loyalty, the most sanguinary law that has ever in our
island been enacted against Protestant Nonconformists.

With this law the whole spirit of his administration was in perfect
harmony. The fiery persecution, which had raged when he ruled Scotland
as vicegerent, waxed hotter than ever from the day on which he became
sovereign. Those shires in which the Covenanters were most numerous
were given up to the license of the army. With the army was mingled a
militia, composed of the most violent and profligate of those who called
themselves Episcopalians. Preeminent among the bands which oppressed
and wasted these unhappy districts were the dragoons commanded by John
Graham of Claverhouse. The story ran that these wicked men used in their
revels to play at the torments of hell, and to call each other by the
names of devils and damned souls. [287] The chief of this Tophet, a
soldier of distinguished courage and professional skill, but rapacious
and profane, of violent temper and of obdurate heart, has left a name
which, wherever the Scottish race is settled on the face of the globe,
is mentioned with a peculiar energy of hatred. To recapitulate all the
crimes, by which this man, and men like him, goaded the peasantry of the
Western Lowlands into madness, would be an endless task. A few instances
must suffice; and all those instances shall be taken from the history
of a single fortnight, that very fortnight in which the Scottish
Parliament, at the urgent request of James, enacted a new law of
unprecedented severity against Dissenters.

John Brown, a poor carrier of Lanarkshire, was, for his singular piety,
commonly called the Christian carrier. Many years later, when Scotland
enjoyed rest, prosperity, and religious freedom, old men who remembered
the evil days described him as one versed in divine things, blameless
in life, and so peaceable that the tyrants could find no offence in
him except that he absented himself from the public worship of the
Episcopalians. On the first of May he was cutting turf, when he was
seized by Claverhouse's dragoons, rapidly examined, convicted of
nonconformity, and sentenced to death. It is said that, even among the
soldiers, it was not easy to find an executioner. For the wife of the
poor man was present; she led one little child by the hand: it was easy
to see that she was about to give birth to another; and even those wild
and hardhearted men, who nicknamed one another Beelzebub and Apollyon,