Clan Dalziel · 1666
Bluidy Tam at Rullion Green
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.
It is twenty past three on the afternoon of the twenty-eighth of November 1666, on the eastern shoulder of the Pentlands at the small farm of Rullion Green, eight miles south of Edinburgh, in failing winter light with the first snow of the season starting on the upper slopes. He is sixty-one years old. He is Lieutenant-General Sir Thomas Dalziel of the Binns, born in 1606 to Thomas Dalziel of the Binns and Janet Bruce, schooled at the household of his uncle the Earl of Linlithgow, in his fortieth year of more or less continuous active service in five armies (the army of Charles I, the cavaliers of Worcester, the Tsar's army of Muscovy, the army of the Restoration, the present King's forces in Scotland). He is in a buff coat and breastplate over the long beard he has not cut since 1649. The beard, by every contemporary account, is grey-white and reaches to the breastplate.
On the heath below him, half a mile to the south, are the south-western countrymen who have come up from Lanark this fortnight to protest the imposition of bishops on the Kirk and the assize of conventicle preachers. They are about nine hundred. They are armed with about four hundred working muskets and the Lanarkshire fowling-pieces of the rest. Their commander is Colonel James Wallace, formerly of the Covenanting army of 1648, an honest captain. He has formed his line on the small ridge above the burn.
Dalziel has, on the high ground behind him, three regiments of horse, two of dragoons, the Royal Regiment of Foot Guards. About three thousand professional troopers, the army of the Crown.
He thinks: the countrymen are spent. They have been on the road in November for three weeks. They have not eaten since the morning. They are at this hour at the limit of their march.
He thinks: Wallace is a captain. The men in front are not soldiers. The men in front, in the front rank, are tenants and ploughmen of the south-west. The men in the second rank are the same.
He thinks: the countrymen are at the limit of conviction. The countrymen are not at the limit of training. The training is what the next hour will be about.
He thinks: I have, in this country, the by-name Bluidy Tam. The by-name has been earned in the cottages of Lanark and Renfrew over the past month for hangings I have not, in fact, ordered. I have ordered three. The cottages have, by hearsay, given me a hundred. I am not, by my instructions from the Council, going to give them less than they have already imagined.
He gives the order at half past three for the 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. The Covenanting line, by the testimony of the survivors deposed afterwards, fires its single volley at fifty yards. The volley does not, by Dalziel's report to the Council that night, do signal damage. The professional volley of the Royal Foot at fifty yards goes through the Covenanting line at the second rank. The cavalry close in from both wings. The action is done within forty-five minutes. About fifty Covenanters dead on the field. About a hundred and twenty taken prisoner. The rest of the host, scattered in the dark down the Pentland passes, is mostly captured by the parish constables in the morning.
By the second week of January 1667, before the Privy Council in Edinburgh, thirty-six of the captured Covenanters had been tried and hanged at the Mercat Cross. A further four had been hanged at Glasgow, two at Ayr, and one at Irvine. The thirty-six were buried in unconsecrated ground at the foot of the Pentland Hills; the Martyrs' Tomb at Rullion Green, put up in 1738 by the western Covenanting societies, is in the spot.
Sir Thomas Dalziel was given the Colonelcy of the Royal Regiment of Scots Dragoons by royal commission of November 1681 (the regiment is still on the British Army's order of battle as the Royal Scots Greys, since 1971 the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards). He governed the forces of Scotland for the King for the next twenty years and is, by the careful judgment of the western Covenanting tradition, the principal architect of the Killing Times of the 1680s, the worst persecution of Scottish dissenters of the seventeenth century. He died at the Binns in West Lothian in 1685, seventy-nine years old, with the long beard intact. The beard, by his instruction, was buried with him. The Binns is in the National Trust for Scotland today; the portrait of Dalziel in the upper drawing-room shows the beard reaching from the breastplate to the belt. Tradition holds, in the Bathgate hills, that the bedroom of the Binns where Dalziel died is haunted by him in winter, and that, every twenty-eighth of November, the dogs at the Binns will not enter the bedroom. The motto of the Dalziel family, I Dare, was the answer he gave to Charles II in 1666 when the king asked him whether he dared go to Scotland to suppress the Covenanters.