FAMOUS SCOTS SERIES

THOMAS CARLYLE. By Hector C. Macpherson.

ALLAN RAMSAY. By Oliphant Smeaton.

HUGH MILLER. By W. Keith Leask.

JOHN KNOX. By A. Taylor Innes.

ROBERT BURNS. By Gabriel Setoun.

THE BALLADISTS. By John Geddie.

RICHARD CAMERON. By Professor Herkless.

SIR JAMES Y. SIMPSON. By Eve Blantyre Simpson.

THOMAS CHALMERS. By Professor W. Garden Blaikie.

JAMES BOSWELL. By W. Keith Leask.

TOBIAS SMOLLETT. By Oliphant Smeaton.

FLETCHER OF SALTOUN. By G. W. T. Omond.

THE “BLACKWOOD” GROUP. By Sir George Douglas.

NORMAN MACLEOD. By John Wellwood.

SIR WALTER SCOTT. By Professor Saintsbury.

KIRKCALDY OF GRANGE. By Louis A. Barbé.

ROBERT FERGUSSON. By A. B. Grosart.

JAMES THOMSON. By William Bayne.

MUNGO PARK. By T. Banks Maclachlan.

DAVID HUME. By Professor Calderwood.

WILLIAM DUNBAR. By Oliphant Smeaton.

SIR WILLIAM WALLACE. By Professor Murison.

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. By Margaret Moyes Black.

THOMAS REID. By Professor Campbell Fraser.

POLLOK AND AYTOUN. By Rosaline Masson.

ADAM SMITH. By Hector C. Macpherson.

ANDREW MELVILLE. By William Morison.

JAMES FREDERICK FERRIER. By E. S. Haldane.

KING ROBERT THE BRUCE. By A. F. Murison.

JAMES HOGG. By Sir George Douglas.

THOMAS CAMPBELL. By J. Cuthbert Hadden.

GEORGE BUCHANAN. By Robert Wallace.

SIR DAVID WILKIE. By Edward Pinnington.

THE ERSKINES, EBENEZER AND RALPH. By A. R. MacEwen.

THOMAS GUTHRIE. By Oliphant Smeaton.

DAVID LIVINGSTONE. By T. Banks Maclachlan.

THE ACADEMIC GREGORIES. By Agnes Grainger Stewart.

JOHNSTON OF WARRISTON. By William Morison.

HENRY DRUMMOND. By James J. Simpson.

PRINCIPAL CAIRNS. By John Cairns.

VISCOUNT DUNDEE. By Louis A. Barbé.

VISCOUNT
DUNDEE

BY

: LOUIS

A : BARBÉ

FAMOUS

•SCOTS•

•SERIES•

PUBLISHED BY

OLIPHANT ANDERSON

& FERRIER EDINBVRGH

AND LONDON

The designs and ornaments of this

volume are by Mr Joseph Brown,

and the printing is from the press of

Messrs Turnbull & Spears, Edinburgh.

TO

MY SONS

LOUIS AND ADRIEN

CONTENTS

VISCOUNT DUNDEE

I
FAMILY, BIRTH AND EARLY LIFE

The Grahams of Claverhouse were a younger branch of an old and illustrious family which, from the twelfth century onwards, bore an important part in Scottish affairs, and of which several members figured prominently in the history of the nation prior to the time when the fame of the house was raised to its highest point by the ‘Great Marquis,’ the ill-fated Montrose.

The Claverhouse offshoot was connected with the main stock through Sir Robert Graham of Strathcarron, son of Sir William Graham of Kincardine by his second wife, the Princess Mary, daughter of King Robert III. During the early years of the sixteenth century, John Graham of Balargus, third in descent from Sir William, acquired the lands of Claverhouse, in Forfarshire, a few miles north of Dundee. From these his son took the territorial title which, a few generations later, was to become so feared and so hated throughout covenanting Scotland, and which, even at the present day, after the lapse of more than two hundred years, is still a bye-word and a shaking of the head to many.

John Graham, the ‘Bloody Claverhouse’ of Whig denunciators, and the ‘Bonnie Dundee’ of Jacobite apologists, was the son of William Graham of Claverhouse and Lady Magdalene Carnegie, fifth and youngest daughter of John, first Earl of Northesk. On the authority of Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe and of Mark Napier, successive writers have stated that the mother of the future Viscount was Lady Jean Carnegie. Sir William Fraser has pointed out, however, that Lady Jean was only his maternal aunt, and that she married, not a Claverhouse, but the Master of Spynie. This mistake as to the name of the mother of Viscount Dundee, adds the author of the ‘History of the Carnegies,’ is the more remarkable that she bore the same Christian name and surname as her cousin, Lady Magdalene Carnegie, first Marchioness of Montrose.

The precise date of Claverhouse’s birth is not known. Biographers, accepting Napier’s computation, almost unanimously assume that it took place about 1643. That is based on an erroneous deduction from a note to a decision of the Court of Session, quoted by Fountainhall under date of the 21st of July 1687. The matter under litigation was a claim put forward by Fotheringham of Powrie to levy fish from the boats passing by Broughty Castle. The Lords decided that his charter gave him sufficient right and title ‘if so be he had possessed forty years by virtue of that title.’ With special reference to one of the three defendants, it was added, ‘as for Clavers, he was seventeen years of these forty a minor, and so they must prove forty years before that.’ Napier assuming the seventeen years of Claverhouse’s minority to have been coincident with the first seventeen of the forty referred to, argued that, as a period of forty years prior to 1687 leads back to 1647, Claverhouse was not twenty-one years of age until seventeen years after 1647; in other words, that he was of age about the year 1664, and, consequently, born about 1643. The calculation is ingenious, and the result plausible; but the marriage contract of Claverhouse’s parents proves the fallacy of the original assumption from which everything depends. That authoritative document, for the discovery of which we are indebted to Sir William Fraser, was subscribed in 1645; the objection which that raises to the date worked out by Napier is obviously insurmountable.

For the approximation thus shown to be erroneous, the ‘Dictionary of National Biography’ substitutes another which has the merit of being more in accord with the known dates of some of the events in Claverhouse’s career. A memorandum preserved at Ethie and noted in the ‘History of the Carnegies,’ supplies the scrap of positive evidence upon which it is founded. It shows that, in 1653, Lady Claverhouse, as tutrix-testamentar to her son, signed a deed relating to a disposition which she was bound to make to two of her kinsmen. It is not improbable that this was done shortly after her husband’s death. If such were the case, their eldest son, who, according to the note to the decision of the Court of Session, was a minor for the space of seventeen years, would have been four years of age at the time, and must therefore have been born about the year 1649.

The only information now available concerning the future Viscount Dundee’s early life, prior to his matriculation as a student, is supplied by the Roll of the Burgesses of Dundee, which sets forth that, on the 22nd of September 1660, ‘John Graham of Claverhouse and David Graham, his brother, were admitted Burgesses and Brethren of the Guild of Dundee, by reason of their father’s privilege.’ The register of St Leonard’s College establishes the fact that the two brothers went up together to the University of St Andrews towards the beginning of 1665.

This may be looked upon as a strong confirmation of the date which we have assigned as that of Claverhouse’s birth. That he should begin his academic course in his twenty-second year and continue it up to the age of twenty-five, would have been quite contrary to the custom of a period when Scottish undergraduates, more particularly those belonging to the leading families of the country, were even more youthful than many of them are at the present day.

It has generally been assumed that Claverhouse remained at St Andrews for the full period of three years; but the University register supplies no evidence in support of this. On the contrary, the absence of John Graham’s name from the list of those of his class-mates who graduated in due course, justifies the belief that his studies were brought to a premature close before 1668. To what extent he availed himself of the opportunities afforded him during such stay as he may have made at St Andrews, is a matter with regard to which proof is wholly wanting and testimony only bare and vague.

Dr Monro, the Principal of the College of Edinburgh, in his answer to the charge brought against him on the ground of ‘his rejoicing the day that the news of Claverhouse his victory came to the town,’ admitted that he had not ‘rejoiced at the fall of my Lord Dundee,’ for whom he ‘had an extraordinary value’; and he challenged any ‘gentleman, soldier, scholar or civilized citizen’ to find fault with him for holding the fallen leader’s memory in respect. From this, the utterance of one well qualified by personal acquaintance to form a competent judgment, and unlikely, from his training and education to express it in inconsiderate terms of meaningless exaggeration, it has been argued that the subject of Monro’s eulogy must have possessed the attainments upon which men of culture naturally set store. In support of this warrantable inference, there is the statement of a writer who, though not a contemporary, is undeniably a well-informed chronicler. The author of the Memoirs of Sir Ewan Cameron says that Claverhouse ‘had ane education suitable to his birth and genius.’ According to the same authority, he ‘made a considerable progress in the mathematicks, especially in those parts of it that related to his military capacity; and there was no part of the Belles Lettres which he had not studyed with great care and exactness. He was much master in the epistolary way of writeing; for he not onely expressed himself with great ease and plaineness, but argued well, and had a great art in giving his thoughts in few words.’

Burnet, who, though a connection of Claverhouse’s, is very far from displaying any partiality for him, allows that he was ‘a man of good parts.’ Dalrymple records that ‘Dundee had inflamed his mind from his earliest youth, by the perusal of antient poets, historians and orators, with the love of the great actions they praise and describe.’ Finally, there is the testimony of the ‘officer’ who wrote the ‘Memoirs of Dundee’ published in 1714, and who makes direct reference to his ‘liberal education in humanity and in mathematicks.’

The question of Claverhouse’s scholarship is not one of special moment in itself; yet it acquires some interest from the animated controversy to which it has given rise, and which originated in a hasty comment made by Sir Walter Scott. The novelist, after referring to a newly published letter, casually added, ‘Claverhouse, it may be observed, spells like a chambermaid.’ Subsequent writers, interpreting this into a general estimate of Dundee’s educational acquirements, repeated the petty and irrelevant charge, in season and out of season, almost as though the quality of his orthography constituted a test by which his whole character was to be estimated. That Claverhouse was erratic in his spelling cannot be denied. It may be questioned, on the other hand, whether, in this respect, he displayed greater disregard for orthography than the average gentleman of his day. If he wrote ‘I hop’ for ‘I hope,’ ‘deuk’ for ‘Duke,’ ‘seased’ for ‘seized,’ ‘fisik’ for ‘physic,’ and ‘childring’ for ‘children,’ it does not require a very extensive acquaintance with the correspondence of the seventeenth century to know that dukes and earls, and even lawyers and divines, indulged in vagaries equally startling. But, if the arbitrary and occasionally whimsical spelling of his letters affords no proof of exceptional ignorance, the vigour, clearness, and directness of the style in which they are written give them a place rather above than below the epistolatory standard of the time.

After leaving St Andrews, Claverhouse, following the example set by so many generations of his countrymen, and notably by his illustrious kinsman, the Marquis of Montrose, repaired to the Continent, with the intention of devoting himself to a military career. According to his earliest biographer, ‘an Officer of the Army,’ he ‘spent some time in the French service as a volunteer, with great reputation and applause.’ This is repeated rather than confirmed by the author of the ‘Memoirs of Sir Ewan Cameron of Lochiel,’ with the addition, it is true, of the statement that it was ‘under the famous Marishall Turenne’ the young soldier received his first training. Dalrymple, without supplying precise information, records that Claverhouse ‘entered the profession of arms with an opinion he ought to know the services of different nations, and the duties of different ranks,’ that, ‘with this view he went into several foreign services,’ and that ‘when he could not obtain a command,’ he served as a volunteer.

The most trustworthy evidence in support of the statement that Claverhouse served and fought in the armies of France, is that of James Philip of Almerieclose, his standard-bearer at Killiecrankie, who, in later years, devoted a Latin epic to the memory and the praise of the gallant Graham. Referring to his hero, he says, ‘The French camps on the Loire, where Orleans lifts her towers, and on the Seine, where her increased waters lave the city of Paris, have beheld him triumphant over the defeated enemy, stained with the blood-marks of relentless war.’ The passage is, unfortunately, one in which the author has so obviously taken poetical liberty with historical facts, that his words cannot be taken literally. As the editor and translator of the poem points out, ‘there could have been no fighting on the Seine or Loire.’ Whether, on the other hand, it be probable that ‘camps of instruction were there, from which young soldiers were sent to the front,’ is a matter of little moment. Even without such explanation the passage is valuable as evidence. It may be accepted as definitively establishing the fact that it was in France Claverhouse first learnt the art of war.

It has been further conjectured that he may have belonged to the contingent of 6000 English and Scottish troops, which, under the leadership of Monmouth, joined Turenne’s army in 1672. If such were the case, the duration of his service must have been brief. There is evidence to prove that, by the summer of 1674, he had transferred his allegiance to William of Orange, and that he was present at the battle of Seneff, fought in August of that year; and there are grounds for believing that he was directly instrumental in rescuing the Prince from a perilous situation.

Macaulay, it is true, rejects the story as ‘invented’ by some Jacobite many years after both William and Dundee were dead. That, however, appears to have been hastily done, on the erroneous assumption that the account of the alleged incident went no further back than the Memoirs of 1714. They, indeed, do state of Claverhouse, that, ‘at the battle of St Neff, 1674, when the Prince of Orange was dismounted, and in great danger of being taken, he rescued him, and brought him off upon his own horse.’ But this does not constitute the sole authority. In addition to it, there is that of the Memoirs of Lochiel. It is the more valuable that the author bases his own narrative on the Latin epic to which, in the following passage, he refers as one of the sources of his compilation. ‘Besides the assistance I have from the Earl of Balcarres his memoirs of the wars, and the several relations I have had of them from many who were eyewitnesses, I have before me a manuscript copy of an historical Latin poem called “The Grameis,” written in imitation of Lucan’s “Pharsalia,” but unfinished, by Mr Philips of Amryclos, who had the office of standard-bearer during that famous expedition’ in the Highlands. From Philips he not only draws the incident of Seneff, but also gives a rough translation in English verse, of the passage commemorating this ‘vigorous exploit.’ It runs thus:—

‘When the feirce Gaule, thro’ Belgian stanks yow fled,

Fainting, alone, and destitute of aid,

While the proud victor urg’d your doubtfull fate,

And your tir’d courser sunk beneath your weight,

Did I not mount you on my vigorous steed,

And save your person by his fatal speed?’

Until recently, Philips’ poem existed in manuscript only. That circumstance consequently gives the value of distinct contemporary evidence to another effusion, of which the author cannot be suspected of having drawn from the ‘Grameis’ his allusion, unfortunately only a vague one, to the exploits of Claverhouse whilst serving under the Prince of Orange. Moreover, it was as early as January 1683, that is several years before the occurrence of the leading events celebrated in the ‘Grameis,’ that the anonymous rhymer published ‘The Muse’s New Year’s Gift, and Hansell, to the right honoured Captain John Graham of Claverhouse.’ In that poem the following lines are to be found:—

‘I saw the man who at St Neff did see

His conduct, prowess, martial gallantry:

He wore a white plumach that day; not one

Of Belgians wore a white, but him alone;

And though that day was fatal, yet he fought,

And for his part fair triumphs with him brought.’

Once, at least, during the period of his military service under the Dutch, Claverhouse returned to Scotland. He was in Edinburgh in March 1676. From there he wrote two letters to John Stewart, younger of Garntully, about the purchase of a horse and the gift of a ‘setting dogue.’ By the beginning of the following month he had again left the country; for, in a letter written by his directions after his hurried departure, and dated the 4th of April, the hope is expressed that ‘this day hie is in Holland.’ He was not to continue in the pay of the States-General much longer. The very next year he resigned his commission, and came home to solicit employment in the British Army. To account for this apparently sudden determination, the author of the Memoirs of Lochiel relates a highly dramatic incident, for which, it must be added, there is no authority but his own, and of which the details are not such as to command unhesitating belief. After having given his account of William’s rescue by Claverhouse, at Seneff, the chronicler continues:—

‘The Prince, in reward of this service, gave him a Captain’s commission, and promised him the first regiment that should fall in the way; and some years thereafter, there happening a vacancy in one of the Scotch regiments, he stood candidate for it, not only upon the assurance of that promise, but also of the letters he procured from King Charles and the Duke of York, recommending him to the Prince, in very strong terms. But, notwithstanding of all this, the Prince preferred Mr Collier, a son of the Earl of Portmore, to the regiment. The Prince then resided at his Palace of the Loo; and Captain Grahame, who was absent while this intrigue was carrying on, chanceing to meet Mr Collier in the Palace Court, expostulated the matter in very harsh terms, and gave him some blows with his cane.

‘The Prince either saw or was soon informed of what passed, and ordering Captain Grahame, who had been seized by the officer of the guards, to be brought before him, he asked him how he dared to strick any person within the verge of his Palace? The Captain answered, that he was indeed in the wrong, since it was more his Highness his business to have resented that quarrel than his; because Mr Collier had less injured him in disappointing him of the regiment, than he had done his Highness in making him breck his word. Then replyed the Prince, in an angry tone, “I make yow full reparation, for I bestow on yow what is more valuable than a regiment, when I give yow your right arm!” The Captain subjoyned, that since his Highness had the goodness to give him his liberty, he resolved to employ himself elsewhere, for he would not serve a Prince longer that had brock his word.

‘The Captain having thus thrown up his commission was preparing in haste for his voyage, when a messenger arrived from the Prince with two hundred guineas for the horse on which he had saved his life. The Captain sent the horse but ordered the gold to be distributed among the grooms of the Prince’s stables. It is said, however, that his Highness had the generosity to wryte to the King and the Duke recommending him as a fine gentleman, and a brave officer, fitt for any office, civil or military.’

