Your sect (and remember, as far as any sect avows me, it is mine)
has not done ill in a worldly sense in the Hawaiian Kingdom.  When
calamity befell their innocent parishioners, when leprosy descended
and took root in the Eight Islands, a quid pro quo was to be looked
for.  To that prosperous mission, and to you, as one of its
adornments, God had sent at last an opportunity.  I know I am
touching here upon a nerve acutely sensitive.  I know that others
of your colleagues look back on the inertia of your Church, and the
intrusive and decisive heroism of Damien, with something almost to
be called remorse.  I am sure it is so with yourself; I am
persuaded your letter was inspired by a certain envy, not
essentially ignoble, and the one human trait to be espied in that
performance.  You were thinking of the lost chance, the past day;
of that which should have been conceived and was not; of the
service due and not rendered.  Time was, said the voice in your
ear, in your pleasant room, as you sat raging and writing; and if
the words written were base beyond parallel, the rage, I am happy
to repeat--it is the only compliment I shall pay you--the rage was
almost virtuous.  But, sir, when we have failed, and another has
succeeded; when we have stood by, and another has stepped in; when
we sit and grow bulky in our charming mansions, and a plain,
uncouth peasant steps into the battle, under the eyes of God, and
succours the afflicted, and consoles the dying, and is himself
afflicted in his turn, and dies upon the field of honour--the
battle cannot be retrieved as your unhappy irritation has
suggested.  It is a lost battle, and lost for ever.  One thing
remained to you in your defeat--some rags of common honour; and
these you have made haste to cast away.

Common honour; not the honour of having done anything right, but
the honour of not having done aught conspicuously foul; the honour
of the inert:  that was what remained to you.  We are not all
expected to be Damiens; a man may conceive his duty more narrowly,
he may love his comforts better; and none will cast a stone at him
for that.  But will a gentleman of your reverend profession allow
me an example from the fields of gallantry?  When two gentlemen
compete for the favour of a lady, and the one succeeds and the
other is rejected, and (as will sometimes happen) matter damaging
to the successful rival's credit reaches the ear of the defeated,
it is held by plain men of no pretensions that his mouth is, in the
circumstance, almost necessarily closed.  Your Church and Damien's
were in Hawaii upon a rivalry to do well:  to help, to edify, to
set divine examples.  You having (in one huge instance) failed, and
Damien succeeded, I marvel it should not have occurred to you that
you were doomed to silence; that when you had been outstripped in
that high rivalry, and sat inglorious in the midst of your
wellbeing, in your pleasant room--and Damien, crowned with glories
and horrors, toiled and rotted in that pigsty of his under the
cliffs of Kalawao--you, the elect who would not, were the last man
on earth to collect and propagate gossip on the volunteer who would
and did.

I think I see you--for I try to see you in the flesh as I write
these sentences--I think I see you leap at the word pigsty, a
hyperbolical expression at the best.  'He had no hand in the
reforms,' he was 'a coarse, dirty man'; these were your own words;
and you may think it possible that I am come to support you with
fresh evidence.  In a sense, it is even so.  Damien has been too
much depicted with a conventional halo and conventional features;
so drawn by men who perhaps had not the eye to remark or the pen to
express the individual; or who perhaps were only blinded and
silenced by generous admiration, such as I partly envy for myself--
such as you, if your soul were enlightened, would envy on your
bended knees.  It is the least defect of such a method of
portraiture that it makes the path easy for the devil's advocate,
and leaves for the misuse of the slanderer a considerable field of
truth.  For the truth that is suppressed by friends is the readiest
weapon of the enemy.  The world, in your despite, may perhaps owe
you something, if your letter be the means of substituting once for
all a credible likeness for a wax abstraction.  For, if that world
at all remember you, on the day when Damien of Molokai shall be
named Saint, it will be in virtue of one work:  your letter to the
Reverend H. B. Gage.

You may ask on what authority I speak.  It was my inclement destiny
to become acquainted, not with Damien, but with Dr. Hyde.  When I
visited the lazaretto, Damien was already in his resting grave.
But such information as I have, I gathered on the spot in
conversation with those who knew him well and long:  some indeed
who revered his memory; but others who had sparred and wrangled
with him, who beheld him with no halo, who perhaps regarded him
with small respect, and through whose unprepared and scarcely
partial communications the plain, human features of the man shone
on me convincingly.  These gave me what knowledge I possess; and I
learnt it in that scene where it could be most completely and
sensitively understood--Kalawao, which you have never visited,
about which you have never so much as endeavoured to inform
yourself; for, brief as your letter is, you have found the means to
stumble into that confession.  'LESS THAN ONE-HALF of the island,'
you say, 'is devoted to the lepers.'  Molokai--'Molokai ahina,' the
'grey,' lofty, and most desolate island--along all its northern
side plunges a front of precipice into a sea of unusual profundity.
This range of cliff is, from east to west, the true end and
frontier of the island.  Only in one spot there projects into the
ocean a certain triangular and rugged down, grassy, stony, windy,
and rising in the midst into a hill with a dead crater:  the whole
bearing to the cliff that overhangs it somewhat the same relation
as a bracket to a wall.  With this hint you will now be able to
pick out the leper station on a map; you will be able to judge how
much of Molokai is thus cut off between the surf and precipice,
whether less than a half, or less than a quarter, or a fifth, or a
tenth--or, say, a twentieth; and the next time you burst into print
you will be in a position to share with us the issue of your
calculations.

