A Popular History of England, From the Earliest Times to the Reign of Queen Victoria; Vol. IV

by François Guizot

The same day the inhabitants of Enniskillen, who had spiritedly held their town in face of the enemy's troops, pursued the Irish in retreat to the village of Newtown Butler. There, at the foot of a hill, in front of a bog, the battle took place. "Advance or retreat?" their leader Wolseley, detailed by Kirke, had asked his improvised soldiers. "Advance! advance!" shouted the Protestants. The rout of King James's partisans was complete, and the massacre frightful. Nothing could check the violence of religious and political hatreds among a half civilized population. "The dragoons, who had fled in the morning, retreated with the rest of the cavalry without firing a pistol," wrote the Count d'Avaux, "and they all ran away in such a panic that they threw away muskets, pistols, and sabres, and most of them having run their horses to death, took off their clothes, to go quicker on foot."

While the arms of King James met with these severe checks in Ireland, he received news from England which for a moment disquieted his counsellors; but soon reanimated, by the very imminence of the danger, the natural courage of the Irish race. The illustrious Marshal Schomberg, who was driven by the revocation of the Edict of Nantes from the adopted country he had gloriously served, the lieutenant of William III. when he first set foot in England, had just embarked for Ireland at the head of a numerous body of troops. Other alarming intelligence was added to this: the last efforts of the Scotch insurrection had miscarried; and all hope of a Jacobite restoration was dying out in the hereditary kingdom of the Stuarts.

A tyranny which England had never endured had long been pressing on Scotland: an oppressive and corrupt government had met little opposition in a timid or venal Parliament; a religion hateful to the nation had been imposed on it by law. The Revolution of 1688 lent to the condition of things and of feelings in Scotland a wholly different character from that which it had assumed in England. There King James had been dethroned in the name of violated law. All legal forms had been observed in the election of the Parliament which proclaimed William and Mary. At Edinburg the reaction was violent, and passions were destructive; the Anglican pastors were maltreated and insulted. The first act of the Convention convoked by the Prince of Orange was the abolition of episcopacy. Everywhere the Presbyterians recovered power as well as liberty; everywhere the Covenanters, long kept down with an iron hand, proudly held up their heads. At the same time, at the moment when the Parliament of Scotland, after a lively debate, decided to recognize the legitimacy of the revolution by proclaiming in its towns the new sovereigns of England, an insurrection broke out in the Scottish Highlands under the conduct of Viscount Dundee, lately celebrated under the name of Graham of Claverhouse. He was sustained in his campaign in favor of King James by the Earl of Balcarras. Both had visited the Prince of Orange at London, both had claimed the protection of the government. "Take care, my lord," William had said to Balcarras, who was excusing himself for not voting for the deposition of James. "Remain inside the limits of the law; if you violate it, expect to be given up to it." Balcarras and Dundee had received the last orders of James II. "I commit to you my affairs in Scotland," the monarch had said, as he made ready to fly; "Balcarras will take care of my civil affairs and Dundee will command my troops." It was with great difficulty that the latter had been able to escape from the Convention where he had had the audacity to present himself. "Where do you purpose going?" Balcarras had asked him. "Where the shade of Montrose shall lead me," replied the intrepid partisan; and he disappeared at the head of fifty dragoons, the remnant of the famous regiments which had lately cut the Covenanters in pieces. The latter had not forgotten the fact.

The English Jacobites belonged almost entirely to the Anglican Church, being passionately and ancestrally devoted to its cause, as well as to the House of Stuart. The Irish Jacobites were Catholics and separatists, convinced that the greatness of their native country, like that of the Roman Church, depended on the restoration of King James. The Scotch Jacobites actively engaged in the struggle were Episcopalians, lately triumphant, but now oppressed in their religion, or Highlanders uniting against the power of the Clan Campbell and its chief, the Earl of Argyle, Mac Callum More, as he was called in the mountains. It was Argyle who, standing before the throne at Whitehall, had pronounced the words of the royal oath, repeated after him by the new sovereigns. At its last clause William had paused for a moment: its purport was that he should destroy all heretics and enemies of God. "I could not engage to become a persecutor," said the king aloud. "Neither the tenor of the oath nor the laws of Scotland impose this obligation on your majesty," replied one of the delegates. "It is on this condition that I swear," returned William; "and I beg you, my lords and gentlemen, to be witnesses of this."

