In the spring of 1622, thirty-four-year-old Margaret Wallace, a resident of Lanark, found herself at the centre of a formal legal process that moved from the local kirk sessions to the high courts of Edinburgh. Margaret occupied a middling socioeconomic position within her community; her husband was a burgess and a craftsman, a life defined by the modest tools of his trade, such as the *elwand* he had once borrowed and inadvertently broken. However, Margaret’s social standing offered no shield against the shadow of suspicion that had lingered over her since at least 1613, when she was first denounced by the Kirk session of Glasgow. Over the ensuing years, her name was further tarnished by being implicated as an accomplice in the testimonies of Christiane Grahame and Katherine Blair.
By March 1622, the case against Margaret had intensified, drawing in Boig and Robertson to act as informers for His Majesty’s Advocate. The legal proceedings were marked by a high degree of scholarly formality; the trial records note an elaborate exchange of pleadings where both the prosecution and the defence cited passages from the works of the Jesuit theologian Martin Delrio to support their competing arguments. Despite a recorded confession and a vigorous attempt at a formal defence, the court found Margaret guilty of charges that included attending a witches' meeting. On the authority of the judges at Edinburgh, she was sentenced to death. In March 1622, Margaret was taken to Castle Hill, where she was executed by the standard method of strangulation and burning.