I imagine you to be one of those persons who talk with cheerfulness
of that place which oxen and wain-ropes could not drag you to
behold.  You, who do not even know its situation on the map,
probably denounce sensational descriptions, stretching your limbs
the while in your pleasant parlour on Beretania Street.  When I was
pulled ashore there one early morning, there sat with me in the
boat two sisters, bidding farewell (in humble imitation of Damien)
to the lights and joys of human life.  One of these wept silently;
I could not withhold myself from joining her.  Had you been there,
it is my belief that nature would have triumphed even in you; and
as the boat drew but a little nearer, and you beheld the stairs
crowded with abominable deformations of our common manhood, and saw
yourself landing in the midst of such a population as only now and
then surrounds us in the horror of a nightmare--what a haggard eye
you would have rolled over your reluctant shoulder towards the
house on Beretania Street!  Had you gone on; had you found every
fourth face a blot upon the landscape; had you visited the hospital
and seen the butt-ends of human beings lying there almost
unrecognisable, but still breathing, still thinking, still
remembering; you would have understood that life in the lazaretto
is an ordeal from which the nerves of a man's spirit shrink, even
as his eye quails under the brightness of the sun; you would have
felt it was (even to-day) a pitiful place to visit and a hell to
dwell in.  It is not the fear of possible infection.  That seems a
little thing when compared with the pain, the pity, and the disgust
of the visitor's surroundings, and the atmosphere of affliction,
disease, and physical disgrace in which he breathes.  I do not
think I am a man more than usually timid; but I never recall the
days and nights I spent upon that island promontory (eight days and
seven nights), without heartfelt thankfulness that I am somewhere
else.  I find in my diary that I speak of my stay as a 'grinding
experience':  I have once jotted in the margin, 'HARROWING is the
word'; and when the Mokolii bore me at last towards the outer
world, I kept repeating to myself, with a new conception of their
pregnancy, those simple words of the song -


''Tis the most distressful country that ever yet was seen.'


And observe:  that which I saw and suffered from was a settlement
purged, bettered, beautified; the new village built, the hospital
and the Bishop-Home excellently arranged; the sisters, the doctor,
and the missionaries, all indefatigable in their noble tasks.  It
was a different place when Damien came there and made his great
renunciation, and slept that first night under a tree amidst his
rotting brethren:  alone with pestilence; and looking forward (with
what courage, with what pitiful sinkings of dread, God only knows)
to a lifetime of dressing sores and stumps.

You will say, perhaps, I am too sensitive, that sights as painful
abound in cancer hospitals and are confronted daily by doctors and
nurses.  I have long learned to admire and envy the doctors and the
nurses.  But there is no cancer hospital so large and populous as
Kalawao and Kalaupapa; and in such a matter every fresh case, like
every inch of length in the pipe of an organ, deepens the note of
the impression; for what daunts the onlooker is that monstrous sum
of human suffering by which he stands surrounded.  Lastly, no
doctor or nurse is called upon to enter once for all the doors of
that gehenna; they do not say farewell, they need not abandon hope,
on its sad threshold; they but go for a time to their high calling,
and can look forward as they go to relief, to recreation, and to
rest.  But Damien shut-to with his own hand the doors of his own
sepulchre.

I shall now extract three passages from my diary at Kalawao.

A.  'Damien is dead and already somewhat ungratefully remembered in
the field of his labours and sufferings.  "He was a good man, but
very officious," says one.  Another tells me he had fallen (as
other priests so easily do) into something of the ways and habits
of thought of a Kanaka; but he had the wit to recognise the fact,
and the good sense to laugh at' [over] 'it.  A plain man it seems
he was; I cannot find he was a popular.'

B.  'After Ragsdale's death' [Ragsdale was a famous Luna, or
overseer, of the unruly settlement] 'there followed a brief term of
office by Father Damien which served only to publish the weakness
of that noble man.  He was rough in his ways, and he had no
control.  Authority was relaxed; Damien's life was threatened, and
he was soon eager to resign.'

C.  'Of Damien I begin to have an idea.  He seems to have been a
man of the peasant class, certainly of the peasant type:  shrewd,
ignorant and bigoted, yet with an open mind, and capable of
receiving and digesting a reproof if it were bluntly administered;
superbly generous in the least thing as well as in the greatest,
and as ready to give his last shirt (although not without human
grumbling) as he had been to sacrifice his life; essentially
indiscreet and officious, which made him a troublesome colleague;
domineering in all his ways, which made him incurably unpopular
with the Kanakas, but yet destitute of real authority, so that his
boys laughed at him and he must carry out his wishes by the means
of bribes.  He learned to have a mania for doctoring; and set up
the Kanakas against the remedies of his regular rivals:  perhaps
(if anything matter at all in the treatment of such a disease) the
worst thing that he did, and certainly the easiest.  The best and
worst of the man appear very plainly in his dealings with Mr.
Chapman's money; he had originally laid it out' [intended to lay it
out] 'entirely for the benefit of Catholics, and even so not
wisely; but after a long, plain talk, he admitted his error fully
and revised the list.  The sad state of the boys' home is in part
the result of his lack of control; in part, of his own slovenly
ways and false ideas of hygiene.  Brother officials used to call it
"Damien's Chinatown."  "Well," they would say, "your China-town
keeps growing."  And he would laugh with perfect good-nature, and
adhere to his errors with perfect obstinacy.  So much I have
gathered of truth about this plain, noble human brother and father
of ours; his imperfections are the traits of his face, by which we
know him for our fellow; his martyrdom and his example nothing can
lessen or annul; and only a person here on the spot can properly
appreciate their greatness.'