In the “Life of Lieutenant-General Hugh Mackay,” the account given is more summary: ‘About this time,’ it is said, ‘the lieutenant-colonelcy of one of the regiments, forming the Scottish brigade, falling vacant, two candidates started for the appointment, both excellent officers, but men of characters widely different. These were Graham of Claverhouse, then an officer in the Prince’s service, afterwards notorious for his unrelenting cruelties to the Covenanters in the West of Scotland, and Mackay, characterised by Bishop Burnet, as the most pious military man he ever knew. The Prince preferred Mackay, which gave such mortal offence to his rival, that he instantly quitted the service and returned to Scotland, burning with resentment against the authors of his disappointment.’

Neither of these two narratives is contemporary. But the more circumstantial embodies the Jacobite legend current in the early years of the eighteenth century, whilst the briefer is founded on the tradition preserved in the family of Claverhouse’s Whig opponent. The one point on which they both agree may therefore be accepted with some confidence; and it seems plausible to ascribe Captain Graham’s withdrawal from the Dutch service to the dissatisfaction which he felt at the inadequate recognition of his claims to promotion.

Claverhouse experienced no difficulty in obtaining employment under his own sovereign. Two letters bearing on the subject have been preserved. They are both written by his relative, the Marquis of Montrose; one of them is addressed to him, the other to the Laird of Monorgan, who was also a Graham. The former is as follows:—

‘For the Laird of Claverhouse.

‘Sir,—You cannot imagine how overjoyed I should be, to have any employment at my disposal that were worthy of your acceptance; nor how much I am ashamed to offer you anything so far below your merit as that of being my Lieutenant; though I be fully persuaded that it will be a step to a much more considerable employment, and will give you occasion to confirm the Duke in the just and good opinion which I do assure you he has of you; he being a person that judges not of people’s worth by the rank they are in.

‘I do not know, after all this, in what terms, nor with what confidence, I can express my desire to have you accept this mean and inconsiderable offer; whether by endeavouring to magnify it all I can, and telling you, that it is the first troop of the Duke of York’s regiment; that I am to raise it in Scotland; and that I pretend that none but gentlemen should ride in it; or, by telling you that I am promised to be very quickly advanced, and that you shall either succeed to me, or share with me in my advancement. I can say no more, but that you will oblige me in it beyond expression.

‘I do not expect any answer to this while I am here; for I do resolve to be in Edinburgh against the first or second day of the next month; where, if you be not already, I earnestly entreat you would be pleased to meet me.—Sir, Your most affectionate cousin and servant,

'London, February 19th [1677-8].'Montrose.'

From this letter, it has been assumed that Claverhouse had previously made application to his kinsman and titular chief. There can, indeed, hardly be a doubt that it is a reply to a previous request. On the other hand, however, the second letter, written on the same day, does not altogether bear out this view. It was thus:—

‘For the Laird of Monorgan.

‘Sir,—I hope now to be able, within a week or ten days, to give you an account, by word of mouth, of my resolutions, and the reasons I have for accepting a troop in the Duke of York’s regiment of horse; so I shall forbear troubling you with a long letter; only I must tell you that I have all along met with a great deal of favour from his Royal Highness, and that he has assured me that this shall be but a step to a more considerable employment.

‘He has a very good opinion of Claverhouse, and he bid me endeavour by all means to get him for my Lieutenant. Therefore, I most earnestly beg that you would be pleased to represent to him the advantages he may have by being near the Duke, and by making himself better known to him. And withal assure him from me, that, if he will embrace this offer, he shall also share with me in my advancement and better fortune. I need not use many words to show you the disparity that is betwixt serving under me and anybody else, though of greater family, he being of my house, and descended of my family.

‘You may say more to this purpose than is fit for me to do. I shall say no more but that by this you will infinitely oblige.—Sir, Your most affectionate cousin and servant,

'London, February 19th [1677-8].'Montrose.'

It is not necessary to look upon this, with Napier, as ‘conclusive against the conjecture that Claverhouse had applied for this service,’ and as affording proof that the commission was spontaneously offered him in recognition of his military abilities. It is more plausible in itself, and more in accordance with the purport of both letters, to believe that Claverhouse had solicited employment from the Duke of York, with whom a recommendation from the Prince of Orange, who had lately become his son-in-law, was likely to possess considerable influence; that James had referred the applicant to the young Marquis, who was then raising a troop for the Duke’s regiment of horse-guards; and that he had, at the same time urged Montrose to secure the services of an officer so brave and so able as Claverhouse had already shown himself to be.

It is not clear whether Claverhouse was really called upon to do duty as a mere subaltern. If so, it was but for a few months. As early as the 21st of November 1678, the Marquis of Montrose superseded the Marquis of Athole as commander of the Royal Horse Guards in Scotland; and the opportunity thus afforded of fulfilling the promise recently made to his kinsman was not neglected. Claverhouse was at once promoted to the vacant post, and thus began that part of his career which was to make him so prominent in the history of his country.

II
THE COVENANT AND THE COVENANTERS

On the 14th of May 1678, a letter addressed to the King by his Privy Council in Scotland, contained a suggestion of which the adoption was destined to exercise an important influence on Claverhouse’s career. It was written in answer to a prior communication, which it sufficiently explains, and ran as follows:—

‘We have of late had divers informations of numerous field-conventicles kept in several places of the kingdom, who, with armed men, have in many places resisted your authority, and which by your letter, we find has reached your ears, and seeing these insolences are daily iterated, and are still upon the growing hand, and that your Majesty is graciously pleased to ask our advice, for raising of more forces,—It’s our humble opinion that, for the present exigent, there may be two company of dragoons, each consisting of one hundred, presently raised, whose constant employment may be for dissipating and interrupting those rendezvouses of rebellion; and therefore we have recommended to the Major-General, the speedy raising of them; and your Majesty may be pleased to give commissions to such qualified persons as the Major-General hath, at our desire, given in a list, to command these two companies; or to what other persons your Majesty shall think fit.’

In accordance with the advice conveyed in this letter, measures were forthwith taken for raising two additional companies. When formed and officered they were sent to join the troop which Claverhouse already commanded. At the head of this body of some three hundred men he was entrusted with the difficult task of ‘dissipating and interrupting’ the conventicles in the western and south-western districts of Scotland.

To understand the principles, motives, and aims of those against whom Claverhouse was now called upon to take action, it is necessary to recall the circumstances which accompanied and some of the events which followed the signing in 1643, of the ‘Solemn League and Covenant for Reformation and Defence of Religion, the Honour and Happiness of the King, and the Peace and Safety of the three kingdoms of Scotland, England and Ireland.’

In the month of August of that year, the respective committees of the General Assembly and of the Convention of Estates had submitted to those bodies a draft of the document, as it had been drawn up by them, after consultation and deliberation with the Committee of the English Parliament. It had been duly sanctioned, and adopted as the most powerful means, by the blessing of God, for settling and preserving the true Protestant religion, with a perfect peace in all his Majesty’s dominions, and propagating the same to other nations, and for establishing his Majesty’s throne to all ages and generations.

Two months later—on the 11th of October—the commissioners of the General Assembly issued an ordinance for the solemn receiving, swearing, and subscribing of the League and Covenant. It contained special injunctions to the Presbyteries that they should take account of the performance thereof in their several bounds; that they should proceed with the censures of the Kirk against all such as should refuse or shift to swear and subscribe, as enemies to the preservation and propagation of religion; and that they should notify their names and make particular report of them to the Commission.

On the next day, the Commissioners of the Convention of Estates, in their turn issued a proclamation by which, supplementing the censures of the Church, they ordained as a penalty on those who should ‘postpone or refuse,’ that they should ‘have their goods and rents confiscate for the use of the public,’ and that they should not ‘bruik nor enjoy any benefit, place nor office within this kingdom.’

The Covenant, which these ordinances thus required the people of Scotland to subscribe, consisted in an oath binding them to support the reformed religion in the Church of Scotland, in doctrine, worship, discipline and government, according to the Word of God, and the example of the best reformed Churches; to endeavour to bring the Churches of God in the three kingdoms to the nearest conjunction and uniformity in religion, confession of faith, form of Church government, directory for worship, and catechising; to strive, without respect of persons, for the extirpation of popery, prelacy (that is, Church government by archbishops, bishops, their chancellors and commissaries, deans and chapters, archdeacons, and all other ecclesiastical officers depending on that hierarchy), superstition, heresy, schism, profaneness and whatsoever should be found to be contrary to sound doctrine and the power of godliness; to endeavour to preserve the rights and privileges of the Parliaments, and the liberties of the kingdoms, and to preserve and defend the King’s person and authority, in the preservation and defence of the true religion and liberties of the kingdoms; to endeavour to discover all such as had been, or should be, incendiaries, malignants, or evil instruments, by hindering the reformation of religion, dividing the King from his people, or one of the kingdoms from another, or making any factions or parties amongst the people, contrary to the League and Covenant, that they might be brought to public trial, and receive condign punishment, as the degree of their offences should require or deserve, or the supreme judicatories of both kingdoms, respectively, or others having power from them for that effect, should judge convenient; and, finally, to assist and defend all those that entered into this League and Covenant, and not to suffer themselves, directly or indirectly by whatsoever combination, persuasion, or terror, to be withdrawn from this blessed union and conjunction, whether to make defection to the contrary part, or to give themselves to a detestable indifference, or neutrality.

If, at its origin, the Covenant of 1643 was practically a treaty between the heads of the Presbyterian party in Scotland and the leading Parliamentarians in England, it entered upon a new phase after the execution of Charles I. Notwithstanding the hostile attitude of the Presbyterians towards the King himself, they were strongly opposed to the subversion of the monarchical form of government. On the 5th of February, six days after the King’s death, and one day earlier than the formal abolition of the monarchy by the English House of Commons, the Scottish Estates of Parliament passed an Act by which Prince Charles, then in Holland, was proclaimed King, in succession to his father. Following upon this, a deputation was sent to the Hague to invite Charles to come over and take possession of the throne of his ancestors. As a preliminary condition, however, it was required that he should give adhesion to the principles set forth in the Solemn Covenant. This he hesitated to do; and the commissioners returned, well pleased, indeed, with “the sweet and courteous disposition” of the Prince, but disappointed at the failure of their mission, owing to the pernicious influence of the “very evil generation, both of English and Scots,” by whom he was surrounded.

A second deputation, sent shortly after this, to treat with the Prince at Breda, was more successful. Charles, seeing no other way open to him of regaining possession of the throne, gave his consent to the demands of the commissioners. In June 1650, he returned to Scotland. On the 1st of January 1651, he was crowned at Scone. Before taking the oath of coronation, and after the full text of the Solemn League and Covenant had been distinctly read to him, kneeling and lifting up his right hand, he assured and declared, on his oath, in the presence of Almighty God, the searcher of hearts, his allowance and approbation of all it set forth, and faithfully obliged himself to prosecute the ends it had in view, in his station and calling. He bound himself in advance to consent and agree to all Acts of Parliament establishing Presbyterial government; to observe their provisions in his own practice and family; and never to make opposition to them or endeavour to make any change in them.

It was not till nearly ten years later that Charles II. was really restored to the throne. The event was hailed with joy by the Presbyterians, who looked upon it as the accession of a covenanting king, and who founded their hopes, not only on the promise made at Scone, but also on a letter which Charles had forwarded, through Sharp, to the Presbytery of Edinburgh, to be communicated to all the Presbyteries in Scotland, and in which he expressed his resolve to protect and preserve the government of the Church of Scotland, as settled by law, without violation.

But the law itself was to be modified in such a manner as to enable the King to violate the spirit of his promise whilst leaving him a verbal quibble with which to justify his breach of faith. On the 9th of February an Act was passed annulling the Parliament and Committees of 1649, that is, declaring those proceedings to be illegal, by which Presbyterianism had been established on its firmest foundations. Less than three weeks later, two other Acts were passed with a view to preparing the way for a complete revolution in Church matters. The first of them, known as the Act Rescissory, had for its objects the annulling of the ‘pretended Parliaments’ of the years 1640, 1641, 1644, 1645, 1646, and 1648—a measure which Principal Baillie described at the time as ‘pulling down all our laws at once which concerned our Church since 1633.’ The other, which purported to be ‘concerning religion and Church government,’ was substantially an assertion and recognition of the King’s claim to be considered as head of the Church. It declared that it was his full and firm intention to maintain the true reformed Protestant religion in its purity of doctrine and worship, as it had been established within the kingdom during the reigns of his father and of his grandfather; to promote the power of godliness; to encourage the exercises of religion, both public and private; and to suppress all profaneness and disorderly walking; and that, for this end he would give all due countenance and protection to the ministers of the Gospel, ‘they containing themselves within the bounds and limits of their ministerial calling and behaving themselves with that submission and obedience to his Majesty’s authority and commands that is suitable to the allegiance and duty of good subjects.’ A concluding clause provided that, notwithstanding the Rescissory Act, the ‘present administration by sessions, presbyteries, and synods—they keeping within bounds and behaving themselves’—should, ‘in the meantime’ be ‘allowed.’

The official toleration of Presbyterianism lasted till the 27th of May 1662. On that day an Act of Parliament, after declaring in its preamble that the ordering and disposal of the external government and policy of the Church properly belonged to the King, as an inherent right of the Crown, and by virtue of his royal prerogative and supremacy in causes ecclesiastical, proceeded to re-establish the ancient government of the Church by the sacred order of Bishops. A further step was taken on the 5th of September of the same year by the imposition of a test on all persons in public trust. Before entering upon the duties of any office under the Crown, they were called upon to subscribe a declaration setting forth that they judged it unlawful in subjects, under pretence of reformation, or for any motive, to enter into leagues and covenants; that they more especially considered the Solemn League and Covenant to have been contrary to the fundamental laws and liberties of the kingdom; and that they repudiated any obligation laid upon them by their former sworn recognition and acceptance of this bond.

As a sequel, an Act not of Parliament but of Council, ordained that the Covenant should be burnt by the hand of the common hangman. Prior to this, however, on the 11th of June 1662, an Act concerning such benefices and stipends as had been possessed without presentations from the lawful patrons deprived the Church of the right claimed by it of calling and choosing its own ministers. Under its provisions, no minister admitted subsequently to the year 1649 could possess any legal claim to his stipend unless he obtained a new presentation, and collation from the bishop of the diocese.

The number of those that consented to make the required application was so small that it was thought necessary to have recourse to the Privy Council for the purpose of enforcing the new law. On the 1st of October, an order was issued which deprived the recusant ministers of their parishes, and required them, with their families, to remove beyond the bounds of their respective presbyteries before the first day of the following November. The Archbishop of Glasgow, at whose instance this coercive measure was adopted, had asserted that there would not be ten in his diocese who refused compliance, under dread of such a penalty. The result falsified his prediction. Nearly four hundred ministers throughout Scotland abandoned their benefices, and subjected themselves and their families to the hardships and privations of banishment rather than recognise the new modelling of the Church.

In many cases the ejection of the ministers and the loss of their stipends did not prevent them from continuing the duties of their office. Secret meetings, either in private houses or in secluded localities, replaced the ordinary services of the Church. For the purpose of checking this violation of the law, the Council, on the 13th of August 1663, again intervened with an Act. It commanded and charged all ministers appointed in, or since, the year 1649, who had not subsequently obtained presentations from the patrons, and yet continued to preach or to exercise any duty proper to the functions of the ministry, either at the parish churches or in any other place, to remove themselves, their families and their goods, within twenty days, out of their respective parishes, and not to reside within twenty miles of them, nor within six miles of Edinburgh or any cathedral church, or three miles of any burgh within the kingdom.

In 1665, this Act was extended so as to include the older ministers, that is, those who had obtained their livings prior to the year 1649; and, on the same day, a proclamation against conventicles and meetings for religious exercises was published. It warned all such as should be present at these unlawful gatherings, that they would be looked upon as seditious persons, and should be punished by fining, confining and other corporal punishments, according to the judgment of the Privy Council, or any having the King’s authority.

To replace the recusant clergy, a number of ministers, King’s curates, as they were called, had been appointed by the bishops. They were so coldly received by the people that, to provide them with congregations, the Privy Council commanded all loyal subjects to frequent the ordinary meetings of public worship in their own parish churches; and required magistrates to treat those who kept away as though they were Sabbath breakers, and to punish them by the infliction of a fine of twenty shillings for each absence. These measures having proved ineffective, the pecuniary penalty was greatly increased by a subsequent Act of Parliament. For refusing to recognise the curates, each nobleman, gentleman or heritor was to lose a fourth part of his yearly revenue; every yeoman, tenant or farmer was to forfeit such a proportion of his free moveables (after the payment of the rents due to the master and landlord) as the Privy Council should think fit, but not exceeding a fourth part of them; and every burgess was to be deprived of the privilege of merchandising and trading, and of all other ‘liberties within burgh,’ in addition to the confiscation of a fourth part of his moveable goods. Further, to prevent any evasion of the law against conventicles, proclamations issued at various times, prohibited all preaching and praying in families, if more than three persons, besides the members of the household, were present; and made landlords, magistrates and heads of families answerable for the default of those under their charge to conform to the episcopal government and ritual.

It was not the intention of those who had instigated this coercive and penal legislation that it should remain a dead letter. As a means of enforcing obedience to it and of levying the fines imposed upon those who would not yield dutiful submission, troops were sent into the discontented districts. The south-western counties, in which the Covenanters were most numerous and most determined, were entrusted to Sir James Turner. His orders were to punish recalcitrant families by quartering his men on them, and, if they remained obstinate, to distrain their goods and gear, and to sell them in discharge of the fines incurred. It was the carrying out of these instructions that first led to armed resistance on the part of the Covenanters.

