than those of the passing hour. Mean- of the old Remonstrants of the Mauchline while we may be content to imagine him, Convention into a fury as wild and unreaas he, no doubt, is content to be, a second soning as that of their persecutors. Every Monkbarns, rejoicing in his "ancient fresh concession, or offer of concession, peaceful quiet dust," even though, unlike was regarded as only designed to open a that amiable but hasty old gentleman, he way for fresh possibilities of persecution, find none to care about disturbing it. In as a snare set to catch bodies as well as one way, at any rate, he is shrewder than souls. The gentle Leighton and his "cuMonkbarns. Antiquary though he be, he rates" were regarded with almost as much cherishes no illusions about Aiken Drum's detestation as the apostate Sharp and the lang ladle; and, warned possibly by his ruffians of Dalziel. The refusal of the forerunner's disappointment, is careful to gentry of Renfrew and Ayrshire to give publish no tract till he has "examined the bail that their servants and tenants should thing to the bottom." abstain from all dealings with intercom

Robert Grierson of Lag, the first baro-muned persons, as well as from personal net of the name, was the son of William attendance on conventicles, gave LauderGrierson of Barquhar, the second son of dale the opportunity which many began Sir Robert Grierson, knight, of Lag. His then to suspect he had been doing his cousin Robert dying while yet a minor, he best to make. The west was declared in succeeded to the estates in 1669. The a state of insurrection. An Irish force family had held land in Dumfriesshire and was assembled at Belfast, an English Galloway since the fifteenth century. One force was marched to the border; but of them had been wounded at Sauchie- better tools were found nearer to hand. burn, fighting probably against his king, Eight thousand savages for as such and another had died by the side of his the Highlanders were then commonly reking at Flodden. At the close of the six-garded, their employment, as was that teenth century a Lag had ridden with the also of the Irish kernes, being indeed no. Maxwells on that fatal day when their toriously contrary to the rules of war chief, the great Lord of Nithsdale and were let loose on the refractory districts. warden of the western marches, tried The effect was, perhaps, not all that had conclusions with the "gentle " Johnstones been anticipated, for only one life, it is of Annandale on the sands of Dryffe.* said, was lost, and that the life of a HighEarly in the seventeenth century the name lander. But during two months these maof Grierson appears in the list of commis- rauders lived at free quarters on friend sioners of both nations appointed by and foe alike, and when at last even the James to keep the peace on the borders; Council saw that it was expedient to get and this Sir Robert was the grandfather rid of them, they returned to their own of the old laird of Lag whose story Colo- country laden with spoil such as they had nel Fergusson has written for us. never dreamed of, and of the use of which they were as ignorant as a Red Indian or a negro.

Lag first finds a place in history by the side of Claverhouse. At the close of the year 1678 the latter had returned to Scotland, and had at once been appointed to one of the three regiments of dragoons then newly raised in the western shires. The wild Westland Whigs, as the Covenanters were then popularly styled in Edinburgh, had fairly turned to bay at last. The gentler measures with which Charles, shocked into a momentary sense of pity, had sought to atone for the brutal punishment of the Pentland rising, had come too late. The savage burst of persecution, into which the years of vague bullying following the Restoration had then burst, had goaded the stubborn sons

* See the fine old ballad of "Lord Maxwell's Goodnight."

"Adieu! Drumlanrig, faise wert aye,

And Closeburn in a band!

The Laird of Lag frae my father that fled
When the Johnstone struck off his hand!"

The skirmish at Drumclog was, however, the real beginning of the rebellion. Lag was not present on that day, but he had already met Claverhouse. A few days before the end of the previous year that officer had been summoned by the regular clergy (who were as bitter against the Whigs as Lag himself or Lauderdale) to demolish a meeting-house which had been raised by the charity of certain ladies at the western end of the bridge of Dumfries. He had declined, on the plea that his or ders confined him to Dumfries and Annandale, and had sent to Linlithgow, then commander-in-chief of the royal forces in Scotland, for further instructions. Lag, who held authority as a principal land. holder in those parts, besides being a dep. uty sheriff in Wigtownshire, was accordingly sent to the scene, and under his supervision the offending conventicle, "a

at the expense of his estate, was Sir Wil liam Scott of Harden, one of the ances tors of the author of "Old Mortality" and

succeeded Lauderdale in the administra. tion of Scotch affairs, when summoned to England by the illness of the king, had declared that "there would never be peace in Scotland till the whole of the country south of the Forth was turned into a hunting-ground." His agents were certainly doing their best to verify the royal judg. ment.

