had been doing his best to make. The west was declared in a state of insurrection. An Irish force was assembled at Belfast, an English force was marched to the Border; but better tools were found nearer to hand. Eight thousand savages-for as such the Highlanders were then commonly regarded, their employment, as was that also of the Irish kernes, being indeed notoriously contrary to the rules of war-were let loose on the refractory districts. The effect was, perhaps, not all that had been anticipated, for only one life, it is said, was lost, and that the life of a Highlander. But during two months these marauders lived at free quarters on friend and foe alike, and when at last even the Council saw that it was expedient to get rid of them, they returned to their own country laden with spoil such as they had never dreamed of, and of the use of which they were as ignorant as a Red Indian or a negro.

The skirmish at Drumclog was, however, the real beginning of the rebellion. Lag was not present on that day, but he had already met Claverhouse. A few days before the end of the previous year that officer had been summoned by the regular clergy (who were as bitter against the Whigs as Lag himself or Lauderdale) to demolish a meeting-house which had been raised by the charity of certain ladies at the western end of the bridge of Dumfries. He had declined, on the plea that his orders confined him to Dumfries and Annandale, and had sent to Linlithgow, then commander-in-chief of the royal forces in Scotland, for further instructions. Lag, who held authority as a principal land-holder in those parts, besides being a deputy-sheriff in Wigtownshire, was accordingly sent to the scene, and under his supervision the offending conventicle, "a good large house, of about sixty foot of length, and betwixt twenty and thirty broad," was quickly demolished.

During the terrible summer of 1679, which saw the battles of Drumclog

and Bothwell Bridge, and the murder on Magus Muir, we get no certain glimpse of Lag. But from the Dumfries Council minutes, and from Claverhouse's letters, it is clear that he was proving himself an active magistrate. He opened a military court of justice at Kirkcudbright, of which shire he was then steward in conjunction with Claverhouse, and another in the parish church of Carsphairn, for the purpose of enforcing the Test Act of 1681, and the Act of 1683, which made owning the Covenant and unsatisfactory answers concerning the matters of Bothwell Bridge and Sharp's murder capital offences, and ordered that all sentences of death were to be executed within three hours of the verdict. Two years later followed a fresh Declaration from the Cameronians,1 which was met in turn by the Abjuration Oath, which conferred a certificate of loyalty on all who took it, and instant death on all who refused it. The next three years, the three years of James's reign, were for long known in Scotland as "the killing time." Among the foremost of those who perished at this time was Baillie of Jerviswood, one of the victims of Fergusson "the Plotter," a man, as Burnet has de

1 This body, the Extreme Left of the Covenanters, received its name from Richard Cameron. Its first public act was the proclamation known as the Sanquhar Declaration, from having been nailed to the market cross of that town on the twenty-second of June, 1680. A month later they were defeated by Bruce of Earlshall, Claverhouse's lieutenant, at Aird's Moss in Ayrshire. Cameron was killed in the struggle, and Hackston of Rathillet, one of Sharp's murderers, taken prisoner, and executed in circumstances of great cruelty at Edinburgh. Donald Cargill became then the leader of the party, and in the autumn of that year he publicly pronounced sentence of excommunication against the king, the Duke of York, Monmouth, Lauderdale, and certain others in authority. Not long afterwards he, too, shared Hackston's fate, and Renwick was then advanced to the perilous position of chief of the Hill-men or Society men, as the Cameronians were indifferently called. He was one of the last victims of "the killing time," being executed but a few months before James fled from England.

scribed him, "of many parts and still more virtues," who was undoubtedly in sympathy with Argyle and the refugees in Holland, but was, as every one knew well, the last of men to have had any share in the plots either of the Rye House or the Assassination. He was, however, tried, convicted, and executed on evidence which, to borrow the words of Halifax on a similar occasion, was not sufficient to Another of the hang a dog on.

sufferers, though he was allowed to keep his head at the expense of his estate, was Sir William Scott of Harden, one of the ancestors of the author of Old Mortality' and 'Redgauntlet.' James, who in 1681 had succeeded Lauderdale in the administration of Scotch affairs, when summoned to England by the illness of the king had declared that "there would never be peace in Scotland till the whole of the country south of the Forth was turned into a huntingground." His agents were certainly doing their best to verify the royal judgment.

