to find excuses for the men
whose orders Claverhouse obeyed, nor arguments to show that in the
circumstances such orders were inevitable. But I have tried to show that
in no single instance, of which the record is complete, did he go
beyond the letter of his commission, and that in more than one instance
he construed its spirit with a mildness for which he has never yet been
given credit.

But nothing will avail to save him in the eyes of those who maintain
that the law of human morality is fixed and immutable, and that men of
every age and every country can only be judged, and must be judged, by
the eternal laws of right and wrong. They, of course, will not allow the
excuse that he was a soldier obeying the orders of his superior
officers, even should they be disposed to admit that he did no more than
that. The orders, they will say, were cruel and unjust: he should have
refused to obey them. But is this unswerving standard possible as a
gauge of human actions? Who then shall be safe? There are offences
which, in Coleridge's happy phrase, are offences against the good
manners of human nature itself. The man who committed such offences in
the reign of Chedorlaomer was no doubt as guilty as the man who should
commit them in the reign of Victoria. But are the offences which can be
fairly laid to Claverhouse's account of such a kind? His most able and
his bitterest accuser pronounces him to have been "rapacious and
profane, of violent temper and obdurate heart." Yet every attempt of his
enemies to convict him of extortion or malversation broke signally down.
The decorum of his life and conversation was allowed even by the
Covenanters; and it is recorded as a notable thing that, however
disturbed or thwarted, he was never known to use profane language. The
imperturbable calm of his temper is said by one of their own party to
have at once exasperated and terrified those who were brought before
him far more than the brutal fury of men like Dalziel and Lag.[67] His
heart was indeed hard to those whom he regarded as plotters and
murderers, traitors to their King and enemies of the true religion. He
was indeed in his own way as much a fanatic as the men whom he was
empowered to crush. His devotion to the Crown and to the Protestant
faith was a passion as deep and sincere as that which moved the simple
peasants of the West to find the gospel of Christ in the horrible
compound of blasphemy and treason which too often made up the e