had last seen it, the following words had been engraved on the
blade:--_Sabre worn by the Emperor on the day of the battle of Mount
Tabor_."--_Bourienne_, vol. iv.]
[Footnote 30: _Biographie Universelle_, &c.]
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 3_l._ a week;
of a captain, 2_l._; of a private, 3_s._ 6_d._ 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 6_s._ 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 _mis_government 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 40,000_l._ 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_."