1625-1649

"I think this fellow Dalgetty is one of those horse-leeches, whose appetite for blood being only sharpened by what he has sucked in foreign countries, he is now returned to batten upon that of his own". Such is one character's view of the Scottish mercenary of the seventeenth century. Yet there is in Dugald Dalgetty's professional ethic, his blundering Latin, his loving care of his horse, and his own self-absorption, more genuine humanity than in the political and religious principles of Royalists and Covenanters alike. And the picture which emerges is not of violence imported into Scotland from Germany but of a country destroyed by uncompromising religious hatred, political bigotry, tribal feud and personal enmity. A Legend of the Wars of Montrose centres on one episode in the most bloody of Scotland's civil wars, Montrose's campaign for King Charles I in 1644-45; it is a short and savage tale.