On the 26th of July, a committee of Privy Council reported that they had examined the proceedings of the commissioners in [Sidenote: 1698.] the case of Elspeth M‘Ewen (the report signed by the _Lord Advocate_), who had been pronounced guilty upon her own confession and the evidence of witnesses, ‘of a compact and correspondence with the devil, and of charms and of accession to malefices.’ It was ordered that the sentence of death against Elspeth should be executed, under care of the steward of Kirkcudbright and his deputies, on the 24th of August. In July, a number of noblemen and gentlemen of Renfrewshire sent a letter to the Privy Council, setting forth the case of a young woman named Margaret Laird, of the Earl of Glencairn’s land in the parish of Kilmacolm. Since the 15th of May, ‘she hath been under ane extraordinary and most lamentable trouble, falling into strange and horrible fits, judged by all who have seen her to be preternatural, arising from the devil and his instruments.’ In these fits, ‘she sees and distinctly converses with divers persons whom she constantly affirms to be her tormentors, and that both while the fits continue, and in the intervals wherein she is perfectly free of all trouble and composed.’ The persons named were of those formerly accused by ‘confessing witches.’ ‘In some of these fits there is such obstruction upon her external senses, that she neither sees nor feels bystanders, though in the meantime she sees and converses with any of her alleged tormentors when we cause any of them come before her; and at the sight or touch of any of them, yea, even upon her essaying to name them when not present, she’s thrown into the fits, and therein gives such an account of their circumstances (though otherwise unknown to her) as is very convincing.’ The writers had been so impressed by the various facts brought under their notice, as proving fascination or witchcraft, that they found themselves obliged to make a representation of the case ‘out of pity to the poor distressed damsel;’ and they were the more solicitous about the affair, that the country people were in a state of such excitement, and so incensed against the alleged witches, that ‘we fear something may fall out in their hands that the government would willingly prevent.’ The Council appointed a committee of inquiry, and ordered the sheriff of the county—the Earl of Eglintoun—to apprehend the suspected witches, ‘that it may appear whether, after their being seized and committed, the said Margaret shall complain of their tormenting her or not.’