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.