Killiecrankie

James VII and II had been deposed by the Convention of Estates in April 1689. John Graham of Claverhouse, raised to the peerage as Viscount Dundee by James the previous November, raised the Highland clans for the exiled king through May and June. By July he had twenty-five hundred Highlanders — Camerons, MacDonalds of Keppoch, MacLeans, MacIans of Glencoe — against the four thousand government foot of Major-General Hugh Mackay, marching north to relieve Blair Castle.

The two armies met at the Pass of Killiecrankie above the River Garry on the evening of 27 July 1689. Dundee waited until the sun was off the high ground at his back, then ordered the Highland charge. The clans came down the slope in three minutes; Mackay's foot, in the regulation system of fixing bayonets into the muzzle of a discharged musket, were caught with the bayonet half-fixed when the Highland line struck. The government army broke. Roughly two thousand were killed in the ten minutes that followed.

Dundee himself, leading the right wing on horseback in steel breastplate, was struck by a single ball under the armpit at the moment of charge. He was carried from the field to Blair Castle and died that night. The Jacobite army went south to Dunkeld three weeks later, where the new Cameronian Regiment held the town against them in a four-hour close-quarter fight in the streets and houses, and the rising of 1689 ended on the spot.

The judgment is consensus across two centuries: with Dundee dead, the rising had no commander capable of the Highland system. He won the day at Killiecrankie and lost the war in the same minute.