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John Graham of Claverhouse is best known today from the popular traditional song 'Bonnie Dundee', the title of which is one of the nicknames by which he came to be known. Graham was for most of his short life a professional soldier. He attended the University of St Andrews but very soon entered the French and Dutch armies as a mercenary.
From 1677, Claverhouse was back in Scotland and for the remainder of his life fought against the forces of the Covenanters in Scotland and for the Stewart kings. As Captain of a troop of horse he was initially unsuccessful, being defeated in 1679 by the Covenanters of south-west Scotland at Drumclog in Ayrshire, but carried on to take a prominent part in the Battle of Bothwell Brig the same year in which the rebel Covenanters were crushed.
Over the next few years he continued in an official capacity to suppress the Conventicles. It is from this time that Graham acquired his other, less flattering epithet, of 'Bloody Clavers', a title apparently undeserved since he was no more brutal than any other commanding officer of this period, which has been named the 'Killing Times'. Given the task of Sheriff of Wigtown, of prosecuting those who refused to take the Test Oath of loyalty to James VII, Graham's role no doubt earned him considerable unpopularity, if not hatred.
For a few years, from 1685 to 1688, he appears to have lived relatively quietly at his home of Dudhope Castle and became Lord Provost of Dundee. In 1688, whatever his reputation, he was rewarded by James with the title of Viscount Dundee.
By 1688, however, William of Orange was staking a claim for the throne of Britain and Claverhouse returned to active support of his monarch. Loyalty in Scotland was divided very much on religious grounds between the Catholic James and the Protestant William and the Convention in Edinburgh bowed to the support for William. Leaving his ally, the Duke of Gordon, to defend Edinburgh Castle, Graham set off north to raise support amongst the Highland clans, which he did very effectively.
 In July 1689, Graham of Claverhouse's highlanders inflicted a heavy defeat in a brief, but decisive, battle against a government force supporting William in the Pass of Killiecrankie in Perthshire. The leader of his opponents was General Hugh Mackay of Scourie and his much larger force suffered many casualties. It was a vital battle in one sense, but achieved only a moral victory because it achieved no outcome, for Claverhouse himself was killed by a stray bullet. It is unlikely that he was struck by the silver bullet by which legend suggests he could only be killed, but his death did confer on him something of a martyr's status in the Royalist camp, and his name became coupled with that of his elder kinsman, the Marquess of Montrose, as one of the most romantic leaders of the seventeenth century.
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