Thomas Dalyell
Of Binns, General of the Scottish Army, and First Colonel of the Scots Grey Dragoons
In my novel of The Scottish Cavalier I have endeavoured to portray the character of this celebrated cavalier officer, with all that military sternness and ferocity of disposition which has generally been attributed to him, but chiefly by his enemies, for the poor man seems never to have found a single friend among the many historians of the Covenant. Thus, notwithstanding his unwavering loyalty to the House of Stuart in the days of its declension, by his extreme severity when that House was in the zenith of its power, he became so unpopular in Scotland, that his memory is still execrated there. He is stigmatized as a “persecutor,” as the Bloody Dalyell, whose spirit is yet averred to haunt the fields where he routed or slew the children of the Covenant—who had sold himself to the devil; one who was shot-proof, and
“Whose form no darkening shadow traced
Upon the sunny wall;”
one who, when he spat, burned a hole in the earth; one in whose military boots water would boil, and whose spectre, habited in a buff coat and morion, wearing that voluminous white beard for which he was so remarkable, still haunts the house in which he was born and the tomb in which he lies.
Descended from an old baronial family, which was afterwards ennobled by the Earldom of Carnwath, and which acquired its estates about the end of the sixteenth century he was the son of Thomas Dalyell, of the Binns, in West Lothian, and of the Honourable Janet Bruce, a daughter of the first Lord Bruce of Kinloss, the eminent minister of James VI.—a peer whose skill in statecraft, in conjunction with the Earl of Mar, was of great service in securing James’s peaceful accession to the English throne in 1603.
Thomas Dalyell, the younger, is said to have been born about the year 1599, during the reign of James VI. in Scotland, at his father’s house of Binns, in the parish of Abercorn, Linlithgowshire. The ancient name is Dalyell; but the z has since crept in, by the corruption of the letter y in old Scottish orthography, and hence the pronunciation of it so puzzling to an English tongue.
Dalyell is first heard of as an officer of those auxiliary Scottish troops sent to Ireland by their native Parliament, at the request of Charles I., to protect the Ulster colonists, and assist in repressing the rebellion under Sir Phelim O’Neil and Macguire, when the dreadful massacre of the English took place.
For this service the Parliament of Scotland levied eight battalions of infantry, of whom two thousand five hundred were Highlanders. Arms for three thousand men were offered to the Irish Protestants, and the castles of Craigmore and Carrickfergus, two small strongholds in the north of Ireland, were supplied with all requisite munitions of war from the magazines at Dumbarton.
The colonels of the eight Scottish regiments which mustered in November, 1641, were as follow:—
Archibald, Earl of Argyle, afterwards executed for treason in 1660.
Sir Duncan Campbell, of Auchinbreck, who was afterwards slain at the battle of Inverlochy.
Sir Mungo Campbell, of Lawers. These three had Highland battalions.
Alexander Lord Forbes, who had served the King of Sweden.
William, Earl of Lothian.
Alexander, Earl of Eglinton.
Lord Sinclair.
The Earl of Lindesay.
Major-General Sir David Leslie, of Pitcairly, was to command the whole. Argyle deputed the leading of his regiment to its lieutenant-colonel, James Wallace, of Auchans; Lord Sinclair’s was led by his major, Sir James Turner, the celebrated military memorialist, and that of the Lord Lindesay was led by Major Borthwick.
Thomas Dalyell was an officer in these forces, but to which corps he was attached is not clearly known. He was with the first column of those auxiliaries which, under Major-General Munro—an officer who had long served with distinction in Germany, at the head of Lord Reay’s Highlanders—embarked on the 2nd of April, 1642, for Ireland. He had with him three thousand infantry, six hundred cavalry, and a train of guns. Landing in the north of Ireland, he took possession of Carrickfergus, and in it placed a garrison under young Dalyell’s command.
The second column sailed for Ireland on the 27th of July under Sir David Leslie, the same general who afterwards commanded the Scottish army at the battle of Dunbar, and for his services was raised to the peerage as Lord Newark.
At Carrickfergus Munro shot thirty Irish prisoners who were accused of committing outrages upon the Protestants. Local tradition has swelled this number to three thousand, and adds that they were thrown over certain rocks named the Gobbins.
On the 28th and 29th of April Munro was joined at Carrickfergus by Lord Conway and Colonel Chichester, with eighteen hundred English infantry, five troops of horse, and two of dragoons; and in May he succeeded in effecting a junction with Sir Henry Tichbourne of Beaulieu, when their united forces mustered only two thousand horse and twelve thousand infantry. At this time the pay of an English colonel was 3l. a week; of a captain, 2l.; of a private, 3s. 6d. In 1645 more troops were required in Scotland to oppose the Cavaliers on the one hand, and the Irish on the other; thus, on the 27th of February, the Scottish shires and boroughs mustered a great force, whose pay was 6s. Scots per day.
It is not improbable that Dalyell was at the battle of Benburb, a village of Tyrone, where, in the spring of 1646, General Munro was defeated by the Irish, and forced to retire, with the loss of three thousand four hundred and twenty-three slain; Lord Montgomerie, twenty-one other officers, a hundred and fifty privates, the Scottish artillery, twenty stand of colours, and fifteen hundred baggage and cavalry horses taken. “In vain did Lord Blaney take pike in hand, and stand in the ranks. Though exposed to the play of Munro’s guns and musketry, the Irish infantry charged up hill without firing a shot. They met a gallant resistance; but Blaney and his men held their ground long, till the superior vivacity and freshness of the Irish clansmen bore him down.”
In 1648 we still find Dalyell, then a colonel, in command at Carrickfergus, when that little fortress was surprised by General Monk, who took possession of it in the name of the English Parliament, and made both Munro and Dalyell prisoners of war. The former he sent to London.
Henry Guthry, Bishop of Dunkeld, in his Memoirs, asserts that the castle was surrendered to Monk treacherously, by the Earl of Glencairn’s regiment, which formed the garrison.
Dalyell was so deeply imbued by the Cavalier loyalty of the period, that about this time, on the death of Charles I., to testify his grief, he made a vow never to shave his beard until he had avenged him; and he cultivated this appendage to his stern visage until it attained great length and volume, for it covered his whole breast and descended below his girdle, as we may still see by the portraits of him. At this period vow beards, as they were named, were not unusual with the more resolute and enthusiastic of the Cavaliers. The comb with which Dalyell was wont to dress his hair is still preserved at Binns, “and it gives a vast idea of the extent of beard and of the majestic character of Dalyell in general, being no less than twelve inches broad, while the teeth are at least six inches deep.”
Dalyell was too enterprising and restless a spirit to remain long a prisoner; for he soon achieved his liberty, and, on returning to Scotland, was appointed major-general, and held that rank in the army, which consisted of eleven regiments of horse and twenty battalions of infantry, with fourteen field pieces, and which was led by Charles II. into England in 1651. At the head of his brigade he fought bravely at the fatal field of Worcester, where, on the defeat of the Scots, he had the misfortune to be again taken prisoner, and, with other officers and captives of rank, was marched, under a sure guard, to London, and committed to the Tower.
Sir Walter Scott, in his history of Scotland, mentions (but I know not on what authority) that he had previously served in the wars of Montrose.
For his loyalty and service in England his estates were declared, by the dominant party in Scotland, to be forfeited, and his name was specially excluded from the general Act of Indemnity. But Dalyell was not to be withheld even by the guards or gates of the Tower of London, for he soon after effected his escape again—how is not recorded; but after lurking somewhere on the Continent, he suddenly made his appearance, in March, 1654, off the northern coast of Scotland, in a small vessel, at a time when the Lowlands were overawed by eighteen of Cromwell’s garrisons and by ten thousand regular forces maintained by him, by Argyle, and his adherents.
