It is said that those stories are best liked which present a hero and sing his achievements from beginning to end. And the more faultless and brilliant the hero, the better goes the tale, and the louder the applause. Certainly John Graham is the central figure in this history, and so rich is the color of the man and so intense his vitality, that other personages among whom he moves become pale and uninteresting. They had, if one takes the long result, a larger share in affairs, and their hand stretches across the centuries, but there was not in them that charm of humanity which captivates the heart. One must study the work of William of Orange if he is to understand the history of his nation, but one would not go round the corner to meet him. Claverhouse, if one faces the facts and sweeps away the glamour, was only a dashing cavalry officer, who happened to win an insignificant battle by obvious local tactics, and yet there are few men whom one would prefer to meet. One would make a long journey to catch a sight of Claverhouse riding down the street, as one to-day is caught by the fascination of his portrait.
But the reader has already discovered that Graham can hardly be called a hero by any of the ordinary tests except beauty of personal appearance. He was not an ignorant man, as certain persons have concluded from the varied and picturesque habits of his spelling, but his friends cannot claim that he was endowed with rich intellectual gifts. He had sense enough to condemn the wilder excesses of his colleagues in the government of the day, but he had not force enough to replace their foolishness by a wiser policy. Had his powers been more commanding, or indeed if he had had any talent for constructive action, with his unwavering integrity and masterful determination, he might have ousted Lauderdale and saved Scotland for King James. But accomplished intriguers and trained politicians were always too much for Claverhouse, and held him as a lithe wild animal is caught in the meshes of a net.
Wild partisans, to whom every man is either white as snow or black as pitch, have gone mad over Graham, making him out, according to their craze, either an angel or a devil, and forgetting that most men are half and between. But it must be also said that those who hold John Graham to have been a Jacobite saint are the more delirious in their minds, and hysterical in their writing, for they will not hear that he ever did anything less than the best, or that the men he persecuted had any right upon their side. He is from first to last a perfect paladin of romance whom everyone is bound to praise. Then artists rush in and not only make fine trade of his good looks, but lend his beauty to the clansmen who fought at Killiecrankie, till the curtain falls upon "Bonnie Dundee" being carried to his grave by picturesque and broken-hearted Highlanders dressed in the costly panoply of the Inverness Gathering, and with faces of the style of George MacDonald or Lord Leighton. Whatever Claverhouse was, and this story at least suggests that he was brave and honorable, he was in no sense a saint, and would have been the last to claim this high degree. It is open to question whether he deserved to be called a good man, for he was ambitious of power and, perhaps for public ends, of wealth; he had no small measure of pride and jealousy in him; he was headstrong and unmanageable, and for his own side he was unrelenting and cruel. There are things he would not have done to advance his cause, as, for instance, tell lies, or stain his honor, but he never would have dreamed of showing mercy to his opponent. Nor did he ever try to enter into his mind or understand what the other man was feeling.