About this time Francis Stuart, the Earl of Bothwell's grandson, was recommended by Dalyell to Charles II. for a commission, and was appointed Captain of Horse with John Creichton, who had hitherto been with him in the Life Guards, as his lieutenant, and these officers served under Colonel Graham, of Claverhouse, at the battle of Drumclog; for after the murder of Archbishop Sharpe on Magus Muir, the armed field conventicles had increased in every part of the country, and discontent, with sullen desperation, were rapidly moulding the people into a mass that was ready for revolt. Conflicts with the soldiers were of daily occurrence, and many of them were barbarously murdered, in lonely billets and solitary parts of the country, by the more savage or fanatical of the hill men, as the recusants were named, from their habit of usually lurking in the mountains.
Superstition was not wanting to lend a darker and more terrible hue to the events of the time, as Scotland is peculiarly the land of omens. Atmospheric visions were everywhere visible, if we are to believe such old memorialists as Law and others.
At Kilbryde, near Glasgow, two armies were seen in the sky, firing platoons of musketry at each other; "the fyre and smock were seen, but without noise or crak." On the slope of a lonely hill near Eastwood Muir, the tall apparition of a blood-red spectre was seen to tower suddenly between the terrified beholders and the blue sky, while a dreadful voice exclaimed—
"Woe! Woe unto the land!"
At a conventicle, suppressed in Fife by Adam Masterton of Grange, an officer of the Life Guards, the fugitive women, who observed the conflict from a distance, asserted that they could perceive, to their awe and terror, "the form of a tall man of majestic stature," hovering in mid air "above the people all the while of the soldiers shooting."
In August, 1678, the devil, who seemed always in those days to take a deep interest in Scottish affairs, held a great meeting of witches and warlocks in Lothian, "where," saith the veracious Law, "there was a warlock who formerly had been admitted to the ministry in the Presbyterian times, and who, when the bishops came in, conformed with them; but being deposed, he now turns under the devil, a preacher of hellish doctrine." In the March of the same year, he adds, a tremendous voice was heard in the ancient and half-ruined Abbey of Paisley, exclaiming—
"Woe, woe, woe! Pray, pray, pray!"
Showers of blood and of Highland bonnets, afforded the crones, elsewhere, ample matter for discussion and wonder.
Amid all this absurdity, while the tyrant Lords of Council tortured and hung peasants and preachers, of ruined honourable and long-descended families, for worshipping God as their hearts desired, and for doing so, in wild and sequestered places, or for refusing to say God save a King, who was uncovenanted; while Dalyell had every satanic power attributed to him, and the black charger of Claverhouse was believed to be the veritable devil himself, the efforts of some to promote godliness in the land were alike melancholy and amusing; thus people were punished for taking snuff in time of sermon, for carrying water on the Sabbath day, and for a thousand charges equally frivolous.
To repress the conventicles which began to assume a more formidable aspect, from the number of armed men who attended them, additional garrisons were established. Two peers and ten barons, who were obnoxious to Lauderdale, were lawlessly dispossessed of their mansions, which were converted into military stations. In each of these Dalyell placed a company of infantry and ten troopers, who were supplied with everything by provincial assessment or military contribution. Fathers were made responsible for their children; husbands for their wives; magistrates for their citizens; landlords for their tenants; and thus, by a network of military tyranny, it was resolved that at the sword's point, Scotland should become a highly episcopal country. Five hundred marks were offered for the seizure of any one who held a religious meeting; and four thousand pounds sterling was an ordinary price for the head of a good preacher. Others were valued according to their reputation among the people; and under such laws as these the troops of his sacred Majesty King Charles made plenty of prize-money and plunder.