Claverhouse’s complaints produced but slight effect, though they were repeated until he grew weary of making them. Failing to obtain satisfaction, he bluntly declared that he would never solicit more, but that, if the King’s service suffered in consequence, he would let the blame lie where it should. About this time, however, an important measure, and one which brought down upon him the jealous displeasure of the Marquis of Queensberry, who resented it as an infringement of his rights, was adopted in Claverhouse’s favour. Even if all the magistrates in the disaffected districts had been men of unimpeachable loyalty to the Government, the necessity for obtaining their co-operation would frequently have hampered and delayed the military authorities. But many of them were soon discovered to be lukewarm partisans at best; whilst not a few, if they did not openly side with the conventiclers, aided and abetted them by a deliberate and studied inactivity. To remedy this, and to give Claverhouse freer hand, he was, in March 1679, appointed sheriff-depute of the shires of Dumfries and Wigtown, and also of the stewartries of Annandale and Kirkcudbright. Andrew Bruce of Earlshall, the lieutenant of his own troop of horse, was given him as a colleague. They were not, however, wholly to supersede the sheriffs previously in office, but only to sit with those judges or to supply them in their absence. Moreover, their powers were limited to putting the laws into execution only against withdrawers from the public ordinances, keepers of conventicles, and such as were guilty of disorderly baptisms and marriages, resetting and communing with fugitives, and intercommuned persons and vagrant preachers. Claverhouse had not been long in the exercise of his twofold duties before he began to realise that his efforts were far from producing the desired results. Not only were conventicles as numerous as before, but there were also signs which convinced him that passive resistance was not all he would soon have to encounter. In a despatch which he wrote from Dumfries on the 21st of April 1679, he informed the Earl of Linlithgow that Mr Welsh was accustoming both ends of the country to face the King’s force, and certainly intended to break out into an open rebellion. In view of this, he pointed out that the arms of the militia in Dumfriesshire as well as in Wigtownshire and Annandale, were in the hands of the country people, though very disaffected; and that those taken from the stewartry were in the custody of the town of Kirkcudbright, the most irregular place in the kingdom. He consequently suggested that they should be entrusted to his keeping, and also that his own men should be provided with more suitable weapons, those which they had got from the Castle being worth nothing.