The Anglo-Scottish War of 1650-1652 was the last gasp of the Wars of the Three Kingdoms. After Oliver Cromwell shattered the Scottish Covenanter army at Dunbar in September 1650 - 1,500 killed or wounded and 6,000 taken prisoner from a force of 12,000 - Scotland kept fighting. David Leslie regrouped at Stirling; Charles II was formally crowned at Scone on 1 January 1651. By summer Cromwell had outflanked the Stirling line, crossed the Firth of Forth, and besieged Perth, the seat of the Scottish government. Perth surrendered after two days. In desperation, Charles and Leslie marched south into England in the hope of triggering a Royalist rising. Cromwell followed, leaving General George Monck with more than 5,000 of the least experienced English troops to mop up Scottish resistance. By August Stirling had fallen, then Stirling Castle. Monck turned toward Dundee, one of the last three significant Scottish strongholds still holding out.

Dundee was a walled town, but its defences were a century out of date - the most recent improvements dated to the 16th century, before the era of heavy siege artillery. The Royalist Marquess of Montrose had taken the town easily in 1645. Still, the walls gave a measure of protection, and the town's garrison of at least 500 men under Governor Robert Lumsden looked formidable on paper. Word had spread across eastern Scotland that Dundee was safe, and refugees flooded in - some from as far away as Edinburgh - bringing with them money, plate, and valuables they hoped to keep out of English hands. When Monck drew up his army outside the town on 23 August and demanded its surrender, Lumsden refused. He believed the walls and the militia would hold.

Poor weather delayed the bombardment. On 30 August the skies cleared, Monck summoned Lumsden again, and was refused again. Furious at having to risk his soldiers' lives in an assault when the war was nearly won, Monck took the customary step - within the rules of war as they then stood - of granting his troops permission to sack the town once it fell. The artillery opened fire that day. On the morning of 1 September, English troops stormed the west and east ports. By noon they had broken into Dundee. What followed was a sack lasting a full twenty-four hours. Lumsden was killed. So were several hundred civilians, including women and children. Monck admitted to 500 Scots dead; modern estimates range from 100 to as high as 1,000. Around 200 prisoners were taken. The booty was vast - the wealth that refugees had carried to Dundee for safekeeping was now divided among the English army, and some individual soldiers seized small fortunes in a single afternoon.

The dead in Dundee that day were not soldiers fighting a soldier's battle. They were townspeople caught when their walls failed, refugees from other Scottish cities who had trusted the walls to protect them, women and children who had nowhere to run when the English broke in. The 17th-century rules of war permitted this. A town that refused an offer of peaceful surrender and was then taken by storm had no legal protection from sack. That such a sack was lawful did not make it bearable for those who lived through it - the families separated, the houses ransacked, the savings carried across half of Scotland gone in an hour. The historian's estimate of 100 to 1,000 dead is itself a measure of how thoroughly the sack disrupted the basic functions of recording who was alive and who was not. Dundee took over a century to recover economically. The human recovery took longer, and in some senses never finished - the city's collective memory carries 1651 to this day.

Within days, Aberdeen surrendered to a single party of Monck's cavalry. A few isolated strongholds - Bass Rock, Dumbarton Castle, Dunnottar Castle near Stonehaven - held out into 1652, but no significant Scottish force remained in the field. On 3 September, two days after the storming of Dundee, Cromwell decisively defeated Charles II at Worcester. Charles escaped into exile. The Covenanter government was dissolved. Scotland was absorbed into the English Commonwealth. 10,000 troops were garrisoned across the country. Military rule lasted until 1660, when Monck - by then governor of Scotland - marched south, entered London, and called the new parliamentary elections that brought Charles II back to the throne. The Restoration completed a strange circle: the general who had sacked Dundee restored the king on whose behalf, in a sense, Dundee had been defending itself. The town's dead did not return. The walls were never rebuilt.