I have set down these private passages, as you perceive, without
correction; thanks to you, the public has them in their bluntness.
They are almost a list of the man's faults, for it is rather these
that I was seeking:  with his virtues, with the heroic profile of
his life, I and the world were already sufficiently acquainted.  I
was besides a little suspicious of Catholic testimony; in no ill
sense, but merely because Damien's admirers and disciples were the
least likely to be critical.  I know you will be more suspicious
still; and the facts set down above were one and all collected from
the lips of Protestants who had opposed the father in his life.
Yet I am strangely deceived, or they build up the image of a man,
with all his weaknesses, essentially heroic, and alive with rugged
honesty, generosity, and mirth.

Take it for what it is, rough private jottings of the worst sides
of Damien's character, collected from the lips of those who had
laboured with and (in your own phrase) 'knew the man';--though I
question whether Damien would have said that he knew you.  Take it,
and observe with wonder how well you were served by your gossips,
how ill by your intelligence and sympathy; in how many points of
fact we are at one, and how widely our appreciations vary.  There
is something wrong here; either with you or me.  It is possible,
for instance, that you, who seem to have so many ears in Kalawao,
had heard of the affair of Mr. Chapman's money, and were singly
struck by Damien's intended wrong-doing.  I was struck with that
also, and set it fairly down; but I was struck much more by the
fact that he had the honesty of mind to be convinced.  I may here
tell you that it was a long business; that one of his colleagues
sat with him late into the night, multiplying arguments and
accusations; that the father listened as usual with 'perfect good-
nature and perfect obstinacy'; but at the last, when he was
persuaded--'Yes,' said he, 'I am very much obliged to you; you have
done me a service; it would have been a theft.'  There are many
(not Catholics merely) who require their heroes and saints to be
infallible; to these the story will be painful; not to the true
lovers, patrons, and servants of mankind.

And I take it, this is a type of our division; that you are one of
those who have an eye for faults and failures; that you take a
pleasure to find and publish them; and that, having found them, you
make haste to forget the overvailing virtues and the real success
which had alone introduced them to your knowledge.  It is a
dangerous frame of mind.  That you may understand how dangerous,
and into what a situation it has already brought you, we will (if
you please) go hand-in-hand through the different phrases of your
letter, and candidly examine each from the point of view of its
truth, its appositeness, and its charity.

Damien was COARSE.

It is very possible.  You make us sorry for the lepers, who had
only a coarse old peasant for their friend and father.  But you,
who were so refined, why were you not there, to cheer them with the
lights of culture?  Or may I remind you that we have some reason to
doubt if John the Baptist were genteel; and in the case of Peter,
on whose career you doubtless dwell approvingly in the pulpit, no
doubt at all he was a 'coarse, headstrong' fisherman!  Yet even in
our Protestant Bibles Peter is called Saint.

Damien was DIRTY.

He was.  Think of the poor lepers annoyed with this dirty comrade!
But the clean Dr. Hyde was at his food in a fine house.

Damien was HEADSTRONG.

I believe you are right again; and I thank God for his strong head
and heart.

Damien was BIGOTED.

I am not fond of bigots myself, because they are not fond of me.
But what is meant by bigotry, that we should regard it as a blemish
in a priest?  Damien believed his own religion with the simplicity
of a peasant or a child; as I would I could suppose that you do.
For this, I wonder at him some way off; and had that been his only
character, should have avoided him in life.  But the point of
interest in Damien, which has caused him to be so much talked about
and made him at last the subject of your pen and mine, was that, in
him, his bigotry, his intense and narrow faith, wrought potently
for good, and strengthened him to be one of the world's heroes and
exemplars.

Damien WAS NOT SENT TO MOLOKAI, BUT WENT THERE WITHOUT ORDERS.

Is this a misreading? or do you really mean the words for blame?  I
have heard Christ, in the pulpits of our Church, held up for
imitation on the ground that His sacrifice was voluntary.  Does Dr.
Hyde think otherwise?

Damien DID NOT STAY AT THE SETTLEMENT, ETC.

It is true he was allowed many indulgences.  Am I to understand
that you blame the father for profiting by these, or the officers
for granting them?  In either case, it is a mighty Spartan standard
to issue from the house on Beretania Street; and I am convinced you
will find yourself with few supporters.

Damien HAD NO HAND IN THE REFORMS, ETC.

I think even you will admit that I have already been frank in my
description of the man I am defending; but before I take you up
upon this head, I will be franker still, and tell you that perhaps
nowhere in the world can a man taste a more pleasurable sense of
contrast than when he passes from Damien's 'Chinatown' at Kalawao
to the beautiful Bishop-Home at Kalaupapa.  At this point, in my
desire to make all fair for you, I will break my rule and adduce
Catholic testimony.  Here is a passage from my diary about my visit
to the Chinatown, from which you will see how it is (even now)
regarded by its own officials:  'We went round all the dormitories,
refectories, etc.--dark and dingy enough, with a superficial
cleanliness, which he' [Mr. Dutton, the lay-brother] 'did not seek
to defend.  "It is almost decent," said he; "the sisters will make
that all right when we get them here."'  And yet I gathered it was
already better since Damien was dead, and far better than when he
was there alone and had his own (not always excellent) way.  I have
now come far enough to meet you on a common ground of fact; and I
tell you that, to a mind not prejudiced by jealousy, all the
reforms of the lazaretto, and even those which he most vigorously
opposed, are properly the work of Damien.  They are the evidence of
his success; they are what his heroism provoked from the reluctant
and the careless.  Many were before him in the field; Mr. Meyer,
for instance, of whose faithful work we hear too little:  there
have been many since; and some had more worldly wisdom, though none
had more devotion, than our saint.  Before his day, even you will
confess, they had effected little.  It was his part, by one
striking act of martyrdom, to direct all men's eyes on that
distressful country.  At a blow, and with the price of his life, he
made the place illustrious and public.  And that, if you will
consider largely, was the one reform needful; pregnant of all that
should succeed.  It brought money; it brought (best individual
addition of them all) the sisters; it brought supervision, for
public opinion and public interest landed with the man at Kalawao.
If ever any man brought reforms, and died to bring them, it was he.
There is not a clean cup or towel in the Bishop-Home, but dirty
Damien washed it.

