of the town.  Meanwhile, their comrades, descending the hill on the other side, saw what was going on, and, having no mind for a similar welcome, turned about and made off by the way they had come.  The two parties joined and halted for a while at the place they had occupied on the previous night; but when they heard Claverhouse’s trumpets sounding again to horse they fell back to Hamilton Park, where it was not thought prudent to follow them.

FOOTNOTES: 

[24] Claverhouse to Linlithgow, June 1st, 1679.  This is the famous despatch which Scott says was spelled like a chambermaid’s.  The original is now among the Stow Manuscripts in the British Museum.

[25] Cannon’s “Historical Records of the British Army” (Second Dragoons):  Macaulay’s History, i. 305-8.

[26] Russell’s account of Sharp’s murder, Kirkton, p. 442.  See also Creichton’s Memoirs, though the captain was not present at the fight, having remained in garrison at Glasgow.  In a Latin poem, “Bellum Bothuellianum,” by Andrew Guild, now in the Advocates’ Library at Edinburgh, are the following lines: 

    “Tum rabiosa cohors, misereri nescia, stratos
    Invadit, laceratque viros:  hic signifer, eheu! 
    Trajectus globulo, Graemus, quo fortior alter
    Inter Scotigenas fuerat, nec justior ullus: 
    Hunc manibus rapuere feris, faciemque virilem
    Foedarunt, lingua, auriculis, manibusque resectis
    Aspera diffuso spargentes saxa cerebro.”

The passage is quoted at length in the notes to “Old Mortality.”  Sharpe, in his notes to Kirkton, says, on the authority of Wodrow, that Cornet Graham was shot by one John Alstoun, a miller’s son, and tenant of Weir of Blackwood.  This is not correct.  There was a Cornet Graham so killed, but not till three years after Drumclog.

[27] “With a pitchfork they made such an openeing in my rone horse’s belly.”  Sir Walter, following tradition, has mounted Claverhouse on a coal-black charger without a single white hair in its body, a present, according to the legends of the time, from the Devil to his favourite servant.  See also Aytoun’s fine ballad “The Burial March of Dundee”: 

    “Then our leader rode among us
      On his war-horse black as night;
    Well the Cameronian rebels
      Knew that charger in the fight.”

[28] Kirkton, 444, note.

[29] It was reported by some of his own party that as his men entered the town Hamilton withdrew into a house at the Gallowgate to wait the issue.  But it would be no more fair to take this report for truth than it would be to assume that Claverhouse really forbad burial to the dead Whigs, that the dogs might eat them where they lay in the streets.  There was too much quarrelling in the Covenanting camp to allow us to take for granted all their judgments on each other when unfavourable; and at Drumclog Hamilton seems by all accounts to have borne himself bravely enough, whatever he may have done subsequently.