Ringan Gilhaize, or, The Covenanters

CHAPTER LXXI

It was in the cool of the evening, on Saturday, the last day of May, when my brother came over to my house, where, with Michael, I had prepared myself to go with him to Loudon-hill. Our intent was to walk that night to Kilmarnock, and abide till the morning with our brother Jacob's widow, not having seen her for a long time.

We had in the course of that day heard something of the publication of "The Declaration and Testimony," which, through the vehemence of the preachers before spoken of, had been rashly counselled at Ruglen, the twenty-ninth of the month; but there was no particulars, and what we did hear was like, as all such things are, greatly magnified beyond the truth. We, however, were grieved by the tidings; for we feared some cause of tribulation would be thereby engendered detrimental to the religious purposes of our journey.

This sentiment pressing heavily on our hearts, we parted from my family with many misgivings, and the bodements of further sorrows. But the outward expression of what we all felt was the less remarkable, on account of what so lately had before happened in my brother's house. Nor indeed did I think at the time, that the foretaste of what was ordained so speedily to come to a head was at all so lively in his spirit, or that of my son, as it was in mine, till, in passing over the top of the Gowan-brae, he looked round on the lands of Quharist, and said, —

"I care nae, Ringan, if I ne'er come back; for though we hae lang dwelt in affection together yon'er, thae that were most precious to me are now both aneath the sod," – alluding to his wife who had been several years dead, – and poor Bell, that lovely rose which the ruthless spoiler had so trampled into the earth.

"I feel," said Michael, "as if I were going to a foreign land, there is sic a farewell sadness upon me."

But we strove to overcome this, and walked leisurely on the high road towards Kilmarnock, trying to discourse of indifferent things; and as the gloaming faded, and the night began to look forth, from her watch-tower in the heavens, with all her eyes of beautiful light, we communed of the friends that we trusted were in glory, and marvelled if it could be that they saw us after death, or ever revisited the persons and the scenes that they loved in life. Rebellion or treason, or any sense of thoughts and things that were not holy, had no portion in our conversation: we were going to celebrate the redemption of fallen man; and we were mourning for friends no more; our discourse was of eternal things, and the mysteries of the stars and the lights of that world which is above the firmament.

When we reached Kilmarnock we found that Jacob's widow had, with several other godly women, set out towards the place of meeting, to sojourn with a relation that night, in order that they might be the abler to gather the manna of the word in the morning. We therefore resolved not to halt there, but to go forward to the appointed place, and rest upon the spot. This accordingly doing, we came to the eastern side of Loudon-hill, the trysted place, shortly after the first scad of the dawn.

Many were there before us, both men and women and little children, and horses intermingled, some slumbering, and some communing with one another; and as the morning brightened, it was a hallowed sight to behold from that rising ground the blameless persecuted coming with sedate steps to worship their Maker on the mountain.

The Reverend Mr Thomas Douglas, who was to open the action, arrived about the rising of the sun with several other ministers, and behind them four aged men belonging to Strathaven bearing the elements.

A pious lady, whose name I never heard, owing to what ensued, spread with her own hands a damask tablecloth on the ground, and the bread and wine were placed upon it with more reverence than ever was in kirk.

Mr Douglas having mounted upon a rock nigh to where this was done, was about to give out the psalm, when we observed several country lads, that were stationed as watchers afar off, coming with great haste in; and they brought word, that Claverhouse and his dragoons were coming to disperse us, bringing with them the Reverend Mr King, a preacher of the gospel at Hamilton, and others that they had made prisoners, tied with cords two and two.

The tidings for a moment caused panic and consternation; but as the men were armed, and resolved to resist, it was thought, in consideration of the women and children, that we ought to go forward, and prevent the adversaries from advancing. Accordingly, to the number of forty horsemen, and maybe near to two hundred foot, we drew ourselves apart from the congregation, and marched to meet Claverhouse, thinking, perhaps, on seeing us so numerous, that he would not come on, – while Mr Douglas proceeded with the worship, the piety of none with him being abated by this grievous visitation.

