ade a rush upon me with his sword, but my friends
were nimbler with theirs; and Sir George Mackenzie interposing, drew him
off, and they went away together.

The affair, however, ended not here. Sir George, with the subtlety of a
lawyer, tried to turn it to some account, and making a great ado of it,
as a design to assassinate Lord Dundee and himself, tried to get the
Convention to order all strangers to remove from the town. This,
however, was refused; so that Claverhouse, seeing how the spirit of the
times was going among the members, and the boldness with which the
presbyterians and the Covenanters were daily bearding his arrogance,
withdrew with his dragoons from the city and made for Stirling.

In this retreat from Edinburgh he blew the trumpet of civil war; but in
less than two hours from the signal, a regiment of eight hundred
Cameronians was arrayed in the High-street. The son of Argyle, who had
taken his seat in the Convention as a peer, soon after gathered three
hundred of the Campbells, and the safety of Scotland now seemed to be
secured by the arrival of Mackay with three Scotch regiments, then in
the Dutch service, and which the Prince of Orange had brought with him
to Torbay.

By the retreat of Claverhouse the Jacobite party in Edinburgh were so
disheartened, and any endeavour which they afterwards made to rally was
so crazed with consternation, that it was plain the sceptre had departed
from their master. The capacity as well as the power for any effectual
action was indeed evidently taken from them, and the ploughshare was
driven over the ruins of their cause on the ever-memorable eleventh day
of April, when William and Mary were proclaimed King and Queen.

But though thus the oppressor was cast down from his throne, and though
thus, in Scotland, the chief agents in the work of deliverance were the
outlawed Cameronians, as instructed by me, the victory could not be
complete, nor the trophies hung up in the hall, while the Tyrant
possessed an instrument of such edge and temper as Claverhouse. As for
myself, I felt that while the homicide lived the debt of justice and of
blood due to my martyred family could never be satisfied; and I heard of
his passing from Stirling into the Highlands, and the wonders he was
working for the Jacobite cause there, as if nothing had yet been
achieved toward the fulfilment of my avenging vow.

CHAPTER XCI

When Claverhouse left Stirling, he had but sixty horse.