Battle of Killiecrankie, 1689

The Last Act of the Killing Times

Stuart Reid

• Publisher: Frontline Books
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781526709967
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early Modern History
• Index: History

The fifty-odd years of Scottish history dominated by the Jacobite Risings are amongst its most evocative and whilst the last battle, Culloden in 1746, is deservedly remembered as a national tragedy, the first battle on the braes of Killiecrankie was unquestionably the most dramatic.It was very much a Scottish battle. The later Jacobite risings would be launched against kings and governments in London. Killiecrankie, on the other hand, pitted Scot against Scot in the last bloody act of the bitter religious struggle known as The Killing Times.Killiecrankie saw the first, and most successful, Highland Charge, as the clansmen broke the line of the Governments redcoats in the twinkling of an eye, and though outnumbered the Jacobites achieved a stunning victory. The Highlanders, however, suffered debilitating losses of almost one third of their strength, and their leader, John Graham the Viscount of Dundee, was killed.The Jacobites continued their advance until stopped by Government forces at the Battle of Dunkeld a little more than three weeks later. Though the Jacobites had failed, the struggle of the Highland clans to return the Catholic James, and his successors, to the throne of Scotland and England would continue for the next two generations.

Chapter 1

The Killing Time

The new century had opened promisingly enough with the happy accession of King James VI of Scotland to sit on the English throne in 1603. James himself unquestionably did well out of the move and smugly boasted that; ‘Here I sit and govern it with my pen: I write and it is done: and by a Clerk of the Council I govern Scotland, which others could not do by the Sword.’1 So he did, and no longer need he fear waking to find a ring of armed men standing in his bedchamber intent on abduction or worse, but with that security came a remoteness which was hardly calculated to bind King and people together as one, or to soften the blow when his son, Charles I, embarked upon a disastrous experiment in absolutism.

It was bad enough that for most of his reign Charles ruled Scotland without recourse to calling a Parliament and even neglected to venture north for his coronation until 1633, fully eight years after his accession. Unfortunately, at that point his benign neglect of his northern kingdom was replaced by a succession of moves aimed, amongst other things, at bringing the Scottish church into conformity with the controversial reforms being enacted in the Church of England. Two generations before, Scotland had firmly embraced the Protestant Reformation and, in particular, the teachings of John Calvin of Geneva. The Church of Scotland, familiarly known simply as the Kirk, became a Presbyterian one and this in turn saw a greater degree of democracy in both church and state. The Scots Parliament traditionally comprised three collegiate estates; the lords or tenants in chief, holding lands directly from the crown; the representatives of the royal burghs, and the Kirk. The latter had once been found from among the bishops, but after the reformation their seats were filled by ordinary ministers and lay representatives of their presbyteries. King James insisted on the return of bishops in 1610, (but only as presidents of their presbyteries and therefore still very much accountable to them) was otherwise content to let well alone, but Charles made the fatal mistake of insisting on overturning this pragmatic settlement by returning to a full-blown Episcopalian system with a Kirk firmly controlled by a hierarchy of bishops who were held directly accountable to the Crown as head of the church. At one and the same time, he also quite casually attempted to emasculate the great magnates or Lords of Parliament through the recovery of feus and other taxes attaching to church lands acquired by their families during the Reformation – monies which were now needed to support the ecclesiastical reformation. Not surprisingly, he soon found himself in trouble. In 1638, exactly fifty years before the Glorious Revolution, opposition to the King’s autocratic reforms took concrete shape in the signing of the National Covenant, binding Scotland’s people and Kirk together. Then came the Great Civil War, catastrophic defeat and the ten-year long Cromwellian occupation of Scotland which ended with the Restoration of King Charles II in 1660. Scotland’s constitution, laws and religion were her own once again, but by then her once great magnates were dead or bankrupted by the wars and no longer able to influence politics as their fathers had done by simply raising their banners. Moreover, after a brief but humiliating reign as a Presbyterian client in 1650-51, Charles II pointedly declined to ever set foot in Scotland again and instead, just as his royal grandfather had done, he governed it distantly for the next twenty-five years by the pen and through a succession of expendable Royal Commissioners and a secret council appointed without reference to Parliament.