Mr William Clelland, with Mr Hamilton, who had come with Mr Douglas, were our leaders, and we met Claverhouse on the moor of Drumclog.

The dragoons were the first to halt, and Claverhouse, having ordered his prisoners to be drawn aside, was the first who gave the word to fire. This was without any parley or request to know whether we came with hostile intent or no. Clelland, on seeing the dragoons make ready, cried to us all to den ourselves among the heather; by which forethought the shot flew harmless. Then we started up, and every one, with the best aim he could, fired at the dragoons as they were loading their carabines. Several men and horses were killed, and many wounded. Claverhouse seeing this, commanded his men to charge upon us; but the ground was rough, the heather deep, and the moss broken where peats had been dug, and the horses floundered, and several threw their riders, and fell themselves.

We had now loaded again, and the second fire was more deadly than the first. Our horsemen also seeing how the dragoons were scattered, fell in the confusion as it were man for man upon them. Claverhouse raged and commanded, but no one now could or would obey. In that extremity his horse was killed, and, being thrown down, I ran forward to seize him, if I could, prisoner; but he still held his sword in his hand, and rising as I came up, used it manfully, and with one stroke almost hewed my right arm from my shoulder. As he fled I attempted for a moment to follow, but staggered and fell. He looked back as he escaped, and I cried – "Blood for blood;" and it has been so, as I shall hereafter in the sequel relate.

When the day was won, we found we numbered among the slain on the side of the vanquished nearly twenty of the dragoons: on our side we lost but one man, John Morton – a ripe saint; but several were wounded; and John Weir and William Daniel died of their wounds. Such was the day of Drumclog.

Being wounded, I was carried to a neighbouring farm, attended by my brother and son, and there put upon a cart and sent home to Quharist, as it was thought I would be best attended there. They then returned to the rest of the host, who, seeing themselves thus brought into open war, resolved forthwith to proceed to Glasgow, and to raise again the banner of the Covenant.

But Claverhouse had fled thither, burning with the thought of being so shorn in his military pride by raw and undisciplined countrymen, whom, if we had been bred soldiers, maybe he would have honoured, but being what we were, though our honour was the greater, he hated us with the deadly aversion that is begotten of vanity chastised; for that it was which incited him to ravage the West Country with such remorselessness, and which, when our men were next day repulsed at Glasgow with the loss of lives, made him hinder the removal of the bodies from the streets, till it was said the butchers' dogs began to prey upon them.

But not to insist on matters of hearsay, nor to dwell at any greater length on those afflicting events, I must refer the courteous reader to the history of the times for what followed, it being enough for me to state here that as soon as the news spread of the battle and the victory, the persecuted ran flocking in from all quarters, by which the rope of sand, that the Lord permitted Monmouth to break at Bothwell-brigg, was soon formed. My brother and my son were both there, and there my gallant Michael lies. My brother, then verging on threescore, being among the prisoners, was, after sore sufferings in the Greyfriars church-yard of Edinburgh, sent on board a vessel as a bondsman to the plantations in America. His wrongs, however, were happily soon over; for the ship in which he was embarked perished among the Orkney islands, and he, with two hundred other sufferers, received the crown of martyrdom from the waves.

O Charles Stuart, king of Scotland! and thou, James Sharp! – false and cruel men – But ye are called to your account; and what avails it now to the childless father to rail upon your memory?

CHAPTER LXXII

Before proceeding farther at this present time with the doleful tale of my own sufferings, it is required of me, as an impartial historian, to note here a very singular example of the spirit of piety which reigned in the hearts of the Covenanters, especially as I shall have to show that such was the cruel and implacable nature of the Persecution, that time had not its wonted influence to soften in any degree its rigour. Thirteen years had passed from the time of the Pentland raid; and surely the manner in which the country had suffered for that rising might, in so long a course of years, have subdued the animosity with which we were pursued; especially, as during the Earl of Tweeddale's administration the bonds of peace had been accepted. But Lauderdale, now at the head of the councils, was rapacious for money; and therefore all offences, if I may employ that courtly term, by which our endeavours to taste of the truth were designated, – all old offences, as I was saying, were renewed against us as recent crimes, and an innocent charity to the remains of those who had suffered for the Pentland raid was made a reason, after the battle of Bothwell-brigg, to revive the persecution of those who had been out in that affair.

