Claverhouse was not left long in idleness. In 1664, the year of the
first Indulgence, it had been determined to withdraw the regular troops
altogether from Scotland, leaving their place to be supplied by the
local militia, which was now practically raised to the condition of a
standing army and, contrary to immemorial law, placed under the
immediate authority of the Crown. But the bishops and their clergy had
demurred. They had little fancy for being left with no other protection
than a half-disciplined rabble, who, ready as they might be to act
against their troublesome countrymen, had no more respect for a lawn
sleeve than for a homespun jerkin. A few troops of regular cavalry were
therefore retained, and one regiment of Foot Guards. The former were
commanded by Athole, the latter by Linlithgow. Towards the end of 1677 a
fresh troop of cavalry was raised, and the command given to the young
Marquis of Montrose, grandson to him who had died on the scaffold and
kinsman to Claverhouse.
Claverhouse applied to him for employment, and it appears from
Montrose's answer that the application had been warmly backed by the
Duke of York. "You cannot imagine," runs the letter, "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." The writer goes on to say that he
himself was expecting instant promotion, and to promise his kinsman a
share in whatever fortune might befall him: none but gentlemen, he adds,
are to ride in his troop. The offer was accepted, and the promotion was
not long delayed.
The Indulgence had failed, as by some at least of those who had
countenanced it it had been expected to fail. The Opposition, led at
Edinburgh by Hamilton and Argyle, and backed in London by Monmouth and
Shaftesbury, which had for some time past been working openly against
Lauderdale, had also for the moment failed. The Commissioner's hands
were strong. With the King and the Duke of York at his back, and, in
Edinburgh, Sharp, Burnet, and the majority of the Episcopalian clergy,
together with all the needy nobles who loved best to fish in troubled
waters, Lauderdale could afford, as he thought then, to laugh at all
opposition. To assume that his design had been from the first to goad
the West into open rebellion affords, indeed, a simple explanation of a
policy that in its persistent unwisdom and brutality seems strangely
irrational and monstrous, even for such times and men. But it is rash to
take any policy as certain in those dark and crooked councils, unless it
be--as probably in Lauderdale's case it was, and as it assuredly was in
the case of most of his creatures--the policy of personal
aggrandisement. At any rate, after the failure of the Indulgence had
been made clear even to those hopeful spirits who still, with Leighton,
had believed it possible to efface years of wrong by a few grudging
concessions, the cruel game was renewed with fresh vigour. The
Highlanders, indeed, had gone, but their place was now to be filled by a
more dangerous because a more disciplined foe. Orders were given to
raise three new troops of cavalry for special service in Scotland. The
Earls of Home and Airlie were chosen by Lauderdale to command two of
these troops: the third was, at the King's express desire, given to
Claverhouse. At the same time, Athole, who was now in opposition with
Hamilton and Argyle, was superseded by Montrose, and Linlithgow named
commander-in-chief of all the royal forces in Scotland.
Claverhouse now for the first time steps in his own person on the stage
of Scottish history. Eleven years later, in 1689, he passes off it for
ever. It is with the tale of that brief time, so crowded with action, so
variously recorded, that we shall be from this point concerned.
He was now in his thirty-fifth year. Confused and conflicting as the
witnesses of his life and character may be, of the man himself as he
looked to the eyes of his contemporaries there is the clearest
testimony. Over the mantelpiece of Scott's study in Castle Street hung
the only picture in the room--a portrait of Claverhouse. An original
portrait Lockhart calls it, but which of the five portraits engraved in
Napier's volumes it may have been, if any of them, I cannot tell. All
these engravings, with a unanimity not common in the portraiture of the
time, show the same face: a face of delicate, almost feminine beauty,
framed in the long full love-locks of the period.[15] The eyes are large
and dark, the figure small but well made, and the general expression of
the countenance one of almost boyish smoothness and simplicity. His
manners were gentle and courteous, though reserved: his habit of life
was, as has been already said, singularly decorous: he was scrupulous in
the observance of all religious ordinances. After his death an old
Presbyterian lady, who had lodged below him in Edinburgh, told Lochiel's
biographer how astonished she had been to find one of his profession so
regular in his devotions. In truth, one of the most curious, and at the
same time one of the most indisputable, points in the life of this
singular man is the contrast between those public actions which have had
so large a share in moulding the popular impression, and his private
character and conduct. And not less curious is the contrast between the
reality of his personal appearance and the counterfeit presentment
likely to be fostered by a too liberal adherence to that impression. It
would be difficult to imagine a more complete surprise than awaits those
who turn for the first time from the stern, brutal, and profane soldier
of the historian's page to the high-bred and graceful gentleman of the
painter's canvas.
