It will be necessary, then, to supply this gap in Claverhouse’s correspondence by a brief review of the state of things from the battle of Drumclog to the date of his new commission.

The garrison of Glasgow had, as we have seen, joined Linlithgow at Stirling.  There they lay for a day or two till orders were received from the Council for the whole army, which only numbered about eighteen hundred men in all, to fall back on Edinburgh.  In the capital the greatest consternation reigned.  The first proceeding of the Council was to proclaim the rising “an open, manifest, and horrid rebellion,” and all the insurgents were summoned to surrender at discretion as “desperate and incorrigible traitors.”  Having thus satisfied their diplomatic consciences they wisely proceeded to more practical measures.  The militia was called out, horse and foot, in all the Lowlands, save in the disaffected shires.  For those north of the Forth the rendezvous was at Stirling, for those south on the links of Leith.  Each man was to bring provisions with him for ten days.  The magistrates were ordered to remove all the powder and other munitions of war they could find in the city to the Castle.  An armed guard was stationed night and day in the Canongate, and another in the Abbey.  Finally, a post was sent to London on Linlithgow’s advice to urge the instant despatch of more troops, and two shillings and sixpence a day of extra pay was promised to every foot soldier.

They were not disturbed in their preparations.  The Covenanters were too busy with their own affairs to take much heed what their enemies might be doing.  They did, indeed, march into Glasgow, but beyond shooting a poor wretch whom they vowed they recognised as having fought against them on the 2nd, and possibly indulging in a little looting, they did nothing.  They did not stay long in the town.  Plans they seem to have had none, nor any settled organisation or discipline.  Moving restlessly about the neighbourhood from village to village and from moor to moor, their preachers exhorted and harangued as much against each other as against Pope or Prelate, and their leaders quarrelled as though there were not a King’s soldier in all Scotland, nor Claverhouse within a dozen miles of them eager for the moment to strike.  There was no lack of arms among them, and their numbers seem at this time to have been not far short of eight thousand.  But no men of any position or influence in the country had joined them with the exception of Hamilton; and his authority, whether the story of his cowardice at Glasgow be true or not, was not what it had been at Rutherglen and Drumclog.  The preachers seemed to have exercised the only control over the rabble; and such control, as was natural, seems rarely to have lasted beyond the length of their sermons, which, indeed, were not commonly short.  As the Covenanters (to keep to the distinguishing name I have chosen) were an extreme section of the Presbyterians, so now the Covenanters themselves were