The matter particularly referred to arose out of the following circumstances:

The number of honest and pious men who were executed in different places, and who had their heads and their right hands with which they signed the Covenant at Lanerk cut off, and placed on the gates of towns and over the doors of tolbooths, had been very great. And it was very grievous, and a sore thing to the friends and acquaintances of those martyrs, when they went to Glasgow, or Kilmarnock, or Irvine, or Ayr, on their farm business, to tryst or market, to see the remains of persons, whom they so loved and respected in life, bleaching in the winds and the rains of Heaven. It was, indeed, a matter of great heart-sadness, to behold such animosity carried beyond the grave; and few they were who could withstand the sight of the orphans that came thither, pointing out to one another their fathers' bones, and weeping as they did so, and vowing, with an innocent indignation, that they would avenge their martyrdom.

Well do I remember the great sorrow that arose one market-day in Irvine, some five or six years after the Pentland raid, when Mrs M'Coul came, with her four weans and her aged gudemother, to look at the relics of her husband, who was martyred for his part in that rising. The bones were standing, with those of another martyr of that time, on a shelf which had been put up for the purpose, below the first wicket-hole in the steeple, just above the door. The two women were very decent in their apparel, rather more so than the common country wives. The gudemother, in particular, had a cast of gentility both in her look and garments; and I have heard the cause of it expounded, from her having been the daughter of one of the Reformation preachers in the Gospel-spreading epoch of John Knox. She had a crimson satin plaid over her head, and she wore a black silk apron and a grey camlet gown. With the one hand she held the plaid close to her neck, and the youngest child, a lassie of seven years or so, had hold of her by the fore-finger of the other.

Mrs M'Coul was more of a robust fabric, and she was without any plaid, soberly dressed in the weeds of a widow, with a clean cambric handkerchief very snodly prined over her breast. The children were likewise beinly apparelled, and the two sons were buirdly and brave laddies, the one about nine, and the other maybe eleven years old.

It would seem that this had been the first of their pilgrimages of sorrow; for they stood some time in a row at the foot of the tolbooth stair, looking up at the remains, and wondering, with tears in their eyes, which were those they had come to see.

Their appearance drew around them many onlookers, both of the country folk about the Cross and inhabitants of the town; but every one respected their sorrow, and none ventured to disturb them with any questions; for all saw that they were kith or kin to the godly men who had testified to the truth and the Covenant in death.

It happened, however, that I had occasion to pass by, and some of the town's folk who recollected me, said whisperingly to one another, but loud enough to be heard, that I was one of the persecuted; whereupon Mrs M'Coul turned round and said to me, with a constrained composure, —

"Can ye tell me whilk o' yon's the head and hand o' John M'Coul, that was executed for the covenanting at Lanerk?"

I knew the remains well, for they had been pointed out to me and I had seen them very often, but really the sight of the two women and the fatherless bairns so overcame me that I was unable to answer.

"It's the head and the hand beside it, that has but twa fingers left, on the Kirkgate end o' the shelf!" replied a person in the crowd, whom I knew at once by his voice to be Willy Sutherland the hangman, although I had not seen him from the night of my evasion. And here let me not forget to set down the Christian worth and constancy of that simple and godly creature, who, rather than be instrumental in the guilty judgment by which John M'Coul and his fellow-sufferer were doomed to die, did himself almost endure martyrdom, and yet never swerved in his purpose, nor was abated in his integrity, in so much, that when questioned thereafter anent the same by the Earl of Eglinton, and his Lordship, being moved by the simplicity of his piety, said, "Poor man, you did well in not doing what they would have had you to do."