Damien WAS NOT A PURE MAN IN HIS RELATIONS WITH WOMEN, ETC.

How do you know that?  Is this the nature of the conversation in
that house on Beretania Street which the cabman envied, driving
past?--racy details of the misconduct of the poor peasant priest,
toiling under the cliffs of Molokai?

Many have visited the station before me; they seem not to have
heard the rumour.  When I was there I heard many shocking tales,
for my informants were men speaking with the plainness of the
laity; and I heard plenty of complaints of Damien.  Why was this
never mentioned? and how came it to you in the retirement of your
clerical parlour?

But I must not even seem to deceive you.  This scandal, when I read
it in your letter, was not new to me.  I had heard it once before;
and I must tell you how.  There came to Samoa a man from Honolulu;
he, in a public-house on the beach, volunteered the statement that
Damien had 'contracted the disease from having connection with the
female lepers'; and I find a joy in telling you how the report was
welcomed in a public-house.  A man sprang to his feet; I am not at
liberty to give his name, but from what I heard I doubt if you
would care to have him to dinner in Beretania Street.  'You
miserable little--' (here is a word I dare not print, it would so
shock your ears).  'You miserable little--,' he cried, 'if the
story were a thousand times true, can't you see you are a million
times a lower--for daring to repeat it?'  I wish it could be told
of you that when the report reached you in your house, perhaps
after family worship, you had found in your soul enough holy anger
to receive it with the same expressions; ay, even with that one
which I dare not print; it would not need to have been blotted
away, like Uncle Toby's oath, by the tears of the recording angel;
it would have been counted to you for your brightest righteousness.
But you have deliberately chosen the part of the man from Honolulu,
and you have played it with improvements of your own.  The man from
Honolulu--miserable, leering creature--communicated the tale to a
rude knot of beach-combing drinkers in a public-house, where (I
will so far agree with your temperance opinions) man is not always
at his noblest; and the man from Honolulu had himself been
drinking--drinking, we may charitably fancy, to excess.  It was to
your 'Dear Brother, the Reverend H. B. Gage,' that you chose to
communicate the sickening story; and the blue ribbon which adorns
your portly bosom forbids me to allow you the extenuating plea that
you were drunk when it was done.  Your 'dear brother'--a brother
indeed--made haste to deliver up your letter (as a means of grace,
perhaps) to the religious papers; where, after many months, I found
and read and wondered at it; and whence I have now reproduced it
for the wonder of others.  And you and your dear brother have, by
this cycle of operations, built up a contrast very edifying to
examine in detail.  The man whom you would not care to have to
dinner, on the one side; on the other, the Reverend Dr. Hyde and
the Reverend H. B. Gage:  the Apia bar-room, the Honolulu manse.

But I fear you scarce appreciate how you appear to your fellow-men;
and to bring it home to you, I will suppose your story to be true.
I will suppose--and God forgive me for supposing it--that Damien
faltered and stumbled in his narrow path of duty; I will suppose
that, in the horror of his isolation, perhaps in the fever of
incipient disease, he, who was doing so much more than he had
sworn, failed in the letter of his priestly oath--he, who was so
much a better man than either you or me, who did what we have never
dreamed of daring--he too tasted of our common frailty.  'O, Iago,
the pity of it!'  The least tender should be moved to tears; the
most incredulous to prayer.  And all that you could do was to pen
your letter to the Reverend H. B. Gage!

Is it growing at all clear to you what a picture you have drawn of
your own heart?  I will try yet once again to make it clearer.  You
had a father:  suppose this tale were about him, and some informant
brought it to you, proof in hand:  I am not making too high an
estimate of your emotional nature when I suppose you would regret
the circumstance? that you would feel the tale of frailty the more
keenly since it shamed the author of your days? and that the last
thing you would do would be to publish it in the religious press?
Well, the man who tried to do what Damien did, is my father, and
the father of the man in the Apia bar, and the father of all who
love goodness; and he was your father too, if God had given you
grace to see it.




THE PENTLAND RISING
A PAGE OF HISTORY
1666




'A cloud of witnesses lyes here,
Who for Christ's interest did appear.'
Inscription on Battlefield at Rullion Green.



CHAPTER I--THE CAUSES OF THE REVOLT



'Halt, passenger; take heed what thou dost see,
This tomb doth show for what some men did die.'
Monument, Greyfriars' Churchyard, Edinburgh,
1661-1668. {2a}


Two hundred years ago a tragedy was enacted in Scotland, the memory
whereof has been in great measure lost or obscured by the deep
tragedies which followed it.  It is, as it were, the evening of the
night of persecution--a sort of twilight, dark indeed to us, but
light as the noonday when compared with the midnight gloom which
followed.  This fact, of its being the very threshold of
persecution, lends it, however, an additional interest.

