Part 34

"When the King walked in the park attended by some of his courtiers, and Dalziel in his company, the same crowds would always be after him, shewing their admiration at his beard and dress, so that the King could hardly pass on for the crowd, upon which his Majesty bade '_the devil take Dalziel for bringing such a rabble of boys together to have their guts squeezed out_,' while they gaped at his long beard and antique habit, requesting him at the same time--as Dalziel used to express it--'_to shave and dress like other Christians, and keep the poor bairns out of danger_.' All this could never prevail on him to part with his beard; but yet, in compliance to his Majesty, he went once to Court in the very height of the fashion; but as soon as the King and those about him had laughed sufficiently at the strange figure he made, he resumed his usual habit, to the great joy of the boys, who had not discovered him in his fashionable dress."

From this it would appear that Dalyell had been much of a wag, that he loved to humour children, and enjoyed their fun and amazement at the sight of his huge beard, and by appearing once in the gaudy frippery of a Cavalier, had striven to ridicule the foppery of the Court of Charles II.--three points of character very different from those usually attributed to him.

He was appointed a Privy Councillor, and soon after represented the county of Linlithgow in Parliament, and in 1670 an act of ratification, confirming all his estates and honours, was passed. In this document he is designated "His Majesties right trustie and weel-beloved Generall Thomas Dalyell, of Binns, late Lieutenant-Generall of His Majesties late forces within this ancient kingdome." From this it would appear that promotion, as well as profit, had resulted to him after the affair at Rullion Green and dragooning the Westland Whigs. He represented his native county in the Scottish Parliament from 1678 to 1685.

To assist in the security of Episcopacy in Scotland, and still further to fortify the royal authority and the power of that tyrannical Council, which committed so many atrocities in the king's name, Lauderdale, who was created a duke when at the head of the Scottish affairs, obtained the formation of a militia consisting of two thousand cavalry and sixteen thousand infantry; and as the northern kingdom swarmed with experienced and high-spirited officers all lacking military employment, these troops were soon disciplined and equipped; but the flower of the national troops were the standing forces of the country.

These, at this time, were as follows:--

1. The Royal Life Guards, the regiment of the famous John Grahame of Claverhouse, Viscount of Dundee, were raised after the Restoration, in 1661. The privates were styled, _par excellence_, gentlemen, and usually appear to have been cadets of good families. The Sieur de la Roche, a French Protestant refugee, who was slain in a tavern brawl at Leith by John Master of Tarbet and an Ensign Mowat, is styled in their indictment, "a gentleman of his Majesty's troop of Guards." Under Claverhouse, this Scottish patrician band served at Bothwell Bridge, at Drumclog, and in all the unhappy contentions of the period. Mr. Francis Stuart, afterwards a captain of the Guards, grandson of the Earl of Bothwell, was, says Captain Creichton, "a private _gentleman_ in the Horse Guards, like myself." In this trooper the reader will no doubt recognise the Serjeant Bothwell of _Old Mortality_.

"On the 2nd of April, 1661," according to Wodrow, "the King's Life Guard was formed. By their constitution they were to consist of noblemen and gentlemen's sons, and were to be one hundred and twenty in number, under command of the Lord Newburgh. After taking an oath to be loyal to his Majesty, they made a parade through the town of Edinburgh, with carbines at their saddles and swords drawn."

The maimed and old veteran officers, adds Kirkton, in his secret history, "the poor colonels, majors, and captains who expected great promotion (at the Restoration) were preferred to be troopers in the King's troop of Life Guards. This goodly employment obliged them to spend with one another the small remnant of the stock their miseries had left them, but more they could not have after all their hopes and sufferings" (he means) during the days of Cromwell.

In 1674 these Life Guards consisted of four squadrons, and were commanded by the Marquis of Athole.

