It is difficult to believe that a story so well and widely
recorded, and so firmly implanted in the hearts of so many generations
of men, can have absolutely no foundation in fact.[52] It is indeed
possible that time has embellished the bald brutality of the deed,
though the graphic narrative of Macaulay is practically that which
Wodrow took from the records of Penninghame. But that the two women
were drowned in the waters of the Blednock on May 11th, 1685, is surely
a fact as well authenticated as any in the martyrology of the Scottish
Covenant.
There is, as I have said, an excellent reason for not dragging my
readers through the obscure and barren mazes of this controversy; and
like all good reasons it is a very simple one. Claverhouse was present
neither at the trial nor the execution. He had, indeed, no more to do
with the deaths of these two women than Cameron, who had been five years
in his grave, or Wodrow, who was but five years old. It is true that one
of his family was present, but this was his brother, David Graham,
Deputy Sheriff of Galloway, and but lately made one of the Lords
Justices of Wigtownshire. Macaulay does not directly name Claverhouse as
concerned in this affair; but it is one out of five selected by the
historian as samples of the crimes by which "he, and men like him,
goaded the Western peasantry into madness"--a consummation which, it may
be observed in passing, had been effected twelve years before
Claverhouse had drawn sword in Scotland.
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