Two cases yet remain of the five cited by Macaulay. With one of
these--the case of the three men shot near Glasgow for refusing to pray
for the King--no writer has ever pretended to implicate Claverhouse
personally; but with the other he is directly concerned. Andrew Hislop
was the son of a poor widow in whose house a proscribed Covenanter had
lately died. This was discovered by one Johnstone of Westerhall, an
apostate Presbyterian, and, like most of his class, particularly bitter
against his former associates. He turned the woman with her younger
children into the fields, pulled down her house, and dragged the eldest
son before Claverhouse, then marching through that part of the country.
So Macaulay tells the story, following for once the "Cloud of Witnesses"
rather than Wodrow. According to the latter, Claverhouse found Hislop
wandering about the fields, and carried him before Westerhall, "without
any design, as appeared, to murder him." Westerhall voted for instant
death, while Claverhouse pleaded for the lad, and only yielded at last
on the other's insistence, saying: "The blood of this poor man be upon
you, Westerhall. I am free of it." He thereupon ordered the captain of a
Highland company, then brigaded with his own men, to provide a
firing-party; but the Highlanders angrily refused, and the troopers had
to do the work. Both versions, it will be seen, agree in representing
Claverhouse as inclined to mercy but overborne by Westerhall. The
question remains, how was it that the former, a masterful man and not
easy to be silenced when he was in the right, could not save this poor
lad if he had a mind to do so?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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