United States or Canada ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Defoe has evidently followed Shields; but Walker, though he quotes the aforesaid epitaph, does not himself implicate Claverhouse. Wodrow does not appear to have heard any of these stories.
There is no mention elsewhere of Robert Auchinleck; but Shields includes in his list a man called Auchinleck, of Christian name unknown, who was killed in similar circumstances; and Wodrow gives a different version of the death of one William Auchinleck, both assigning the act to one Captain Douglas, who was marching from Kirkcudbright with a company of foot.
An almost exactly similar story has been preserved by Robert Wodrow, the indefatigable collector, in a notebook which he appears to have intended to be the foundation of a scientific collection of marvellous tales. Wodrow died early in the eighteenth century. Gilbert Rule, the founder and first Principal of Edinburgh University, once reached a desolate inn in a lonely spot on the Grampians.
It was our pleasure to use these words at this present time, that we might declare our opinion in our religion and worshipping of God. 'Miscellany of Wodrow Society, i. 23.
The authority for this surprising statement is Robert Wodrow, who was not born when Claverhouse returned to Scotland, and whose history of the Scottish Church was not published till more than thirty years after the battle of Killiecrankie.
According to one of their own party, who was present, the Covenanters did not exceed two hundred and fifty fighting men, of whom fifty were mounted and the same proportion armed with guns. These numbers have been accepted, of course, by Wodrow, and also by Dr. Burton.
You would have seen them with loads of bedclothes, carpets, men and women's wearing clothes, pots, pans, gridirons, shoes and other furniture whereof they had pillaged the country." Wodrow, ii. 413. Claverhouse was not left long in idleness.
Hibbert thinks that Pitcairn himself dictated this account, much more marvellous than the form in which Wodrow received the story.
'William Guthrie was a great melancholian, says Wodrow, and as we read that we are reminded of some other great melancholians, such as Blaise Pascal and John Foster and William Cowper.
Leaving a solitary Jacobite vision, for a true blue Presbyterian 'experience, we learn that Wodrow's own wedded wife had a pious vision, 'a glorious, inexpressible brightness'. The thought which came presently was, 'This perhaps may be Satan, transforming himself into an angel of light'. 'It mout or it moutn't. In 1729, Wodrow heard of the ghost of the Laird of Coul, which used to ride one of his late tenants, transformed into a spectral horse.
Word Of The Day