On May 5th, Lord Ross[22] from Lanark, and on the 6th Claverhouse from Dumfries, sent in their despatches to the commander-in-chief at Edinburgh as usual.  It is clear that neither of them had at that time heard any rumour of an event which had happened a few days previously at no very great distance from their quarters.  On May 2nd the Primate of Scotland had been dragged from his carriage as he was driving across an open heath three miles out of Saint Andrews, and murdered in open day before the eyes of his daughter.

James Sharp, Archbishop of Saint Andrews, was at that time probably the best-hated man in Scotland.  Like all renegades he was in no favour even with his own party, though Lauderdale found after trial that he could not dispense with his support.  Even the moderate Presbyterians, who regarded the uncompromising Covenanters as the real cause of their country’s troubles, looked askance upon Sharp, as the man whom they had chosen out of their number to save them and who had preferred to save himself.  By the Covenanters themselves he was assailed with every form of obloquy as the Judas who had sold his God and his country for thirty pieces of silver, and who had hounded on the servants of the King to spill the blood of the saints.  Yet his murder was but an accident.  Eleven years before an attempt had, indeed, been made upon his life by one Mitchell, a fanatical and apparently half-witted preacher, who was after a long delay put to the torture and finally executed on a confession which he had been induced to make after a promise from the Privy Council that his life should be spared.  It is said that Lauderdale would have spared him, but Sharp was so vehement for his death that the Duke dared not refuse.

The chief promoters of the Archbishop’s murder were Hackston of Rathillet, Russell of Kettle, and John Balfour of Burley, or, more correctly, of Kinloch.  These three men were typical of the class who at this time began to come to the front among the Covenanters, and by their incapacity, folly, and brutality discredited and did their best to ruin a cause whose original justice had been already too much obscured by such parasites.  It is impossible to believe that they, or such as they, were inspired by any strong religious feelings.  Hackston and Balfour were men of some fortune, who had been free-livers in their youth, and were now professing to expiate those errors by a gloomy and ferocious asceticism.  Both had a grudge against Sharp.  Balfour had been accused of malversation in the management of some property for which he was the Archbishop’s factor, and Hackston, his brother-in-law, had been arrested as his bail and forced to make the money good.  Russell, who has left a curiously minute and cold-blooded narrative of this murder,[23] was a man of headstrong and fiery temper.  They had all those dangerous gifts of eloquence which, coarse and uncouth as it sounds to our ears, was, when liberally garnished with texts of Scripture, precisely