Having identified himself with the Pentland Rising, he was outlawed, and escaped to Newcastle, where he became chaplain in the family of the Mayor.
Whilst living at the latter place under the assumed name of William [or George] Johnston, he was arrested on 16 January, and sentenced to the Bass Rock 22 February 1679.
He was the younger son of John Veitch, the minister of Roberton, Lanarkshire, and was born on 27 April 1640.
About 1664 he took license as a preacher and joined the presbyterians; but, being forfeited in 1667 for having been at Mauchline and the Pentlands, he escaped to England, where he lived under the name of Johnson.
On 16 January 1679 he was apprehended, while living there under the name of Johnson, but having been on 22 February sisted before the committee of public affairs in Edinburgh, he was sent to imprisonment on the Bass Rock.
He says: "With respect to Mr William Veitch, although the Privy Council, on the 25th of February 1679, "approved the report of the Committee for Public Affairs that he be sent to the Bass," and, on the 11th of March, appointed him to be conveyed to that prison, yet this act was not executed; for, in an order of the 18th of that month, requiring the King's Advocate to proceed against him before the Justiciary Court, he is represented as "prisoner in the tolbooth of Edinburgh.
Had Veitch been a prisoner in the Bass, such a fact would undoubtedly have been recorded in his Memoirs of Himself, in which he describes so minutely the public sufferings he endured in the cause of Presbytery.
When in December 1681 the Earl of Argyll escaped from prison, Veitch not only sheltered him in his house, but, being an adept in the shifts of a fugitive from justice, conducted him safely to London.
Veitch had soon afterwards to make his own escape to Holland (in 1683), but during the Monmouth rising of 1685 was sent to Northumberland to foment an outbreak there.
Returning to Scotland, he was called to the parish of Whitton Chapel[4] in the presbytery of Kelso, where he was admitted in April 1688.
His wife, Marion Fairlie of the house of Braid, was author of a diary which was published by the Free Church of Scotland in 1846.