Alexander Gordon of Earlston

[4] Alexander was in the army of the Covenanters at Bothwell Bridge, and narrowly escaped being taken by the ingenuity of one of his tenants, who recognizing him as he rode through Hamilton, made him dismount, hid his horse's furniture in a dunghill, dressed him in women's clothes, and set him to rock the cradle.

[6] From 1682, Gordon was involved with John Nisbet in seeking support and financial assistance for the radical Covenanters, a group known as the United Societies.

30 June, 5 July, and 25 September 1683, with Nisbet's letter, and his own commission from the ‘societies’ in Scotland, were printed at length by Thomas Sprat in his True Account of the Horrid Conspiracy against the late King.

[10][6] On 16 August, he had been brought to the bar of the justiciary court, and the sentence of death and forfeiture was passed upon him, and 28 September was fixed as the date of his execution.

The council replied that it was irregular to torture malefactors after they had been condemned to death, but the King responded by sending Gordon on 11 September a reprieve till the second Friday of November.

On 3 November, King Charles II extended the reprieve for a month, and a fortnight later again wrote ordering Gordon to be examined by torture.

This command was immediately obeyed, but Gordon, on being brought to the council chamber on 23 November, either ‘through fear or distraction, roared out like a bull, and cried and struck about him so that the hangman and his man durst scarce lay hands on him,’ and at last fell down in a swoon.

On 13 December, his case was again before the council, when, as it was thought that the execution of a man in a state of insanity would endanger his soul, he was reprieved until the last Friday of January 1684.

[11] He was there until 22 August 1684, when he was transferred back to the Edinburgh Tolbooth by the Privy Council and not allowed to speak to anyone before he was shown to William Spence, another Scottish conspirator.

They found that the breaking of prison was not an offence punishable by death, and this could not legally be done; so on 20 September they ordered him to be removed to Blackness Castle.

Three covenant engagements into which she entered during her sojourn in Blackness Castle and her later life were printed after her death, entitled ‘Lady Earlston's Soliloquies.’[15] She and her husband both corresponded with the covenanting preachers James Renwick, Donald Cargill, and Richard Cameron; nine letters to them by those ministers were printed in a collection of Renwick's ‘Letters.’ Gordon remarried in 1697 to Marion, a daughter of Alexander, viscount Kenmure.

A sequel, Lochinvar Archived 21 June 2020 at the Wayback Machine was serialised in The Christian World Magazine and published by Methuen in 1897.