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An effort has, of late,
been made to repel the allegations which, for ages past, have been made
against the infamous instruments of cruelty during the twenty-eight years’
persecution. The Covenanters have been represented as factious democrats,
setting at defiance all constituted authority, and exposing themselves to
the vengeance of law and justice. These sentiments are apt to identify
themselves with modern politics; but we hope we will never see our country
again devastated by oppression, cruelty, and all the shootings, and
headings, and hangings of the Stuart despotism repeated. It becomes,
therefore, the duty of every friend of good and equal government to put
his hand to the work, and to support those principles under which Britain
has flourished so long, and every man has sat in safety and in peace under
his own vine and his own fig-tree. No train of reasoning, or of
demonstration, however, will suffice for this. The judgment is, in many
occasions, convinced of error and injustice, whilst the heart and the
conduct remain the same. There must be something in accordance with the
decisions of the judgment pressed home upon the feelings. There must be
vivid pictures of the workings of a system of misrule placed before the
mind’s eye, so that a deep and a human interest may be felt in the
picture. The reader must open the doors of our suffering peasantry, and
witness their family and fireside bereavements. He must become their
companion under the snow-wreath and the damp cave—he must mount the
scaffold with them, and even listen to their last act and testimony. How
vast is the impression which a painter can, in this way, make upon the
spirit of the spectator! Let Allan’s famous Circassian slave be an
instance in point; but the painter is limited to a single point of time,
and the relation which that bears and exhibits to what has gone before or
will come after; but the writer of narrative possesses the power of
shifting his telescope from eminence to eminence—of varying, ad libitum,
time, place, and circumstances—and thus of making up for the
acknowledged inferiority of written description or narratives to what is
submitted, as Horace says, "Oculis fidelibus," by his vast and
unlimited power of variety. The means, therefore, by which past
generations have been made to feel and acknowledge the inhumanities, the
scandalous atrocities of those blood-stained times, still remain
subservient to their original and long-tried purposes; and it becomes the
imperious duty of every succeeding age to transmit and perpetuate the
impressions of abhorrence with which those times were regarded and
recollected. This duty, too, becomes so much the more necessary, as the
times become the more remote. The object which is rapidly passed and
distanced by the speed of the steam-engine, does not more naturally
diminish in dimensions to the eye, as it recedes into the depths of
distance, than do the events which, in passing, figured largely and
impressively, lose their bulk and their interest when removed from us by
the dim and darkening interval of successive centuries; and the only
method by which their natural and universal law can be modified, or in any
degree counteracted, is by a continuous and uninterrupted reference to the
past—by making what is old, recent by description and imagination; and by
more carefully tracing and acknowledging the connection which past agents
and times have, or may be supposed to have, upon the present advancement
and happiness of man. Had the devotedness of the Covenanter and
Nonconformist been less entire than it was—had the arbitrary desires of a
bigoted priesthood and a tyrant prince been submitted to—then had the Duke
of York been king to the end of his days—Rome had again triumphed in her
priesthood; and we at this hour, if at all awakened from the influence of
surrounding advancement to a sense of our degradation, had been only
enacting bloody Reformation, instead of bloodless Reform, and suffering
the incalculable miseries which our forefathers, centuries ago,
anticipated. Nay, more, but for the lesson taught us by the friends of the
Covenant and the conventicle, where had been the great encouragement to
resist political oppression in all time to come, when the proudly elevated
finger may point to the record, which said, and still says, in letters
indeed of blood— "A people resolved to be free, can never be ultimately
enslaved." The Covenant had its use; and, immense in its own day, and in
its immediate efforts, it placed William, and law, and freedom on the
throne of Britain; but that is as nothing in the balance when compared
with the less visible and more remote effects of this distinguished
triumph:—It, throughout all the last century, maintained a firm and
unyielding struggle with despotism, sometimes indeed worsted, but never
altogether subdued; and it has, of late years, issued in events and
triumphs too recent and too agitating to be now fairly and fully
discussed. Nor will the influence of the Covenant cease to be felt in our
land, till God shall have deserted her, and left her entirely to the
freedom of her own will, to the debasing influence of that luxury and
corruption which has formed the grave of every kingdom that has yet lived
out its limited period.
These Gleanings of the
Covenant have been written under the impression, and with the view above
expressed; and it is hoped that the following narrative, true in all its
leading circumstances, and more than true in the vraisemblable, may
contribute something to the object thus distinctly stated.
The funeral of Thomas
Thomson had advanced from the Gaitend to the Lakehead. The accompaniment
was numerous—the group was denser. Thomas had lived respected, and died
regretted. He was the father of five helpless children, all females, and
his wife was manifestly about to be delivered of a sixth. Just as the
procession had advanced to the house of Will Coultart, a troop of ten men
rode up. They had evidently been drinking, and spoke not only
blasphemously, but in terms of intimidation,—"Stop, you cursed crew," said
the leader. "He has escaped law, but he shall not escape justice. Come
here lad;" and at once they slighted from their horses, seized the coffin,
and opening the lid, were about to penetrate the corpse through and
through. "Stop a little," said John Ferguson, the famous souter of
Closeburn, "there are maybe twa at a bargain-making;" so saying, he lifted
an axe which he took up at a wright’s door, and dared any one to disturb
them in their Christian duty. A "pell~mell" took place, in the midst of
which poor Ferguson was killed. He had two sons in the company, who,
seeing how their father had been used, rushed upon the dragoons, and were
both of them severely wounded. In the meantime, Douglas of Drumlanrig came
up, and, understanding how things went, ordered the soldiers to give in,
and the wounded men to be taken care of. All this was wondrous well; but
what follows is not so. The body of Ferguson was carried to Croalchapel;
and the two sons accompanied it, with many tears. Douglas seemed to feel
what had happened, and could not help accompanying the party home. He
entered the house of mourning, where there was a dead father, a weeping
widow, and two wounded sons. He entered, but he saw nothing but Peggy.
