Finding their churches closed, they met in arms on the green hill sides, and in lonely muirs, to hold what were termed field conventicles, where the oppression they endured for conscience sake, the recollection of their present danger, and the memory of their struggles made in years gone by, together with the grandeur of the solemn scenery by which they were surrounded, filled their hearts with a splendid enthusiasm and with a purity of soul, as, with the sword by their sides, they worshipped God in those wild places, which, since the days of the Romans, had been the best stronghold of their forefathers. As a ballad (which I quote from memory) has it:-- "Oh, sad and dreary was the lot of Scotland's true ones then, A famine-stricken remnant with scarce the guise of men; They burrowed few and lonely mid the chill dark mountain caves, For those who once had sheltered them were in their martyr-graves. "A sword had rested on the land! it did not pass away; Long had they watched and waited; but there dawned no brighter day, And many had gone back from them, who owned the truth of old, Because of much iniquity their love was waxen cold." To crush this growing enthusiasm (which was so great at times, that an angel was more than once averred to have been seen in mid air, overhanging a conventicle), to suppress these armed religious meetings, and enforce Episcopacy on the people, was now the ungrateful task assigned to Dalyell, to Drummond, and the Scottish standing forces, who were all commanded by officers of high Cavalier principles, and were usually men without much scruple in obeying the orders of the king and council. Alarmed at the spirit of resistance evinced by the people, and remembering perhaps the fate of his father, Charles II. changed the Scottish ministry. Lauderdale had begun to persuade him that more lenient measures were necessary, and Sharpe, whom the Covenanters received as a Judas, retired from the administration of ecclesiastical affairs; but the change came _too late_, for again the banner which had been displayed so victoriously of old, "for an oppressed Kirk and broken Covenant," was unfurled, and a body of the Presbyterians rose in arms. Lieutenant-colonel Sir James Turner, author of a little treatise on the art of war, and of his own Memoirs, from which we may learn that he was a fierce and unscrupulous _sabreur_, was captured with his troops at Ayr, by the Lairds of Corsack and Barscob at the head of a few followers. Another party of soldiers were routed by them at Dalry, and these insurgents began at once their march for Edinburgh, the seat of government, in the autumn of 1666. They first proposed to put Turner to death; but spared his life on Corsack discovering that his conduct to the people had been much less severe than the written _orders_, which were found on his person, had inculcated.