Macaulay's superficial treatment of Scottish affairs. 9

the name of “fanatics" and "enthusiasts," upon grounds as justifiable as those of "rebels" and "outlaws" from Mr. Aytoun. If they were fanatics, so are their descendants, and so were all the glorious martyrs who live in history. It is a charge which would apply to Luther, to Knox, to Wishart, to Hamilton, to all the men whose lives mark distinct epochs in the progress of civilisation. The principles of our fanatical fathers are the principles of the Scottish people now; and the same faith which, during the reign of the Stuarts, was promulgated amid the moors by forlorn, miserable, and hunted ministers to the straggling congregations who attended them, was, at the Revolution, embodied into a law, and now forms the creed of the Scottish people.

And we object to the general tone in which our country is mentioned. It is difficult, indeed, to believe that this was the same land which had once filled the world with the renown of its achievements. It is hard to recognise its features in the prostration of the Stuart reigns, when we think of it in the palmy days of Wallace, hurling back the chivalry of England-at the Reformation, when Knox gave an impetus to a movement which shook the world-or in the times of Henderson, when it commenced the opposition to those regal encroachments which ultimately brought the "royal martyr" to the scaffold. The way in which the history disposes of "the Scotch provincial assemblies," and their general affairs, is peculiarly offensive. Perched on the very pinnacle of absolute wisdom, and gazing serenely on a fanatical race, Mr. Macaulay dismisses us with many words of brilliant compassion, and many others of contemptuous indifference. At the dizzy height on which he sits, it is natural that he should forget at times the insignificant details of a nation's history, and square it all according to an entirely new general rule of cosmopolitan application. He appears to be writing the history of a people who occupy themselves in a continual war for trifles; and thus we are represented as a pack of children, refusing to be at peace for no other reason than because our superiors so commanded us, and enduring sufferings unto death for matters so unimportant that they would be laughed at by every Englishman out of Bedlam.

In a general history of England, it was of course impossible for Mr. Macaulay to do more than give a slight sketch of the Scottish persecution, the details of which fill two folio volumes of Wodrow; and thus the author was obliged to make a selection.

Among the numerous instances of well-authenticated atrocities perpetrated by Government, he has taken the tragedy of John Brown, the "Christian carrier." It holds a prominent place in his animated narrative; and if true as he has told it, it

stamps eternal infamy on the memory of Graham of Claverhouse. Mr. Aytoun has selected it as the ground of his attack. He first attempts to palliate, and then proceeds to deny it. It is, in his pages, a mere myth concocted in later times by lying calumniators of a paternal government. Let us then see how it is told in old histories,-as an outrage on humanity and religion, and a fitting theme not for sneering merriment, but for burning shame and deep and sorrowful contrition.

This was the story:-In a lonely heath in the parish of Muirkirk and county of Ayr, there stood, near the close of the 17th. century, a house of stone covered with heather. On entering, you found it furnished with more comfort than its external appearance warranted, though scarcely of that description that would be considered comfortable at the present day. There was no grate; the fire was on the floor, and the smoke emerged not through a chimney carried up the wall, but by a hole in the roof. Dark and smoky as it was, it yet contained a man whose holy life and tragic death have linked his name with the history of his country. Intended for the Church, he received the education of a clergyman; but some impediment in his speech prevented his prosecution of that profession. He became the carrier between his own district of country and the neighbouring towns, to which he carried the produce of the shepherds, which he disposed of at market. His honesty, his piety, his faithfulness in warning the persecuted ministers of danger, and his fidelity in giving them a refuge in their misery, procured for him the patronymic which he bore more honourable than all the noble and heraldic honours appended to the name of his titled murderer.

He was quite a youth at the rising of Pentland, and he was neither at the battles of Drumclog or Bothwell. There was no real ground therefore for holding him (in the language of the time) a "rebel ;" and the sole cause of offence against him was that of not attending the curate, and of giving refuge to the hunted ministers of his own faith. He was married to a woman of great virtue and of great strength of mind, by one of the most noted of the Presbyterian ministers-Peden. The two lived many happy days together; and many years after both of them were in their grave, the writer of their Lives tells us, that "the domestic peace and comfort of Priesthill are talked of to this day in the district in which they lived."* A number of the neighbours were in the habit of meeting in their house for prayer, but these meetings were soon broken up. John Wilson and John Smith, two of the party, were shot by Colonel Buchan and the Laird of Lee in February

* Memoirs of John Brown of Priesthill, with Preface by Wm. M‘Gavin. Glasgow, 1827. P. 21.

1685. John Brown of Blackwood in Lesmahago was murdered in the beginning of March by Lieutenant Murray, and the persecution became too hot even for the inoffensive Christian carrier. The same fate that overtook them might be his on the morrow, and often was he obliged to hide in terror amid the highlands of Kyle and Lanarkshire, under the cutting blasts of the March and April winds. His fame spread, even in an age when the fury of persecution had made conspicuous the virtues of thousands, and to this must be attributed the scene which followed. On the night before his murder, Peden the minister who married him, came to his house, weary from his wanderings in the hills, and claimed the hospitality that would not have been denied to any one. It must surely have been a hard heart that could have refused admission to a poor, old, weary man; it surely would have been inhuman to have denied it to one so intimately connected with the happiest day in the lives of this humble pair. Yet this is the charge upon which his murder is now defended.