"My Lord," replied Willy, "you are speaking treason! and yet you persecute to the uttermost, which shows that you go against the light of your conscience."

"Do you say so to me, after I kept you from being hanged?" said his Lordship.

"Keep me from being drowned, and I will still tell you the verity." The which honesty in that poor man begat for him a compassionate regard that the dignities of many great and many noble in that time could never command.

When the sorrowful M'Couls had indulged themselves in their melancholy contemplation, they went away, followed by the multitude with silence and sympathy, till they had mounted upon the cart which they had brought with them into the town. But from that time every one began to speak of the impiety of leaving the bones so wofully exposed; and after the skirmish at Drumclog, where Robin M'Coul, the eldest of the two striplings above spoken of, happened to be, when Mr John Welsh, with the Carrick men that went to Bothwell-brigg, was sent into Glasgow to bury the heads and hands of the martyrs there, Robin M'Coul came with a party of his friends to Irvine to bury his father's bones. I was not myself present at the interment, being, as I have narrated, confined to my bed by reason of my wound. But I was told by the neighbours, that it was a very solemn and affecting scene. The grieved lad carried the relics of his father in a small box in his hands, covered with a white towel; and the godly inhabitants of the town, young and old, and of all denominations, to the number of several hundreds, followed him to the grave where the body was lying; and Willy Sutherland, moved by a simple sorrow, was the last of all; and he walked, as I was told, alone, behind, with his bonnet in his hand; for, from his calling, he counted himself not on an equality with other men. But it is time that I should return from this digression to the main account of my narrative.

CHAPTER LXXIII

Being wounded, as I have rehearsed, at Drumclog, and carried to my own house, Sarah Lochrig, while she grieved with a mother's grief for the loss of our first-born and the mournful fate of my honest brother, advanced my cure more by her loving ministrations to my aching mind, than by the medicaments that were applied to the bodily wound, in so much that something like a dawn of comfort was vouchsafed to me.

Our parish was singularly allowed to remain unmolested when, after the woful day of Bothwell-brigg, Claverhouse came to ravage the shire of Ayr, and to take revenge for the discomfiture which he had suffered, in his endeavour to disturb the worship and sacrament at Loudon-hill. Still, however, at times clouds overcame my spirit; and one night my daughter Margaret had a remarkable dream, which taught us to expect some particular visitation.

It was surely a mysterious reservation for the greater calamity which ensued, that while the vial of wrath was pouring out around us, my house should have been allowed to remain so unmolested. Often indeed when in our nightly worship I returned thanks for a blessing so wonderful in that time of general woe, has a strange fear fallen upon me and I have trembled in thought, as if the thing for which I sent up the incense of my thanks to heaven, was a device of the Enemy of man, to make me think myself more deserving of favour than the thousands of covenanted brethren who then, in Scotland, were drinking of the bitterness of the suffering. But in proportion as I was then spared, the heavier afterwards was my trial.

Among the prisoners taken at Bothwell-brigg were many persons from our parish and neighbourhood, who, after their unheard-of sufferings among the tombs and graves of the Greyfriars church-yard at Edinburgh, were allowed to return home. Though in this there was a show of clemency, it was yet but a more subtle method of the tyranny to reach new victims. For those honest men were not long home till grievous circuit-courts were set agoing, to bring to trial not only all those who were at Bothwell, or approved of that rising, but likewise those who had been at the Pentland raid; and the better to ensure condemnation and punishment, sixteen persons were cited from every parish to bear witness as to who, among their neighbours, had been out at Bothwell, or had harboured any of those who were there. The wicked curates made themselves, in this grievous matter, engines of espionage, by giving in the names of those, their parishioners, whom they knew could bear the best testimony.