And among them none at this time was more active than Lag. One of Lauderdale's first acts on his appointment as Lord High Commissioner in 1669 had been to give to the local militia, which had at the Restoration taken the place of the royal troops, all the duties and privileges of a standing army. In 1678, when it was found necessary to send fresh troops into the western shires, this militia was embodied, under its local leaders, with the royal forces, and according to the historians of the Covenanters it was the men under the immediate command of Lag who indulged in the peculiar practices ascribed by Macaulay to Claverhouse's dragoons. In a passage familiar to every one he has described them as relieving their hours of duty by revels in which they mocked the torments of hell, calling each other by the names of devils and damned souls. For this information he has quoted the authority of Wodrow, but the sense of Wodrow's words, as must have been

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perfectly clear to Macaulay, points to the militia of Lag rather than to the regulars of Claverhouse as the heroes of this startling form of relaxation. And in a work a little later than Wodrow's, but very similar in style and of about equal trustworthiness, in the Biographia Scoticana ' of John Howie, Lag, who figures as "a prime hero for the promoting of Satan's kingdom," is directly named as the chief performer in these revels. Such," it is said, was their audacious impiety, that he, with the rest of his boon companions and persecutors, would, over their drunken bowls, feign themselves devils and those whom they supposed in hell, and then whip one another, as a jest upon that place of torment." And then the pious biographer goes on to give, in the remarkably straightforward language of his class and time, other particulars of Lag's life and habits, which it is neither necessary nor convenient to quote. As a matter of fact there seems no reason to suppose that Lag was pre-eminent among his fellows for an evil life and conversation, though there is a story of his so grossly insulting Lord Kenmure that even the authority of Claverhouse could hardly keep the peace; and once, on being asked by one of his victims for a few minutes' respite for prayer, he is reported to have made answer, "What a devil have you been doing so many years in these hills-have you not prayed enough?" But the times were certainly not delicate; and the stories of Middleton and his drunken parliament show that no very grave scandal was supposed to belong even to the most public breach of decorum. On the other hand, the sobriety and cleanliness of Claverhouse's life were always quoted even by his bitterest foes as curious and signal facts in a man of his quality and position. And this might in itself be enough to seriously weaken Macaulay's charge, were no absolute disproof forthcoming. A captain cannot of course, be always looking after his soldiers' morals and manners, but

it is abundantly clear that Claverhouse was one of the sternest disciplinarians that ever took or gave orders; and as he was, during these years at any rate, thrown into unusually close personal contact with his men, it is unlikely that their opportunities for relaxation such as their commander would certainly not have countenanced can have been many. It would only be to meet the counsel for the prosecution at their own game to go a step farther, and, on the good old theory of like master like man, question whether the men under Claverhouse's command would not probably have contented themselves with some more decorous form of pastime.

But no one, of course, except for his own purposes, would seriously take the historians of the Covenanters as incontestable witnesses to the characters of

one.

the Cavaliers. Whatever Lag's private character may have been, there is no doubt whatever about his public It was as bad as bad could be. As a man of weight and mark in the country, and in high favour with the Council of Edinburgh for his energy and administrative parts, no doubt he bore on his shoulders the burden of many misdeeds for which he was not personally responsible. So Claverhouse has borne on his shoulders for the last two centuries the burden of many of Lag's misdeeds; and among these the most notorious is that popularly known as the case of the Wigtown martyrs.

The responsibility of Claverhouse for this affair again rests, we are sorry to have to say, with Macaulay. After the passage referred to above, in which he first brings John Graham on the stage, as "a soldier of distinguished courage and professional skill, but rapacious and profane, of violent temper, and of obdurate heart," who "has left a name which, wherever the Scottish race is settled on the face of the globe, is mentioned with peculiar energy of hatred," Macaulay proceeds to give instances of the crimes

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by which he goaded the peasantry of the western lowlands into madness-an operation, it may in passing be observed, which had been performed just two years before young Graham had left the university of Saint Andrews.

