any
mercy. But it is clear that Monmouth was able to save many. When Dalziel
arrived next day in camp and learned how things had gone, he rebuked
the Duke to his face for betraying his command. "Had I come a day
sooner," he said, "these rogues should never have troubled his majesty
or the kingdom any more."[33]

There is no authority for attributing to Claverhouse himself any
particular ferocity. We may be pretty sure that the Covenanting
chroniclers would not have refrained from another fling at their
favourite scapegoat could they have found a stone to their hand; but as
a matter of fact, in no account of the battle is he mentioned, save by
name only, as having been present with his troop in Monmouth's army. The
fiery and vindictive part assigned to him by Scott rests on the
authority of the most amazing tissue of absurdities ever woven out of
the inventive fancy of a ballad-monger.[34] He had no kinsman's death to
avenge, and he was too good a soldier to directly disobey his chief's
orders, however little they may have been to his taste.

There is, moreover, positive evidence to the contrary. Six years after
the battle one Robert Smith, of Dunscore, who had been among the rebel
horsemen at Bothwell, deposed that as they, some sixteen hundred in
number, were in retreat towards Carrick, he saw the royal cavalry halted
within less than a mile from the field, and this was considered by the
fugitives to have been done to favour their escape. "For," he went on,
"if they had followed us they had certainly killed or taken us all." It
is clear, therefore, that whatever Claverhouse might have done had he
been left to himself, or whatever he may have wished to do--what he did
do was, in common with the rest of the army, to obey his superior's
orders.

FOOTNOTES:

[30] "Lives of the Scots Worthies," p. 383.

[31] Wodrow, iii. 93.

[32] Wodrow, iii. 107.

[33] Creichton, pp. 37-8.

[34] See some doggrel verses on the battle in "The Minstrelsy of the
Scottish Border," in which Claverhouse is represented as posting off to
London from the field of battle and, by means of false witnesses,
bringing Monmouth to the scaffold as a traitor who had given quarter to
the King's enemies. Sir Walter, of course, knew very well what he was
about; but it did not seem to him necessary to write fiction with the
nice exactness of the historian; nor was he, happily for us, of that
scrupulous order of minds which conceives that a cruel wro