Peden himself was one of the most remarkable of the men who in that day kept up the spirit of the drooping Covenanters. Along with Cameron and Cargill, he was the foremost of the ministers against whom the whole fury of Government was directed; but, unlike them, he escaped by a natural death from the troubles of his harassed existence. Many a tale is still circulating amongst the Scottish peasantry as to his powers of prophecy, and even Lord Grange, one of the Senators of the College of Justice, believed in them.* The book published with a list of his prophecies is not authentic, of which we here make Mr. Aytoun aware, that he may correct in his next edition the injustice he has done to the memory of a good man. He was a man of great sagacity, a keen judge of human motives, well-informed as to the condition of his country, and therefore capable of foreseeing coming events, in regard to which it required no supernatural gift of prophecy to foretell a death of violence to men whose lives were one long murder, or the bloody overthrow of a Government which existed by terror. His predictions, always true, were referred by his fond but humble and uneducated hearers to inspiration; and Mr. Aytoun, of course, took the occasion of their pious reverence for his memory to indulge in sneers against a man who has left behind him a name endeared by every virtue-an ornament of this world and an emblem of a better.

Graham of Claverhouse is the next figure that appears. Mr. Aytoun commences his duty as the champion of his "public and private virtues, his high and chivalrous honour," by protesting

* See Scots Worthies, p. 504, note. Edit. 1846.

that he would "never vindicate an action of wanton and barbarous cruelty, or even attempt to lessen the stigma by a frivolous or dishonest excuse." The question thus resolves entirely into one of historical evidence. All parties are agreed as to the character of the act, and we regret to say that the epithets of the author are not inapplicable to the character of his defence.

The great historian of the persecution was Robert Wodrow, one of the most laborious, most candid, and honest of writers. His history was compiled certainly in a different mode from that taken by his modern reviler. His was no night-gown and slipper history. It was not jotted down according to the exigency of the argument, or the indolence of the writer. He spent a small fortune in travelling and in correspondence to procure his materials, and these are still preserved in the Library of the Faculty of Advocates, as an honourable trophy of his honesty and his industry. In his own day many a threatening and reviling letter he received; but every attack made upon him has been long forgotten. In an age when the Royal patronage of literature was almost unknown, the historian of the Scottish persecution received even from George the First a Royal present. It is true that like many better men, he partook largely of the superstition and credulity of the times. He believed, as Mr. Aytoun proves, in the personality of the Devil, and in his personal conferences with his agent Sharp. He also believed in witches; and in this belief he was supported not merely by the speculative opinions of his contemporaries, but by the practical judgments of courts of law, who condemned and executed with unrelenting fury the unhappy victims of their ignorant credulity. Even the Scottish Parliament itself-the essential essence it should be thought of Scottish civilisation-made it one of the proofs of the charge on which Argyle was condemned and executed, that a particular tree testified to his guilt by a spring of blood, "which sprung out of the very heart of the root thereof." Even when we come to a later age, we find the great English moralist himself the slave of superstitious fears which no doubt a cool rhetorician like Mr. Aytoun would laugh at, but which a more logical mind would never conclude to be evidence that the party holding them was a forger or a liar. We notice the circumstance simply to show the total want of philosophy in the mode in which this gentleman gauges the value of human testimony. Because he was credulous and superstitious, it does not follow that Wodrow was dishonest and a knave; otherwise we would require to blot out nearly the whole past history of mankind, handed down to us by writers who lived in a world of gross and childish superstitions,

*Howel's State Trials, vol. v. p. 1384.

themselves the slaves of foolish and delusive absurdities; and among whom are the honoured names of Luther, Bacon, Judge Hale, Baxter, Glanville, and Dr. Robertson.

Mr. Macaulay cited Wodrow as his authority, and Mr. Aytoun having finished his attack on the latter, thus proceeds—

“For thirty-three years after the Revolution, the details of this atrocious murder were never revealed to the public! Nowhere in print or pamphlet, memoir, history, or declaration, published previously to Wodrow, does even the name of John Brown occur, save once in the Cloud of Witnesses, a work which appeared in 1714; and in that work no details are given, the narrative being comprehended in a couple of lines. I have searched for it amidst all the records of the so-called Martyrology, but cannot find a trace of it elsewhere, until the Rev. Robert Wodrow thought fit to place the tale, with all its circumstantiality, in his History. How, then, came Wodrow to know anything about the murder of John Brown? He could have had no personal knowledge or recollection of the circumstance; for he was not quite six years of age at the time when it is said to have occurred. He has not offered one scrap of evidence in support of his allegation, and merely leaves it to be inferred that he had derived the story from that most uncertain of all sources-tradition. Even at the hands of the most honest, cautious, and scrupulous chronicler, we should hesitate to receive a tale of this kind; but, from Wodrow, who is certainly entitled to claim none of the above adjectives as applicable to himself, who will take it? No one, I should hope, whose prejudice is not so strong as to lead him to disregard the most ordinary verification of evidence. Claverhouse had enemies enough to insure the circulation of such a damning tale, supposing it to have been true, long before he had lain for two-and-thirty years in his grave. He was not without eulogists whose tribute to his memory was as gall and wormwood to their opponents, and in whose teeth, most assuredly the details of such a dastardly and unprovoked murder would have been cast. Yet no man charged him with it. More than a generation passed away, the two kingdoms had been united, and Mar's insurrection quelled, before the miracle-mongering minister of Eastwood ventured, upon no documentary authority at all, to concoct and publish the story which Mr. Macaulay has adopted without a scruple.”—(Aytoun, p. 334.)

Now, let us examine this emphatic passage. In the course of Mr. Aytoun's inquiries, he could not fail to meet with the well-known "Cloud of Witnesses," and unhappily for his argument, the tale of the Priesthill tragedy is there inserted in the following terms:-" Item, the said Claverhouse, in May 1685, apprehended John Brown in Priesthill, in the parish of Moorkirk, in the shire of Ayr, being at his work about his own house, and shot him dead before his own door, in presence of his wife."*

* Appendix, Cloud of Witnesses, p. 382.