Pre-Union Scots Army

The feudal and common-service system

In the later Middle Ages Scottish armies were assembled from three overlapping obligations. Common service (sometimes called "Scottish service") was a universal, unpaid duty: in principle every free man between roughly 16 and 60 could be summoned to "the host" for a maximum of 40 days a year, serving at his own expense and bringing his own food and equipment — a factor that severely limited Scotland's capacity for sustained campaigning. Feudal knight service, introduced during the Davidian Revolution of the 12th century, was a separate, additional obligation: landholders held estates in exchange for providing mounted, armoured troops, typically also on a 40-day basis. Layered on top were private bonds of manrent — written contracts by which a lesser man or kin-group pledged service to a lord in return for protection, distinct from feudal land tenure and functionally similar to English indentures used to retain professional fighting men. Jenny Wormald's study Lords and Men in Scotland: Bonds of Manrent, 1442–1603 remains the standard treatment.

In practice these forms blurred and overlapped, and great lords brought contingents drawn from their kindred. Together they produced the "common army" mustered for major medieval campaigns, most famously Flodden in 1513, when messengers were sent out on 24 July 1513 instructing the host to muster at Ellem in Berwickshire. But the system was inconsistently enforced: for the Flodden campaign it produced a large and formidable force, yet by the religiously and politically divided mid-16th century the authorities faced increasing difficulty in recruitment. Full mobilisation should therefore not be presented as something reliably achieved — it was an aspiration as much as a reality established.

Wapinschawings and the sport-ban legislation

Readiness was policed through wapinschawings ("weapon-showings") — periodic musters, held between two and four times a year at sheriffdom or burgh level, at which men displayed that they possessed and could use arms appropriate to their status. Men were summoned by the sheriff and civil magistrates, typically at least 20 days in advance, and lords and barons had to submit lists of their men and weapons.

Documented instructions to sheriffs in 1513 indicate the expected kit: gentlemen were to muster in plate armour, while common soldiers were to come in "jacks" (padded/quilted coats) and steel "sallets" (helmets), together with axes and polearms such as the spear, Lochaber axe, Leith axe and Jedburgh stave (Gervase Phillips, The Anglo-Scots Wars, 1513–1550). After the Flodden disaster the nobility seems to have deliberately abandoned plate armour, partly because it hampered handling a pike. Highland levies mustered separately and differently equipped — lighter chainmail, the belted plaid, and weapons including bows, targes and two-handed swords (the claidheamh mór).

A vivid documented example survives from Speyside: in February 1596 John Grant of Freuchie mustered 500 men of his kin, friends and servants able to fight for James VI and the Sheriff of Moray; of these, 300 were armed and ready for war, 40 with habergeons (mail), two-handed swords and helmets, and another 40 with bows, helmets, swords and targes "according to the Highland custom" (Register of the Privy Council of Scotland, Addenda, ed. D. Masson, 1898).

The link between military readiness and Parliament's sport bans is explicit and documented. The Football Act of 1424 ("Of playing at the fut ball") is probably the shortest act in the Scottish statute book, forbidding football on pain of a fine of fourpence. Subsequent acts in 1457, 1471 and 1491 banned both "the fut ball" and "ye golf" — the 1457 act being the earliest written evidence of golf in Scotland — because these pastimes distracted men from compulsory archery practice. Parliament ordered wapinschaws four times a year, targets to be set up at every parish church, and shooting practised each Sunday, explicitly "for the common good and for the defence of the country" established.

established The historians Steve Murdoch and Alexia Grosjean, in Alexander Leslie and the Scottish Generals of the Thirty Years' War (2014), fill in the later wapinschaw system. The Wapinschaw Act of 1575 accepted that Highlanders and Lowlanders fought with different weapons and asked each region to standardise by the second muster of the year. Lowland landholders with 300 merks of yearly rent were to appear in armour, light or heavy as they chose, others with jacks, steel bonnets, pikes, culverins, halberds or two-handed swords. Highlanders came with habergeons, padded actouns, bows and quivers (dorlochs) and handguns. The first musters under the regency were held in July 1578; in 1584 they were ordered twice a year, and James VI revived them in 1587 as long neglected. Men were not allowed to carry weapons in public (from 1579 the penalty was £10 Scots and loss of the weapon), but they were expected to own them and show them at the musters.

