HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
Beelzebub and Apollyon, shrank from the great wickednessof butchering her husband before her face. The prisoner,meanwhile, raised above himself by the near prospect ofeternity, prayed loud and fervently as one inspired, tillClaverhouse, in a fury, shot him dead. It was reported bycredible witnesses that the widow cried out in her agony,“Well, Sir, well; the day of reckoning will come;” and thatthe murderer replied, “To man I can answer for what I havedone; and as for God, I will take him into mine own hand.”Yet it was rumoured that even on his seared conscience andadamantine heart the dying ejaculations of his victim made animpression which was never effaced. *
On the fifth of May two artisans, Peter Gillies and JohnBryce, were tried in Ayrshire by a military tribunal consistingof fifteen soldiers. The indictment is still extant. The pri-soners were charged, not with any act of rebellion, but withholding the same pernicious doctrines which had impelledothers to rebel, and with wanting only opportunity to act uponthose doctrines. The proceeding was summary. In a fewhours the two culprits were convicted, hanged, and flungtogether into a hole under the gallows.**
The eleventh of May was signalised by more than onegreat crime. Some rigid Calvinists had from the doctrineof reprobation drawn the consequence that to pray for anyperson who had been predestined to perdition was an actof mutiny against the eternal decrees of the Supreme Being.Three poor labouring men, deeply imbued with this unamiable
* Wodrow, III. ix. 6. The editor of the Oxford edition of Burnetattempts to excuse this act by alleging that Claverhouse was thenemployed to intercept all communication between Argyle and Monmouth,and by supposing that John Brown may have been detected in conveyingintelligence between the rebel camps. Unfortunately for this hypothesisJohn Brown was shot on the first of May, when both Argyle. and Mon-mouth were in Holland, and when there was no insurrection in any partof our island.
** Wodrow, III. ix. 6.