Hence the Revolution was perhaps welcome to him.  As an adherent of character and some position he met with marked favour from the new sovereigns, who promoted him to the bench, and corrected the injustice which had been done to him in the matter of the patent of his father’s baronetcy, and also granted him a pension of L100 a year, an addition of fifty per cent. to his official salary.  Shortly afterwards he was offered the post of Lord Advocate, but declined it, because the condition was attached that he should not prosecute the persons implicated in the Massacre of Glencoe.[21] From these facts it has been sometimes inferred that Lauder was disaffected to the Stewart dynasty, and that his professional advancement was thereby retarded.  In reality his career was one of steady prosperity.  Having already received the honour of knighthood while still a young man, and being a member of parliament for his county, he became a judge at the age of forty-three.  So far from holding opinions antagonistic to the reigning house, Lauder was an enthusiastic royalist.  He was indeed a staunch Protestant at a time when religion played a great part in politics.  In his early youth the journal here published shows him as perhaps a bigoted Protestant.  But he was not conscious of any conflict between his faith and his loyalty till the conflict was forced upon him, and that was late in the day.  In this position he was by no means singular.  Sir George Mackenzie, who as Lord Advocate was so vigorous an instrument of Charles II.’s policy, refused, like Lauder, to concur in the partial application of the penal laws, and his refusal led to his temporary disgrace.  Lauder was not even a reformer.  He was a man of conservative temperament, and while his love of justice and good government led him to criticise in his private journals the glaring defects of administration, and especially the administration of justice, there is no evidence that he had even considered how a remedy was to be found.  There was indeed no constitutional means of redress, and all revolutionary methods, from the stubborn resistance of the Covenanters, to the plots in London, real or imaginary, but always implicitly believed in by Lauder, and the expeditions of Monmouth and Argyll, met with Lauder’s unqualified disapproval and condemnation.

    [21] It has been said that there is no sufficient evidence of this
        honourable incident in Fountainhall’s career.  But Sir Thomas Dick
        Lauder (MS. Genealogical Roll, supra) reproduces it in a poem to
        the Memory of Sir John Lauder, published in 1743, and attributed
        to Blair, the author of ‘The Grave,’ in which the following lines
        occur.  He

          ’Saw guiltless blood poured out with lavish hand,
          And vast depopulated tracts of land;
          And saw the wicked authors of that ill
          Unpunished, nay, caressed and favoured still. 
          The power to prosecute he would not have,
          Obliged such miscreants overlooked to save.’