This was in anticipation of the Restoration, and at a time when the cause of royalty in Britain seemed most desperate. Being joined by a Colonel Blackadder and a slender band of loyalists, he took possession of the castle of Skelko, and, wherever he went, boldly proclaimed the king, and denounced Argyle and Cromwell as rebels and regicides. To stimulate his exertions, he received the following characteristic letter from the young king, Charles II.:—
“Tom Dalyell,
“Though I need say nothing to you by this honest bearer, Captain Mewes, who can tell you all I would have said, yet I am willing to give it to you under my own hand, that I am very much pleased to hear how constant you are in your affection to me, and in your endeavours to advance my service. We have all a hard work to do; yet I doubt not God will carry us through it: and you can never fear that I will forget the good part you have acted, which, trust me, shall be rewarded, whenever it shall be in the power of your affectionate friend,
“Charles R.”31
“Colen, 30th Dec. 1654.”
This attempt of Dalyell’s had been made in unison with the Earl of Glencairn’s rash but gallant expedition to the Highlands, when Glengarry, Lochiel, Struan, and other chiefs, whose swords were never in the scabbard when Scotland or her king required them, met in the wilds of Lochearn, and made an arrangement to rise in arms and attempt a restoration; but all hope of success soon proved desperate, and they dispersed. Dalyell abandoned the castle he had taken, and retired once more to the Continent, where he obtained from the exiled king a letter or certificate, in which his bravery, loyalty, and faith, were warmly extolled and recommended.
Furnished with this, and having nothing else in the world now but his sword and his stout heart, the penniless cavalier resolved to seek his fortune in foreign wars. Proceeding to Russia, which has ever formed so ample a field for Scottish enterprise and valour, he visited the barbarous court of the czar, and applied for military service.
The sovereign then reigning was Alexis Michailowitch, grandson of the patriarch Fedor Romanoff, who in his fifteenth year had succeeded in 1645 to the title of czar; and is chiefly remarkable as being the father of Peter the Great, who raised the Muscovites from the depths of barbarism to a state of comparative civilization.
The letter of Charles II. at once procured for Dalyell the rank of lieutenant-general in the service of Muscovy; but great obscurity involves his career in that country, for even the wars in which he was engaged were little noted by the rest of Europe.
He was now in his fifty-fifth year.
Alexis invited several other Scots to join his army being anxious to introduce a more regular system of discipline into his ranks; but the most eminent of these were General Drummond, Governor of Smolensko, and the two Gordons,32 who, under Peter the Great, brought to perfection the standing forces of Russia, which however were so few, that in 1687 they amounted to no more than ten thousand men. An old topographical work, published at the Savoy in London, in 1711, mentions that “the Russians endeavoured to bring their soldiers under better discipline; for which end they made use of a great many Scots and German officers, who instruct them in all the warlike exercises that are practised by other European nations.”
At that time—the beginning of the last century—their infantry were armed with a musket, sword, and an axe, which were slung behind; their cavalry were clad in steel morions and cuirasses, and were armed with bows, arrows, iron mouls, sabres, targets, and spears; and in the epoch of Dalyell, their army had a great battle-drum, which was fastened to the backs of four horses abreast, and had eight drummers to beat upon it.
His first active service was against the Poles, with whom Alexis Michailowitch had gone to war in 1653, and from whom he captured Smolensko, which he united to Russia, and Kiow, after committing frightful devastations in Lithuania. The Russian armies then invaded Livonia, stormed Dorpt, Kokenhausen, and other places, but were obliged to retire from before Riga with severe loss.
Dalyell was now raised to the rank of full general, and commanded against the Tartars, and the Turkish armies of Mohammed IV.—the son of the debauched Sultan Ibrahim—against whom Alexis declared war about this time (1654-5); and in these contests, waged at the head of barbarous hordes against hordes equally barbarous, the wanderer must have acquired much of that unyielding sternness, if not ferocity, which characterized his future proceedings in his own country. In these campaigns quarter was never asked nor given; prisoners were shot, beheaded, impaled, or put to death by slow fires, and by every species of torture that Muscovite brutality, or the most refined cruelty of the Oriental mind could suggest; and in this terrible arena of foreign service was schooled the future commander-in-chief of the Scottish troops—the scourge of the Covenanters—he to whom was given full power to crush and to destroy the men who struggled for freedom of religious opinion, for liberty of conscience, and who, as they phrased it, “drew the sword for an oppressed Kirk and broken Covenant.”
After eleven years of service in these wild and snow-covered regions, Dalyell requested permission, by desire of Charles II., to return to Scotland. The king had now been restored; Cromwell was in his grave; the Parliament and great officers of state had once more taken upon them the misgovernment of Scotland, and a wicked war was maintained there against the Presbyterian Church, which Lauderdale and his ministry were leaving nothing undone to subvert and to suppress. The Laird of Binns now requested from the czar a certificate of his faithful service in Russia, and a missive to that effect was passed under the great seal of the empire.
“Part of this document,” says Chambers, “was conceived in the following terms:—
“That he formerly came hither to serve our great Czarian Majesty: whilst he was with us, he stood against our enemies and fought valiantly. The military men that were under his command, he regulated and disciplined, and himself led them to battle: and he did and performed everything faithfully, as a noble commander. And for his trusty services we were pleased to order the said lieutenant-general to be a general. And now having petitioned us to give him leave to return to his own country, We, the great Sovereign and Czarian Majesty, were pleased to order, that the said noble General, Thomas, the son of Thomas Dalyell, should have leave to go to his own country.
“And by this patent of our Czarian Majesty, we do testify of him, that he is a man of virtue and honour, and of great experience in military affairs. And in case he should be willing again to serve our Czarian Majesty, he is to let us know of it beforehand, and he shall come into the dominions of our Czarian Majesty, with proper passports. Given at our Court, in the Metropolitan City of Moscow, in the year from the Creation of the World 7173, January 6.”33
From Russia he was accompanied by his countryman and old fellow-soldier, who had served with him in Ireland, General Drummond, who was also summoned by Charles II. and obeyed the royal behest. In an Act passed by the Scottish Parliament in 1686, granting this officer the lands of Torwoodie, it is stated “that upon a call from his majesty’s royal brother, after his restoration, he left a splendid and honourable employment under the Emperor of Russia to give obedience to his native prince, and since his return to this kingdom, he did good and signal service as major-general, in the defeat of the rebels and suppression of the rebellion raised in 1686.”
From a passage in Burnet it would seem, that when the nonjuring exiles at Rotterdam and other Covenanters, were preparing to rise in arms in 1665, and when Charles II. found the necessity of raising more troops, he formally summoned Dalyell home.
“Two gallant officers,” continues the Bishop, in the “History of his own Times,” “that had served him in the wars, and when these were over had gone with his letters to serve in Muscovy, where one of them, Dalyell, was raised to be a general, and the other was advanced to be a lieutenant-general and Governor of Smolensko, were now, but not without great difficulty, sent back by the czar.”
There can be little doubt that Dalyell returned to Scotland, with a heart boiling with rancour against those who had sold and destroyed the king; and who had brought so many of his brother soldiers—the Scottish Cavaliers of Montrose, of Hamilton and Munro—and so many of his own kinsmen, to the scaffold. With this sentiment may have been a longing for vengeance upon those who had been so long dominant in the land; who had deprived him of his estate and driven him into exile; and all these bitter sentiments were doubtless fostered by the inborn prejudice of class, religion, education, and the foreign service of years. To all these must be attributed many of the fierce and relentless acts which are related of him by the historians of the Covenant. Many of these dark deeds must, however, be doubted; and many accepted with caution.
After the Restoration, the Parliament of Scotland, which was presided over by Lieutenant-General the Earl of Middleton as High Commissioner, proved a very pliant and complying body. They granted to Charles II. a revenue of 40,000l. for life, and rescinded all the acts passed by their wiser predecessors for defining or restricting the royal prerogative. The Solemn League and Covenant was pronounced a treasonable and seditious bond; and they passed other acts, by which the Earl of Lauderdale, Secretary of State for Scotland, gradually prepared a way for the abolition of Presbytery, and the restoration of an Episcopal Hierarchy. Alarmed by these measures, the Scottish Kirk sent James Sharpe, one of their most eminent divines, to expostulate with Charles II.; but Sharpe abandoned his colours, and betrayed their cause by accepting the Archbishopric of St. Andrews, while the Marquis of Argyle, James Guthrie, and Johnstone of Warriston, who had conspired with Cromwell, and directly, or indirectly, abetted the sale and execution of Charles I., were consigned to the headsman. Such was the new aspect of affairs, and it made religion and rancour grow side by side in the land.
