heavier
afterwards was my trial.

Among the prisoners taken at Bothwell-brigg were many persons from our
parish and neighbourhood, who, after their unheard-of sufferings among
the tombs and graves of the Greyfriars church-yard at Edinburgh, were
allowed to return home. Though in this there was a show of clemency, it
was yet but a more subtle method of the tyranny to reach new victims.
For those honest men were not long home till grievous circuit-courts
were set agoing, to bring to trial not only all those who were at
Bothwell, or approved of that rising, but likewise those who had been at
the Pentland raid; and the better to ensure condemnation and punishment,
sixteen persons were cited from every parish to bear witness as to who,
among their neighbours, had been out at Bothwell, or had harboured any
of those who were there. The wicked curates made themselves, in this
grievous matter, engines of espionage, by giving in the names of those,
their parishioners, whom they knew could bear the best testimony.

Thus it was, that many who had escaped from the slaughter--from the
horrors of the Greyfriars church-yard--and from the drowning in the
Orkneys,--and, like myself, had resumed their quiet country labour, were
marked out for destruction. For the witnesses cited to Ayr against us
were persons who had been released from the Greyfriars church-yard, as I
have said, and who, being honest men, could not, when put to their
oaths, but bear witness to the truth of the matters charged against us.
And nothing surely could better show the devilish spirit with which
those in authority were at that time actuated, nor the unchristian
nature of the prelacy, than that the prisoners should thus have been set
free to be made the accusers of their neighbours; and that the curates,
men professing to be ministers of the Gospel, should have been such fit
instruments for such unheard-of machinations. But to hasten forward to
the fate and issue of this self-consuming tyranny, I shall leave all
generalities, and proceed with the events of my own case; and, in doing
so, I shall endeavour what is in me to inscribe the particulars with a
steady hand; for I dare no longer now trust myself with looking to the
right or to the left of the field of my matter. I shall, however, try to
narrate things just as they happened, leaving the courteous reader to
judge what passed at the time in the suffocating throbs wherewith my
heart was then affected.

It wa