Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 44.djvu/218

 in December ordered that he and certain others should be transported to the plantations in Virginia, and be discharged from ever again returning to Scotland. They were therefore shipped from Leith to London; but Peden, according to Patrick Walker, comforted his fellow prisoners by the declaration that ‘the ship was not yet built’ that would take him or them ‘to Virginia or any other plantation in America.’ And so at last it turned out; for the captain of the ship chartered to convey them to Virginia, on learning that they were not convicts of the class to which he was accustomed, but persons banished on account of their religious beliefs, refused to take them on board, and they were set at liberty. Peden returned to Scotland in June of the following year, and went thence to Ireland. He was in Ayrshire again in 1680, and after performing the marriage ceremony of John Brown (1627?–1685) [q. v.], the ‘Christian carrier,’ in 1682, went back to Ireland. He returned to Ayrshire in 1685, and preached his last sermon at Colinswood at the water of Ayr. His privations and anxieties had gradually undermined his health, and, resolving to spend his last days in his native district, he found shelter in a cave on the banks of the river Ayr, near Sorn. Having a presentiment that he had not many hours to live, he one evening left the cave and went to his brother's house at Sorn, where he died on 28 Jan. 1686. Before his death he had an interview with James Renwick [q. v.], and the two became fully reconciled. Peden was buried in the Boswell aisle in the parish church of Auchinleck; but forty days after the burial a troop of dragoons came, and, lifting the corpse, carried it two miles to Cumnock gallows, intending to hang it up there in chains. Finding it impossible to do so, they buried it at the gallows' foot. After the Revolution the inhabitants of the parish of Cumnock, in token of their esteem for Peden, abandoned their ancient burial-place, and formed a new one round the gallows hill.

Peden's fame as a prophet was perpetuated among the peasants of the south of Scotland by the collection of his prophecies, with instances of their fulfilment, made by Patrick Walker. He was the most famed and revered of all the Scottish covenanting preachers. ‘The Lord's Trumpet sounding an Alarm against Scotland by Warning of a Bloody Sword; being the substance of a Preface and two Prophetical Sermons preached at Glenluce, Anno 1682, by that great Scottish Prophet, Mr. Alexander Peden, late Minister of the Gospel at New Glenluce in Galloway,’ was published at Glasgow in 1739, and reprinted in 1779.

[The Life and Prophecies of Alexander Peden by Patrick Walker has been frequently reprinted; see also Histories of Kirkton and Wodrow; Howie's Scottish Worthies; New Statistical Account of Scotland; Hew Scott's Fasti Eccles. Scot. i. 168; Scott's Old Mortality, note 18; Watson's Life and Times of Peden, Glasgow, 1881.] 

PEDLEY, ROBERT (1760–1841), eccentric author. [See .]

PEDROG (fl. 550?), British saint, commemorated on 4 June, was the founder of the ancient church of Bodmin, where his relics were long preserved. The life in ‘Acta Sanctorum’ (June, i. 400–1), previously printed by Capgrave (Nova Legenda Angliæ, p. 266), is meagre and of no authority. We only learn from it that Pedrog was ‘natione Cumber’ (i.e. a Welshman), and of royal birth. On the death of his father he declined the succession to the crown, and, with sixty companions, retired to a monastery. After studying in Ireland for twenty years, he spent another thirty in monastic seclusion in Britain. Then he visited Rome, Jerusalem, and India, living for seven years on a desert island in the Indian Ocean. He returned to Western Britain, and ultimately died there on 4 June. The Life of St. Cadoc in ‘Cambro-British Saints’ (pp. 22–3), which was apparently written about 1070, so far confirms this account as to make Pedrog a son of King Glywys of (what is now) Glamorgan, who did not take his share of the royal inheritance with his brothers, but served God at ‘Botmenei’ in Cornwall, where a great monastery was afterwards founded in his honour. The Hafod MS. of ‘Bonedd y Saint,’ however, and other manuscripts of the same class call Pedrog the son of ‘Clemens tywysog o Gernyw’ (i.e. a prince from Cornwall) (Myvyrian Archæology, 2nd edit. pp. 416, 429; Cambro-British Saints, p. 267).

Pedrog is called by Fuller ‘the captain of the Cornish saints,’ and the number of dedications to him in Devonshire and Cornwall show that his name was widely revered in the district. He is the patron saint of Bodmin, Padstow, Trevalga, and Little Petherick in Cornwall, and of West Anstey, South Brent, Clannaborough, St. Petrock's, Exeter, Hollacombe, Lidford, and Newton St. Petrock in Devonshire. Llanbedrog, Carnarvonshire, and St. Petrox, Pembrokeshire, are also dedicated to him. He was, moreover, honoured, as St. Perreux, in the monastery of St. Méen in Brittany, and in 1177 the monks of St. Méen made an unsuccessful attempt to obtain possession of his relics ( sub anno). 