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 assassin 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.
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