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Updated: June 13, 2025
He says little, and it's a mercy he has less power, or rather, I should say, a dispensation of Providence, for if the misguided man had his way of it, Jean would be married to-morrow to some drinking, swearing officer in Claverhouse's Horse, or, for that matter, to that son of Satan, Claverhouse himself."
I trust that it is well with the Lady Cochrane, of whom I have often heard, and whom I dared to hope I might have the privilege of meeting." And a second time the same smile flickered over Claverhouse's face, and he seemed to challenge Jean for an answer.
As the skirmish of Drumclog has been of late the subject of some enquiry, the reader may be curious to see Claverhouse's own account of the affair, in a letter to the Earl of Linlithgow, written immediately after the action. This gazette, as it may be called, occurs in the volume called Dundee's Letters, printed by Mr Smythe of Methven, as a contribution to the Bannatyne Club.
On Defoe's list of victims murdered, as he calls it, by Claverhouse's own hand is the name of Graham of Galloway. The young man, he says, being pursued by the dragoons, had taken refuge in his mother's house; but being driven out thence was overtaken by Claverhouse and shot dead with a pistol, though he offered to surrender and begged hard for his life.
The author has been misled as to the colour by the many extraordinary traditions current in Scotland concerning Claverhouse's famous black charger, which was generally believed to have been a gift to its rider from the Author of Evil, who is said to have performed the Caesarean operation upon its dam.
Claverhouse's letter to his wife was written in May, and by October his gloomy forebodings regarding the king were being verified. During the autumn William of Orange had been preparing to invade England, and it was freely said he would come on the invitation of the English people and as the champion of English liberty.
With the exception of his wife he was betrayed on every hand, while a multitude hated him with all their strength and thirsted for his blood. If Jean were not true to him there would not be one star in the dark sky of Claverhouse's life. But this irredeemable and final disaster is surely incredible.
But his industry is unimpeachable; and, through the kindness of the late Duke of Buccleuch, he was able to publish no less than thirty-seven letters written in Claverhouse's own hand to the first Duke of Queensberry, not one of which had been included in the collection printed for the Bannatyne Club in 1826, nor was, in fact, known to be in existence by anyone outside the family of Buccleuch.
All through Claverhouse's letters of this time run allusions to some great personage whom it might be wise to make an example of, and he himself had taken an early opportunity of impressing on Sir James the necessity of caution. But the latter would not be warned. He set himself against Claverhouse at every opportunity, both openly and in secret.
He also, in the report Lord Evandale makes to his chief, rates the Covenanters at near a thousand fighting men, which would probably tally with Claverhouse's estimate. But, whatever the strength of either side may have been, it is tolerably certain that the advantage that way was on the side of the Covenanters.
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