They
wished for peace; and no peace was possible so long as an ignorant and
noisy minority would suffer it only at their own price.
One other point should also be remembered. It has been the custom to
excuse the cruelties of the Covenanters, when they could not be denied,
as the acts of men goaded into madness by years of persecution. This
excuse will hardly serve. It might, indeed, serve to explain the murder
of Sharp and the savage deeds of such men as Hamilton and Burley; but
long before that time the Scottish fanatic had proved himself a match
in ferocity for the bloodiest Malignant of them all. After Philiphaugh
one hundred Irish prisoners were shot in cold blood, while a minister of
the Covenanting Church stood by, reiterating in savage glee, "The wark
goes bonnily on." About the same time eighty women and children were in
one day flung over the bridge at Linlithgow for the crime of having been
followers of the camp of Montrose. In 1647 three hundred of the
Macdonalds who held a fortified post on a hill in Kintire surrendered at
discretion to David Leslie. It is said that Leslie would have let them
go but for his chaplain, John Nave. Borrowing the words of Samuel, "What
meaneth then this bleating of the sheep in mine ears, and the lowing of
the oxen which I hear?" in a long and fiery harangue this man of God
exhorted the conquerors to finish their work, and threatened their
captain with the curse of Saul who spared the Amalekites.
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