"
Defoe's "Memoirs of the Church of Scotland" were first published in
1717, a few years before Wodrow's History. Elsewhere in the same work he
states that Claverhouse had "among the rest of his cruelties barbarously
murdered several of the persecuted people with his own hands," also that
"this man is said to have killed above a hundred men in this kind of
cold blood cruelty." But Defoe's qualifications for a historian of those
times are, to say the least, uncertain. He mentions Cameron and Cargill
as alive and busy in 1684, four years after one had died fighting at
Aird's Moss, and the other on the scaffold at Edinburgh.
[63] Wodrow, iv. 197; Napier, i. 89. I have called this the most
authentic version because it professes to have come from the murderers
themselves. It is to be found in a letter to Wodrow (printed by Napier)
now in the Advocates' Library at Edinburgh. The date is 1715, and the
writer, who only signs his initials, J.C., calls Wodrow "cousin." "I
give you the account," he writes, "from the best information it's
possible to be got, viz., from Robert Dun, in Woodheade of Carsphairn,
and John Clark, then in that parish, now in Glenmont, in the parish of
Strathone, anent the curate's death of Carsphairn, which they had from
the actors' own mouths." Wodrow adds a little touch of his own--"Mr.
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