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!