After the Union, in 1707, this corps was removed to London, and is now represented by the 2nd troop of the 1st Life Guards.[35]

2. The Scottish Foot Guards, raised in November, 1660, were commanded by George, Earl of Linlithgow, and were, as they are still, named Fusiliers, being armed with the _fusil_, a light French musket; and by the Scottish Privy Council, in their orders to the army in 1667, it was ordained that the field officers of this corps should command in chief, and give orders in field and garrison, to all troops whatsoever. In 1707 these Guards were placed upon the united British establishment; in February, 1712, they were marched to London; in the following year they shared the duties for the _first_ time with the English Guards, and have _never been in Scotland since_.[36]

3. The Royal Regiment, known of old as the Scottish Archers in France, was at this time abroad at Tangiers, and did not return until 1682, when it arrived in Rochester, reduced to sixteen companies, and after the battle of Sedgemoor was sent into Holland.

4. The Earl of Mar's regiment, which served at Bothwell Bridge, was remodelled in 1689, and now known as the 21st Fusiliers.

5. The infantry regiment of Dalyell is no longer in existence, but Leven's Scottish regiment is now known as the 25th, or Royal Borderers; Angus's Foot--the regiment of our old friend, Uncle Toby--is numbered as the 26th, or Cameronians; and the regiment of Argyle, infamous as the perpetrators of the Glencoe tragedy, is no longer in the service.

6. The Scottish train of artillery, commanded by the Laird of Lundin in 1687, was disbanded at the Union, when Lord Leven was its general, and the last survivor of it, then an old man, served as a volunteer, with Sir John Cope's army, at Preston Pans. In this corps was a strange rank, named "gentlemen of the cannon," as we may learn from a letter of Viscount Teviot, dated 1699, and printed among Carstare's State Papers.

At the union with England, in 1707, it would seem to have been arranged that Scotland should have the first regiment of infantry, theirs being the oldest, and that England should have the first regiment of Dragoons.

The severity with which Dalyell and Drummond treated the Covenanters with these regular troops drove them frantic.

In February, 1677, the former despatched John Creichton, one of his most active, favourite, and relentless troopers, with an ensign and fifty soldiers of the Foot Guards, to seize Adam Stobie, of Luscar, near Culross, in Fife, "a fellow who," as the captain says, "had gone through the west, endeavouring to stir up sedition in the people by his great skill in canting and praying."

After surrounding his house in the night, the unfortunate Covenanter was discovered in concealment under some straw in a lime-kiln, from whence he was at once dragged forth. His daughter, in tears and terror, besought mercy of Creichton, and offered to ransom her father for two hundred dollars; but the trooper knew too well the inflexibility of his general, and, though not always insensible either to the voice of a woman or the offer of a handsome sum, he marched back to Edinburgh, and presented Stobie to Dalyell, together with four other recusants, who had been found in Culross by the Ensign of the Guards.

On the 22nd of February, the General brought his prisoners before the Privy Council, who fined Stobie three thousand marks for keeping conventicles and _conversing_ with intercommuned persons. After paying this he was to be transported; but he saved their lordships further trouble on his account by breaking from his prison and escaping in the night. After this he joined in the next rising, and is believed to have been slain at Bothwell Bridge, as he was never heard of afterwards.

About this time Francis Stuart, the Earl of Bothwell's grandson, was recommended by Dalyell to Charles II. for a commission, and was appointed Captain of Horse with John Creichton, who had hitherto been with him in the Life Guards, as his lieutenant, and these officers served under Colonel Graham, of Claverhouse, at the battle of Drumclog; for after the murder of Archbishop Sharpe on Magus Muir, the armed field conventicles had increased in every part of the country, and discontent, with sullen desperation, were rapidly moulding the people into a mass that was ready for revolt. Conflicts with the soldiers were of daily occurrence, and many of them were barbarously murdered, in lonely billets and solitary parts of the country, by the more savage or fanatical of the hill men, as the recusants were named, from their habit of usually lurking in the mountains.

Superstition was not wanting to lend a darker and more terrible hue to the events of the time, as Scotland is peculiarly the land of omens. Atmospheric visions were everywhere visible, if we are to believe such old memorialists as Law and others.

