to commence their exploits upon the 29th of May, 1679, being the anniversary of the Restoration, appointed to be kept as a holiday, by act of parliament; an institution which they esteemed a presumptuous and unholy solemnity.  Accordingly, at the head of eighty horse, tolerably appointed, Hamilton, Burly, and Hackston, entered the royal burgh of Rutherglen, extinguished the bonfires, made in honour of the day; burned at the cross the acts of parliament in favour of prelacy, and for suppression of conventicles, as well as those acts of council, which regulated the indulgence granted to presbyterians.  Against all these acts they entered their solemn protest, or testimony, as they called it; and, having affixed it to the cross, concluded with prayer and psalms.  Being now joined by a large body of foot, so that their strength seems to have amounted to five or six hundred men, though very indifferently armed, they encamped upon Loudoun Hill.  Claverhouse, who was in garrison at Glasgow, instantly marched against the insurgents, at the head of his own troop of cavalry and others, amounting to about one hundred and fifty men.  He arrived at Hamilton, on the 1st of June, so unexpectedly, as to make prisoner John King, a famous preacher among the wanderers; and rapidly continued his march, carrying his captive along with him, till he came to the village of Drumclog, about a mile east of Loudoun Hill, and twelve miles south-west of Hamilton.  At some distance from this place, the insurgents were skilfully posted in a boggy strait, almost inaccessible to cavalry, having a broad ditch in their front.  Claverhouse’s dragoons discharged their carabines, and made an attempt to charge; but the nature of the ground threw them into total disorder.  Burly, who commanded the handful of horse belonging to the whigs, instantly led them down on the disordered squadrons of Claverhouse, who were, at the same time, vigorously assaulted by the foot, headed by the gallant Cleland,[A] and the enthusiastic Hackston.  Claverhouse himself was forced to fly, and was in the utmost danger of being taken; his horse’s belly being cut open by the stroke of a scythe, so that the poor animal trailed his bowels for more than a mile.  In his flight, he passed King, the minister, lately his prisoner, but now deserted by his guard, in the general confusion.  The preacher hollowed to the flying commander, “to halt, and take his prisoner with him;” or, as others say, “to stay, and take the afternoon’s preaching.”  Claverhouse, at length remounted, continued his retreat to Glasgow.  He lost, in the skirmish, about twenty of his troopers, and his own cornet and kinsman, Robert Graham, whose fate is alluded to in the ballad.  Only four of the other side were killed, among whom was Dingwall, or Daniel, an associate of Burly in Sharpe’s murder.  “The rebels,” says Creichton, “finding the cornet’s body, and supposing it to be that of Clavers, because the name of Graham was wrought in the shirt-neck, treated it with the utmost inhumanity; cutting off the nose, picking out the eyes, and stabbing it through in a hundred places.”  The same charge is brought by Guild, in his Bellum Bothuellianum, in which occurs the following account of the skirmish at Drumclog:—­