[28] Kirkton, 444, note.
[29] It was reported by some of his own party that as his men entered the town Hamilton withdrew into a house at the Gallowgate to wait the issue. But it would be no more fair to take this report for truth than it would be to assume that Claverhouse really forbad burial to the dead Whigs, that the dogs might eat them where they lay in the streets. There was too much quarrelling in the Covenanting camp to allow us to take for granted all their judgments on each other when unfavourable; and at Drumclog Hamilton seems by all accounts to have borne himself bravely enough, whatever he may have done subsequently.
CHAPTER V.
There is no letter from Claverhouse in this year, 1679, later than that reporting the defeat at Drumclog. There was, indeed, no occasion for him to write. As soon as the news of his defeat and the attack on Glasgow had reached the Council, orders were at once sent for the forces to withdraw from the latter place and join Linlithgow at Stirling. After Bothwell Bridge had been won he was sent again into the West on the weary work that we have already seen him employed on. But during the intervening time his independent command had ceased. At the same time there is no reason to suppose that he was in any disgrace for the defeat at Drumclog. He had committed the fault, not uncommon, as military history teaches, with more experienced leaders than Claverhouse, of holding his foe too cheaply: he had committed this fault, and he had paid the penalty. There is some vague story of a sealed commission not to be opened till in the presence of the enemy, and when opened on the slope of Drumclog containing strict orders to give battle wherever and whenever the chance might serve. But the story rests on too slight authority to count for much. His own temperament would have made him fight without any sealed orders; and, indeed, he had not long before written to Linlithgow that he was determined to do so on the first occasion, and had warned his men to that effect. The wisdom of his resolve is clear. Disgusted with their work, discontented with the hardness of their fare and the infrequency of their pay, in perpetual danger of their lives from unseen enemies, his soldiers were getting out of hand. Claverhouse was the sternest of disciplinarians; but the discipline of those days was a very different thing from our interpretation of the word. It was more a recognition by the soldier of the superior strength and possibilities of his officer, than trained obedience to an inevitable law. When they once had satisfied themselves that their captain was unable to bring the enemy to book, was unable even to provide them with proper rations and pay, no love for the flag would have kept them together for another hour. It was essential for Claverhouse to show them that he and they were more than a match for their foes whenever and in whatever form the opportunity came. Unfortunately for him it came in the form of Drumclog, and the proof had still to be given.
But it is abundantly clear that no stain was considered to rest either on his honour or his skill. The only ungenerous reference to his discomfiture came a few years later in the shape of a growl from old Dalziel against the folly of splitting the army up into small detachments at the discretion of rash and incompetent leaders. Claverhouse was removed from his independent command only because the circumstances of the moment made it necessary. When it was found necessary to despatch a regular army against the insurgents (as, for all their provocation, they must after Drumclog be styled), he took his proper place in that army as captain of a troop in the Royal Scottish Life Guards. When the brief campaign had closed at Bothwell Bridge, and, worst fortune for him, affairs had resumed their original complexion, he went back to his old position.
It will be necessary, then, to supply this gap in Claverhouse's correspondence by a brief review of the state of things from the battle of Drumclog to the date of his new commission.
The garrison of Glasgow had, as we have seen, joined Linlithgow at Stirling. There they lay for a day or two till orders were received from the Council for the whole army, which only numbered about eighteen hundred men in all, to fall back on Edinburgh. In the capital the greatest consternation reigned. The first proceeding of the Council was to proclaim the rising "an open, manifest, and horrid rebellion," and all the insurgents were summoned to surrender at discretion as "desperate and incorrigible traitors." Having thus satisfied their diplomatic consciences they wisely proceeded to more practical measures. The militia was called out, horse and foot, in all the Lowlands, save in the disaffected shires. For those north of the Forth the rendezvous was at Stirling, for those south on the links of Leith. Each man was to bring provisions with him for ten days. The magistrates were ordered to remove all the powder and other munitions of war they could find in the city to the Castle. An armed guard was stationed night and day in the Canongate, and another in the Abbey. Finally, a post was sent to London on Linlithgow's advice to urge the instant despatch of more troops, and two shillings and sixpence a day of extra pay was promised to every foot soldier.