And among them none at this time was more active than Lag. One of Lauderdale's first acts on his appointment as lord high commissioner in 1669 had been to give to the local militia, which had at the Restoration taken the place of the royal troops, all the duties and privileges of a standing army. In 1678, when it was found necessary to send fresh troops into the western shires, this militia was embodied, under its local leaders, with the royal forces, and according to the histo

good large house, of about sixty foot of length, and betwixt twenty and thirty broad," was quickly demolished. During the terrible summer of 1679,"Redgauntlet." James, who in 1681 had which saw the battles of Drumclog and Bothwell Bridge, and the murder of Magus Muir, we get no certain glimpse of Lag. But from the Dumfries Council minutes, and from Claverhouse's letters, it is clear that he was proving himself an active magistrate. He opened a military court of justice at Kirkcudbright, of which shire he was then steward in conjunction with Claverhouse, and another in the parish church of Carsphairn, for the purpose of enforcing the Test Act of 1681, and the Act of 1683, which made owning the Covenant and unsatisfactory answers concern ing the matters of Bothwell Bridge and Sharp's murder capital offences, and ordered that all sentences of death were to be executed within three hours of the ver. dict. Two years later followed a fresh Declaration from the Cameronians, which was met in turn by the Abjuration Oath, which conferred a certificate of loy-rians of the Covenanters it was the men alty on all who took it, and instant death on all who refused it. The next three years, the three years of James's reign, were for long known in Scotland as "the killing time." Among the foremost of those who perished at this time was Baillie of Jerviswood, one of the victims of Fergusson the Plotter," a man, as Burnet has described him, "of many parts and still more virtues," who was undoubtedly in sympathy with Argyle and the refugees in Holland, but was, as every one knew well, the last of men to have had any share in the plots either of the Rye House or the assassination. He was, however, tried, convicted, and executed on evidence which, to borrow the words of Halifax on a similar occasion, was not sufficient to hang a dog on. Another of the sufferers, though he was allowed to keep his head

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* This body, the Extreme Left of the Covenanters,

received its name from Richard Cameron. Its first public act was the proclamation known as the Sanquhar Declaration, from having been nailed to the market cross of that town on the twenty-second of June, 1680. A month later they were defeated by Bruce of Earlshall, Claverhouse's lieutenant, at Aird's Moss in Ayrshire. Cameron was killed in the struggle, and Hackston of Rathillet, one of Sharp's murderers, taken prisoner, and executed in circumstances of great cruelty at Edin burgh. Donald Cargill became then the leader of the party, and in the autumn of that year he publicly pronounced sentence of excommunication against the king, the Duke of York, Monmouth, Lauderdale, and certain others in authority. Not long afterwards he, too, shared Hackston's fate, and Renwick was then advanced to the perilous position of chief of the Hill-men or Society men, as the Cameronians were indifferently called. He was one of the last victims of "the killing time," being executed but a few months before James

fled from England.

under the immediate command of Lag
who indulged in the peculiar practices
ascribed by Macaulay to Claverhouse's
dragoons. In a passage familiar to every
one he has described them as relieving
their hours of duty by revels in which
they mocked the torments of hell, calling
each other by the names of devils and
damned souls. For this information he
has quoted the authority of Wodrow, but
the sense of Wodrow's words, as must
have been perfectly clear to Macaulay,
points to the militia of Lag rather than to
the regulars of Claverhouse as the heroes
of this startling form of relaxation. And
in a work a little later than Wodrow's, but
very similar in style and of about equal
trustworthiness, in the "Biographia Scoti
cana" of John Howie, Lag, who figures
as "a prime hero for the promoting of
Satan's kingdom," is directly named as
the chief performer in these revels.
'Such," it is said, "was their audacious
impiety, that he, with the rest of his boon
companions and persecutors, would, over
their drunken bowls, feign themselves
devils and those whom they supposed in
hell, and then whip one another, as a jest
upon that place of torment." And then
the pious biographer goes on to give, in
the remarkably straightforward language
of his class and time, other particulars of
Lag's life and habits, which it is neither
necessary nor convenient to quote. As a
matter of fact there seems no reason to
suppose that Lag was pre-eminent among

