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Updated: June 13, 2025
Gradually the dramatic stories had grown stale and lost their bite, and when she noticed that with every new telling it was necessary to strengthen the horrors, Jean had begun to regard them as works of political fiction. But this was another story about Claverhouse's engagement to Helen Graham.
A French soldier missed Claverhouse's head by a hair's-breadth, while he, swerving, struck down another on his right. Carlton had disappeared, Hales had been wounded, but in the end escaped with his life.
Probably, if we increase the former total and diminish the latter, we shall get nearer the mark; but it is impossible to do more than conjecture. Sharpe, in the fragment printed by Napier, rates Hamilton's force at six hundred. Claverhouse's own estimate was "four battalions of foot, and all well armed with fusils and pitchforks, and three squadrons of horse."
Whether William was angry at Claverhouse's impertinence, or was no more touched than the cliff by the spray from a wave, only his intimates could have told, but in this conflict between the two temperaments, the Prince was in the end an easy victor.
Regardless of Claverhouse's disinterested command to the contrary, he ordered the party which he headed to charge down hill and extricate their Colonel. Some advanced with him most halted and stood uncertain many ran away. With those who followed Evandale, he disengaged Claverhouse.
Lord Dundonald himself was pleased because the marriage secured Claverhouse's influence, and so were his personal friends, such as Lord Ross, who knew and admired Jean; Claverhouse could not hide from himself, however, that the world judged the marriage an irreparable mistake, and Grimond, so far as he dared but he had now to be very careful rubbed salt into the wound.
Both in Scotland and England events were now moving fast to their inevitable conclusion, but of Claverhouse's part in public affairs there is for the next three years little record. Only two of his letters have survived between May, 1685, and October, 1688, when the disastrous march into England began.
This story has been contemptuously rejected by Macaulay as a Jacobite fable composed many years after both actors in the scene were dead. The story may not be true, but Macaulay's reasons for rejecting it are not quite exact. Reports of Claverhouse's gallantry at Seneff were certainly current during his lifetime.
Fortunately the pursuit had slackened, or it might have gone ill with the garrison in Glasgow. Claverhouse's men had no doubt fine tales to tell of the fury of the Whig devils behind them; and had Hamilton been strong enough in cavalry to enter the town at the heels of the flying troopers it is not likely that he would have met with much opposition. The pursuit, however, did not follow far.
The two parties joined and halted for a while at the place they had occupied on the previous night; but when they heard Claverhouse's trumpets sounding again to horse they fell back to Hamilton Park, where it was not thought prudent to follow them. This is the famous despatch which Scott says was spelled like a chambermaid's. The original is now among the Stow Manuscripts in the British Museum.
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