the world continue discovering it today.
Government possesses real authority.
But never ultimate authority.
The state may command obedience.
But it may never command worship.
It may govern citizens.
But it does not govern Christ.
Margaret understood that distinction.
So an earthly king could threaten her life.
He could not have her conscience.
The water rose.
The breath left her lungs.
Her body died.
But the throne she confessed remains occupied.
Charles II is dead.
James VII is dead.
The Stuart claim to supremacy over the Scottish Church is dead.
Jesus Christ lives.
And somewhere beneath the memory of those cold Scottish waters stands the testimony of an eighteen-year-old girl who understood exactly which King deserved her final allegiance.
Soli Deo Gloria
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