Viscount Dundee by Louis A. Barbé

Author:Louis A. Barbé [Barbé, Louis A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Classics
ISBN: 9785040657179
Google: k8dSEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Litres
Published: 2021-12-02T02:52:12+00:00

VI

THE KILLING TIME

The last year of the reign of Charles II. was marked by a recrudescence of fanaticism on the part of the Covenanting extremists. It found expression in an ‘apologetical declaration’ drawn up by Renwick, and ordered to be affixed, as though it were a royal proclamation, ‘upon a sufficient and competent number of the public market-crosses of the respective burghs, and of the patent doors of the respective kirks within this kingdom.’ This document disowned the authority of Charles Stuart, and threatened to inflict the severest punishment, not only on those who were actively employed in enforcing the penal laws, ‘such as bloody militia men, malicious troopers, soldiers and dragoons,’ but also on the ‘viperous and malicious bishops and curates,’ and all such sort of counsellors and ‘intelligencers.’

This ‘declaration’ was dated the 28th of October 1684, and was promulgated on the 8th of November. It appeared so outrageous even to some of the Covenanters themselves, that they denounced it as ‘but a State invention, set on foot by the soldiers, to make that party odious and themselves necessary.’ But before many days these sceptics were to be convinced ‘of the reality of this declared war.’ On the 20th of November news reached Edinburgh that, the night before, some of the desperate fanatics had broken in upon two of the King’s Life Guards—Thomas Kennoway and Duncan Stewart—who were lying at Swyne Abbey, beyond Blackburn, in Linlithgowshire, and murdered them most barbarously. ‘This,’ adds Fountainhall, one of the contemporary chroniclers of the incident, ‘was to execute what they had threatened in their declaration.’

This was not the only act of violence by which Renwick’s proclamation was followed. Within the next month there occurred two others, of which the scene lay within the district committed to the care of Claverhouse. The prompt and successful measures which he took to punish the perpetrators supply the elements of fact which partisan writers have distorted and exaggerated into one of the most wanton atrocities of the ‘killing times’; and much may be learnt from an examination of the whole episode in its successive phases.

It opens with the murder of the curate of Carsphairn on the night between the 11th and the 12th of December. The victim was Mr Peter Peirson. The worst of the unsubstantiated charges brought against him by Wodrow, who, whilst professing to abhor and detest the crime, is nevertheless at great pains to find extenuating circumstances in the ‘unwarrantable provocations this ill man gave,’ amount to this, that he was a surly, ill-natured man, and horridly severe; that he was very blustering and bold, and used openly to provoke the poor people by saying in public companies, ‘He feared none of the Whigs, nor anything else but rats and mice’; that he was openly a favourer of popery, and not only defended the doctrine of purgatory, but also declared openly that Papists were much better subjects than Presbyterians; that he was a notorious informer and instigator of all the violent measures resorted

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