Unless, therefore, we are ready to suppose that officers were in the
habit of sitting on a jury with their own troopers, or to believe that
within three days a change had taken place in Claverhouse's position of
which there is no record either in his own letters or in any other
existing document, we must accept Wodrow's narrative as the true one,
and exonerate Claverhouse from all responsibility for the deaths of
Gillies and his unfortunate fellow-sufferers.
Two cases yet remain of the five cited by Macaulay. With one of
these--the case of the three men shot near Glasgow for refusing to pray
for the King--no writer has ever pretended to implicate Claverhouse
personally; but with the other he is directly concerned. Andrew Hislop
was the son of a poor widow in whose house a proscribed Covenanter had
lately died. This was discovered by one Johnstone of Westerhall, an
apostate Presbyterian, and, like most of his class, particularly bitter
against his former associates. He turned the woman with her younger
children into the fields, pulled down her house, and dragged the eldest
son before Claverhouse, then marching through that part of the country.
So Macaulay tells the story, following for once the "Cloud of Witnesses"
rather than Wodrow. According to the latter, Claverhouse found Hislop
wandering about the fields, and carried him before Westerhall, "without
any design, as appeared, to murder him.
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