The garrison in Edinburgh was commanded by Thomas Dalziel, a ferocious old soldier who had learned his trade in the Russian wars.  His dress was as uncouth as his manners, and he wore a long white bushy beard that no steel had been suffered to touch since the death of the first Charles.[11] With all the regulars he could muster Dalziel was quickly after the fugitives.  He came up with them on Rullion Green, a ridge of the Pentland Hills.  Though now numbering scarce a thousand men, the Covenanters were strongly posted, and defended themselves bravely.  The royal troops were twice driven back before they could carry the ridge, and night had fallen before the insurgents were fairly broken.  The slaughter was not great; and it is significant of the unpopularity of their cause that the fugitives suffered more from the Lothian peasantry than from the victorious soldiers.

The Government could now assume the virtue of those who are summoned to quell an open rebellion.  Dalziel was put in command of the insurgent districts, and his little finger was indeed found thicker than Turner’s loins.  Twenty men were hanged on one gibbet in Edinburgh and many others in various parts of the country:  crowds were shipped off to the plantations:  torture was freely applied, and the ingenious devices of the boot and the thumbkin were in daily requisition.[12] Dalziel was in his element.  A prisoner reviled him at the council board for “a Muscovy beast who roasted men.”  The old savage struck the man with the hilt of his sword so fiercely in the mouth that the blood gushed out.

At length there came a lull.  Weary of the useless butchery, which, hitherto, they had not perhaps fully realised, the English Government determined to see if indulgence could persuade where persecution was powerless to force.  Orders to that effect were sent up to Edinburgh.  The soldiers were withdrawn from the western shires.  Sharp was bidden to retire to his see.  Lauderdale took the place of Rothes as commissioner.

The character of Lauderdale is one of the most curious problems of the time.  In his youth he had been as zealous for the Covenant as he now appeared to be zealous for Episcopacy.  Hence some have supposed that his real design was by favouring the intolerance of the bishops to bring them to discomfiture, and to re-establish on their ruin the old Presbyterian Church, for which, despite the profligacy of his life and conversation, he was still believed to entertain as much veneration as he was capable of feeling for any form of religion.  But whatever may have been his regard for the old Covenant of his youth, he was set as a rock against the men who were now as much opposed to any moderate observance of Presbyterian worship as the most inveterate Malignant at Whitehall.