John Leyden, Edinburgh, 1803:

"Where Bothwell's bridge connects the margins steep,
And Clyde, below, runs silent, strong, and deep,
The hardy peasant, by oppression driven
To battle, deemed his cause the cause of heaven:
Unskilled in arms, with useless courage stood,
While gentle Monmouth grieved to shed his blood:
But fierce Dundee, inflamed with deadly hate,
In vengeance for the great Montrose's fate,
Let loose the sword, and to the hero's shade
A barbarous hecatomb of victims paid."

The object of Claverhouse's revenge, assigned by Wilson, is grander,
though more remote and less natural, than that in the ballad, which
imputes the severity of the pursuit to his thirst to revenge the death
of his cornet and kinsman, at Drumclog;[A] and to the quarrel betwixt
Claverhouse and Monmouth, it ascribes, with great _naiveté_ the bloody
fate of the latter. Local tradition is always apt to trace foreign
events to the domestic causes, which are more immediately in the
narrator's view. There is said to be another song upon this battle, once
very popular, but I have not been able to recover it. This copy is given
from recitation.

[Footnote A: There is some reason to conjecture, that the revenge of the
Cameronians, if successful, would have been little less sanguinary than
that of the royalists. Creichton mentions, that they had erected, in
their camp, a high pair of gallows, and prepared a quantity of halters,
to hang such prisoners as might fall into their hands, and he admires
the forbearance of the king's soldiers, who, when they returned with