his fellows for an evil life and conversa- | have to say, with Macaulay. After the tion, though there is a story of his so passage referred to above, in which he grossly insulting Lord Kenmure that even first brings John Graham on the stage, as the authority of Claverhouse could hardly "a soldier of distinguished courage and keep the peace; and once, on being asked professional skill, but rapacious and proby one of his victims for a few minutes' fane, of violent temper, and of obdurate respite for prayer, he is reported to have heart," who "has left a name which, wher made answer, "What a devil have you ever the Scottish race is settled on the been doing so many years in these hills-face of the globe, is mentioned with a have you not prayed enough?" But the peculiar energy of hatred," Macaulay protimes were certainly not delicate; and the ceeds to give instances of the crimes by stories of Middleton and his drunken par- which he goaded the peasantry of the liament show that no very grave scandal western lowlands into madness an op. was supposed to belong even to the most eration, it may in passing be observed, public breach of decorum. On the other which had been performed just two years hand, the sobriety and cleanliness of Cla- before young Graham had left the Univerhouse's life were always quoted even versity of Saint Andrews. by his bitterest foes as curious and signal With two out of the four he has selected, facts in a man of his quality and position. Claverhouse had no more to do than And this might in itself be enough seri Richard Cameron, who had been five ously to weaken Macaulay's charge, were years in his grave, or Robert Wodrow, Do absolute disproof forthcoming. A who was just five wears old. For the captain cannot, of course, be always look worse of these two, the case of the Wig. ing after his soldiers' morals and manners, town martyrs, the responsibility rests with but it is abundantly clear that Claverhouse Lag and David Graham, brother of John, was one of the sternest disciplinarians who was then sheriff of Galloway and one that ever took or gave orders; and as he of the lords justices of Wigtownshire, but was, during these years at any rate, thrown primarily with Lag. Macaulay does not, into unusually close personal contact with indeed, directly name Claverhouse as rehis men, it is unlikely that their opportu- sponsible for the deaths of Margaret nities for relaxation such as their com Maclachlan and Margaret Wilson, but mander would certainly not have counte- the sense of the context is, designedly or nanced can have been many. It would not, inevitable. only be to meet the counsel for the prosecution at their own game to go a step farther, and, on the good old theory of like master like man, question whether the men under Claverhouse's command would not probably have contented them selves with some more decorous form of pastime.

But no one, of course, except for his own purposes, would seriously take the historians of the Covenanters as incontestable witnesses to the characters of the Cavaliers. Whatever Lag's private character may have been, there is no doubt whatever about his public one. It was as bad as bad could be. As a man of weight and mark in the country, and in high favor with the Council of Edinburgh for his energy and administrative parts, no doubt he bore on his shoulders the burden of many misdeeds for which he was not personally responsible. So Claverhouse has borne on his shoulders for the last two centuries the burden of many of Lag's misdeeds; and among these the most notorious is that popularly known as the case of the Wigtown martyrs.

The responsibility of Claverhouse for this affair again rests, we are sorry to

It is a curious point in connection with this affair that, after all the horror and indignation the story of the cruel deed has aroused for upwards of two centuries, there should be no certain proof that it was ever committed. The tribunal, before which the two women (and a third unnamed prisoner who seems to have been acquitted) were brought, was com posed of Lag, David Graham, Major Windram, Captain Strachan, and Provost Cultrain. The day of the trial was April the thirteenth, and on the thirtieth of the same month a reprieve was sent down from the Privy Council at Edinburgh, pending the answer of the secretaries of state to a recommendation for pardon. After this all is a blank for five and twenty years. Some time between 1708 and 1711 the General Assembly of the Scotch Church determined to collect particulars of the late persecution, and the record of the Kirk Session of the parish of Penninghame, which professes to narrate this particular case, is dated in the latter year. There is no mention of it in the minutes of the burg of Wigtown; and writers such as Mackenzie, the lord advocate, before whom the case must have come, and Foun

declines to commit himself to either side -a piece of wisdom in which we shall take the liberty of imitating him.

