[59] For example, in the earliest edition of the pamphlet containing his version of this affair ("The Life of Peden") an "old singular Christian woman named Elizabeth Menzies" is mentioned as the first neighbour who came to condole with Mrs. Brown. In later editions Elizabeth Menzies becomes Jean Brown. The wife also is sometimes Isabel and sometimes Marion. Walker's "Biographia Presbyteriana" is a collection of tracts published by him at different times, of which this "Life of Peden" is the earliest and the best. [60] "A Short Memorial of the Sufferings of the Presbyterians." [61] This Buiening is called Bruning in "The Cloud of Witnesses," and may be the Brownen of Claverhouse's letter, that is to say, the nephew of John Brown. [62] "It seems somebody had maliciously told this Graham they were of the Whigs who used the field meetings, upon which, without any trial or other sentence than his own command, his soldiers fetched them all to Mauchline, a village where his headquarters were, and hanged them immediately, not suffering them to enter into any house at their coming, nor at the entreaty of the poor men would suffer one to lend them a Bible, who it seems offered it, nor allow them a moment to pray to God." Defoe's "Memoirs of the Church of Scotland" were first published in 1717, a few years before Wodrow's History. Elsewhere in the same work he states that Claverhouse had "among the rest of his cruelties barbarously murdered several of the persecuted people with his own hands," also that "this man is said to have killed above a hundred men in this kind of cold blood cruelty." But Defoe's qualifications for a historian of those times are, to say the least, uncertain. He mentions Cameron and Cargill as alive and busy in 1684, four years after one had died fighting at Aird's Moss, and the other on the scaffold at Edinburgh. [63] Wodrow, iv. 197; Napier, i. 89. I have called this the most authentic version because it professes to have come from the murderers themselves. It is to be found in a letter to Wodrow (printed by Napier) now in the Advocates' Library at Edinburgh. The date is 1715, and the writer, who only signs his initials, J.C., calls Wodrow "cousin." "I give you the account," he writes, "from the best information it's possible to be got, viz., from Robert Dun, in Woodheade of Carsphairn, and John Clark, then in that parish, now in Glenmont, in the parish of Strathone, anent the curate's death of Carsphairn, which they had from the actors' own mouths." Wodrow adds a little touch of his own--"Mr. Peirson with fury came out upon them with arms"--and is silent on the fact of Mitchell's presence. [64] Fountainhall's "Historical Notices," and a letter to Queensberry from Sir Robert Dalzell and others, quoted by Napier, ii. 427-8. [65] Wodrow, iv. 184.