Guillotine Destiny
A Dynasty on the Scaffold · Like Father Like Son
I reached for who was left on my cousin Agnes Douglas-Campbell’s limb.
Her husband & the kids. Her husband lived for another 31 years.
He remarried—and it ignited a massive family and political scandal.
When Lady Agnes Douglas died in May 1607, just weeks after giving birth, the 7th Earl was left with a nursery full of young children: three daughters (Margaret, Annabella, and Anne) and his newborn son and heir, Archibald.
Tragic.
Three years after Agnes’s death, Archibald married Anne Cornwallis, a wealthy English gentlewoman and a devout Roman Catholic.
The marriage apparently tore the family apart. Under the stepmother Anne’s influence, the Earl secretly converted to Roman Catholicism! She must have been pretty persuasive! In Protestant post-Reformation Scotland, a Highland chief turning Catholic was viewed as near-treason! He knew this would be life-altering.
In 1618, the Earl slipped away to enter the military service of Catholic Spain—Scotland and England’s mortal enemy. SMH
The Scottish Privy Council declared him a traitor and an outlaw.
To save Clan Campbell’s sprawling estates from crown forfeiture, control of the vast Argyll lands and chiefdom was formally stripped from the father and handed directly to Agnes’s young son, Archibald (future 1st Marquess), while he was still a boy.
While his father, the 7th Earl, spent much of his later life abroad with his new English Catholic family, young Archibald grew up in Scotland under the guardianship of Protestant Campbell kinsmen—a fractured upbringing that shaped him into the stern Covenanter leader he became, obviously!
His mother died only a month after his birth, leaving him the primary heir to Clan Campbell’s expanding power.
I can imagine he had his share of issues.
The Fall of the Earls of Argyll
Bound to both the crown and the Presbyterian cause as the English Civil War and the Wars of the Three Kingdoms erupted, Archibald became Scotland’s de facto ruler and the chief of the hardcore Presbyterian Covenanter movement.
Known to political enemies as “Archibald the Grim” because of a squint evident in his portraits, he did not look friendly.
Archibald Campbell, 8th Earl of Argyll (1607-1661) · National Galleries of Scotland collection
In 1651, he really reached the height of his political career when he placed the crown of Scotland on the head of young King Charles II at Scone.
Yet his authority rested on treacherous ground. When Oliver Cromwell’s New Model Army invaded and conquered Scotland, Argyll was forced to make a deal with the English Commonwealth to protect Clan Campbell lands.
That small compromise later proved fatal.
Later, when the Stuart monarchy was restored in 1660, thinking it was all good…
Argyll traveled south to London to welcome King Charles II.
In the process, Archibald was arrested and convicted of high treason for showing his compliance with Cromwell’s government over that land deal…
Archibald Campbell was sentenced to die. He was about 54 years old.
On May 27, 1661, the 1st Marquess was led to the Mercat Cross in Edinburgh and beheaded by the Scottish guillotine known as The Maiden.
The Maiden Guillotine
After the execution, authorities stuck his severed head up on that spike atop the Edinburgh Tolbooth as a stark warning against rebellion. For anyone walking Edinburgh's High Street after 27 May 1661, the senior Argyll's death was impossible to miss.
His head stood high on that iron spike for three years.
People viewed this as political vengeance.
His wife Margaret was still alive. After nearly thirty-five years of marriage, she watched the Crown execute her husband, strip the family of its position, and leave his head displayed above Edinburgh. She lived another seventeen years without him, dying on 13 March 1678.
How humiliating for Margaret. She was just his wife. No crime.
The Tolbooth · Edinburgh
The Campbell title passed to their son, Archibald, 9th Earl of Argyll. The younger Archibald grew up during the Restoration; Argyll's Protestant views increasingly put him at odds with the Crown.
In 1681, he refused to accept the Scottish Test Oath.
He was arrested, convicted of treason, and sentenced to death. Rather than wait for the executioner, Argyll escaped Edinburgh Castle disguised as a servant, walking out with his stepdaughter while pretending to be her page and carrying her train!
He made his way out of Scotland and eventually reached the Dutch Republic, where he remained in exile for the next four years.
Archibald Campbell, 9th Earl of Argyll (c. 1629–1685)
In 1685, following the death of Charles II and the accession of King James VII & II, exiled Protestant nobles tried again to overthrow the new king. Argyll partnered with James Scott, 1st Duke of Monmouth—the illegitimate, Protestant son of Charles II—in a joint uprising. And that was a very, very bad decision!
The Shadow of the Tolbooth
He was taken in chains to Edinburgh. He was about 56 years old.
The 9th Earl received no new trial; the crown simply executed the outstanding sentence from 1681.
On June 30, 1685, twenty-four years after his father’s death, Archibald Campbell was led to the Mercat Cross. He was beheaded by The Maiden—the exact same blade that had claimed his father’s life.
Creepy.
His severed head was then impaled upon the Edinburgh Tolbooth, fixed to the very spike where his father’s skull had once stood.
So dark.
Mary Stuart, the mother of all seven of his children, had died in May 1668.
Sadly, his second wife, Anna Mackenzie, Countess of Balcarres, was still alive when he was executed fifteen years later.
The principles they fought for were realized only three years later when the Glorious Revolution of 1688 permanently broke the Stuart line and restored the Campbell heirs to full honor and political preeminence in Scotland.
If he had only laid low for a few more years…
