But considering all the circumstances--the
circumstances of the time, of his subject, and of his own
prepossessions, he is a writer whom it is impossible to disregard; and,
indeed, compared with the other Covenanting chroniclers he stands apart
as the most sober and impartial of historians. Where he got the story
that has been so ingeniously fashioned into an indictment against
Claverhouse is not clear. The passage runs as follows:--"Dreadful were
the acts of wickedness done by the soldiers at this time, and Lag was as
deep as any. They used to take to themselves, in their cabals, the names
of devils and persons they supposed to be in hell, and with whips to
lash one another, as a jest upon hell. But I shall draw a veil over many
of their dreadful impieties I meet with in papers written at this time."
This is not exactly the sort of evidence any judge but a hanging judge
would allow, though it would serve well enough the turn of a prosecutor.
It is at any rate evidence which no one, with any experience of the sort
of gossip the annalists of the Covenant were content to call history,
would care to take seriously. But whatever its value may really be, so
far as it goes it is evidence not against Claverhouse but against Lag.
It is clear from Wodrow that the story refers not to the royal soldiers
but to the local militia; and a writer a little later than Wodrow makes
it still more clear that the men supposed thus to have disported
themselves in their cups were those commanded by Lag.
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