h uplifted hands,
From Remonstrators with associate bands,
Good Lord, deliver us!"
_Royalist Rhyme_, KIRKTON, p. 127.
Late on the fourth night of November, exactly twenty-four days before
Rullion Green, Richard and George Chaplain, merchants in Haddington,
beheld four men, clad like West-country Whigamores, standing round some
object on the ground. It was at the two-mile cross, and within that
distance from their homes. At last, to their horror, they discovered
that the recumbent figure was a livid corpse, swathed in a blood-stained
winding-sheet.[17] Many thought that this apparition was a portent of
the deaths connected with the Pentland Rising.
On the morning of Wednesday, the 28th of November 1666, they left
Colinton and marched to Rullion Green. There they arrived about sunset.
The position was a strong one. On the summit of a bare, heathery spur of
the Pentlands are two hillocks, and between them lies a narrow band of
flat marshy ground. On the highest of the two mounds--that nearest the
Pentlands, and on the left hand of the main body--was the greater part
of the cavalry, under Major Learmont; on the other Barscob and the
Galloway gentlemen; and in the centre Colonel Wallace and the weak,
half-armed infantry. Their position was further strengthened by the
depth of the valley below, and the deep chasm-like course of the Rullion
Burn.
The sun, going down behind the Pentlands, cast golden lights and blue
shadows on their snow-clad summits, slanted obliquely into the rich
plain before them, bathing with rosy splendour the leafless,
snow-sprinkled trees, and fading gradually into shadow in the distance.
To the south, too, they beheld a deep-shaded amphitheatre of heather and
bracken; the course of the Esk, near Penicuik, winding about at the foot
of its gorge; the broad, brown expanse of Maw Moss; and, fading into
blue indistinctness in the south, the wild heath-clad Peeblesshire
hills. In sooth, that scene was fair, and many a yearning glance was
cast over that peaceful evening scene from the spot where the rebels
awaited their defeat; and when the fight was over, many a noble fellow
lifted his head from the blood-stained heather to strive with darkening
eyeballs to behold that landscape, over which, as over his life and his
cause, the shadows of night and of gloom were falling and thickening.
It was while waiting on this spot that the fear-inspiring cry was
raised: "The enemy! Here come
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