The immediate cause of the rising, however, is conflictingly stated by different writers. Kirkton’s version of the occurrence, which has been reproduced almost literally by Wodrow, is to the effect that, on the 13th of November 1666, four of the men who had abandoned their homes on the appearance of the military, coming, in the course of their wanderings, towards the old clachan of Dalry, in Galloway, to seek refreshment after long fasting, providentially met, upon the highway, three or four soldiers driving before them a company of people, for the purpose of compelling them to thresh the corn of a poor old neighbour of theirs, who had also fled from his house, and from whom the church fines, as they were called, were to be exacted in this way. ‘This,’ says Kirkton, ‘troubled the poor countrymen very much, yet they passed it in silence, till, coming to the house where they expected refreshment, they were informed the soldiers had seized the poor old man, and were about to bind him and set him bare upon a hot iron gird-iron, there to torment him in his own house. Upon this they ran to relieve the poor man, and coming to his house, desired the soldiers to let the poor man go, which the soldiers refused, and so they fell to words; whereupon two of the soldiers rushing out of the chamber with drawn swords, and making at the countrymen, had almost killed two of them behind their backs, and unawares; the countrymen having weapons, one of them discharged his pistol, and hurt one of the soldiers with the piece of a tobacco pipe with which he had loaded his pistol instead of ball. This made the soldiers deliver their arms and prisoner.’

The accuracy of the account given by Kirkton has been denied. Burnet distinctly asserts that ‘this was a story made only to beget compassion’; that after the insurrection was quashed, the Privy Council sent commissioners to examine into the violences that had been committed, particularly in the parish where this was alleged to have been done; that he himself read the report they made to the Council, and all the depositions taken by them from the people of the district, but that no such violence on the part of the military was mentioned in any one of them. The wounded soldier himself, one George Deanes, a corporal in Sir Alexander Thomson’s company, from whose body ten pieces of tobacco pipe were subsequently extracted by the surgeon, told Sir James Turner that he was shot because he would not take the covenanting oath.

Whether premeditated and concerted, or merely ‘an occasional tumult upon a sudden fray,’ this attack on the military was the signal for a gathering of the discontented peasantry of the district. On the morrow, the four countrymen, one of whom was M’Lelland of Boscob, being joined by six or seven others, fell upon a second party of soldiers. One of these, having offered resistance was killed; his comrades, about a dozen in number, according to Kirkton, quietly gave up their arms. Within two days the insurgents had recruited about fourscore horse and two hundred foot. Proceeding to Dumfries, where Turner then lay with only a few of his soldiers, the greater number of them being scattered about the country in small parties, for the purpose of levying the fines, they seized him, together with the papers and the money in his possession, and carried him off as a prisoner. After this, ‘in their abundant loyalty,’ as Wodrow characterises it, they went to the Cross and publicly drank to the health of the King and the prosperity of his Government.

In daily increasing numbers the insurgents marched towards Edinburgh. At Lanark, where all the contingents they could expect from the south and west had already joined them, and where ‘this rolling snow-ball was at the biggest,’ they were estimated at some three thousand. Here they renewed the Solemn League and Covenant. In spite of repeated warnings from men who, whilst fully sympathising with them, yet understood the hopeless nature of the enterprise in which they were engaged, the leaders determined to push on towards the capital. But the enthusiasm of many amongst their followers was beginning to wane; and by the time Colinton was reached, the ill-armed and undisciplined crowd had dwindled down again to a bare thousand. Then at length, even those who had previously rejected the well-meant advice of their more cautious friends, and had declared that, having been called by the Lord to this undertaking, they would not retire till he who bade them come should likewise command them to go, became conscious of their desperate plight, and consented to a retreat towards the west. Turning the eastern extremity of the Pentland hills, they directed their march towards Biggar.

But it was too late. Dalziel, the governor of Edinburgh, who, at the head of a hastily mustered body of regulars, had been sent out to intercept them, came upon them at Rullion Green, on the evening of the 28th of November. A sharp engagement followed. Twice in the course of it success seemed to favour the insurgents; but in the end the military training and the superior weapons of their opponents prevailed, and the Covenanters were scattered in headlong flight. Of the soldiers, only five fell. On the other side there were about forty killed and a hundred and thirty taken. These prisoners were next day marched into Edinburgh. They might all have saved their lives if they had consented to renounce the Covenant; but their refusal to do so was severely punished. According to Burnet, who certainly does not exaggerate the number who suffered the death penalty, ten were hanged upon one gibbet in Edinburgh, and thirty-five more were sent to be hanged up before their own doors. Many were transported across the seas. The torture of the boot and of the thumbkins—the latter said to have been introduced by Dalziel, who had learnt their use in Russia, where he served for a time—was freely applied in the hope of wringing from the prisoners the admission that the rising was part of a concerted plot for the subversion of the existing government. They all strenuously denied it.

That shortly prior to this, a conspiracy had been formed for this object is a well established fact. A document discovered by Dr M’Crie in the Dutch archives and published by him in his edition of the Memoirs of Veitch, shows that a plan was formed, in July 1666, for seizing on the principal forts in the kingdom, and that ‘the persons embarked in this scheme had carried on a correspondence with the Government of the United Provinces then at war with Great Britain, and received promises of assistance from that quarter.’ Another document referred to by the same writer asserts that the castles of Edinburgh, Stirling, and Dumbarton were amongst those to be taken possession of. Whether this Dutch plot and the Galloway insurrection were connected with each other, is a point with regard to which historians have maintained conflicting opinions in accordance with their own sympathies. The strongest evidence that Napier is able to adduce, on the one side, is the fact that a Mr Wallace is mentioned as one of those in correspondence with Holland, and that Colonel James Wallace was the leader of the insurgents whom Dalziel routed at Rullion Green. But, on the other hand, it is pointed out by Dr M’Crie that, as the other names are obviously fictitious, this coincidence affords no ground for supposing that the Colonel was the person referred to.

For many months after the Pentland rout, the harrying of the late insurgents continued; but, at length, the political changes which placed the administration of the country into the hands of Lauderdale, also marked the inauguration of a more lenient policy towards the Presbyterians. On the 15th of July 1669, a letter was communicated to the Council, in which the King signified his desire that it should authorise as many of the ejected ministers as had lived peaceably in the places where they had resided, to return and preach, and exercise the other functions of their office in the parish churches which they formerly occupied, providing these were vacant. Ministers who took collation from the bishop of the diocese and kept presbyteries and synods, might be allowed to receive their stipends. The others were not to be permitted ‘to meddle with the local stipend, but only to possess the manse and glebe.’

This concession proved of little effect. The few who availed themselves of the ‘Indulgence’—two and forty in all, according to Wodrow—were looked upon as renegades by the irreconcilables, and found no more toleration at their hands than the curates had done. The moderate Presbyterians who accepted the ‘indulged’ clergy were denounced as traitors to the cause. The conventicles which it had been hoped the new measure would suppress, began to assume a more desperate character, as the gatherings of those who, in their unbending determination to abide by the very letter of the Covenant, declared themselves freed from their allegiance to a king whom they considered as perjured, and against whose agents, as malignant persecutors of the true religion, they believed themselves justified in adopting the most violent measures. It is of these extremists that the covenanting party now consisted.

It has been urged that these new developments were too natural, in the circumstances of the time, not to have been anticipated, by some, at least, of those who were responsible for the government of the country. They have consequently been credited with the deliberate intention not only of causing a disruption in the ranks of the Presbyterians, but also of making the expected refusal of the indulgence a pretext for further and sterner measures of coercion. If such were the case, the machiavellian policy was successful. Within six months, the old system of penal legislation was again adopted. On the 3rd of February 1670, a proclamation prohibiting conventicles under heavy penalties was issued by the Council. It was followed in August by an Act of Parliament which made it illegal for outed ministers not licensed by the Council or for any other persons not authorised or tolerated by the bishop of the diocese, to preach, expound Scripture, or pray in any meeting, except in their own houses and to members of their own family. Such as should be convicted of disobedience to this law were to be imprisoned till they found security, to the amount of five thousand merks, for their future good behaviour. Persons attending meetings of this kind were to be heavily fined, according to their respective conditions, for each separate offence. Against outdoor meetings, or ‘field conventicles,’ the law was still more severe. Death was to be the penalty for preaching or praying at them, or even for convening them. A reward of five hundred merks was offered to any of his Majesty’s subjects who should seize and secure the person of an active conventicler. As a further inducement, a subsequent proclamation made over to the captor the fine incurred by the offender he secured.

Amongst the many devices resorted to at this time, with a view to enforcing conformity, there is one which, because of its immediate consequences, is deserving of special mention. In October 1677, the Council addressed a letter to the Earls of Glencairn and Dundonald and to Lord Ross, requiring them to call together the heritors of the shires of Ayr and Renfrew, and to urge on them the necessity for taking effective measures to repress conventicles. The answer given to the three noblemen and forwarded by them to Edinburgh was practically a refusal though it took the form of a plea of inability on the part of those whose co-operation had thus been invoked. This alleged powerlessness was made an excuse for the next step taken by the Government, that of quartering a body of eight thousand Highlanders in the disaffected counties, on those who refused to subscribe a bond by which every heritor made himself answerable, not only for his wife, children, and servants, but also for his tenants.

The commission for raising the Highlanders authorised them to take free quarters, and, if need were, to seize on horses as well as on ammunition and provisions. They were indemnified against all pursuits, civil and criminal, which might at any time be intented against them or anything they should do, by killing, wounding, apprehending, or imprisoning such as should make opposition to the King’s authority, or by arresting such as they might have reason to suspect. For two months the clansmen availed themselves to the full of the arbitrary powers with which the royal warrant invested them. At length the Duke of Hamilton appealed directly to the King to put an end to the oppression exercised in his name by the Highland men; and an express was sent down from London, requiring the Council to disband them and to send them back to their homes. This brings events down to 1678, the year in which Claverhouse was appointed to the command of the dragoons who were to make another effort to disperse the conventicles against which so many Acts of Parliament and decrees of Council had been directed in vain, and which even the depredations of the Highland host had failed to check.

III
DISPERSING THE CONVENTICLERS

By the end of 1678 Claverhouse was at Moffat, expecting to be joined by one of the newly-levied troops of dragoons—that under Captain Inglis. From that town he forwarded to the Earl of Linlithgow, Commander-in-chief of the King’s forces, the first of a series of despatches which contain a precise and detailed account of his movements at this time. As indicating the spirit in which he had undertaken the duties assigned to him, and the strict and literal obedience to orders that characterised his execution of them, the document is both interesting and valuable. It is dated the 28th of December, and runs as follows:—

‘My Lord,—I came here last night with the troop, and am just going to march for Dumfries, where I resolve to quarter the whole troop. I have not heard anything of the dragoons, though it be now about nine o’clock, and they should have been here last night, according to your Lordship’s orders. I suppose they must have taken some other route. I am informed, since I came, that this country has been very loose. On Tuesday was eight days, and Sunday, there were great field-conventicles just by here, with great contempt of the regular clergy, who complain extremely when I tell them I have no orders to apprehend anybody for past misdemeanours. And besides that, all the particular orders I have being contained in that order of quartering, every place where we quarter must see them, which makes them fear the less. I am informed that the most convenient post for quartering the dragoons will be Moffat, Lochmaben and Annan; whereby the whole country may be kept in awe. Besides that, my Lord, they tell me that the end of the bridge of Dumfries is in Galloway; and that they may hold conventicles at our nose and we not dare to dissipate them, seeing our orders confine us to Dumfries and Annandale. Such an insult as that would not please me; and, on the other hand, I am unwilling to exceed orders, so that I expect from your Lordship orders how to carry in such cases. I send this with one of my troop, who is to attend orders till he be relieved. I will send one every Monday, and the dragoons one every Thursday, so that I will have the happiness to give your Lordship account of our affairs twice a week, and your Lordship occasion to send your commands for us as often. In the meantime, my Lord, I shall be doing, according to the instructions I have, what shall be found most advantageous for the King’s service, and most agreeable to your Lordship.—I am, my Lord, your Lordship’s most humble and obedient servant,

J. Grahame.’

‘My Lord, if your Lordship give me any new orders, I will beg they may be kept as secret as possible; and sent to me so suddenly as the information some of the favourers of the fanatics are to send may be prevented, which will extremely facilitate the executing of them.’

On the 6th of January 1679, Claverhouse, now at Dumfries, again addressed a despatch to the Commander. He appears to have, in the meantime, received an explanation of the Council’s intention, and an intimation that his conscientious regard for the exact terms of his commission did not meet with unqualified approval. This may be gathered from the following paragraph in his letter:—

‘My Lord, since I have seen the Act of Council, the scruple I had about undertaking anything without the bounds of these two shires, is indeed frivolous, but was not so before. For if there had been no such Act, it had not been safe for me to have done anything but what my order warranted; and since I knew it not, it was to me the same thing as if it had not been. And for my ignorance of it, I must acknowledge that till now, in any service I have been in, I never enquired farther in the laws, than the orders of my superior officers.’

In another passage, having to report various incidents of recent occurrence, with respect to some of which it was intended to make formal complaint, he again gives proof of his respect for discipline, and manifests his determination not only to enforce it, but also to compensate those upon whom injury might be inflicted by any breach of it on the part of the men under his command. At the same time, he does not hesitate to make it clearly understood that, whilst ready to answer for his own conduct, he repudiates responsibility for the actions of others. His own words are as follows:—

‘On Saturday night, when I came back here, the sergeant who commands the dragoons in the Castle came to see me; and while he was here, they came and told me there was a horse killed just by, upon the street, by a shot from the Castle. I went immediately and examined the guard, who denied point blank that there had been any shot from thence. I went and heard the Bailie take depositions of men that were looking on, who declared, upon oath, that they saw the shot from the guard-hall, and the horse immediately fall. I caused also search for the bullet in the horse’s head, which was found to be of their calibre. After that I found it so clear, I caused seize upon him who was ordered by the sergeant in his absence to command the guard, and keep him prisoner till he find out the man,—which I suppose will be found himself. His name is James Ramsay, an Angusman, who has formerly been a lieutenant of horse, as I am informed. It is an ugly business, for, besides the wrong the poor man has got in losing his horse, it is extremely against military discipline to fire out of a guard. I have appointed the poor man to be here to-morrow, and bring with him some neighbours to declare the worth of the horse, and have assured him to satisfy him if the Captain, who is to be here to-morrow, refuse to do it. I am sorry to hear of another accident that has befallen the dragoons, which I believe your Lordship knows better than I, seeing they say that there is a complaint made of it to your Lordship or the Council; which is, that they have shot a man in the arm with small shot, and disenabled him of it, who had come this length with a horse to carry baggage for some of my officers; but this being before they came to Moffat, does not concern me.

‘The Stewart-Depute, before good company, told me that several people about Moffat were resolved to make a complaint to the Council against the dragoons for taking free quarters; that if they would but pay their horse-corn and their ale, they should have all the rest free; that there were some of the officers that had, at their own hand, appointed themselves locality above three miles from their quarter. I begged them to forbear till the Captain and I should come there, when they should be redressed in everything. Your Lordship will be pleased not to take any notice of this, till I have informed myself upon the place.

‘This town is full of people that have resetted, and lodged constantly in their houses intercommuned persons and field preachers. There are some that absent themselves for fear; and Captain Inglis tells me there are Bailies have absented themselves there at Annan, and desired from me order to apprehend them; which I refused, for they are not included in all the Act of Council. Mr Cupar, who is here Bailie and Stewart for my Lord Stormont, offered to apprehend Bell that built the meeting-house, if I would concur. I said to him that it would be acceptable, but that the order from the Council did only bear the taking up the names of persons accessory to the building of it.’

The meeting-house referred to was situated in the neighbourhood of Castlemilk, and had been built at the expense of the common purse of the disaffected. It is described as a good large house, about sixty feet in length and between twenty and thirty in breadth, with only one door and with two windows at each side, and one at either end. After its purpose had become known to the authorities, it was fitted up with stakes and with a ‘hek’ and manger, to make it pass for a byre. In spite of this, an order for its destruction was issued by the Privy Council, shortly before Claverhouse’s arrival in the district.

The first duty he was called upon to perform was that of supplying the squad that was to serve as an escort to James Carruthers, the Stewart-Depute, who had been commissioned to carry out the order. The dragoons themselves took no part in the actual demolition; but their presence was necessary, not only to overawe resistance, but also to compel the ‘four score of countrymen, all fanatics,’ whom Carruthers brought with him, to pull down the building. ‘The Stewart-Depute,’ Claverhouse reported, ‘performed his part punctually enough. The walls were thrown down, and timber burnt. So perished the charity of many ladies.’

In subsequent despatches Claverhouse gives the most minute particulars as to the manner in which he has carried out his orders for the apprehension of various persons; and does not spare his comments on the lack of adequate support in the discharge of his arduous and ungrateful duties. A point upon which he lays great stress is the insufficiency of the arrangements made for supplying his men with proper quarters and with forage for their horses. He was obliged, he said, to let the dragoons quarter at large; and he was convinced that this was extremely improper at a time when the Council seemed resolved to proceed vigorously against the disaffected. He thought it strange, too, that they who had the honour to serve the King should have to pay more for hay and straw than would be asked from any stranger. He was determined for his part, that his troop should not suffer from the neglect or indifference of the commissioners appointed to treat with him. Though very unwilling to disoblige any gentleman, if his men ran short, he would go to any of the commissioners’ lands that were near, and requisition what was required, offering the current rates in payment. This, he thought, was a step which he was justified in taking, and he was ready to defend his conduct if called upon to do so.