The prejudices of the people against Episcopacy were 'out of
measure increased,' says Bishop Burnet, 'by the new incumbents who
were put in the places of the ejected preachers, and were generally
very mean and despicable in all respects.  They were the worst
preachers I ever heard; they were ignorant to a reproach; and many
of them were openly vicious.  They . . . were indeed the dreg and
refuse of the northern parts.  Those of them who arose above
contempt or scandal were men of such violent tempers that they were
as much hated as the others were despised.' {2b}  It was little to
be wondered at, from this account that the country-folk refused to
go to the parish church, and chose rather to listen to outed
ministers in the fields.  But this was not to be allowed, and their
persecutors at last fell on the method of calling a roll of the
parishioners' names every Sabbath, and marking a fine of twenty
shillings Scots to the name of each absenter.  In this way very
large debts were incurred by persons altogether unable to pay.
Besides this, landlords were fined for their tenants' absences,
tenants for their landlords', masters for their servants', servants
for their masters', even though they themselves were perfectly
regular in their attendance.  And as the curates were allowed to
fine with the sanction of any common soldier, it may be imagined
that often the pretexts were neither very sufficient nor well
proven.

When the fines could not be paid at once, Bibles, clothes, and
household utensils were seized upon, or a number of soldiers,
proportionate to his wealth, were quartered on the offender.  The
coarse and drunken privates filled the houses with woe; snatched
the bread from the children to feed their dogs; shocked the
principles, scorned the scruples, and blasphemed the religion of
their humble hosts; and when they had reduced them to destitution,
sold the furniture, and burned down the roof-tree which was
consecrated to the peasants by the name of Home.  For all this
attention each of these soldiers received from his unwilling
landlord a certain sum of money per day--three shillings sterling,
according to Naphtali.  And frequently they were forced to pay
quartering money for more men than were in reality 'cessed on
them.'  At that time it was no strange thing to behold a strong man
begging for money to pay his fines, and many others who were deep
in arrears, or who had attracted attention in some other way, were
forced to flee from their homes, and take refuge from arrest and
imprisonment among the wild mosses of the uplands. {2c}

One example in particular we may cite:

John Neilson, the Laird of Corsack, a worthy man, was,
unfortunately for himself, a Nonconformist.  First he was fined in
four hundred pounds Scots, and then through cessing he lost
nineteen hundred and ninety-three pounds Scots.  He was next
obliged to leave his house and flee from place to place, during
which wanderings he lost his horse.  His wife and children were
turned out of doors, and then his tenants were fined till they too
were almost ruined.  As a final stroke, they drove away all his
cattle to Glasgow and sold them. {2d}  Surely it was time that
something were done to alleviate so much sorrow, to overthrow such
tyranny.

About this time too there arrived in Galloway a person calling
himself Captain Andrew Gray, and advising the people to revolt.  He
displayed some documents purporting to be from the northern
Covenanters, and stating that they were prepared to join in any
enterprise commenced by their southern brethren.  The leader of the
persecutors was Sir James Turner, an officer afterwards degraded
for his share in the matter.  'He was naturally fierce, but was mad
when he was drunk, and that was very often,' said Bishop Burnet.
'He was a learned man, but had always been in armies, and knew no
other rule but to obey orders.  He told me he had no regard to any
law, but acted, as he was commanded, in a military way.' {2e}

This was the state of matters, when an outrage was committed which
gave spirit and determination to the oppressed countrymen, lit the
flame of insubordination, and for the time at least recoiled on
those who perpetrated it with redoubled force.



CHAPTER II--THE BEGINNING



I love no warres,
I love no jarres,
Nor strife's fire.
May discord cease,
Let's live in peace:
This I desire.

If it must be
Warre we must see
(So fates conspire),
May we not feel
The force of steel:
This I desire.

T. JACKSON, 1651 {3a}


Upon Tuesday, November 13th, 1666, Corporal George Deanes and three
other soldiers set upon an old man in the clachan of Dalry and
demanded the payment of his fines.  On the old man's refusing to
pay, they forced a large party of his neighbours to go with them
and thresh his corn.  The field was a certain distance out of the
clachan, and four persons, disguised as countrymen, who had been
out on the moors all night, met this mournful drove of slaves,
compelled by the four soldiers to work for the ruin of their
friend.  However, chided to the bone by their night on the hills,
and worn out by want of food, they proceeded to the village inn to
refresh themselves.  Suddenly some people rushed into the room
where they were sitting, and told them that the soldiers were about
to roast the old man, naked, on his own girdle.  This was too much
for them to stand, and they repaired immediately to the scene of
this gross outrage, and at first merely requested that the captive
should be released.  On the refusal of the two soldiers who were in
the front room, high words were given and taken on both sides, and
the other two rushed forth from an adjoining chamber and made at
the countrymen with drawn swords.  One of the latter, John M'Lellan
of Barscob, drew a pistol and shot the corporal in the body.  The
pieces of tobacco-pipe with which it was loaded, to the number of
ten at least, entered him, and he was so much disturbed that he
never appears to have recovered, for we find long afterwards a
petition to the Privy Council requesting a pension for him.  The
other soldiers then laid down their arms, the old man was rescued,
and the rebellion was commenced. {3b}

And now we must turn to Sir James Turner's memoirs of himself; for,
strange to say, this extraordinary man was remarkably fond of
literary composition, and wrote, besides the amusing account of his
own adventures just mentioned, a large number of essays and short
biographies, and a work on war, entitled Pallas Armata.  The
following are some of the shorter pieces 'Magick,' 'Friendship,'
'Imprisonment,' 'Anger,' 'Revenge,' 'Duells,' 'Cruelty,' 'A Defence
of some of the Ceremonies of the English Liturgie--to wit--Bowing
at the Name of Jesus, The frequent repetition of the Lord's Prayer
and Good Lord deliver us, Of the Doxologie, Of Surplesses,
Rotchets, Canonnicall Coats,' etc.  From what we know of his
character we should expect 'Anger' and 'Cruelty' to be very full
and instructive.  But what earthly right he had to meddle with
ecclesiastical subjects it is hard to see.

