Published: Wednesday, 12th March, 2008 12:00
MOORLAND ARREST: MAN GUNNED DOWN
By by Douglas Skelton
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The memorial for John Brown at the spot where he was shot on the moors above Muirkirk
Pic by: Douglas Skelton
Army Commander feels 'justified’ in executing elderly man
MAY 2, 1685
SOLDIERS under the command of John Graham of Claverhouse today executed a Covenanter in the hills above Muirkirk.
John Brown, 58, was a local farmer and haulier known as the Christian Carrier. He was well-known in the area for transporting goods across the district by packhorse.
A friend of notorious preacher Alexander Peden, who conducted his second marriage, Brown may well have become a minister himself but for a serious stammer. Despite that, Peden once described him as 'the greatest Christian I ever conversed with.’
Brown’s farm at Priesthill was a known haunt of renegade Covenanters. Illegal conventicles were held there and that, along with Brown’s refusal to attend services held by a recognised minister of religion, saw his name placed on the Royal roster of fugitives.
Today the authorities caught up with him when a party of Dragoons led by Captain Graham surrounded him as he and his nephew John Browning were cutting peat for the fire. Browning was wanted for the attack on Newmilns Tower in April and was sent to Mauchline to be imprisoned before execution.
Brown was then questioned by the commander over his illegal activities and pressed to swear the Oath of Allegiance to His Majesty. Brown refused, for to do so would put King before God. In his answers, it was noted, his stutter left him and his speech was both clear and passionate.
John Graham - known as 'Bluidy Clavers’ to his enemies - marched the man back to his farm, where his wife, Isabel, had been alerted to the threat. She waited in the doorway, her infant child in her arms and her older daughter at her side.
The soldiers gave Brown another chance to recant but still he refused. They then forced him to the ground and informed him that he was about to die.
As the man’s prayers rose from the dirt, John Graham was heard to snap that he had given him 'time to pray, not preach’ and ordered his men to open fire. However, some reports suggest that the dragoons hesitated to do their duty and that their commander shot the man dead with a pistol. Other reports state the six soldiers fired with the majority of the bullets striking the man in the head.
Isabel Brown told the Killing Times that after he was shot, John Graham asked her what she thought of her husband now.
She said: “As I cradled his head in my lap, I told him that I thought muckle of him, but now more than ever.”
She went on to claim that Claverhouse then threatened her life, to which she responded 'I doubt not your cruelty would to that length, but how will you make answer for this morning’s work?”
Captain Graham has told the 'Times’ that “to man I can be answerable, and for God, I will take Him in my own hands.”
In an official statement issued today, the military commander reported: “We pursued two fellows a great way through the mosses and in end seized them. They had no arms about them, and denied they had any, but being asked if they would take the abjuration, the eldest of the two, call John Brown, refused it.”
John Graham said that Brown would not refuse to rise in arms against the King and even went so far as to say that 'he knew no King.’ The soldier claimed that arms and ammunition were found in his home along with certain 'treasonable papers’ and so felt justified in having him summarily executed.
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