Clan Dalziel

On the late afternoon of the twenty-eighth of November 1666, on the eastern shoulder of the Pentland Hills above the small farmstead of Rullion Green, eight miles south of Edinburgh, the south-western Covenanting host of about nine hundred armed countrymen was destroyed by a Government cavalry force of about three thousand horse and dragoons under Lieutenant-General Sir Thomas Dalziel of the Binns, in the action that closed the Pentland Rising. Dalziel, in his sixty-first year, was the soldier in Scotland under Charles II, freshly returned from fifteen years in the service of the Tsar of Muscovy in the campaigns against the Tatars and the Turks, where he had grown a long full beard he had vowed never to cut while Charles I and his cause were avenged. The countrymen had risen at Lanark over the imposition of bishops on the Kirk and the harassment of conventicle preachers; they had marched on Edinburgh, found the city closed against them, and turned south for home. Dalziel caught them at Rullion Green at sunset. The action lasted under an hour. The Covenanters who survived were taken to Edinburgh, where about forty were hanged at the Mercat Cross over the next two months. Dalziel was rewarded with the Colonelcy of the Royal Regiment of Scots Dragoons (the modern Royal Scots Greys, lineally descended) and held the King's commission in Scotland for the next twenty years. He earned the by-name Bluidy Tam in the western Covenanting cottages, where it has stayed for three and a half centuries.

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