In daily increasing numbers the insurgents marched towards Edinburgh. At Lanark, where all the contingents they could expect from the south and west had already joined them, and where ‘this rolling snow-ball was at the biggest,’ they were estimated at some three thousand. Here they renewed the Solemn League and Covenant. In spite of repeated warnings from men who, whilst fully sympathising with them, yet understood the hopeless nature of the enterprise in which they were engaged, the leaders determined to push on towards the capital. But the enthusiasm of many amongst their followers was beginning to wane; and by the time Colinton was reached, the ill-armed and undisciplined crowd had dwindled down again to a bare thousand. Then at length, even those who had previously rejected the well-meant advice of their more cautious friends, and had declared that, having been called by the Lord to this undertaking, they would not retire till he who bade them come should likewise command them to go, became conscious of their desperate plight, and consented to a retreat towards the west. Turning the eastern extremity of the Pentland hills, they directed their march towards Biggar. But it was too late. Dalziel, the governor of Edinburgh, who, at the head of a hastily mustered body of regulars, had been sent out to intercept them, came upon them at Rullion Green, on the evening of the 28th of November. A sharp engagement followed. Twice in the course of it success seemed to favour the insurgents; but in the end the military training and the superior weapons of their opponents prevailed, and the Covenanters were scattered in headlong flight. Of the soldiers, only five fell. On the other side there were about forty killed and a hundred and thirty taken. These prisoners were next day marched into Edinburgh. They might all have saved their lives if they had consented to renounce the Covenant; but their refusal to do so was severely punished. According to Burnet, who certainly does not exaggerate the number who suffered the death penalty, ten were hanged upon one gibbet in Edinburgh, and thirty-five more were sent to be hanged up before their own doors. Many were transported across the seas. The torture of the boot and of the thumbkins—the latter said to have been introduced by Dalziel, who had learnt their use in Russia, where he served for a time—was freely applied in the hope of wringing from the prisoners the admission that the rising was part of a concerted plot for the subversion of the existing government. They all strenuously denied it.