The muscovite de il

THE MUSCOVITE DE’IL
A Scots Historical Ballad on Tam Dalyell of the Binns
1615–1685
with a Literary Commentary and a Historical Note
Daniil Lazko
Tuapse · 16 September 2026
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THE MUSCOVITE DE’IL
A Scots Historical Ballad on Tam Dalyell of the Binns

I
The rain comes doun on Lothian,
The Forth lies grey as leid;
There’s a rider on the Binns road
Wi’ iron on his heid.
An’ the wives that draw at the Linlithgow well
Hae names for him — mair than ane;
They hap their bairns in their plaidies
Till the iron’s by an’ gane.

II
He was bred at the Binns abune the Forth
Whaur the whaups gang crying lang,
An’ he kent the weight o’ a grown man’s sword
Ere he kent a lassie’s sang.
But when they took the auld king’s heid
On a black Whitehall morn,
Tam laid the shears in the kist-neuk,
An’ his beard was never shorn.

III
They rade sooth wi’ the young king
Ower the Border in the heat,
An’ at Worcester by the Severn side
They gaed doun like stricken wheat.
The smoke lay laigh on the watter-brigs,
An’ the Scots drums brak an’ ceased,
An’ Tam, that wadna turn his horse,
Was led like a tethered beast.

IV
They laid him in the London Tower,
Stane abune an’ stane ablow,
An’ he heard the Thames at the watergate
Gang by him cauld an’ slow.
But the wa’s were biggit for smaller men,
An’ ae mirk nicht in spring
The keepers fand an empty cell
An’ naething but the ring.

V
He gaed ower the sea wi’ a broken cause
An’ a king that had nae croun,
An’ he ate his bread at strangers’ boards
In mony a furrin toun.
The king that had nae kingdom
Had but ink an’ wax tae gie:
A line tae the lord o’ Muscovy
Far east ayont the sea.

VI
Then the road ran east, an’ the road ran on,
Past the last kirk bell he kent,
Till the pines stood black on either hand
An’ the snaw lay whaur he went.
His mither-tongue grew little worth,
An’ his Latin little mair;
He learned their word for bread an’ horse,
An’ "forward!" in the frozen air.

VII
He cam tae Moscow in the simmer stour
When the bells were ringing late,
An’ the craws gaed up frae the lang slow river
Abune the Kremlin gate.
An’ the Tsar sat still in his painted ha’
Wi’ his boyars roun’ like stane,
An’ they read him the Stewart letter through,
An’ he took the Scot for his ain.

VIII
He rade on the Polish marches
Whaur the black bog-water lies,
An’ he met the Tatar on the steppe
Wi’ the arrows thick as flies.
Ten winters he wore the Russian frost
Like a second coat o’ mail,
An’ he drilled their foot tae stand like a dyke
When the leid cam doun like hail.

IX
The news cam hame wi’ the Leith boats,
Wi’ the hemp an’ the Baltic deal,
That the lad wha gaed east frae the Binns was gane
An’ there rade the Muscovite De’il.
They said the Tsar had learned him things
That nae Christian hand should ken;
They said he’d brocht a Russian screw
For the thooms o’ honest men.

X
When a Stewart sat in his faither’s chair
An’ the Tsar had let him gang,
Tam cam hame by the grey sea-road
Wi’ his beard grown white an’ lang.
He stood in the door o’ the Binns again
Whaur the whaups cried ower the lea,
But the bairns that played at the yett ran ben
When they saw wha it micht be.

XI
The west rase up for the Covenant
Wi’ the psalm-book an’ the flail,
An’ they cam through the black November rain
Frae Galloway an’ Clydesdale.
An’ the king’s horse followed hard ahint
Wi’ a grey beard at their heid
That had ridden the frozen roads o’ the East
An’ had lang forgot its dreid.

XII
At Rullion Green in the Pentland Hills
The short day wore awa’,
An’ the psalm that rase frae the brae abune
Was a cry ere the mirk could fa’.
Then the word gaed roun’ by the shepherds’ fires
Like a tod that has taen a lamb,
That the De’il had come hame frae Muscovy,
An’ the hill-folk ca’d him Bluidy Tam.

XIII
He was auld when they gied him the king’s command
In the last o’ his hard days,
An’ he raised dragoons by the Binns yett,
Syne the years wad ca’ them Greys.
An’ the wives sat late at the ingle’s lowe
An’ turned ower the auld man’s name:
Gin the East had hammered him intae iron,
Or he’d carried the iron frae hame.

