But it was not Claverhouse’s intention that his opponent should escape so easily. He met the charges made against him with a bill of complaint, in which the gravest accusations followed each other in overwhelming array. The leading counts in the indictment bore that Sir John Dalrymple had weakened the hands of the Government in the county of Galloway, by traversing and opposing the commission which the King’s Council had given Claverhouse; that he had done his utmost to stir up the people to a dislike of the King’s forces there; that he kept disloyal and disaffected persons to be bailies and clerks in his regality, and had not administered the test to them till long after January 1682, contrary to the Act of Parliament; that he had imposed on delinquents mock fines, not the fiftieth or sixtieth part of what the law required, for the sole purpose of anticipating and forestalling Claverhouse; that he and his father had offered Claverhouse a bribe of £150 sterling, out of the fines, to connive at the irregularities of his mother, Lady Stair, of his sisters, and of others; that he had laughed insolently at the proclamation of a court, made by Claverhouse, and had ordered his tenants not to attend it; that he had traduced and defamed Claverhouse to the Privy Council; and that he had accused him of cheating the King’s Treasury, by exacting fines and not accounting for them. When Sir John Dalrymple’s answers to these charges had been read, the Chancellor gave some indication of the temper and feeling of the Council by reproving him ‘for his tart reflections on Claverhouse’s ingenuity,’ and by denying his right to adduce witnesses, whilst, on the other side, Claverhouse was allowed to call whom he chose, in support of the charges brought by him against Sir John. Fountainhall states that ‘there was much transport, flame, and humour in this cause;’ and he mentions that, at one phase of the proceedings, when Dalrymple alleged that the people of Galloway had turned orderly and regular, Claverhouse, alluding to the latest Edinburgh novelty of the time, replied that there were as many elephants and crocodiles in Galloway as loyal subjects. According to Sir John himself, Claverhouse went much further than a direct denial of his opponents’ assertions, and, in the presence of the Committee of Council appointed to examine witnesses, threatened to give him a box in the ear.