A Journey To The Strange Histories Of Scotland, England, Ireland And Wales
Jack's Strange Tales Series by Jack Strange
Series Excerpt
He had many nicknames, which is never a good thing. To some he was ‘The Muscovy De’il’, to others ‘Lang Tam Dalyell’ or ‘Muscovy Tam’ but most knew him as ‘Bluidy Tam.’ General Thomas Dalyell has received a black press over the years, yet he was possibly one of the most loyal men in a period when loyalty was hard to retain; and a professional soldier at a time when the Scottish Army was not at its best.
Dalyell was a Royalist during the great civil war that tore the four nations of the British Isles apart from 1639 until the early 1650s. He played a full part in the Scottish Wars, and when he heard that Cromwell’s regime had executed Charles I he is said to have sworn a solemn oath never to shave his beard. After that Dalyell stood out in any crowd, particularly as he grew older. By the time the second Charles ascended the throne, Dalyell was a tall, slender man with a bald head and a long grey beard that stretched below his belt. Unlike his contemporaries, Bluidy Tam refused to wear a wig, and the beaver hat he sported had a narrow brim. With this strange headgear above his beard, and a tight jockey’s coat beneath, Dalyell was a distinctive figure as he stalked the streets and hills of Scotland.
According to his contemporary, Captain John Creighton, when Dalyell travelled to London to speak to the king, hordes of cheering boys followed him, but rather than chasing them away, he thanked them for their attention. The king, however, was less pleased by these crowds of unwashed and unruly subjects and wondered why Dalyell did not shave and dress ‘like other Christians.’
There were those in Scotland who would dispute that Dalyell was any sort of Christian. His reputation went far deeper than any eccentricity of clothing to forms of cruelty and oppression that ground into the still-emerging Church of Scotland so that his name became a by-word for unease in the South West of the country.
Religion and power were at the heart of the troubles that beset seventeenth century Scotland. There was a struggle to control the Church and a dispute about what type of Church there should be. While the power of the Roman Catholic Church was mainly removed from Scotland in the sixteenth century, now the various factions of Protestantism squabbled amongst themselves. There is no need to go into the petty splits and factions, but the main argument was about control. While the Episcopalians sought a Church with pyramidical hierarchy headed by the King and containing a structure of rank including bishops and archbishops, the Presbyterians looked for a democratic church where people were responsible for their own souls.
The king, naturally, disliked to see control of the Church slip away from his hands and so began the religious wars of the seventeenth century. They were as bitter and cruel as any other civil war, and as a Royalist, Tam Dalyell was in the thick of them. When King Charles I was executed, Dalyell was imprisoned in the Tower of London but he escaped to serve Tsar Alexis Mikhailovich of Russia, the father of Peter the Great. For ten years Dalyell fought in the Tsar’s army. According to his enemies, it was there that he learned new tricks of cruelty and torture that he brought back to Scotland when Charles II ascended the throne. His name ‘The Muscovy Devil’ came from these rumours and half truths. In part, this nickname is a gentle play on words, as Dalyell is often pronounced Dee-il or Deil, the same as the old Scots name for the devil.
In truth Dalyell was the antithesis of the more extreme Presbyterians, the Covenanters who took to the hills of the South West during the years of their persecution. While they were reputed to be humourless and sombre, devoted to psalms and the Conventicles, the religious gatherings among the hills with only the sky for a roof and pewits for music, Dalyell was anything but. It was during these bad, killing times that Dalyell earned his reputation. He was a pleasure loving man with a mistress in Russia and perhaps a couple more in Scotland, with whom he sired a brood of children. He liked cards and gambling, drinking, roistering and boisterous parties that any other gallant cavalier would have envied, so he was seen as ungodly and unchristian by the grim Covenanters. When he returned from Russia, Dalyell brought with him a reputation for ruthless efficiency edged with cruelty, and the Covenanters wasted no opportunity to blacken his name.
Forgetting their own behaviour in the aftermath of the Battle of Philliphaugh, when they happily drowned the wives, children and camp followers of the Royalist army, the Covenanters accused Dalyell of every imaginable sin. According to them, he was a tyrant and a devil worshipper. He had sold his soul to Satan. He consorted with demons. He played terrible games in his house of the Binns. He tortured prisoners and hanged men at their own front doors.
The list is formidably shocking, and some of the accusations may even have a vestige of truth in them. As a battle-hardened soldier who had experienced war fighting for the Tsar against the Poles, Dalyell had undoubtedly witnessed some terrible things; it is unlikely he treated the Covenanters, lineal descendants of the men who had committed regicide on his king, with gentle sympathy.
As Commander in Chief of the King’s Army in Scotland, Tam Dalyell was responsible for ending the Covenanters insurrection of 1666. More commonly known as the Pentland Rising, this little war involved some hundreds of Presbyterians engaged in a spirited but hopeless march from the South West toward Edinburgh in an attempt to ask the king to redress their grievances. In atrocious weather, Dalyell marched the two thousand or so soldiers of the Scottish Army across the country; met the Covenanters in the Pentland Hills and in a bloody little encounter that showed the stalwart heroism of the Presbyterians, won his battle. Fifty Covenanters were killed, and about one hundred and thirty killed in this Battle of Rullion Green.
The aftermath was not pretty as first the Royal troops murdered thirty of the camp followers and prisoners and then Dalyell stuffed his prisoners into Haddock’s Hole, an exposed part of Edinburgh’s Greyfriars Kirk. From there many were transported as bonded slaves to the Americas and others hanged at Edinburgh’s Mercat Cross. Dalyell continued to press hard on the Covenanters, allegedly using thumbscrews and an atrociously repulsive torture instrument called the Boot to learn the names and whereabouts of other Presbyterians.