The rash king next enjoined the Scottish privy council openly to establish Episcopacy, and bishops for the new dioceses were consecrated in England; while Fairfowl, Archbishop of Glasgow, was insane enough to solicit an act of council to eject all recusant ministers, and close their churches until episcopally ordained incumbents could be procured: and by this act, three hundred and fifty parishes, about a third of those in the kingdom, were declared to be vacant; and this tyranny was attempted after all the wars, battles, and bloodshed in defence of the Covenant—after all the armies levied and lives lost since 1638, and after the king himself had perished in attempting to subvert the rights of the people! Now, the Scots became justly more than ever inflamed against the cruelty and injustice of their own government.
Finding their churches closed, they met in arms on the green hill sides, and in lonely muirs, to hold what were termed field conventicles, where the oppression they endured for conscience sake, the recollection of their present danger, and the memory of their struggles made in years gone by, together with the grandeur of the solemn scenery by which they were surrounded, filled their hearts with a splendid enthusiasm and with a purity of soul, as, with the sword by their sides, they worshipped God in those wild places, which, since the days of the Romans, had been the best stronghold of their forefathers.
As a ballad (which I quote from memory) has it:—
“Oh, sad and dreary was the lot of Scotland’s true ones then,
A famine-stricken remnant with scarce the guise of men;
They burrowed few and lonely mid the chill dark mountain caves,
For those who once had sheltered them were in their martyr-graves.
“A sword had rested on the land! it did not pass away;
Long had they watched and waited; but there dawned no brighter day,
And many had gone back from them, who owned the truth of old,
Because of much iniquity their love was waxen cold.”
To crush this growing enthusiasm (which was so great at times, that an angel was more than once averred to have been seen in mid air, overhanging a conventicle), to suppress these armed religious meetings, and enforce Episcopacy on the people, was now the ungrateful task assigned to Dalyell, to Drummond, and the Scottish standing forces, who were all commanded by officers of high Cavalier principles, and were usually men without much scruple in obeying the orders of the king and council.
Alarmed at the spirit of resistance evinced by the people, and remembering perhaps the fate of his father, Charles II. changed the Scottish ministry. Lauderdale had begun to persuade him that more lenient measures were necessary, and Sharpe, whom the Covenanters received as a Judas, retired from the administration of ecclesiastical affairs; but the change came too late, for again the banner which had been displayed so victoriously of old, “for an oppressed Kirk and broken Covenant,” was unfurled, and a body of the Presbyterians rose in arms.
Lieutenant-colonel Sir James Turner, author of a little treatise on the art of war, and of his own Memoirs, from which we may learn that he was a fierce and unscrupulous sabreur, was captured with his troops at Ayr, by the Lairds of Corsack and Barscob at the head of a few followers. Another party of soldiers were routed by them at Dalry, and these insurgents began at once their march for Edinburgh, the seat of government, in the autumn of 1666.
They first proposed to put Turner to death; but spared his life on Corsack discovering that his conduct to the people had been much less severe than the written orders, which were found on his person, had inculcated.
Dalyell at this crisis commanded the king’s troops in the capital. He concentrated all the detachments which were dispersed throughout the adjacent country, and marched westward, by the Glasgow road, to meet these insurgents, whose strength was ever varying, and whose numbers were greatly exaggerated.
“A great many came to the rebels who were called Whiggs,” says Bishop Burnet; “at Lanark, in Clydesdale, they held a solemn fast day, in which, after much praying, they renewed the Covenant and set out their manifesto, in which they denied that they rose against the King, but complained of the oppressions under which they groaned; they desired that Episcopacy might be put down, that the Covenant might be set up, their ministers restored to them; and then they promised that they would be, in all other things, the king’s most obedient subjects.”
Such were the simple and just demands of these poor people. Dalyell followed them closely from place to place with his cavalry, the flower of which were the high-spirited Scottish Life Guards. He published a proclamation, offering pardon to all who within twenty-four hours returned to their own houses; but he threatened with death all who were taken in arms after that brief period. He found the whole country so completely in the interest of the revolters, that he could obtain no intelligence of their number, intention, or movements, save the rumours brought to head quarters by his own parties and horse-patrols; and thus, while he was hovering in the west, by a sudden march, they appeared unexpectedly within four miles of Edinburgh.
Their number had considerably augmented during their march; but few men of any influence or property joined them; as most of the Covenanting gentry had been committed to various castles and prisons, on the plausible pre-text that it was necessary to insure their neutrality in case of a war with the Dutch.
On reaching the vicinity of the Pentland Hills, they numbered about three thousand horse and foot, ill armed and totally undisciplined.
Colonel James Wallace, of Auchans, a descendant of the Wallaces of Dundonald, a brave officer, who had served with distinction in former wars, and been lieutenant-colonel of Argyle’s Highland regiment in Ireland—a veteran soldier, who had seen the battles of Benburb, Kilsythe, and Dunbar, when he was lieutenant-colonel of the Scottish Foot Guards34—took command of the whole, and, knowing how slender was his force, how destitute of succour, and how desperate in purpose and position, he left nothing undone to ensure a victory, or at least a death that should avenge their defeat and fall.
On reaching the secluded village of Colinton, which lies in a deep and wooded hollow, they learned that in Edinburgh, where they confidently expected a great accession, the citizens, under their provost, Sir Andrew Ramsay, were in arms against them, and had made vigorous preparations for a defence. The barrier gates were shut and fortified by cannon; the gentlemen of the neighbouring shires had been summoned to defend the walls; the College of Justice had formed a corps of cavalry, and all gentlemen in the city who possessed horses were ordered to mount, and appear in arms in the Meal Market, under the young Marquis of Montrose, to await the orders of General Dalyell.
The latter sent Alexander Seton, Viscount Kingston, with a body of the Guards, to the old quarries in Bruntsfield Links, with orders to lie there concealed, as across these links lay the direct road to the quarters of the insurgents, who had many friends in the capital; but, overawed by the active measures of the Cavalier government, they—according to Kirkton—“could only fast and pray for them.”
On learning all this, Colonel Wallace marched along the slope of the Pentland Hills, in the hope of being able to effect a retreat towards Biggar. The season was the dreary month of November. Dogged by Dalyell and battered by a storm of wind and rain, the hapless Covenanters had been losing heart, and as their spirit diminished, so did their numbers, which, from three thousand, dwindled down to nine hundred hungry, wet, and famished creatures, “who looked more like dying men than soldiers going to conquer.”
Wallace began to see the hopelessness of the cause he had undertaken; but the spirit of the few who adhered to him never flinched.
“We are not unwilling to die for religion and liberty,” said these brave fellows; “yea, we would esteem a testimony for the Lord and our country a sufficient reward for all our loss and labour.”
They wrote to General Dalyell a long and pathetic letter, setting forth their religious grievances; but no answer was returned to it, save the sound of his trumpets and the clash of the kettle-drums, when, on the afternoon of the 28th of November, his cavalry and infantry—upwards of three thousand strong,—after a fortnight’s constant marching, were seen traversing the western slope of the beautiful Pentland range, and, descending, with all their standards displayed, towards Rullion Green, where these nine hundred devoted men, with their swords and Bibles, awaited them. As Dalyell approached, they sang the seventy-fourth and seventy-eighth Psalms.
