It would be as foolish to take these witnesses too literally, as it is foolish to call Claverhouse a blockhead because he could not spell correctly.  For many years after his death men of position and abilities far more distinguished and acknowledged than his, were not ashamed to spell with a recklessness that would inevitably now entail on any fourth-form boy the last penalty of academic law.  Scott says that Claverhouse spelled like a chambermaid; and Macaulay has compared the handwriting of the period to the handwriting of washerwomen.  The relative force of these comparisons others may determine, but it is certain that in this respect at least Claverhouse sinned in good company.  The letters of even such men as the Lord Advocate, Sir George Mackenzie, and the Dalrymples,—­letters written in circumstances more favourable to composition than the despatches of a soldier are ever likely to be—­are every whit as capricious and startling in their variations from the received standard of orthography.  If it is impossible quite to agree with his staunch eulogist, Drummond of Bahaldy, that Claverhouse was “much master in the epistolary way of writing,” at least his letters are plain and to the purpose; and the letters of a soldier have need to be no more.

It is, of course, unlikely that he could have been, even for those days, a cultivated man.  The studies of youth are but the preparation for the culture of manhood; and after his three quiet years at Saint Andrews were done, his leisure for study must have been scant indeed.  But all we know of his character, temperament, and habits of life forbid the supposition that he wasted that precious time either in idleness or indulgence.  His bitterest enemies have borne witness to his singular freedom from those vices which his age regarded more as the characteristics than the failings of a gentleman.  The most scurrilous of the many scurrilous chroniclers of the Covenanters’ wrongs has owned in a characteristic passage that his life was uniformly clean.[3] Gifted by nature with quick parts, of dauntless ambition and untiring energy both of mind and body, he was not the man to have let slip in idleness any chance of fortifying himself for the great struggle of life, or to have neglected studies which might be useful to him in the future because they happened to be irksome in the present.  It is only, therefore, in reason to suppose that he managed his time at the University prudently and well, and this may easily be done without assuming for him any special intellectual gifts or graces.

But, as a matter of strict fact, from the date of his matriculation to the year 1672 nothing is really known of Claverhouse or his affairs.  It has, however, been generally assumed that, after the usual residence of three years at the University, he crossed over into France to study the art of war under the famous Turenne.  As the practice was common then among young men of good birth and slender fortune,