disciplinarian. Yet it is well known that many things were done during the Peninsular campaign which no general now would dare to pass unpunished, which no soldier now would even dare to do; and it is quite possible that eighty years hence our descendants will read with horror of the deeds done by their grandsires among the rocky passes of Afghanistan or on the burning sands of Egypt. I do not claim for Claverhouse that he was gentle, merciful, or humane beyond his time, though I believe him to have had as large a share of those qualities as any of his contemporaries would have displayed in similar circumstances. But I do claim for him that his faults were the faults not of the man but of his age; and I maintain that his age cannot in such matters be tried by the standard of this. FOOTNOTES: [49] I have been much indebted in this chapter to an anonymous pamphlet entitled "A Note to the Pictorial History of Scotland, on Claverhouse," apparently printed at Maidstone; but when, or on whose authority, I have been unable to discover. It was sent to me by an equally nameless benefactor. [50] Napier, iii. Appendix 3, and his "Case for the Crown": Blackwood's Magazine, December 1863. On the other side see Barton, vii. 255: Macmillan's Magazine, December 1862; and a pamphlet by the Rev. Archibald Stewart, "History Vindicated in the case of the Wigtown Martyrs," 2nd ed. 1869. [51] According to "The Cloud of Witnesses," first published in 1714, the epitaph ran as follows: "Murdered for owning Christ supreme Head of his Church, and no more crime But her not owning Prelacy, And not abjuring Presbytery. Within the sea, tied to a stake, She suffered for Christ Jesus' sake." The stone on which these lines were inscribed covered, according to the same authority, "the body of Margaret Wilson, who was drowned in the water of the Blednock upon the 11th of May, 1684 [5], by the Laird of Lagg." [52] In Colonel Fergusson's most entertaining chapter of family history, "The Laird of Lagg," he mentions an old lady, still alive in 1834, who remembered her grandfather's account of the execution, which he declared he had himself witnessed: "There were cluds o' folk on the sands that day in clusters here and there, praying for the women as they were put down." [53] Charles Kingsley, for example, wrote in "Alton Locke" of "the Scottish Saint Margaret whom Claverhouse and his men bound to a stake." [54] Wodrow, iv. 244. [55] Claverhouse to Queensberry, May 3rd, 1685. Napier, i. 141; and iii. 457.