Viscount Dundee

by Louis A. Barbé

The immediate cause of the rising, however, is conflictingly stated by different writers. Kirkton’s version of the occurrence, which has been reproduced almost literally by Wodrow, is to the effect that, on the 13th of November 1666, four of the men who had abandoned their homes on the appearance of the military, coming, in the course of their wanderings, towards the old clachan of Dalry, in Galloway, to seek refreshment after long fasting, providentially met, upon the highway, three or four soldiers driving before them a company of people, for the purpose of compelling them to thresh the corn of a poor old neighbour of theirs, who had also fled from his house, and from whom the church fines, as they were called, were to be exacted in this way. ‘This,’ says Kirkton, ‘troubled the poor countrymen very much, yet they passed it in silence, till, coming to the house where they expected refreshment, they were informed the soldiers had seized the poor old man, and were about to bind him and set him bare upon a hot iron gird-iron, there to torment him in his own house. Upon this they ran to relieve the poor man, and coming to his house, desired the soldiers to let the poor man go, which the soldiers refused, and so they fell to words; whereupon two of the soldiers rushing out of the chamber with drawn swords, and making at the countrymen, had almost killed two of them behind their backs, and unawares; the countrymen having weapons, one of them discharged his pistol, and hurt one of the soldiers with the piece of a tobacco pipe with which he had loaded his pistol instead of ball. This made the soldiers deliver their arms and prisoner.’

The accuracy of the account given by Kirkton has been denied. Burnet distinctly asserts that ‘this was a story made only to beget compassion’; that after the insurrection was quashed, the Privy Council sent commissioners to examine into the violences that had been committed, particularly in the parish where this was alleged to have been done; that he himself read the report they made to the Council, and all the depositions taken by them from the people of the district, but that no such violence on the part of the military was mentioned in any one of them. The wounded soldier himself, one George Deanes, a corporal in Sir Alexander Thomson’s company, from whose body ten pieces of tobacco pipe were subsequently extracted by the surgeon, told Sir James Turner that he was shot because he would not take the covenanting oath.

Whether premeditated and concerted, or merely ‘an occasional tumult upon a sudden fray,’ this attack on the military was the signal for a gathering of the discontented peasantry of the district. On the morrow, the four countrymen, one of whom was M’Lelland of Boscob, being joined by six or seven others, fell upon a second party of soldiers. One of these, having offered resistance was killed; his comrades, about a dozen in number, according to Kirkton, quietly gave up their arms. Within two days the insurgents had recruited about fourscore horse and two hundred foot. Proceeding to Dumfries, where Turner then lay with only a few of his soldiers, the greater number of them being scattered about the country in small parties, for the purpose of levying the fines, they seized him, together with the papers and the money in his possession, and carried him off as a prisoner. After this, ‘in their abundant loyalty,’ as Wodrow characterises it, they went to the Cross and publicly drank to the health of the King and the prosperity of his Government.

In daily increasing numbers the insurgents marched towards Edinburgh. At Lanark, where all the contingents they could expect from the south and west had already joined them, and where ‘this rolling snow-ball was at the biggest,’ they were estimated at some three thousand. Here they renewed the Solemn League and Covenant. In spite of repeated warnings from men who, whilst fully sympathising with them, yet understood the hopeless nature of the enterprise in which they were engaged, the leaders determined to push on towards the capital. But the enthusiasm of many amongst their followers was beginning to wane; and by the time Colinton was reached, the ill-armed and undisciplined crowd had dwindled down again to a bare thousand. Then at length, even those who had previously rejected the well-meant advice of their more cautious friends, and had declared that, having been called by the Lord to this undertaking, they would not retire till he who bade them come should likewise command them to go, became conscious of their desperate plight, and consented to a retreat towards the west. Turning the eastern extremity of the Pentland hills, they directed their march towards Biggar.

But it was too late. Dalziel, the governor of Edinburgh, who, at the head of a hastily mustered body of regulars, had been sent out to intercept them, came upon them at Rullion Green, on the evening of the 28th of November. A sharp engagement followed. Twice in the course of it success seemed to favour the insurgents; but in the end the military training and the superior weapons of their opponents prevailed, and the Covenanters were scattered in headlong flight. Of the soldiers, only five fell. On the other side there were about forty killed and a hundred and thirty taken. These prisoners were next day marched into Edinburgh. They might all have saved their lives if they had consented to renounce the Covenant; but their refusal to do so was severely punished. According to Burnet, who certainly does not exaggerate the number who suffered the death penalty, ten were hanged upon one gibbet in Edinburgh, and thirty-five more were sent to be hanged up before their own doors. Many were transported across the seas. The torture of the boot and of the thumbkins—the latter said to have been introduced by Dalziel, who had learnt their use in Russia, where he served for a time—was freely applied in the hope of wringing from the prisoners the admission that the rising was part of a concerted plot for the subversion of the existing government. They all strenuously denied it.

