163.The following incident was much spoken of at the time. Mr W. Hanna, one of these prisoners, on being threatened with banishment, told the council he was now too old to work or go to war. General Dalziel bitterly replied, “But you are not too old to hang.” On that same day, the General, in the act of drinking a glass of wine, was suffocated, and went to his own place.
163.The following incident was much spoken of at the time. Mr W. Hanna, one of these prisoners, on being threatened with banishment, told the council he was now too old to work or go to war. General Dalziel bitterly replied, “But you are not too old to hang.” On that same day, the General, in the act of drinking a glass of wine, was suffocated, and went to his own place.
163.The following incident was much spoken of at the time. Mr W. Hanna, one of these prisoners, on being threatened with banishment, told the council he was now too old to work or go to war. General Dalziel bitterly replied, “But you are not too old to hang.” On that same day, the General, in the act of drinking a glass of wine, was suffocated, and went to his own place.
About the latter end of this year, John Nisbet of Hardhill, with three of his fellow-sufferers, was surprised by a relation of his own, Lieutenant Nisbet, in a house in the parish of Fenwick. They defended themselves bravely, till the three were killed and he was wounded and taken. When tauntingly questioned what he thought of himself now? “I think,” he replied, “as much of Christ and his cause as ever; but I judge myself at a loss, being in time, and my dear brethren, whom you have murdered, being in eternity.” He was sent to Edinburgh, and, on his examination before the council, behaved with much Christian fortitude. Being asked if he would own the king’s authority? He said he would not. “Why?” said they; “do you not own the Scriptures and Confession of Faith?”—“I own both,” he replied, “with all my heart, but the king is a Roman Catholic;and I have not only been educated a Presbyterian, but solemnly sworn against owning popery.”
The council ordered him to be prosecuted before the justiciary. His confession was adduced against him, and he was sent to follow those who had not counted their lives dear unto them, that they might finish their course with joy, and set to their seals to the truth. “Now,” said he, in his last testimony, “we see open doors, that are made wide, to bring in popery and set up idolatry in the Lord’s covenanted land. Wherefore, it is the indispensable duty of all who have any love to God, or to his Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, to witness faithfully, constantly, and conscientiously, against all that the enemies have done, or are doing, to the overthrow of the glorious work of reformation. But it will not be long to the fourth watch, and then will He come in garments died in blood, to raise up saviours upon Mount Zion to judge the mount of Esau; and then the house of Jacob and Joseph shall be for fire, and the malignants, papists, and prelates shall be for stubble, the flame whereof shall be great. But my generation work being done with my time, I go to him who loved me, and washed me from all my sins in his own blood.” And thus, after much, long, and painful suffering (upwards of twenty years), did this faithful servant enter into the joy of his Lord. Edward Marshall of Kaemuir, formerly forfeited, was executed along with him.
From this period we shall meet only with one other public judicial murder, expressly on account of religion; yet many died in prison and exile who may be numbered among the martyrs, as having suffered unto death. Many others were scourged, had their ears cropt, and were sent to the plantations. The indecent cruelty of their conduct towards pious women was unworthy of manhood. Thus a number of old women were whipped at Glasgow; at Dumfries two women were scourged, and the youngest afterwards sent to New Jersey with Pitlochie, merely because they would swear no oaths; another poor woman was tied to a man, and both scourged together through the town, because they would not tell what wanderers they had harboured, though to have acknowledged the fact would have been exposing themselvesto the gallows. But the banishments, plunderings, and varied modes of harassing still continued, or were intermitted only by arbitrary and insidious indulgences, intended to prepare the way for the introduction of popery.
Without natural affection is one of the peculiar marks of a reprobate, but the prelatical rulers of Scotland deemed its possession a peculiar object of punishment. By order of the sheriff of Wigton, a party of his underlings after destroying the furniture of a Sarah Stuart, the wife of William Kennedy, in the parish of Cunningham, marched the poor woman, with a child in her arms, not quite nine months old, to Wigton, a distance of several miles, forcing her to leave other three behind without any one to look after them, though the oldest was not nine years of age. There she was kept eleven weeks prisoner, though a conformist herself, because she would not engage never to converse with her husband, nor consent to discover him! And another, Jean Dalziel, a tenant of Queensberry’s, was banished for the same reason.
Thus closed the year sixteen hundred and eighty-five—a year long remembered by the sufferers, and which was remarkable also for that terrible revocation of the edict of Nantz by Louis XIV., which made Europe resound with tales of horror, equalled only by the retributive sufferings the descendants of the persecutors endured in the days of Robespierre, from a revolution whose origin may perhaps be traced back to the ambition, mis-government, and cruelty of Voltaire’s Louis le Grand.