Tag Archives: spott

1570: Rev. John Kello, the Parson of Spott

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This date in 1570 marked the remarkable Edinburgh hanging of a preacher for murdering his wife.

It’s one of Twelve Scots Trials featured in William Roughead‘s public-domain true-crime tome of that title

“The time,” muses our correspondent, “was the year of grace 1570.”

Calvinism had triumphed, and the cause of Queen Mary and the ‘Auld Faith’ was lost. That unhappy lady was safely in Elizabeth’s parlour, the gallant Kirkcaldy still kept the flag of his Royal mistress flying on the castle of Edinburgh, and the ambition of her ambiguous brother, the ‘Good Regent,’ had lately been abridged by the bullet of Bothwellhaugh at Linlithgow. The scene was the hill parish of Spott, on the eastern slope of the Lammermuirs, near the coast town of Dunbar … celebrated, too, as being the scene of the last witch-burnings in Scotland, for so late as October 1705, only two years before the Union, the minutes of the Kirk Session significantly record: ‘Many witches burnt on the top of Spott Loan.’

In the sixteenth century a strange fatality attached to the incumbency of this quiet rural parish … Robert Galbraith, parson of Spott … was murdered in 1543 by one John Carkettle, a burgess of Edinburgh. The next rector, John Hamilton … [became] the Archbishop Hamilton of Queen Mary’s reign. He was taken prisoner at the capture of Dumbarton Castle in 1571, and was hanged at Stirling for complicity in the assassination of the Regent Moray … The fate of the archbishop’s successor in the manse of Spott, the first minister of the new and purified Kirk, forms the subject of the present study.

Young Kello presumably fancied Spott a station on his own cursus honorum towards archbishoprics and assassinated regents; he found himself irksomely constrained by the cheapness of the parish wage (which drove him into speculative debt) and by his “amiable but plebeian consort” Margaret Thomson.

“Thir wer the glistering promises whairwith Sathan, efter his accustomed maner, eludit my senses,” Kello’s eventual confession would sigh. Specifically, Sathan suggested he lose the wife and upgrade to a socially-advantageous match with a lord’s daughter.

On September 24, 1570, Kello came upon his spouse defenseless in prayer, and strangled her with a towel.

“In the verie death,” he admits, “she could not beleive I bure hir ony evill will, bot was glaid, as sche than said, to depairt, gif hir death could doe me ather vantage or pleasoure.”

“Verily,” Roughead adds, “it is difficult to write with patience of the Reverend John.”

Reverend John strung up his infinitely self-sacrificing wife to make it look like she’d done herself to death, went out, preached — it was Sunday — and returned home with some guests, ever-so-casually coming upon the poor woman’s dangling body to great surprise and chagrin in the presence of witnesses.

And this ruse worked, at first. Kello began entertaining sympathy calls from neighbors; it’s unremarked in the existing documentation, but it’s conceivable that the body of the presumed suicide might even have been mutilated or dishonored as was the style at the time.

Overacting the part a bit, Kello sought out the counsel of a brother-minister by the name of Andrew Simpson over the question of the probable disposition of his self-murdering wife’s soul. This Rev. Simpson had tended Kello during a sickness prior to Kello’s wife’s passing, when the Parson of Spott had Sathan’s cogitations in mind. And apparently, Kello related at that time a strange dream that Simpson would on the subsequent visit turn into a supernatural Colombo moment, reciting back that past phantasm plus Simpson’s interpretation of it that it denoted the dreamer’s blood guilt.

This gave the heretofore icily hypocritical Reverend John such a case of the heebie-jeebies that he proceeded to Edinburgh to turn himself in.

And so, on October 4, he preached his last sermon — this one from the scaffold, enjoining advice of timeless utility:

Measoure not the treuth of Godis word altogether be the lyvis of sic as are apointed pastouris ower you, for thei beir the self same fleshe of corruptioune that ye doe, and the moir godlie the charge is whairunto thai are called, the readier the Enemie to draw thame bak from Godis obedience.

On this day..