With two out of the four he has selected, Claverhouse had no more to do than Richard Cameron, who had been five years in his grave, or Robert Wodrow, who was just five years old. For the worse of these two, the case of the Wigtown martyrs, the responsibility rests with Lag and David Graham, brother of John, who was then sheriff of Galloway and one of the Lords Justices of Wigtownshire, but primarily with Lag. Macaulay does not, indeed, directly name Claverhouse as responsible for the deaths of Margaret Maclachlan and Margaret Wilson, but the sense of the context is, designedly or not, inevitable.

It is a curious point in connection with this affair that, after all the horror and indignation the story of the cruel deed has aroused for upwards of two centuries, there should be no certain proof that it was ever committed. The tribunal, before which the two women (and a third unnamed prisoner who seems to have been acquitted) were brought, was composed of Lag, David Graham, Major Windram, Captain Strachan, and Provost Cultrain. The day of the trial was April the thirteenth, and on the thirtieth of the same month a reprieve was sent down from the Privy Council at Edinburgh, pending the answer of the Secretaries of State to a recommendation for pardon. After this all is a blank for five and twenty years. Some time be

tween 1708 and 1711 the General Assembly of the Scotch Church determined to collect particulars of the late persecution, and the record of the Kirk Session of the parish of Penninghame, which professes to narrate this particular case, is dated in the latter year. There is no mention of it in the minutes of the burgh of Wigtown; and writers such as Mackenzie, the

Lord Advocate, before whom the case must have come, and Fountainhall, are equally silent. Patrick Walker, the most scurrilous and bitter of all the Covenanting scribes, after abusing Lag for the crime in language which John Howie's own Lag could hardly have bettered, owns that the story was not universally believed. On the other hand there is the evidence of tradition only; but it is the evidence of a tradition that has been faithfully preserved by generation after generation for two hundred years, and preserved with an amplitude and minuteness of detail such as it is hard to believe the sheer fabrication of a furious and frightened peasantry. Colonel Fergusson has recorded one touch of terrible picturesqueness. Many years after that cruel scene on the Solway sands, an old broken-down man used to wander about the streets of Wigtown, bearing on his shoulders a pitcher of water from which he was ever seeking to quench an intolerable thirst. Every one knew and shunned him, for the cause of his strange disease was common talk. He had been the town-officer of Wigtown, and when the youngest of the two martyrs had been lifted for a moment above the rising tide to give her one more chance of life by uttering the few necessary words of abjuration, he had, on her refusal, thrust her down again with his halberd, bidding her take another drink with her gossips, the crabs. And to the evidence of tradition must be added the evidence of a stone in the churchyard of Wigtown, which, as far back as 1714, marked the grave of Margaret Wilson, "who was drowned in the water of the Blednock, upon the eleventh of May, 1684 (5), by the Laird of Lag." That Wodrow employed the pencil of tradition to illustrate his melancholy tale, and that Macaulay, as his fashion was, heightened the primitive touches of Wodrow, no one would dispute; but that the whole affair should be sheer fiction seems impossible. It is, however, a story which those who will

accept nothing that cannot be proved with mathematical certainty will always find arguments for doubting. We, for our part, are not concerned any further to renew a controversy once so eagerly waged,' but now wellnigh perhaps forgotten. To such of our readers as may be still curious on the point Colonel Fergusson's book will afford the means of forming their own conclusions without prejudice; for he himself, with a restraint perhaps unprecedented in history, entirely declines to commit himself to either side a piece of wisdom in which we shall take the liberty of imitating him.

