Do we want to claim this one?

One of the royalist troops who killed Richard Cameron on Airds Moss in 1680 could be described as an Ulster-Scot. Hmmm....

Captain John Creighton's great grandfather was Alexander Creichton. He was from Dumfries and had become embroiled in a classic Lowland Scots / Reiver clan feud between the Maxwells and the Johnstons. He was on the Johnston side, and killed some of the Maxwells himself. So he had to flee Scotland, and came to Ulster around 1603. He settled near Caledon in County Armagh, but about 2 years later he was hunted down by some of the Maxwells who set an ambush and shot him dead on his way to church.

His son, John Creighton, lived through the brutalities of the 1641 Massacres - his house is said to have been the first one that the Irish attacked - and he joined up with Sir Robert Stewart's army.

Captain John Creighton was born in Castlefin in Co Donegal on 8 May 1648. About 1674, right in the middle of "The Killing Times" he was invited to join the army in Scotland.

His first mission was to capture a Covenanter field preacher called David Williamson ( Williamson features in the 1847 book Scotch Presbyterian Eloquence Display'd ). This was just the start - what followed was a long military career of anti-Presbyterian persecution. He even took one of his Ireland-born soldiers, James Gibb, who Creighton knew "was skilful in praying well in the style and tone of the Covenanters" and sent him as a decoy to infiltrate the Covenanters of Kilmarnock. Gibb did so by claiming that he had come across from Ulster to join the fight at Bothwell Bridge. The story was so plausible that he was welcomed with open arms. Inside a month Gibb had gathered full intelligence of the Covenanters activities in the west of Scotland.

Creighton claimed to have shot dead two of the nine Covenanters who died at Airds Moss with Cameron. After the Glorious Revolution, Creighton was imprisoned for a time and was refused bail or pardon "...if Captain Creighton should obtain his liberty, he would murder all Scotland in one night...". He was eventually released and returned to Ulster to live in County Tyrone with his father. Aged 83, he said "...I am still hated by those people who affirm the old Covenanters to have been unjustly dealt with..."

(Source: The Memoirs of Captain John Creighton from his own materials, by Jonathan Swift, 1731. Available here on GoogleBooks. During a visit to meet Sir Arthur Acheson at Markethill in County Armagh, Acheson advised Swift to visit Creighton)