Thus it was, that many who had escaped from the slaughter – from the horrors of the Greyfriars church-yard – and from the drowning in the Orkneys, – and, like myself, had resumed their quiet country labour, were marked out for destruction. For the witnesses cited to Ayr against us were persons who had been released from the Greyfriars church-yard, as I have said, and who, being honest men, could not, when put to their oaths, but bear witness to the truth of the matters charged against us. And nothing surely could better show the devilish spirit with which those in authority were at that time actuated, nor the unchristian nature of the prelacy, than that the prisoners should thus have been set free to be made the accusers of their neighbours; and that the curates, men professing to be ministers of the Gospel, should have been such fit instruments for such unheard-of machinations. But to hasten forward to the fate and issue of this self-consuming tyranny, I shall leave all generalities, and proceed with the events of my own case; and, in doing so, I shall endeavour what is in me to inscribe the particulars with a steady hand; for I dare no longer now trust myself with looking to the right or to the left of the field of my matter. I shall, however, try to narrate things just as they happened, leaving the courteous reader to judge what passed at the time in the suffocating throbs wherewith my heart was then affected.

It was the last day of February, of the year following Bothwell-brigg, that, in consequence of these subtle and wicked devices, I was taken up. I had, from my wound, been in an ailing state for many months, and could then do little in the field; but the weather for the season was mild, and I had walked out in the tranquillity of a sunny afternoon to give my son Joseph some instructions in the method of ploughing; for, though he was then but in his thirteenth year, he was a by-common stripling in capacity and sense. He was indeed a goodly plant; and I had hoped, in my old age, to have sat beneath the shelter of his branches; but the axe of the feller was untimely laid to the root, and it was too soon, with all the blossoms of the fairest promise, cast down into the dust. But my task now is of vengeance and justice, not of sorrowing, and I must more sternly grasp the iron pen.

A party of soldiers, who had been that afternoon sent out to bring in certain persons (among whom I was one) in a list malignantly transmitted to the Archbishop of Glasgow, by Andrew Dornoch, the prelatic usurper of our minister's place, as I was leaving the field where my son was ploughing, saw me from the road, and ordered me to halt till they came up, or they would fire at me.

It would have been unavailing of me, in the state I then was, to have attempted to flee, so I halted; and, after some entreaty with the soldiers, got permission from them to have my horse and cart yoket, as I was not very well, and so to be carried to Ayr. And here I should note down that, although there was in general a coarse spirit among the King's forces, yet in these men there was a touch of common humanity. This was no doubt partly owing to their having been some months quartered in Irvine, where they became naturally softened by the friendly spirit of the place. It was not, however, ordained that men so merciful should be permitted to remain long there.

As it was an understood thing that the object of the trials to which the Covenanters were in this manner subjected was chiefly to raise money and forfeitures for the rapacious Duke of Lauderdale, then in the rule and power of the council at Edinburgh, my being carried away prisoner to Ayr awakened less grief and consternation in my family than might have been expected from the event. Through the humane permission of my guard, having a little time to confer with Sarah Lochrig before going away, it was settled between us that she should gather together what money she could procure, either by loan or by selling our corn and cattle, in order to provide for the payment of the fine that we counted would be laid upon us. I was then taken to the tolbooth of Ayr, where many other covenanted brethren were lying to await the proceedings of the circuit-court, which was to be opened by the Lord Kelburne from Glasgow, on the second day after I had been carried thither.

Among the prisoners were several who knew me well, and who condoled as Christians with me for the loss I had sustained at Bothwell; so, but for the denial of the fresh and heavenly air, and the freedom of the fields, the time of our captivity might have been a season of much solace: for they were all devout men, and the tolbooth, instead of resounding with the imprecations of malefactors, became melodious with the voice of psalms and of holy communion, and the sweet intercourse of spirits that delighted in one another for the constancy with which they had borne their testimony.

When the Lord Kelburne arrived, on the first day that the court opened, I was summoned to respond to the offences laid to my charge, if any charge of offence it may be called, wherein the purpose of the court was seemingly to search out opinions that might serve as matter to justify the infliction of the fines, – the whole end and intent of those circuits not being to award justice, but to find the means of extorting money. In some respects, however, I was more mercifully dealt by than many of my fellow-sufferers; but in order to show how, even in my case, the laws were perverted, I will here set down a brief record of my examination or trial, as it was called.