crushed-but still the poor wretch kept his secret, till, at the ninth blow, he fainted clean away; and then the judges, who had hitherto looked on, rose and left the room. barbarous cruelty had failed of its purpose.1

Their

Mitchell was sent back to prison, but Sharp seems to have thought himself unsafe so long as he lived. The letters of intercommuning had filled the country with desperate men, and he dreaded others might be encouraged to assassinate him if Mitchell were allowed to escape. Lauderdale yielded to his clamours, and, in January 1678, Mitchell was again placed at the bar of the Justiciary Court. His previous indictment had embraced, besides the attempted murder of the primate, the Pentland Hill rising, but now the charge was limited to the first of these. No proof was produced but his confession before the Privy Council. Sir George Lockhart, one of the ablest lawyers and most upright men of the day, undertook his defence, and pleaded that no such extrajudicial confession could be allowed in court. This plea was overruled, on the ground that the Privy Council was a judicatory. Lockhart next pleaded the solemn promise of indemnity, but, to their everlasting infamy, Lauderdale, Rothes, Halton, and Sharp denied upon oath that any such promise had been given. Lockhart produced a copy of the Act of Council, in which mention of the promise was made; it was an uncertified copy, but he asked that the Registers of Council might be examined, and argued that, as the Council had been declared to be a judicatory, there was a right of search. Lauderdale was in court when this request was made, and stood up and said that he was not brought there to be accused of perjury that the books of Council contained the king's secrets, and that no court should have the perusal of them. Mitchell was condemned to be hanged, and hanged he was at the Grass market; but the act still remains in the records of the Privy Council, to prove the perjury of the four greatest persons in the realm to take away his life. After the trial, Lauderdale talked of granting him a reprieve, till the king should be con sulted; but Sharp, haunted by the dread of assassination, re sisted such clemency: "Then," said the duke, with a brutal jest, and mimicking the cant of the Covenanters, "let him go and glorify God at the Grassmarket!" 2

Conventicles still continued, especially in the west and 1 Wodrow's History, vol. ii. pp. 457, 458.

2 Burnet's History, vol. ii. pp. 15-18. Wodrow, vol. ii. pp. 468-71.

south-west country, and the gentry had shown a great reluctance to subscribe the bonds which made them responsible for all their dependents. It was resolved to treat the country as in a state of rebellion. A host of ten thousand men, of whom six thousand were Highlanders, was marched into the western counties, to seek free quarters there, and promote Episcopacy in their own fashion. We shall deceive ourselves if we think of this wild horde of men from the hills as being in anything like to that Highland Brigade which now embraces some of the finest regiments in the British army. It was a rabble of caterans accustomed to murder and theft, taught to regard plundering the Sassenach as a virtue, and having many of the habits of savage life. A committee of Council accompanied it, to point out the victims of oppression. Still the majority of the westland gentry resolutely refused to enter into the bonds, and the Duke of Lauderdale is said, in a frenzy at their obstinacy, to have bared his arm at the council-table, and sworn, by the name of the great Jehovah, that he would yet compel them to do so.1

The Duke of Hamilton, grieved to see the country laid waste, ventured to visit London to complain to the king. The Earls of Athole and Perth followed him, bent on the same errand. Charles received them coldly, and said he approved of all that his Commissioner had done; but still it was felt both by the king and his minister that such oppression could not be continued, and so the Highland host was dismissed to its native mountains. It returned laden with the spoils of the campaign.2 Still the country continued in a most miserable condition. Hundreds were in hiding for fear of the law. Field meetings, attended by armed men, were regularly held. The Episcopal clergy were regarded by the Presbyterians as the cause of all their woes, and many were ripe for any desperate deed. Yet, to such a state of abject servitude had the nobles sunk, that a Convention of the Estates this very year wrote a letter to the king magnifying above mea

sure the administration of Lauderdale.

There was a wretch named Carmichael commissioned by the Privy Council, at the request of Archbishop Sharp, to ferret out all frequenters of conventicles in Fife, and he had used his power with merciless severity. On the 3d of May 1679, a band of outlawed men resolved to lie in wait for him near St Andrews, where it was understood he was to be hunt1 Burnet's History, vol. ii. p. 20. 2 Ibid. pp. 21, 22.

ing. He did not appear, and just as they were about to disperse, a boy told them that the archbishop was at Ceres, on his way from Edinburgh to St Andrews. The stern fanatics concluded that Providence had delivered their enemy into their hands, and the desperate resolution of murdering him was formed. It was not long till they descried the archbishop's coach driving along Magus Moor, about two miles to the south-west of his episcopal city. They instantly gave chase. Sharp, perceiving himself pursued, cried to the coachman to drive with all his might; but a heavy, lumbering coach on a bad road had no chance against light horsemen. He was soon overtaken; the traces were cut; and he was at the mercy of men who regarded him as a traitor to his country and his God, and believed that to slay him was to render an acceptable service to Heaven. His daughter was beside him in the carriage, and though a pistol-shot was fired in at the window, he still clung to her side, perhaps thinking that her sex would save him, while she, poor girl! screamed with terror. After a short scuffle he was dragged from the carriage and stabbed to death with many wounds, in vain begging for mercy. The bloody work being done, the assassins mounted their horses and galloped off, leaving the body of the murdered prelate lying on the moor.1

There were some in Scotland who applauded the deed, as there are some in every country who justify assassination in such circumstances still. But the great majority of the people condemned it as a foul murder. There were few, however, who greatly lamented the murdered man. A monument in white marble, reared by filial affection, in the Town Church of St Andrews, still remains to his memory; but history belies his epitaph, and posterity still regards him as the Judas of the Scottish Church.

