Cargill, Donald (Daniel)

CARGILL, DONALD (or DANIEL): One of the leaders of the Scotch Covenanters; b. in the parish of Rattray, Perthshire, 1619; beheaded at Edinburgh July 27, 1681. He was educated at Aberdeen and St. Andrews; and about 1650 he became pastor of the Barony Church, Glasgow. In 1661, when Episcopacy was established in Scotland, he refused to accept his charge from the archbishop, and was banished (1662) beyond the Tay; but he did not go; instead he became one of the "field preachers," who, deprived of their churches, preached in the open air. In 1679 he joined Cameron, Douglas, Hamilton, and others in the rebellion against prelacy, which arose out of the "Rutherglen Declaration" of May 29 of that year, and with his fellow Covenanters endured the defeat of Bothwell Bridge, June 22. He fled to Holland, but soon returned. The next year he and Cameron, with their adherents, drew up the "Sanquhar Declaration," June 22. The government set a price upon the leaders' heads. They were attacked at Ayrsmoss, July 22, and Cameron was slain; but Cargill succeeded to the leadership, and, as if to testify in the most signal manner his abhorrence of the tyrannical persecutors, he publicly excommunicated the king and several of the nobles at a field-preaching held at Torwood in Stirlingshire in September. When the Duke of York, one of the " excommunicated," came to Scotland, the persecution of the followers of Cargill increased. He himself was hunted from place to place; but on July 11, 1681, he was captured between Clydesdale and Lothian, and taken to Edinburgh for trial. He readily confessed that he had done what the council had called treason. The council were equally divided whether to imprison him for life or to execute him; but the vote of the Duke of Argyle decided in favor of the latter—a vote which cost Argyle, later on, the support of the Covenanters, to say nothing of deep remorse. Accordingly Cargill was put to death. See Covenanters.

Bibliography: Biographia presbyteriana, vol. ii., Edinburgh, 1827 (life of Cargill); R. Wodrow, Hist. of the Sufferings of the Church of Scotland, 2 vols., ib. 1721–22; T. McCrie, Sketches of Scottish Church Hist., ib. 1875; J. Cunningham, Church Hist. of Scotland, 2 vols., ib. 1883; DNB, ix. 79–80.