[34] He had no kinsman's death to
avenge, and he was too good a soldier to directly disobey his chief's
orders, however little they may have been to his taste.
There is, moreover, positive evidence to the contrary. Six years after
the battle one Robert Smith, of Dunscore, who had been among the rebel
horsemen at Bothwell, deposed that as they, some sixteen hundred in
number, were in retreat towards Carrick, he saw the royal cavalry halted
within less than a mile from the field, and this was considered by the
fugitives to have been done to favour their escape. "For," he went on,
"if they had followed us they had certainly killed or taken us all." It
is clear, therefore, that whatever Claverhouse might have done had he
been left to himself, or whatever he may have wished to do--what he did
do was, in common with the rest of the army, to obey his superior's
orders.
FOOTNOTES:
[30] "Lives of the Scots Worthies," p. 383.
[31] Wodrow, iii. 93.
[32] Wodrow, iii. 107.
[33] Creichton, pp. 37-8.
[34] See some doggrel verses on the battle in "The Minstrelsy of the
Scottish Border," in which Claverhouse is represented as posting off to
London from the field of battle and, by means of false witnesses,
bringing Monmouth to the scaffold as a traitor who had given quarter to
the King's enemies.
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