These three years, from 1685 to 1688, form, as one may say, Lag's flowering

deeds soon grows as monotonous as revolting, and our readers will probably thank us for again imitating Colonel Fergusson - or even, as we are not writing a book, for improving on his example — and refraining even earlier than he does from exhausting their patience. For a wonder James proved no ungrateful master. He conferred on Lag a baronetcy and a pension of two hundred pounds: the latter he was not suffered long to enjoy.

tainhall, are equally silent. Patrick Walker, the most scurrilous and bitter of all the Covenanting scribes, after abusing Lag for the crime in language which John Howie's own Lag could hardly have bettered, owns that the story was not univer-time. But the record of the old ruffian's sally believed. On the other hand there is the evidence of tradition only; but it is the evidence of a tradition that has been faithfully preserved by generation after generation for two hundred years, and preserved with an amplitude and minuteness of detail such as it is hard to believe the sheer fabrication of a furious and frightened peasantry. Colonel Fergusson has recorded one touch of terrible picturesqueness. Many years after that cruel scene on the Solway sands, an old broken-down man used to wander about the streets of Wigtown, bearing on his shoulders a pitcher of water from which he was ever seeking to quench an intolerable thirst. Every one knew and shunned him, for the cause of his strange disease was common talk. He had been the town officer of Wigtown, and when the younger of the two martyrs had been lifted for a moment above the rising tide to give her one more chance of life by uttering the few necessary words of abju. ration, he had, on her refusal, thrust her down again with his halberd, bidding her take another drink with her gossips, the crabs. And to the evidence of tradition must be added the evidence of a stone in the churchyard of Wigtown, which, as far back as 1714, marked the grave of Margaret Wilson, “who was drowned in the water of the Blednock, upon the eleventh of May, 1684 (5), by the Laird of Lag." That Wodrow employed the pencil of tradition to illustrate his melancholy tale, and that Macaulay, as his fashion was, heightened the primitive touches of Wodrow, no one would dispute; but that the whole affair should be sheer fiction seems impossible. It is, however, a story which those who will accept nothing that cannot be proved with mathematical certainty will always find arguments for doubting. We, for our part, are not concerned any further to renew a controversy once so eagerly waged, but now well-nigh perhaps forgotten. To such of our readers as may be still curious on the point Colonel Fergusson's book will afford the means of forming their own conclusions without prejudice; for he himself, with a restraint perhaps unprecedented in history, entirely

*

* In the pages of this magazine among other places. See an article on "The Wigtown Martyrs," by the late Principal Tulloch, in December, 1862.

On the fourth of April, 1689, the Estates passed a vote declaring that James had forfeited his right to the crown, and that the throne was accordingly vacant. This was followed a week later by a Claim of Right, enlarging on the reasons of that forfeiture, and an offer of the crown to William and Mary. Among the great Scotch nobles who, while caring little for the political liberty of their country, would resist every attack on the Protestant religion, was the Duke of Queensberry, Lag's brother-in-law.* He had in consequence been stripped of all his employments, but nevertheless had stood by his king so long as there had been a king for him to stand by. He had returned to Scotland when William reached London, and had at first been regarded by those members of the Estates who still remained loyal to James as their most capable leader. But Queensberry had no intention of risking his life in a lost cause. On the motion for declaring the throne vacant he would not vote; but when the motion had been passed he gave his voice willingly to the proposition that William was the proper person to fill the vacancy. Queensberry and Lag had always been good friends, and had the latter chosen to keep quiet, his brother-in-law's influence would prob. ably have served to protect him from his many enemies. But he stoutly refused to take the oath of allegiance, standing apart from trimmers like Athol, from disappointed place-hunters like Montgomery and Annandale, and from the open adherents of William like Queensberry and Hamilton. It was not likely that such a man would be left to drink his toasts over the water in peace. Through the most part of William's reign his story is one

