It is said that Lauderdale
would have spared him, but Sharp was so vehement for his death that the
Duke dared not refuse.
The chief promoters of the Archbishop's murder were Hackston of
Rathillet, Russell of Kettle, and John Balfour of Burley, or, more
correctly, of Kinloch. These three men were typical of the class who at
this time began to come to the front among the Covenanters, and by their
incapacity, folly, and brutality discredited and did their best to ruin
a cause whose original justice had been already too much obscured by
such parasites. It is impossible to believe that they, or such as they,
were inspired by any strong religious feelings. Hackston and Balfour
were men of some fortune, who had been free-livers in their youth, and
were now professing to expiate those errors by a gloomy and ferocious
asceticism. Both had a grudge against Sharp. Balfour had been accused of
malversation in the management of some property for which he was the
Archbishop's factor, and Hackston, his brother-in-law, had been
arrested as his bail and forced to make the money good. Russell, who has
left a curiously minute and cold-blooded narrative of this murder,[23]
was a man of headstrong and fiery temper. They had all those dangerous
gifts of eloquence which, coarse and uncouth as it sounds to our ears,
was, when liberally garnished with texts of Scripture, precisely such as
to inflame the heated tempers of an illiterate peasantry to madness.
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