having
commission to that effect." With the severity, the folly, or the
injustice of such a law we are not for the moment concerned. The fact
remains that such was the law; and Claverhouse transgressed no jot of
it in ordering John Brown to death. It was no question of form of
religion: it was no question of previous misconduct. The man would not
take the oath; and he was accordingly shot in the presence of the
requisite number of witnesses by the order of a competent authority.

On the truth of the details given both by Wodrow and Walker it is
impossible to form any conclusion. Wodrow gives no authority for his
version. "I am well informed," he says, "I am credibly informed," and so
on; but the sources of his information he nowhere gives. Walker is more
communicative; he, as we have seen, professed to have learned his story
from Brown's wife; but no statement of Walker's can be accepted for
absolute truth, and his uncertainty about even the names of his
witnesses does not add the stamp of conviction to their testimony.[59]
Beyond the bare fact that the man was shot in the presence of
Claverhouse nothing is certain. On the rest of the story each must make
up his mind as seems best to him.

With the death of Peter Gillies and John Bryce Claverhouse is not
directly charged by Wodrow. Walker, however, quotes an epitaph said to
have been inscribed on the grave of these men, who, with three others,
were hanged, without trial, at Mauchline by

"Bloody Dumbarton, Douglas, and Dundee,
Moved by the devil and the Laird of Lee."

These lines must have been composed some years after the event, inasmuch
as the men were hanged on May 6th, 1685, and the patent of Claverhouse's
peerage bears the date November 12th, 1688. This proves, what indeed few
people can have doubted, that the damning testimony of "The Cloud of
Witnesses" wants at least the weight of contemporary evidence. An
authority, however, for this particular epitaph can be traced back to
1690, when Alexander Shields published his martyrology.[60] "The said
Claverhouse," he wrote, "together with the Earl of Dumbarton and
Lieut.-General Douglas, caused Peter Gillies, John Bryce, Thomas Young
(who was taken by the Laird of Lee), William Fiddisone, and John
Buiening to be put to death upon a gibbet, without legal trial or
sentence, suffering them neither to have a Bible nor to pray before they
died."[61] Defoe has evidently followed Shields;[62] but Walker, though