At least the westland Covenanters bore manfully the scourge which they looked on as an instrument of righteousness, but for the time laid on the wrong shoulders. Their enthusiasm was not to be damped by the scenery of their secret gatherings. Boldly they took the sword against a conformity dictated by dragoon colonels, by selfish statesmen, and by such a sacred majesty as Charles II.’s. If only they had added to their faith the practical spirit of the English Roundheads, who did not neglect discipline for doctrine! In the Whig country was borne highest that blue banner inscribed in letters of gold “For Christ’s Crown and Covenant.” At Lanark gathered to a head the first rising of 1666, easily crushed among the Pentlands when the rustic army had fallen back from the gates of latitudinarian Edinburgh. At Rutherglen, near Glasgow, began the second outbreak, stirred up by the brutal murderers of Archbishop Sharpe; then it was near Loudon Hill, where the counties of Lanark, Ayr, and Renfrew meet, that a half-armed congregation routed Claverhouse’s guardsmen on the morass of Drumclog. This casual success was wasted on an army that, when a few thousand strong, dared to defy the forces of the three kingdoms. Torn by fanatical dissensions, paying more attention to loud-lunged preachers than to prudent officers, it met at Bothwell Bridge the fate that was a foregone conclusion. Cameron, leader of the “wild” or extreme party, was followed up and slain in that desolate moorland region, “without grandeur, without even the dignity of mountain wildness, yet striking from the huge proportion it seemed to bear to such more favoured spots of the country as were adapted to cultivation.” In caves and remote cottages skulked the faithful remnant, while persecution raged unchecked for years. Dark and bloody are the memories of that “killing time,” and the superstitious legends that attached themselves to the fame of the martyrs, to Cargill and Cameron, to Peden and others in whom Scriptural gifts of prophecy blended with Celtic second sight. Still darker stories were whispered of the persecutors, believed to have sold themselves to the devil that they might have power over the Lord’s people; of “bloody Mackenzie,” the Lord Advocate; of Grierson of Lag, in whose hands a cup of wine would turn to blood; of the calm cruelty of Claverhouse, charmed against bullets; of the ruthlessness of Dalziel, who, with Tartar manners brought from Russian wars, with his bygone dress and the outlandish beard unshaved since Charles I.’s execution, might well seem an infernal monster. But all the slaughters, the maddening tortures by boot and by thumbkins, the miserable imprisonments on the Bass Rock and in Dunnottar Castle, the mockery of lighter spirits among the populace, only went to harden Presbyterian endurance. The Covenanter wrapped tighter about him his blood-stained cloak of orthodoxy till that bitter wind blew over. Then the westland, so vainly