sible; that is
to say, all that was within forty miles, which is the most
can be ridden in one night; and of six made search for, I
found only two, which are John Livingston, bailie of
Kirkcudbright, and John Black, treasurer there. The other
two bailies were fled, and their wives lying above the
clothes in the bed, and great candles lighted, waiting for
the coming of the party, and told them, they knew of their
coming, and had as good intelligence as they themselves; and
that if the other two were seized on, it was their own
faults, that would not contribute for intelligence. And the
truth is, they had time enough to be advertised, for the
order was dated the 15th, and came not to my hands till the
20th. I laid the fellow in the guard that brought it, so
soon as I considered the date, where he has lain ever since,
and had it not been for respect to Mr. Maitland
[Lauderdale's nephew] who recommended him to me I would have
put him out of the troop with infamy."[21]

The letters written during the first months of his commission are full
of warnings of this sort. And he had other complaints to make, which
must have been still more against the grain. He was so inadequately
supplied with money by the Council that he found it a hard matter to pay
his men, and harder still to pay the country people for the necessary
provisions and forage; for, so far from quartering his men at large upon
the peasantry, he seems, at any rate in those first months, to have been
scrupulous to pay at the current rates for all he required to a degree
that matches rather with the niceties of modern warfare than the customs
of those rough times.

In March Claverhouse was appointed Deputy-Sheriff of Dumfriesshire by a
particular warrant from Whitehall, and Andrew Bruce of Earlshall, one of
his lieutenants, was nominated with him. This step gave great offence to
Queensberry, who, as Sheriff of the shires of Dumfries and Annandale, by
law held all such patronage in his own hand, and marks the beginning of
the petty jealousy which from this time forward he seems to have shown
to Claverhouse whenever he dared, and which rose afterwards, as we shall
see, to a serious height. But Queensberry was no match for Lauderdale;
and Claverhouse was duly settled in his new office, which, while
strengthening his hands and enabling him to dispense with many tedious
formalities, at t