Claverhouse seems to have received his commission in the autumn of 1678.
The earliest of his letters extant is dated from Moffat, a small town
in the north of Dumfriesshire, on December 28th. It is addressed to Lord
Linlithgow, and contains this significant passage: "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 order to apprehend anybody for past misdemeanours."[16]
And this scrupulous observance of his orders, at a time when a little
excess of zeal was unlikely to be regarded as a very serious blunder, is
yet more strikingly illustrated in his next letter, written a week later
from Dumfries. In that town, at the southern end of the bridge over the
Nith, the charity of some devout Covenanting ladies had lately set up a
large meeting-house. The clergy, as wild against the Covenanters as
Lauderdale himself, were very importunate with Claverhouse to demolish
this hotbed of disaffection; but he, though he confessed privately to
his chief his annoyance at seeing a conventicle held with impunity "at
our nose," answered all importunities with a calm reference to his
orders. The southern end of the bridge was in Galloway, and in Galloway
his commission did not run. The authority of the Deputy-Sheriff of the
shire was therefore called into play, and with his countenance the
offending building was quickly razed to the ground. In his report of
this business Claverhouse writes:--"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, I
never inquired further in the laws than the orders of my superior
officers." This will not be the only occasion on which Claverhouse will
be found keeping strictly within the lines of his commission, instead
of, as he has been so frequently charged with doing, wantonly and
savagely exceeding it.
This Deputy-Sheriff (or Steward, as the phrase then ran) needs a word to
himself, both on his own account, as representing a certain phase of
character unfortunately too common to the time, and as the real author
of many of the cruel deeds of which Claverhouse so long has borne the
blame. Sir Robert Grierson of Lag was regarded in his own district with
an energy of hatred to which even the terror inspired by Claverhouse
gave place, and which has survived to a time within the memory of men
still living. In the early years of this century the most monstrous
traditions of his cruelty were still current, and are not yet wholly
extinct. In a vaulted chamber of the house in which he lived, on the
English road some three miles south of Dumfries, is still shown an iron
hook from which he is said to have hung his Covenanting prisoners; and
a hill in the neighbourhood is still pointed out as that down which he
used, for his amusement, to send the poor wretches rolling in a barrel
filled with knife-blades and iron spikes,--an ingenious form of torture,
commonly supposed to have been invented by the Carthaginians two
thousand years ago for the particular benefit of a Roman Consul. The
dark and mysterious legend of Sir Robert Redgauntlet, with which
Wandering Willie beguiled the way to Brokenburn-foot, was a popular
tradition of Sir Robert Grierson, or Lag (as, in the familiar style of
the day he was more commonly called) in Scott's own lifetime: the fatal
horseshoe, the birth-mark of all the Redgauntlet line, was believed to
be conspicuous on the foreheads of every true Grierson in moments of
anger; and it was a grandson of old Lag himself who sat to Scott for the
portrait of the elder Redgauntlet, the rugged and dangerous Herries of
Birrenswark. Within the last fifty years it was a custom of Halloween in
many of the houses in Dumfriesshire and Galloway to celebrate by a rude
theatrical performance the evil memory of the Laird of Lag.[17]
Born of a family which had held lands in Dumfriesshire since the
fifteenth century, and had figured at various times on the troubled
stage of Scottish history, Lag was undoubtedly a man of some parts and
capacity for public affairs, but coarse, cruel and brutal beyond even
the license of those times. The Covenanting historians charge him with
vices such as even they shrank from attributing to Claverhouse; and,
careful as it is always necessary to be in taking the evidence of such
witnesses, it is abundantly clear that even these ingenious romancists
would have been hard put to it to stain the memory of Lag. Later
historians have been sometimes less careful in distinguishing between
the two men. At least in one striking instance, the misdeeds of this
ruffian have been circumstantially charged to the account of his more
famous and important colleague.