Another serious ground for complaint was the want of proper information. Good intelligence, he said, was the thing most wanted. The outlawed ministers, men like Welsh of Irongray, were preaching within twenty or thirty miles, yet nothing could be done for want of spies to bring timely and trustworthy information concerning their movements. On the other hand, the conventiclers received regular and speedy knowledge of any expedition intended against them. There was reason to suppose that their informants were sometimes the troopers entrusted with orders. Of the treachery of one of these, who did not deliver till the twentieth a despatch dated the fifteenth, he was so convinced that, had it not been for the man’s influential patrons, he would have turned him out of the troop with infamy, instead of merely putting him under arrest. The result of such insufficient and unsatisfactory service was well exemplified in the case of a number of persons whom he had been instructed to seize in Galloway. He had set out the very night he received his orders, and had covered forty miles of country. Of those for whom search was made, only two were apprehended, and that because they refused to take the same precautions as the rest for their safety. ‘The other two Bailies were fled, and their wives lying above the clothes in the bed, and great candles lighted, waiting for the coming of the party, and told them they knew of their coming, and had as good intelligence as they themselves; and that if the other two were seized on, it was their own faults, that would not contribute for intelligence.’

Claverhouse’s complaints produced but slight effect, though they were repeated until he grew weary of making them. Failing to obtain satisfaction, he bluntly declared that he would never solicit more, but that, if the King’s service suffered in consequence, he would let the blame lie where it should.

About this time, however, an important measure, and one which brought down upon him the jealous displeasure of the Marquis of Queensberry, who resented it as an infringement of his rights, was adopted in Claverhouse’s favour. Even if all the magistrates in the disaffected districts had been men of unimpeachable loyalty to the Government, the necessity for obtaining their co-operation would frequently have hampered and delayed the military authorities. But many of them were soon discovered to be lukewarm partisans at best; whilst not a few, if they did not openly side with the conventiclers, aided and abetted them by a deliberate and studied inactivity. To remedy this, and to give Claverhouse freer hand, he was, in March 1679, appointed sheriff-depute of the shires of Dumfries and Wigtown, and also of the stewartries of Annandale and Kirkcudbright. Andrew Bruce of Earlshall, the lieutenant of his own troop of horse, was given him as a colleague. They were not, however, wholly to supersede the sheriffs previously in office, but only to sit with those judges or to supply them in their absence. Moreover, their powers were limited to putting the laws into execution only against withdrawers from the public ordinances, keepers of conventicles, and such as were guilty of disorderly baptisms and marriages, resetting and communing with fugitives, and intercommuned persons and vagrant preachers.

Claverhouse had not been long in the exercise of his twofold duties before he began to realise that his efforts were far from producing the desired results. Not only were conventicles as numerous as before, but there were also signs which convinced him that passive resistance was not all he would soon have to encounter. In a despatch which he wrote from Dumfries on the 21st of April 1679, he informed the Earl of Linlithgow that Mr Welsh was accustoming both ends of the country to face the King’s force, and certainly intended to break out into an open rebellion. In view of this, he pointed out that the arms of the militia in Dumfriesshire as well as in Wigtownshire and Annandale, were in the hands of the country people, though very disaffected; and that those taken from the stewartry were in the custody of the town of Kirkcudbright, the most irregular place in the kingdom. He consequently suggested that they should be entrusted to his keeping, and also that his own men should be provided with more suitable weapons, those which they had got from the Castle being worth nothing.

A few days later, Lord Ross, writing from Lanark, conveyed a similar warning. He could learn nothing, he said, but of an inclination to rise, although there were none yet actually in arms. This was on the 2nd of May. On the 5th he forwarded another despatch in which he had to report an encounter between a small party of troopers and some peasants of the district. The soldiers had been sent out to apprehend a man who was reported to have in his possession some of the ‘new-fashioned arms,’ that is, halberts which were provided with a cleek, or crooked knife, for the purpose of cutting the dragoons’ bridles, and of which the manufacture was in itself an indication of what was intended. After seizing the young fellow, who did not deny that he had been enlisted as one of those who were to defend the conventicles in arms, the troopers, instead of returning with their prisoner stabled their horses and fell a-drinking. Some of the neighbours, availing themselves of the opportunity, attacked them with forks, and the like, and wounded one of them ‘very desperately ill.’

The next day Claverhouse also forwarded his report from Dumfries. It contained, in addition to an account of his own movements, the following comment on orders which he had just received, and which indicated that the Earl of Linlithgow was also alive to the dangers of the situation:—

‘My Lord, I have received an order yesterday from your Lordship, which I do not know how to go about on a sudden, as your Lordship seems to expect. For I know not what hand to turn to, to find those parties that are in arms. I shall send out to all quarters, and establish spies; and shall endeavour to engage them Sunday next, if it be possible. And if I get them not here, I shall go and visit them in Teviotdale or Carrick; where they say, they dare look honest men in the face.’

On the 3rd of May, a few days before Lord Ross and Claverhouse drew up their respective reports, there had happened an event which was destined to bring matters to an immediate crisis, and which proved the signal for another, and a far more serious rising than that of 1666. James Sharp, Archbishop of St Andrews and Primate of Scotland, was murdered on Magus Muir, by a party of Covenanters.

Of this terrible tragedy, each side has its own account. On the one hand, there is that which is based on the narrative subsequently drawn up by Russell, one of the leading actors in it. According to this version, no premeditation existed on the part of the nine men concerned. They were in search of William Carmichael, the Sheriff-depute of Fifeshire, a man who had made himself obnoxious by the unrelenting severity which he displayed in carrying out the laws against the Covenanters. Having missed him, they were about to separate, when information was brought them that Sharp’s carriage was approaching. Interpreting this into ‘a clear call from God to fall upon him,’ they there and then resolved ‘to execute the justice of God upon him for the innocent blood he had shed.’

But if the Archbishop’s murder was not determined upon until the actual moment when circumstances cast him into the hands of his enemies, Russell’s account shows that it had been discussed a short time prior to its perpetration. He states that, on the 11th of April, a meeting was held to consider what course should be taken with Carmichael to scare him from his cruel courses; that it was decided to fall upon him at St Andrews; and that when ‘some objected, what if he should be in the prelate’s house, what should be done in such a case, all present judged duty to hang both over the post, especially the Bishop, it being by many of the Lord’s people and ministers judged a duty long since, not to suffer such a person to live, who had shed and was shedding so much of the blood of the saints, and knowing that other worthy Christians had used means to get him upon the road before.’ He further represents himself as urging the murder of Sharp, in the course of the hurried consultation held as the primate’s carriage was approaching, on the ground that ‘he had before been at several meetings with several godly men in other places of the kingdom, who not only judged it their duty to take that wretch’s life, and some others, but had essayed it twice before.’

Whilst it would appear from this account that no definite plan had been formed, to be carried out on the 3rd of May, though some of the more desperate of the Covenanters had come to a general understanding not to neglect any favourable opportunity ‘to execute the justice of God’ upon the wretch whom the Lord delivered into their hands, the other version, accepting the official narrative published immediately after the murder, asserts a distinct and premeditated purpose on the part of the assassins. It founds this on the ‘informations’ which were sent from St Andrews to the Privy Council, and which purported to embody the evidence of persons alleged to have been in communication with the men who perpetrated the crime.

In these it was stated that his Grace was waylaid by divers parties and could not escape, whether he went straight to St Andrews or repaired to his house at Scotscraig; that three days before the murder, several of those concerned in it met in Magask, at the house of John Miller, one of the witnesses, where they concerted the business; that the next night they put up with Robert Black, another witness, whose wife was a great instigator of the deed; that at parting, when one of them kissed her, the woman prayed that God might bless and prosper them, adding, ‘if long Leslie’—the episcopalian minister of Ceres—‘be with him, lay him on the green also,’ to which the favoured individual whom she more particularly addressed, holding up his hand, answered, ‘this is the hand that shall do it’; and that further, on the morning of the 3rd of May, the nine men followed the coach for a considerable distance, intending to attack it, first on the heath to the south of Ceres, and then at the double dykes of Magask, though owing to various circumstances, duly detailed, they did not get what seemed an available opportunity of doing so until it reached Magus Muir.

Standing thus, the question of premeditation gave rise to a long and acrimonious controversy in which recriminations and invectives were freely bandied, and which, being characterised, on either side, rather by a determination to uphold a preconceived opinion than by a desire to arrive at the plain truth, naturally led to no satisfactory conclusion.

The murder of Archbishop Sharp was followed by further proclamations against the Covenanters, to whom, as a body, the Government attributed the crime; and the episcopalian agents throughout the country, actuated partly by a desire for revenge, partly by fear for their own safety, displayed increased zeal in carrying out the repressive enactments of the Privy Council. This was met on the other side with corresponding measures for self-defence. Even before the tragedy at Magus Muir, a determination to repel force by force had been noted and reported, and conventicles had ceased to be merely peaceful gatherings of unarmed men. They now began to assume the appearance of military camps, to which the numerous smaller congregations that joined together for mutual protection gave formidable proportions.

That with a view to bringing matters to an issue and saving themselves by a general rising, Balfour and the other outlaws who had fled as he had, for protection, to the west, after the murder of the primate, were further instrumental in stirring up a spirit of rebellion, scarcely admits of doubt, and is, indeed, conceded by Wodrow. But it is probable that they only helped to precipitate what would not long have been delayed under any circumstances, and what Robert Hamilton, brother to the Laird of Preston, and others who, like him, were violently opposed to the indulgence, had for some time been working to bring about. Towards the end of May, these men put forth a manifesto, in which they declared it to be their duty ‘to publish to the world their testimony to the truth and cause which they owned, and against the sins and defections of the times.’

In accordance with this proclamation, they decided that a party of armed men should go to some public place and burn the Acts of Parliament passed since 1660 ‘for overturning the whole covenanted reformation.’ Amongst these was included ‘that presumptuous Act for imposing an holy anniversary day to be kept yearly upon the 29th of May, as a day of rejoicing and thanksgiving for the King’s birth and restoration,’ whereby the appointers had ‘intruded upon the Lord’s prerogative,’ and the observers had ‘given the glory to the creature that is due to our Lord Redeemer, and rejoiced over the setting up an usurping power to the destroying the interest of Christ in the land.’

The 29th of May was at hand; and it was thought fitting that the obnoxious anniversary should witness the public protest and demonstration. Glasgow was the place originally chosen for the ‘declaration and testimony of some of the true Presbyterian party in Scotland,’ and for burning ‘the sinful and unlawful Acts’ passed against them, just as their own ‘sacred covenant’ had been burned. But a considerable number of the royal troops previously quartered in Lanark having been sent up to the city, it was thought prudent to go no nearer to it than Rutherglen. A party of the irreconcilables accordingly marched to the royal burgh. After burning the hated Acts in the bonfire with which the day was being solemnised, they put it out as a further protest against the celebration, publicly read their own declaration and testimony, and affixed a copy of it to the Market Cross.

On that same Thursday, Claverhouse, now at Falkirk, sent the Earl of Linlithgow a despatch containing the following paragraph:—

‘I am certainly informed there is a resolution taken among the Whigs, that eighteen parishes shall meet Sunday next in Kilbride Moor, within four miles of Glasgow. I resolve, though I do not believe it, to advertise my Lord Ross, so that with our joint force we may attack them. They say they are to part no more, but keep in a body.’

At once taking measure to carry out the plan thus indicated, Claverhouse set out for Glasgow. On his way he received information of the proceedings at Rutherglen Cross, and thought it his duty to proceed, with his men, to the scene of the demonstration. The sequel is told in the next despatch to the Earl of Linlithgow:—

‘Glasgow, June 1st, 1679.

‘My Lord,—Upon Saturday’s night, when my Lord Rosse came into this place, I marched out; and because of the insolency that had been done two nights before at Ruglen, I went thither, and inquired for the names. So soon as I got them, I sent out parties to seize on them, and found not only three of those rogues, but also an intercommuned minister called King. We had them at Strathaven about six in the morning yesterday; and resolving to convey them to this, I thought that we might make a little tour, to see if we could fall upon a conventicle; which we did little to our advantage. For, when we came in sight of them, we found them drawn up in battle, upon a most advantageous ground, to which there was no coming but through mosses and lakes.

‘They were not preaching, and had got away all their women and children. They consisted of four battalions of foot and all well armed with fusils and pitchforks, and three squadrons of horse. We sent both parties to skirmish; they of foot and we of dragoons: They run for it, and sent down a battalion of foot against them: We sent threescore of dragoons, who made them run shamefully: But, in the end (they perceiving that we had the better of them in skirmish), they resolved a general engagement, and immediately advanced with their foot, the horse following: They came through the loch, and the greatest body of all made up against my troop: We kept our fire till they were within ten pace of us: They received our fire, and advanced to shock: The first they gave us brought down the Cornet Mr Crafford and Captain Bleith: Besides that, with a pitchfork, they made such an opening in my sorrel horse’s belly, that his guts hung out half an ell; and yet he carried me off a mile; which so discouraged our men, that they sustained not the shock, but fell into disorder.

‘Their horse took the occasion of this, and pursued us so hotly that we got no time to rally. I saved the standards; but lost on the place about eight or ten men, besides wounded. But the dragoons lost many more. They are not come easily off on the other side, for I saw several of them fall before we came to the shock. I made the best retreat the confusion of our people would suffer; and am now laying with my Lord Ross. The town of Strathaven drew up as we was making our retreat, and thought of a pass to cut us off; but we took courage and fell on them, made them run, leaving a dozen on the place. What these rogues will do, yet I know not; but the country was flocking to them from all hands. This may be counted the beginning of the rebellion, in my opinion.—I am, my Lord, your Lordship’s most humble servant,

J. Grahame.’

‘My Lord, I am so wearied, and so sleepy, that I have written this very confusedly.’

As to the respective numbers of the combatants engaged in the battle of Drumclog, as it is commonly called from the place near which it was fought, and which Claverhouse forgot to name in his despatch, it is difficult to arrive at a definite conclusion. Russell, who was in the ranks of the Covenanters, sets down the ‘honest party’ as consisting of ‘about fifty horse and about as many guns, and about a hundred and fifty with forks and halberts’; but that is not consistent with the details which he himself gives of the fighting. Sir Walter Scott, who has been followed by most modern writers, computes the forces opposed to Claverhouse at about one thousand, horse and foot, and the regulars at no more than two hundred and fifty. But even this estimate of the latter is probably excessive. In a letter written from Mugdock on the 30th of May, the Marquis of Montrose informed the Earl of Menteith that he had that day met with Claverhouse, who had been sent ‘with his troop and a troop of dragoons, to guard some arms and ammunition transported to this country.’ That may be taken to mean an escort of about two hundred men. But Captain Creichton, who was then serving as a lieutenant under Claverhouse, states that he, with Captain Stewart’s troop of dragoons remained in Glasgow, when his commanding officer set out to enquire into the Rutherglen demonstration; and he adds that those who fought at Drumclog were about one hundred and eighty strong. Apart from the fact that there is no reason for doubting his veracity, the number which he gives exactly agrees with that which may be deduced from the casual reference in Montrose’s letter; and there is, consequently, good reason for accepting it as correct. With regard to the insurgents, it is less easy to make even an approximative calculation. It is generally admitted, however, that they greatly outnumbered their adversaries; and this seems implied by the despatch which Lord Ross forwarded to the commander-in-chief immediately after Claverhouse’s return to Glasgow on the memorable Sunday. ‘Be assured,’ he wrote to the Earl, ‘if they were ten to one, if you command it, we shall be through them if we can.’ Moreover, it is difficult to believe that the Covenanting forces could have increased to some six thousand within a week after Drumclog, as Hamilton, one of their leaders, boasts they did, if, on the 1st of June, they numbered no more than the mere handful of Russell’s estimate.

The passage in which Claverhouse mentions the officers killed in the engagement has always been read as referring to only two; and it has caused some surprise that he should have omitted to report the loss of a third, about whose death there cannot be a doubt, and who, moreover, was a kinsman of his—Cornet Graham. Captain Creichton who, it must be remembered, is speaking of a comrade, and whose words alone might be looked upon as absolutely authoritative, states, in his Memoirs, that ‘the rebels finding the cornet’s body, and supposing it to be that of Clavers, because the name of Graham was wrought in the shirt-neck, treated it with the utmost inhumanity; cutting off the nose, picking out the eyes, and stabbing it through in a hundred places.’ Andrew Guild, in his Latin poem, ‘Bellum Bothwellianum,’ records the same barbarity. ‘They laid savage hands on him,’ he says, ‘and mutilated his manly face; having cut off his tongue, his ears, and his hands, they scattered his brains over the rough stones.’ In an old ballad on the Battle of Loudon Hill—another name for the fight of Drumclog—Claverhouse’s cornet and kinsman is twice made to foretell his own death:—

‘I ken I’ll ne’er come back again,

An’ mony mae as weel as me.’

In another Covenanting poem, ‘The Battle of Bothwell Brig,’ Claverhouse is represented as avenging young Graham’s death on the fugitives:—

‘Haud up your hand,’ then Monmouth said;

‘Gie quarters to these men for me;’

But bloody Claver’se swore an oath,

His kinsman death avenged should be.

Russell, too, states that Graham was killed, and refers to the mutilation of the lifeless body, though he accounts for it in a very remarkable way. The passage is as follows: ‘One Graham, that same morning in Strevan his dog was leaping upon him for meat, and he said he would give him none, but he should fill himself of the Whig’s blood and flesh by night; but instead of that, his dog was seen eating his own thrapple (for he was killed), by several; and particularly James Russell after the pursuit, coming back to his dear friend James Dungel, who was severely wounded, asked at some women and men who it was; they told that it was that Graham, and afterwards they got certain word what he said to his dog in Strevan.’

