Jean Kincaid was a Scottish woman who was convicted of murdering her husband.
Background
Jean Kincaid was the daughter of John Livingstoun of Dunipace, born in 1579 as Jean Livingston. Robert Weir, a servant of her father, and her reputed lover, was admitted by Kincaid into her husband"s chamber in his house at Warriston at an early hour on the morning of 1 July 1600, and he gripped Kincaid tightly around the throat and held him for a long time until the struggling Kincaid was dead.
Career
News of the murder quickly reached Edinburgh, and "the Lady Warristoun", "the fause nourise", and her two "hyred women", were arrested "red-handed". Weir escaped, refusing to allow Kincaid to accompany him in his flight. Kincaid and the other prisoners were immediately brought before the magistrates of Edinburgh, and a sentence of death was passed upon them.
Number official records of the trial are extant.
Birrel wrote that:
Scho was tane to the girth-crosse, upon the 5 day of July, and her heid struck fra her bodie, at the Cannagait-fit. Quha deit very patiently.
Her nurische was brunt at the same tyme, at 4 houres in the morneing, the 5 of July. According to Calderwood"s History of the Kirk of Scotland, "the nurse and ane hyred woman, her complices, were burnt in the Castell Hill of Edinburgh".
In the brief interval between the sentence and execution Mistress
Kincaid was brought, by the efforts of a clergyman, from a state of callous indifference to one of religious resignation. Weir, who was arrested four years afterwards, was broken on a wheel next to the Mercat Cross in Edinburgh, on 26 June 1604, a rare mode of execution in Scotland. A "memorial" of her "conversion…with an account of her carriage at her execution," by an eyewitness, was privately printed at Edinburgh in 1827, from a paper preserved among Wodrow"s manuscripts. in the Advocates" Library, by Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe.
The youth and beauty of Mistress
Kincaid were dwelt upon in numerous popular ballads, which are to be found in Jamieson"s, Kinloch"s, and Buchan"s collections. The songs songs variously ascribe blame to the husband, the wife, or the devil.