menced his military career as a volunteer in the French service, and when the
British war with Holland was concluded, became a cornet in the guards of the
prince of Orange, whose life he saved at the battle of Seneff, in the year 1674;
a service for which he was rewarded by receiving a captain's commission in the
same corps. One of the Scottish regiments in the service of the States shortly
after becoming vacant, from the favour of the prince, and his interest with the
court of England, Graham was induced to offer himself as a candidate for it.
It was, however, carried against him, in consequence of which he determined to
abandon the Dutch service, and in 1677 returned to Scotland, bringing with
him particular recommendations from the prince of Orange to king Charles, who
appointed him captain to the first of three troops of horse which he was raising
at that time for enforcing compliance with the established religion. Of all who
were employed in this odious service, captain Graham was the most indefatigable
and unrelenting. His dragoons were styled by the less serious part of the
people, the ruling elders of the church; and recusancy was the great crime they
had it in charge to repress. Conventicles, as they were called, the peaceable
assemblies of the people in the open fields, to hear from their own ministers the
word of God, were the objects against which Clavers, as he was called in contempt, had it in charge to wage an exterminating warfare; and to discover and
bring to punishment such as frequented them, he spared not to practise the most
detestable cruelties. But though the subject of this memoir was the most forward
and violent, he was not the sole persecutor of the field preachers and their adherents. In every quarter of the country, particularly in the shire of Fife, and in
the southern and western counties there was a Sharp, an Earlshall, a Johnston, a
Bannatyne, a Grierson, an Oglethorpe, or a Main, with each a host of inferior
tyrants, who acted under him as spies and informers in consequence of whose
procedure no man was for a moment safe in his life or his property, either in
house or. in field, at home or abroad. Arms, of course, were necessarily resorted to by the sufferers, and a party of them falling in by accident with the primate Sharpe, in the beginning of May, 1679, put him to death, which excited the
fears, and, of course, the rage of the whole of the dominant parly to the highest pitch of extravagance; and in pursuit of the actors in that affair, and to put down all conventicles by the way, Claverhouse and his dragoons, with a party of
foot, were immediately sent to the west.
Meanwhile a party in arms had assembled in Evandale, to the number of eighty persons, with Robert Hamilton of Preston at their head, and came to Rutherglen, on the 29th of May, the anniversary of the restoration extinguished the bonfires that were blazing in honour of the day and having burned the act of supremacy, the declaration, &c., published at the market cross of that burgh, a short testimony against all these acts, since known by the name of the Rutherglen Declaration, returned to Evandale. Sermon having been announced by some of their preachers on the approaching Sunday, June the first, in the neighbourhood of Loudon hill ; Claverhouse, who it appears was either in Glasgow or its neighbourhood at the time, and had information both of what they had done and of what they intended to do, followed almost upon their heels, and on Saturday the 31st of May, surprised and made prisoners in the neighbourhood of Hamilton, Mr John King, and seventeen persons on their way to join the meeting at Loudon-hill. Tying his prisoners together, two and two, and driving them before him like cattle, to be witnesses to the murder of their brethren, he hasted on Sunday morning early, by the way of Strathaven, to surprise them before they should have time to be fully assembled. The service, however, was begun by Mr Thomas Douglas, Avho had been an actor in the publication of the Rutherglen Declaration on the preceding Thursday, before he could come
