und in his
own despatch to Lord Melville after the battle.

[103] It was the disastrous experience of this day that led Mackay to
devise a plan of fixing the bayonet to the musket so that each could be
used, as now, without interfering with the other.

[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 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. 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