flank.  Meanwhile the more advanced part of the Covenanting force were driving back some Gordons from a hill on Montrose’s left, who were rescued by a desperate charge of Aboyne’s handful of horse among the red coats; Airlie charged with the Ogilvies; the advanced force of the Covenant was routed, and the Macleans and Macdonalds completed the work they had begun (August 15).  Few of the unmounted Covenanters escaped from Kilsyth; and Argyll, taking boat in the Forth, hurried to Newcastle, where David Leslie, coming north, obtained infantry regiments to back his 4000 cavalry.

In a year Montrose, with forces so irregular and so apt to go home after every battle, had actually cleared militant Covenanters out of Scotland.  But the end had come.  He would not permit the sack of Glasgow.  Three thousand clansmen left him; Colkitto went away to harry Kintyre.  Aboyne and the Gordons rode home on some private pique; and Montrose relied on men whom he had already proved to be broken reeds, the Homes and Kers (Roxburgh) of the Border, and the futile and timid Traquair.  When he came among them they forsook him and fled; on September 10, at Kelso, Sir Robert Spottiswoode recognised the desertion and the danger.

Meanwhile Leslie, with an overpowering force of seasoned soldiers, horse and foot, marched with Argyll, not to Edinburgh, but down Gala to Tweed; while Montrose had withdrawn from Kelso, up Ettrick to Philiphaugh, on the left of Ettrick, within a mile of Selkirk.  He had but 500 Irish, who entrenched themselves, and an uncertain number of mounted Border lairds with their servants and tenants.  Charteris of Hempsfield, who had been scouting, reported that Leslie was but two or three miles distant, at Sunderland Hall, where Tweed and Ettrick meet; but the news was not carried to Montrose, who lay at Selkirk.  At breakfast, on September 13, Montrose learned that Leslie was attacking.  What followed is uncertain in its details.  A so-called “contemporary ballad” is incredibly impossible in its anachronisms, and is modern.  In this egregious doggerel we are told that a veteran who had fought at Solway Moss a century earlier, and at “cursed Dunbar” a few years later (or under Edward I.?), advised Leslie to make a turning movement behind Linglie Hill.  This is not evidence.  Though Leslie may have made such a movement, he describes his victory as very easy:  and so it should have been, as Montrose had only the remnant of his Antrim men and a rabble of reluctant Border recruits.

A news letter from Haddington, of September 16, represents the Cavaliers as making a good fight.  The mounted Border lairds galloped away.  Most of the Irish fell fighting:  the rest were massacred, whether after promise of quarter or not is disputed. Their captured women were hanged in cold blood some months later.  Montrose, the Napiers, and some forty horse either cut their way through or evaded Leslie’s overpowering cavalry, and galloped across the hills