A low wail followed, as the poor boy fell over in a swoon.
The shepherd’s heart almost stood still, and his great chest quivered for a moment as he gazed, but he was a man of strong will and iron mould. Stooping, he picked up his little friend and carried him silently away.
Their grief was, however, diverted to other channels on reaching the abode of Mrs Black, for there they found her and Mrs Wallace and Jean in deepest sorrow over the terrible news just brought to them by Jock Bruce.
Andrew Black, he told them, had been sent a prisoner to the Bass Rock, and Will Wallace, with two hundred others, had been banished to the plantations in Barbadoes, where they were to be sold as slaves.
Quentin sat down, covered his face with both hands, and groaned aloud on hearing this. Peter, who had recovered by that time, looked about him with the expressionless face of one whose reason has been unseated. Observing that Jean was sitting apart, sobbing as if her heart would break, he went quietly to her, and, taking one of her hands, began to stroke it gently. “Dinna greet, Jean,” he said; “the Lord will deliver them. Marion aye telt me that, an’ I believe she was richt.”
Truly these unfortunate people needed all the consolation that the Word could give them, for banishment to the plantations usually meant banishment for life, and as to the hundreds who found a prison on the bleak and rugged Bass Rock at the mouth of the Forth, many of these also found a grave.
After the battle of Bothwell Bridge the persecutions which had been so severe for so many years were continued with intensified bitterness. Not only were all the old tyrannical laws carried into force with increased severity, but new and harsher laws were enacted. Among other things the common soldiers were given the right to carry these laws into effect—in other words, to murder and plunder according to their own will and pleasure. And now, in 1680, began what has been termed the killing-time; in which Graham of Claverhouse (afterwards Viscount Dundee), Grierson of Lagg, Dalziel, and others, became pre-eminently notorious for their wanton cruelty in slaughtering men, women, and even children.
On 22nd June 1680 twenty armed horsemen rode up the main street of the burgh of Sanquhar. The troop was headed by Richard Cameron and his brother Michael, who, dismounting, nailed to the cross a paper which the latter read aloud. It was the famous “Declaration of Sanquhar,” in which Charles Stuart was publicly disowned.
While the fields of Scotland were being traversed and devastated by a lawless banditti, authorised by a lawless and covenant-breaking king and Government, those indomitable men who held with Cameron and Cargill united themselves more closely together, and thus entered into a new bond pledging themselves to be faithful to God and to each other in asserting their civil and religious rights, which they believed could only be secured by driving from the throne that “perfidious covenant-breaking race, untrue both to the most high God and to the people over whom for their sins they were set.”
If the Cameronians were wrong in this opinion then must the whole nation have been wrong, when, a few years later, it came to hold the same opinion, and acted in accordance therewith! As well might we find fault with Bruce and Wallace as with our covenanting patriots.