[50] Napier, iii.  Appendix 3, and his “Case for the Crown”:  Blackwood’s Magazine, December 1863.  On the other side see Barton, vii. 255:  Macmillan’s Magazine, December 1862; and a pamphlet by the Rev. Archibald Stewart, “History Vindicated in the case of the Wigtown Martyrs,” 2nd ed. 1869.

[51] According to “The Cloud of Witnesses,” first published in 1714, the epitaph ran as follows: 

    “Murdered for owning Christ supreme
    Head of his Church, and no more crime
    But her not owning Prelacy,
    And not abjuring Presbytery. 
    Within the sea, tied to a stake,
    She suffered for Christ Jesus’ sake.”

The stone on which these lines were inscribed covered, according to the same authority, “the body of Margaret Wilson, who was drowned in the water of the Blednock upon the 11th of May, 1684 [5], by the Laird of Lagg.”

[52] In Colonel Fergusson’s most entertaining chapter of family history, “The Laird of Lagg,” he mentions an old lady, still alive in 1834, who remembered her grandfather’s account of the execution, which he declared he had himself witnessed:  “There were cluds o’ folk on the sands that day in clusters here and there, praying for the women as they were put down.”

[53] Charles Kingsley, for example, wrote in “Alton Locke” of “the Scottish Saint Margaret whom Claverhouse and his men bound to a stake.”

[54] Wodrow, iv. 244.

[55] Claverhouse to Queensberry, May 3rd, 1685.  Napier, i. 141; and iii. 457.

[56] “John Inglis, captain of a troop of dragoons, lying in garrison at Newmills, in the West, a house belonging to the Earl of Loudon, having taken some of these fanatics prisoners, and though he had power to execute them, yet keeping them alive, some of their desperate comrades breaks in upon the garrison and rescues them, to their great shame; for which Inglis was degraded, and his place was given to Mr. George Winrahame, a bigot Papist.”  Fountainhall, quoted by Napier, iii. 457.  This Winrahame may be the Winram who had to do with the Wigtown Martyrs.  According to “The Cloud of Witnesses,”

    “The actors of this cruel crime
    Was Lagg, Strachan, Winram, and Grahame.”

A letter more or less in a name was of no account in the cacography of those times.

[57] “The new reign was not to remain long undisturbed; before the end of April there was the apprehension of a great civil war, and in May the news came that it had begun both in England and Scotland.”  These are Burton’s words (vii. 258), and no one can accuse Burton of undue partiality to James or his government.  See also Aytoun’s Appendix to his “Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers,” which, however, was written before the publication of Napier’s book had proved Claverhouse’s responsibility for the death of John Brown.