from being the contemptible thing some apologists for Claverhouse would
have us believe; but he is not a witness whose unsupported testimony it
is always safe to take for gospel-truth. He wrote at a time when the
naturally romantic imagination of the Scottish peasantry, stimulated by
the memories of old men who had known the evil times, had largely
embellished the facts he set himself to chronicle; and following the
fashion of his day (indeed, as one may say, the fashion of many
historians who cannot plead Wodrow's excuse), he was not always careful
to separate the romance from the reality, even where the latter might
have better served his turn. But considering all the circumstances--the
circumstances of the time, of his subject, and of his own
prepossessions, he is a writer whom it is impossible to disregard; and,
indeed, compared with the other Covenanting chroniclers he stands apart
as the most sober and impartial of historians. Where he got the story
that has been so ingeniously fashioned into an indictment against
Claverhouse is not clear. The passage runs as follows:--"Dreadful were
the acts of wickedness done by the soldiers at this time, and Lag was as
deep as any. They used to take to themselves, in their cabals, the names
of devils and persons they supposed to be in hell, and with whips to
lash one another, as a jest upon hell. But I shall draw a veil over many
of their dreadful impieties I meet with in papers written at this time."
This is not exactly the sort of evidence any judge but a hanging judge
would allow, though it would serve well enough the turn of a prosecutor.
It is at any rate evidence which no one, with any experience of the sort
of gossip the annalists of the Covenant were content to call history,
would care to take seriously. But whatever its value may really be, so
far as it goes it is evidence not against Claverhouse but against Lag.
It is clear from Wodrow that the story refers not to the royal soldiers
but to the local militia; and a writer a little later than Wodrow makes
it still more clear that the men supposed thus to have disported