It will be remembered that in the picture Macaulay has drawn of
Claverhouse the soldiers under his command, and by implication
Claverhouse himself, figure as relieving their sterner duties by a
curious form of relaxation. They would call each other, he says, by the
names of devils and damned souls, mocking in their revels the torments
of hell. The authority for this surprising statement is Robert Wodrow,
who was not born when Claverhouse returned to Scotland, and whose
history of the Scottish Church was not published till more than thirty
years after the battle of Killiecrankie.[18] Wodrow's work is very far
from being the contemptible thing some apologists for Claverhouse would
have us believe; but he is not a witness whose unsupported testimony it
is always safe to take for gospel-truth. He wrote at a time when the
naturally romantic imagination of the Scottish peasantry, stimulated by
the memories of old men who had known the evil times, had largely
embellished the facts he set himself to chronicle; and following the
fashion of his day (indeed, as one may say, the fashion of many
historians who cannot plead Wodrow's excuse), he was not always careful
to separate the romance from the reality, even where the latter might
have better served his turn. But considering all the circumstances--the
circumstances of the time, of his subject, and of his own
prepossessions, he is a writer whom it is impossible to disregard; and,
indeed, compared with the other Covenanting chroniclers he stands apart
as the most sober and impartial of historians. Where he got the story
that has been so ingeniously fashioned into an indictment against
Claverhouse is not clear. The passage runs as follows:--"Dreadful were
the acts of wickedness done by the soldiers at this time, and Lag was as
deep as any. They used to take to themselves, in their cabals, the names
of devils and persons they supposed to be in hell, and with whips to
lash one another, as a jest upon hell. But I shall draw a veil over many
of their dreadful impieties I meet with in papers written at this time."
This is not exactly the sort of evidence any judge but a hanging judge
would allow, though it would serve well enough the turn of a prosecutor.
It is at any rate evidence which no one, with any experience of the sort
of gossip the annalists of the Covenant were content to call history,
would care to take seriously. But whatever its value may really be, so
far as it goes it is evidence not against Claverhouse but against Lag.
It is clear from Wodrow that the story refers not to the royal soldiers
but to the local militia; and a writer a little later than Wodrow makes
it still more clear that the men supposed thus to have disported
themselves in their cups were those commanded by Lag. John Howie, an
Ayrshire peasant and a Cameronian of the strictest sect, who was not
born till fourteen years after Wodrow had published his history, has
given Lag a particular place in the Index Expurgatorius of his "Heroes
for the Faith." There we may read how this "prime hero for the promoting
of Satan's kingdom" would, "with the rest of his boon companions and
persecutors, feign themselves devils, and those whom they supposed in
hell, and then whip one another, as a jest upon that place of torment."
Claverhouse, as has been already shown, was himself singularly averse to
all rioting and drunkenness, as well as to profane amusements of every
kind; and, as he was indisputably one of the sternest disciplinarians
who ever took or gave orders, it is unlikely that he would have
countenanced any such unseemly revels in the men under his command, with
whom, moreover, he was in these years thrown into unusually close
personal contact. But, in truth, the story, so far as he is concerned,
is too foolish to need any solemn refutation. It has been only examined
at this length as furnishing a signal instance of the recklessness with
which the misdeeds of others have been fathered on him.[19]
The work Claverhouse now found to do must have been singularly
distasteful to one who had seen war on a great scale under such captains
as William and Condé. It was at once undignified and dangerous; and
though danger was all to his taste, it was one thing to risk one's life
in open battle with enemies worthy of a soldier's steel, and another and
very different thing to run the chance of a stray bullet from behind a
haystack or through a cottage window. The line of country he had to
patrol (for his work was really little more than that) was all too large
for the forces at his disposal. The enemies with whom he had mostly to
deal were either old men or women, for the Covenanters were well
supplied with intelligence, and generally had ample warning of his
movements, quick and indefatigable as they were. "If your lordship give
me any new orders, I will beg they may be kept as secret as possible,
and sent for me so suddenly as the information some of the favourers of
the fanatics are to send may be prevented."[20] And again:
"I obeyed the orders about seizing persons in Galloway that
very night I received it, as far as it was possible; that is
to say, all that was within forty miles, which is the most
can be ridden in one night; and of six made search for, I
found only two, which are John Livingston, bailie of
Kirkcudbright, and John Black, treasurer there. 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. And the
truth is, they had time enough to be advertised, for the
order was dated the 15th, and came not to my hands till the
20th. I laid the fellow in the guard that brought it, so
soon as I considered the date, where he has lain ever since,
and had it not been for respect to Mr. Maitland
[Lauderdale's nephew] who recommended him to me I would have
put him out of the troop with infamy."[21]
The letters written during the first months of his commission are full
of warnings of this sort. And he had other complaints to make, which
must have been still more against the grain. He was so inadequately
supplied with money by the Council that he found it a hard matter to pay
his men, and harder still to pay the country people for the necessary
provisions and forage; for, so far from quartering his men at large upon
the peasantry, he seems, at any rate in those first months, to have been
scrupulous to pay at the current rates for all he required to a degree
that matches rather with the niceties of modern warfare than the customs
of those rough times.
