Little is known of the early life of Sir Archibald Johnston, otherwise known as Lord Warriston. He grew up in seventeenth-century Scotland and became active in the Scottish government and in Presbyterian church life, rising to a position of great respect. His mind was as sharp as any on the British islands, and he witnessed freely to world leaders of his faith. During the Puritan revolt, he sided with Cromwell as King Charles I was deposed and executed. When Charles II restored the British monarchy in 1660, Johnston found himself in danger; and on October 10, 1660 he was pronounced a condemned fugitive.
Johnston fled to the Continent, but while there became sick. As it happened, one of King Charles’s physicians, Dr. Bates, attended him. Intending to kill him, Dr. Bates injected him with poison and drew from him sixty ounces of blood. While Johnston didn’t die, he was permanently impaired in his mind and could never again remember what he had said or done a quarter hour before.
Aided by friends, Johnston fled to France; but Charles’s agents were looking for him there, too, and he was seized while at prayer. In January, 1663, he was returned to England and imprisoned in the Tower of London. At length, he was transported to Edinburgh for execution, though according to his nephew, “he was so disordered in body and mind that it was a reproach to any government to proceed against him.”
He slept well on the night before his execution, and he took his last lunch cheerfully, “hoping to sup in heaven, and to drink the next cup fresh in his Father’s kingdom.” At two o’clock he was taken from the prison to the scaffold. There he pulled a paper from his pocket, being unable to remember what he wanted to say. He read from it front and back; then as if in a rapture, he looked up and prayed: “Abba, Father! Accept this thy poor sinful servant, coming unto thee, through the merits of Jesus Christ.”
He was hanged, and his head was nailed beside that of James Guthrie on Netherbow Port.
Robert J. Morgan