The train of artillery was commanded by a Master of the Ordnance, whose pay was 120l. per annum, with a conductor, engineer, fireworker, and master gunners.—(Miscellany of the Maitland Club.)
Dalyell's pay as a Scottish General was 400l. per annum.
Assisted by a militia, this small force proved sufficient, for a time, to coerce all the Lowlands of Scotland.
In July, this year, Mr. William Spence, a follower of the recently forfeited Marquis of Argyle, was tortured by the Privy Council, that he might be forced to reveal all he knew of that noble's intrigues with the English, and to read certain letters in cypher, which were placed before him by Major Holmes; but on the torture failing to produce the desired effect, "he was," according to Lord Fountainhall, "put in General Dalyell's hands; and it was reported that by a hair shirt and pricking (i.e., with a needle), as the witches are used, he was five nights kept from sleep, till he was half distracted. He ate very little that he might require less sleep; yet all this while he discovered nothing; though had he done so, little credit was to be given to what he should say at such a time."
After this is the following entry:—
"August 7th, 1684. At Privy Council, Spence (mentioned 26th July) is again tortured, and has his thumbs crushed with thumbiekins. It is a new invention used among the colliers when transgressors, and discovered by General Dalziell and Drummond, they having seen them used in Muscovy. After this, when they were about to put him in the boots, he, being frightened, desired time, and he would declare what he knew; whereon they gave him some time, and sequestrated him in the Castle of Edinburgh, as a place where he would be free from any bad advice or impression to be obstinate in not revealing."
There is something alike quaint and horrible in the quiet and matter-of-fact way in which this old senator records such extra-judicial barbarities; but instruments of torture were then as necessary to the Privy Council as the pen and ink with which their minutes were recorded.
To repress the reviving spirit of the Covenanters, four Commissions of Lieutenancy were, in September, ordained to meet at Glasgow, Ayr, Dumfries, and Dunse. The first, as Dalyell ordered, to be guarded by Lord Ross's troop of Horse and Captain Inglis's Dragoons; the second by the troop of Guards and his own Grey Dragoons; the third by the Horse of Claverhouse, Drumlanrig, and Strachan; the fourth by the Horse of Balcarris and Lord Charles Murray's Dragoons; but now the horrors of this civil and military persecution received a check by the death of Charles II. on the 6th February 1685, and on the accession of his brother, who was immediately proclaimed at Edinburgh, James VII. of Scotland, by the Lyon King and magistrates, and Dalyell received a new commission as commander-in-chief of the kingdom; but the Catholic tendencies of the new court—tendencies to which, with all his hatred of Covenanters and Low Churchmen, "the old Muscovite" was rigidly averse—would not have permitted him to retain his authority long.
Death now, however, solved the important problem of how he was to act at this peculiarly dangerous juncture; he was thus, to use the words of his comrade Creichton, "rescued from the difficulties he was likely to be under, between the notions he had of duty to his prince on one side, and true zeal for his religion on the other;" as he expired suddenly at his house in the Canongate of Edinburgh, in the month of July, 1685.