In March Claverhouse was appointed Deputy-Sheriff of Dumfriesshire by a
particular warrant from Whitehall, and Andrew Bruce of Earlshall, one of
his lieutenants, was nominated with him. This step gave great offence to
Queensberry, who, as Sheriff of the shires of Dumfries and Annandale, by
law held all such patronage in his own hand, and marks the beginning of
the petty jealousy which from this time forward he seems to have shown
to Claverhouse whenever he dared, and which rose afterwards, as we shall
see, to a serious height. But Queensberry was no match for Lauderdale;
and Claverhouse was duly settled in his new office, which, while
strengthening his hands and enabling him to dispense with many tedious
formalities, at the same time considerably increased his labours.
And so winter passed into spring, and still Claverhouse found no work
more worthy of him than patrolling the country, arranging for his men's
quarters, examining suspected persons, and endeavouring to persuade the
Government to leave him not entirely penniless. More than once he sent
word to Edinburgh that he believed something serious was afoot. "I
find," he writes to Linlithgow on April 21st, "Mr. Welsh is accustoming
both ends of the country to face the king's forces, and certainly
intends to break out into open rebellion." This Welsh is a famous figure
in Covenanting history. Grandson to a man whose name was long held in
affectionate memory by his party as that of the "incomparable John Welsh
of Ayr," and great-grandson to no less a hero than John Knox himself, he
was on his own account a memorable man. He had inaugurated the first
conventicle, and had ever since been zealous in promoting them and
officiating at them among the wild hills and moorlands of the western
shires, till his name had become a byword among the soldiers for his
courage in braving and his skill in evading them. But though one of the
most resolute and indefatigable of the ministers of the Covenant, he was
also one of the most moderate and sensible. Had no one among them been
more eager than he to carry the war into the enemy's country there had
been no Bothwell Bridge. And, indeed, we shall find him seriously taken
to task by the more extreme of the party as a backslider from the good
cause for his endeavour to avert that disastrous affair.
Yet Claverhouse was right. Something very serious was soon to be afoot.
During the last few weeks the Covenanters had been notoriously growing
bolder. They did not always now, as hitherto, content themselves with
evading the soldiers: they became in their turn the aggressors. More
than once an outlying post of Claverhouse's men had been fired upon;
and on one occasion a couple of the dragoons had been savagely murdered
in cold blood. Even Wodrow found himself forced to own that about this
time "matters were running to sad heights among the armed followers of
some of the field meetings." But the trouble did not arise through John
Welsh. It came through a servant of the Crown who had been a sorer
plague to his countrymen than a myriad of disaffected ministers.
On May 5th, Lord Ross[22] from Lanark, and on the 6th Claverhouse from
Dumfries, sent in their despatches to the commander-in-chief at
Edinburgh as usual. It is clear that neither of them had at that time
heard any rumour of an event which had happened a few days previously at
no very great distance from their quarters. On May 2nd the Primate of
Scotland had been dragged from his carriage as he was driving across an
open heath three miles out of Saint Andrews, and murdered in open day
before the eyes of his daughter.
James Sharp, Archbishop of Saint Andrews, was at that time probably the
best-hated man in Scotland. Like all renegades he was in no favour even
with his own party, though Lauderdale found after trial that he could
not dispense with his support. Even the moderate Presbyterians, who
regarded the uncompromising Covenanters as the real cause of their
country's troubles, looked askance upon Sharp, as the man whom they had
chosen out of their number to save them and who had preferred to save
himself. By the Covenanters themselves he was assailed with every form
of obloquy as the Judas who had sold his God and his country for thirty
pieces of silver, and who had hounded on the servants of the King to
spill the blood of the saints. Yet his murder was but an accident.
Eleven years before an attempt had, indeed, been made upon his life by
one Mitchell, a fanatical and apparently half-witted preacher, who was
after a long delay put to the torture and finally executed on a
confession which he had been induced to make after a promise from the
Privy Council that his life should be spared. It is said that Lauderdale
would have spared him, but Sharp was so vehement for his death that the
Duke dared not refuse.
