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refused to serve under him," says Captain Creichton, "and remained at his lodgings in Edinburgh, till his Grace was superseded, which happened about a fortnight after."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."