At Kilbryde, near Glasgow, two armies were seen in the sky, firing platoons of musketry at each other; "the fyre and smock were seen, but without noise or crak." On the slope of a lonely hill near Eastwood Muir, the tall apparition of a blood-red spectre was seen to tower suddenly between the terrified beholders and the blue sky, while a dreadful voice exclaimed--

"Woe! Woe unto the land!"

At a conventicle, suppressed in Fife by Adam Masterton of Grange, an officer of the Life Guards, the fugitive women, who observed the conflict from a distance, asserted that they could perceive, to their awe and terror, "the form of a tall man of majestic stature," hovering in mid air "above the people all the while of the soldiers shooting."

In August, 1678, the devil, who seemed always in those days to take a deep interest in Scottish affairs, held a great meeting of witches and warlocks in Lothian, "where," saith the veracious Law, "there was a warlock who formerly had been admitted to the ministry in the Presbyterian times, and who, when the bishops came in, conformed with _them_; but being deposed, he now turns under the devil, a preacher of hellish doctrine." In the March of the same year, he adds, a tremendous voice was heard in the ancient and half-ruined Abbey of Paisley, exclaiming--

"Woe, woe, woe! Pray, pray, pray!"

Showers of blood and of Highland bonnets, afforded the crones, elsewhere, ample matter for discussion and wonder.

Amid all this absurdity, while the tyrant Lords of Council tortured and hung peasants and preachers, of ruined honourable and long-descended families, for worshipping God as their hearts desired, and for doing so, in wild and sequestered places, or for refusing to say God save a King, who was _uncovenanted_; while Dalyell had every satanic power attributed to him, and the black charger of Claverhouse was believed to be the veritable devil himself, the efforts of some to promote godliness in the land were alike melancholy and amusing; thus people were punished for taking snuff in time of sermon, for carrying water on the Sabbath day, and for a thousand charges equally frivolous.

To repress the conventicles which began to assume a more formidable aspect, from the number of armed men who attended them, additional garrisons were established. Two peers and ten barons, who were obnoxious to Lauderdale, were lawlessly dispossessed of their mansions, which were converted into military stations. In each of these Dalyell placed a company of infantry and ten troopers, who were supplied with everything by provincial assessment or military contribution. Fathers were made responsible for their children; husbands for their wives; magistrates for their citizens; landlords for their tenants; and thus, by a network of military tyranny, it was resolved that at the sword's point, Scotland should become a highly episcopal country. Five hundred marks were offered for the seizure of any one who held a religious meeting; and four thousand pounds sterling was an ordinary price for the head of a good preacher. Others were valued according to their reputation among the people; and under such laws as these the troops of his sacred Majesty King Charles made plenty of prize-money and plunder.

The barbarities to which the people were subjected at last attracted the attention of the English House of Commons, who appointed a committee to inquire into these affairs, and into the Act empowering the Privy Council at Edinburgh to march the Scottish army wheresoever they chose; but there the matter ended. The Government was then _federal_, and any interference might have caused another national rupture.

Roused at last to more open resistance, a body of these poor people appealed again to that which of old was ever the Scotsman's best and most ready argument--the sword--and the defeat of Claverhouse's cavalry at Drumclog was deemed a sure omen of great events to come. They established their camp at Hamilton, and unfurled a standard, which is still preserved at Edinburgh. It is blue, crossed by the white saltire of St. Andrew, and is inscribed--

"COVENANTS--RELIGION--KING AND KINGDOMES."

Robert Hamilton, of Preston, a brave but intolerant and injudicious man, assumed the command. He was without experience as a leader, and his followers were destitute of all discipline as soldiers; hence dissensions were of hourly occurrence in the camp.

Alarmed by the tidings of this rising, the end of which no one could then foresee, the King sent his son James, Duke of Monmouth and Buccleugh, to assume command of the Scottish troops, and enforce the restoration of order. The duke brought with him four troops of English horse, commanded by a Major Main, a novelty which did not increase his popularity in Scotland, where English troops had not been seen since Cromwell's time. At the head of ten thousand men, with a fine park of artillery, he marched westward at midsummer, against the insurgents.

