Setting up his headquarters at Dean Castle in Kilmarnock, he started putting his military experience gained in the civil war and in Russia and Poland to use. His was a psychological war as much as a physical one, using strict laws to exact punishments and commit terrible atrocities on the local populace to break their will to resist the church and crown as much as to defeat the rebels in battle.
Some examples of his alleged barbarity are women being thrown into dungeons with wild animals, crushing supposed Covenanters' lower limbs under a torture device known as ‘the boot’, burning a woman’s hand with matches until it was so damaged that she lost it, and shooting entire families without trial. Dalziel was also responsible for introducing the thumbscrew, a Russian invention, to the British Isles. His terrible reputation was so intense that stories about him playing cards with the devil were widespread. His tyranny in Ayrshire, Dumfries and Galloway and Lanark, though, rather than destroying the Covenanters, initially forced them underground, where they practised their religion ‘in wild places’, and continued a guerrilla war against the Government Dragoons. Unable to find the Covenanters and their outlawed ministers, Dalziel practised his oppression on the population at large, causing many to join the rebels.
The local people, who mainly came from Ayrshire, Lanark and Dumfries and Galloway, rose in 1666 after an elderly man was severely beaten by troops in Kirkcudbrightshire, and marched on Dumfries, attacking any Dragoons they met on the way. At the Bridge of Doon they chose professional soldiers from their ranks as their leaders: Colonel James Wallace of Auchens, Major Learmouth, Captain Arnott and Captain Paton of Meadowhead. Now well led and organised they marched to Ayr then Mauchline, gathering recruits until their numbers swelled to nearly 1500. Although this was a good sized army for the day, they had to abandon their initial goal of taking Edinburgh. They had hoped that the people there would rise and join their cause, but the fervour for rebellion was not as strong there and news reached the Covenanters that the city planned to defend itself against the army from the western lowlands with cannon.
As they turned back towards Galloway, they ran into Dalziel and his professional troops who had them badly outnumbered at Rullion Green in Pentland. The Covenanter army put up a prolonged and inspired fight but were ultimately crushed by Dalziel’s dragoons with many dead, injured or captured, the remaining Covenanters fled into the hills.
Dalziel had about 30 of the prisoners hanged in the Mercat Cross in Edinburgh and had others brutally executed at prime locations throughout the south west of the country as a warning to others. In Ayr 8 prisoners who were sentenced to hang got a temporary reprieve when both the official hangman of Ayr and that of Irvine refused to despatch the men. Cornelius Anderson, one of the condemned, was then bribed with a pardon to carry out the deed, both for the 7 remaining prisoners at Ayr and for two others in Irvine. Many others had to be transported overseas into slavery in America and the West Indies to make space in the overflowing dungeons of Glasgow, Edinburgh, Ayr, Dumfries and Kilmarnock. One man, who was the only survivor from a transportation ship which sunk carrying prisoners from the dungeon at Dean Castle in Kilmarnock to the West Indies, was pardoned as it was agreed that he had been saved by an Act of God. Even now, however, visitors to the south west of Scotland can see martyrs' headstones in kirkyards throughout the region which bear the mark of the treatment by Charles II of his own people and once loyal subjects and the terrible retribution they received at the hands of ‘Bloody Tam’.
General Dalziel continued in his role as Commander in Chief of the King’s Forces in Scotland and as the representative for Linlithgow in the Scottish Parliament after the accession of James II but died shortly after in 1685. After his death ‘Bluddy Tam’, passed into folklore and stories of his boots marching around by themselves still appear in many collections of stories about ‘the ‘supernatural’ in Scotland. It is also said that if water was poured into his boots it would boil! His regiment, ‘The Scots Greys’ continued after his death and served with distinction in the Napoleonic Wars with their famous grey horses. They later became the ‘Royal Scots Greys’, before amalgamating in 1971 with the 3rd Carabiniers to form the ‘Royal Scots Dragoon Guards’. They most recently saw action in 2003 when they served in Iraq (now with Challenger II tanks).
