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36. Colonel Walter WHITEFORD
died in 1686. Soldier and second son of Bishop Whitefoord, Walter fought
on the side of the King in the Civil War, and attained the rank of Colonel, and
on the overthrow of Charles, took refuge in Holland. He was one of the Scottish
followers of Montrose at the time of Cromwell. The conduct of Dr. Doirslaus,
the regicide and Cromwell's envoy at the Hauge in 1649, so enraged the Montrose
Royalists, and a scheme was laid among them to murder this new envoy.
On the evening of 12 May, 1649, as Doirslaus was sitting down to supper at the
Witte Zwaan, six men burst into his rooms, and while some of them secured his
servants, Whitefoord, after slashing him over the head, passed a sword through
his body and said, "Thus dies one of the King's judges." The whole
party, leaving their victim dead upon the ground, made their escape, and Whitefoord
succeeded in crossing the frontier into the Spanish Netherlands, where he was
in perfect safety. All Royalists received the news of the murder with unbounded
satisfaction. Upon the Restoration he was to receive for his services, an augmentation
to his arms of 'three crosses patees' of the form of those on the Scots crown
on the Bend, the pigeon removed from the crest and the new motto 'Ubique aut
nusquam'.
Whitefoord accompanied Montrose in his last Scottish expedition in 1650 and was
taken prisoner after the battle of Carbisdale on 27 April. In August, 1656 he
was at the court of Charles. He entered the Russian service in Moscow, but returned
to England before 1666. Eventually, he received a commission in the guards but
was dismissed from the guards in 1673 as a papist. James II granted him a pension
on 31 Dec. 1685.
During his wanderings on the continent he entered the Duke of Savoy's service
and was there when the last massacre of the Vaudois was perpetrated. At the close
of his life these remembrance of these atrocities preyed upon his mind. Bishop
Burnet says "he died a few days before the Parliament met (in 1686), and
called for some ministers, and to them he declared his forsaking of popery, and
his abhorrence of it for its cruelty.
He was married to ?. Colonel Walter WHITEFORD and ? had
the following children:
51 i.
Charles WHITEFORD was a Head of the Scots College in Paris in 1714. He died
in 1722. without issue.
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