The accuracy of the account given by Kirkton has been denied. Burnet distinctly asserts that ‘this was a story made only to beget compassion’; that after the insurrection was quashed, the Privy Council sent commissioners to examine into the violences that had been committed, particularly in the parish where this was alleged to have been done; that he himself read the report they made to the Council, and all the depositions taken by them from the people of the district, but that no such violence on the part of the military was mentioned in any one of them. The wounded soldier himself, one George Deanes, a corporal in Sir Alexander Thomson’s company, from whose body ten pieces of tobacco pipe were subsequently extracted by the surgeon, told Sir James Turner that he was shot because he would not take the covenanting oath. Whether premeditated and concerted, or merely ‘an occasional tumult upon a sudden fray,’ this attack on the military was the signal for a gathering of the discontented peasantry of the district. On the morrow, the four countrymen, one of whom was M’Lelland of Boscob, being joined by six or seven others, fell upon a second party of soldiers. One of these, having offered resistance was killed; his comrades, about a dozen in number, according to Kirkton, quietly gave up their arms. Within two days the insurgents had recruited about fourscore horse and two hundred foot. Proceeding to Dumfries, where Turner then lay with only a few of his soldiers, the greater number of them being scattered about the country in small parties, for the purpose of levying the fines, they seized him, together with the papers and the money in his possession, and carried him off as a prisoner. After this, ‘in their abundant loyalty,’ as Wodrow characterises it, they went to the Cross and publicly drank to the health of the King and the prosperity of his Government.