In the face of such evidence, it is hardly possible to deny the actual fact of Graham’s death. Neither can it be looked upon as probable that his kinsman had no knowledge of it when he wrote his despatch. If, therefore, Claverhouse really did omit to report it amongst the other casualties, his silence is difficult to understand. But, it must be pointed out that the whole question may, after all, resolve itself into one of punctuation. The insertion of a single comma makes three persons of ‘the Cornet, Mr Crafford and Captain Bleith.’ A matter so utterly trifling in itself would not be deserving of notice if some of Claverhouse’s irrational detractors, no less than some of his irrational apologists, had not magnified it out of all proportion.

Throughout the engagement Claverhouse made himself conspicuous by his courage, and was exposed to special danger because of the attention which he attracted. One of the Covenanters, a Strathaven man, was subsequently wont to relate that he had concealed himself behind a hillock and fired eight shots at the leader of the royal troops; and it may be assumed that, in those days, want of skill on the part of the marksman was not considered the cause of his failure. It is also stated by De Foe, that William Cleland, who, in later years distinguished himself as a soldier and rose to be Lieutenant-Colonel of the Cameronian regiment, actually succeeded in catching hold of Claverhouse’s bridle, and that the latter had a narrow escape of being taken prisoner. Thanks to his coolness and presence of mind no less than to his good fortune, he left the field unscathed, but only when the discomfiture of his men had become so complete as to render any effort to rally them wholly hopeless. Like them, he galloped back to Strathaven; and local tradition still points out the spot where he shot down one of the townsmen who endeavoured to stay him in his flight. Some accounts relate that on his road he had to pass the house where the outlawed minister King had been left under guard, when the soldiers set out for Drumclog, and that, as he did so, his prisoner of the morning ironically invited him to remain for the afternoon sermon.

Before the engagement, Hamilton, who had assumed the command of the Covenanters, gave out the word that no quarter should be given. In spite of this, five out of seven men who had been captured, were granted their lives and allowed to depart. ‘This,’ writes a contemporary, ‘greatly grieved Mr Hamilton, when he saw some of Babel’s brats spared, after that the Lord had delivered them into their hands, that they might dash them against the stones.’ When he returned from the pursuit of the routed royalists, a discussion had arisen as to the fate of the two remaining prisoners. Hamilton settled it, in so far at least as one of them was concerned, by killing him on the spot. ‘None could blame me,’ he wrote in a letter of justification published five or six years later, ‘to decide the controversy; and I bless the Lord for it to this day.’

Wodrow gives it as ‘the opinion of not a few,’ that if the ‘country men’ had pushed their success, followed their chase, and gone straight to Glasgow that day, they might easily, with the help of the reinforcements that would have come to them on the road, as soon as their success became known, have driven out the garrison, ‘and very soon made a great appearance.’

Without entering into a futile discussion as to what might have happened, it may be pointed out that the actual circumstances of the case scarcely justify so sanguine a view. When Claverhouse and his troopers rode back to Glasgow, they had no certainty that, in the flush of victory, the Covenanters would not continue the pursuit right up to the city, and endeavour to take the fullest advantage of their success. Indeed, the conduct of the royalist officers rather seems to imply that they recognised the possibility of such a course on the part of the enemy, for they caused half the men to stand to their arms all night. If, therefore, the few horsemen on the Covenanting side, who alone could possibly perform the distance of nearly thirty miles before dusk, even on a long June day, had ventured on an attack, it may be believed that they would have met with a reception calculated to make them regret their rashness.

There is no occasion to assume that any reason but that dictated by common prudence induced the foremost of the pursuers to halt at a considerable distance from Glasgow, in order to await the coming of the unmounted men, with such recruits as they might have been able to gather on the way. Statements differ as to the precise place where the greater number of them determined to stay for the night; but Wodrow is probably accurate in saying that they did not press further forward than Hamilton, and that it was from that town they resumed their march on the morrow.

In the meantime Lord Ross and his officers, Major White and Captain Graham, had not been idle. With carts, timber, and such other materials as could be hastily requisitioned, they erected four barricades in the centre of the city, and posted their men behind them to await the expected onset. At daybreak next morning, Creichton, with six dragoons, was sent out to take up his station at a small house which commanded a view of the two approaches to Glasgow, so that he might at once be able to report which of them the Covenanters decided to take. About ten o’clock he saw them advance to the place which he had been instructed to watch, and there, by a most injudicious manœuvre, divide themselves into two bodies. Of these, one, under Hamilton, marched towards the Gallowgate; whilst the other took a more circuitous road ‘by the Wyndhead and College.’ There may have been a vague intention of taking the military between two fires, but the movements were ill concerted, and resulted in two disjointed attacks, which were both easily repulsed.

As Creichton returned to inform Claverhouse of the enemy’s dispositions, he was followed close to the heels by that detachment which was making for the Gallowgate bridge. When they reached the barricade which had been raised on that side, they were received by Claverhouse and his men with a volley which killed several, and threw the remainder into confusion. The soldiers following up this first advantage, and jumping over the carts that formed the obstruction, then charged the wavering Covenanters, and drove them out of the town. They had time to do this and to return to their original position before those of the ‘country men,’ who had marched round by the north, came down by the High Church and the College. These were allowed to come within pistol shot; and when the soldiers fired into them at such close range, it was with the same effect as before.

The second party was also forced to fall back. They appear to have done so in better order than Hamilton’s men, for they were able to rally in a field behind the High Church, where they remained till five o’clock in the afternoon, unmolested by the soldiers, from whose sight they were concealed, and who, not knowing when they might again be attacked, and fully aware that the majority of the citizens were hostile to them, contented themselves with remaining on the defensive. Prudence prevailed with the Covenanters too, and without making any further attempt to carry the barricade, they retired to Toll Cross Moor. Finding that Claverhouse, who had been informed of the movement, had come out after them, they continued their retreat as far as Hamilton, protecting their rear so effectively with their cavalry, that Graham deemed it advisable to fall back upon Glasgow.

At Drumclog, and subsequently at Glasgow, unforeseen circumstances had imposed a leading and conspicuous part on Claverhouse. The measures which the Government was now called on to adopt for the purpose of quelling an insurrection of formidable proportions, were necessarily of such magnitude, that he naturally fell back to his own subordinate position, that of a captain of dragoons. To represent him as having incurred the displeasure of his chiefs, and as having been superseded in consequence, is contrary to fact, and wholly unfair to him. Proof is at hand that no blame was laid upon him for the defeat of Drumclog. In a letter written by the Council to Lauderdale on the 3rd of June, it was admitted that he had been overpowered by numbers; and six days later, through Lauderdale, the Chancellor conveyed the King’s thanks to Lord Ross and to Claverhouse for their great diligence and care, and his assurance that he would be very mindful of their conduct on all occasions.

Creichton, who did not supply Swift with the materials for his memoirs till many years later, and who, therefore, cannot always be implicitly depended upon as regards details of minor importance, states that the morning after the attack ‘the Government sent orders to Claverhouse to leave Glasgow and march to Stirling.’ But Wodrow, who founds his narrative on letters which he met with in the Council Registers, and which he duly quotes, makes no special reference to Claverhouse. He simply records the fact that ‘my Lord Ross and the rest of the officers of the King’s forces, finding the gathering of the country people growing, and expecting every day considerable numbers to be added to them, and not reckoning themselves able to stand out a second attack, found it advisable to retire eastward.’ He indicates, day by day, the marching and counter-marching of the royalist troops, and narrates all the steps that were taken to bring together a body sufficiently strong to disperse the Covenanting insurgents.

From all this it is evident that there was no room for independent action on the part of Claverhouse from the time of his leaving the West to that of his return to it with the Duke of Monmouth, who had been appointed Commander-in-Chief, and who, on the 22nd of June, encountered the Covenanters at Bothwell Bridge. In the course of the engagement which followed, no opportunity was given him of playing a prominent part. Sir Walter Scott asserts on two different occasions, that the horse were commanded by Claverhouse; and, in his well-known description of the battle, he adds the detail that ‘the voice of Claverhouse was heard, even above the din of conflict, exclaiming to the soldiers—“Kill, kill—no quarter—think of Richard Grahame.”’ The historical truth is, that Claverhouse was simply a captain of horse, as were also the Earl of Home, and the Earl of Airlie, and that he was himself under the command of his kinsman Montrose, Colonel of the Horse Guards. Beyond stating this no accounts of the encounter make any reference to him. In so far as he is personally concerned there is no reason for recalling the incident of the fight which effectively put an end to the Covenanting insurrection. His presence at it is the single, bare fact that requires mention.

There are no official documents extant to enable us to follow Claverhouse’s movements during the period immediately subsequent to Bothwell Bridge. All that has been stated with regard to his doings at this time rests on the authority of Wodrow, who himself admits, though not, it is true, for the purpose of questioning their accuracy, that the traditions embodied in his narrative were vague and uncertain. ‘Everybody must see,’ he says, ‘that it is now almost impossible to give any tolerable view to the reader, of the spulies, depredations and violences committed by the soldiers, under such officers as at that time they had. Multitudes of instances, once flagrant are now at this distance lost; not a few of them were never distinctly known, being committed in such circumstances as upon the matter buried them.’

The order of the Privy Council, in accordance with which Claverhouse again proceeded to the Western Counties, to begin his ‘circuit,’ as Wodrow styles it, a few days after the engagement which had proved so disastrous to the Covenanters has disappeared. It may, however, be assumed that the powers conferred upon him were wide; and there is no reason to suppose that he was instructed to deal leniently with those who had been in arms against the royal troops. Although no proof can be adduced in support of Wodrow’s statement, that Claverhouse ‘could never forgive the baffle he met with at Drumclog, and resolved to be avenged for it’; and although it would be rash to accept, except on the very strongest evidence, the further assertion that he was one of those who solicited Monmouth ‘to ruin the West Country, and burn Glasgow, Hamilton and Strathaven, to kill the prisoners, at least, considerable numbers of them, and to permit the army to plunder the western shires, who, they alleged, had countenanced the rebels,’ the principles which he unhesitatingly set forth in subsequent despatches, and in accordance with which in the following July, he consented to go to London, as an envoy from the Privy Council, to represent to the King the unwisdom of adopting Monmouth’s more conciliatory policy, and of granting the Covenanters favours, ‘to soften the clamour that was made upon the Duke of Lauderdale’s conduct,’ quite justify the assumption that he fully approved of severe measures against the actual rebels, and felt neither scruple nor compunction in carrying them out.

But, when this has been admitted, it is only fair to bear in mind that there were others besides Claverhouse, and ‘more bloody and barbarous than he,’ engaged in the odious work of hunting down and punishing the Bothwell outlaws, and preventing their friends and sympathisers from harbouring and concealing them. If, instead of indiscriminately attributing to him every alleged act of cruelty and rapacity, as partisan writers have not unfrequently done, care had been taken to ascertain whether he was even indirectly concerned in it, and whether he was so circumstanced that he could prevent the perpetration of it, there can be but little doubt that the list of atrocities imputed to him at this date would assume less terrible proportions.

Nor should it be forgotten that many of the instances of severity recorded against Claverhouse, harsh as they may have been, did not go beyond the letter, or, indeed, the spirit of the law. It was his duty to yield implicit obedience to the commands of his superiors. To condemn in him that loyalty which has always been looked upon as the essential quality of a soldier, and to hold him personally responsible for carrying out with all the zeal and energy of his nature the policy of the Government to which he owed allegiance, is inconsistent and unjust.

To object that, even as a soldier, he was not bound to support a cause which he knew to be bad, is to ignore what his very enemies recognised—that he was no reckless and ungodly persecutor of religion, but, on the contrary, a man of deep convictions and of strict, almost puritanical, practice. No estimate of his character can be adequate and impartial, which does not take into account the essential fact that he was as sincere—as fanatical, if the word be insisted upon—as those whom he treated as rebels.

IV
REJECTED ADDRESSES

There is a section of the extant correspondence of Claverhouse which opens about the end of 1678 and extends through several years, and which stands in remarkable contrast with the military despatches of the same period. It consists of letters addressed to William Graham, eighth and last Earl of Menteith. That nobleman, though twice married, had no issue. His nearest male relative was his uncle, Sir James Graham, whose only children were two daughters. With a view to settling the succession to the earldom, Menteith favoured a matrimonial alliance between Lady Helen, the younger of them, and some member of the Graham family. Sir William Fraser, who discovered and published the letters, is of opinion that the first thoughts of such a scheme were suggested to the Earl by his kinsman, John Graham of Claverhouse. The following passage in the earliest letter of the extant collection, though obviously not the first of the correspondence, seems to bear out this view:—

‘My Lord, as your friend and servant, I take the liberty to give you an advice, which is, that there can be nothing so advantageous for you as to settle your affairs, and establish your successor in time, for it can do you no prejudice if you come to have any children of your own body, and will be much for your quiet and comfort if you have none; for whoever you make choice of will be in place of a son. You know that Julius Cæsar had no need to regret the want of issue, having adopted Augustus, for he knew certainly that he had secured to himself a thankful and useful friend, as well as a wise successor, neither of which he could have promised himself by having children; for nobody knows whether they beget wise men or fools, besides that the ties of gratitude and friendship are stronger in generous minds than those of nature.

‘My Lord, I may, without being suspected of self-interest, offer some reasons to renew to you the advantage of that resolution you have taken in my favour. First, that there is nobody of my estate and of your name would confound their family in yours, and nobody in the name is able to give you those conditions, nor bring in to you so considerable an interest, besides that I will easier obtain your cousin german than any other, which brings in a great interest, and continues your family in the right line. And then, my Lord, I may say without vanity that I will do your family no dishonour, seeing there is nobody you could make choice of has toiled so much for honour as I have done, though it has been my misfortune to attain but a small share. And then, my Lord, for my respect and gratitude to your Lordship, you will have no reason to doubt of it, if you consider with what a frankness and easiness I live with all my friends.

‘But, my Lord, after all this, if these reasons cannot persuade you that it is your interest to pitch on me, and if you can think on anybody that can be more proper to restore your family and contribute more to your comfort and satisfaction, make frankly choice of him, for without that you can never think of getting anything done for your family: it will be for your honour that the world see you never had thoughts of alienating your family, then they will look no more upon you as the last of so noble a race, but will consider you rather as the restorer than the ruiner, and your family rather as rising than falling; which, as it will be the joy of our friends and relations, so it will be the confusion of our enemies.’

Claverhouse’s proposal found favour with the Earl of Menteith. He wrote a very earnest letter to his ‘much honorrd Unkle,’ who resided in Ireland; and formally made an offer of marriage in Claverhouse’s name. He described the ‘noble young gentleman’ in glowing terms. He was, the Earl said, ‘exceeding well accomplished with nature’s gifts,’—as much so as any he knew. ‘All that is noble and virtuous’ might be seen in him; and as a further and not inconsiderable recommendation, it was added that he had ‘a free estate upwards of six hundred pound sterling yearly of good payable rent, near by Dundee,’ and also that he was ‘captain of the standing troops of horse in this kingdom,’ which was ‘very considerable.’ To crown all this, he was a Graham; and it would be ‘a singular happiness’ to the family to form an alliance with ‘such a gentleman as he.’ To persuasion the matchmaking Earl added something not very far removed from a menace, and concluded his letter with the following vigorous words:—

‘For if ye give and bestow that young lady on any other person bot he, I sall never consent to the mariag unless it be Cleverus, whom I say again is the only person of all I know fitest and most proper to marie yor daughter.’

Claverhouse, notwithstanding the important matters that were engaging his attention at the time, was willing to go over to Ireland to prosecute his suit in person. He would not, however, presume to do so until a line from Sir James and his lady brought the assurance that he should be welcome. In the meantime, he sent a messenger, probably with letters of his own, whose delay in returning with an answer called forth the following rather desponding letter, which bears date, Dumfries, February 14th, 1679:—

‘My dear Lord,—I have delayed so long to give a return to your kind letter, expecting that my man should return from Ireland, that I might have given your Lordship an account of the state of my affairs; but now that I begin to despair of his coming, as I do of the success of that voyage, I would not lose this occasion of assuring your Lordship of my respects. I have received letters from my Lord Montrose, who gives me ill news, that an Irish gentleman has carried away the Lady, but it is not certain, though it be too probable. However, my Lord, it shall never alter the course of our friendship, for if, my Lord, either in history or romance, either in nature or the fancy, there be any stronger names or rarer examples of friendship than these your Lordship does me the honour to name in your kind and generous letter, I am resolved not only to equal them, but surpass them, in the sincerity and firmness of the friendship I have resolved for your Lordship. But, my Lord, seeing it will, I hope, be more easy for me to prove it by good deeds in time to come, than by fine words to express it at present, I shall refer myself to time and occasion, by which your Lordship will be fully informed to what height I am, my dear Lord, your Lordship’s most faithful and most obedient servant,

J. Grahame.’

Claverhouse’s fears were not without foundation. His offer was declined. As the letter conveying Sir James’s refusal has not been preserved, it is impossible to learn what reasons he assigned for it. The first intimation to be found of his adverse decision occurs in a letter addressed to him, in the following November, by his nephew, who again approached him with a matrimonial scheme, this time in favour of Montrose. The terms of the wholly unromantic proposal were, that the Earldom of Menteith should, failing heirs male, be entailed upon the young Marquis, and that he, in return, should marry Helen Graham, and should allow the Earl a life annuity of a hundred and fifty pounds. Matters went so far that the necessary charter had been submitted to the King for signature, when Montrose broke off his engagement under circumstances which Claverhouse details in an indignant letter addressed from London to the Earl of Menteith, on the 3rd of July 1680:—

‘My Lord,—Whatever were the motives obliged your Lordship to change your resolutions to me, yet I shall never forget the obligations that I have to you for the good designs you once had for me, both before my Lord Montrose came in the play and after, in your endeavouring to make me next in the entail, especially in so generous a way as to do it without so much as letting me know it. All the return I am able to make is to offer you, in that frank and sincere way that I am known to deal with all the world, all the service that I am capable of, were it with the hazard or even loss of my life and fortune. Nor can I do less without ingratitude, considering what a generous and disinterested friendship I have found in your Lordship.

