being abolished by Cromwell, and that lie was not affluent, having "conquest no lands but Warriston,[1] of the avail of 1000 merks Scots a-year, where he now lives freed of trouble of state or country."[2]
He was a member of the committee of protestors, who in 1657, proceeded to London to lay their complaints before the government. Cromwell knew the value of the man he had before him, and persuaded him to try the path of ambition under the new government. Wodrow and others have found it convenient to palliate his departure from the adherence to royalty, as an act for which it was necessary to find apologies in strong calls of interest, and facility of temper. It will, however, almost require a belief in all the mysteries of divine right, to discover why Warriston should have adhered to royalty without power, and how the opinions he always professed should have made him prefer a factious support of an absent prince to the service of a powerful leader, his early friend and co-adjutor in opposing hereditary loyalty.
On the 9th of July, 1657, he was re-appointed clerk register, and on the 3rd of November in the same year, he was named as one of the commissioners for the administration of justice in Scotland.[3] Cromwell created Johnston a peer, and he sat in the protector's upper house, with the title of lord Warriston, occupying a station more brilliant, but not so exalted as those he had previously filled. After the death of Cromwell, Warriston displayed his strong opposition to the return of royalty, by acting as president of the committee of safety under Richard Cromwell. Knowing himself to be marked out for destruction, he fled at the Restoration to France. It is painful, after viewing a life spent with honour and courage, in the highest trusts, to trace this great man's life to an end which casts a blot on the times, and on the human race. He was charged to appear before the Estates ; and having been outlawed in the usual form, on the 10th October, 1661, a reward of 5000 merks was offered for his apprehension. By a fiction of law, the most horrible which a weak government eter invented for protection against powerful subjects, but which, it must be acknowledged, was put in force by Warriston and his confederates against Montrose, an act of forfeiture in absence passed against him, and he was condemned to death on the 15th of May, 1661. The principal and avowed articles of accusation against him were, his official prosecution of the royalists, and particularly of Gordon of Newton, his connexion with the Remonstrance, his sitting in parliament as a peer of England, and his accepting office under Cromwell.
It was necessary that the victim of judicial vengeance should be accused of acts ivhich the law knows as crimes ; and acts to which the best protectors of Charles the Second's throne were accessary, were urged against this man. For the hidden causes of his prosecution we must however look in his ambition, the influence of his worth and talents, and the unbending consistency of his political principles ; causes to which Wodrow has added his too ungracious censure of regal vice.
In the mean time, Johnston had been lurking in Germany and the Low Countries, from which, unfortunately for himself, he proceeded to France. A confidant termed "major Johnston," is supposed to have discovered his retreat; and a spy of the name of Alexander Murray, commonly called " crooked Murray," was employed to hunt him out. This individual, narrowly watching the motions of lady Warriston, discovered his dwelling in Rouen, and with consent of the council of France, he was brought prisoner to England, and lodged in the Tower on the 8th of June, 1663; thence he was brought to Edinburgh, not
