and by the tyranny of
the sword, at the very time he was covenanting with the commissioners
sent from the Lords at Edinburgh with the offer of the throne of his
ancestors, that with my father and my brother Robin, together with many
of our neighbours, I did sign the Remonstrance against making a prince
of such a treacherous and unprincipled nature king. But in that we only
delivered reasons and opinions on a matter of temporal expediency; for
it was an instrument that neither contained nor implied obligation to
arm; indeed our deportment bore testimony to this explanation of the
spirit in which it was conceived and understood. For when the prince had
received the crown and accepted the Covenant, we submitted ourselves as
good subjects. Fearing God, we were content to honour in all rights and
prerogatives, not contrary to Scripture, him whom, by His grace in the
mysteries of His wisdom, He had, for our manifold sins as a nation and a
people, been pleased to ordain and set over us for king. And verily no
better test of our sincerity could be, than the distrust with which our
whole country-side was respected by Oliver Cromwell, when he thought it
necessary to build that stronghold at Ayr, by which his Englishers were
enabled to hold the men of Carrick, Kyle and Cunningham in awe,--a race
that, from the days of Sir William Wallace and King Robert the Bruce,
have ever been found honest in principle, brave in affection, and
dauntless and doure in battle. But it is not necessary to say more on
this head; for full of griefs and grudges as were the hearts of all true
Scots, with the thought of their country in southern thraldom, while
Cromwell's Englishers held the upper hand amongst us, the season of
their dominion was to me and my house as a lown and pleasant spring. All
around me was bud, and blossom, and juvenility, and gladness, and hope.
My lot was as the lot of the blessed man. I ate of the labour of my
hands, I was happy, and it was well with me; my wife, as the fruitful
vine that spreads its clusters on the wall, made my lowly dwelling more
beautiful to the eye of the heart than the golden palaces of crowned
kings, and our pretty bairns were like olive plants round about my
table;--but they are all gone. The flood and the flame have passed over
them;--yet be still, my heart; a little while endure in silence; for I
have not taken up the avenging pen of history, and dipped it in the
blood of martyrs, to record only my own p