Even before the unfortunate day of Steinkirk the English officers did not willingly communicate with him, and the private men murmured at his harshness.

But after the battle the outcry against him became furious.
He was accused, perhaps unjustly, of having said with unfeeling levity, while the English regiments were contending desperately against great odds, that he was curious to see how the bulldogs would come off.
Would any body, it was asked, now pretend that it was on account of his superior skill and experience that he had been put over the heads of so many English officers?
It was the fashion to say that those officers had never seen war on a large scale.

But surely the merest novice was competent to do all that Solmes had done, to misunderstand orders, to send cavalry on duty which none but infantry could perform, and to look on at safe distance while brave men were cut to pieces.

It was too much to be at once insulted and sacrificed, excluded from the honours of war, yet pushed on all its extreme dangers, sneered at as raw recruits, and then left to cope unsupported with the finest body of veterans in the world.

Such were the complains of the English army; and they were echoed by the English nation.
Fortunately about this time a discovery was made which furnished both the camp at Lambeque and the coffeehouses of London with a subject of conversation much less agreeable to the Jacobites than the disaster of Steinkirk.
A plot against the life of William had been, during some months, maturing in the French War Office.