Biggar and the House of Fleming

THE COVENANTERS OF THE BIGGAR DISTRICT. 253
and thus their names were added to the roll of martyrs who
have laid down their lives for opposition to tyranny and in de-
fence of religious liberty. Irvine of Bonshaw, as is well
known, a short time afterwards, was killed in a squabble with
one of his drunken associates at the town of Lanark ; and it
has ever since been considered by some persons as a special
mark of divine vengeance, that he suffered punishment in the
place where he had exercised his cruelties on Donald Cargill.
After this period Mrs Baillie, or, as she was usually termed,
the Lady of St John's Kirk, fell into considerable odium with
the more rigid of the Covenanters. It was rumoured that she
had been accessory to the capture of her late friends at Cov-
ington Mill. The rumour, it appears, had even reached those
men in their confinement in the Tolbooth of Edinburgh, short
as the time was which they were allowed to live. One of
them, Walter Smith, in his dying testimony, as inserted in the
" Cloud of Witnesses," however, exonerates her from that
charge. In reference to this he says, " As to my apprehend-
ing, we were singularly delivered by Providence into the ad-
versaries' hands, and, for what I could know, betrayed by no
one, nor were any accessory to our taking more than we were
ourselves. And particularly, let none blame the Lady of St
John's Kirk." This lady, in the killing years that followed,
actually, it is said, became a persecutor, and allowed no person
to dwell on her lands unless they took the oath of abjuration,
and attended the ministration of the curates. When Mr
John Johnston in Grangehill of Pettinain, and Francis Lever-
ance of Covington, two of her old Covenanting friends, waited
on her to remind her of her solemn declarations in favour of
the covenanted work of Reformation, and to remonstrate with
her on her inconsistent and injurious conduct, she refused to
hold conversation with them, and ordered the door to be shut
in their faces. The dread of imprisonment and the forfeiture
of the family estate had, no doubt, produced this change in
her professions and deportment ; and this incident furnishes
another illustration of the unhappy effects produced by perse-
cution for religion's sake.
But two of the most remarkable religious meetings that
took place in the Biggar distinct were held in the Castle of
Boghall, under the personal auspices of the Dowager Countess