XIV
He dee’d in the year o’ eighty-five
In the heart o’ Edinburgh toun,
An’ they carried him hame tae Abercorn
Wi’ the beard that was never cut doun.
But the Binns folk tell o’ a card-play late,
An’ a stranger that couldna win,
An’ a marble table hurled in the pond
When the dawn cam creepin’ in.

XV
The rain comes doun on Lothian,
The Forth lies grey as leid,
An’ the Binns sits quiet on its hill,
An’ the men o’ the wars are deid.
But whiles, when the wind’s in the bare ash-trees
An’ the licht’s oot in the ha’,
There’s a shod horse gangs by the Binns at dark,
An’ it disna stop at a’.

Daniil Lazko
Tuapse, 16 September 2026
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A Short Glossary of Scots
abune / ablow — above / below
ahint — behind
ane — one
ayont — beyond
bairn — child
ben — inside, into the inner room
biggit — built
brae — hillside
brak — broke
brig — bridge
ca’ — call; ca’d, called
cam — came
craw — crow
deal — sawn pine timber (the Baltic trade)
De’il — Devil
disna — does not
dreid — dread
dyke — dry-stone wall
fand — found
frae — from
gaed / gang — went / go
gane — gone
gie / gied — give / gave
gin — whether, if
ha’ — hall
hap — wrap, cover
heid — head
ingle — hearth-fire
kent — knew
kist-neuk — corner of the chest
laigh — low
learn (someone) — teach
leid — lead (the metal)
licht — light
lowe — glow, blaze
mair — more
mirk — dark
mither-tongue — mother tongue
rade — rode
rase — rose
sooth — south
stour — dust, haze of dust
syne — afterwards, later
taen — taken
thoom — thumb
tod — fox
wa’ — wall
wadna — would not
whaup — curlew
whiles — at times
yett — gate
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Literary Commentary
1. Form and metre
The Muscovite De’il is written in fifteen numbered octaves, each of which is built from two ballad quatrains rhymed xaxa: the rhyme falls only on the second and fourth line of each half, as in the great majority of the Scottish ballads collected by Scott and later by Francis James Child. The resulting 120 lines are governed not by syllable count but by stress. The dominant pattern is the old ballad measure of four stresses followed by three (4–3–4–3), with free unstressed syllables between the beats. The short third-stress line gives each half-stanza its characteristic fall, the cadence of a thing told aloud rather than read.
The octave was chosen deliberately. It allows each stanza to hold a complete narrative episode — a place, an action and its consequence — while preserving the smaller ballad quatrain as the unit of breath. The fifteen octaves follow the career of the historical Dalyell in strict order, from the Binns to Worcester, the Tower, exile, Muscovy, the return, Rullion Green, old age, death and legend.
2. One man, three names
The dramatic spine of the poem is the passage of a single man through three names. In the first stanzas he is simply Tam of the Binns, a laird’s son who “kent the weight o’ a grown man’s sword / Ere he kent a lassie’s sang.” In stanza IX the second name arrives, not as a fact but as news carried home on the Leith boats with the hemp and the Baltic timber: the rhyme deal / De’il binds the rumour to the very cargo that brings it. In stanza XII the third name is born, and the poem repeats the grammar of stanza IX almost exactly — a report travelling among common people, a that-clause, a naming. The repetition is the argument: the devil who was once imagined far away in Muscovy is now said to have “come hame,” and the Scots give him a Scots name. The poem never says that Scotland has acquired its own devil; the parallel says it.
The word De’il is used only twice in the body of the poem. Its scarcity is intended: a nickname that is shouted in every stanza stops frightening anyone.
3. The recurrent motifs
Iron. The rider of the opening stanza is known first by the iron on his head, and the wives wait “till the iron’s by an’ gane”: the man is replaced by his metal before he is named. Iron returns as the lead that “cam doun like hail” in the Russian wars and culminates in the question of stanza XIII, the moral centre of the ballad: “Gin the East had hammered him intae iron, / Or he’d carried the iron frae hame.” The question is left unanswered, and it is placed in the mouths of women at the fireside, the traditional keepers of the ballad story.
The beard. The historical vow after the execution of Charles I becomes a measure of time. In II the shears are laid away and “the beard was never shorn”; in X it is “grown white an’ lang”; in XI the king’s horse ride “wi’ a grey beard at their heid,” so that the man is reduced to a synecdoche, a beard that “had lang forgot its dreid”; in XIV he is buried “wi’ the beard that was never cut doun.” The symbol is never explained.
