of old men who had known the evil times, had largely embellished the facts he set himself to chronicle; and following the fashion of his day (indeed, as one may say, the fashion of many historians who cannot plead Wodrow’s excuse), he was not always careful to separate the romance from the reality, even where the latter might have better served his turn.  But considering all the circumstances—­the circumstances of the time, of his subject, and of his own prepossessions, he is a writer whom it is impossible to disregard; and, indeed, compared with the other Covenanting chroniclers he stands apart as the most sober and impartial of historians.  Where he got the story that has been so ingeniously fashioned into an indictment against Claverhouse is not clear.  The passage runs as follows:—­“Dreadful were the acts of wickedness done by the soldiers at this time, and Lag was as deep as any.  They used to take to themselves, in their cabals, the names of devils and persons they supposed to be in hell, and with whips to lash one another, as a jest upon hell.  But I shall draw a veil over many of their dreadful impieties I meet with in papers written at this time.”  This is not exactly the sort of evidence any judge but a hanging judge would allow, though it would serve well enough the turn of a prosecutor.  It is at any rate evidence which no one, with any experience of the sort of gossip the annalists of the Covenant were content to call history, would care to take seriously.  But whatever its value may really be, so far as it goes it is evidence not against Claverhouse but against Lag.  It is clear from Wodrow that the story refers not to the royal soldiers but to the local militia; and a writer a little later than Wodrow makes it still more clear that the men supposed thus to have disported themselves in their cups were those commanded by Lag.  John Howie, an Ayrshire peasant and a Cameronian of the strictest sect, who was not born till fourteen years after Wodrow had published his history, has given Lag a particular place in the Index Expurgatorius of his “Heroes for the Faith.”  There we may read how this “prime hero for the promoting of Satan’s kingdom” would, “with the rest of his boon companions and persecutors, feign themselves devils, and those whom they supposed in hell, and then whip one another, as a jest upon that place of torment.”  Claverhouse, as has been already shown, was himself singularly averse to all rioting and drunkenness, as well as to profane amusements of every kind; and, as he was indisputably one of the sternest disciplinarians who ever took or gave orders, it is unlikely that he would have countenanced any such unseemly revels in the men under his command, with whom, moreover, he was in these years thrown into unusually close personal contact.  But, in truth, the story, so far as he is concerned, is too foolish to need any solemn refutation.  It has been only examined at this length as furnishing a signal instance of the recklessness with which the misdeeds of others have been fathered on him.[19]