Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 10, 2025
"Aweel, hinny," continued Niel Blane, sighing deeply, "let Bauldy drive the pease and bear meal to the camp at Drumclog he's a whig, and was the auld gudewife's pleughman the mashlum bannocks will suit their muirland stamachs weel. "And what are we to eat oursells then, father," asked Jenny, "when we hae sent awa the haill meal in the ark and the girnel?"
Come, my lord, we must e'en ride for it." So saying, he put spurs to his wounded horse; and the generous animal, as if conscious that the life of his rider depended on his exertions, pressed forward with speed, unabated either by pain or loss of blood. It appears, from the letter of Claverhouse afterwards quoted, that the horse on which he rode at Drumclog was not black, but sorrel.
How Claverhouse went with his disciplined dragoons, seized John King, chaplain to Lord Cardross, with about fourteen other prisoners, in passing through Hamilton, tied them in couples, drove them before the troops like sheep, attacked the Covenanters at Drumclog, received a thorough defeat from the undisciplined "rebels," who freed the prisoners, and sent the dragoons back completely routed to Glasgow, is matter of history.
Sorely as he may have chafed at the order, he halted his troopers on the banks of the Clyde when Monmouth's trumpets sounded the recall, with the same readiness and composure that he showed in leading them to the charge down the slopes of Drumclog; and he would have led them against his brothers-in-arms Ross or James Douglas, had they turned rebels, as straightly and keenly as he led them against Hamilton and Burley.
"The fragment of steel that parted from this first gap rested on the skull of the perjured traitor who first introduced Episcopacy into Scotland; this second notch was made in the rib-bone of an impious villain, the boldest and best soldier that upheld the prelatic cause at Drumclog; this third was broken on the steel head-piece of the captain who defended the Chapel of Holyrood when the people rose at the Revolution.
But from that time every one began to speak of the impiety of leaving the bones so wofully exposed; and after the skirmish at Drumclog, where Robin M'Coul, the eldest of the two striplings above spoken of, happened to be, when Mr John Welsh, with the Carrick men that went to Bothwell-brigg, was sent into Glasgow to bury the heads and hands of the martyrs there, Robin M'Coul came with a party of his friends to Irvine to bury his father's bones.
Mr William Clelland, with Mr Hamilton, who had come with Mr Douglas, were our leaders, and we met Claverhouse on the moor of Drumclog. The dragoons were the first to halt, and Claverhouse, having ordered his prisoners to be drawn aside, was the first who gave the word to fire. This was without any parley or request to know whether we came with hostile intent or no.
But within a week this handful had, on Hamilton's own testimony, grown to six thousand horse and foot; and though, no doubt, the success at Drumclog would have materially swelled the Covenanting ranks, if they were only two hundred and fifty on that day, the most liberal calculation can hardly accept the numbers said to have been gathered on Glasgow Moor six days later.
Its immediate result was to throw the direction of affairs still more exclusively into the hands of the clergy: indirectly, but no less surely, it was the cause of the Pentland Rising and the savage persecution which followed, of the murder of Archbishop Sharp, of the battles of Drumclog and Bothwell Bridge, and of those terrible years still spoken of in Scotland as the "killing-time."
Scott puts the King's forces at Drumclog at two hundred and fifty men; and, as a detachment had been left behind in garrison with Ross's men at Glasgow, this is probably not over the mark, if Macaulay's estimate of a regiment be correct.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking