The work Claverhouse now found to do must have been singularly distasteful to one who had seen war on a great scale under such captains as William and Conde.  It was at once undignified and dangerous; and though danger was all to his taste, it was one thing to risk one’s life in open battle with enemies worthy of a soldier’s steel, and another and very different thing to run the chance of a stray bullet from behind a haystack or through a cottage window.  The line of country he had to patrol (for his work was really little more than that) was all too large for the forces at his disposal.  The enemies with whom he had mostly to deal were either old men or women, for the Covenanters were well supplied with intelligence, and generally had ample warning of his movements, quick and indefatigable as they were.  “If your lordship give me any new orders, I will beg they may be kept as secret as possible, and sent for me so suddenly as the information some of the favourers of the fanatics are to send may be prevented."[20] And again: 

“I obeyed the orders about seizing persons in Galloway that very night I received it, as far as it was possible; that is to say, all that was within forty miles, which is the most can be ridden in one night; and of six made search for, I found only two, which are John Livingston, bailie of Kirkcudbright, and John Black, treasurer there.  The other two bailies were fled, and their wives lying above the clothes in the bed, and great candles lighted, waiting for the coming of the party, and told them, they knew of their coming, and had as good intelligence as they themselves; and that if the other two were seized on, it was their own faults, that would not contribute for intelligence.  And the truth is, they had time enough to be advertised, for the order was dated the 15th, and came not to my hands till the 20th.  I laid the fellow in the guard that brought it, so soon as I considered the date, where he has lain ever since, and had it not been for respect to Mr. Maitland [Lauderdale’s nephew] who recommended him to me I would have put him out of the troop with infamy."[21]

The letters written during the first months of his commission are full of warnings of this sort.  And he had other complaints to make, which must have been still more against the grain.  He was so inadequately supplied with money by the Council that he found it a hard matter to pay his men, and harder still to pay the country people for the necessary provisions and forage; for, so far from quartering his men at large upon the peasantry, he seems, at any rate in those first months, to have been scrupulous to pay at the current rates for all he required to a degree that matches rather with the niceties of modern warfare than the customs of those rough times.