Thomas Aikenhead

On January 8th, 1697, Thomas Aikenhead (c. 1678 - 1697), a young medical student, "son to the deceest James Aikenhead, chirurgeon in Edinburgh," was hanged for blasphemy in Edinburgh. In the words of Robert Louis Stevenson he was "hanged for a piece of boyish incredulity" He was the last person to be executed for blasphemy in the UK.

The accusation arose from casual conversation between Aikenhead and friends who reported him to the authorities, leading to prosecution under a Restoration law. Having been apprehended and imprisoned, he was, by a special Act of Privy Council, remitted to the High Court of Justiciary on 23d December 1696, for trial upon a charge for breach of an Act of Parliament " against the crime of Blasphemy." Aikenhead retracted the views attributed to him, but the jury found him guilty, and he was sentenced to be hanged on the 8th of January following. A full report was published in the Collection of State Trials by T. B. Howell, vol. xiii. 1812. The case was also reported in Maclaurin's "Criminal Cases", p.12, Edinburgh, 1774; and in Hugo Arnot's "Celebrated Criminal Trials", p. 322, Edinburgh, 1785.

Aikenhead's chief accuser was a fellow student, Mungo Craig, who printed a tract entitled "A SATYR against Atheistical-Deism, with the Genuine Character of a Deist. To-which is Prefixt, An account of Mr Aikinhead's Notions, who is now in Prison for the same Damnable Apostacy."

Aikenhead's indictment read:

That ... the prisoner had repeatedly maintained, in conversation, that theology was a rhapsody of ill-invented nonsense, patched up partly of the moral doctrines of philosophers, and partly of poetical fictions and extravagant chimeras: That he ridiculed the holy scriptures, calling the Old Testament Ezra's fables, in profane allusion to Esop's Fables; That he railed on Christ, saying, he had learned magick in Egypt, which enabled him to perform those pranks which were called miracles: That he called the New Testament the history of the imposter Christ; That he said Moses was the better artist and the better politician; and he preferred Mahomet to Christ: That the Holy Scriptures were stuffed with such madness, nonsense, and contradictions, that he admired the stupidity of the world in being so long deluded by them: That he rejected the mystery of the Trinity as unworthy of refutation; and scoffed at the incarnation of Christ".

Aikenhead left a speech, expressing penitence. It did him little good in this life, he was swifly hanged.

"And I cannot, without doing myself a manifest injury, but viudicat my innocence from those" abominable aspersions in a printed Satyr of Mr Mungo Craig's, who was an evidence against me; whom I leave to reckon with God and his own conscience, if he was not as deeply concerned in those hellish notions (for which I am sentenced) as ever I was; however, I bless the Lord, I forgive him and all men, and wishes the Lord may forgive him likewise. To conclude, as the Lord in his providence hath been pleased in this examplary manner to punish my great sins, so it is my earnest desire to him, that my blood may give a stop to that rageing spirit of Atheism which hath taken such footing in Brittain, both in practice and profession."

Lord Macaulay (History of England, vol. iv. p. 781, 1855,) described the scene of execution thus:

The preachers who were the boy’s murderers crowded round him at the gallows, and, while he was struggling in the last agony, insulted Heaven with prayers more blasphemous than any thing that [Aikenhead] had ever uttered. [1]