Claverhouse Part 10

[104] "History of the Rebellions in Scotland." Even the men who had stood by Lord Murray joined in the slaughter. He did his best to keep them quiet, but was forced to own afterwards to Mackay that he had not been very successful. "It cannot be helped," he wrote, "of almost all country people, who are ready to pillage and plunder whenever they have occasion." See the Bannatyne edition of Dundee's Letters, &c.

[105] Mackay's opinion was that "the English commonalty were to be preferred in matter of courage to the Scots."

[106] One tradition, for a long while current among the Lowlands, declares him to have been shot by one of his own men in the pay of William Livingstone, who afterwards married Lady Dundee; Livingstone having been for some weeks a close prisoner in Edinburgh with the other disaffected officers of his regiment. Lady Dundee, the story goes on to say, was aware of his intentions, and on the following New Year's day sent "the supposed a.s.sa.s.sin a white night-cap, a pair of white gloves, and a rope, being a sort of suit of canonicals for the gallows, either to signify that she esteemed him worthy of that fate, or that she thought the state of his mind might be such as to make him fit to hang himself." Another tradition makes Dundee fall by a shot fired from the window of Urrard House, in which a party of Mackay's men had lodged themselves. He was watering his horse at the time at a pond called the Goose-Dub, where the Laird of Urrard's geese were wont to disport themselves. This story is evidently part of the old nurse's prophecy mentioned on page 3. For these and many other anecdotes of the battle, see the "History of the Rebellions in Scotland." I have taken my account of Dundee's death from the memoirs of Balcarres and Lochiel, and from the depositions, printed by Napier, of certain witnesses examined afterwards at Edinburgh, among them being an officer of Kenmure's regiment, who was carried prisoner into the castle after the battle and heard Johnstone's story. As for the letter said to have been written by Dundee to James after the battle, and now among the Nairne Papers, there is more to be said for it than some have allowed. Macaulay, alluding to it as dated the day after the battle, calls it as impudent a forgery as Fingal. But in fact it bears no date at all: the handwriting is declared on the best authority to be beyond question contemporary; and there is no absolute proof that Dundee did not live long enough at least to dictate an account of his victory to James. It is tolerably certain that he would have done so had his strength permitted him. But in a letter written from Dublin in the following November by James to Ballechin, there is no mention of any letter from Dundee, and his death is there alluded to as having occurred at the beginning of the action. This, of course, is not conclusive; James's actual words are, "the loss you had ... at your entrance into action," which need not imply instant death.

On the whole, however, the balance of evidence seems to me to prove that Dundee died where he fell, and that the letter is not genuine, though certainly no forgery of Macpherson's. Those who are still curious on a point which is, after all, of no very great importance, will find it amply discussed in a note to the edition of Dundee's letters published for the Bannatyne Club, and in an appendix to Napier's third volume. A stone still marks the spot where Dundee is said to have fallen, and was seen by Captain Burt less than fifty years after the battle.