A week in which to remember Thomas Aikenhead, the last man in Britain to be hanged for blasphemy

PRECISELY 311 years after the last person in Britain was hanged for blasphemy, the British Government announced that it will consider scrapping the country’s archaic and discredited blasphemy laws.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s spokesman said this week that ministers may table amendments to the Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill in the House of Lords.
But he added:

We do believe it is necessary to consult with the churches, particularly the Anglican church, before coming to a final decision, and that’s what we are doing.

On January 8, 1697, Scottish medical student, Thomas Aikenhead, 19, was hanged on the road from Edinburgh to Leith for blasphemy, an already-archaic punishment inflicted for what reads like headstrong youthful atheism of a decidedly garden variety.

According to Executedtoday.com, Aikenhead “partook of the times’ emerging (albeit forbidden) store of humanist and skeptical literature, and chatted most unguardedly with University of Edinburgh ‘friends’ who tattled to authorities to the extent that, not content with testifying against him, one published a pamphlet demanding the offender ‘atone with blood, the affronts of heaven’s offended throne’.”

Said authorities scarcely elevated the dignity of the temporal throne in their own eagerness to swing a sledgehammer against a fly, trying the young hothead for his life under a Restoration law which by its own letter should not have lodged him in mortal peril until his third offense.

“Thou Aikenhead, ” the indictment thundered in the second person:

shakeing off all fear of God and regaird to his majesties lawes, have now for more than a twelvemoneth by past…[vented] your wicked blasphemies against God and our Saviour Jesus Christ, and against the holy Scriptures, and all revealled religione…you said and affirmed, that divinity or the doctrine of theologie was a rapsidie of faigned and ill-invented nonsense, patched up partly of the morall doctrine of philosophers, and pairtly of poeticall fictions and extravagant chimeras.

He called the Old Testament “Ezra’s fables”, Jesus the “Imposter Christ” (preferring Mahomet), and anticipated the extirpation of Christianity.

It was a bare two weeks from conviction to execution. Accounts of Aikenhead’s last days seem inconsistent; the prisoner recanted, possibly sincerely, but the Church — explicitly handed the power to at least reprieve him by its intervention — demanded hurried and “vigorous execution.”

Macaulay disgustedly pictured the scene:

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.

The singular punishment meted out this day — the last hanging for blasphemy throughout the United Kingdom — cast a long shadow into the coming century’s remarkable Scottish renaissance and lingers even today as a suggestion to some just how near the menace of theocracy might yet remain.
You can read a full account Thomas Aikenhead’s trial and execution here.