late his majesty upon so happy a turn in his affairs. To this he must have been misled from the promissory note of kindness which he held, payable on demand, as well as by some flattering expressions which Charles had made use of regarding him to his son, lord Lorn; but when he arrived at Whitehall, July 8, 1660 the king no sooner heard his name announced, than, "with an angry stamp of the foot, he ordered Sir William Fleming to execute his orders," which were to carry him to the Tower. To the Tower he was carried accordingly, where he lay till the month of December, when he was sent down to Leith aboard a man-of-war, to stand his trial before the high court of parliament. While confined in the Tower, the marquis made application to have the affidavits of several persons in England taken respecting some matters of fact, when he was concerned in the public administration before the usurpation, which, had justice been the object of the prosecution against him, could not have been denied. Revenge, however, being the object, facts might have happened to prove inconvenient, and the request was flatly refused.
On his arrival at Leith, he was conveyed to the casrle of Edinburgh, and, preparatory to his being brought to trial, the president of the committee for bills, on the eighteenth of January, reported to the parliament that a supplication had been presented to them by the laird of Lamont, craving warrant to cite the marquis of Argyle, with some others, to appear before parliament, to answer for crimes committed by him and them as specified in the bill given in. Some little opposition was made to this; but it was carried by a vast plurality to grant warrant according to the prayer of the petition. This charge could not be intended to serve any other purpose than to raise a prejudice in the public mind against the intended victim; for it Avas a charge which not a few of the managers themselves knew well to be false. Middleton could have set the question at once to rest, as he had had a deeper hand in many of the cruelties complained of than Argyle, for he had acted under general Leslie, in suppressing the remains of Montrose's army, and, much nearer home than the islands, namely at Kincardine house, belonging to Montrose, had shot twelve cavaliers without any ceremony, sending the remainder to be hanged at Edinburgh, all which, bo it observed, was in defence of a party of Argyle's people who had been driven to seek refuge in Lennox, and was no doubt one of the items in the general charge. But the charge generally referred to the clearing of his own territories of Alister Macdonald and his Irish bands by Leslie, who, in reducing the strengths belonging to the loyalists in the north, had, conformably to the orders of parliament, shot or hanged every Irishman he found in them without ceremony. Sir James Turner, who was upon this expedition, and has left an account of it in his Memoirs, acquits Argyle of all blame, in so far as concerns the seizure of the castle of Dunavertie, one of the cases that has been most loudly complained of, though he fastens a stain on the character of Mr John Nevoy, the divine who accompanied the expedition, who, he says, took a pleasure in wading through the blood of the victims. A small extract will show that Leslie confined himself strictly to the parliamentary order, which was perhaps no more severe than the dreadful character of the times had rendered necessary. "From Ila we boated over to Jura, a horrid isle, and a habitation fit for deer and wild beasts, and so from isle to isle till we come to Mull, which is cue of the best of the Hebrides. Here Maclean saved his lands with the loss of his reputation, if he ever had any: he gave up his strong castles to Leslie; gave his eldest son for hostage of his fidelity, and, which was unchristian baseness in the lowest degree, he delivered up fourteen very pretty Irishmen, who had been all along faithful to him, to the lieutenant general, who immediately caused hang them all. It was not well done to demand them from