‘And your Lordship will do me, I hope, the justice to acknowledge that I have shown all the respect to your Lordship and my Lord Montrose, in your second resolutions, that can be imagined. I never inquired at your Lordship nor him the reason of the change, nor did I complain of hard usage. Though really, my Lord, I must beg your Lordship’s pardon to say that it was extremely grievous to me to be turned out of the business, after your Lordship and my Lord Montrose had engaged me in it, and had written to Ireland in my favour; and the thing that troubled me most was that I feared your Lordship had more esteem for my Lord Montrose than me, for you could have no other motive, for I am sure you have more sense than to think the offers he made you more advantageous for the standing of your family than those we were on.

‘Sir James and I together would have bought in all the lands ever belonged to your predecessors, of which you would have been as much master as of those you are now in possession; and I am sorry to see so much trust in your Lordship to my Lord Montrose so ill-rewarded. If you had continued your resolutions to me, your Lordship would not have been thus in danger to have your estate rent from your family; my Lord Montrose would not have lost his reputation, as I am sorry to see he has done; Sir James would not have had so sensible an affront put upon them, if they had not refused me, and I would have been, by your Lordship’s favour, this day as happy as I could wish. But, my Lord, we must all submit to the pleasure of God Almighty without murmuring, knowing that everybody will have their lot.

‘My Lord, fearing I may be misrepresented to your Lordship, I think it my duty to acquaint your Lordship with my carriage since I came hither, in relation to those affairs. So soon as I came, I told Sir James how much he was obliged to you, and how sincere your designs were for the standing of your family; withal I told him that my Lord Montrose was certainly engaged to you to marry his daughter, but that from good hands I had reason to suspect he had no design to perform it; and indeed my Lord Montrose seemed to make no address there at all in the beginning, but hearing that I went sometimes there, he feared that I might get an interest with the father, for the daughter never appeared, so observant they were to my Lord Montrose, and he thought that if I should come to make any friendship there, that when he came to be discovered I might come to be acceptable, and that your Lordship might turn the tables upon him. Wherefore he went there and entered in terms to amuse them till I should be gone, for then I was thinking every day of going away, and had been gone, had I not fallen sick. He continued thus, making them formal visits, and talking of the terms, till the time that your signature should pass; but when it came to the King’s hand it was stopped upon the account of the title.

‘My Lord Montrose who, during all this time had never told me anything of these affairs, nor almost had never spoken to me, by Drumeller and others, let me know that our differences proceeded from mistakes, and that if we met we might come to understand one another, upon which I went to him. After I had satisfied him of some things he complained of, he told me that the title was stopped, and asked me if I had no hand in it; for he thought it could be no other way, seeing Sir James concurred. I assured him T had not meddled in it, as before God, I had not. So he told me he would settle the title on me, if I would assist him in the passing of it. I told him that I had never any mind for the title out of the blood. He answered me, I might have Sir James’s daughter and all. So I asked him how that could be. He told me he had no design there, and that to secure me the more, he had given commission to speak to my Lady Rothes about her daughter, and she had received it kindly. I asked how he would come off. He said upon their not performing the terms, and offered to serve me in it, which I refused, and would not concur. He thought to make me serve him in his designs, and break me with Sir James and his Lady: for he went and insinuated to them as if I had a design upon their daughter, and was carrying it on under hand. So soon as I heard this, I went and told my Lady Graham all. My Lord Montrose came there next day and denied it. However, they went to Windsor and secured the signature, but it was already done. They have not used me as I deserved at their hands, but my design is not to complain of them, and they had reason to trust entirely one whom your Lordship had so strongly recommended. After all came to all, that Sir James offered to perform all the conditions my Lord Montrose required, he knew not what to say, and so, being ashamed of his carriage, went away without taking leave of them; which was to finish his tricks with contempt.

‘This is, my Lord, in as few words as I can, the most substantial part of that story. My Lord Montrose and some of his friends endeavoured to ruin that young lady’s reputation to get an excuse for his carriage. But I made them quickly quit those designs, for there was no shadow of ground for it. And I must say she has suffered a great deal to comply with your Lordship’s designs for her; and truly, my Lord, if you knew her, you would think she deserved all, and would think strange my Lord Montrose should have neglected her.

‘My Lord, I know you want not the best advice of the nation, yet I think it not amiss to tell you that it is the opinion of everybody that you may recover your estate, and that you ought to come and make your case known to the King and Duke. Your family is as considerable as Caithness or Maclean, in whose standing they concern themselves highly. My Lord, you would by this means recover your affairs; you would see your cousin; and you and Sir James would understand one another, and take right measures for the standing of your family. If you let your title stand in the heirs male, your family must of necessity perish, seeing in all appearance you will outlive Sir James, and then it would come to the next brother, who has neither heirs nor estate, so that your only way will be to transfer the title to that young lady, and get the father and mother to give you the disposing of her. The Duke assures me, that if my Lord Montrose would have married her, the title should have passed, as being in the blood, and that it may be done for anybody who shall marry her with your consent.

‘My Lord, if I thought your Lordship were to come up, I would wait to do you service; for your uncle is old and infirm. My Lord, I hope you will pardon this long letter, seeing it is concerning a business touches you so near, and that of a long time I have not had the happiness to entertain your Lordship. Time will show your Lordship who deserves best your friendship.

‘My Lord, things fly very high here; the indictments appear frequently against the honest Duke, and I am feared these things must break out. I am sorry for it; but I know you, impatient of the desire of doing great things, will rejoice at this. Assure yourself, if ever there be barricades again in Glasgow, you shall not want a call; and, my Lord, I bespeak an employment under you, which is to be your lieutenant-general, and I will assure you we will make the world talk of us. And, therefore, provide me trews, as you promised, and a good blue bonnet, and I will assure you there shall be no trews trustier than mine.

‘My Lord, despond not for this disappointment, but show resolution in all you do. When my affairs go wrong, I remember that saying of Lucan, “Tam mala Pompeii quam prospera mundus adoret.” One has occasion to show their vigour after a wrong step to make a nimble recovery. You have done nothing amiss, but trusted too much to honour, and thought all the world held it as sacred as you do.

‘My dear Lord, I hope you will do me the honour to let me hear from you, for if there be nothing for your service here I will be in Scotland immediately, for now I am pretty well recovered. I know my Lord Montrose will endeavour to misrepresent me to your Lordship, but I hope he has forfeited his credit with you, and anything he says to you is certainly to abuse you. My Lord, I have both at home and abroad sustained the character of an honest and frank man, and defy the world to reproach me of anything. So, my Lord, as I have never failed in my respect to your Lordship, I hope you will continue that friendship for me which I have so much ambitioned. When I have the honour to see you I will say more of my inclination to serve you. I will beg the favour of a line with the first post.

‘I am, my Lord, your Lordship’s most faithful and humble servant,

J. Grahame.

‘Excuse this scribbling, for I am in haste, going to Windsor, though I write two sheets.’

This long letter was followed at short intervals, by others to the same effect, full of protestations on the part of Claverhouse of his desire to serve the Earl. It would appear, however, that Menteith was not fully satisfied as to his correspondent’s sincerity and disinterestedness. No direct reply to the latter’s denunciation of Montrose has been preserved; but there is a communication addressed to the young Marquis himself, in which the Earl expresses himself very strongly and very plainly with regard to the ‘malicious letters’ too often written to him, and in which he assures him that his generous actings and noble endeavours for the standing and good of the Menteith family, vindicate to the world his Lordship’s honour and reputation from the false and unjust aspersions that some unworthy and seditious persons, though they were of no mean quality, would make all men believe.

It is true that the Earl of Menteith himself had good reason for wishing to conciliate Montrose. He was not without hope that the Marquis would ‘effectuate a speedy and right course and method for the relieving of the pressing debts of his poor, though ancient, family.’ Moreover, he had a special favour to beg, and one which illustrates how greatly fallen from its high estate the noble house of Menteith really was. The wording and the spelling of the letter which contained it are scarcely less remarkable than the request itself.

‘My Deir Lord,—After cerious consideration with myself, I thinck most fiting and proper for me that I com to Edinburgh, God willing, agane the siting of the Parliment, the twenti-awght of the nixt month. In ceass that I should stay from the Parliment, his Royall Hyghnes might tak exceptiones, and be offended at me if I ware not at the doune sitting thairoff, and possablie might doe me much hearme in that bussines your Lordship hes in hand conserning my affaer with the King. Therfor I am fullie resolued to be at Edinburgh agane the twenty of Jwllay at fardast, wherfor I humblie intreat your Lordship to prowid and get the lene from sume Earle thair robs, fite mantle, and wellwat coats, and all things that belongs to Parliment robs. I will heave four footmen in liwra. Ther is no doubt but ther is sewerall Earles that will not ryd the Parliment. Therfor be humblye pleased to get the lene to me of sume Earle’s robes onley for a day to ryde in the Parliment, and they shall be cearfulie keipt be me that none of them be spoylt, for all the robs that belonged to my grandfather was destroyed in the Einglish tyme. The last tyme when I reid the Parliment, I cearied the Secepter, and I head the lene of the deces’d Earle of Lowdian’s robes, but it may be that this Earle will reid himself. I hop your Lordship will get the lene of robs to me from sume Earle or other, as also the lene of a peacable horse, because I am werie unable in both my foot and both my hands as yet. I thought good to acqwant your Lordship of this beforhand in a letter by itself. Hoping to receave tuo lines of ane answer of returne thairto from your Lordship, I pray let me know iff his Hyghnes will be Woiceroy at this Parliment, or who it is that will represent the King. I expect all the news from your Lordship, but on no termes doe not keip the bearar heirof, who is my gardner; he must surlie be at hom agan Thursdays night, so not willing to give farder trouble, I remaine wncheangablie, my deir Lord,—Your Lordship’s most affectionat cousine and faithful servant,

‘Menteith.’

The intricacy of a wooing in which there does not seem to have been an excess of love-making, is made more puzzling by a letter addressed by Isabella, wife of Sir James Graham, to the Earl of Menteith. It was written about a month later than his own obsequious epistle to Montrose; and yet it shows that at that time a match between Claverhouse and Lady Helen was again under consideration. Lady Isabella informed his Lordship that she had so far complied with his desires as to waive the propositions of two matches, though the worse of the suitors had two thousand pounds a year, besides a troop of horse, and a fair prospect of many thousands more. At the same time, she bade him bear in mind that, unless he were very willing to assist as far as he could towards the recovering of such lands as formerly belonged to his ancestors, she would decline all thoughts of matching her daughter in Scotland, where she would be a daily spectator of the ruin of the noble family she came from. Her Ladyship’s very outspoken letter also referred to the dilatoriness that had so far marked the whole course of the negotiations, and let it be understood that, in her opinion, the responsibility for much of it lay with the Earl.

The delay with which Lady Graham found fault may, in its most recent phase at least, have been due to rumours and reports which had reached Menteith, to the effect that Claverhouse had spoken disparagingly of him to the Duke of Lauderdale; for the next letter in the correspondence contains an energetic, almost passionate denial of such conduct. The writer swears before Almighty God, and upon his salvation, that he has never given either a good or a bad character of the Earl to Lauderdale, and that he has not even mentioned his person or affairs to him; he declares himself ready to spend his blood in revenge of so base and cowardly an injury on the ‘infamous liar’ who has traduced him, and to whom he begs his letter may be shown. From Claverhouse’s special insistence on the fact that he had never cast a doubt on the Earl’s capacity for affairs, it may be presumed that this was one of the points with regard to which he was charged with having ‘said things.’ Another letter to the Earl, written on the same day, but as a distinct and more confidential communication, suggests a suspicion that Menteith had been very near committing disastrous blunders in his efforts to urge Claverhouse’s suit. In answer, doubtless, to Lady Isabella’s pointed letter, the Earl had written both to her and to her daughter, and had commissioned the suitor himself to deliver these communications to the ladies. Claverhouse, however, thought it wiser to refrain from doing so, for reasons which he thus explained:—

‘I have not dared to present them (the letters) because that in my Lady’s letter you wished us much joy, and that we might live happy together, which looked as if you thought it a thing as good as done. I am sure my Lady, of the humour I know her to be, would have gone mad that you should think a business that concerned her so nearly, concluded before it was ever proposed to her; and in the daughter’s you was pleased to tell her of my affections to her, and what I have suffered for her; this is very galant and obliging, but I am afraid they would have misconstrued it, and it might do me prejudice; and then in both, my Lord, you were pleased to take pains to show them almost clearly they had nothing to expect of you, and took from them all hopes which they had, by desiring them to require no more but your consent.’

The question of conditions and settlements being thus approached, Claverhouse hastens to affirm his own absolute disinterestedness. ‘I will assure you,’ he writes, ‘I need nothing to persuade me to take that young lady. I would take her in her smock.’ He is not sure, however, of such unselfish and generous treatment from the other side; and he consequently requests the Earl to hold out hopes to them, though without binding himself in any way. ‘When you say you give them your advice to the match,’ he writes, ‘tell them that they will not repent it, and that doing it at your desire, you will do us any kindness you can, and look on us as persons under your protection, and endeavour to see us thrive—which obliges you to nothing, and yet encourages them.’

This plain suggestion of a course which it would tax a casuist’s ingenuity to distinguish from double-dealing and deception, is hardly creditable to Claverhouse under any circumstances. For his sake it may be hoped that the excuse for it lay in the fact that by this time he had really fallen in love, and was, as he said, anxious to win the young lady for her own sake. If such were not the case, there would be an almost repulsive insincerity in his closing appeal, ‘For the love of God write kindly of me to them. By getting me that young lady you make me happy.’

Two months later negotiations were still dragging on—they had now extended, from first to last, through fully three years, from the end of 1678 to the end of 1681. On the 11th of December, Claverhouse again appealed to the Earl to come to some settlement of his affairs, either one way or the other, for, in the meantime, his own age was slipping away, and he was losing other occasions, as he supposed the young lady also was doing. The Grahams, he feared, had gone back to Ireland; and, if it were so, he proposed to invite them to come over to his house in Galloway. But it would be necessary to offer something definite to induce them to do so, for, ‘my Lady Graham was a very cunning woman, and certainly would write back that she would be unwilling to come so far upon uncertainties.’ He therefore further suggested that the Earl should communicate directly with her Ladyship. That ‘they would take it much more kindly, and be far the readier to comply’ was the reason urged for this. But another was hinted. Claverhouse was ashamed to write, not knowing what to say, seeing that after all he had promised on Menteith’s behalf, his Lordship had not yet come to a final decision.

Claverhouse’s letter does not appear to have produced any effect. As late as the beginning of March 1682, matters were still in the same unsettled and unsatisfactory state. The Earl had not yet resolved on any decisive action, and was doubtless endeavouring to make a bargain as favourable as possible to himself, when he received a short but urgent letter from Claverhouse. It asked for an early meeting, and indicated the reason for it in these words: ‘I have had one in Ireland whom I shall bring along with me, and you shall know all. Send nobody to Ireland; but take no new measures till I can see you.’

There are no letters from Claverhouse relative to subsequent negotiations. It appears from other documents, however, that Sir James Graham had come to believe in the existence of a plot between the two suitors, to get the better of both him and the Earl. Everything, he declared, had been contrived by the hand of Claverhouse; and it was his ambitious desire to make himself the head of their ancient family that had brought them all the trouble of my Lord Montrose’s business. There was, he asserted, an agreement that Montrose should use his interest with the Earl for a settlement of his honours and estates upon Claverhouse, who, on his side, had bound himself to make over the estates privately to Montrose. The letter setting all this forth in tones of the bitterest resentment was written from Drogheda in March 1683. Before that, however, Lady Helen had made further matrimonial arrangements impossible. She had married Captain Rawdon, son of Sir George Rawdon, and nephew, as well as heir apparent to the Earl of Conway. And so an Irish gentleman, who was possibly no myth when Montrose wrote about him four years earlier, carried away the lady.

