The register of that year shows that the two brothers matriculated at Saint Leonard’s College in the University of Saint Andrews, on February 13th, 1665.  Before this date all is a blank.  Of John’s boyish years history and tradition are equally silent.  Long after his death, indeed, some idle stories became current, as their fashion is, of prophecies and prodigies in that early time.  His nurse is said to have foretold that a river taking its name from a goose would prove fatal to him, and to have lamented that her child’s career of glory had been frustrated because he had been checked in the act of devouring a live toad.  This last story sounds much like a popular version of the Grecian fable of Demophooen, as told in the Homeric hymn to Demeter.  But, as a matter of fact, it was a legend current of the infancy both of the Regent Morton and of Montrose himself before it was given to Claverhouse; and possibly of many other youthful members of the Scottish aristocracy, who happened to make themselves obnoxious to a class of their countrymen whose piety seems to have added no holy point to their powers of invective.  There is an ingenious fancy, and, at least, as much reason as is generally displayed in mythological researches, in the surmise that this particular legend may have owed its origin to the French connection with Scotland, a connection which would naturally have found little favour in the eyes of the followers of John Knox.

Claverhouse seems to have neglected neither the studies nor the discipline of the University.  He has, indeed, in our own time been denied enough even of the common intellectual culture of his day to save him from ridicule as a blockhead.  But there is no reason for this contemptuous statement.  His own contemporaries, and others, who if not exactly contemporaries have at least as good right to be heard as a writer of our own time, have left very different testimony.  Burnet, who, though connected by marriage with Claverhouse and at one time much in his confidence, was the last of men to praise him unduly, has vouched both for his abilities and virtues.  Dalrymple, who was certainly no Jacobite, though censured by the Whigs for his indulgence to James, has described him as from his earliest youth an earnest reader of the great actions recorded by the poets and historians of antiquity.  More particular testimony still is offered by a writer whose work was not, indeed, undertaken till nearly fifty years after the battle of Killiecrankie, but whose pictures of those men and times have all the freshness and colour of a contemporary.  The author of those memoirs of Lochiel of which Macaulay has made such brilliant use, has credited Claverhouse with a considerable knowledge of mathematics and general literature, especially such branches of those studies as were likely to be of most use to a soldier.  Lastly, Doctor Munro, Principal of the College of Edinburgh, when charged before a Parliamentary Commission with rejoicing at the news of Killiecrankie, denied at least that he had rejoiced at the death of the conqueror, for whom he owned “an extraordinary value,” such as, in his own words, “no gentleman, soldier, scholar, or civilised citizen will find fault with me for."[2]