I beseech Your Grace, say nothing of this to any; nay, not now to your brother.  For Lord Melfort said to Sir Andrew Forrester, that he was sure there would be a new storm on him.  I could not, nor is [it] fit this should have been kept from you; but you will find it best for a while to know or take little notice, for it gives him but ground of talking, and serves no other end."[70]

But these jealous fellows were not to have it all their own way.  In the autumn of the same year Claverhouse was summoned to London with Balcarres to be heard on a complaint he had in his turn to make against Queensberry.  Early in the spring he had been peremptorily ordered to discharge a bond he had given to the Treasury for fines due from delinquents in Galloway.  He answered that his brother (then Deputy-Sheriff of that shire) was collecting the fines, and requested more time for payment.  On being told that he might take five or six days, he replied that, considering the difficulty of collection and the distances to be travelled, they might as well give him none.  “Then,” answered Queensberry, “you shall have none."[71] Claverhouse had many times applied for leave to be heard in his own defence; but Murray had hitherto persuaded the King to answer that no audience could be granted to him until he had made his peace with the Treasurer and been restored to his seat at the Council.  But the name of Queensberry was not now the power it had been at Whitehall.  It is difficult to believe that he was much more concerned with religion than Lauderdale; but he was, at any rate by profession, a staunch Protestant, and there were those among his colleagues ready to take every advantage of this passport to James’s disfavour.  It was determined to hear what Claverhouse had to say for himself.  He was summoned to London, graciously received by the King, and pleaded his cause so effectually that the Treasurer was ordered to refund the money.

Claverhouse and Balcarres returned to Edinburgh on December 24th.  With them came the Chancellor Perth and his brother, John Drummond, the new Lord Melfort.  The brothers were in James’s best books, for they had recently professed themselves converted to the Roman Catholic faith by the convincing logic of the papers found in Charles’s strong-box and made public by the King.[72] But they were not so popular in Edinburgh.  The new year opened with something very like a No Popery riot.  Lady Perth was insulted on her way home from mass by a baker’s boy.  The Privy Council ordered the lad to be whipped through the Canongate, but the ’prentices rose to the rescue of their comrade.  The guard was called out:  there was firing, and some citizens fell.  There was disaffection, too, among the troops:  one soldier was arrested for refusing to fire on a Protestant:  another was shot for threatening to run his sword through a Papist.  In the Council Perth moved that one Canaires, minister at Selkirk, should be arraigned for preaching against the Pope; but he found no man on his side except Claverhouse, who, though Protestant to the backbone, had no mind to see his King insulted under the cloak of religion.  James’s famous scheme of Universal Toleration was soon found to be what every sensible man had foreseen—­a scheme of toleration for his own religion and of persecution for all others.