Scarcely was I well in, when Heron, her son, came flying to her with a report that a man was seized in the palace garden who had threatened the Duke's life, and he was fearful lest it had been me; and I was much grieved by these tidings, in case any honest man should be put to the torture on my account; but the Lord had mercifully ordained it otherwise.
In the course of the night Heron Brownlee, after closing his shop, came again and told me that no one had been taken, but that some person in the multitude had given the Duke a dreadful paper, which had caused great consternation and panic; and that a council was sitting at that late hour with the Duke, expresses having arrived with accounts of the same paper having been seen on the doors of many churches, both in Nithsdale and the shire of Ayr. The alarm, indeed, raged to such a degree among all those who knew in their consciences how they merited the doom we had pronounced, that it was said the very looks of many were withered as with a pestilent vapour.
Yet, though terrified at the vengeance declared against their guilt, neither the Duke nor the Privy Council were to be deterred from their malignant work. The curse of infatuation was upon them, and instead of changing the rule which had caused the desperation that they dreaded, they heated the furnace of persecution sevenfold; and voted, That whosoever owned or refused to disown the declaration should be put to death in the presence of two witnesses, though unarmed when taken; and the soldiers were not only ordered to enforce the test, but were instructed to put such as adhered to the declaration at once to the sword, and to slay those who refused to disown it; and women were ordered to be drowned. But my pen sickens with the recital of horrors, and I shall pass by the dreadful things that ensued, with only remarking that these bloody instructions consummated the doom of the Stuarts; for scarcely were they well published when the Duke hastened to London, and soon after his man-sworn brother, Charles, the great author of all our woes, was cut off by poison, as it was most currently believed, and the Duke proclaimed King in his stead. What change we obtained by the calamity of his accession will not require many sentences to unfold.
CHAPTER LXXXVI
As soon as it was known abroad that Charles the Second was dead, the Covenanters who had taken refuge in Holland from the Persecution assembled to consult what ought then to be done; for the papist James Stuart, on the death of his brother, had caused himself to be proclaimed King of Scotland, without taking those oaths by which alone he could be entitled to assume the Scottish crown.
At the head of this congregation was the Earl of Argyle, who, some years before, had incurred the aversion of the tyrant to such a degree that, by certain of those fit tools for any crime, then in dismal abundance about the court of Holyrood, he had procured his condemnation as a traitor, and would have brought him to the scaffold, had the Earl not fortunately effected his escape. And it was resolved by that congregation that the principal personages then present should form themselves into a Council, to concert the requisite measures for the deliverance of their native land; the immediate issue of which was, that a descent should be made by Argyle among his vassals, in order to draw together a sufficient host to enable them to wage war against the Usurper, for so they lawfully and rightly denominated James Stuart.
The first hint that I gleaned of this design was through the means of Mrs Brownlee. She was invited one afternoon by the gentlewoman of the Lady Sophia Lindsay, the Earl's daughter-in-law, to view certain articles of female bravery which had been sent from Holland by his Lordship to her mistress; and, as her custom was, she, on her return home, descanted at large of all that she had seen and heard.
The receipt, at that juncture, of such gear from the Earl of Argyle, by such a Judith of courage and wisdom as the Lady Sophia Lindsay, seemed to me very remarkable, and I could not but jealouse that there was some thing about it like the occultation of a graver correspondence. I therefore began to question Mrs Brownlee how the paraphernalia had come, and what the Earl, according to the last accounts, was doing; which led her to expatiate on many things, though vague and desultory, that were yet in concordance with what I had overheard the Lord Perth say to the Earl of Aberdeen in the Bishop's house. In the end, I gathered that the presents were brought over by the skipper of a sloop, one Roderick Macfarlane, whom I forthwith determined to see, in order to pick from him what intelligence I could, without being at the time well aware in what manner the same would prove useful; I felt myself, however, stirred from within to do so; and I had hitherto, in all that concerned my avenging vow, obeyed every instinctive impulse.
Accordingly, next morning I went early to the shore of Leith, and soon found the vessel and Roderick Macfarlane, to whom I addressed myself, inquiring, as if I intended to go thither, when he was likely to depart again for Amsterdam.