Upon the 12th of the month he had received some information
concerning Gray's proceedings, but as it was excessively indefinite
in its character, he paid no attention to it.  On the evening of
the 14th, Corporal Deanes was brought into Dumfries, who affirmed
stoutly that he had been shot while refusing to sign the Covenant--
a story rendered singularly unlikely by the after conduct of the
rebels.  Sir James instantly dispatched orders to the cessed
soldiers either to come to Dumfries or meet him on the way to
Dalry, and commanded the thirteen or fourteen men in the town with
him to come at nine next morning to his lodging for supplies.

On the morning of Thursday the rebels arrived at Dumfries with 50
horse and 150 foot.  Neilson of Corsack, and Gray, who commanded,
with a considerable troop, entered the town, and surrounded Sir
James Turner's lodging.  Though it was between eight and nine
o'clock, that worthy, being unwell, was still in bed, but rose at
once and went to the window.

Neilson and some others cried, 'You may have fair quarter.'

'I need no quarter,' replied Sir James; 'nor can I be a prisoner,
seeing there is no war declared.'  On being told, however, that he
must either be a prisoner or die, he came down, and went into the
street in his night-shirt.  Here Gray showed himself very desirous
of killing him, but he was overruled by Corsack.  However, he was
taken away a prisoner, Captain Gray mounting him on his own horse,
though, as Turner naively remarks, 'there was good reason for it,
for he mounted himself on a farre better one of mine.'  A large
coffer containing his clothes and money, together with all his
papers, were taken away by the rebels.  They robbed Master
Chalmers, the Episcopalian minister of Dumfries, of his horse,
drank the King's health at the market cross, and then left
Dumfries. {3c}



CHAPTER III--THE MARCH OF THE REBELS



'Stay, passenger, take notice what thou reads,
At Edinburgh lie our bodies, here our heads;
Our right hands stood at Lanark, these we want,
Because with them we signed the Covenant.'
Epitaph on a Tombstone at Hamilton. {4a}


On Friday the 16th, Bailie Irvine of Dumfries came to the Council
at Edinburgh, and gave information concerning this 'horrid
rebellion.'  In the absence of Rothes, Sharpe presided--much to the
wrath of some members; and as he imagined his own safety
endangered, his measures were most energetic.  Dalzell was ordered
away to the West, the guards round the city were doubled, officers
and soldiers were forced to take the oath of allegiance, and all
lodgers were commanded to give in their names.  Sharpe, surrounded
with all these guards and precautions, trembled--trembled as he
trembled when the avengers of blood drew him from his chariot on
Magus Muir,--for he knew how he had sold his trust, how he had
betrayed his charge, and he felt that against him must their
chiefest hatred be directed, against him their direst thunder-bolts
be forged.  But even in his fear the apostate Presbyterian was
unrelenting, unpityingly harsh; he published in his manifesto no
promise of pardon, no inducement to submission.  He said, 'If you
submit not you must die,' but never added, 'If you submit you may
live!' {4b}

Meantime the insurgents proceeded on their way.  At Carsphairn they
were deserted by Captain Gray, who, doubtless in a fit of oblivion,
neglected to leave behind him the coffer containing Sir James's
money.  Who he was is a mystery, unsolved by any historian; his
papers were evidently forgeries--that, and his final flight, appear
to indicate that he was an agent of the Royalists, for either the
King or the Duke of York was heard to say, 'That, if he might have
his wish, he would have them all turn rebels and go to arms.' {4c}

Upon the 18th day of the month they left Carsphairn and marched
onwards.

Turner was always lodged by his captors at a good inn, frequently
at the best of which their halting-place could boast.  Here many
visits were paid to him by the ministers and officers of the
insurgent force.  In his description of these interviews he
displays a vein of satiric severity, admitting any kindness that
was done to him with some qualifying souvenir of former harshness,
and gloating over any injury, mistake, or folly, which it was his
chance to suffer or to hear.  He appears, notwithstanding all this,
to have been on pretty good terms with his cruel 'phanaticks,' as
the following extract sufficiently proves:

'Most of the foot were lodged about the church or churchyard, and
order given to ring bells next morning for a sermon to be preached
by Mr. Welch.  Maxwell of Morith, and Major M'Cullough invited me
to heare "that phanatick sermon" (for soe they merrilie called it).
They said that preaching might prove an effectual meane to turne
me, which they heartilie wished.  I answered to them that I was
under guards, and that if they intended to heare that sermon, it
was probable I might likewise, for it was not like my guards wold
goe to church and leave me alone at my lodgeings.  Bot to what they
said of my conversion, I said it wold be hard to turne a Turner.
Bot because I founde them in a merrie humour, I said, if I did not
come to heare Mr. Welch preach, then they might fine me in fortie
shillings Scots, which was double the suome of what I had exacted
from the phanatics.' {4d}

This took place at Ochiltree, on the 22nd day of the month.  The
following is recounted by this personage with malicious glee, and
certainly, if authentic, it is a sad proof of how chaff is mixed
with wheat, and how ignorant, almost impious, persons were engaged
in this movement; nevertheless we give it, for we wish to present
with impartiality all the alleged facts to the reader:

