The English Jacobites belonged almost entirely to the Anglican Church, being passionately and ancestrally devoted to its cause, as well as to the House of Stuart. The Irish Jacobites were Catholics and separatists, convinced that the greatness of their native country, like that of the Roman Church, depended on the restoration of King James. The Scotch Jacobites actively engaged in the struggle were Episcopalians, lately triumphant, but now oppressed in their religion, or Highlanders uniting against the power of the Clan Campbell and its chief, the Earl of Argyle, _Mac Callum More_, as he was called in the mountains. It was Argyle who, standing before the throne at Whitehall, had pronounced the words of the royal oath, repeated after him by the new sovereigns. At its last clause William had paused for a moment: its purport was that he should destroy all heretics and enemies of God. "I could not engage to become a persecutor," said the king aloud. "Neither the tenor of the oath nor the laws of Scotland impose this obligation on your majesty," replied one of the delegates. "It is on this condition that I swear," returned William; "and I beg you, my lords and gentlemen, to be witnesses of this."
So much moderation and prudence remained without effect upon the Highlanders. Argyle was employed in the new government. However unimportant his part in it was to be, from the capacity and character of the earl, the traditional foes of his clan, the Camerons, the Macleans, the Macgregors, naturally, went over to the other camp. When Dundee, threatened with arrest, left the little castle where he had quartered himself since fleeing from Edinburg, he found the Highlanders already risen under the command of Lochiel, chief of the Camerons, and Colin Keppoch, one of the Macdonalds. { 26} Bringing in his suite some Lowland gentlemen, capturing some Whigs, whom he carried with him as prisoners, sending the fiery cross before him, and accompanied everywhere by the terror of his name, Dundee soon found himself at the head of an army of five or six thousand men, all brave, hardy, inured to fatigue, undisciplined and tumultuous, incapable of fighting according to the ordinary rules of war, and, consequently, of making a long resistance to regular troops. "We would not have time to learn your mode of fighting," said Lochiel, "and we would have time to forget our own."