The See of St Andrews, the second dignity in the kingdom, had been as fatal to its possessors as had the throne to the Stewarts. Beaton was assassinated in his castle at St Andrews; Hamilton was hanged on a gibbet at Stirling; Adamson died in beggary, and of a broken heart; and now Sharp lay murdered on Magus Moor.

1 Wodrow's History, vol. iii.

CHAPTER XX.

WHEN news of the archbishop's murder reached

A.D. 1679. Edinburgh, the Privy Council issued a proclamation, offering a large reward for the apprehension of his murderers; but they had fled to the west, where they were in the midst of men prepared to resist the officers of justice. A few days later the Council issued another proclamation, declaring conventicles to be the rendezvouses of rebellion, and that persons attending them with arms would be punished as traitors. But proclamations of the Council could not prevent what was inevitable. The west was ripe for rebellion; and the crisis was hastened by the presence of the desperadoes who had fled from Fife.

A few determined men resolved to give a public testimony against the sins of the government. They fixed upon the 29th of May as the most fitting day, being the anniversary of the Restoration. They had at first thought of making Glasgow the scene of their demonstration, but deterred by the presence of the military, they proceeded to Rutherglen, a small royal burgh about three miles further east, and there they boldly threw down the gauntlet. They extinguished the bonfires which were blazing in honour of the Restoration; they affixed to the market-cross a paper in which they denounced the various acts of parliament by which Presbyterianism had been overthrown, Prelacy established, and the country exposed to persecution; and then they burned the acts to which their declaration referred.2

This daring deed made a considerable noise both in Edinburgh and Glasgow. Grahame of Claverhouse, who at this time held a commission as captain in a regiment of horse, and had already distinguished himself by his zeal in hunting down the Covenanters, was stationed at Glasgow; and on Saturday, the 31st of May, proceeded to Hamilton in search of the men who had defied the government. He there seized an intercommuned minister, and some other Presbyterians, but not of those who had been present at Rutherglen. He learned, however, that Thomas Douglas, a well known Covenanting 1 Wodrow's History, vol. iii. p. 58.

2

А сору of the Rutherglen Declaration will be found in Wodrow, vol. iii. pp. 66, 67. See also Law's Memorable Things, p. 149.

minister, was to preach the next day at Loudon Hill, and he determined to march thither and disperse the conventicle.

To the south of the village of Strathaven the country becomes high and moorland, a heathy waste stretches out on every side as far as the eye can reach, and there is nothing to relieve the dull dreariness of the landscape but the towering form of Loudon Hill. In this desolate region the Covenanters met to worship their God, in their own fashion, on the Sunday morning of the 1st of June. The stern and rugged character of the scenery harmonized with the stern and rugged character of the men. Several of those who had been at Rutherglen were there. The simple services were begun, when the watch stationed on the top of the hill gave the alarm that a body of horse was approaching; and soon afterwards Claverhouse and his dragoons were observed on the rising ground betwixt them and Strathaven. Being mostly armed, they resolved to fight rather than to flee, and sending their women and children to the rear, they advanced to a swampy piece of ground near Drumclog, and there awaited the approach of their enemy. The Covenanters, though undisciplined, were determined; and after a sharp skirmish Claverhouse was compelled to sound a retreat, leaving some thirty of his troopers dead on the heath.1

Elated by this success, the Covenanters marched the next day upon Glasgow; but after some fighting with the military, who had barricaded the streets, they retired towards Hamilton, where they formed a camp. The disaffected from every part of the country hastened to join them, and in a few days they could count four or five thousand men. But it was a desperate enterprise in which they were engaged. How could these four or five thousand hope to withstand the military power of three kingdoms? But oppression makes wise men mad, and when the blood is up we do not nicely calculate the odds. Burnet declared before the House of Commons that the Duke of Lauderdale had once said to him, that he wished the Presbyterians would rebel, that he might bring over an army of Papists from Ireland to cut their throats;2 and something like a rebellion had now taken place. This army of Irish cutthroats was not brought over; but the Privy Council called out the militia of the eastern and northern counties, and

1 Wodrow, vol. iii. p. 69. See also Scots Worthies, Lives of Paton, Nisbet, &c., and Appendix.

2 History of his Own Times, vol. ii.