They were not disturbed in their preparations. The Covenanters were too busy with their own affairs to take much heed what their enemies might be doing. They did, indeed, march into Glasgow, but beyond shooting a poor wretch whom they vowed they recognised as having fought against them on the 2nd, and possibly indulging in a little looting, they did nothing. They did not stay long in the town. Plans they seem to have had none, nor any settled organisation or discipline. Moving restlessly about the neighbourhood from village to village and from moor to moor, their preachers exhorted and harangued as much against each other as against Pope or Prelate, and their leaders quarrelled as though there were not a King's soldier in all Scotland, nor Claverhouse within a dozen miles of them eager for the moment to strike. There was no lack of arms among them, and their numbers seem at this time to have been not far short of eight thousand. But no men of any position or influence in the country had joined them with the exception of Hamilton; and his authority, whether the story of his cowardice at Glasgow be true or not, was not what it had been at Rutherglen and Drumclog. The preachers seemed to have exercised the only control over the rabble; and such control, as was natural, seems rarely to have lasted beyond the length of their sermons, which, indeed, were not commonly short. As the Covenanters (to keep to the distinguishing name I have chosen) were an extreme section of the Presbyterians, so now the Covenanters themselves were divided into a moderate and an extreme party. The chiefs of the former, or Erastians as their opponents scornfully termed them, were John Welsh and David Hume. Of Hume there is no particular account, but Welsh we have met before. Though he had been under denunciation as a rebel ever since the Pentland rising (in which he had, indeed, borne no part), he had never given his voice for war; and, though assuredly neither a coward nor a trimmer, had always kept from any active share in the proceedings of his more tumultuous brethren. His plan, and the plan of the few who at that time and place were on his side, was temperate and reasonable. They asked for no more than they were willing to give. Against the King, his government, and his bishops they had no quarrel, if only they were suffered to worship God after their own fashion. Though they themselves had not accepted the Indulgence, they were not disposed to be unduly severe with those who had. In a word, they were willing to extend to all men the liberty they demanded for themselves. Had there been more of this wise mind among the Covenanters—among the Presbyterians, one may indeed say—though it is hardly possible to believe that Lauderdale and his crew would not still have found occasion for oppression, it would be much easier to find sympathy for the oppressed.
On the other side, Hamilton himself, Donald Cargill, and Thomas Douglas were the most conspicuous in words, while Hackston, Burley, and the rest of Sharp's murderers were, of course, with them. Hamilton and Douglas we know. Cargill, like Douglas, was a minister: he had received a good education at Aberdeen and Saint Andrews, but had soon fallen into disgrace for the disloyalty and virulence of his language. In a sermon on the anniversary of the Restoration he had declared from his pulpit that the King's name should "stink while the world stands for treachery, tyranny, and lechery."[30] In this party all was confused, extravagant, fierce, unreasoning. What they wanted, what they were fighting to get, from whom they expected to get it, even their own historians are unable to explain, and probably they themselves had no very clear notions. They talked of liberty, by which they seem to have meant no more than liberty to kill all who on any point thought otherwise than they did: of freedom, which meant freedom from all laws save their own passions: of the God of their fathers, and every day they violated alike His precepts and their practice. To slay and spare not was their watchword; but whom they were to slay, or what was to be gained or done when the slaying was accomplished, no two men among them were agreed. For the moment the current of their fury seems to have set most strongly against the Indulgence and those who had accepted its terms. A single instance will show pretty clearly the state of insubordination into which those unhappy men had fallen. It was announced that one Rae, a favourite expounder on the moderate side, was about to preach on a certain day in camp. Hamilton, who still retained the nominal command, sent him a letter bidding him not spare the Indulgence. To this Rae, who does not seem himself to have been in any position of authority, made answer that Hamilton had better mind what belonged to him, and not go beyond his sphere and station.[31] It would not be difficult to draw a parallel between the condition of the Covenanting camp at that time and the so-called Irish Party of our own time. Indeed, if any body will be at the trouble to examine the contemporary accounts of Hamilton and his followers, and particularly their language, much of which has been faithfully chronicled by their admirers, they will be surprised to find how closely the parallel may be pushed.