An ‘Act Recissory’, was passed in 1661 rendering null and void all legislation enacted since the coronation of Charles I in 1633 and a corresponding act of Indemnity and Oblivion also followed as a matter of course. Bygones were to be bygones and forgiveness offered to all but a token handful of individuals, but in reality, there was far too much unfinished business which was to dominate Scottish politics to the end of the century and beyond. Not unexpectedly, the greatest problems still centred around religion. While the Recission was confidently followed by another Act confirming the continuance of a Presbyterian Kirk; this was effectively nullified by the restoration of Episcopacy proclaimed on 6 September 1661 and in the following year all ministers of the Kirk were required to renounce the Covenant or lose their livings.

Upwards of 270 of them, perhaps a third of the total, stuck by the Covenant and refused to recognise the authority of the new bishops set over them. Having suffered the threatened consequences, they then took to preaching at outdoor services or conventicles. Naturally enough the authorities took a dim view of this defiance, but their resources for dealing with the problem were limited. Until then there had been no such thing as a Scottish Army, or at least not a regular standing army paid for out of the King’s revenues. Instead, the government had relied time out of mind on levying out fencible men for ‘the Scottish service’ only as and when required, and almost invariably only in time of actual or threatened war, but in May 1662 Charles ordered the raising of six Scottish companies of foot, which were then regimented in 1664 under the Earl of Linlithgow, first as ‘the King’s Regiment’ and afterwards ‘His Majesty’s Regiment of Guards’.2 Three of the companies served as the garrisons of Edinburgh, Stirling and Dumbarton castles, but the rest went to Glasgow and the south-west to serve as an armed police force, under the command of Sir James Turner.

THE ‘PENTLAND RISING’ 1666

Like most of the regiment’s officers, Turner was a veteran of the Civil War and the earlier wars on the Continent as well. Born in Dalkeith in about 1615, he was a good soldier, but a hard and totally unscrupulous one of flexible loyalties. Once a major general, by November 1666 he had been promoted to lieutenant colonel of the regiment and was busy levying fines on recalcitrant Covenanters and generally throwing his weight about in Dumfriesshire, when a rebellion quite unexpectedly broke out. His regime was not particularly harsh by the standards of the time as he had no great inclination to religion, but on 13 November, a small party of his soldiers arrested an old man at Dalry for non-payment of the fines due for his failing to attend the Kirk. Stirred up by a couple of fugitive Covenanters who were eating breakfast in a nearby inn, a mob rescued the old man and in the process shot and wounded the corporal in charge of the soldiers.3 Without the shooting the incident might have been accounted of little consequence but the ringleaders were already wanted men with nothing to lose, so while the unfortunate Corporal Deane was put on the back of a horse and sent off to Dumfries for treatment, they invited others to join them and forestall the expected ‘terrible reprisals’. As it happened, since March 1665 England had been at war with Holland and although Charles’ other kingdom of Scotland was incidentally but peripherally involved in what was essentially a maritime conflict, most of Turner’s troops had been recalled to man coastal fortifications such as the citadel at Leith. Consequently, he only had some seventy infantry at hand, and with most of them scattered in small parties up and down Annandale and Nithsdale, a third of them had been taken prisoner by the time the insurgents entered Dumfries early on the morning of 15 November. There they seized Turner himself, still wearing only his nightshirt, drawers and socks, and, despite the cold, paraded him around for some time in that state before allowing him to get dressed.

Scotland in 1689. Most of Scotland was mountainous and devoid of proper roads. For all practical purposes, the only crossing point between southern Scotland and the rest of the country was by way of Stirling. From time to time the rebels attempted to by-pass Stirling to the west by way of Balquhidder and Mentieth but the small forces involved were easily blocked. Further north, the key to movement into the hills was by way of the numerous river valleys.

Already they numbered some fifty horse ‘provided with cloaks girded over their shoulder for fighting’ (i.e. rolled tightly as a protection against sword-cuts) and perhaps as many as 200 foot. A little incongruously, having secured Turner, they then drank the King’s health by way of declaring that their quarrel was only with the newly re-instated bishops, not with the Crown. There were suggestions afterwards that the outbreak may have anticipated a more serious insurrection proposed for the following Spring, but it seems unlikely. On the contrary, the unpremeditated nature of the rising grew painfully obvious over the next few days as the rebels wandered aimlessly around the south-west. Beyond Dumfriesshire there were no lack of recruits in Ayrshire and Clydesdale, despite constant heavy rain which ought to have kept honest men at home and although they declined to attack Glasgow on hearing that it was held by Major General Thomas Dalyell of The Binns, a terrifying veteran of the Russian service and ruthless servant of the Crown, a rendezvous at the Bridge of Doon on 21 November discovered them to be 700 strong.

