In March Claverhouse was appointed Deputy-Sheriff of Dumfriesshire by a particular warrant from Whitehall, and Andrew Bruce of Earlshall, one of his lieutenants, was nominated with him.  This step gave great offence to Queensberry, who, as Sheriff of the shires of Dumfries and Annandale, by law held all such patronage in his own hand, and marks the beginning of the petty jealousy which from this time forward he seems to have shown to Claverhouse whenever he dared, and which rose afterwards, as we shall see, to a serious height.  But Queensberry was no match for Lauderdale; and Claverhouse was duly settled in his new office, which, while strengthening his hands and enabling him to dispense with many tedious formalities, at the same time considerably increased his labours.

And so winter passed into spring, and still Claverhouse found no work more worthy of him than patrolling the country, arranging for his men’s quarters, examining suspected persons, and endeavouring to persuade the Government to leave him not entirely penniless.  More than once he sent word to Edinburgh that he believed something serious was afoot.  “I find,” he writes to Linlithgow on April 21st, “Mr. Welsh is accustoming both ends of the country to face the king’s forces, and certainly intends to break out into open rebellion.”  This Welsh is a famous figure in Covenanting history.  Grandson to a man whose name was long held in affectionate memory by his party as that of the “incomparable John Welsh of Ayr,” and great-grandson to no less a hero than John Knox himself, he was on his own account a memorable man.  He had inaugurated the first conventicle, and had ever since been zealous in promoting them and officiating at them among the wild hills and moorlands of the western shires, till his name had become a byword among the soldiers for his courage in braving and his skill in evading them.  But though one of the most resolute and indefatigable of the ministers of the Covenant, he was also one of the most moderate and sensible.  Had no one among them been more eager than he to carry the war into the enemy’s country there had been no Bothwell Bridge.  And, indeed, we shall find him seriously taken to task by the more extreme of the party as a backslider from the good cause for his endeavour to avert that disastrous affair.

Yet Claverhouse was right.  Something very serious was soon to be afoot.  During the last few weeks the Covenanters had been notoriously growing bolder.  They did not always now, as hitherto, content themselves with evading the soldiers:  they became in their turn the aggressors.  More than once an outlying post of Claverhouse’s men had been fired upon; and on one occasion a couple of the dragoons had been savagely murdered in cold blood.  Even Wodrow found himself forced to own that about this time “matters were running to sad heights among the armed followers of some of the field meetings.”  But the trouble did not arise through John Welsh.  It came through a servant of the Crown who had been a sorer plague to his countrymen than a myriad of disaffected ministers.