In this district there was but little of the Covenanting feeling that was rampant in the West. An Abdiel, however, was found among the faithless in the person of William Spence, minister of Glendevon. In 1678 he laid a paper on the table of Presbytery in which he testified against the errors of the times. He was dealt with with great leniency and patience, but in the end he proved incorrigible. After long delay he was at last, in the beginning of 1681, deposed and excommunicated by the Bishop and Synod. From that time onwards he became a political agent, and was mixed up in the plots which filled the closing years of the reign of Charles II. In 1684 he was arrested and questioned. Though made to undergo the torture of the boot, he refused to disclose anything. He was then handed over to the tender mercies of General Dalziel, the "Muscovy beast who would roast men," and was kept from sleeping for eight or nine days till his enemies themselves were weary. He had to be thumbscrewed, and told that they would screw every joint of his body, one after another, before his courage began to fail. "Yet {108} such was the firmness and fidelity of this poor man," writes Bishop Burnet, "that even in that extremity he capitulated, that no new questions should be put to him, but those already agreed on; and that he should not be obliged to be a witness against any person, and that he himself should be pardoned." After the Revolution he came back to Glendevon; in 1691 was translated to Fossoway, and, having outlived all his troubles, died there in peace in 1715 at the age of eighty. The policy, with which he had associated himself as a minority of one, had triumphed.