of the victors of Drumclog were swollen by their success, but
they were repulsed with loss in an attack on Glasgow. The commands of
Ross and Claverhouse were then withdrawn to Stirling, and when
Livingstone joined them at Larbert, the whole army mustered but 1800
men--so weak were the regulars. The militia was raised, and the king
sent down his illegitimate son, Monmouth, husband of the heiress of
Buccleuch, at the head of several regiments of redcoats. Argyll was not
of service; he was engaged in private war with the Macleans, who refused
an appeal for help from the rebels. They, in Glasgow and at Hamilton,
were quarrelling over the Indulgence: the extremists called Mr Welsh's
party "rotten-hearted"--Welsh would not reject the king's authority--the
Welshites were the more numerous. On June 22 the Clyde, at Bothwell
Bridge, separated the rebels--whose preachers were inveighing against
each other--from Monmouth's army. Monmouth refused to negotiate till the
others laid down their arms, and after a brief artillery duel, the Royal
infantry carried the bridge, and the rest of the affair was pursuit by
the cavalry. The rival Covenanting leaders, Russel, one of Sharp's
murderers, and Ure, give varying accounts of the affair, and each party
blames the other. The rebel force is reckoned at from five to seven
thousand, the Royal army was of 2300 according to Russel. "Some
hundreds" of the Covenanters fell, and "many hundreds," the Privy Council
reported, were taken.

The battle of Bothwell Bridge severed the extremists, Robert Hamilton,
Richard Cameron and Cargill, the famous preachers, and the rest, from the
majority of the Covenanters. They dwindled to the "Remnant," growing the
fiercer as their numbers decreased. Only two ministers were hanged;
hundreds of prisoners were banished, like Cromwell's prisoners after
Dunbar, to the American colonies. Of these some two hundred were drowned
in the wreck of their vessel off the Orkneys. The main body were penned
up in Greyfriars Churchyard; many escaped; more signed a promise to
remain peaceful, and shun conventicles. There was more of cruel
carelessness than of the deliberate cruelty displayed in the massacres
and hangings of women after Philiphaugh and Dunaverty. But the
avaricious and corrupt rulers, after 1679, headed by James, Duke of York
(Lauderdale being removed), made the rising of Bothwell Bridge the
pretext for fining and ruining hundreds of persons, especia