190 John Welsh, the Irongray Covenanter. 



1st March f 1912. 



Chairman — S. Arnott, V.P. 



John Welsh, the Irongray Covenanter. By the Rev. S. 

 DuNLOP, Minister of Irongray. 



It is a noteworthy fact that there exists no memoir of John 

 Welsh of Irongray, though from the Battle of Rullion Green till 

 Bothwell Bridge he was the most conspicuous Co^■enanting mini- 

 ster in Scotland. Had he glorified God in the Grassmarket, or 

 fallen in some scuffle with Claverhouse's dragoons, or even like his 

 friend Blackadder of Troqueer languished in prison on the Bass 

 Rock, some pious hand would have been moved to write his story. 

 His last public appearance in Scotland at the Battle of Bothwell 

 Bridge alienated the extremists, and Patrick Walker speaks of 

 him much in the same way as Robert Browning spoke of his Lost 

 Leader : — " It was the observe and saying of several .solid Chris- 

 tians, especially Mr John Dick, that singular and cheerful sufferer 

 at Edinburgh, the 5th March, 1684, who rode much with that 

 gracious and worthy Mr Welsh, ' That he had always had ups and 

 downs in his case, warm blinks and clouds, but especially from 

 the time he took the wrong end of the plea, in pleading in favour 

 of the indulgence and censuring the more f?iithful by witnessing 

 against it, and opposing the inserting of it among the steps of our 

 defections as one of the causes of a day of humiliation.' 

 He died at London under a cloud at last " (Patrick Walker, " Six 

 Saints of the Covenant "). 



As far as men interest themselves now-a-da\s in the 

 squabbles of the Covenanters between Drumclog and Bothwell 

 Bridge, they will be more inclined to sympathise with Welsh's 

 attitude than that of " the singular and cheerful sufferer, Mr John 

 Dick." It was Welsh's misfortune that he died in his bed — such a 

 death for such a man was a sort of anti-climax. The man upon 

 whose head the price of 9000 merks was set — three times as much 

 as that offered for any other Covenanting minister (Wodrow iii.. 

 15) — the man who " had long set at defiance every magistrate in 

 Scotland, riding about in a stately fashion to his conventicles with 

 a party of armed men, who went under the name of Mr Welsh's 

 bodyguard," ought not to have died in peace. 