V
MATTERS CIVIL, MILITARY AND MATRIMONIAL

The letters which enable us to trace the course of Claverhouse’s matrimonial negotiations are also the documents upon which we have mainly to depend for our knowledge of his movements during the period immediately subsequent to the ‘circuit’ which he made in the south-western counties after the Battle of Bothwell Bridge. From these we learn that he was in London during the summer of 1680; and a letter from Charles Maitland of Hatton to Queensberry, suggests a probable motive for the journey to town. ‘Claverhouse’s commission as to the rebels’ goods,’ he wrote, ‘is recalled by the Council; so your man will have room for his payment; that ye need not fear.’ This measure, with which, to judge from the tenor of Maitland’s remarks, Queensberry was not improbably connected, appears to have followed upon a charge of misappropriation of public monies, brought against Claverhouse by the Treasurer, and intended to supply an excuse for preventing him from entering into possession of the forfeited estate of Patrick Macdowall of Freugh, bestowed upon him by royal grant in consideration of ‘his good and faithful services.’ It is warrantable to suppose that the immediate object of his journey to London was to appeal from the Council’s decision to the King himself. In any case, there is evidence that he availed himself of his stay in the English capital to bring the matter before his sovereign, and to plead his cause in person. The result may be gathered from a letter addressed by Charles to the Lords Commissioners of the Treasury, on the 26th of February 1681. ‘As to what you have represented concerning Claverhouse, particularly in reference to the commission granted by you unto him for uplifting and sequestrating not only the rents, duties, and movables belonging to Freugh, but of all the rebels in Wigtownshire who have been in the rebellion, whereof you say he hath made no account yet, we have spoke to him about it, and he doth positively assert, that, while he was in Scotland, he received not one farthing upon that account, and that if anything have since been recovered by those whom in his absence he hath entrusted with the execution of that commission, he believes it to be so inconsiderable as it will not much exceed the charges that must necessarily be laid out in that affair. However, we do expect that he will meet with no worse usage from you, upon that occasion than others to whom you have granted the like commissions.’ The letter also conveyed his Majesty’s ‘express pleasure’ that the Commissioners should remove the stop that was put upon the gift of forfeiture, and should cause the same to be passed in the Exchequer at their very next meeting.

In October 1681, also, Claverhouse was in London; and though there is nothing to show whether his stay there had been continuous, the fact that there is no record of his doings in Scotland during the interval, may be taken as negative, yet strong, evidence of his absence from the country. There is a curious document to prove that, on the 26th of the next month he crossed the Firth of Forth from Burntisland to Leith. It is a poem entitled ‘The Tempest,’ and written by Alexander Tyler, the minister of Kinnettles, who describes it as ‘being an account of a dangerous passage from Burntisland to Leith in a boat called the Blessing, in company of Claverhouse, several gentlewomen, ministers and a whole throng of common passengers upon the 26th of November 1681.’ On the 11th of the following month, Claverhouse dates a letter from Edinburgh; and, from that time, his activity and his influence again begin to be felt.

The Earl of Queensberry, writing from Sanquhar to Lord Haddo on the 2nd of January 1682, reports that in his part of the country all is peaceable, ‘save only that in the heads of Galloway some rebels meet.’ Their numbers being inconsiderable, and their business ‘only to drink and quarrel,’ neither Church nor State need, in his judgment, fear them; still, he is of opinion that ‘the sooner garrisons be placed, and a competent party sent with Claverhouse for scouring that part of the country, the better.’ ‘Besides,’ he adds, ‘I’m told field-conventicles continue in Annandale and Galloway, but all will certainly evanish upon Claverhouse’s arrival, as I have often told.’ It would appear from this, that Captain Graham had returned to Scotland for a special and definite purpose; and this view is borne out by his appointment on the 31st of January to be heritable sheriff of Wigtownshire, in the place of Sir Andrew Agnew of Lochnaw, and heritable bailie of the regality of Tongland, instead of Viscount Kenmure, both the former possessors having been deprived of their commissions in consequence of their refusal to take the prescribed test. In terms of his appointment, Claverhouse was to have jurisdiction within the shire of Dumfries and stewartries of Kirkcudbright and Annandale; but, with regard to these districts, it was specially provided that the powers conferred upon him were in no way to be prejudicial to the rights of the heritable sheriff or steward, and that he was ‘only to proceed and do justice,’ when he was ‘the first attacher,’ that is to say, only in cases with regard to which no legal proceedings had already been taken.

Claverhouse had not long assumed his new duties before he discovered that the ‘rebels’ and ‘conventiclers’ were not the only people with whom he had to deal, and that a task far more difficult than hunting them down or scattering their meetings would be to expose the connivance of some of the leading families, and to check the disorders arising from it. As early as the 5th of March, in a letter to Queensberry, he wrote, ‘Here, in the shire, I find the lairds all following the example of a late great man, and still a considerable heritor among them, which is, to live regularly themselves, but have their houses constant haunts of rebels and intercommuned persons, and have their children baptized by the same; and then lay all the blame on their wives; condemning them and swearing they cannot help what is done in their absence. But I am resolved this jest shall pass no longer here; for it is laughing and fooling the Government; and it will be more of consequence to punish one considerable laird, than a hundred little bodies. Besides, it is juster; because these only sin by the example of those.’

At the date of this communication, Claverhouse had already begun to carry out the policy to which it referred; and a letter written four days earlier supplies important details as to the course which he had adopted. ‘The way that I see taken in other places, is to put laws severely, against great and small, in execution, which is very just; but what effects does that produce, but more to exasperate and alienate the hearts of the whole body of the people? For it renders three desperate where it gains one; and your Lordship knows that in the greatest crimes it is thought wisest to pardon the multitude and punish the ringleaders, where the number of the guilty is great, as in this case of whole countries. Wherefore, I have taken another course here. I have called two or three parishes together at one church, and after intimating to them the power I have, I read them a libel narrating all the Acts of Parliament against the fanatics; whereby I made them sensible how much they were in the King’s reverence, and assured them he was relenting nothing of his former severity against dissenters, nor care of maintaining the established government; as they might see by his doubling the fines in the late Act of Parliament; and, in the end, told them that the King had no design to ruin any of his subjects he could reclaim, nor I to enrich myself by their crimes; and, therefore, any who would resolve to conform, and live regularly, might expect favour; excepting only resetters and ringleaders. Upon this, on Sunday last, there was about three hundred people at Kirkcudbright church; some that for seven years before had never been there. So that I do expect that within a short time I could bring two parts of three to the church.’

But though there seemed to be some hope of influencing the people, if they were left to themselves, Claverhouse was fully alive to the fact that it was vain to think of any settlement so long as their irreconcilable ministers were able to exercise their influence. No sooner was he gone, than they came in, he said, and all repented and fell back to their old ways. With a view to remedying this, he strongly and repeatedly urged the necessity of having a constant force of dragoons in garrison; and, in the meantime, he took vigorous measures to carry out the work entrusted to him. To quote his own summary of a report presented by him to the Committee of the Privy Council, ‘The first work he did, was to provide magazines of corn and straw in every part of the country, that he might with conveniency go with the whole party wherever the King’s service required; and, running from one place to another, nobody could know where to surprise him; and in the meantime quartered on the rebels, and endeavoured to destroy them by eating up their provisions, but that they quickly perceived the design, and sowed their corns on untilled ground. After which he fell in search of the rebels; played them hotly with parties; so that there were several taken, many fled the country, and all were dung from their haunts; and then rifled so their houses, ruined their goods, and imprisoned their servants, that their wives and children were brought to starving; which forced them to have recourse to the safe conduct; and made them glad to renounce their principles, declare Bothwell Bridge an unlawful rebellion, swear never to rise in arms against the King, his heirs and successors, or any having commission or authority from him, upon any pretext whatsomever, and promise to live orderly hereafter.’

Three months of this repressive and coercive policy produced results which Claverhouse himself declared to be beyond his expectation. Writing to Queensberry, on the 1st of April 1682, he said, ‘I am very happy in this business of this country, and I hope the Duke will have no reason to blame your Lordship for advising him to send the forces hither. For this country now is in perfect peace: all who were in the rebellion are either seized, gone out of the country, or treating their peace; and they have already so conformed, as to going to the church, that it is beyond my expectation. In Dumfries, not only almost all the men are come, but the women have given obedience; and Irongray, Welsh’s own parish, have for the most part conformed; and so it is over all the country. So that, if I be suffered to stay any time here, I do expect to see this the best settled part of the Kingdom on this side the Tay. And if those dragoons were fixed which I wrote your Lordship about, I might promise for the continuance of it.

‘Your Lordship’s friends here are very assisting to me in all this work; and it does not contribute a little to the progress of it, that the world knows I have your Lordship’s countenance in what I do. All this is done without having received a farthing money, either in Nithsdale, Annandale, or Kirkcudbright; or imprisoned anybody. But, in end, there will be need to make examples of the stubborn that will not comply. Nor will there be any danger in this after we have gained the great body of the people; to whom I am become acceptable enough; having passed all bygones, upon bonds of regular carriage hereafter.’

The measures adopted by Claverhouse met with the fullest approval of the Government, and the results achieved through them were deemed so satisfactory as to call for special recognition. Wodrow states that on the 15th of May, ‘Claverhouse got the Council’s thanks for his diligence in executing his commission in Galloway.’

Further evidence of the favour in which Claverhouse was held is afforded by the instructions given by the Council to General Dalziel, in view of the military visitation of the shires of Lanark and of Ayr, which he was appointed to hold. He is directed ‘to repair to the town of Ayr, and there to meet with the Earl of Dumfries, and the Commissioners of that shire, where the laird of Claverhouse is to be present, and there to confer with them anent the security of that shire.’ After having complied with this, he is to return to the shire of Lanark, and the laird of Claverhouse with him, ‘and there to consider what further is necessary to be done, as to the settling of the peace of both these shires.’ Finally, when these matters have been fully considered and discussed by them, he and Claverhouse ‘are to come in with all possible diligence, and give an account to the Lord Chancellor’ of their procedure, ‘to be communicated to his Majesty’s Privy Council.’

When Claverhouse was returning from Edinburgh to Galloway, at the conclusion of this mission, there occurred an incident which must have convinced him that, even if, as he said, he had become acceptable enough to the great body of the people, there was a remnant of desperate men, whom his repressive measures had only inspired with a still fiercer hatred of him. His own account of it is contained in a letter to Queensberry, to whom he says: “I thought to have waited on your Lordship before this, but I was stayed at Edinburgh two days beyond what I designed, which has proved favourable for me. Yesterday when I came at the Bille, I was certainly informed that several parties of Whigs in arms, to the number of six or seven score, were gone from thence but six hours before. They came from Clydesdale upon Monday night, and passed Tweed at the Bille, going towards Teviotdale, but went not above three miles farther that way. They stayed thereabout, divided in small parties, most all on foot, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, till Friday morning, when they passed the hills towards Clydesdale. Some say they had a meeting with Teviotdale folks; others would make me believe that they had a mind for me. They did ask, in several places, what they heard of me, and told they were sure my troop was far in, in Galloway. Others say they were flying the West for fear of the diligence the gentry is designed to use for their discovery. I could believe this, were they not returned. I spoke with the minister, and several other people in whose houses they were; but he kept out of the way. They did no prejudice in his house, further than meat and drink. They gave no where that I could learn any account of their design there; only, I heard they said they were seeking the enemies of God, and inquired roughly if anybody there kept the church. The country keeps up this business. I heard nothing of it till I was within two miles of the Bille, and that was from a gentleman on the road, who had heard it at a burial the day before. There was a dragoon all Tuesday night at the change-house at the Bille, and the master of the house confessed to me he let him know nothing of it. They pretend it is for fear of bringing trouble to the country. I sent from the Bille an express to acquaint my Lord Chancellor with it; for I thought it fit the quarters should be advertised not to be too secure, when these rogues had the impudence to go about so.’

Queensberry was as fully convinced as Claverhouse that there had been a plot, which the unforeseen delay in Edinburgh had alone prevented from being put to execution. Writing to the Chancellor a few days later, he said: ‘I doubt not but your Lordship has full account of Clavers’ re-encounter at the Bille. It was good he did not come a day sooner; for certainly their design was against him.’

In the course of the year 1682, the jealousy aroused by Claverhouse’s appointment as Sheriff-Principal of Wigtownshire, and by the special power bestowed upon him to hold criminal courts, culminated in an open quarrel between him and the family of Stair, of which the head was Sir James Dalrymple, who, but a short time previously, had fallen into disgrace, and had been virtually deposed from his office of President of the Court of Session, for not conforming with the Test Act. According to the summary given of the case by Fountainhall, who was one of the counsel for the Stair family, Captain Graham of Claverhouse having imprisoned some of the Dalrymples’ tenants in Galloway for absenting themselves from the parish church and attending conventicles, Sir John, the ex-president’s son, took up the matter, and presented a bill of suspension to the Privy Council, alleging that he, as heritable Bailie of the Regality of Glenluce, within which the peasants lived, had already taken cognizance of their case; and that Claverhouse, not being the first attacher, was precluded by the limitations and restrictions of his commission, from taking action in the matter, and had no claim to the ‘casualities and emoluments of the fine.’

Claverhouse replied that it was he who had first cited the offenders, and that Sir John’s action was collusive. When the matter was first brought before the Privy Council, it was ordained that the imprisoned tenants should be set at liberty, after consigning their fines, which Fountainhall denounces as ‘most exorbitant,’ into the hands of the clerk. The point of jurisdiction was reserved; but in the meantime, the Council administered a reprimand to the Dalrymples, and told them in very plain terms, that ‘heritable Bailies and Sheriffs who were negligent themselves in putting the laws in execution, should not offer to compete with the Sheriffs commissioned and put in by the Council, who executed vigorously the King’s law.’

But it was not Claverhouse’s intention that his opponent should escape so easily. He met the charges made against him with a bill of complaint, in which the gravest accusations followed each other in overwhelming array. The leading counts in the indictment bore that Sir John Dalrymple had weakened the hands of the Government in the county of Galloway, by traversing and opposing the commission which the King’s Council had given Claverhouse; that he had done his utmost to stir up the people to a dislike of the King’s forces there; that he kept disloyal and disaffected persons to be bailies and clerks in his regality, and had not administered the test to them till long after January 1682, contrary to the Act of Parliament; that he had imposed on delinquents mock fines, not the fiftieth or sixtieth part of what the law required, for the sole purpose of anticipating and forestalling Claverhouse; that he and his father had offered Claverhouse a bribe of £150 sterling, out of the fines, to connive at the irregularities of his mother, Lady Stair, of his sisters, and of others; that he had laughed insolently at the proclamation of a court, made by Claverhouse, and had ordered his tenants not to attend it; that he had traduced and defamed Claverhouse to the Privy Council; and that he had accused him of cheating the King’s Treasury, by exacting fines and not accounting for them.

When Sir John Dalrymple’s answers to these charges had been read, the Chancellor gave some indication of the temper and feeling of the Council by reproving him ‘for his tart reflections on Claverhouse’s ingenuity,’ and by denying his right to adduce witnesses, whilst, on the other side, Claverhouse was allowed to call whom he chose, in support of the charges brought by him against Sir John. Fountainhall states that ‘there was much transport, flame, and humour in this cause;’ and he mentions that, at one phase of the proceedings, when Dalrymple alleged that the people of Galloway had turned orderly and regular, Claverhouse, alluding to the latest Edinburgh novelty of the time, replied that there were as many elephants and crocodiles in Galloway as loyal subjects. According to Sir John himself, Claverhouse went much further than a direct denial of his opponents’ assertions, and, in the presence of the Committee of Council appointed to examine witnesses, threatened to give him a box in the ear.

As might have been foreseen from the tone and tenor of the whole proceedings, the judgment of the Council, pronounced on the 12th of February 1683, was a complete triumph for Claverhouse. Not only was it found that he had done nothing but what was legal and consonant with his commission and instructions; but, in addition to that, the Chancellor complimented him, and, expressing wonder that he, not being a lawyer, had walked so warily in so irregular a country, conveyed to him the Council’s thanks, as an encouragement. With regard to Sir John Dalrymple, on the other hand, the finding of the Council, set forth under five specific heads, was, generally, to the effect that he had exceeded his commission, weakened the authority of the King and of the Council, and interfered with the due administration of the law. In punishment of his conduct, he was deprived of his jurisdiction and office, as bailie of the regality of Glenluce, and fined in the sum of £500 sterling. Further, it was ordered that he should be submitted prisoner in the Castle of Edinburgh, and detained there, not merely till the money was paid, but during the Council’s pleasure. His incarceration was not, however, of long duration. He was liberated on the 20th of the same month, after paying the fine, acknowledging his rashness, and craving the Council’s pardon.

Whilst the matter between Claverhouse and Dalrymple was still pending, neither the Duke of York nor the King appears to have felt conscious of any impropriety in giving expression to his personal sentiments and sympathy. The former, writing to Queensberry at the beginning of December, said: ‘I am absolutely of your mind as to Claverhouse; and think his presence more necessary in Galloway than anywhere else; for he need not fear anything Stairs can say of him, his Majesty being so well satisfied with him.’ On the 25th of the same month, Charles, to show his appreciation of Claverhouse’s ‘loyalty, courage, and good conduct,’ appointed him to be Colonel of a regiment of horse, which was formed for his special benefit, and also gave him the captaincy of a troop in the same regiment.

Shortly after his promotion Claverhouse undertook a journey to the English court, partly on public business, as the bearer of despatches from the Council, and partly as a private suitor, not only on his own behalf but also in the interest of others who had not been slow to recognise the favour in which he stood, and were anxious to avail themselves of his influence. At this time, the Committee which, in June 1682, had been appointed to investigate the charges of peculation and malversation brought against Charles Maitland of Hatton, younger brother and heir presumptive to the Duke of Lauderdale, whom the family influence had raised to the responsible position of General of the Scottish mint, had not yet presented its report; but there existed no doubt that the decision would prove adverse to Hatton, who had, in the meantime, become Earl of Lauderdale, and greedy suitors were already preparing to put forward their claims to a share of the spoils which the ruin of the family would place at the King’s disposal. Amongst these were Queensberry who, though but lately raised to a marquisate, already aspired to a dukedom, and Gordon of Haddo, who was anxious to obtain a grant of money, either a thousand pounds sterling a year, or twenty thousand pounds sterling, which were thought to be the equivalent, to enable him to maintain the double dignity of High Chancellor and of Earl of Aberdeen recently conferred upon him.

