Matthew Meiklewrath is another of the victims of this terrible time; and if the account of his death given by De Foe were as accurate as it is circumstantial, no term but that of murder could be applied to the outrage alleged to have been committed by Claverhouse. ‘At Comonel, in the County of Carrick,’ states the chronicler of his misdeeds, ‘he saw a man run hastily across the street before his troop, and as he might suppose did it to escape from or avoid them, though, as the people of the place related it, the poor man had no apprehensions of them, but as he took all occasions for his bloody designs, he commanded his men to shoot this person, without so much as examining him, or asking who he was.’ The refutation of this charge of wanton barbarity is to be found in the epitaph quoted in ‘The Cloud of Witnesses’ from a stone in the churchyard where Meiklewrath was interred:—
‘In this parish of Colmonel, By bloody Claverhouse I fell, Who did command that I should die, For owning covenanting Presbytery. My blood a witness still doth stand, ‘Gainst all defections in this land.’
The cases that have been cited do not exhaust the black list that might be drawn up from the accounts already referred to. They may suffice, however, to show, not indeed that Claverhouse performed the odious duties imposed upon him by his position otherwise than sternly and remorselessly, but, at least, that the most notorious of the instances which represent him as going far beyond even what the merciless laws required or authorised, as delighting in suffering and revelling in bloodshed, are demonstrably exaggerations, and that impartial investigation, whilst it may lead us to deplore the relentless severity with which he carried out the orders of the Government, does not justify us in holding him up to obloquy as a monster of cruelty.
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CHARLES II. died at the beginning of February 1685, and was succeeded by his brother. As Duke of York James had been Claverhouse’s chief patron; as King, one of his first actions was to express his disapproval of the conduct to which his favourite had been urged by a ‘high, proud and peremptory humour.’ This was the result of a quarrel with Queensberry, of which the origin, trifling in itself, went back to the beginning of the previous December. At a meeting of the Privy Council, held on the 11th of that month, there was read a complaint presented by some soldiers whom Queensberry’s brother, Colonel James Douglas had turned out of his regiment, and who alleged that their commanding officer ‘had taken the arrears of their pay, and clothed and shoed some of the rest of the soldiers therewith.’ The complainant’s cause was taken up by Claverhouse, on the ground that the treatment to which they had been submitted would discourage others from entering into his Majesty’s service. This the High Treasurer resented as reflecting on the manner in which his brother had done his duty; and thus, says Fountainhall, grew the difference between him and Claverhouse.