That shortly prior to this, a conspiracy had been formed for this object is a well established fact. A document discovered by Dr M’Crie in the Dutch archives and published by him in his edition of the Memoirs of Veitch, shows that a plan was formed, in July 1666, for seizing on the principal forts in the kingdom, and that ‘the persons embarked in this scheme had carried on a correspondence with the Government of the United Provinces then at war with Great Britain, and received promises of assistance from that quarter.’ Another document referred to by the same writer asserts that the castles of Edinburgh, Stirling, and Dumbarton were amongst those to be taken possession of. Whether this Dutch plot and the Galloway insurrection were connected with each other, is a point with regard to which historians have maintained conflicting opinions in accordance with their own sympathies. The strongest evidence that Napier is able to adduce, on the one side, is the fact that a Mr Wallace is mentioned as one of those in correspondence with Holland, and that Colonel James Wallace was the leader of the insurgents whom Dalziel routed at Rullion Green. But, on the other hand, it is pointed out by Dr M’Crie that, as the other names are obviously fictitious, this coincidence affords no ground for supposing that the Colonel was the person referred to.

For many months after the Pentland rout, the harrying of the late insurgents continued; but, at length, the political changes which placed the administration of the country into the hands of Lauderdale, also marked the inauguration of a more lenient policy towards the Presbyterians. On the 15th of July 1669, a letter was communicated to the Council, in which the King signified his desire that it should authorise as many of the ejected ministers as had lived peaceably in the places where they had resided, to return and preach, and exercise the other functions of their office in the parish churches which they formerly occupied, providing these were vacant. Ministers who took collation from the bishop of the diocese and kept presbyteries and synods, might be allowed to receive their stipends. The others were not to be permitted ‘to meddle with the local stipend, but only to possess the manse and glebe.’

This concession proved of little effect. The few who availed themselves of the ‘Indulgence’—two and forty in all, according to Wodrow—were looked upon as renegades by the irreconcilables, and found no more toleration at their hands than the curates had done. The moderate Presbyterians who accepted the ‘indulged’ clergy were denounced as traitors to the cause. The conventicles which it had been hoped the new measure would suppress, began to assume a more desperate character, as the gatherings of those who, in their unbending determination to abide by the very letter of the Covenant, declared themselves freed from their allegiance to a king whom they considered as perjured, and against whose agents, as malignant persecutors of the true religion, they believed themselves justified in adopting the most violent measures. It is of these extremists that the covenanting party now consisted.

It has been urged that these new developments were too natural, in the circumstances of the time, not to have been anticipated, by some, at least, of those who were responsible for the government of the country. They have consequently been credited with the deliberate intention not only of causing a disruption in the ranks of the Presbyterians, but also of making the expected refusal of the indulgence a pretext for further and sterner measures of coercion. If such were the case, the machiavellian policy was successful. Within six months, the old system of penal legislation was again adopted. On the 3rd of February 1670, a proclamation prohibiting conventicles under heavy penalties was issued by the Council. It was followed in August by an Act of Parliament which made it illegal for outed ministers not licensed by the Council or for any other persons not authorised or tolerated by the bishop of the diocese, to preach, expound Scripture, or pray in any meeting, except in their own houses and to members of their own family. Such as should be convicted of disobedience to this law were to be imprisoned till they found security, to the amount of five thousand merks, for their future good behaviour. Persons attending meetings of this kind were to be heavily fined, according to their respective conditions, for each separate offence. Against outdoor meetings, or ‘field conventicles,’ the law was still more severe. Death was to be the penalty for preaching or praying at them, or even for convening them. A reward of five hundred merks was offered to any of his Majesty’s subjects who should seize and secure the person of an active conventicler. As a further inducement, a subsequent proclamation made over to the captor the fine incurred by the offender he secured.

Amongst the many devices resorted to at this time, with a view to enforcing conformity, there is one which, because of its immediate consequences, is deserving of special mention. In October 1677, the Council addressed a letter to the Earls of Glencairn and Dundonald and to Lord Ross, requiring them to call together the heritors of the shires of Ayr and Renfrew, and to urge on them the necessity for taking effective measures to repress conventicles. The answer given to the three noblemen and forwarded by them to Edinburgh was practically a refusal though it took the form of a plea of inability on the part of those whose co-operation had thus been invoked. This alleged powerlessness was made an excuse for the next step taken by the Government, that of quartering a body of eight thousand Highlanders in the disaffected counties, on those who refused to subscribe a bond by which every heritor made himself answerable, not only for his wife, children, and servants, but also for his tenants.