So much moderation and prudence remained without effect upon the Highlanders. Argyle was employed in the new government. However unimportant his part in it was to be, from the capacity and character of the earl, the traditional foes of his clan, the Camerons, the Macleans, the Macgregors, naturally, went over to the other camp. When Dundee, threatened with arrest, left the little castle where he had quartered himself since fleeing from Edinburg, he found the Highlanders already risen under the command of Lochiel, chief of the Camerons, and Colin Keppoch, one of the Macdonalds. Bringing in his suite some Lowland gentlemen, capturing some Whigs, whom he carried with him as prisoners, sending the fiery cross before him, and accompanied everywhere by the terror of his name, Dundee soon found himself at the head of an army of five or six thousand men, all brave, hardy, inured to fatigue, undisciplined and tumultuous, incapable of fighting according to the ordinary rules of war, and, consequently, of making a long resistance to regular troops. "We would not have time to learn your mode of fighting," said Lochiel, "and we would have time to forget our own."

Dundee was uneasy; he asked King James to send him considerable reinforcements. He waited through the month of June, encamped at Lochaber, until the forces of General Mackay, tired of pursuing him without coming up to him, retreated into the Lowlands. The castle of Edinburg, long held by the Duke of Gordon for King James, had just capitulated. The numerous dependents of the Marquis of Athole were waiting for him to declare himself; his eldest son, Lord Murray, had embraced King William's party; the confidential agent of the marquis, Stewart of Badenoch, served King James. Lord Murray had presented himself before Blair Castle. The garrison which occupied it, in behalf of his father, refused him admittance to the fortress. He had laid siege to it, when Dundee and all the Highland chiefs descended impetuously from the mountains to the relief of the garrison.

The siege was raised when they arrived. Murray's soldiers had abandoned it; filling their caps with the water of a spring, they had drunk to the health of King James, and dispersed. But Mackay and his troops already occupied the defile of Killiecrankie, which led to the fortress. Dundee resolved to attack them. The aged Lochiel moved to and fro among the ranks of the Highlanders, whose fierce cries the echoes repeated; while the tone of the enemy was feeble and faint. "We shall carry the day," said Lochiel; "that is not the cry of men about to conquer." He charged the enemy at the head of his clan with sword in hand, and bare feet, like his soldiers.

A first discharge had not checked the forward motion of the Highlanders, and Mackay's soldiers were reloading their pieces, when the torrent of mountaineers came down upon them. Reeling, overthrown, deafened by the shouts, dazzled by the sheen of swords, the men threw away their muskets and began to fly. Mackay, intrepid in defeat, called to his aid his cavalry, dreaded by the mountaineers. Only Dundee could have rallied his troops, carried away by their eagerness to plunder. Dundee was dead in his glory, struck, it was told afterwards, by a silver button used as a ball and discharged at him by the superstition of the soldiers. "He is invulnerable to lead and iron," said the covenanters, who had not long ago seen him urging on his soldiers in the middle of a rain of balls. The intrepid soldier, the bold and skilful leader, the pitiless persecutor, had been mortally wounded while leading a small body of horse to the front. Falling from his charger, a soldier had received him in his arms. "How goes it?" asked Dundee. "Well for King James," answered the trooper, "but I grieve for your lordship." "Small matter about me, if things go well for him," murmured Dundee. These were his last words. His body, wrapped in the plaids of the Highlanders, was borne to Blair Castle.