These three years, from 1685 to 1688, form, as one may say, Lag's flowering-time. But the record of the old ruffian's deeds soon grows as monotonous as revolting, and our readers will probably thank us for again imitating Colonel Fergusson or even, as we are not writing a book, for improving on his example-and refraining even earlier than he does from exhausting their patience. For a wonder James proved no ungrateful master. He conferred on Lag a baronetcy and a pension of two hundred pounds the latter he was not suffered long to enjoy.

On the fourth of April, 1689, the Estates passed a vote declaring that James had forfeited his right to the crown, and that the throne was accordingly vacant. This was followed a week later by a Claim of Right, enlarging on the reasons of that forfeiture, and an offer of the crown to William and Mary. Among the great Scotch nobles who, while caring little for the political liberty of their country, would resist every attack on the Protestant religion, was the Duke of Queensberry, Lag's brother-in-law.2 He had in consequence been stripped

1 In the pages of this Magazine among other places. See an article on 'The Wigtown Martyrs,' by the late Principal Tulloch, in December, 1862.

Lag had married the Lady Henrietta Douglas, Queensberry's sister.

of all his employments, but nevertheless had stood by his king so long as there had been a king for him to stand by. He had returned to Scotland when William reached London, and had at first been regarded by those members of the Estates who still remained loyal to James as their most capable leader. But Queensberry had no intention of risking his life in a lost

cause.

On the motion for declaring the throne vacant he would not vote; but when the motion had been passed he gave his voice willingly to the proposition that William was the proper person to fill the vacancy. Queensberry and Lag had always been good friends, and had the latter chosen to keep quiet, his brother-in-law's influence would probably have served to protect him from his many enemies. But he stoutly refused to take the oath of allegiance, standing apart from trimmers like Athol, from disappointed place - hunters like Montgomery and Annandale, and from the open adherents of William like Queensberry and Hamilton. It was not likely that such a man would be left to drink his toasts over the water in peace. Through the most part of William's reign his story is one of perpetual fines and imprisonments. Nor had he the fortune of his former colleague in the chance of proving himself fit for something better than hunting peasants to death. Through the wild summer that followed Claverhouse's defiance to the Convention, Lag lay among a crowd of prisoners in the Tolbooth of Edinburgh, packed as close as negroes in a slaver's hold and in much the same plight, in daily peril of a death far less glorious than that Dundee found in the Pass of Killiecrankie.' But, perhaps, the cruellest blow that the proud impetuous old man suffered was from an

1 The minutes of the Privy Council for the twenty-eighth of August, 1689, show a petition from Lag, praying to be released from an imprisonment which had lasted since the eighth of July, on the ground that his health had suffered from a malignant fever which had broken out in the jail.

action, too frivolous indeed to need any defence, brought against him seven years later for uttering false coin. It seems that he had let his house at Rockhall to an engraver who was also interested in a new device for stamping patterns on linen. The case broke completely down, but Lag's fury, as his biographer observes, may be easier imagined than described.

At this point he disappears from public record, though he lived on till 1733, a savage, gloomy old man in the same house at Rockhall, a lonely three storied building a few miles south of Dumfries on the English road, looking over Solway Firth to the hills of Cumberland. His eldest son William, to whom he had two years previously made over his estates, was out in "the Fifteen," and only escaped with a heavy fine. But Lag had so craftily worded the deed of entail that he was enabled to escape the penalty of his son's treason. In fact, as far as worldly prosperity goes, both he and his family fared much better than they could reasonably have hoped.

The active hate he had once inspired had now died down into monstrous traditions which are still not wholly extinct. From the ceiling of a room on the ground floor of the house at Rockhall, now used as a wine-cellar, still hangs an iron hook twelve inches long from which the old tyrant 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 roll them in a barrel full of spikes and knifeblades, after a fashion believed to have been invented by the Carthaginians nearly two thousand years earlier for the special behoof of a Roman consul. It was also said of him, as of another Sir Robert-Sir Robert Laurie, of Maxwelton-that a cup of wine had once tured to bloond in his hand. Of course there was keen curiosity among the rising generation for a glimpse of the grim old man of whom their fathers had such dreadful memories. On one occasion, a lad, full of