Home and its echoes. The whaups (curlews) that cry over the Binns in II cry again in X, but the second homecoming is different: the children at the gate run indoors “when they saw wha it micht be.” The same gate (yett) reappears in XIII, where the old general raises his dragoons. The whole poem is framed by the identical opening lines of I and XV — rain on Lothian, the Forth “grey as leid” — a ring composition familiar from oral tradition, in which the landscape outlasts the story it contains.
4. Muscovy without exoticism
The Russian stanzas avoid picturesque clich;. Muscovy is given through a small number of concrete things: the dust of a summer arrival, bells ringing late, crows rising from the river above the Kremlin gate, a painted hall, boyars standing “roun’ like stane,” the black bog-water of the Polish marches, the Tatar horse, frost worn “like a second coat o’ mail.” The strangeness of the East is rendered chiefly as a loss of language: “His mither-tongue grew little worth, / An’ his Latin little mair.” For a seventeenth-century officer, Latin was the learned reserve language of diplomacy and command; the line records the failure of both the native and the educated tongue, and the stanza ends with the soldier learning, word by word, only what he needs: bread, horse, and the order to advance.
5. Rumour, legend and moral ambiguity
The ballad takes no side in the quarrel between Royalist and Covenanter. What it records is reputation, and reputation is consistently framed as report: “They said the Tsar had learned him things… / They said he’d brocht a Russian screw / For the thooms o’ honest men.” The accusation is present and unverified in the same breath. At Rullion Green the poem shows only the end of a day and a psalm that becomes a cry; the judgement belongs to the shepherds, whose simile — news spreading “like a tod that has taen a lamb” — comes from their own world of hillside and fold. The loyalty, hardness and refusal to yield that make Dalyell admirable from one side make him terrible from the other, and the poem allows both perspectives to stand.
The supernatural enters only at the end and only as local tradition: “the Binns folk tell” of a late card-game, a stranger who “couldna win,” and a marble table hurled into the pond. The Devil is never named in that stanza. The closing image — a shod horse that passes the Binns after dark “an’ it disna stop at a’” — may be read as a ghost, or simply as the way a district goes on speaking about a frightening man. The battles are over; the legend is still riding.
6. Language and literary lineage
The Scots of the poem is a literary register rather than phonetic dialect. It relies on a limited, consistent vocabulary (abune, gaed, kent, mirk, yett, whaup), on characteristic grammar — the zero relative of “There’s a shod horse gangs by the Binns,” the transitive learn meaning “teach” — and on a restrained use of apostrophised forms. It draws in a general way on four traditions: the historical ballad narrative of Sir Walter Scott; the darker, uncanny border legend of James Hogg; the natural song-diction of Robert Burns; and the plain older Scots texture of Allan Ramsay. No line imitates or reworks any particular poem by these authors.
7. Deliberate compressions
As a ballad the poem selects and compresses. It omits Dalyell’s boyhood service at La Rochelle, his long Irish service and the capitulation of Carrickfergus, and his part in Glencairn’s Highland rising of 1654. The scene in which the Stuart letter is read before the Tsar is a dramatisation of a documented fact, the letter of recommendation from the exiled Charles II. “Ten winters” rounds the Russian service of 1656–1665. Dalyell’s two terms as commander-in-chief in Scotland, from 1666 and again from 1679, are folded into the single command of stanza XIII, and the regiment raised under his commission of 1681 received the name Scots Greys only later, as the stanza itself indicates with “syne.” The ballad’s legends are marked as legends throughout.
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Historical Note
General Sir Thomas Dalyell of the Binns (1615–1685)
Thomas Dalyell, known as Tam Dalyell of the Binns, was born into a cadet branch of the family of the Earls of Carnwath. His father, also Thomas, built the House of the Binns near Linlithgow in West Lothian; his mother Janet was a daughter of Edward Bruce, first Lord Kinloss. The year of birth is usually given as 1615, although some older sources propose about 1599. The surname, variously spelled Dalyell, Dalziel or Dalzell, is traditionally pronounced “dee-ell.” In Russian sources he appears as Òîìàñ Òîìàñîâè÷ Äàëåéëü (Tomas Tomasovich Daleil).
Early service and the Royalist cause