'Towards the evening Mr. Robinsone and Mr. Crukshank gaue me a
visite; I called for some ale purposelie to heare one of them
blesse it.  It fell Mr. Robinsone to seeke the blessing, who said
one of the most bombastick graces that ever I heard in my life.  He
summoned God Allmightie very imperiouslie to be their secondarie
(for that was his language).  "And if," said he, "thou wilt not be
our Secondarie, we will not fight for thee at all, for it is not
our cause bot thy cause; and if thou wilt not fight for our cause
and thy oune cause, then we are not obliged to fight for it.  They
say," said he, "that Dukes, Earles, and Lords are coming with the
King's General against us, bot they shall be nothing bot a
threshing to us."  This grace did more fullie satisfie me of the
folly and injustice of their cause, then the ale did quench my
thirst.' {4e}

Frequently the rebels made a halt near some roadside alehouse, or
in some convenient park, where Colonel Wallace, who had now taken
the command, would review the horse and foot, during which time
Turner was sent either into the alehouse or round the shoulder of
the hill, to prevent him from seeing the disorders which were
likely to arise.  He was, at last, on the 25th day of the month,
between Douglas and Lanark, permitted to behold their evolutions.
'I found their horse did consist of four hundreth and fortie, and
the foot of five hundreth and upwards. . . . The horsemen were
armed for most part with suord and pistoll, some onlie with suord.
The foot with musket, pike, sith (scythe), forke, and suord; and
some with suords great and long.'  He admired much the proficiency
of their cavalry, and marvelled how they had attained to it in so
short a time. {4f}

At Douglas, which they had just left on the morning of this great
wapinshaw, they were charged--awful picture of depravity!--with the
theft of a silver spoon and a nightgown.  Could it be expected that
while the whole country swarmed with robbers of every description,
such a rare opportunity for plunder should be lost by rogues--that
among a thousand men, even though fighting for religion, there
should not be one Achan in the camp?  At Lanark a declaration was
drawn up and signed by the chief rebels.  In it occurs the
following:

'The just sense whereof '--the sufferings of the country--'made us
choose, rather to betake ourselves to the fields for self-defence,
than to stay at home, burdened daily with the calamities of others,
and tortured with the fears of our own approaching misery.' {4g}

The whole body, too, swore the Covenant, to which ceremony the
epitaph at the head of this chapter seems to refer.

A report that Dalzell was approaching drove them from Lanark to
Bathgate, where, on the evening of Monday the 26th, the wearied
army stopped.  But at twelve o'clock the cry, which served them for
a trumpet, of 'Horse! horse!' and 'Mount the prisoner!' resounded
through the night-shrouded town, and called the peasants from their
well-earned rest to toil onwards in their march.  The wind howled
fiercely over the moorland; a close, thick, wetting rain descended.
Chilled to the bone, worn out with long fatigue, sinking to the
knees in mire, onward they marched to destruction.  One by one the
weary peasants fell off from their ranks to sleep, and die in the
rain-soaked moor, or to seek some house by the wayside wherein to
hide till daybreak.  One by one at first, then in gradually
increasing numbers, at every shelter that was seen, whole troops
left the waning squadrons, and rushed to hide themselves from the
ferocity of the tempest.  To right and left nought could be
descried but the broad expanse of the moor, and the figures of
their fellow-rebels, seen dimly through the murky night, plodding
onwards through the sinking moss.  Those who kept together--a
miserable few--often halted to rest themselves, and to allow their
lagging comrades to overtake them.  Then onward they went again,
still hoping for assistance, reinforcement, and supplies; onward
again, through the wind, and the rain, and the darkness--onward to
their defeat at Pentland, and their scaffold at Edinburgh.  It was
calculated that they lost one half of their army on that disastrous
night-march.

Next night they reached the village of Colinton, four miles from
Edinburgh, where they halted for the last time. {4h}



CHAPTER IV--RULLION GREEN



'From Covenanters with uplifted hands,
From Remonstrators with associate bands,
Good Lord, deliver us!'
Royalist Rhyme, KIRKTON, p. 127.


Late on the fourth night of November, exactly twenty-four days
before Rullion Green, Richard and George Chaplain, merchants in
Haddington, beheld four men, clad like West-country Whigamores,
standing round some object on the ground.  It was at the two-mile
cross, and within that distance from their homes.  At last, to
their horror, they discovered that the recumbent figure was a livid
corpse, swathed in a blood-stained winding-sheet. {5a}  Many
thought that this apparition was a portent of the deaths connected
with the Pentland Rising.

On the morning of Wednesday, the 28th of November 1666, they left
Colinton and marched to Rullion Green.  There they arrived about
sunset.  The position was a strong one.  On the summit of a bare,
heathery spur of the Pentlands are two hillocks, and between them
lies a narrow band of flat marshy ground.  On the highest of the
two mounds--that nearest the Pentlands, and on the left hand of the
main body--was the greater part of the cavalry, under Major
Learmont; on the other Barscob and the Galloway gentlemen; and in
the centre Colonel Wallace and the weak, half-armed infantry.
Their position was further strengthened by the depth of the valley
below, and the deep chasm-like course of the Rullion Burn.

The sun, going down behind the Pentlands, cast golden lights and
blue shadows on their snow-clad summits, slanted obliquely into the
rich plain before them, bathing with rosy splendour the leafless,
snow-sprinkled trees, and fading gradually into shadow in the
distance.  To the south, too, they beheld a deep-shaded
amphitheatre of heather and bracken; the course of the Esk, near
Penicuik, winding about at the foot of its gorge; the broad, brown
expanse of Maw Moss; and, fading into blue indistinctness in the
south, the wild heath-clad Peeblesshire hills.  In sooth, that
scene was fair, and many a yearning glance was cast over that
peaceful evening scene from the spot where the rebels awaited their
defeat; and when the fight was over, many a noble fellow lifted his
head from the blood-stained heather to strive with darkening
eyeballs to behold that landscape, over which, as over his life and
his cause, the shadows of night and of gloom were falling and
thickening.