shared Historians disagree about how long the system worked. Ian Whyte argued that wapinschaws were all but abandoned after 1600 for lack of public interest. Murdoch and Grosjean reply that James kept calling them until 1625 and Charles I after him, often when a real threat loomed, and that the system could put an army in the field. James led his forces in person six times between 1587 and 1594. In April 1589 he marched north against the Earl of Huntly with about 3,000 men. In 1594 the burghs paid for a royal army of 1,600 foot and 400 horse at Aberdeen, while an advance force of up to 4,000 Highlanders under Argyll, about half of them with firearms and the rest with bows, Lochaber axes and swords, was beaten at Glenlivet on 3 October by the Catholic earls' stronger cavalry and privately owned artillery. The authors use these campaigns to argue that Scotland was not a kingdom in martial decline: its military strength, in a phrase they borrow, was "still based on the host".

The Lord High Constable and command structure

The Lord High Constable of Scotland was, after the King, nominally the supreme officer of the Scottish army, and also chief judge of the High Court of Constabulary. The office became hereditary in the Hay family — later Earls of Erroll — granted by Robert the Bruce to Sir Gilbert de la Hay around 1314 (Hay held the constableship from 1309, hereditary from 1314). The 4th Earl of Erroll, holding the office, was killed at Flodden in 1513, illustrating that in earlier centuries it carried genuine battlefield command.

By the 17th century, however, the constableship had become largely ceremonial. Real operational command was exercised not by the hereditary Constable but by appointed generals (such as Alexander Leslie) and by the war committees of the Privy Council of Scotland and the Committee of Estates. The office survived the Union of 1707 and continues today as a ceremonial dignity ranking, in Scottish precedence, above all but the royal family — currently held by the Earl of Erroll established. The shift from working command to hereditary honour is an important corrective: nominal supreme command and actual command had diverged long before the Union.

Scots military service abroad

Before Scotland possessed its own standing army, Scottish martial energy was overwhelmingly exported. The Garde Écossaise, an elite Scottish bodyguard for the kings of France, grew out of the Auld Alliance in the early 15th century — conventionally dated to 1418 and associated with the large Scottish expeditionary force under John Stewart, Earl of Buchan, and Sir John Stewart of Darnley that came to the aid of the future Charles VII. Around 100 of the finest were selected as the king's personal guard. The unit was assimilated into the French royal household and endured for four centuries, finally disbanded in 1830; its senior company retained the honorific les fiers Écossais ("the proud Scots") established.

On a far larger scale, the Thirty Years' War (1618–1648) drew Scots into continental service in enormous numbers, especially in Swedish service under Gustavus Adolphus, and also in Dutch, Danish and French armies. Steve Murdoch and Alexia Grosjean's scholarship (drawing on the SSNE database) is the authority here. In his introduction to Scotland and the Thirty Years' War, 1618–1648 (Brill, 2001), Murdoch concludes that some 100,000 British soldiers served in the anti-Habsburg armies, "of whom about fifty thousand were Scots" — a figure that, as Barbara Donagan noted in her H-Albion review, represented roughly 20 per cent of the adult male Scottish population. This created a reservoir of veteran professional officers who, when conflict with Charles I loomed, returned home to train and command Scotland's new armies — most importantly Alexander Leslie (later Earl of Leven), a Swedish field marshal established.

The Covenanting national armies and their destruction

The National Covenant of 1638 and the ensuing Bishops' Wars (1639–1640) produced Scotland's first genuinely large, nationally organised army in centuries. It was raised through a parish- and shire-level committee system that listed and levied able-bodied men, and it was drilled to Continental standards by Leslie and his returning veterans. As Edward Furgol has shown, the Covenanters copied the Swedish model: military districts, nominated colonels, and troop quotas set for each shire and burgh, coordinated by war committees with Leslie at their head established. Estimates put the First Bishops' War force (1639) at around 16,500 and the Second (1640) at around 20,000; Murdoch and Grosjean give about 23,000 for 1640, of whom some 12,000 foot and 1,500 horse crossed the Tweed with Leslie in the east and about 6,000 foot and 1,000 horse with James Livingston, a long-serving officer of the Scots-Dutch Brigade, in the west shared. At the Battle of Newburn (28 August 1640) Leslie's main army, with nine guns hidden overnight on the north bank of the Tyne, routed the roughly 4,500 Royalists holding the ford (other accounts say around 5,000), enabling the Scots to take Newcastle and occupy Northumberland and Durham; the Treaty of Ripon (October 1640) required Charles I to pay their expenses and to recall the English Parliament — a chain of events that helped precipitate the English Civil War established.

