which can be fairly laid to Claverhouse’s account of such a kind?  His most able and his bitterest accuser pronounces him to have been “rapacious and profane, of violent temper and obdurate heart.”  Yet every attempt of his enemies to convict him of extortion or malversation broke signally down.  The decorum of his life and conversation was allowed even by the Covenanters; and it is recorded as a notable thing that, however disturbed or thwarted, he was never known to use profane language.  The imperturbable calm of his temper is said by one of their own party to have at once exasperated and terrified those who were brought before him far more than the brutal fury of men like Dalziel and Lag.[67] His heart was indeed hard to those whom he regarded as plotters and murderers, traitors to their King and enemies of the true religion.  He was indeed in his own way as much a fanatic as the men whom he was empowered to crush.  His devotion to the Crown and to the Protestant faith was a passion as deep and sincere as that which moved the simple peasants of the West to find the gospel of Christ in the horrible compound of blasphemy and treason which too often made up the eloquence of the Conventicles.  But his hardness, if not tempered with mercy, was at least guided by more justice than was common among his colleagues.  He both advocated and practised the policy of distinguishing between the multitude and their ringleaders.  The just punishment of one of the latter might save, he said, many of the former;[68] and his entreaty for the prisoners whom he found under sentence of death at Dundee proves that his actions were dictated by no vulgar thirst for blood.  When judged by the general manners of the age, the circumstances of the time and his position, I do not believe him to have been cruel by nature or careless of human life.  The standard of military morals in vogue two hundred years ago cannot be weighed by that in vogue to-day.  The humanity of one generation is not the humanity of the next.  Wellington was certainly not a cruel man, and he certainly was a most strict disciplinarian.  Yet it is well known that many things were done during the Peninsular campaign which no general now would dare to pass unpunished, which no soldier now would even dare to do; and it is quite possible that eighty years hence our descendants will read with horror of the deeds done by their grandsires among the rocky passes of Afghanistan or on the burning sands of Egypt.  I do not claim for Claverhouse that he was gentle, merciful, or humane beyond his time, though I believe him to have had as large a share of those qualities as any of his contemporaries would have displayed in similar circumstances.  But I do claim for him that his faults were the faults not of the man but of his age; and I maintain that his age cannot in such matters be tried by the standard of this.

FOOTNOTES: 

[49] I have been much indebted in this chapter to an anonymous pamphlet entitled “A Note to the Pictorial History of Scotland, on Claverhouse,” apparently printed at Maidstone; but when, or on whose authority, I have been unable to discover.  It was sent to me by an equally nameless benefactor.