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 wrong has been done to the reputation of a man who has been in his grave for nearly a century and a half by employing the colours of tradition to heighten the pictures of fancy.

CHAPTER VI.

Could Monmouth’s influence have lasted, their defeat at Bothwell Bridge might have turned out well for the Covenanters.  As soon as he had led his army back into quarters, he hastened to London, where he so strongly represented the brutal folly and mismanagement of Lauderdale’s government, that he prevailed upon the King to try once more the effect of gentler measures.  An indemnity was granted for the past, and even some limited form of indulgence for the future.  But the unexpected return of the Duke of York from Holland put an end to all these humane counsels.  Monmouth was himself soon again in disgrace; and Lauderdale, though his power was now past its height, was still strong enough to mould to his own will concessions for which the time had now perhaps irrevocably gone.

The twelve hundred prisoners from Bothwell were marched in chains to Edinburgh, and penned like sheep in the churchyard of the Grey Friars, the building which barely forty years before had witnessed the triumphant birth of that Covenant which was, if ever covenant of man was, assuredly to be baptized in blood.  Two of them, and both ministers, were immediately executed:  five others, as though to appease the cruel ghost of Sharp, were hanged on Magus Moor:  of the rest, the most part were set at liberty on giving bonds for their future good behaviour, while the more obstinate were shipped off to the plantations.