Cecily Jackson burning at the stake in Derry to be remembered on 300th anniversary

Cecily Jackson, who was the Bishop of Derry’s cook, was convicted of the murder of her child on March 17, 1725. She was burned at the stake outside Bishop’s Gate – the last person to suffer such a fate in the city – after being publicly paraded.

John Thompson, a law lecturer at Ulster University in Derry, has spent years researching beyond the scant contemporary references to the case, and his work is ensuring that Cecily will become more than just a “footnote” in the histories of powerful men. Mr Thompson and his students from Magee plan to stage a simulation of Cecily’s trial soon, with the students currently preparing for this. The new Cecily Jackson Memorial Trophy will be awarded to one of them.

Mr Thompson came across mention of the killing of this woman from the household of then Church of Ireland Bishop of Derry, William Nicolson quite a few years ago.

Shortly before this, he had experienced a strange feeling and the ‘hairs standing up at the back of my neck for some reason’ as he passed through the Bishop’s Gate area.

Cecily, it transpired, had been convicted of ‘petty treason’ for the murder of her ‘natural born child’.

Information collated by Mr Thompson since has revealed that the baby’s father was James Nicolson, nephew or cousin of the Bishop. James had been ordained deacon by the Bishop in June 1721. This would have no doubt caused a major scandal if it had got out, Mr Thompson said, and raises the possibility that there could be more to the murder of the child.

The Bishop’s familial ‘difficulty’ in connection with the case was established in correspondence with a friend and later successor, Henry Downes. He references the ‘sadness’ visited upon himself ‘made worse’ by the fact that one of his own ‘namesake’ was also involved in the ‘adultery and murder’, Mr Thompson revealed.

Bishop Downes, he adds, wrote back sympathising and referencing how ‘murder and adultery’ under your own roof ‘may indeed strike you with indignation and horror’, and especially involving a ‘clergyman’ whom Bishop Nicolson ‘had taken under your own protection’.

This is not the only ominous twist in this macabre tale however. Mr Thompson’s research has also revealed that the day before Cecily is condemned, Bishop Nicolson had dinner with the judge and the Mayor.

"There are very little details about Cecily Jackson and I wonder if that is intentional,” Mr Thompson said. “It seems to have started around January 1725 with an inquiry into what is described as his ‘cook’s lewdness’. Then there is a reference to the ‘cook’s murdered child’s is found in her trunk’ on January 16th. She goes for trial at the assizes on March 10th, a one day trial. She is condemned on March 11th and executed on the 17th.

"Nicolson was Oxford-educated, and had a massive library which ultimately became part of that Derry & Raphoe Diocesan Library that was given to Magee.

"The Bishop was a man well known for keeping journals, but significantly all he mentions in his journal for that day was ‘Cecily Jackson was executed’.

"James Nicolson disappears off the face of the earth, and my evidence suggests that he is then sent somewhere in the west of Ireland, out of the frame.”

Mr Thompson said through history the law seemed to treat women accused of crimes, especially murder, differently.

Women who were convicted of killing, he said, were, and to an extent still are, often considered ‘very mad or very bad’.

"If Cecily did kill the child, was she suffering postpartum depression? There was a double tragedy here, and I would ask people to spare a thought for them both this St Patrick’s Day.”

Interestingly at the time the Dean of Derry, though he never came to Derry to fulfil the role, was George Berkeley who founded Berkeley in America, Mr Thompson said.

Bishop Nicolson himself would not long survive Cecily. In 1727 he was appointed Archbishop of Cashel but never made it out of Derry, dying in in the city two years after the burning of Cecily Jackson.