Wallace drew up his little band in line, with a few of his toil-worn horsemen covering the right flank, which was somewhat exposed. Desperation and religious enthusiasm enhanced their natural bravery, and twice they repulsed the attack of the royal troops; but it was renewed by Dalyell’s horse, the finest cavalry in Scotland, being principally cavaliers of the Life Guards, nobly mounted and richly accoutred. Dalyell led them on, and, by a single charge, they bore down horse and foot alike, at sword’s point. This was when the dusk was closing on these lofty and heath-clad mountains. Fifty Covenanters were slain, including two eminent Irish divines—Andrew MacCormick and John Crookshanks—who had joined them, and who perished in the front rank.
In this conflict Dalyell and the famous Covenanter, Captain John Paton, of Meadowhead, met hand to hand on horseback, and exchanged several blows before they were separated by the pressure of their soldiers. Paton then discharged his pistols at Dalyell, off whose person the balls were seen to recoil. On perceiving this (and knowing him to be shot-proof, according to a superstitious historian), the captain loaded his pistol with a silver coin, a manœuvre observed by Dalyell; he stepped behind a soldier, who fell, pierced by the coin which was supposed to be proof to any spell; but the same legend is related of Claverhouse at Killycrankie. Paton was among the last who left the field. Dalyell perceived him retiring, and sent three well-mounted troopers in pursuit, and these came to blows with him when he was urging his horse to leap a deep ditch. By a back-handed stroke he clove in two the head and helmet of his first assailant; the other two fell headlong into the ditch, where they lay struggling under their fallen chargers.
“Take my compliments to Dalyell, your master,” said Baton, tauntingly, as he rode off; “tell him that I am not going home with him to-night.”
John Nesbit, of Hardhill, a tall and powerful Covenanter, fell on the field, covered with wounds, but was found to be alive next day, when he was stripped and about to be interred with the dead. He was a brave man, and had served in foreign wars, for which he was made a captain of Musketeers at Bothwell some years after.
The gloom of the November night, and a sentiment of chivalry—of pity, perhaps, for their poor and persecuted countrymen—inspired the Life Guards to spare the fugitives, the mass of whom escaped and dispersed; but eighty prisoners—among whom was Neilson, the unfortunate Laird of Corsack—were taken, and these were next day marched in triumph through the streets of Edinburgh, while cannon thundered a salute from the castle, and the bells rang in every steeple; while the streets resounded with the tramp of the cavalry, who, with standards advanced and kettle-drums beating, escorted them to prison. “It is recorded that Andrew Murray, an aged Presbyterian minister, when he beheld the ferocious Dalyell in his rusted head-piece, buff coat, and long waving beard, riding at the head of his cavalier squadrons, who, flushed with victory, surrounded the manacled prisoners with drawn swords and cocked carbines—and when he heard the shouts of acclamation from the people, was so overpowered with grief for what he deemed the downfall for ever of God’s Covenanted Kirk, that he became ill, and expired.”
The dead were buried on the field, and there may yet be seen, within a small and rude enclosure, which is overshadowed by a few trees, a monument bearing an inscription to the memory of Crookshanks, MacCormick, and others who lie where they fell. At the back of the Pentland Hills runs a rivulet named the Deadman’s-grain, from the circumstance of a wounded Covenanter falling there when pursued by a cavalier trooper. Drawing a pistol from his holsters, he fired it at his pursuer underneath his bridle arm, but, missing, shot his own horse in the flank. The animal fell, and his rider was immediately slain, where his green grave is yet shown by the side of the mountain burn.
At Easton, in Dunsyre, there was long visible a lonely grave, in which, according to a tradition transmitted from father to son, there lay a Covenanter who had expired of wounds received at Rullion Green. It was opened in 1817, and found to contain the skeleton of a tall man, with two silver coins dated 1620. On being touched, the bones crumbled to dust.
Colonel Wallace, on seeing all lost, left the field, accompanied by Mr. John Welsh, and, favoured by the darkness, took a north-westerly direction among the hills, and escaped. After long concealment and enduring many privations, he reached the Continent, and died in penury, at Rotterdam, in 1678.
It is a strange circumstance that, after the rout of his followers, many of them were slain by the Lothian peasantry.
Of the unfortunate prisoners, the servile and barbarous Scottish Privy Council made a severe example. Twenty were executed at Edinburgh, ten being hanged upon the same gibbet at once; seven were executed at Ayr, and many were hanged before their own doors in other parts of the country. The heads of those who perished at Edinburgh were fixed above the city gates, and their right arms and the hands with which they subscribed the Covenant were affixed to the Tolbooths of Lanark and other towns.
When Gordon, of Knockbreck, and his brother were hanged on the same gibbet, they clasped each other in their arms, that together, and at once, they might endure the pangs of death.
Like all Covenanters, the whole of these men maintained, with their dying breath, that they had taken up arms not against the king, but against the insupportable tyranny of the Episcopal prelates. And that these men, and such as these, did not die in vain, the future history of their country has shown, for their last words left an echo that lingers yet in the hearts of the people.
Dalyell was highly complimented by the Council for this victory, and Neilson of Corsack, the most important of his prisoners, was ordered to be tortured in that dark, panelled room under the Parliament Hall, wherein sat the Council, over which the Duke of Rothes presided.
Neilson of Corsack was a country laird, who had been long distinguished for gentleness and amiability of disposition; but rage at the ill-treatment he received from the new clergy alone drove him to despair, and from despair to arms. On his refusal to become an Episcopalian, by the information (or at the instance) of the curate of his parish, he was dragged from his house, fined, and imprisoned, while his delicate wife and little children had been driven as outcasts into the mountains. Soldiers were then quartered on his lands, and his cattle were carried off. This was scarcely such treatment as a Scottish gentleman of the seventeenth century would endure with calmness. Rendered desperate, Corsack took to his sword, and commanded the party which surprised Sir James Turner, whose life he subsequently saved. That officer was not ungrateful for the act, and did all in his power to obtain mercy for him, but in vain. The Council were inexorable, and “Corsack was so cruelly tortured by the iron boots, that his shrieks were sufficient to move the heart of a stone.”
The thumbikins were the favourite instrument of torture most generally resorted to by the Lords of Council. These were small steel screws which compressed the thumb-joint, or whole hand if necessary, and were an invention brought to Scotland by General Dalyell from the Continent.
Charles II. distinctly, by letter, ordained the Privy Council to substitute banishment for torture and death; but his missive was concealed, and in his name the work of cruelty still went on, and still unsated by the daily horrors furnished by the result of the conflict at Rullion Green, Generals Dalyell and Drummond were ordered into the Shires of Ayr, Dumfries, and Galloway, to complete the destruction of any Covenanters or recusants who might remain in these districts.
In this year, and most probably for that duty, he raised a regiment of infantry; but it has long ceased to exist, and was probably one of the many Scottish corps disbanded at the peace of Ryswick.
While on this new service the enemies of Dalyell record innumerable instances of cruelty perpetrated by him; and though his temper was hot and his character undoubtedly fierce and resolute, these stories must be accepted under reservation.
“The forces were ordered to lie in the west,” says Burnet, “where Dalyell acted the Muscovite too grossly. He threatened to spit men and to roast them, and he killed some in cold blood, or rather hot blood, for he was then drunk, when he ordered one to be hanged because he would not tell where his father was, for whom he was in search. When he heard of any who did not go to church, he did not trouble himself to set a fine upon him, but sent as many soldiers as might eat him up in a night. And the clergy were so delighted with it, that they used to speak of that time as the poets do of the golden age. They looked upon the soldiery as their patrons. They were ever in their company, and complying with them in their excesses, and, if they are not much wronged, they rather led them into them, than checked them for them. Dalyell himself and his officers were so disgusted with them, that they increased the complaints, that had now more credit from them than from those of the country, who were looked on as their enemies. Things of so strange a pitch in vice were told of them, that they seemed scarce credible.”
And this severe picture of the Episcopal Clergy is given by a Scottish Bishop, which renders it the more worthy of credence.
