Free A People's History of Scotland by Chris Bambery

troops to break them up, but the Covenanters, as they termed themselves, resisted.
    On 13 November 1666, near Dalry in Kirkcudbrightshire, government troops stopped and held an old man charged with refusing to acknowledge the new episcopacy. They threatened to strip him bare and roast him alive in his own home, but four fellow Covenanters intervened, shooting the corporal and taking the other three prisoner.
    News of this took twenty-four hours to reach the garrison in Dumfries. Meanwhile, the Covenanters had overrun the sixteen-strong government garrison at Balmaclellan and, on 15 November, with their numbers put at between 150 and 500, captured Dumfries, taking the government commander in his nightgown. For the next week, they moved around the south-west, threatening to march on Glasgow, before deciding on Edinburgh, where they believed their friends were set to rise. Meanwhile, the government commander, General ‘Black Tam’ Dalyell, had been ordered to bring them to battle.
    The Covenanters were ahead of Dalyell as they marched towards the capital, but discovered the city had been made secure by the Crown. Dalyell caught up with them on 24 November at Rullion Green, seven miles south, where it took three charges for the regular troops to break the Covenanters, and when they did, ‘darkness afforded escape.’ 18 Nevertheless, 120 were captured and 50 killed. Of those captured, 36 were executed in Edinburgh, their heads and body parts put on display around Scotland. On the scaffold, a captain in the rebel army, Andrew Arnot, prayed for his fellow accused, threw out a proclamation in support of the Covenant and then ‘… pluckt out a pocket butt of sack and with a roaring voice uttered … that he would drink no more of the wyne till hee had it new in his father’s kingdome’. 19
    In 1679, a group of Covenanters dragged Archbishop Sharp of St Andrews from his carriage at Magus Muir in Fife and slashed him to death. Once more royal troops were sent to root out illegal conventicles. That June a force of dragoons under John Graham, the Laird of Claverhouse, a Royalist who had been in exile and had served in the French and Dutch armies, came across one at Drumclog near Kilmarnock. Warned by lookouts, the minister told the women and children to depart and ended his sermon thus: ‘Ye have got the theory; now for the practice.’ 20 In the battle that followed, Claver-house was defeated, losing thirty-six men.
    The Covenanters now advanced on Glasgow, but internal divisions and the authorities’ capacity to hold the city meant they did not press the attack. Eventually, they faced the royal army at Bothwell Bridge. For over an hour, Galloway men held the south side of the bridge but, on running out of ammunition, were told to rejoin the main force, allowing the government forces to bring across the artillery. The Covenanters broke under cannon fire. Four hundred were killed and 1,500 captured. Seven of their leaders were executed and 250 who refused to submit to the Crown were sent as forced labour to the West Indies. En route their ship sunk off the Orkneys and 200 drowned. 21
    What followed became known as the ‘Killing Time’. Royal commanders went around the south-west demanding that individuals swear loyalty to the king’s Church. If they refused, they were summarily executed.
    In the following years low-level guerrilla war took place across the region until the Glorious Revolution in 1688 brought an end to the repression. Some ninety Covenanters were executed. During this period the Covenanter Alexander Shields came to the conclusion that the terms king and tyrant were interchangeable. Radical Covenanters began to advocate a Republic of Jesus Christ. 22 One of the radicals, James Renwick, aged just twenty-six, returned from exile and ventured to Edinburgh, despite there being a price on his head. He exchanged shots with government troops before being captured. He mounted