Wodrow, as has been seen, states that Westerhall was ‘one empowered by the Council.’ The commission to which this refers had been granted on the 3rd of January 1684; and, it may be incidentally mentioned that the power which it gave him to judge desperate rebels, could not be exercised by him individually and alone, but in conjunction with two other colleagues. But what Wodrow either overlooked or ignored, is the fact that, on the 21st of April 1685, General Drummond was invested with the whole authority previously held conjointly by the commissioners; and that the royal warrant by which this supersession was effected, expressly declared that all former commissions granted either by the King or by the Privy Council for trying or punishing criminals, were void and extinct. It consequently follows that if Claverhouse acted as he is alleged to have done, he did not merely consent, sullenly or otherwise, to the carrying out of a cruel and iniquitous, but strictly legal sentence, he actually became an accomplice in a deliberate murder of which he did not approve and which he could have prevented by taking up the same position as the Highland gentleman is said to have assumed. Were this the case, the shooting of Hislop would be one of the most indefensible of the atrocities with which Claverhouse has been charged. And yet we do not find that those who were watching his conduct at the time with all the keenness of enmity, and who would gladly have availed themselves of such an opportunity for doing him an ill turn, took any notice of the occurrence. Still more convincing is it, that the Covenanting writers who record the incident, whilst bitter enough in their denunciations of Claverhouse’s inhumanity, are absolutely silent as to the lawlessness of his action. This difficulty has been met by the suggestion that there were probably other proceedings, of which the accounts omit to make mention; that Hislop was asked to take the oath, and, by refusing to do so, made himself amenable to the full penalty of the law. Such an assumption clears both Westerhall and Claverhouse of the actual guilt of murder. It does not free the latter from the charge of having acted with a weakness and a subserviency as unjustifiable in themselves as they seem foreign to his nature. Under the circumstances, the least that can be claimed for him is an open verdict. To convict him on such evidence as has been adduced, and to do so for the purpose of vindicating the veracity of writers who are not even in accord with each other would be palpably unjust.