"Upon the duke being made commander-in-chief, Dalyell refused to serve under him," says Captain Creichton, "and remained at his lodgings in Edinburgh, till his Grace was superseded, which happened about a fortnight after."

The principal officers in the kingdom attended the duke on this expedition. Among them were the Earl of Linlithgow, with his regiment of Foot Guards; the Earl of Mar, with his regiment of Fusiliers; the Marquis of Montrose, the Earls of Airley and Home, and Graham of Claverhouse, all commanders of horse; while a host of cavalier nobles and gentlemen attended him to serve as he might require.

On the 22nd of June, he found the Covenanters in position at the bridge of Bothwell, where the Clyde is seventy-one yards wide. This picturesque old bridge was twelve feet broad, and one hundred and twenty feet long, with a rise of twenty in the centre, where there was a barrier gate, which was removed in 1826. This gate Preston had barricaded, while flanking the approaches with musketry. To three hundred stout hearts led by Hackston of Rathillet, and the stern John Balfour of Kinloch, otherwise styled of Burley, was confided the keeping of the bridge, and well these brave men kept it too, under a heavy fire of cannon and musketry, to which the flankers of the bridge replied by firing briskly from behind the thickets of alder and hazel trees which clothed the banks of the stream.

Under cover of a cannonade, Lord Livingstone led the assault, at the head of his father's regiment, the Scottish Foot Guards, and despite its barricade of stones and timber, and all the efforts of its desperate defenders, the gate was stormed by the infantry, and the bridge was carried by the clubbed musket and levelled pike, after a fierce contest. Then a body of the Lennox Highlanders, led, say some authorities, by General Dalyell; by their own chief, Macfarlane, say others, raised the war-cry of _Loch sloy_ and flung themselves, claymore in hand, on the main body of the Covenanters, while Claverhouse with the Life Guards--all burning to avenge their recent defeat at Drumclog--defiled across the bridge at full speed, and forming in squadron on the opposite side, swept all before them, as they might have driven a flock of sheep. Main's English dragoons and the Highlanders are accused of behaving with great barbarity in slaughtering the fugitives. The aged Laird of Earlstone prayed for quarter from Major Main, who ran him through the body and slew him on the spot.

When the charge was over, the gentlemen of the Scottish Life Guards became so exasperated on seeing the Covenanters treated thus by Englishmen, that they fell, sword in hand, upon Main's dragoons, and cut many of them down, "being grieved," as the Rev. John Blackadder has it, "to see Englishmen delighting so much to shed their countrymen's blood."

In the streets of Hamilton the reckless Balfour of Burley made a bold attempt to rally the fugitives; but a musket-ball broke his sword arm, as his troopers reined up their horses in the thoroughfare.

"Withered be the hand that fired the shot--I can fight no longer now!" he exclaimed in bitterness, as the weapon fell from his grasp, and once more the flight was renewed.

Four hundred Covenanters were slain on the field, and twelve hundred were made prisoners; these, on the evening after the battle, were marched to Edinburgh, where they were thrust into the Greyfriars churchyard, like sheep penned in a fold. Some were selected for the scaffold, the rest were banished to the plantations, and of these many perished miserably at sea.

The pursuit was scarcely over and the troops returned to their various colours, when old General Dalyell, on horseback and in fiery haste, lest the fighting should all be over, arrived from Edinburgh, with a new commission appointing _him_ commander-in-chief. This document, which he had received by express from London, was dated 22nd June, 1679, the very day of the encounter. It did not, however, entirely supersede the authority of the Duke of Monmouth, who by the Privy Council was styled "Lord General." Dalyell is said to have publicly upbraided the gentle duke with his clemency to the prisoners, and for the tenor of the orders he issued before the battle. These were, to yield quarter to all who asked it, to make as many prisoners as possible, and to spare life.

"Had _my_ commission come _before_ the battle," said Dalyell, grimly, "these rogues should never more have troubled the king or country."