The Solemn League and Covenant (1643) brought the Covenanters into the First English Civil War alongside the English Parliament; a Scots army under Leslie (now Earl of Leven) contributed decisively to the parliamentarian victory at Marston Moor (1644) established.

established The army that crossed into England in January 1644 numbered about 22,000. Broadsheets listed its officers down to the rank of major and marked those who had served abroad with credit; five of the six general staff were veterans of Swedish service, three of them Leslies. The Committee of Both Kingdoms set daily pay at six shillings sterling for an officer of horse, one shilling for a trooper and sixpence for a foot soldier, and the English Parliament promised £30,000 a month. That money often failed to arrive. By November 1645, when Leven besieged Newark, garrisons, detachments to Scotland and Ireland, wounds and disease had cut his field force to just over 7,000: 4,136 horse, 2,836 foot and 50 gunners, not counting officers. The army finally left England when Newcastle was handed over on 30 January 1647.

The veteran generals: how much did they matter?

established The Covenanting army leaned heavily on men who had learned their trade abroad, and Murdoch and Grosjean trace them by name. When Leslie summoned officers home in 1638–39, Sir Thomas Roe saw Scots flocking to Bremen "as to a fayre" to take ship. Leslie organised his army after "Gustavus Adolphus his modelle", and his discipline was noted by friend and foe: in 1640 the Venetian ambassador reported that he prevented looting in northern England, and at Newcastle released captured common soldiers and held only officers. Robert Monro's Expedition (1637), with its long appendix on drill, company organisation and quartering, circulated as a manual. Veterans' methods showed early: on 21 March 1639 Leslie's party blew in the gate of Edinburgh Castle with a petard.

shared It is often said that the Covenanters beat Charles I because they had a larger pool of Continental veterans. Murdoch and Grosjean reject this. England had as many veterans, especially from the Anglo-Dutch Brigade, and many Scottish veterans stayed loyal to the king. Four of the Scottish generals formerly in Swedish service took royal service: the Marquis of Hamilton, Patrick Ruthven, James King and Major General John Ruthven, Leslie's own son-in-law. Ruthven held Edinburgh Castle for the king from early 1640 until he surrendered it by treaty on 15 September 1640. In the authors' reading, what decided the Bishops' Wars was the Covenanters' willingness to give a professional absolute command, while the Royalists offered Ruthven only a command shared with the nobility, which he refused. Other historians put more weight on politics, money and English reluctance to fight. The authors also stress that later failures under David Leslie, such as the indiscipline of his troops in Yorkshire in 1646 and the defeat at Dunbar, came after Leven had stepped back from field command.

This military system was then destroyed in two stages. At the Battle of Dunbar (3 September 1650), Oliver Cromwell's New Model Army — around 11,000 men — routed a larger Scottish army under David Leslie, usually put at around 23,000. Casualty figures vary widely and should be treated with caution: Cromwell claimed 3,000 Scots killed and 10,000 captured, while the Scottish officer Sir James Balfour recorded only "8 or 900 killed." A significant caveat concerns the pre-battle religious purge: the Kirk party's insistence on removing "ungodly" and ex-Royalist officers weakened the army's leadership — though the frequently repeated claim of a "4,000-strong" purge is an exaggeration. As Mark Cartwright notes for the World History Encyclopedia, Leslie "reorganised his officer corps, although with only around 80 men dismissed, it was hardly the 4,000-strong debilitating purge that some English commentators described after the event." The final blow came exactly a year later at the Battle of Worcester (3 September 1651), where Cromwell's roughly 28,000 overwhelmed a mainly Scottish Royalist force of about 16,000, ending organised Scottish military resistance established.

