Be this as it may, Richard Cameron with his followers asserted the principle which afterwards became law—namely, that the House of Stuart should no longer desecrate the throne. He did not, however, live to see his desire accomplished.
At Airsmoss—in the district of Kyle—with a band of his followers, numbering twenty-six horse and forty foot, he was surprised by a party of upwards of one hundred and twenty dragoons under command of Bruce of Earlshall. The Cameronians were headed by Hackston of Rathillet, who had been present at the murder of Sharp, though not an active participator. Knowing that no mercy was to be expected they resolved to fight. Before the battle Cameron, engaging in a brief prayer, used the remarkable words: “Lord, take the ripe, but spare the green.” The issue against such odds was what might have been expected. Nearly all the Covenanters were slain. Richard Cameron fell, fighting back to back with his brother. Some of the foot-men escaped into the moss. Hackston was severely wounded and taken prisoner. Cameron’s head and hands were cut off and taken to Edinburgh, where they were cruelly exhibited to his father—a prisoner at the time. “Do ye know them?” asked the wretch who brought them. The old man, kissing them, replied, “Ay, I know them! They are my son’s—my own dear son’s! It is the Lord; good is the will of the Lord, who cannot wrong me nor mine, but has made goodness and mercy to follow us all our days.” A wonderful speech this from one suffering under, perhaps, the severest trial to which poor human nature can be subjected. Well might be applied to him the words—slightly paraphrased—“O man, great was thy faith!”
Hackston was taken to Edinburgh, which he entered on a horse with his head bare and his face to the tail, the hangman carrying Cameron’s head on a halter before him. The indignities and cruelties which were perpetrated on this man had been minutely pre-arranged by the Privy Council. We mention a few in order that the reader may the better understand the inconceivable brutality of the Government against which the Scottish Covenanters had to contend. Besides the barbarities connected with poor Cameron’s head and hands, it was arranged that Hackston’s body was to be drawn backward on a hurdle to the cross of Edinburgh, where, in the first place, his right hand was to be struck off, and after some time his left hand. Thereafter he was to be hanged up and cut down alive; his bowels to be taken out and his heart shown to the people by the hangman, and then to be burnt in a fire on the scaffold. Afterwards his head was to be cut off, and his body, divided into four quarters, to be sent respectively to Saint Andrews, Glasgow, Leith, and Burntisland.
In carrying out his fiendish instructions the bungling executioner was a long time mangling the wrist of Hackston’s right arm before he succeeded in separating the hand. Hackston quietly advised him to be more careful to strike in the joint of the left. Having been drawn up and let fall with a jerk, three times, life was not extinct, for it is said that when the heart was torn out it moved after falling on the scaffold.
Several others who had been with Cameron were betrayed at this time, by apostate comrades, tried under torture, and executed; and the persecution became so hot that field-preaching was almost extinguished. The veteran Donald Cargill, however still maintained his ground.
This able, uncompromising, yet affectionate and charitable man had prepared a famous document called the “Queensferry Paper,” of which it has been said that it contains “the very pith of sound constitutional doctrine regarding both civil and ecclesiastical rights.” Once, however, he mistook his mission. In the presence of a large congregation at Torwood he went so far as to excommunicate Charles the Second; the Dukes of York, Lauderdale, and Rothes; Sir C. McKenzie and Dalziel of Binns. That these despots richly deserved whatever excommunication might imply can hardly be denied, but it is equally certain that prolonged and severe persecution had stirred up poor Cargill upon this occasion to overstep his duty as a teacher of love to God and man.
Heavily did Cargill pay for his errors—as well as for his long and conscientious adherence to duty. Five thousand merks were offered for him, dead or alive. Being captured, he was taken to Edinburgh on the 15th of July, and examined by the Council. On the 26th he was tried and condemned, and on the 27th he was hanged, after having witnessed a good confession, which he wound up with the words: “I forgive all men the wrongs they have done against me. I pray that the sufferers may be kept from sin and helped to know their duty.”
About this time a test oath was ordered to be administered to all men in position or authority. The gist of it was that King Charles the Second was the only supreme governor in the realm over all causes, as well ecclesiastical as civil, and that it was unlawful for any subject upon pretence of reformation, or any pretence whatever, to enter into covenants or leagues, or to assemble in any councils, conventicles, assemblies, etcetera, ecclesiastical or civil, without his special permission.
Pretty well this for a king who had himself signed the covenant—without which signing the Scottish nation would never have consented to assist in putting him on the throne! The greater number of the men in office in Scotland took the oath, though there were several exceptions—the Duke of Argyll, the Duke of Hamilton, John Hope of Hopetoun, the Duchess of Rothes, and others—among whom were eighty of the conforming clergy whose loyalty could not carry them so far, and who surrendered their livings rather than their consciences.
It would require a volume to record even a bare outline of the deeds of darkness that were perpetrated at this time. We must dismiss it all and return to the actors in our tale.