Book 4 Chapter 3 Faithful Unto Death

It is written in an ancient book "weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning," and with the brief darkness of the summer night passed the shadow from Claverhouse's soul. According, also, to the brightness and freshness of the early sunshine was his high hope on the eventful day, which was to decide both the fate of his king and of himself. The powers of darkness had attacked him on every side, appealing to his fear and to his faith, to his love and to his hate, to his pride and to his jealousy, to see whether they could not shake his constancy and break his spirit. They had failed at every assault, and he had conquered; he had risen above his ghostly enemies and above himself, and now, having stood fast against principalities and powers of the other world, he was convinced that his earthly enemies would be driven before him as chaff before the wind.

He knew exactly what MacKay and his army could do, and what he and his army could, in the place of issue, where, by the mercy of God, Who surely was on the side of His anointed, the battle would be fought. What would avail MacKay's parade-ground tactics and all the lessons of books, and what would avail the drilling and the manoeuvring of his hired automatons in the pass of Killiecrankie, with its wooded banks and swift running river, and narrow gorge and surrounding hills? This was no level plain for wheeling right and wheeling left, for bombarding with artillery and flanking by masses of cavalry. Claverhouse remembers the morning of the battle of Seneffe, when he rode with Carleton and longed to be on the hills with a body of Highlanders, and have the chance of taking by surprise the lumbering army of the Prince of Orange and sweeping it away by one headlong charge. The day for this onslaught had come, and by an irony, or felicity, of Providence, he has the troops he had longed for and his rival has the inert and helpless regulars.