It is recorded of Dalyell, that once, when inflamed by passion, he struck a prisoner on the face with the hilt of his dagger so severely that blood flowed from the wound but it must be remembered that this person had boldly taunted the fierce old man, as “a Muscovite beast who used to roast men alive!” He established his head-quarters at Lanark for some weeks, and there he imprisoned many Covenanters in a damp dungeon, which was so narrow that, owing to their number, they could neither sit nor lie at length with comfort; and where they were deprived of all accommodation for preserving cleanliness or decency.
While his troops were in this town, a peasant when passing through the streets was seized by a patrol, and brought before him; and because this man either could not, or would not, give such information as would commit some of the prisoners, he was condemned to instant death. He begged one night’s reprieve, that he might prepare to die, and make his peace with Heaven; but even this was denied him, and, according to the historians of the Kirk, he was dragged into a neighbouring field, shot dead by a platoon of carbines, stripped and left nude upon the ground.
On another occasion, we are told that he ordered a woman, who had aided the escape of a fugitive, to be cast into a hole filled with toads and reptiles, where she died in great misery.
Such stories seem exceedingly improbable, yet they pass current in Scotland, and are still believed to the present day.
In Dumfries the soldiers were accused of “having tied a man neck and heels to a pole, and turned him like a joint of meat before a great fire.” In Kilmarnock, the men of Dalyell’s regiment placed an old recusant in a dungeon, which was destitute of vent or chimney, and there tortured him by the smoke of a coal fire. When almost suffocated he was borne forth, amid laughter and derision, to the open air, and permitted to revive. After this he was imprisoned again; and this torture was continued for several nights and days.
At Dalry, Sir William Bannatyne, one of Dalyell’s officers, ordered a woman who had been accessory to the escape of her husband, to be tortured by having lighted musket-matches tied between her clenched fingers, a cruelty by which she lost one hand entirely, and some days afterwards expired of torture. A farmer, whom this officer was dragooning, and from whom he was extorting money, asked why he was thus fined.
“Because,” replied Sir William, with provoking candour, “you have great gear, and I must have part of it.”
And on service so barbarous as this, the year 1667 passed away; and the estates of the forfeited Wallace of Auchans and others were bestowed by Parliament upon Dalyell and Drummond, or were retained by the grasping officers of State to enrich themselves. Thus for a time the unhappy Covenanters seemed to be completely crushed. Upon Dalyell was conferred the valuable estate of Mure of Caldwell, who had been accessory to that revolt which terminated at the Pentland hills; but of this property his family were deprived by the Revolution of 1688. Those who made peace with the Government, by interest, bribery, or fines, received protections, of which the following, in my own possession, granted the year before Bothwell, may serve as an example:—
“At Glasgow, the twenty day of March, 1678.
“For saemeikelas Major Alexander Coult of Garturke, in the parish of Monkland, hath signed the bond appoynted by the Lords of His Maties Privy Councell ffor himself and all such who live under him, ffor their peaceable and orderlie deportment; the Comitty of His Maties Privy Councell do hereby take the said Major Alexander Coult under their special protection and safeguard: and hereby discharge all officers and souldiers to trouble or molest the said Major Alexander Coult, his house, famillie, tenants, cottars or servants, or any belonging to him, in their personal gudes or estate, as they will be answerable at their highest perill, and allows him to have and wear his wearing sword and pistolls. “Glencairne,
“Strathmore, Wigtoune,
“Airlie, Caithness.”
Captain John Creichton, the celebrated cavalier trooper, who served long, both as a private and officer, under Dalyell in Scotland, and whose interesting memoirs were published by Dean Swift, has left us the following portrait of his stern leader, and it is so graphic that I may be pardoned quoting it entire.
“He was bred up very hardy from his youth, both in diet and clothing. He never wore boots, nor above one coat, which was close to his body, with close sleeves like those we call jockey coats. He never wore a peruke, nor did he shave his beard since the murder of King Charles the First. In my time his head was bald, which he covered only with a beaver hat, the brim of which was not above three inches broad. His beard was white and bushy, and yet reached down almost to his girdle. He usually went to London once or twice in a year to kiss the King’s hand, who had a great esteem for his valor and worth. His unusual dress and figure, when he was in London, never failed to draw after him a great crowd of boys and other young people, who constantly attended at his lodgings, and followed him with huzzas, as he went to court and returned from it. As he was a man of humour, he would always thank them for their civilities when he left them at the door to go to the King, and would let them know exactly at what hour he intended to come out again and return to his lodgings.
“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.”
He was shot and buried in the moss, where his grave is still shown; but his head and hands were conveyed by Creichton to head-quarters. So perished this enthusiast; but he bequeathed his name to a sect from which the 26th Scottish Regiment of the Line still takes its title of the Cameronians.
With a barbarity worthy of the Sepoy mutineers his head and hands were exhibited to his aged father, then a prisoner in the gloomy Tolbooth of Edinburgh, and tauntingly he was asked, if he knew to whom they had belonged.
“Oh yes,” said the old man, as he wept and kissed the bloody relics; “they are my son’s—my dear son’s—but good is the will of the Lord!”
After this revolting incident, they were fixed to the Netherbow-porte, the eastern gate of Edinburgh.
Captains Bruce and Creichton had also brought with them from Airsmoss the Laird of Rathillet, who had received many wounds in the skirmish. He was personally questioned by Dalyell, who is said to have threatened to roast him, because his answers to certain queries were brief, sullen, and unsatisfactory. Covenanting writers add, that the general refused to permit Hackston’s wounds to be dressed, and ordered him to be chained to the floor of his dungeon till he was conveyed to Edinburgh, where he was executed by prolonged tortures with a barbarity that had never been equalled, even in those days.
Among others seized by Dalyell was John Spreul, an apothecary in Glasgow, whom he brought before the Council, and accused of being concerned in the fight at Bothwell. His leg was put in the iron boot, and at each query the headsman gave the wedges five strokes with a mallet. “Dalyell,” says Wodrow, “complained that he did not strike strongly enough; upon which, he (the torturer) offered himself the mallet, saying he struck with all his might.” Spreul was afterwards imprisoned on the Bass Rock, where he remained for six years.
Amid the many instances of severity attributed to Dalyell, I must not omit to record one of a different kind.
The most celebrated prisoner taken at Bothwell was Captain John Paton, of Meadowhead, who served under Gustavus Adolphus, and had fought at Kilsythe against Montrose, where he had displayed remarkable bravery and skill in the use of his sword. Dalyell was present when this fine old veteran was examined before the Privy Council. On this occasion a soldier had the rudeness to taunt him with being “a rebel.”
“Sir,” retorted Paton, “I have done more for the King perhaps than you have done—I fought for him at Worcester.”
Some humane impression or soldierly emotion stirred the heart of Dalyell at these words.
“Yes, John, you are right—that is true,” said he: and striking the soldier with his cane, added, “I will teach you, sirrah, other manners, than to abuse a prisoner such as this.” He then expressed sorrow for Paton’s situation, and said he would have set him at liberty had his actions not been subject to the control of others; “but,” he added, “I will yet write to the King, and crave at least your life.”
“I thank you,” replied the unmoved Covenanter; “but you will not be heard.”
It is said that he obtained a reprieve for Paton, but was unable to save his life; for though willing to take the test, the Captain was hanged, by sentence of a quorum of the Council, in the Grassmarket, on the 9th May. In August, 1853, a monument to his memory was erected in the churchyard of Ayr.
Undaunted by all that had passed and was still passing around him, in the September of that year, Donald Cargill, one of the most determined preachers of the Covenant, and one who had long escaped the fangs of the Council, held a conventicle in the Torwood, near Stirling, and with all solemnity and bitterness excommunicated the King, the Dukes of York, Monmouth, and Lauderdale, General Dalyell and others, an act of daring which, at such a time, made a deep impression on the Government; but in the following year he paid for his enthusiasm by the forfeit of his life, being captured by General Dalyell, and executed by the authorities.
Tyranny and local misgovernment had now rendered the condition of poor Scotland sad beyond description.
