said his prayers, and carabines presented to shoot him, I offered him that, if he would make an ingenuous confession, and make a discovery that might be of any importance for the king's service, I should delay putting him to death, and plead for him.’ Brown on this assurance made a clean breast of it. After detailing his confession, Claverhouse concludes: ‘I have acquitted myself when I have told your grace the case. He has been but a month or two with his halbert, and if your grace thinks he deserves no mercy justice will pass on him; for I, having no commission of justiciary myself, have delivered him up to the lieutenant-general to be disposed of as he pleases’ (Napier, i. 141, iii. 457). In the case of the nephew the conduct of Claverhouse was less irreproachable than in that of the uncle. He had no right to apply the mental strain, in the absence of direct evidence; in pretending to reprieve one whom he dared not execute, he was, to say the least, taking credit for greater generosity than he possessed; and he scarcely fulfilled his promise to ‘plead for him’ with the sincerity the man had a right to expect. His reserved method of ‘pleading’ may, however, be partly accounted for by the strained character of his relations with the Duke of Queensberry, to whom the letter is addressed.
Shortly after the despatch of this letter Claverhouse, by order of the king, was restored to the privy council. In a few days subsequent to this he was, in view of the threatened incursion of Argyll, made a brigadier-general of horse. This would have given him precedency over Colonel Douglas, whom it was proposed to make a brigadier-general of foot, and to prevent this the commission of Douglas was drawn two days before that of Claverhouse (Napier, iii. 469). After the danger from the Argyll invasion was over, Claverhouse went to London to complain of the conduct of Queensberry in regard to the Galloway fines, and Queensberry was ordered to refund him the money. He returned to Edinburgh along with Balcarres on 24 Dec. (Fountainhall, p. 688). The insecurity of his position, apart from the special support of the king, was probably what chiefly determined Claverhouse to link his fortunes so closely to those of James, and to give him a support in his policy towards the catholics, which seems to have been unquestioning and absolute. At the meeting of the council in February 1686 he was the only one who supported the motion of the chancellor Perth for taking notice of a sermon against popery preached by one Canaires, minister of Selkirk, the other councillors maintaining a ‘deep silence’ (ib. p. 709). In the autumn of 1686 he was promoted major-general. In the disaffected districts the ‘killing time’ was succeeded by a period of almost unbroken stillness. The most prominent leaders had either been executed, or were languishing in prison, or toiling in the plantations. Isolated rebels who had escaped either of these fates were occasionally discovered in hiding-places and summarily dealt with. Possibly the last official act of Claverhouse against conventicles was the examination of James Renwick before the privy council. Renwick, the last of the martyrs, suffered on 17 Feb. 1688.
It was no doubt with a view to strengthen his hands in the north-east of Scotland that James, in March 1688, appointed Claverhouse by royal warrant provost of Dundee, which with the constable's jurisdiction would ‘make him absolute there’ (ib. p. 860). The letter of the king announcing the appointment was engrossed in the town council's minutes of 27 March (Millar, Roll of Eminent Burgesses of Dundee, p. 166), but the town and Claverhouse had for years been on indifferent terms, and the arbitrary appointment only widened the estrangement. Nearly four years previously, on 14 May 1684, the council had protested against the charter of King Charles appointing Claverhouse constable (Charters of Dundee, pp. 103–5). On one occasion at least he exercised his office as constable to moderate punishment for crime, for in February 1684 he used his influence with the privy council to enable him to substitute some ‘arbitrary’ punishment for that of death for petty thefts (Napier, ii. 410). The town council, however, were jealous of the jurisdiction of the constable; Claverhouse was supposed to have carried his pretensions to further lengths than any of his predecessors, and, so far from his appointment as provost aiding him in his final effort in behalf of James, the town became one of the rallying points of his rival, General Mackay.
When news reached the privy council in Edinburgh of the threatened invasion of England by the Prince of Orange, they advised the concentration of a large force under Douglas and Claverhouse on the borders; but, while preparations were proceeding, a peremptory order came from the king that all the available forces in Scotland should be despatched southwards. The total Scottish contingent, numbering 3,763, under the command of Douglas, Claverhouse being second in command and general of the cavalry, accordingly left Scotland in October, and, after taking up their quarters for a short time in London, marched on 10 Nov. to join the general rendezvous of the king's forces at Salisbury. On the 12th the king marked his
