had “among the rest of his cruelties barbarously murdered several of the persecuted people with his own hands,” also that “this man is said to have killed above a hundred men in this kind of cold blood cruelty.”  But Defoe’s qualifications for a historian of those times are, to say the least, uncertain.  He mentions Cameron and Cargill as alive and busy in 1684, four years after one had died fighting at Aird’s Moss, and the other on the scaffold at Edinburgh.

[63] Wodrow, iv. 197; Napier, i. 89.  I have called this the most authentic version because it professes to have come from the murderers themselves.  It is to be found in a letter to Wodrow (printed by Napier) now in the Advocates’ Library at Edinburgh.  The date is 1715, and the writer, who only signs his initials, J.C., calls Wodrow “cousin.”  “I give you the account,” he writes, “from the best information it’s possible to be got, viz., from Robert Dun, in Woodheade of Carsphairn, and John Clark, then in that parish, now in Glenmont, in the parish of Strathone, anent the curate’s death of Carsphairn, which they had from the actors’ own mouths.”  Wodrow adds a little touch of his own—­“Mr. Peirson with fury came out upon them with arms”—­and is silent on the fact of Mitchell’s presence.

[64] Fountainhall’s “Historical Notices,” and a letter to Queensberry from Sir Robert Dalzell and others, quoted by Napier, ii. 427-8.

[65] Wodrow, iv. 184.

[66] For example, the story told of Claverhouse sparing a man’s life for the sport his capture had afforded, but ordering his ears to be shorn off.  This may be found in a book called “Gleanings among the Mountains, or Traditions of the Covenanters,” published at Edinburgh, in 1846, by the Rev. Robert Simpson, of Sanquhar.  The same gentleman is responsible for an earlier volume, “The Times of Claverhouse,” in which the Covenanters are described as a class of “quiet and orderly men,” maintaining the standard of their gospel in “the most peaceful and inoffensive way.”  In neither volume is any authority offered for these stories:  even the evidence of time and place is rarely vouchsafed.

[67] Walker’s “Biographia Presbyteriana:”  Lochiel’s Memoirs.

[68] See ante, p. 92:  also Napier, ii. 360, for a letter to the Lord Chancellor, June 9th, 1683.  “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.”

CHAPTER VIII.

Both in Scotland and England events were now moving fast to their inevitable conclusion, but of Claverhouse’s part in public affairs there is for the next three years little record.  Only two of his letters have survived between May, 1685, and October, 1688, when the disastrous march into England began.  From one of these it is clear that his restoration to favour at Whitehall had not improved his position at Edinburgh.