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'Paul had need, Rutherford writes to Lady Kenmure, 'of the devil's service to buffet him, and far more, you and me. I am downright afraid to go on to tell you how Satan was sent to buffet Samuel Rutherford in his banishment, and how he was sifted as wheat is sifted in his exile.
That one so skilled in human affairs should venture, even in a subordinate degree, to espouse so desperate a cause as that of James was generally reputed to be, might seem to prove that even the wise were sanguine, or that they were carried away by the enthusiasm of the hour. Neither of these circumstances appear to bear any considerable weight in revolving the conduct of Lord Kenmure.
Derwentwater and Kenmure were later executed. Forster and Nithsdale made escapes; Charles Wogan, a kinsman of the chivalrous Wogan of 1650, and Mackintosh, with six others, forced their way out of Newgate prison on the night before their trial. Wogan was to make himself heard of again.
As long as Kenmure was young and well, as long as he was haunting the purlieus of the Court, and selling his church and his soul for a smile from the King, the Provost of Kirkcudbright and his saintly wife were despised and forgotten; but when he was suddenly brought face to face with death and judgment, when his ribbons and his titles were now like the coals of hell in his conscience, nothing would satisfy him but that his niece must leave her husband and her children and take up her abode in Kenmure Castle.
Lord Kenmure, attended by the Jacobite chiefs, and Lord Nithisdale, soon quitted the town of Lochmaben; and proceeding to Ecclefechan, and thence marching to Langholme, reached Hawick on the fifteenth of September, and determined on proceeding from that place into Teviotdale.
"Secret History of the Rebels in Newgate;" a scarce Sixpenny Tract, in the British Museum. Third Edition. For this interesting paper I am indebted to the Hon. Mrs. Bellamy, sister of the present and niece of the late Viscount Kenmure. Faithful Register of the late Rebellion, p. 93; also State Trials.
'I may be a great bookman, writes Rutherford to Lady Kenmure, 'and yet be a stark idiot in the things of Christ. It was not his knowledge of Hebrew, though he almost discovered that hidden language in Ettrick. No, but it was his discovery of himself, and his experimental study of his own heart.
Let them read his Letters, and they will see that Rutherford could not only write home to the deepest experiences of Lady Boyd and Lady Kenmure and Marion M'Naught, but that he was quite as much at home with their sons and daughters also.
I turned to Kenmure to see if he could resist the influence. He scarcely gave her a glance. "Go, Marian," he said, not impatiently, for he was too thoroughly courteous ever to be ungracious, even to a child, but with a steady indifference that cut me with more pain than if he had struck her.
Remembering his covenant with young Gillespie in the woods of Kenmure, Rutherford wrote of himself to his friend, and said: 'At my first entry on my banishment here my apprehensions worked despairingly upon my cross. By that he means, and Gillespie would quite well understand his meaning, that his banishment from his work threw him in upon his conscience, and that his conscience whispered to him that he had been banished from his work because of his sins.
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