Lag had married the Lady Henrietta Douglas, Queensberry's sister.

of perpetual fines and imprisonments. Nor had he the fortune of his former colleague in the chance of proving himself fit for something better than hunting peasants to death. Through the wild summer that followed Claverhouse's defiance to the Convention, Lag lay among a crowd of prisoners in the Tolbooth of Edinburgh, packed as close as negroes in a slaver's hold and in much the same plight, in daily peril of a death far less glorious than that Dundee found in the Pass of Killiecrankie.* But, perhaps, the cruellest blow that the proud, impetuous old man suffered was from an action, too frivolous indeed to need any defence, brought against him seven years later for uttering false coin. It seems that he had let his house at Rockhall to an engraver who was also in terested in a new device for stamping patterns on linen. The case broke completely down, but Lag's fury, as his biographer observes, may be more easily imagined than described.

said of him, as of another Sir RobertSir Robert Laurie, of Maxwelton that a cup of wine had once turned to blood in his hand. Of course there was keen curiosity among the rising generation for a glimpse of the grim old man of whom their fathers had such dreadful memories. On one occasion, a lad, full of this curiosity, got leave to carry a load of faggots into the hall where Lag was used to sit all day cowering over a huge fire. As the boy entered, the old man, well knowing the popular feeling, turned on him, and, bending his brows into the fatal horseshoe, said, in a voice whose harshness even fourscore years had not wholly quenched, "Ony Whigs in Gallowa' noo, lad?" The boy dropped his load and scuttled from the hall as though the devil indeed had been after him.

Lag died on the last day of the year 1733, in his house at Dumfries. As his end drew near he was sorely tormented with the gout, and the story goes that At this point he disappears from public relays of servants were posted from his record, though he lived on till 1733, a sav- door to the Nith, some two hundred yards age, gloomy old man in the same house away, to hand up buckets from the fresh at Rockhall, a lonely three-storied build- stream to cool his fiery torments; and that ing a few miles south of Dumfries on the the moment his feet touched the water it English road, looking over Solway Firth | began to hiss and smoke! So, as every to the hills of Cumberland. His eldest one knows for we reject as too gross a son William, to whom he had two years previously made over his estates, was out in "the Fifteen," and only escaped with a heavy fine. But Lag had so craftily worded the deed of entail that he was enabled to escape the penalty of his son's treason. In fact, as far as worldly prosperity goes, both he and his family fared much better than they could reasonably have hoped.

libel even on this generation the thought that there can be any one who does not know his Scott - so bubbled and sparkled like a seething cauldron the water into which Redgauntlet plunged his swollen feet on the awful day when Willie Steenson's father last saw him alive. And here we may note a curious piece of family history Colonel Fergusson has recorded: the last paper to which old Lag ever put his name was a receipt for some back arrears of rent; and the paper is among the fam

The active hate he had once inspired had now died down into monstrous tra ditions which are still not wholly extinct.ily archives at this day. From the ceiling of a room on the ground floor of the house at Rockhall, now used as a wine-cellar, still hangs an iron hook twelve inches long from which the old tyrant is said to have hung his Covenant ing prisoners; and a hill in the neighborhood is still pointed out as that down which he used for his amusement to roll them in a barrel full of spikes and knifeblades, after a fashion believed to have been invented by the Carthaginians nearly two thousand years earlier for the special behoof of a Roman consul. It was also

The minutes of the privy council for the twenty

eighth of August, 1689, show a petition from Lag, praying to be released from an imprisonment which had lasted since the eighth of July, on the ground that his health had suffered from a malignant fever which had broken out in the jail.

But we have not space to go through all the legends coined about this fell old creature. Colonel Fergusson's book will feed all further curiosity full. And let him who has such curiosity be careful not to miss the chapter on "Lag's Elegy," that scathing diatribe on the protagonists of "the killing time" which Carlyle has told us in his "Reminiscences was the work of old John Orr, the dominie of Hoddam parish, of whom he had often heard his father talk as a man religious and enthusiastic, though in practice irregular with drink." How fresh still in his own childhood was the memory of Lag our author gives an extremely curious instance, which will best be told in his own language:

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