Dalyell appears to have accompanied the English expedition to relieve the Huguenots at La Rochelle in 1628, when he was about thirteen. In the 1640s he served as an officer, later a colonel, in the Scottish army in Ulster under Robert Munro and Alexander Leslie. After the execution of Charles I on 30 January 1649 he is said to have vowed never again to cut his hair or beard; his portraits show a great white beard and long hair falling down his back. He was taken prisoner at the capitulation of Carrickfergus in August 1650, released on a pass, and banished from Scotland.
He fought for Charles II at the Battle of Worcester on 3 September 1651, where his men surrendered; he was captured and imprisoned in the Tower of London, from which he escaped in May 1652. In 1654 he took part in the Royalist Highland rising led by the Earl of Glencairn. He was excluded from Cromwell’s Act of Grace, and a reward was offered for his capture, dead or alive. After the rising collapsed he went into exile.
In the service of the Tsar
Carrying a letter of recommendation from the exiled Charles II, Dalyell arrived in Moscow on 21 July 1656 together with his comrade of the Highland campaign, William Drummond, later first Viscount Strathallan. He entered the service of Tsar Alexis Mikhailovich with the rank of lieutenant-general and served through the Russo-Polish War of 1654–1667, as well as in campaigns against the Tatars and the Ottoman Turks. In 1663 he was promoted to full general. His Russian career earned him in Scotland the nickname The Muscovite De’il; later hostile tradition also claimed, without reliable evidence, that he had learned cruel methods of interrogation in Russia. He left Russian service in 1665 and returned to Scotland, bringing with him considerable experience of European warfare.
Rullion Green and “Bluidy Tam”
By 19 July 1666 Dalyell had been appointed commander-in-chief of the king’s forces in Scotland, with orders to suppress the Covenanters, the Presbyterian opponents of royal church policy. In November 1666 an armed rising began in Galloway and moved through Ayrshire and Lanarkshire towards Edinburgh. On 28 November 1666 Dalyell’s army defeated the insurgents at Rullion Green in the Pentland Hills, south of the capital. The severity of the reprisals that followed, for which the general was widely held responsible, gave him the name Bluidy Tam. Historians note that Covenanting writers had every reason to darken his portrait, and some accounts suggest that Dalyell himself objected to certain excesses. He received several forfeited estates of his opponents.
Later career
Dalyell became a privy councillor on 3 January 1667, and from 1678 until his death he represented Linlithgowshire in the Parliament of Scotland. When the Duke of Monmouth was given supreme command against the renewed Covenanting rising of 1679, Dalyell refused to serve under him; the king confirmed Dalyell’s own commission, but he reached Bothwell Bridge only after the battle was over. He then resumed the chief command in Scotland. On 25 November 1681 he received a commission to raise a regiment of dragoons, later known as the Royal Scots Greys. His commission was confirmed on the accession of James VII in 1685.
Dalyell died at his house in the Canongate, Edinburgh, in August 1685, and after a large military funeral was buried at Abercorn church, near the Binns. On 7 November 1685 his son Thomas was created a baronet of Nova Scotia in recognition of his father’s services. The House of the Binns, which remained with the family, is now in the care of the National Trust for Scotland.
The legends of the Binns
Local tradition made the general a man in league with the Devil. It was said that musket balls rebounded from him, and that he played cards with the Devil at the Binns; when the Devil lost, he hurled the marble card table at his opponent, missed, and sent it through the window into the pond. During a drought in the later nineteenth century a marble-topped table was indeed seen in the drained pond and recovered. Other tales speak of the Devil threatening to blow the house down, and of the general’s ghost riding a white horse near the Binns. These stories belong to folklore rather than history, and the ballad treats them as such.

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Sources
“Tam Dalyell of the Binns.” Wikipedia (English and French editions).
“Äàëåéëü, Òîìàñ Òîìàñîâè÷.” Âèêèïåäèÿ (Russian edition).
Henderson, T. F. “Dalyell, Thomas.” Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 13. London, 1888.
Chisholm, H., ed. “Dalyell, Thomas.” Encyclop;dia Britannica, 11th ed., vol. 7, pp. 779–780. Cambridge, 1911.
Dalyell, J., and Beveridge, J. “Inventory of the Plenishing of the House of the Binns at the Date of the Death of General Thomas Dalyell, 21st August 1685.” Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland.
National Trust for Scotland. “Dealing with the Devil.” nts.org.uk.
The Scotland, Scandinavia and Northern European Biographical Database (SSNE), entry 3854: Dalyell, Thomas. University of St Andrews.
Coventry, M. Haunted Castles and Houses of Scotland. 2006.