xxvi Proceedings of Boyal Soeiety of Edinhurgh. 
estate, and plundered the castle. The laird himself was more than 
once fined and imprisoned on account of his loyalty and refusal to 
swear to the Covenant. For his contumacy and his appeal to the 
civil power in the person of Overton, one of Cromwell’s colonels, he 
was excommunicated by the Presbytery of Aberdeen. In his pro- 
test against their sentence, he declared “ that he separated himself 
“ from the discipline of Presbytery — in particular that of Aberdeen — 
“as a human invention, destructive to the civil peace of Christians, 
“ and that he intended, by the aid of God, to walk and live in such a 
“ Christian way as is conform to the Divine will in the sacred Word.” 
Whitelock in his Memorials reports “that letters had come from 
“ Scotland that the ministers of Scotland inflame the people against 
“ England, and damn all their brethren and people who are not of 
“ their opinion, and that the Laird of Drum had bid them defiance.” 
The first wife of this laird was Lady Mary Gordon, daughter of 
Lord Huntly; his second was Mary Coutts, the “shepherd’s daughter” 
of the ballad of “ The Laird of Drum,” who, when his kinsmen 
would not bid her welcome, and the laird gave her the somewhat 
halting consolation — 
“ Ye shall be cook in my kitchen, 
Butler in my ha’, 0, 
Ye shall be lady to my command 
When I ride far away, 0.” 
replied with the spirit and plain speech of a Scottish wife — 
‘ ‘ But I told ye afore we were wed 
I was ower low for thee, 0.” 
“But 
“ An I were deid and ye were deid. 
And baith in a grave laid, 0, 
And ye and I were tane up again, 
Wha could ken your moulds fra mine, 0.” 
Something in the name of Irvine, as in that of YArrow, seems to 
have attracted the ballad writer, and the heroine of the far finer song 
of “ Helen of Kirkconnel Lea ” was of the race of the Irvines of 
the Border. It was, indeed, a name which, in one or other of its 
forms of Irvine, Irwin, and Irving, spread wide as well as took 
