Before the engagement, Hamilton, who had assumed the command of the Covenanters, gave out the word that no quarter should be given. In spite of this, five out of seven men who had been captured, were granted their lives and allowed to depart. ‘This,’ writes a contemporary, ‘greatly grieved Mr Hamilton, when he saw some of Babel’s brats spared, after that the Lord had delivered them into their hands, that they might dash them against the stones.’ When he returned from the pursuit of the routed royalists, a discussion had arisen as to the fate of the two remaining prisoners. Hamilton settled it, in so far at least as one of them was concerned, by killing him on the spot. ‘None could blame me,’ he wrote in a letter of justification published five or six years later, ‘to decide the controversy; and I bless the Lord for it to this day.’ Wodrow gives it as ‘the opinion of not a few,’ that if the ‘country men’ had pushed their success, followed their chase, and gone straight to Glasgow that day, they might easily, with the help of the reinforcements that would have come to them on the road, as soon as their success became known, have driven out the garrison, ‘and very soon made a great appearance.’ Without entering into a futile discussion as to what might have happened, it may be pointed out that the actual circumstances of the case scarcely justify so sanguine a view. When Claverhouse and his troopers rode back to Glasgow, they had no certainty that, in the flush of victory, the Covenanters would not continue the pursuit right up to the city, and endeavour to take the fullest advantage of their success. Indeed, the conduct of the royalist officers rather seems to imply that they recognised the possibility of such a course on the part of the enemy, for they caused half the men to stand to their arms all night. If, therefore, the few horsemen on the Covenanting side, who alone could possibly perform the distance of nearly thirty miles before dusk, even on a long June day, had ventured on an attack, it may be believed that they would have met with a reception calculated to make them regret their rashness. There is no occasion to assume that any reason but that dictated by common prudence induced the foremost of the pursuers to halt at a considerable distance from Glasgow, in order to await the coming of the unmounted men, with such recruits as they might have been able to gather on the way. Statements differ as to the precise place where the greater number of them determined to stay for the night; but Wodrow is probably accurate in saying that they did not press further forward than Hamilton, and that it was from that town they resumed their march on the morrow.