was spent.  He sent to Hamilton for more, or for fresh troops, but the only answer he received was an order to retire.  He had no choice but to fall back on the main body, which he found at that supreme moment busily engaged in cashiering their officers, and quarrelling over the choice of new ones.  The English foot then crossed the bridge:  Monmouth followed leisurely at the head of the horse, while his cannon played from the eastern bank on the disordered masses of the Covenanters.  A few Galloway men, better mounted and officered than the rest of their fellows, spurred out against the Life Guards as they were filing off the narrow bridge, but were at once ordered back by Hamilton.  The rest of the horse in taking up fresh ground to avoid the English cannon completed the disorder of the foot—­if, indeed, anything were wanted to complete the disorder of a rabble which had never known the meaning of the word order; and a general forward movement of the royal troops, who had now all passed the bridge, gave the signal for flight.  Hamilton was the first to obey it, thus, in the words of an eye-witness, “leaving the world to debate whether he acted most like a traitor, a coward, or a fool."[32] Twelve hundred of the poor wretches surrendered at discretion:  the rest fled in all directions.  Monmouth ordered quarter to be given to all who asked it, and there is no doubt that he was able considerably to diminish the slaughter.  Comparatively few fell at the bridge, but four or five hundred are said to have fallen, “murdered up and down the fields,” says Wodrow, “wherever the soldiers met them, without mercy.”  Mercy was not a conspicuous quality of the soldiery of those days; and the discovery of a huge gallows in the insurgents’ camp, with a cartload of new ropes at the foot, was not likely to stay the hands of men who knew well enough that had the fortune of war been different those ropes would have been round their necks without any mercy.  But it is clear that Monmouth was able to save many.  When Dalziel arrived next day in camp and learned how things had gone, he rebuked the Duke to his face for betraying his command.  “Had I come a day sooner,” he said, “these rogues should never have troubled his majesty or the kingdom any more."[33]

There is no authority for attributing to Claverhouse himself any particular ferocity.  We may be pretty sure that the Covenanting chroniclers would not have refrained from another fling at their favourite scapegoat could they have found a stone to their hand; but as a matter of fact, in no account of the battle is he mentioned, save by name only, as having been present with his troop in Monmouth’s army.  The fiery and vindictive part assigned to him by Scott rests on the authority of the most amazing tissue of absurdities ever woven out of the inventive fancy of a ballad-monger.[34] He had no kinsman’s death to avenge, and he was too good a soldier to directly disobey his chief’s orders, however little they may have been to his taste.