Bluidy Tam at Rullion Green

A war is not always lost in the year it ends. Sometimes it is lost in an hour, on a hillside in failing light, by a man who has been waiting forty years for the order to settle it. The veteran soldier carries the unfinished business of his youth into his sixtieth decade, and when the moment comes he is not surprised by it. He has rehearsed it in five armies and three languages, and he knows exactly what a tired line of countrymen looks like at the limit of its march.

THE BEARDED GENERAL

Sir Thomas Dalziel of the Binns was born in 1606 and put on harness for the first King Charles in his twentieth year. He fought at Worcester in 1651, was taken prisoner to the Tower, escaped, and crossed the sea to offer his sword to the Tsar of Muscovy. Fifteen winters he passed on the steppe in the service of Alexis Mikhailovich, riding against Tatar and Turk, learning the use of dragoons on open ground, the dispersal of irregular horse, the value of cold and patience. He had vowed, on the scaffold news of the first King Charles in 1649, never to shave again until the cause was avenged. The vow held. By the time he came home in 1665 the beard reached his breastplate, grey-white, and the Edinburgh laddies ran from him in the close as from a figure in a wood-cut. He took his commission from the second King Charles, and when the King in audience asked whether he dared go north to suppress the conventicles, he answered, by the family record, I Dare. The two words became the motto on the gate of the Binns. They were not boast. They were inventory.

THE COUNTRYMEN ON THE ROAD

They had risen at Lanark on the fifteenth of November, nine hundred armed men of Galloway and the Nith and the upper Clyde, over the imposition of bishops on the Kirk and the harrying of their preachers from the moors. Colonel James Wallace, an honest captain of the old Covenanting army of 1648, had taken the command. They marched on Edinburgh and found the city gates closed and the trained bands on the walls. They turned for home. Three weeks of November rain had thinned them; the muskets were four hundred good and the rest fowling-pieces; they had not eaten since the morning of the twenty-eighth. On the eastern shoulder of the Pentlands, above the small farm of Rullion Green, eight miles south of Edinburgh, Wallace drew them up on the ridge above the burn and waited for what was coming up the pass behind them.

THE AFTERNOON OF RULLION GREEN

It was twenty past three on the twenty-eighth of November 1666. The first snow of the season had begun on the upper slopes. Behind the General, on the high ground, stood three regiments of horse, two of dragoons, and the Royal Regiment of Foot Guards, three thousand professional troopers of the Crown of Scotland. He sat his horse in buff coat and breastplate, the long beard laid down over the steel, and looked at the line on the ridge half a mile to the south. They were spent. He could see it in the way the second rank leaned on the first. He had seen the same posture on the Don in 1660, on a frozen river above a town whose name he could no longer pronounce. A captain who had ridden for the Tsar against the Crim Tatars learned to read a tired line at half a mile.

A SECOND OF TIME ABOVE THE BURN

The General held the order in his mouth for perhaps the length of a paternoster. The countrymen in front of him were tenants and ploughmen of the south-west; their captain was an honest man; their line was steady in the way that conviction is steady, not in the way that drill is steady. In the cottages of Lanark and Renfrew, this past month, they had given him already a hundred hangings he had not ordered. He had ordered three. The cottages, by hearsay, had multiplied it as cottages do, and the by-name had attached itself: Bluidy Tam. The order he was about to give would not lessen it; nor would silence. He had not come north from the Tsar's service to be remembered as a moderate man. The Council in Edinburgh had been clear, and his instructions were in the saddlebag under his knee, and he could feel them there as one feels a stone in a boot. Forty years of campaigning had taught him that the great fault of irregulars was not want of courage but want of an hour's training in volley-fire at fifty yards, and the great fault of the man who fought them was hesitation. He did not hesitate. At half past three he gave the order: dragoons to dismount on the heath, the Royal Foot to deploy on the right of the burn, the regiments of horse to take the wings and close.

THE HOUR

The Covenanting line fired its single volley at fifty yards. By the General's own dispatch to the Privy Council that night, it did not do signal damage. The Royal Foot's professional volley at fifty yards went through the second rank. The horse closed from both wings and the action was done within forty-five minutes. About fifty countrymen lay dead on the heath. About a hundred and twenty were taken. The rest scattered in the dark down the Pentland passes and were lifted by the parish constables in the morning, named by neighbours, walked into Edinburgh in halters.

THE MERCAT CROSS

In the cell under the Tolbooth, Colonel Wallace was not among the captured; he had got clear in the dark and would die in Holland four years later, an old man writing his apology to nobody. The thirty-six who were taken and tried before the Privy Council in the second week of January 1667 went up the ladder at the Mercat Cross over the next two months, four more at Glasgow, two at Ayr, one at Irvine. They were buried in unconsecrated ground at the foot of the Pentland Hills. The Council recorded its thanks to the Lieutenant-General in the language proper to such occasions. The western parishes recorded their own language for him at the hearth, and it has not been edited out in the three hundred and sixty years since.

THE BINNS

By the royal commission of November 1681 he was given the Colonelcy of the Royal Regiment of Scots Dragoons, the regiment still on the order of battle of the British Army as the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards. He held the King's commission in Scotland for twenty years after Rullion Green, and the western Covenanting tradition, weighing him with care, names him the principal architect of the Killing Times of the 1680s, the worst persecution of Scottish dissenters of the century. He died at the Binns in West Lothian in 1685, in his seventy-ninth year, with the beard intact to the belt. It was buried with him by his own instruction. The Martyrs' Tomb above Rullion Green, raised by the western societies in 1738, stands on the ground where the Royal Foot's volley fell.

An age is closed by the man who has the training to close it, and the cost is paid by the men who had only the conviction to oppose him. The General understood the trade in both directions and signed for it with his own hand. At the Binns, in the National Trust house under the Bathgate hills, the portrait in the upper drawing-room shows the beard running from the breastplate to the belt, and the dogs, by the tradition of the house, will not enter the bedroom where he died on the twenty-eighth of November.