On Easter Sunday, March 31, 1689, the Lord President, Sir George Lockhart of Carnwath, was shot dead by John Chiesly of Dalry. The motives for this dreadful deed were those of private ill-feeling. Chiesly, who was on bad terms with his wife, swore to be revenged on the Lord President for assigning to her a small aliment (only £93 a year) out of his estates. He was a man of violent and ungovernable passions. Six months before the murder, he told Sir James Stewart in London that he was "determined to go to Scotland before Candlemas, and kill the President." "The very imagination of such a thing," said Sir James, "is a sin before God." "Leave God and me alone," was the fierce answer; "we have many things to reckon betwixt us, and we will reckon this too!" The Lord President was warned of these threats, but took no notice. Chiesly dogged him home from church that Easter Sunday, and shot him in the back as he went into his own house, in the Old Bank Close. Lady Lockhart was confined to her bed with illness, but, on hearing the pistol-shot, she sprang up and rushed forward in her night-dress, just in time to see her husband carried in, and laid on two chairs, where he instantly expired. Chiesly, being caught red-handed, was sentenced to death next day by the Lord Provost. He was dragged on a hurdle to the Cross, where his right hand was struck off while still alive. Then he was hanged in chains at the Gallowlee, and his right hand was nailed on the West Port. It was said that his relations and servants came at dead of night and carried off his body, and buried it near his house of Dalry, which for long after was alleged to be haunted. It is a curious fact "that on repairing the garden-wall at a later period," says Wilson, "an old stone seat, which stood in a recess of the wall, had to be removed, and underneath was found a skeleton entire, except the bones of the right hand--without doubt the remains of the assassin, that had secretly been brought hither from the Gallowlee." His daughter Rachel married the Honourable James Erskine, Lord Grange, and was the unhappy Lady Grange, whose story is well known. After twenty years of quarrels and unhappiness, her husband had her secretly conveyed to the Hebrides, where, first in one island, then in another, she lingered out in captivity and solitude the remaining seventeen years of her most wretched life. Lord Grange was involved in Jacobite plots, and it is believed that his wife's threat of betraying him to the Government was what finally decided him in shutting her up where she could not hurt him.