It will be sufficient to indicate where the arguments employed to discredit this affair may be found.[50] They do not practically amount to more than this—­that as a reprieve was certainly granted in the Council Chamber at Edinburgh, the execution could not possibly have taken place on the sands of the Solway.  The case is indeed one which those who will accept nothing that cannot be proved with mathematical certainty will always find reasons for doubting; but at least they must have read the history of those times to little purpose if they can accept such an argument as conclusive.  For the rest, it will be enough to say that the story first found its way into print in 1687, and that it was more circumstantially repeated in 1711, when the records of the Kirk Session of the parish of Penninghame were published by direction of the General Assembly.  At that time Thomas Wilson, a brother of the younger sufferer, was still alive, with many others to whom the Killing-Time was something very much more than a tradition.  In 1714 (possibly to a later date, but certainly in that year) a stone in Penninghame churchyard still marked the grave of Margaret Wilson, and told the story of her death.[51] The ruins of the church may still be seen, but the stone has long ago gone to join the dust that was once the bones of Margaret; and an obelisk, raised within our own times on the high ground outside the busy little seaport, now serves in statelier, if less vital, fashion to recall to the traveller the memory of the Martyrs of Wigtown.  It is difficult to believe that a story so well and widely recorded, and so firmly implanted in the hearts of so many generations of men, can have absolutely no foundation in fact.[52] It is indeed possible that time has embellished the bald brutality of the deed, though the graphic narrative of Macaulay is practically that which Wodrow took from the records of Penninghame.  But that the two women were drowned in the waters of the Blednock on May 11th, 1685, is surely a fact as well authenticated as any in the martyrology of the Scottish Covenant.

There is, as I have said, an excellent reason for not dragging my readers through the obscure and barren mazes of this controversy; and like all good reasons it is a very simple one.  Claverhouse was present neither at the trial nor the execution.  He had, indeed, no more to do with the deaths of these two women than Cameron, who had been five years in his grave, or Wodrow, who was but five years old.  It is true that one of his family was present, but this was his brother, David Graham, Deputy Sheriff of Galloway, and but lately made one of the Lords Justices of Wigtownshire.  Macaulay does not directly name Claverhouse as concerned in this affair; but it is one out of five selected by the historian as samples of the crimes by which “he, and men like him, goaded the Western peasantry into madness”—­a consummation which, it may be observed in passing, had been effected twelve years before Claverhouse had drawn sword in Scotland.  It is not certain that Macaulay believed the Graham who sat in judgment on these women to have been John Graham of Claverhouse.  But it is certain that the effect of his narrative has been, in the minds of most English-speaking men, to add this also to the long list of mythical crimes which have blackened the memory of the hero of Killiecrankie.[53]