Page:A biographical dictionary of eminent Scotsmen, vol 8.djvu/41

Rh was accordingly deposed by the Assembly of 1639, in company with his colleague Dr Gladstanes, the celebrated Samuel Rutherford and Mr Robert Blair coming in their places. Having been subsequently detected in a correspondencewith the royalists, Wishart was plundered of all his worldly goods, and thrown into a dungeon called the Thieves' Hole, said to have been the most nauseous part of one of the most nauseous prisons in the world, the old tolbooth of Edinburgh. Wishart himself tells us that, for his attachment to royalty and episcopacy, he thrice suffered spoliation, imprisonment, and exile, before the year 1647. In October, 1644, he was taken by the Scottish army at the surrender of Newcastle, in which town he had officiated professionally. On this occasion, he suffered what appears to have been his third captivity. In January, 1645, he is found petitioning the estates from the tolbooth, for maintenance to himself, his wife, and five children, who otherwise, he says, must starve: the petition was remitted to the Committee of Monies, with what result does not appear. A few months afterwards, when Montrose had swept away the whole military force of the covenanters, and was approaching the capital in triumph, Wishart was one of a deputation of cavalier prisoners, whom the terrified citizens sent to him to implore his clemency. He seems to have remained with the marquis as his chaplain, during the remainder of the campaign, and to have afterwards accompanied him abroad in the same capacity. This connexion suggested to him the composition of an account of the extraordinary adventures of Montrose, which was published in the original Latin at Paris in 1647. His chief object in this work, as he informs us in a modest preface, was to vindicate his patron from the aspersions which had been thrown upon him by his enemies; to clear him from the charges of cruelty and irreligion, which had been brought against him by the covenanters, and show him as the real hero which he was. Whatever might be the reputation of Montrose in Scotland, this work is said to have given it a very enviable character on the continent. "To the memoir," says the publisher of the English translation of 1756, "may be in a great measure ascribed that regard and notice which was had of Montrose, not only in France, where the proscribed queen then held her thin-attended court, and where it was first published, but likewise in Germany, and most of the northern courts of Europe, which he soon after visited. That peculiar elegance of expression, and animated description, with which it abounds, soon attracted the regard of the world, and in a few years carried it through several impressions both in France and Holland."

Proportioned to the estimation in which the work was held by the persecuting party, was the detestation with which it was regarded by the Scottish covenanters. Those daring and brilliant exploits which formed the subject of its panegyric could never be contemplated by the sufferers in any other light than as inhuman massacres of the Lord's people; and he whom cardinal de Retz likened to the heroes of Plutarch, was spoken of in his own country in no other terms than as "that bloody and excommunicate traitor." An appropriate opportunity of showing their abhorrence of the book was presented within a very few years after its publication, when Montrose, having fallen into their hands, was ordered to be executed with all possible marks of odium and degradation. Over the gay dress he assumed on that occasion, they hung from his neck the obnoxious volume, together with the declaration he had published on commencing his last and fatal expedition; the one hanging at the right shoulder, and the other at the left, while a cincture, crossing the back and breast, kept them at their proper places. As this ceremonial was made matter for a parliamentary decree, there can be little doubt that the Scottish presbyterians