These measures not proving effectual for the purpose for which they were intended, or, as some say, the object of Charles II.'s government being to provoke an insurrection, a demand was made upon the landholders in the district supposed to be most disaffected of bonds, whereby they were to become responsible for their wives, families, tenants, and servants, and likewise for the wives, families, and servants of their tenants, and, finally, for all persons living upon their estates, that they should not withdraw from the Church, frequent or preach at conventicles, nor give any succour, or have any intercourse with persons with whom it was forbidden to intercommune; and the penalties attached to the breach of this engagement, the keeping of which was obviously out of the power of him who was required to make it, were to be the same as those, whether capital or other, to which the several persons for whom he engaged might be liable. The landholders, not being willing to subscribe to their own destruction, refused to execute the bonds, and this was thought sufficient grounds for considering the district to which they belonged as in a state of rebellion. English and Irish armies were ordered to the frontiers; a train of artillery and the militia were sent into the district itself; and six thousand Highlanders, who were let loose upon its inhabitants, to exercise every species of pillage and plunder were connived at, or rather encouraged, in excesses of a still more atrocious nature. The bonds being still refused, the government had recourse to an expedient of a most extraordinary nature, and issued what the Scotch called a writ of Lawburrows against the whole district. This writ of Lawburrows is somewhat analogous to what we call "swearing the peace" against any one, and had hitherto been supposed, as the other is with us, to be applicable to the disputes of private individuals, and to the apprehensions which, in consequence of such disputes, they may mutually entertain of each other. A government swearing the peace against its subjects was a new spectacle; but if a private subject, under fear of another, hath a right to such a security, how much more the government itself? was thought an unanswerable argument. Such are the sophistries which tyrants deem satisfactory. Thus are they willing even to descend from their loftiness into the situation of subjects or private men, when it is for the purpose of acquiring additional powers of persecution; and thus truly formidable and terrific are they, when they pretend alarm and fear. By these writs the persons against whom they were directed were bound, as in case of the former bonds, to conditions which were not in their power to fulfil, such as the preventing of conventicles and the like, under such penalties as the Privy Council might inflict, and a disobedience to them was followed by outlawry and confiscation.