Claverhouse, too, meant to avail himself of the opportunity thus offered him, for the purpose of adding to his own estates in Forfarshire the neighbouring lands of Dudhope, and of obtaining the constabulary of Dundee. The main object of his visit to England was to look after these several interests; and the letters written by him from Newmarket, where the King and the Duke of York were staying at the time, give his correspondents in Scotland a full and detailed account of the manner in which he discharged his commission, in the intervals of ‘cock-fighting and courses.’

When he returned to Scotland, about the middle of May 1683, he was able to convey to those concerned satisfactory assurances, which the sequel justified, as to the success of the extensive job which they had planned between them. He had been preceded by a royal letter in which Charles informed his ‘right trusty and right well-beloved cousins and counsellors’ of his desire that Colonel John Graham of Claverhouse, in consideration of his loyalty, abilities, and eminent services, should be received and admitted a Privy Councillor. Claverhouse was accordingly sworn in, on the 22nd of the month, and at once took an important part in carrying out the further punitive measures which had been determined upon during his stay at the English Court, and of which he was, in all probability, the instigator.

More than twelve months earlier, on the report that an ‘indulgence’ was to be granted, he had protested to Queensberry against such a course, and had expressed a hope that nobody would be so mad as to advise it. There is every reason to suppose that, as soon as the opportunity occurred, he laid before the King opinions consonant with this, and was directly instrumental in the appointment of a Circuit Court of Justiciary for the enforcement of the Test Act. It was his views which the royal proclamation embodied in the statement that the indemnities, indulgences, and other favours granted to the fanatic and disaffected party had hitherto produced no other effect than to encourage them to further disorders and to embolden them to abuse the royal goodness; it was his conviction to which it gave utterance in the assertion that neither difference in religion, nor tenderness of conscience, but merely principles of disloyalty and disaffection to the Government moved them to disturb the quiet of the King’s reign and the peace of his kingdom; and it was his experience of the evasions and subterfuges used by them which dictated the steps to be taken, not only for the punishment of obstinate recusants, but also for the encouragement of the well-intentioned whom circumstances might hitherto have prevented from formally signifying their submission and promising obedience.

The first sitting of the Circuit Court of Justiciary was to be held at Stirling on the 5th of June. A few days previously, the Privy Council issued an order that Colonel John Graham of Claverhouse should go along with the Justices during their whole progress in the Justice Air, and should command the forces in every place visited by them, with the exception of Glasgow and Stirling, where it was supposed the Lieutenant-General would be present. To this circumstance we owe it that a report of the only case in which sentence of death was pronounced, can be given in his own words. It is contained in a letter to the Lord Chancellor, and is deserving of notice, not merely on account of the facts which it relates, for those may be gathered from other documents, but also because of the sentiments and principles which the writer found opportunity to express in it, and which help us to understand the spirit by which Claverhouse was actuated, and the view which he took of both duty and expediency in carrying out the law.

As a brief recapitulation of Boog’s case, the writer says: ‘He was actually in the rebellion; continued in that state for four years; and now comes in with a false, sham certificate to fool the judges. For, being desired to give his oath that he had taken the bond, he positively refused. Being asked if Bothwell Bridge was a rebellion, refused to declare it so. Or the Bishop’s murder, a murder. And positively refused, in the face of the Court, the benefit of the King’s indemnity by taking the Test. Upon which the Judges, moved by the outcry of all the bystanders, as by their conviction of the wickedness of the man, referred the matter to the knowledge of an inquest, who brought him in guilty. After which, he begged to acknowledge his folly; and offered to take the Test, with the old gloss,—“as far as it consisted with the Protestant religion, and the glory of God.” And after that was refused him, offered in end to take it any way. By all which it clearly appears, that he would do anything to save his life, but nothing to be reconciled to Government.’

After having thus summarised the heads of the case, Claverhouse proceeds to justify the action of the Government in not allowing men to take the Test after they were condemned. All casuists agree, he says, that an oath imposed where the alternative is hanging cannot in any way be binding; and it may consequently be supposed that they who refused it when they had the freedom of choice, and took it after being condemned, did it only because they thought themselves not bound to keep it. In point of prudence, too, he argues, such leniency would be misplaced and pernicious; it would leave it in the power of the disaffected to continue all their tricks up to the very last day fixed for taking benefit of the indemnity, and then, if they should be apprehended and condemned, enable them to escape the punishment of their treason by taking the Test. Against this he protests as turning the whole thing into ridicule; ‘for great clemency has, and ought to be, shown to people that are sincerely resolved to be reclaimed, but the King’s indemnity should not be forced on villains.’ As to the effect which severity in Boog’s case might produce, Claverhouse scouts the idea that it would deter others from ‘coming in’; and in support of his opinion to the contrary, he points to the actual fact that twenty have taken the Test since the man was condemned, and that the ‘terror of his usage’ is generally looked upon as likely to induce many more to submit.

Referring to the rescue of a prisoner, which had recently been effected by a party of armed men, and in the course of which one of the King’s guards had been killed—a crime for which Wharry and Smith were subsequently executed in Glasgow and hung in chains near Inchbellybridge, between Kirkintilloch and Kilsyth, where their ‘monument’ may still be seen—Claverhouse continues, ‘If this man should not be hanged, they would take advantage, that they have disappointed us by rescuing the other, and give us such apprehensions that we durst not venture on this.’ Then he gives expression to a sentiment which should never be lost sight of in forming an estimate of his character and conduct: ‘I am as sorry to see a man die, even a Whig, as any of themselves. But when one dies justly, for his own faults, and may save a hundred to fall in the like, I have no scruple.’

At the beginning of July 1683, Claverhouse returned to Edinburgh. For the next ten months his labours mainly consisted in attendance at the meetings of the Privy Council, and do not bring him specially into prominence. Towards the close of the comparatively quiet period he again appears in the character of a suitor. On this occasion, his matrimonial plans met with more success than those of which Lady Helen Graham had been the object. By what may seem a singular freak of fate, Jean, youngest daughter of the late Lord Cochrane, the lady on whom he had bestowed his affections, belonged to a family of strong Covenanting sympathies. Her father had, in the earlier days of the religious troubles, refused the Bond, and protested against the illegality of the clause which obliged masters to answer for their servants’ attendance at church. Her mother, a Kennedy by birth, professed the stern and uncompromising Presbyterianism of her house. Her grandfather, Lord Dundonald, had been the subject of an inquisition for keeping a chaplain who prayed God to bless the rebels in the West with success. And her uncle, Sir John Cochrane, was an outlawed rebel and a suspected traitor.

The circumstances of Claverhouse’s wooing were not overlooked by his enemies and ill-wishers. Amongst them was the Duke of Hamilton, whose professed loyalty does not appear to have placed him above suspicion, and whose daughter, Lady Susannah, was at this very time sought in marriage by Lord Cochrane, Claverhouse’s prospective brother-in-law. This coincidence afforded the Duke an opportunity of which he ingeniously availed himself to direct attention to the nature of the alliance contemplated by Claverhouse. The way in which he did so is indicated by the following passage from a letter addressed by the latter to Queensberry. Referring to his intended marriage, he says: ‘My Lord Duke Hamilton has refused to treat of giving his daughter to my Lord Cochrane till he should have the King and the Duke’s leave. This, I understand, has been advised him, to goad me. Wherefore I have written to the Duke, and told him that I would have done it sooner, had I not judged it presumption in me to trouble his Highness with my little concerns; and that I looked upon myself as a cleanser, that may cure others by coming amongst them, but cannot be infected by any plague of Presbytery; besides, that I saw nothing singular in my Lord Dundonald’s case, save that he has but one rebel on his land for ten that the rest of the lords and lairds of the South and West have on theirs; and that he is willing to depone that he knew not of there being such. The Duke is juster than to charge my Lord Dundonald with Sir John’s crimes. He is a madman, and let him perish; they deserve to be damned would own him. The Duke knows what it is to have sons and nephews that follow not advice.

‘I have taken pains to know the state of the country’s guilt as to reset; and if I make it not appear that my Lord Dundonald is one of the clearest of all that country, and can hardly be reached in law, I am content to pay his fine. I never pleaded for any, nor shall I hereafter. But I must say I think it hard that no regard is had to a man in so favourable circumstances—I mean considering others—upon my account, and that nobody offered to meddle with him till they heard I was likely to be concerned in him.’ After further comments and protests in this tone of suppressed indignation, he concludes his letter with the following emphatic words: ‘Whatever come of this, let not my enemies misrepresent me. They may abuse the Duke for a time, and hardly. But, or long, I will, in despite of them, let the world see that it is not in the power of love, nor any other folly, to alter my loyalty.’

There is a remarkable proof of the annoyance which Claverhouse felt at the attacks directed against him, and, perhaps, also of his secret consciousness that if the political position of his intended bride’s family did not wholly justify them, it at least supplied that element of partial truth which makes slander doubly dangerous. On the same day he wrote another letter to Queensberry, and dealt once more and at considerable length with his approaching marriage. After again expressing his opinion as to the real motive and meaning of Hamilton’s ostentatious scruples, and repeating the assurance that he was proof against the infection of Presbyterianism, he asserted, if not the absolute at least the comparative, loyalty of the Cochrane family, in which he saw very little but might be easily rubbed off, and added what was even more important, an emphatic declaration of the soundness of Lady Jean’s own sentiments. ‘And for the young lady herself, I shall answer for her. Had she not been right principled, she would never in despite of her mother and relations, have made choice of a persecutor, as they call me. So, whoever thinks to misrepresent me on that head, will find themselves mistaken. For both in the King’s and the Church’s cause, drive as fast as they think fit, they will never see me behind. However, my Lord, malice sometimes carries things far; so I must beg your Lordship will defend me if you find anything of this kind stirring.’

This was written on the 19th of May 1684. On the 9th of the following month, the marriage contract between Colonel John Graham of Claverhouse and Lady Jean Cochrane was signed in Paisley. The bride’s mother had, apparently, proved relentless in her opposition to the ‘persecutor.’ Her signature does not appear on the document.

The lady’s dowry consisted of forty thousand merks—rather more than two thousand pounds sterling. Her jointure was fixed at five thousand merks, or about two hundred and seventy-six pounds yearly. As heritable security for it, the bridegroom’s lands and houses were set forth in imposing array. Amongst them was included the estate of Dudhope which, with the Constabulary of Dundee, had come into Claverhouse’s possession a few months earlier, after prolonged litigation, and in spite of a private bargain which Aberdeen and Lauderdale had made between them, and which but for the direct interposition of the King’s authority, would have prevented his acquiring the long coveted lands.

Whilst Claverhouse was in Paisley, events were leading up to a sudden and dramatic interruption of the bridal festivities. On Sunday, the 8th of June, that is, the day before that upon which the marriage contract was signed, General Dalziel, the commander of the forces in Glasgow, received information, as he was ‘at the forenoon’s sermon,’ that a conventicle was being held near the Black Loch, a small lake in Renfrewshire, about eight miles south-east of Paisley. He at once sent out forty men, of whom twenty were dragoons, under the command of Lieutenant-Colonel Winrhame. They were informed that a party of about a hundred, mostly men armed with guns and swords, had assembled at Drumlech-hill, and had thence proceeded through the moors, in a south-westerly direction. But, though traces of them were found at Allanton, at Cambusnethan, and at Crossford, where they passed the water, the nature of the country made it impossible to come up with them. After marching all night in fruitless pursuit, Winrhame returned to Glasgow on the Monday with his wearied men.

On the previous Saturday, Claverhouse had informed Dalziel of his departure for Paisley, so that there might be no delay in conveying orders to him, if he were required for special duty. Possibly out of consideration for the bridegroom, it was not to him, but to Lord Ross, who was one of the wedding guests, and had acted as witness for his brother-officer the day before, that, on the Tuesday morning, the General sent information of what had taken place.

When the purport of the letter was communicated to Claverhouse, he had no hesitation as to his own course of action. With a growl at the ‘dogs,’ who ‘might have let Tuesday pass,’ and a vow that he would, some time or other, be revenged on them for ‘the unseasonable trouble’ they were causing him, he made hasty preparation, and set out on the rebels’ track. Tuesday night and Wednesday all day he scoured the country, leaving ‘no den, no knowe, no moss, no hill unsearched.’ Beyond catching sight of two men, who were running to the hills, but who, on account of the marshy nature of the ground, could not be overtaken he was not more successful than Winrhame had been. On reaching Strathaven, he decided to ride back to Paisley, and gave over the command to Colonel Buchan, with instructions to follow more leisurely and, on his march, to search the skirts of the hills and moors on the Clydesdale side.

On the Friday morning Buchan sent his superior officer a report of the stirring incidents of the previous day. After Claverhouse had left him, he had met a man from whom he learnt that there were numbers of rebels in arms in the heart of the hills, on the Clydesdale side, and who gave him a description of the two leaders—one a lusty, black, one-eyed man, with a velvet cap; the other a good-like man, who wore a grey hat. Buchan at once made for the place which had been indicated. On the way to it, a party of foot, that he had sent out on his right, accidentally came upon the armed Covenanters. Four soldiers, who formed a kind of advance-guard, were fired on by seven men that started up suddenly, out of a glen, and one of them was wounded. The other three, after discharging their pieces without effect at their assailants, thought it safer not to venture in pursuit over the treacherous ground. Hastening back, they informed their colonel of the encounter; but, though Buchan made all possible diligence, he could not succeed in even catching sight of the fugitives. He could only learn that they had made for Cumnock, and he himself proceeded with all speed in the same direction, in the hope of preventing their passing into Galloway.

By noon that same Friday, Claverhouse had again taken a hurried leave of his bride, and was on the road to Ayrshire. From that point his movements may best be narrated in his own terse words: ‘I went immediately to Mauchline, and from this to Cumnock, where we learned that on Thursday night they had passed at the bog-head, near Airdsmoss, and were then only fifty-nine in arms. They were running in great haste, barefooted many of them, and taking horses in some places, to help them forward. We heard they went from that to a place called the Hakhill, within two miles of Cumnock, and from that to the Gap, which goes to the hills lying betwixt the Sanquhar and Moffat. But we could never hear more of them. I sent on Friday night for my troop from Dumfries, and ordered them to march by the Sanquhar to the Muirkirk, to the Ploughlands, and so to Straven. I sent for Captain Strachan’s troop from the Glenkens, and ordered him to march to the old castle of Cumnock, down to the Lorne, and through the country to Kilbride, leaving Mauchline and Newmills on his left, and Loudon-hill on his right. By this means they scoured this country, and secured the passages that way.

‘Colonel Buchan marched with the foot and dragoons some miles on the right of my troop, and I, with the Guards and my Lord Ross and his troop up by the (Shaire?). We were at the head of Douglas. We were round and over Cairntable. We were at Greenock-head, Cummer-head, and through all the moors, mosses, hills, glens, woods; and spread in small parties, and ranged as if we had been at hunting, and down to Blackwood, but could learn nothing of those rogues. So the troops being extremely harassed with marching so much on grounds never trod on before, I have sent them with Colonel Buchan to rest at Dalmellington, till we see where these rogues will start up. We examined all on oath, and offered money, and threatened terribly, for intelligence, but we could learn no more.’

No further information is available as to the result of Claverhouse’s search. That a number of people residing in the district were apprehended about this time, however, appears from the fact that the next recorded appearance of the ‘rogues’ denounced by him had for its object the rescue of some prisoners whom he had sent from Dumfries to Edinburgh under the escort of a detachment of his dragoons. A carefully planned ambush was laid by a number of armed men, amongst whom some English borderers were said to be. The spot chosen as most favourable for it was near Enterkin hill, ‘where there is a very strait road and a deep precipice on both sides.’ Taken at a disadvantage in this narrow pass, the soldiers of whom several were killed at the first discharge, had but slight chance of success against superior numbers. The accounts of the encounter differ from each other as regards several details; but they leave no doubt about this one fact, at least, that the dragoons were worsted, and that it was with at most two of their prisoners only that they succeeded in reaching Edinburgh.

This daring act of aggression called forth fresh measures on the part of the Government. On the 1st of August, the Privy Council passed an Act redistributing the cavalry through the country, with a view to the more effectual suppression of ‘all such rebellious courses for the future.’ Claverhouse’s troop of Guards, and that of his friend Lord Ross, together with two troops of dragoons, respectively commanded by Captain Inglis and Captain Cleland, were ordered for service in Ayrshire. In addition to this, Claverhouse was appointed, with Lieutenant-Colonel Buchan as his second, to command all the forces, ‘foot, and horse, and dragoons, in the shires of Ayr and Clydesdale.’ Further, to the effect that discovery might be made of the rebels in arms, and of such as had been present at field conventicles, the two officers were empowered and commissioned to call for and examine upon oath, all persons able to supply any information, and to use all legal diligence for that purpose.

In accordance with his new commission, Claverhouse again swept the south-western shires in every direction. If the actual capture of rebels be taken as the standard by which to estimate the result of his efforts, it appears to have been absolutely null. In spite of the promptitude of his movements, and in spite, too, of the care which he took to conceal them, it was impossible for him to secure secrecy. No sooner was his arrival known at any point than the news of his presence was spread through the surrounding country; and when his search through the wild moorlands and over the pathless hills began, those whom he hoped to surprise were either in safe hiding or beyond the reach of his troopers. ‘They have such intelligence,’ he wrote to Queensberry on the 5th of August, ‘that there is no surprising them’; and he added, with something of despondency in his tone, ‘I fear we do nothing.’ But, on the other hand, his success in temporarily clearing the district of conventiclers appears to have been rapid. Before the end of the same month he was able to delegate his duties to his subordinates, and to retire for a short time to Dudhope.