Poor Peggy was an only sister of these lads—an only daughter of her
murdered father. Douglas was a man of the world! Oh! my God, what a term
that is! and how much misery and horror does it not contain! Peggy
was really beautiful—not like Georgina Gordon, or Lady William, or Mrs
Norton, or Lady Blessington; for her beauty depended in no degree upon
art. Had you arrayed her in rags, and placed her in a poors’-house, she
would have appeared to advantage. Peggy, too, (the God who made her
knows,) was pure in soul, and innocent in act as is the Angel Gabriel! she
never once thought of sinning, as a woman may, and does (sometimes) sin;
she lived for her father, whom she loved—and for her mother, whom she did
not greatly dislike. But her mother was a stepmother, and Peggy liked her
father. Guess, then, her grief, when Peggy saw her father murdered, her
brothers wounded, and knew the cause thereof. Lift her, said Douglas to
his men, after he had, in seeming humanity, seen the corpse and brothers
home; lift her into Red Rob’s saddle, and carry her to Drumlanrig. No
sooner said than done. The weeping, screaming girl was lifted into the
saddle, and conveyed, per force, to Drumlanrig. At that gate there stood a
figure clothed in dyed garments. It was the elder brother of Peggy, he who
had been least injured of the two. He stood with his sword in his hand,
and dared any one who would conduct his sister into the abode of
dishonour. Douglas snapped, and then fired a pistol at him, but neither
took effect. In the meantime, the brother was secured, and the sister was
carried into the "Blue Room," well known afterwards as the infamous
sleeping chamber of old "Q." The not less infamous, though ultimately
repentant Douglas, advanced into the chamber. The poor girl seemed as if
she had seen a snake; she shrunk from his approach, and from his
blandishments. She had previously opened the window into the green walk;
she had taken her resolve, and, in a few instants, lay a maimed, almost
mangled being, on the beautiful walks of Drumlanrig. Douglas was
manifestly struck by the incident, but not converted. He took sufficient
care to have the poor girl conveyed home, and to have the brothers
provided for; but his hour was not yet come. It was not till after his
frequent conversations with the minister of Closeburn, that he came to a
proper sense of his horrible conduct. But what was the awful devastation
of his family. The poor beauteous flower Peggy, who was about to have been
married to a farmer’s son, (Kirkpatrick of Auchincairn,) was by him
rejected. He called at the house sometime afterwards, with a view to see
her; but he came full of suspicion, and therefore unwilling to receive the
truth. He had heard the whole story, and must have known that his Peggy
was at least as pure in mind as she had been beautiful in person; but he
belonged not naturally to the noble stock of the family to which he was to
have been allied, and gave himself up to prejudice. The girl was still in
bed, to which, from her bruises, she had been confined for months. The
meeting might have been one which a poet would have gloried in describing,
or a painter in delineating and embellishing, with hues stolen from the
arc of heaven. Alas! lit was one only worthy of the pencil of a Ribera—fraught
with cruelty, and abounding in selfishness and dishonour. The girl, as she
turned her pale yet beautiful face on him, told him the truth, and
watched, with tears in her eyes, the effect of her narrative on one whose
image had never been absent from her mind, if indeed it had not supported
her in her struggle, and nerved her to the purpose which preferred death
to dishonour. Her bruises and wounds spoke for her, and, to any one but
her lover, would have proved that he was a part of the object of her
sacrifice. It was all to no purpose. The eloquence of truth, of love, of
nature, was lost upon him; nothing would persuade him that the object of
his love had not been degraded. He turned a cold glance of doubt upon her,
and turned to leave the room. Peggy rushed out of bed, and, maimed and
weak as she was, would have stopped him. Her energies failed her; her
lover was gone; and her mother, roused by the cries of her pain, came and
assisted her again into bed. Poor Peggy heard no more of Kirkpatrick. She
sickened and died!— no! far worse!—she became desperate, married a
blackguard, and lived a drunkard; the sons were banished for firing at
Douglas, as he passed in his carriage through Thornhill; and the poor
mother of the whole family became—shall I tell it!—an object of charity.
Thus was, to my certain knowledge, at least to that of my ancestors, a
most creditable and well-doing family ruined, root and branch, by the
persecutors; or, in other words, by those who, without knowing what they
did, regarded the "Covenant" as an unholy thing, and fought the foremost
of the ranks of oppression and uniformity.
Now, there is not a word of
this in Woodrow, or Burns, or even in the MS. of the Advocates’ Library;
and yet we can assure the reader, that the material facts are as true as
is the death of Darnley, or the murder of Rizzio! God bless you, madam!
You have, and can have, and ought to have no notion whatever of the united
current of horribility, which ran through the whole ocean and
cruelty during these awful and most terrific times! May the God that made,
the Saviour that redeemed, and the Holy Spirit that prepares us for
heaven, make us thankful that in those times we do not live; and
that such men as Woodrow and Burns (the first and the last) have been
raised up, to vindicate and to justify such men as then suffered in their
families, or in their persons, for the covenanted cause of the Great Head
of our Presbyterian Church! |
