Referring to the rescue of a prisoner, which had recently been effected by a party of armed men, and in the course of which one of the King’s guards had been killed—a crime for which Wharry and Smith were subsequently executed in Glasgow and hung in chains near Inchbellybridge, between Kirkintilloch and Kilsyth, where their ‘monument’ may still be seen—Claverhouse continues, ‘If this man should not be hanged, they would take advantage, that they have disappointed us by rescuing the other, and give us such apprehensions that we durst not venture on this.’ Then he gives expression to a sentiment which should never be lost sight of in forming an estimate of his character and conduct: ‘I am as sorry to see a man die, even a Whig, as any of themselves. But when one dies justly, for his own faults, and may save a hundred to fall in the like, I have no scruple.’ At the beginning of July 1683, Claverhouse returned to Edinburgh. For the next ten months his labours mainly consisted in attendance at the meetings of the Privy Council, and do not bring him specially into prominence. Towards the close of the comparatively quiet period he again appears in the character of a suitor. On this occasion, his matrimonial plans met with more success than those of which Lady Helen Graham had been the object. By what may seem a singular freak of fate, Jean, youngest daughter of the late Lord Cochrane, the lady on whom he had bestowed his affections, belonged to a family of strong Covenanting sympathies. Her father had, in the earlier days of the religious troubles, refused the Bond, and protested against the illegality of the clause which obliged masters to answer for their servants’ attendance at church. Her mother, a Kennedy by birth, professed the stern and uncompromising Presbyterianism of her house. Her grandfather, Lord Dundonald, had been the subject of an inquisition for keeping a chaplain who prayed God to bless the rebels in the West with success. And her uncle, Sir John Cochrane, was an outlawed rebel and a suspected traitor.