The chief promoters of the Archbishop's murder were Hackston of
Rathillet, Russell of Kettle, and John Balfour of Burley, or, more
correctly, of Kinloch. These three men were typical of the class who at
this time began to come to the front among the Covenanters, and by their
incapacity, folly, and brutality discredited and did their best to ruin
a cause whose original justice had been already too much obscured by
such parasites. It is impossible to believe that they, or such as they,
were inspired by any strong religious feelings. Hackston and Balfour
were men of some fortune, who had been free-livers in their youth, and
were now professing to expiate those errors by a gloomy and ferocious
asceticism. Both had a grudge against Sharp. Balfour had been accused of
malversation in the management of some property for which he was the
Archbishop's factor, and Hackston, his brother-in-law, had been
arrested as his bail and forced to make the money good. Russell, who has
left a curiously minute and cold-blooded narrative of this murder,[23]
was a man of headstrong and fiery temper. They had all those dangerous
gifts of eloquence which, coarse and uncouth as it sounds to our ears,
was, when liberally garnished with texts of Scripture, precisely such as
to inflame the heated tempers of an illiterate peasantry to madness. It
is important to distinguish men of this stamp from the genuine sufferers
for conscience' sake. The latter men were, indeed, often wrought up by
their crafty leaders to a pitch of blind and brutal fury which has done
much to lessen the sympathy that is justly theirs. But they were at the
bottom simple, sincere, and pious; and they can at least plead the
excuse of a long and relentless persecution for acts which the others
inspired and directed for motives which it would be difficult, perhaps,
to correctly analyse, but assuredly were not founded on an unmixed love
either for their country or their faith. Stripped of the veil of
religious enthusiasm which they knew so well how to assume, men of the
stamp of Sharp's murderers were in truth no other than those brawling
and selfish demagogues whom times of stir and revolution always have
brought and always will bring to the front. There need, in these days,
be no difficulty in understanding the characters of men who dress Murder
in the cloak of Religion and call her Liberty.
Every child knows the story of the tragedy on Magus Moor. It will be
enough here to remind my readers, once more, that it was no preconcerted
plan, but a pure accident--or, as the murderers themselves called it, a
gift from God. The men I have named, with a few others, were really
after one Carmichael, who had made himself particularly odious by his
activity in collecting the fines levied on the disaffected. But
Carmichael, who was out hunting on the hills, had got wind of their
design and made his way home by another route. As the party were about
to separate in sullen disappointment, a messenger came to tell them that
the Archbishop's coach was in sight on the road to Saint Andrews. The
opportunity was too good to be lost. Hackston was asked to take the
command, but declined, alleging his cause of quarrel with Sharp, which
would, he declared, "mar the glory of the action, for it would be
imputed to his particular revenge." But, he added, he would not leave
them, nor "hinder them from what God had called them to." Upon this,
Balfour said, "Gentlemen, follow me;" and the whole party, some nine or
ten in number, rode off after the carriage, which could be seen in the
distance labouring heavily over the rugged track that traversed the
lonely expanse of heath. How the butcher's work was done: how Sharp
crawled on his knees to Hackston, saying, "You are a gentleman--you will
protect me," and how Hackston answered, "Sir, I shall never lay a hand
on you": how Balfour and the rest then drew their swords and finished
what their pistols had begun; and how the daughter was herself wounded
in her efforts to cover the body of her father--these things are
familiar to all.
From May 6th to 29th no letters from Claverhouse have survived; but on
the latter date he sent a short despatch from Falkirk, announcing his
intention of joining his forces with Lord Ross to scatter a conventicle
of eighteen parishes which, he had just received news, were about (on
the following Sunday) to meet at Kilbryde Moor, four miles from Glasgow.
The following Sunday was June 1st, on which day Claverhouse was indeed
engaged with a conventicle; but in a fashion very different from any he
had anticipated.
FOOTNOTES:
[15] It is said that he used to tend these curls with very particular
care, attaching small leaden weights to them at night to keep them in
place,--a custom which, I am informed, has in these days been revived by
some dandies of the other sex.
[16] This very much bears out Burnet's complaint against the Episcopal
clergy in Scotland, which has been so strenuously denied by Creichton.
"The clergy used to speak of that time as the poets do of the golden
age. They never interceded for any compassion to their people; nor did
they take care to live more regularly, or to labour more carefully. They
looked on the soldiery as their patrons; they were ever in their
company, complying with them in their excesses; and, if they were not
much wronged, they rather led them into them than checked them for
them."--"History of My Own Time," i. 334.
[17] "The Laird of Lag," by Lieut.-Col. Fergusson, pp. 7-11.
[18] His "History of the Sufferings of the Church of Scotland" was first
published in 1721.
[19] This confusion was first pointed out by Aytoun in an appendix to
the second edition of his "Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers."
[20] Claverhouse to Linlithgow, December 28th, 1678. These letters are
all quoted from Napier's book. I have thought it better to give the date
of the letter than the reference to the page.
[21] Claverhouse to Linlithgow, February 24th, 1679.
[22] George, eleventh Lord Ross, was joined with Claverhouse in the
command of the western shires. He had married Lady Grizel Cochrane,
daughter of the first Earl of Dundonald, and aunt of the future Lady
Dundee.
[23] Printed in Sharpe's edition of Kirkton's "History of the Church of
Scotland." It differs in some, but not very important, points from the
account printed in the same volume from Wodrow's manuscripts.