Next we find four men dragged out of a house at Auchencloy, on Dee-side,
where they had met for prayer, and shot before the door, without any
examination. Defoe gives the names of the four as John Grier, Robert
Fergusson, Archibald Stuart, and Robert Stuart. Shields substitutes for
Archibald Stuart the name of James Macmichael. In "The Cloud of
Witnesses" only Grier, Robert Stuart, and Fergusson are named. In
Wodrow's pages the four men become eight: of these four, as given by
Shields (Macmichael, however, being spelt Macmichan), were shot at once:
two more, Smith and Hunter, were carried to Kirkcudbright and hanged
after a form of trial: two, unnamed, got safe away. "It may be," adds
Wodrow, "the rescue of some prisoners at Kirkcudbright by some of the
wanderers, a little before this, was the pretext for all this cruelty."
It may indeed have been so, and something more than a rescue of
prisoners may have helped. The affair on Dee-side took place December
18th, 1684. On the 11th of the same month (just after Renwick's
proclamation of war) a party of men, headed by James Macmichael,
murdered Peter Peirson, minister of Carsphairn, at his own door. Wodrow
cannot shirk this fact: he finds it detestable, and generally denounced
and disowned by the more respectable of the Covenanters; but he also
manages to find as many excuses for it as he conveniently can in the
provocation given by the victim.
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