Claverhouse was now sent back to his old employment.  Though none of his own letters of this time have survived, it is clear from an Order of the Privy Council that shortly after the affair at Bothwell he was again entrusted with the control of the rebellious shires.  There is unfortunately no record of his own by which it is possible to check the vague charges of Wodrow, who wisely declines to commit himself to particulars on the ground that “multitudes of instances, once flagrant, are now at this distance lost,” while not a few, he candidly admits, “were never distinctly known.”  In the rare cases in which he becomes more specific in his complaints, he does not make it clear that the offences were committed in Claverhouse’s presence, nor even that they were always committed by soldiers of his troop—­“the soldiers under Claverhouse” seem to stand with him for all the royal forces then employed in the western shires.  That what he calls “spulies, depredations, and violences” were committed on Claverhouse’s authority may be freely granted:  they were precisely such as a strict obedience to the letter (and no less to the spirit) of his commission would have enjoined—­the levying of fines, the seizure of arms, horses, and other movable property from all suspected of any share in the rebellion who would not absolve themselves by taking the oath of abjuration, and from all resetters, or harbourers, of known rebels.  It would be idle to refuse to believe that many unjust and cruel acts were not committed at this time, as we know they were committed subsequently, merely because they cannot be succinctly proved.  It is unlikely that Claverhouse himself wasted over-much time on sifting every case that was brought in to him by his spies; and where he was not himself present—­and it must be remembered that he was not the only officer engaged in this service, and also that his own soldiers were often employed under his lieutenants on duties he was personally unable to attend to—­it is hard to doubt that much wild and brutal work went on.  The whole case, in short, except in a very few instances (which will be examined elsewhere), is one solely of hearsay and tradition; and it is no more than common justice in any attempt to define Claverhouse’s share in it, to give him the benefit of the doubt where it is not directly contrary to the proved facts and the evidence of his despatches.  For Claverhouse, it should be also and always remembered, may be implicitly trusted to speak the truth in these matters, for the simple reason that he was not in the least ashamed of his work.  We may well believe that it was not the work he would have chosen; but it was the work he had been set to do; and his concern was only to execute it as completely as possible.  He was a soldier, obeying the orders of his superiors, for which they and they only were responsible.  That their orders matched with his feelings, religious as well as political, for Claverhouse was as thorough