It must always be difficult to reconsider with absolute impartiality any verdict that has been generally accepted for close upon two hundred years.  On the one hand, there is a not unnatural disinclination for the trouble necessary to re-open a case already heard and judged:  on the other, is a most natural inclination to take every fresh fact discovered, or every old blunder detected, as of paramount importance.  The explorer in strange lands is too apt to take every mole-hill for a mountain.  And when the verdict is one that has been endorsed by Macaulay, he must be a bold man indeed who thinks to upset it.  Nevertheless, something has, I hope, been done to bear out my belief that Claverhouse has been too harshly judged.  No attempt has been made to gloss over or conceal any crime that can be brought fairly home to him.  The case of Andrew Hislop (a far blacker case than the more notorious one of John Brown) has been left as it stands, so far as the imperfect evidence enables us now to judge it.  If that one case be held enough to substantiate the general verdict, if nothing can be set against it, there is no more to be said—­save that, if this be justice, many a better man than Claverhouse must go to the wall.

One thing, at least, should be clear.  He was no capricious and unlicensed oppressor of a God-fearing and inoffensive peasantry, but a soldier waging war against a turbulent population carrying arms and willing to use them.  I have nowhere tried to soften the bitter tale of folly, misrule, and cruelty which drove those unhappy men into rebellion, nor to heighten by a single touch their responsibility for their own misfortunes.  I have not tried to find excuses for the men whose orders Claverhouse obeyed, nor arguments to show that in the circumstances such orders were inevitable.  But I have tried to show that in no single instance, of which the record is complete, did he go beyond the letter of his commission, and that in more than one instance he construed its spirit with a mildness for which he has never yet been given credit.

But nothing will avail to save him in the eyes of those who maintain that the law of human morality is fixed and immutable, and that men of every age and every country can only be judged, and must be judged, by the eternal laws of right and wrong.  They, of course, will not allow the excuse that he was a soldier obeying the orders of his superior officers, even should they be disposed to admit that he did no more than that.  The orders, they will say, were cruel and unjust:  he should have refused to obey them.  But is this unswerving standard possible as a gauge of human actions?  Who then shall be safe?  There are offences which, in Coleridge’s happy phrase, are offences against the good manners of human nature itself.  The man who committed such offences in the reign of Chedorlaomer was no doubt as guilty as the man who should commit them in the reign of Victoria.  But are the offences