Hamilton and his party pressed William to exempt from the general amnesty certain members of the Scottish Council whom they named as particular and unscrupulous instruments of James’s tyranny, and unsafe to be let go at large.  But the Prince with his usual good sense refused to drive any man into opposition:  the past even of the most guilty should, he said, be forgotten till he was forced to remember it.  Against Dundee and Balcarres he had been especially warned.  He remembered both well:  Balcarres had married a lady of his family, and Dundee had fought by his side.  He asked them both to enter his service.  They refused, and Balcarres, plainly avowing the commission entrusted to him by James, asked if, in such circumstances, he could honourably take service with another.  “I cannot say that you can,” was the answer, “but take care that you fall not within the law, for otherwise I shall be forced against my will to let the law overtake you.”  Dundee was told that if he would live quietly at home, no allegiance should be exacted from him and no harm done to him.  He answered that he would live quietly, if he were not forced to live otherwise.  Early in February the two friends left London for Edinburgh.[76]

FOOTNOTES: 

[69] Claverhouse to Queensberry, June 16th, 1685.

[70] Napier, iii. 464:  this Murray was Alexander Stuart, Earl of Murray, descendant and heir of the famous Regent.  He declared himself a convert to the Church of Rome at the same time as Perth and Melfort.

[71] Napier, iii. 435:  quoted from Fountainhall.

[72] Burnet, ii. 341.

[73] The memoirs of Colin Lindsay, third Earl of Balcarres, were presented to James at Saint Germains in 1690.  The edition I have used is that printed for the Bannatyne Club in 1841 by the late Lord Crawford, from a transcript made by James, the son of the writer, and great-grandfather of Lord Crawford.  The editions previously printed in 1715 and 1754, and in Walter Scott’s edition of Somers’s Tracts published in 1814, contain many passages not to be found in the first transcript, and declared, by its latest editor, to reflect the opinions and sentiments of the copyist rather than those of the original author.

[74] Cannon’s “Historical Records of the British Army:”  Napier, iii. 475-76.  Claverhouse’s own regiment was disbanded early in the following year.  The first colonel of the Greys, then officially known as “The Royal Regiment of Scots Dragoons,” was Dalziel, Lord Charles Murray (afterwards created Earl of Dunmore) serving as captain under him.  Dalziel died in 1685, and was succeeded in the command by Dunmore.  Napier gives the muster-roll of Claverhouse’s regiment for May, 1685.  It consisted of six troops, of which the colonel, as the custom then was, commanded the first in person, the other captains being Lords Drumlanrig, Ross, Airlie, Balcarres, and William Douglas;