When the battle of Worcester was fought exactly a year had passed since the battle of Dunbar. The events of that year were not such as to reconcile Scotland to the Union which was now proposed by the Government of England. All trade between the two countries had been forbidden. Edinburgh had been taken, the royal palace of Holyrood, turned into barracks, had been set on fire through the carelessness of the soldiers, and almost totally destroyed. The churches had been desecrated, their pulpits and seats torn down and used as firewood. The edifice which George Heriot had directed his executors to raise for the benefit of the poor of Edinburgh was seized, while still in the builder’s hands, and turned into a military hospital. The castle had been surrendered into the hands of the invader. In the Parliament House, English troopers prayed and preached. The garrison of Stirling Castle had capitulated; the public records of the kingdom had been removed to the Tower of London; and the whole country south of the Forth and Clyde was subdued. Dundee held out to the last; but just two days before the battle of Worcester the town was stormed by Monk. The slaughter at Dundee, and the news brought home by those who had escaped from the field of Worcester, extinguished all hopes of further resistance. In the Highlands alone there remained some faint show of adherence to the cause of the Stuarts, which afterwards found an outlet in the rising under Glencairn; and the Marquis of Argyll strove, for a time, to stem the tide which was overwhelming Scotland. But, to all intents and purposes, the country was now thoroughly subdued.