he quotes the aforesaid epitaph, does not himself implicate
Claverhouse.

Wodrow does not appear to have heard any of these stories. He names only
Gillies and Bryce, quoting from the indictment, which does not specify
the other sufferers, to show that the men were tried before General
Drummond and a tribunal of fifteen soldiers on May 5th, and hanged on
the following day. We have already seen that a few days previously
Claverhouse had sent a prisoner for trial to this same General Drummond,
because he had himself at that time no commission to try prisoners.
Unless, therefore, we are ready to suppose that officers were in the
habit of sitting on a jury with their own troopers, or to believe that
within three days a change had taken place in Claverhouse's position of
which there is no record either in his own letters or in any other
existing document, we must accept Wodrow's narrative as the true one,
and exonerate Claverhouse from all responsibility for the deaths of
Gillies and his unfortunate fellow-sufferers.

Two cases yet remain of the five cited by Macaulay. With one of
these--the case of the three men shot near Glasgow for refusing to pray
for the King--no writer has ever pretended to implicate Claverhouse
personally; but with the other he is directly concerned. Andrew Hislop
was the son of a poor widow in whose house a proscribed Covenanter had
lately died. This was discovered by one Johnstone of Westerhall, an
apostate Presbyterian, and, like most of his class, particularly bitter
against his former associates. He turned the woman with her younger
children into the fields, pulled down her house, and dragged the eldest
son before Claverhouse, then marching through that part of the country.
So Macaulay tells the story, following for once the "Cloud of Witnesses"
rather than Wodrow. According to the latter, Claverhouse found Hislop
wandering about the fields, and carried him before Westerhall, "without
any design, as appeared, to murder him." Westerhall voted for instant
death, while Claverhouse pleaded for the lad, and only yielded at last
on the other's insistence, saying: "The blood of this poor man be upon
you, Westerhall. I am free of it." He thereupon ordered the captain of a
Highland company, then brigaded with his own men, to provide a
firing-party; but the Highlanders angrily refused, and the troopers had
to do the work. Both versions, it will be seen, agree in representing
Claverhouse as inclined to me