Through the lonely mosses, the pathless moors, and pastoral mountain districts of their native land, the unhappy Covenanters were hunted like beasts of prey, without a refuge or a resting place but such as Heaven accords to wild animals; and wherever found, captivity or death was the penalty. During twenty-eight years of this military persecution, it has been calculated that eighteen thousand persons suffered death in the field, or by the utmost extremities of torture that the Council could inflict; seventeen hundred were banished to the plantations, and two hundred perished on the scaffold alone; seven thousand are said to have fled to foreign countries, and four hundred and ninety-eight were slain in cold blood, or in casual encounters; and all this was done in the name of God, of Religion, and Law!
In September, 1679, there was a stormy debate in the Scottish Privy Council. By an act of indemnity, his Majesty pardoned all who had been at Bothwell Bridge, ministers and lesser barons excepted, provided they appeared before such persons as the Council should appoint, and signed a bond that never again would they rise in arms against the government. It may readily be believed that very few gave this promise; and from the minutes it would appear that Dalyell and Sir George Mackenzie of Rosehaugh, urged that all who had not done so should be proceeded against as rebels. The President and others pled that to proceed to further extremities would be cruel, as more than four thousand persons, many of whom might be sick or ignorant of the King’s letter, were involved in the measure proposed, and ultimately Dalyell, and those who adhered to him, agreed that the King should once more be addressed on the subject.
The next entry connected with the General runs thus:—
November 6, 1679. “At Privy Council there is a letter read from his Majesty, nominating Lieutenant-General Dalziel commander-in-chief of all the forces of Scotland, with power to him to act as he shall think fit, and only be liable and accountable and judgeable by his Majesty himself; for Dalziel would not accept of it otherways; only he promised and declared, that in difficult exigents he should take the advice of his Majesty’s Privy Council.” (Fountainhall, vol. i.) On the 3rd June, 1680, the Council received a letter from Charles on this subject. It declared that when he gifted forfeitures, he always reserved for his own use the houses standing on the forfeited lands. He also gave Dalyell a Commission of Justiciary, with the advice of nine others, to execute justice on all who were in arms at Bothwell, or failed to take the bond within the period stated, since the 1st of January.
In 1680, the Duke of York and Albany arrived in Edinburgh, to supersede Lauderdale, and took up his residence at Holyrood. Dalyell received him at the head of the troops and a body of armed citizens, consisting of sixty men chosen from the sixteen companies of the Trained Bands which lined the streets. After his arrival, he and his Duchess, Marie d’Este of Modena, so celebrated for her beauty, left nothing undone to ingratiate themselves with the Scottish people, to the end that, if excluded by the Act of Succession from the English throne, they might for themselves secure the ancient crown of Scotland. Everything was studied, done, and adopted to ensure popularity; and one fact is certain, that after the Duke’s arrival the persecution of the Covenanters was much less severe than before. By ostentatious pageants, he revived in the nation what it was even then beginning to forget, the memory of its regal independence and the pride of better days; and thus he sought to make his family less abhorred in the hearts of the people. He projected many improvements at Edinburgh. Among others, the plan for building a bridge across the North Loch, and having a new town built upon the northern ridge; and the Holyrood parties, where tea was seen for the first time in Scotland, the balls and masques of the Ladies Anne, afterwards of Denmark, and Mary, afterwards of Orange, were long the theme of aged demoiselles and stately dowagers in Edinburgh, where the beauty and charming suavity of the young princesses, with their natural gaiety, brightened the gloomy towers and tapestried rooms of the ancient palace: and the memory of these things was transmitted by many a mother and grandmother to their little ones, when the last of that old royal race was far away in hopeless exile and obscurity, and the first grass of spring was sprouting on the graves of Culloden.
The Duke of York and his Duchess are said to have been warned of the lofty spirit and haughty punctilio of the old Scottish aristocracy from a speech of General Dalyell.
James had invited this stern and bearded cavalier to dine with them at Holyrood soon after his arrival; but the Duchess Mary, as a daughter of the ducal Prince of Modena, seemed to consider it somewhat derogatory to her rank to sit with a subject at table, and declined to take her place.
“Madam,” said the old veteran, “I have dined at a table where your father must have stood at my back.”
In this instance it is supposed that he alluded to the board of the Emperor of Germany, whom the Duke of Modena, if summoned, must have attended as an officer of the household. Abashed by the firm retort of this grim old man, the haughty princess at once took her seat, and from thenceforward she and her husband resolved, in their intercourse with the Scottish noblesse, to exercise all the suavity and affability they could command. By various acts of leniency the Duke also sought to win favour.
“General Dalyell,” says old Lord Fountainhall in his Diary, “having caused to be condemned by court martial a sentinel who had been found sleeping at one of the gates of the Abbey, the Duke caused him to be remitted and forgiven all punishment.”
In this year, soon after the Duke’s arrival, the services of the General were required to repress a dangerous demonstration among the students of the Edinburgh University. Being deeply imbued with the sentiments of the Covenanters, on Christmas Day, 1680, these young men resolved to manifest publicly their horror of all prelacy, by burning an effigy of the Pope, a ceremony eminently calculated to offend the royal Duke, as a zealous Catholic; and the magistrates, having resolved at all hazards to prevent this impolitic display, immediately communicated with General Dalyell, that he might have the troops in readiness to overawe the city. In furtherance of their daring scheme, the students posted on all the gates and public places of Edinburgh the following curious placard:—
“AN ADVERTISEMENT.
“These are to give notice to all noblemen, gentlemen, and citizens, that we, the students in the Royal College of Edinburgh (to show our detestation and abhorrence of the Romish religion, and our zeal and fervency for the Protestant), do resolve to burn the effigies of Antichrist, the Pope of Rome, at the Mercat-cross of Edinburgh, at twelve o’clock in the forenoon—being the festival of our Saviour’s nativity. And since we hate tumults as we do superstition, we do hereby, under pain of death, discharge all plunderers, robbers, thieves, whores, and bawds to come within forty paces of our company, and such as shall be found disobedient to these our commands, sibi caveant.
“By our special command, Robert Brown, Secretary to all our Theatrical and Extra-Literal Divertisements.”
By an oath, the students bound themselves to stand by each other, under a penalty, and employed a carver in wood to make them an effigy of his Holiness, “with clothes, triple crown, keys, and other necessary habiliments.”
The Lord Provost, Sir James Dick, reported their intentions to the Duke of York, and threatened that “he would make it a bloody Christmas for them;” while Dalyell marched all the troops from Leith into the Canongate. The Grassmarket, an old quaint street lying to the south of the Castle rock, was filled with troops, whose patrols scoured all the wynds and closes, as the narrow alleys of the ancient city are named. The militia, or trained bands of Edinburgh, occupied the High-street; guards were placed on the College, which stood without the walls, and those at the palace were doubled for additional security to the royal duke and his family.
Undismayed by all these warlike preparations, the students, many of whom were armed with swords and pistols in their belts, mustered in the High School yard, and with loud shouts bore, shoulder high, an effigy of the Holy Father, clad in pontifical robes, with mitre and keys, down the narrow wynd that led from the school to the wynd of the Blackfriars, from whence they boldly issued by an archway into the lower end of the High-street; and there, after reading an accusation and sentence, amid a general cry of Pareat Papa! they set fire to the effigy, which was hollow and filled with gunpowder. To these proceedings the city militia offered no opposition; but, according to the history of this affair, published in Paternoster-row in 1681, “on the first report of what was doing, General Dalyell galloped in with his dragoons through the Netherbow-porte, and was followed by the infantry under the Earl of Mar.”
