On the truth of the details given both by Wodrow and Walker it is impossible to form any conclusion.  Wodrow gives no authority for his version.  “I am well informed,” he says, “I am credibly informed,” and so on; but the sources of his information he nowhere gives.  Walker is more communicative; he, as we have seen, professed to have learned his story from Brown’s wife; but no statement of Walker’s can be accepted for absolute truth, and his uncertainty about even the names of his witnesses does not add the stamp of conviction to their testimony.[59] Beyond the bare fact that the man was shot in the presence of Claverhouse nothing is certain.  On the rest of the story each must make up his mind as seems best to him.

With the death of Peter Gillies and John Bryce Claverhouse is not directly charged by Wodrow.  Walker, however, quotes an epitaph said to have been inscribed on the grave of these men, who, with three others, were hanged, without trial, at Mauchline by

    “Bloody Dumbarton, Douglas, and Dundee,
    Moved by the devil and the Laird of Lee.”

These lines must have been composed some years after the event, inasmuch as the men were hanged on May 6th, 1685, and the patent of Claverhouse’s peerage bears the date November 12th, 1688.  This proves, what indeed few people can have doubted, that the damning testimony of “The Cloud of Witnesses” wants at least the weight of contemporary evidence.  An authority, however, for this particular epitaph can be traced back to 1690, when Alexander Shields published his martyrology.[60] “The said Claverhouse,” he wrote, “together with the Earl of Dumbarton and Lieut.-General Douglas, caused Peter Gillies, John Bryce, Thomas Young (who was taken by the Laird of Lee), William Fiddisone, and John Buiening to be put to death upon a gibbet, without legal trial or sentence, suffering them neither to have a Bible nor to pray before they died."[61] Defoe has evidently followed Shields;[62] but Walker, though he quotes the aforesaid epitaph, does not himself implicate Claverhouse.

Wodrow does not appear to have heard any of these stories.  He names only Gillies and Bryce, quoting from the indictment, which does not specify the other sufferers, to show that the men were tried before General Drummond and a tribunal of fifteen soldiers on May 5th, and hanged on the following day.  We have already seen that a few days previously Claverhouse had sent a prisoner for trial to this same General Drummond, because he had himself at that time no commission to try prisoners.  Unless, therefore, we are ready to suppose that officers were in the habit of sitting on a jury with their own troopers, or to believe that within three days a change had taken place in Claverhouse’s position of which there is no record either in his own letters or in any other existing document, we must accept Wodrow’s narrative as the true one, and exonerate Claverhouse from all responsibility for the deaths of Gillies and his unfortunate fellow-sufferers.