He marched the troops to Glasgow, and three days afterwards--the insurrection being deemed at an end--they were dispersed in detachments throughout the Lowlands, most of them being sent to where they were far from welcome--their old quarters.

After the battle, Dalyell captured the Reverend John King, a preacher who had once been chaplain to the exiled Lord Cardross. This gentleman he sent in irons to Edinburgh, escorted by a guard of Main's dragoons, and on their march from Glasgow there occurred a strange accident, which the people believed to be a visitation of Heaven. One of these troopers, at a wayside alehouse, drank, "Confusion to the Covenant!" and being asked "where he was going,"

"I am carrying King to hell," said he, an answer likely enough to be made by a reckless soldier.

"The judgment of Heaven did not linger on this wretch," records the superstitious Wodrow; "he had not proceeded many paces on his journey, when his horse stumbled, his carbine went off and shot him dead."

King perished on the gibbet soon after, and had his head and right hand cut off.

In the winter after the battle, Dalyell quartered himself at Kilmarnock, with one battalion of Linlithgow's Foot Guards, and the horse troops of the Earl of Airlie and Captain Francis Stuart of Bothwell.

"Here," says Captain Creichton, "the general, one day happening to look on while I was exercising the troop of dragoons, asked me when I had done, whether I knew any one of my men who was skilful in praying well in the style and tone of the Covenanters? I immediately thought upon one named James Gibb, who had been born in Ireland, and whom I had made a dragoon. This man I brought to the general, assuring his Excellency 'that if I had raked hell, I could not find his match in mimicking the Covenanters.' Whereupon the general gave him five pounds to buy him a greatcoat and a bonnet, and commanded him to find out the rebels, but be sure to take care of himself among them.

"The dragoon went eight miles off that very night, and got admittance into the house of a notorious rebel, pretending he had come from Ireland out of zeal for the cause, to assist at the fight of Bothwell Bridge, and could not find an opportunity since of returning with safety; and therefore, after bewitching the family with his gifts of praying, he was conveyed in the dusk of the evening by a guide to the house of the next adjoining rebel, and thus in the same manner from one to another, till in a month's time he got through the principal of them in the west, telling the general at his return, that he 'made the old wives, in their devout fits, tear off their biggonets and mutches;' he likewise gave the general a list of their names and places of abode, and into the bargain brought back a good purse of money in his pocket."

"How used you to pray among them?" asked Dalyell.

"It was my custom in my prayers," replied the trooper, "to send the king, the ministers of state, the officers of the army, with all their soldiers and the episcopal clergy, all at one broadside to hell; but

## particularly our general himself."

"What," exclaimed the general, "did you also send _me_ to hell, sir?"

"Yea," replied the unabashed dragoon, "you at the head of them as their leader."

This discreditable abuse of hospitality and breach of faith in the soldier is recorded as a piece of admirable tact and strategy by Creichton, and doubtless Dalyell would make good use of the notes supplied to him.

In the month of July, in the following year, 1680, Dalyell sent Creichton with thirty of Airlie's horse, and fifty of Strachan's dragoons, under Captain Bruce of Earlshall, to capture or kill a hundred and fifty Covenanters, who, since the fight at Bothwell, had been lurking in the wilds of Galloway. These unfortunates, after being tracked from place to place by Bruce and Creichton, made a stand against them at Airsmoss, near Muirkirk, on the 22nd July, and there these desperate men fought as only the homeless and the outlawed, the brave and the foredoomed, can fight; but they were routed, and fourteen of them were taken prisoners. Among these was David Hackston, of Rathillet, who had been present at the murder of the Archbishop of St. Andrews. Sixty were slain, and one of these was Richard Cameron, a preacher, and formerly a schoolmaster at Falkland, for whose capture five thousand marks had long been offered by the government at Edinburgh.

"Lord!" he exclaimed, before the cavalry charged; "Lord, spare the green and take the ripe! Come on," he added, drawing his sword, "let us fight it out to the last. This is the day I longed for! This is the death I have prayed for; to die fighting against the avowed enemies of the Lord."