A scuffle ensued. The Earl of Linlithgow, a Catholic peer, with a few of his Foot Guards, dispersed the students sword in hand, and in making a pass at one of them, fell, amid loud laughter, prostrate before the blazing figure, which was burned to the complete satisfaction of all concerned therein. Many students were captured and threatened with torture by the Council; but for his loyalty in this affair, the house of the Lord Provost, an old manor at Priestfield, near Duddingstone, was one night set on fire by ignited powder-balls, and burned to the ground. A proclamation was issued, banishing all students fifteen miles from the capital, and for closing the gates of the university; but the circumstance of a gunpowder barrel, bearing the Edinburgh Castle mark, being found near Priestfield, caused a general suspicion that some officers of the garrison had a hand in the affair. A reward of two hundred merks was offered for each of the leaders in these outrages; but it was to the honour of the students that not one was betrayed by his comrades.
The civil commotions were now of a nature so serious, that the local government forced the magistrates of Edinburgh to number the inhabitants of the city and its suburbs, and to make accurate lists of all men and women between the ages of sixteen and sixty, for the information of the Lords of Council. The name, rank, or profession of persons in lodgings or hostelries, and of all strangers in the city, were to be delivered nightly by the bailies to the captain of the city guard, who, under a penalty of 100l. Scots, was to send it to the commander-in-chief, or officer next in command.
On the 15th of November, 1681, Dalyell raised that celebrated dragoon regiment, so well known in military history as the Scots Greys, from the peculiar colour of their horses. They were a corps of horse-grenadiers, and were recruited almost exclusively among the sons of the Cavalier gentry and their tenants.37 The regiment is now numbered as the 2nd Cavalry of the Line. They wore the old heavy-skirted buff coat; and it is worthy of remark, that the last time such a garment was worn in the British service was by the colonel who commanded them at Minden, seventy-four years after.
Captain Creichton mentions that, when he was lying in his lodgings at Edinburgh, suffering from sword wounds received at Airsmoss, Dalyell was wont to visit him daily, as he went to the Duke’s Court at Holyrood, and once “did me the honour,” he continues, “to mention me and my services to His Royal Highness, who was desirous to see me. I was admitted to kiss his hand, and ordered to sit down in consequence of my honourable wounds, which would not suffer me to stand without great pain.”
About this time the Reverend John Blackadder, a pious and good man, who had long continued preaching in solitary places, revisited his native country, after having been in Holland, and was captured by a party of soldiers, and brought to Edinburgh, where Johnstone, the town major, at once conveyed him, under escort, to the house of Dalyell, in the Canongate. The account of their interview, and of the examination of Blackadder before the inexorable Lords of Council, are graphically detailed in the memoirs of that unfortunate Covenanter.
The Major conducted him down that long and ancient street to where the General lived, near the old palace porch, which has now been demolished. The prisoner was accompanied by his son Thomas, who in after years died a merchant in New England. It chanced that the dreaded Dalyell, whose white vow-beard and lofty bald head impressed with fear and respect all on whom he bent his stern grey eye, opened the door as they approached, being probably about to walk forth.
“I have brought you a prisoner,” said Major Johnstone.
“Take him to the guard,” replied Dalyell, briefly.
On this the poor minister, whose emotions on finding himself confronted by the scourge of the Covenanters must have been far from enviable, stepped up the stair, and said timidly—
“Sir, may I speak with you a little?”
“You, sir, have spoken too much already,” replied Dalyell, in anger, for he never controlled his wrath at the sight of a Covenanter. “I should hang you with my own hands, over that outshot!”
At that moment Dalyell knew not who Blackadder really was; but finding him in a mood so sullen, and aware that the old man’s anger was not to be trifled with, the Major took his prisoner away. Instead, however, of consigning him to the common guard-house—for Blackadder was a man alike venerable by his years and character—he gave him a room in the house of Captain Murray, of Philiphaugh, where he remained until he was brought to the dread Council chamber for examination before the Duke of Rothes, then Lord High Chancellor of Scotland; Sir George Mackenzie, of Rosehaugh, King’s Advocate; General Dalyell, and Paterson, the last Bishop of Edinburgh.
“Are you a minister?” asked Rothes.
“I am,” replied Blackadder.
“Where?”
“At Troqueer, in Galloway.”
“How long since?”
“Since 1653.”
“Did you excommunicate the King at the Torwood, or were you there at the time?” continued the Chancellor.
“I have not been at the Torwood for these four years.”
“But what do you think of it (the excommunication)? Do you approve of it?”
He was asked the usual ensnaring questions (and, like other prisoners, had the instruments of torture on the table before him) as to whether he approved of the execution of Charles I.; if he had preached in the fields and on the hill-sides, and so forth; but his answers proved unsatisfactory, and, after a long examination, he was sent back to Philiphaugh’s apartments at Holyrood.
On the morning of the next day he sent his son Thomas to a kinsman named Blackadder, who bore the rank of colonel, and had been Dalyell’s comrade in the expedition at Skelko Castle in 1654, and who now exerted himself in his favour, and made such interest with the stern General, that he received the recusant divine with great politeness in the forenoon, when he was again brought before the Council.
“Mr. Blackadder,” said he, “of what family are you—the House of Tulliallan?”
“Yes, General, I am the nearest alive now, to represent that family, although it is now ruined and brought so low.”
Dalyell was also allied by blood to the family of Tulliallan.
“Are you the son of Sir John Blackadder?” asked Bishop Paterson; but the inflexible Covenanter declined his authority as a spiritual lord, and would not reply even to this trivial question.
In the sequel, he was sent prisoner to the Bass, escorted by three Life Guardsmen, and an officer named Rollock, who threatened to pistol him at Fisher-row, when the people gathered to see him pass. On that dreary rock, which was then the home of many a broken heart, the old man died in his seventieth year, and he now lies in the churchyard of North Berwick.38
The publication of a stern and high-toned manifesto against Charles Stuart, and all supporters of his authority, together with the secret murder of two gentlemen of the Life Guards, who had been particularly active in discovering conventicles, and who were assassinated a few nights after its appearance in November, 1684, excited great alarm in the minds of the Scottish ministry. An oath, abjuring the principles inculcated by this document, was ordained to be put to all persons above sixteen years of age, and capital punishment was the penalty of all who refused it. Dalyell took measures still more decisive with the parish where the guardsmen were murdered; and he marched a body of troops to Livingstone, where the officers had authority to summon before them the inhabitants of that parish, and of five others adjacent, that they might be interrogated upon the late seditious manifesto.
Those who owned it were instantly to be shot; and those who refused to answer were also to be shot. Officers and soldiers were sent through Edinburgh—particularly to the Calton, where the poorest and most humble class of citizens resided—to enforce the oath of abjuration and ask ensnaring questions, as to whether the rising at Bothwell was a rebellion, and the slaying of Archbishop Sharpe a murder? “Old women were taken from their wheels, and journeymen and apprentices from the forge, to answer these teazing and captious questions,” and the thumbikins were always at hand to freshen their memories.
A document preserved in the General Register House at Edinburgh, signed by Charles II. at Windsor, 16th of June, 1684, and printed by a literary club, affords us a list of the Scottish standing forces, then commanded by Dalyell, and irrespective of the militia which formed the main strength of the country.
Reduced since Bothwell, the Life Guards then consisted of a hundred men; each officer was furnished with two horses; the pay, sterling, of a captain was 1l. per diem; of the lieutenants 12s.; of the cornets 7s.; of the troopers 2s. 6d.
His Majesty’s regiment of Foot Guards, still commanded by Lieut.-General George, Earl of Linlithgow, consisted of ten companies, each consisting of three officers, two sergeants, two drummers, and seventy-three rank and file, making a total strength, staff included, of eight hundred and seven men.
The grenadiers of the Foot Guard were the same in number as the ten preceding companies.
The Earl of Mar’s regiment consisted of eleven companies of eighty strong. The pay of a captain of infantry was 8s. sterling per diem; the privates received 5d.
A regiment of horse (armed with sword and pistol), consisting of five troops of fifty men each, including officers and men.
A regiment of dragoons (armed with sword, pistol, and musket, for service on horseback or on foot), the Scots Greys, consisting of “six companies,” also of fifty-nine each, including officers. All troopers received 1s. per diem.