Although the thumbscrews had been known in Scotland since around the fifteenth century, Dalyell was slandered with the dubious honour of having introduced them from Russia. While that device for crushing the thumbs was an awful enough instrument, the Boot was truly chilling. Simple in construction, the Boot was a box that fitted around the shin and, when wedges were hammered in, crushed the bone so the marrow eased through. Dalyell was not blamed for inventing this monstrosity; he was only accused of agreeing to its use.
Probably more effective in preventing any real threat of revolution were the Scots Greys. This regiment of dragoons – the name came from the ‘dragon’ or type of firearm the original dragoons carried- wore grey cloth that Dalyell ordered specially after seeing the camouflaged Polish cavalry. These grey horsemen became expert in hunting down the Conventicles and harrying the hill-preachers that roamed the damp green hills of the Presbyterian west. And Dalyell was blamed for that too.
In the 1680s the persecution hit a new high as the Killing Times peaked. There had been another insurrection in 1679, with the twin battles of Drumclog and Bothwell Brig seeing the Covenanters hopes rise and then shatter. In 1680 the Covenanter Reverent Donald Cargill summarily excommunicated Dalyell and Charles II for:
killing pillaging, robbing and oppressing. . . the Lord’s people and free subjects of this kingdom. . . for this lewd and impious life leading adulteries and incleanness from his youth
This was a time of hatred and rumours, of women tied to stakes and drowned in the rising tide of Solway, of soldiers billeted in the homes of recalcitrant Presbyterians, of hidden Conventicles in the hills, of Episcopalian ministers stripped and abused by bands of screaming Covenanting woman, of sordid beatings and tragic families watching their men hanged, of women cast into pits filled with snakes and spiders and masked hill-preachers rallying the extremists.
Outside the turbulence of South West Scotland came the Rye House Plot, an attempt to depose Charles II, whose tentacles spread across England and deep into Scotland. The idea had been to kidnap or kill both the king and his son, the Duke of York as they travelled from Newmarket to the mansion of Rye House. A fire had caused Newmarket to be evacuated early so the timing was upset and the plot failed. Many prominent Scottish Covenanters were implicated, including an excommunicated minister called William Spence who was tortured by sleep deprivation, the Boot and what the Council minutes blandly described as: ‘the use of a new invention and engine called the thumbikins which will be very effective.’
Dalyell supervised the interrogation, along with George, ‘bloody’ Mackenzie, a judge who had sentenced many Covenanters to the gallows or slavery in the Americas. Just two years later, in August 1685, General Thomas Dalyell died. It was said he was admiring the painted ceiling of his town house in the splendidly named Black Jack’s Close in the Burgh of the Canongate beside Edinburgh. Marion Abercrombie, his fourth wife, was said to be quite upset. It was fitting that he should have a glass in his hand, and more than fitting he had a military funeral. He was seventy years old.
The funeral was a solemn occasion. His own Scots Greys were there, as well as the Scots Guards and six pieces of artillery; his baton was placed carefully on top of his coffin and his boots were hung, reversed, from his saddle as hundreds gathered to watch him go, or perhaps to ensure that he was finally dead. Leaving the Capital by the Portsburgh, the funeral procession trundled westward to Abercorn Church, not far from Dalyell’s seat in The Binns in what is now West Lothian. Old Tam of Muscovy, Bloody Tam, was dead and a generation of Covenanters breathed their relief.
But although the body of one of the last of the Cavaliers and possibly the most loyal of the Royalists was dead, his spirit lived on. The Binns began to resonate with rumours. There was the legend that Dalyell and the Devil used to regularly play cards. Not unnaturally, the supernatural powers of the Devil ensured he won most of the games, but on one occasion he lost and was so frustrated he lifted the heavy marble card table and threw it out of the window. Hundreds of years later workmen were employed in the grounds outside the Binns. When they drained the Sergeant’s Pool, where the Scots Greys had once watered their horses, they were astonished to find the same table as deposited by the devil. For years before this event, this pool was said to be the home of a water spirit that dragged people to their death.
It might have been after this card game that Dalyell and the Devil argued, and the Devil threatened to blow The Binns down. Shortly afterward, Dalyell added the towers that firmly nail down each corner of the building. They are still there, and so far the Devil has not blasted down the Binns.
Dalyell’s third son Jon had taken charge of the boots and took them home to his own home in Fife, but night after night they kept the house awake by marching around, so John returned them to The Binns. It was also said that if cold water would boil if they were poured inside them.
Dalyell himself has also been seen riding through the Black Lodge and onto the grounds of The Binns. His horse is pure white as it gallops over the Errack Burn carrying Dalyell along the old, now seldom-used road. Strangely, another spirit was also said to infest this entrance to the grounds.
Today The Binns is a quiet spot although the legends remain. Few people know about the Battle of Rullion Green in the Pentlands, but Greyfriars Churchyard still has a strange atmosphere; and the mausoleum of Bloody Mackenzie glowers at the space where his mortal enemies, the Covenanters, had once suffered and prayed. Dalyell’s memory survives, although the cause for which he fought has long passed.
However, Lang Tam was not the only Royalist to enjoy a black reputation. When Sir Archibald Kennedy of Culzean died, the devil was seen in the midst of a storm, carrying away his corpse. The Duke of Queensberry was another disliked man and when he died his soul was transported into a black coach drawn by six black horses. The coach took off from Scotland at great speed and rattled to Mount Vesuvius where a voice roared out: ‘Open to the Duke of Drumlanrig!’
True or not, such legends show the depth of feeling against those who persecuted the Covenanters.
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