Michael Barrington

David Arnot Michael Barrington

DAVID ARNOT By Barrington, Michael BY THE SAME AUTHOR: THE KINGS FOOL THE INVISIBLE ARMY THE LADY OF TRIPOLI AND GRAHAME OF CLAVER HOUSE VISCOUNT DUNDEE, 1648-1689 A MILITARY BIOGRAPHY CONTENTS: PREFACE PART ONE MASTER AND PUPIL THE CHOICE PART TWO THE LADY OF Rusco A MIRACLE LIKING WHO shall remember thee when thou art dead, and who shall pray for thee? asks one whose written words upon the vanity of earthly glory have weathered the storms of centuries Death is the end of all, and mans life suddenly passeth away like a shadow. Thus, sombrely exhorting his readers, the ancient sage meditated upon the piteous and pathetic fragility of the strength and intellect which, even in the vigour of triumphant joy, may be stricken, turned to dust, and buried in oblivion, His lamentation came echoing across time and space to me, when, questing in old note hooks of a Scottish lawyer, eminent in the time of Charles the Second, came haphazard upon several amaing cases, vibrating with life, though now entirely forgotten and even then in the late seventeenth century merely remembered for the sake of legal precedent. Among those precedents was one which proved so haunting that it has been impossible to resist the appeal of the prisoner at the bar: devoted servant of Joel and nun, tragically fated to live, suffer, and die three hundred years too early to be understood by his contemporaries But it is not too late for us to honour a pioneer who kept the torch alight amid plaomy and horrible fanaticism. Far from death bcinj the end of all things, it would be more just to say that heroic nobility of spirit is inextinguish able and everlasting and though it for while seem vanquished, the time must come that shall raise it even after it is buried, and deliver it from the malignity of the age that oppressed it. A word once spoken cannot he back by a chariot and four horses l Proverb,