The garrison of Edinburgh Castle consisted of 5 officers and 121 soldiers; of Stirling Castle, 3 officers and 47 soldiers; of Dunbarton Castle, 3 officers and 32 soldiers; of the Bass Rock, 1 officer and 28 soldiers.
The train of artillery was commanded by a Master of the Ordnance, whose pay was 120l. per annum, with a conductor, engineer, fireworker, and master gunners.—(Miscellany of the Maitland Club.)
Dalyell’s pay as a Scottish General was 400l. per annum.
Assisted by a militia, this small force proved sufficient, for a time, to coerce all the Lowlands of Scotland.
In July, this year, Mr. William Spence, a follower of the recently forfeited Marquis of Argyle, was tortured by the Privy Council, that he might be forced to reveal all he knew of that noble’s intrigues with the English, and to read certain letters in cypher, which were placed before him by Major Holmes; but on the torture failing to produce the desired effect, “he was,” according to Lord Fountainhall, “put in General Dalyell’s hands; and it was reported that by a hair shirt and pricking (i.e., with a needle), as the witches are used, he was five nights kept from sleep, till he was half distracted. He ate very little that he might require less sleep; yet all this while he discovered nothing; though had he done so, little credit was to be given to what he should say at such a time.”
After this is the following entry:—
“August 7th, 1684. At Privy Council, Spence (mentioned 26th July) is again tortured, and has his thumbs crushed with thumbiekins. It is a new invention used among the colliers when transgressors, and discovered by General Dalziell and Drummond, they having seen them used in Muscovy. After this, when they were about to put him in the boots, he, being frightened, desired time, and he would declare what he knew; whereon they gave him some time, and sequestrated him in the Castle of Edinburgh, as a place where he would be free from any bad advice or impression to be obstinate in not revealing.”
There is something alike quaint and horrible in the quiet and matter-of-fact way in which this old senator records such extra-judicial barbarities; but instruments of torture were then as necessary to the Privy Council as the pen and ink with which their minutes were recorded.
To repress the reviving spirit of the Covenanters, four Commissions of Lieutenancy were, in September, ordained to meet at Glasgow, Ayr, Dumfries, and Dunse. The first, as Dalyell ordered, to be guarded by Lord Ross’s troop of Horse and Captain Inglis’s Dragoons; the second by the troop of Guards and his own Grey Dragoons; the third by the Horse of Claverhouse, Drumlanrig, and Strachan; the fourth by the Horse of Balcarris and Lord Charles Murray’s Dragoons; but now the horrors of this civil and military persecution received a check by the death of Charles II. on the 6th February 1685, and on the accession of his brother, who was immediately proclaimed at Edinburgh, James VII. of Scotland, by the Lyon King and magistrates, and Dalyell received a new commission as commander-in-chief of the kingdom; but the Catholic tendencies of the new court—tendencies to which, with all his hatred of Covenanters and Low Churchmen, “the old Muscovite” was rigidly averse—would not have permitted him to retain his authority long.
Death now, however, solved the important problem of how he was to act at this peculiarly dangerous juncture; he was thus, to use the words of his comrade Creichton, “rescued from the difficulties he was likely to be under, between the notions he had of duty to his prince on one side, and true zeal for his religion on the other;” as he expired suddenly at his house in the Canongate of Edinburgh, in the month of July, 1685.
On the 7th August, while the minute-guns boomed from the dark portholes of the ancient half-moon battery of the castle, his body, in a magnificent hearse, drawn by plumed horses, and having six pieces of brass cannon, his led charger, his suit of armour, and his many trophies, sword, spurs, helmet, and gauntlets, and his general’s bâton, all borne by officers of rank, and escorted by all the standing forces in Edinburgh, with drums muffled, standards craped, and arms reversed, was slowly conveyed through the western gate of the city to Linlithgowshire, and interred in the family vault of the Dalyells at Binns, in the parish of Abercorn.
There the persecuting Cavalier rests in peace, though the superstitious peasantry still aver that his tall, thin, and venerable figure, in buff coat and head-piece, with his vast white beard floating from his grim visage to his military girdle, is seen “in glimpses of the moon,” flitting, like an unquiet spirit, about the old manor house, or in the avenues and parks which were formed by himself around it.
He died in his eighty-fifth year.
The hearts of the Covenanters gathered hope, and held jubilee at his death; and if all be true that is recorded of him, it can scarcely be a matter for wonder that his name and memory are still execrated in Scotland, and that the reputation he has left behind him is not one to be envied.
General Drummond, his old Russian comrade, succeeded him as Commander-in-Chief of the Scottish army; Charles, Earl of Dunmore, was appointed Colonel of the Scots Greys, and the Laird of Livingstone filled the seat left vacant by him, as Commissioner in Parliament for the shire of Linlithgow.
His son Thomas, who succeeded him, was created a baronet of Nova Scotia, and left a daughter, Magdalene Dalyell, who, by her marriage with James Menteith, of Auldcathie, transmitted the property to her son, who thus represented the ancient line of the Earls of Menteith.
In reviewing the life of this singular officer, I cannot do better than quote the words of one of the most temperate and popular of Scottish writers:—
“There are two ways of contemplating the character even of so blood-stained a persecutor as Dalyell. He had, it must be remarked, served royalty upon principle in its worst days, and seen a monarch beheaded by a small party of his rebellious subjects, and a great part of the community, including himself, deprived of their property, and obliged to fly for their lives to foreign lands; and all this was on account of one particular way of viewing politics and religion. When the usual authorities of the land regained their ascendancy, Dalyell must naturally have been disposed to justify and support very severe measures, in order to prevent the recurrence of such a period as the Civil War and the Usurpation. Thus all his cruelties are resolved into an abstract principle, to the relief of his personal character, which otherwise, we do not doubt, might be very good. How often do we see, even in modern times, actions justified upon general views, which would be shuddered at if they stood upon their naked merits, and were to be performed upon the sole responsibility of the individual!”
Such was the chequered military career of the first colonel of the old Scots Greys, certainly one of the most remarkable men of a time replete with bloodshed and cruelty.
The persecuted and the persecutor—the fiery Cavalier and the stern Covenanter—are alike in their quiet graves, and the grass of nearly two hundred years has grown and withered over them. Their strife is becoming, indeed, a tale of the times of old; yet few Scotsmen can look back without emotions of sorrow and compassion to those dark days of religious madness and political misrule when, with all their bravery, their forefathers perpetrated such deeds as made “the angels weep.” But, happily for us, time and the grave mellow the memory of all things.
Footnotes
31 Chambers’ Eminent Scotsmen.
32 Alexander Gordon, of Auchintoul, major-general in the service of the czar, wrote a life of Peter I., which was published at Aberdeen in 1755. “On the 30th November, this year,” says this work, “died also General Patrick Gordon, much regretted by the czar and the whole nation. His majesty visited him five times during his illness—was present at the moment he expired, and shut his eyes with his own hands. He was buried also in great state. He was son to John Gordon, Esq., of Achlenchries in the county of Aberdeen, whose grandfather was a son of the family of Haddo, now Earls of Aberdeen.” This officer entered the Russian service in the reign of Alexis; and Alexander Gordon joined it in 1693. Both served at the capture of Azof; the younger was at the battle of Narva, and was long a prisoner in the hands of the Swedes. In his old age, he returned to Scotland, and closed his days in peace in his native place.
33 This must be the Russian computation of time.
34 Raised for Charles II. in 1650, and disbanded after Worcester.
35 War-office communicated.
36 The Royal Horse Guards of Scotland were raised at Edinburgh in 1702. The Duke of Argyle, who came over in 1688, was their first colonel. Lord Polwarth’s Horse (now the 7th Hussars) then the only Scottish regiment of Light Dragoons, were embodied in 1689.
37 In a muster-roll of Captain Murray’s Scottish company, at this time, I find “Corporall Sir David Livingstone.”
38 See Crichton’s Memoirs of Blackadder.