It was while waiting on this spot that the fear-inspiring cry was
raised:  'The enemy!  Here come the enemy!'

Unwilling to believe their own doom--for our insurgents still hoped
for success in some negotiations for peace which had been carried
on at Colinton--they called out, 'They are some of our own.'

'They are too blacke ' (i.e. numerous), 'fie! fie! for ground to
draw up on,' cried Wallace, fully realising the want of space for
his men, and proving that it was not till after this time that his
forces were finally arranged. {5b}

First of all the battle was commenced by fifty Royalist horse sent
obliquely across the hill to attack the left wing of the rebels.
An equal number of Learmont's men met them, and, after a struggle,
drove them back.  The course of the Rullion Burn prevented almost
all pursuit, and Wallace, on perceiving it, dispatched a body of
foot to occupy both the burn and some ruined sheep-walls on the
farther side.

Dalzell changed his position, and drew up his army at the foot of
the hill, on the top of which were his foes.  He then dispatched a
mingled body of infantry and cavalry to attack Wallace's outpost,
but they also were driven back.  A third charge produced a still
more disastrous effect, for Dalzell had to check the pursuit of his
men by a reinforcement.

These repeated checks bred a panic in the Lieutenant-General's
ranks, for several of his men flung down their arms.  Urged by such
fatal symptoms, and by the approaching night, he deployed his men,
and closed in overwhelming numbers on the centre and right flank of
the insurgent army.  In the increasing twilight the burning matches
of the firelocks, shimmering on barrel, halbert, and cuirass, lent
to the approaching army a picturesque effect, like a huge, many-
armed giant breathing flame into the darkness.

Placed on an overhanging hill, Welch and Semple cried aloud, 'The
God of Jacob! The God of Jacob!' and prayed with uplifted hands for
victory. {5c}

But still the Royalist troops closed in.

Captain John Paton was observed by Dalzell, who determined to
capture him with his own hands.  Accordingly he charged forward,
presenting his pistols.  Paton fired, but the balls hopped off
Dalzell's buff coat and fell into his boot.  With the superstition
peculiar to his age, the Nonconformist concluded that his adversary
was rendered bullet-proof by enchantment, and, pulling some small
silver coins from his pocket, charged his pistol therewith.
Dalzell, seeing this, and supposing, it is likely, that Paton was
putting in larger balls, hid behind his servant, who was killed.
{5d}

Meantime the outposts were forced, and the army of Wallace was
enveloped in the embrace of a hideous boa-constrictor--tightening,
closing, crushing every semblance of life from the victim enclosed
in his toils.  The flanking parties of horse were forced in upon
the centre, and though, as even Turner grants, they fought with
desperation, a general flight was the result.

But when they fell there was none to sing their coronach or wail
the death-wail over them.  Those who sacrificed themselves for the
peace, the liberty, and the religion of their fellow-countrymen,
lay bleaching in the field of death for long, and when at last they
were buried by charity, the peasants dug up their bodies,
desecrated their graves, and cast them once more upon the open
heath for the sorry value of their winding-sheets!


Inscription on stone at Rullion Green:


HERE
AND NEAR TO
THIS PLACE LYES THE
REVEREND MR JOHN CROOKSHANK
AND MR ANDREW MCCORMICK
MINISTERS OF THE GOSPEL AND
ABOUT FIFTY OTHER TRUE COVENANTED
PRESBYTERIANS WHO WERE
KILLED IN THIS PLACE IN THEIR OWN
INOCENT SELF DEFENCE AND DEFFENCE
OF THE COVENANTED WORK OF
REFORMATION BY THOMAS DALZEEL OF BINS
UPON THE 28 OF NOVEMBER
1666.  REV. 12. 11. ERECTED
SEPT. 28 1738.


Back of stone:


A Cloud of Witnesses lyes here,
Who for Christ's Interest did appear,
For to restore true Liberty,
O'erturned then by tyranny.
And by proud Prelats who did Rage
Against the Lord's Own heritage.
They sacrificed were for the laws
Of Christ their king, his noble cause.
These heroes fought with great renown;
By falling got the Martyr's crown. {5e}



CHAPTER V--A RECORD OF BLOOD



'They cut his hands ere he was dead,
And after that struck of his head.
His blood under the altar cries
For vengeance on Christ's enemies.'
Epitaph on Tomb at Longcross of Clermont. {6a}


Master Andrew Murray, an outed minister, residing in the Potterrow,
on the morning after the defeat, heard the sounds of cheering and
the march of many feet beneath his window.  He gazed out.  With
colours flying, and with music sounding, Dalzell, victorious,
entered Edinburgh.  But his banners were dyed in blood, and a band
of prisoners were marched within his ranks.  The old man knew it
all.  That martial and triumphant strain was the death-knell of his
friends and of their cause, the rust-hued spots upon the flags were
the tokens of their courage and their death, and the prisoners were
the miserable remnant spared from death in battle to die upon the
scaffold.  Poor old man! he had outlived all joy.  Had he lived
longer he would have seen increasing torment and increasing woe; he
would have seen the clouds, then but gathering in mist, cast a more
than midnight darkness over his native hills, and have fallen a
victim to those bloody persecutions which, later, sent their red
memorials to the sea by many a burn.  By a merciful Providence all
this was spared to him--he fell beneath the first blow; and ere
four days had passed since Rullion Green, the aged minister of God
was gathered to is fathers. {6b}