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This chapter discusses the history of Thomas Aikenhead. Aikenhead was an intellectual iconoclast from an idiosyncratic and marginal Edinburgh family. He was orphaned at nine, with no wealth within his immediate family on which to rely. At sixteen years old, Aikenhead enrolled in Edinburgh's town college. While he attended lectures for four years, he never completed the requirements for his degree. Mungo Craig spent a lot of time talking with Aikenhead, who was perhaps not the best social companion for an aspiring Presbyterian pastor. Craig would ultimately be the leading witness at Aikenhead's trial, but he did not wait until then to make his accusations public. Craig wrote some of his accusations into a pamphlet, published for his landlord, Robert Hutchison, whose property was at the head of the College Wynd. The pamphlet presented Aikenhead as an object of ridicule and execration, convicting him first in the court of public opinion.

This chapter talks about the trial and execution of Thomas Aikenhead. The trial convened in Edinburgh's tolbooth on 23 December 1696, after several delays for reasons that may have involved locating the necessary witnesses. The indictment went on to claim that Aikenhead had vented ‘wicked blasphemies against God and the Saviour Jesus Christ, and against the holy Scriptures and all revealed religione’ several times for more than a year. On a more philosophical level, the indictment alleged that he had argued against the likelihood of eternal reward or punishment or the existence of spirits, and had claimed that God, the world, and nature, are but one thing and that the world was from eternity. Aikenhead was found guilty of the most serious charges in the indictment, based primarily on the testimony of Mungo Craig. Then he was hanged, twisting in the January breeze as a short Edinburgh afternoon descended into twilight. His body was buried at the foot of the gallows.

This chapter discusses the events following the execution of Thomas Aikenhead. Nobody did more than Mungo Craig to blacken Thomas Aikenhead's reputation and to supply the evidence that sent him to the gallows. But it appears that this smear campaign also sullied the reputation of its primary author to the extent that he had to defend himself in print. Craig's twisting of the words of Aikenhead's last speech suggests a desperate need to clear himself lest he be charged with a similar crime. Only eleven days after Aikenhead's execution, the Earl of Tullibardine wrote to the Scottish Chancellor, Hume of Polwarth, scolding him and his administration over their handling of the case, and the way the English news media were portraying it. The case of Thomas Aikenhead would cast a long shadow over the eighteenth century, particularly as Edinburgh became one of the centres of the European Enlightenment.

This chapter talks about Thomas Aikenhead, a twenty-year-old student from the town college of Edinburgh who was executed for blasphemy. Those hanged rarely died instantly, so onlookers would probably have watched him shudder for several minutes, fists clenched, nose and mouth oozing bloody mucus, gradually suffocating. Many had died for causes related to religion, particularly in the period of highly politicised covenants after 1638, but these victims had found themselves on the wrong side of political struggles, and were more likely to meet their ends on the battlefield than the scaffold. There was no such obviously political element in Aikenhead's demise. The Aikenhead case was born in the initial collision between Covenanted Presbyterianism and the countercurrents of deism, biblical criticism, and religious scepticism.

This concluding chapter talks about Thomas Aikenhead, a young man, living in the seventeenth century, a time when confessional orthodoxy was jealously guarded in that splintered sectarian landscape comprising western religion. It would be rash to argue that, had Aikenhead lived, he would have become a philosopher on a par with Baruch Spinoza; indeed, it is probably much more likely that he would have disappeared into obscurity and conventional Calvinism, perhaps later writing a spiritual autobiography in which he recalled his youthful flirtation with deism. But this was not to be; the timing of his brush with fame, in the crisis atmosphere of 1696, his lack of influential friends, and the determination of the authorities to demonstrate their own orthodoxy combined to usher him to the gallows. Anyone reading newspapers or following other media in recent years has probably noticed that blasphemy has resurfaced as an issue with global repercussions.

This chapter talks about the dreadful year of 1696 in Scotland. It was a year of famine, the fifth of what came to be called ‘the seven ill years’. The harvest of 1695 was particularly thin, and that of 1696 would be even worse, with high food prices, unemployment, and starvation. The war against France, which had been going on since 1689, strangled what little trade there was between Scotland and continental Europe. Despite the grave problems facing Scotland in 1696, the General Assembly wanted the laws against irreligion strictly enforced. On 10 November 1696, Thomas Aikenhead was brought before the council, charged with blasphemy. The council concluded that the charges were serious and ordered that Aikenhead be tried for his life before the High Court of Justiciary, instructing Stewart of Goodtrees to continue preparing the case against him. Aikenhead was sent to Edinburgh's tolbooth to await trial.

This chapter discusses the situation of Edinburgh and Scotland in the 1690s. Thomas Aikenhead's trial and execution took place in a city that retains some elements that Aikenhead and his contemporaries would recognise, thanks to the combination of Edinburgh's dramatic topography and the preservation of several buildings in the central city that were standing during Aikenhead's lifetime. The National Covenant had linked the security of the Presbyterian Kirk with the security of the monarchy, suggesting that the latter was just as threatened by ‘innovations’ in religion as the former. As the seat of parliament, Edinburgh played host to much of the regime change in Scotland. Residents also participated in these changes, and then felt their impact on local institutions.

This chapter discusses the politics of blasphemy. The issue of the Episcopal clergy was complicated by relations with England, whose Anglican religious establishment viewed the Scots Episcopal clergy as co-religionists who ought at least to be tolerated, and preferably employed as well, north of the border. The ongoing hard-core Presbyterian refusal to make concessions to Episcopalians was answered by Englishmen of High Church inclinations with a refusal to countenance Protestant dissent in England. Church courts were told to take action against offenders and urge magistrates to enforce relevant Acts of Parliament. The same was to hold for anyone who ‘shall deny God or any of the persons of the blessed Trinity and obstinately continew therin’. The state of alert would inspire ministers and magistrates to go out and find a couple of deists to placate an obviously angry God. Thomas Aikenhead would be the least fortunate of them.