There they were joined by another Civil War veteran, Colonel James Wallace of Auchans. It was Wallace who now started to turn the insurgents into a proper army by organising them into troops and companies, although he had great trouble in finding men able and willing to act as officers. He was also sensible enough to recognise that marching around in circles was a recipe for disaster, especially as the weather showed no sign of improving. Accordingly, the Covenanters marched eastwards, rather uncertainly heading for Edinburgh, and pursuing an illusory hope that the capitol would rise in the name of the Covenant. By the time they reached Lanark on 25 November, Turner, expressing admiration for their marching ability, estimated them to number 450 horse and something over 500 Foot. Of those, the former he said were said reasonably well equipped, with most having swords, or pistols or both, but the armament of the foot amounted to no more than a bucolic assortment of muskets, pikes, scythes, pitchforks and even simple wooden staves.

From Lanark it went downhill and eventually on 28 November the rebels were brought to bay standing on Rullion Green, in the Pentland Hills, some miles south of Edinburgh. Finding Dalyell coming up fast, Wallace (on Turner’s advice) immediately moved off the low green and took up a strong position ‘on the syd off the turnhous hill, which is the westmost, greatest and highest off the pentlanhills, and the tope off it doeth just resemble the tope off Arthur’s seat.’4 Once on the top, Wallace divided his little force into three bodies, facing eastwards; on the Covenanters’ right was the Galloway horse under Robert MacClellan of Barscobe – the man who shot Corporal Deanes – and on the left wing the main body of the horse under Major Joseph Learmonth of Newholm. Wallace himself took post in the centre with the foot and waited for Dalyell to close up; ‘Now there was a great glen [the Glencorse Burn] betwixt us, so as neither of us could have access to other. There we stood brandishing our swords.’ All of those involved, either in the fighting or as onlookers, agreed as to the formidable obstacle formed by the burn and the difficulty of getting up the fearsomely steep slope to the Covenanters’ position, but it had to be done, as Dalyell’s second-in-command, Lieutenant General William Drummond colourfully related:

[the rebels] were at Collintoune 2 myles from Edenburgh, on Tuesday the 27th by midday to our admiration whatever their designe or invitacon was for soe desperate a march they found their plot p’vented; wee judged rightly they would get of to Bigger and betook us to fall in their way going over the Pentland Hills at Currie, our fore party of 100 horse discovered them on their march toewards Linton the Bigger way near a place called Glencorse Kirk and with great boldness sett upon them, and endured the danger to face all their strength, horse and foot, until our cavalry far behind came up and that spent near 2 houres, soe had God blinded these fooles to neglect their advantage, our party being in a ground whence they could not come off: some sharp charges past in this time, wch the rebells gave and received with desperate resolucon to our prejudice, at last our horse comes on and gave breathing to that weary party, but our foot was yet 4 miles from us, we found it convenient to draw from that ground very advantageous for their foot wch they after much consideracon began to employ agst us but we prevented them and got off a little to a better ground where they made a fashion to annoy us without any gaine; so soon as our foot came up we put ourselves in order and embattled in a faire plaine upon their noses; they upon the hill above did the like but gave us noe disturbance tho well they might. 5

Once everyone was arrived and in place, Dalyell’s army amounted to two troops of Horse Guards6, and six other troops belonging to Drummond’s Regiment of Horse. As to the infantry, there were two regiments of foot; a part of the King’s Regiment, and Dalyell’s own newly raised one. Estimates giving the General something in the region of 600 cavalry and 2,000 infantry seem optimistic, but there is no doubt that he outnumbered the rebels and in any case he was running out of time and had to fight at once, for as Drummond continues: 7

By this time the sun was sett, we must make haste and advanced a partie of horse and foot from our right hand to assault their left wing of horse wch instantly came doune and met them, and there the work began, wee fought obstinately a long time with swords until they mixed like chessmen in a bag; we...