There followed the decisive rupture in the whole story: from 1651 to 1660 Scotland had no independent army of its own. The country was under direct Cromwellian military occupation, its native institutions of government abolished and new trace italienne citadels built to hold it down. Any narrative of an unbroken "Scots Army" founders on this decade-long gap established.

The Restoration standing army (1660–1707)

The Restoration of Charles II in 1660 produced something genuinely new: Scotland's first professional, permanent, paid and uniformed military establishment, raised and administered under the authority of the Scottish Privy Council. Founding components included a troop of Life Guards (a prestige mounted bodyguard revived in Edinburgh in 1661), William Drummond's Regiment of Horse and independent cavalry troops, a regiment of Foot Guards (the future Scots Guards), and the Royal Regiment of Foot (the future Royal Scots).

Two lineage claims must be handled carefully under the "accuracy over patriotism" standard. The Scots Guards trace their origin to a regiment raised in 1642 by the Marquess of Argyll for service in Ireland; after the Restoration, the Earl of Linlithgow received a commission dated 23 November 1660 to raise the Scottish Regiment of Foot Guards, and the regiment dates its formal existence to 1662 traditional. The Royal Scots trace their lineage to a warrant granted to Sir John Hepburn in 1633 to raise a regiment for French service, itself built on a nucleus that had served in Sweden from 1625; the regiment spent decades on the Continent and was brought onto the establishment in 1662 traditional. Both are best phrased as regiments that "trace their lineage to" these dates rather than as bodies of demonstrably unbroken corporate existence.

The army's first duties were to garrison the royal castles at Edinburgh, Stirling, Dumbarton and Blackness, and increasingly to suppress Covenanter dissent. Early units wore grey; from 1684 red cloth was imported from England to match the English army's uniforms. On the eve of the 1688–89 Revolution the standing army numbered "about 3,000 men in various regiments and another 268 veterans in the major garrison towns, at an annual cost of about £80,000" (J. Young, Oxford Companion to Scottish History) — a figure sometimes rendered as "over 3,500" at the peak of the 1688–89 mobilisation, when several new regiments were raised established.

The Highland Host and the Killing Time

The Restoration army's most notorious role was internal security against the Presbyterian Covenanters of the south-west. In 1678 the government billeted the so-called "Highland Host" — some 3,000 Lowland militia and 6,000 Highlanders — on Covenanting households in the south-west as a form of collective punishment, to extract bonds of allegiance and suppress illegal open-air "conventicles." The following year, after the assassination of Archbishop James Sharp and a Covenanter victory at Drumclog, government forces won a decisive victory at Bothwell Bridge (22 June 1679); at least 1,184 prisoners were delivered to Edinburgh and held in the yard at Greyfriars that became known as the "Covenanters' Prison" (Dr Mark Jardine). Of those, 257 were finally sentenced to transportation to the colonies in November 1679 — of whom only 48 survived a shipwreck off Orkney. The 1680s "Killing Time" saw the Privy Council authorise summary executions of radical Covenanters (the Cameronians) caught in arms, with same-day trial and execution for those refusing loyalty oaths. Casualty and troop figures for this period should be read with caution given source variation and later martyrological framing established.

1688–89 and Killiecrankie (in brief)

The overthrow of James VII & II split Scotland's army and officer corps. John Graham of Claverhouse, Viscount Dundee ("Bonnie Dundee"), raised Jacobite Highland forces and won a startling tactical victory over government troops under General Hugh Mackay at the Battle of Killiecrankie (27 July 1689) — but was killed in the moment of victory, and the rising quickly lost momentum, stalling at Dunkeld the following month. The reorganised post-Revolution Scots army then served alongside English and Dutch forces in William III's Nine Years' War on the Continent from 1689. (Detailed Jacobite narrative belongs to this collection's History series; it is kept deliberately brief here.) established

The army as political leverage, 1703–1705

In the Union crisis the Scots Army became a bargaining chip. The Act anent Peace and War (1703) provided that after Queen Anne no monarch could take Scotland to war without the consent of the Scottish Parliament. The Act of Security (1704) asserted Scotland's right to choose a different successor from England's Hanoverian heir unless conditions safeguarding Scottish trade, religion and government were met — and it was pushed through partly by the Parliament's refusal to vote taxes and its threat to withdraw Scottish troops then serving under Marlborough in the War of the Spanish Succession. England retaliated with the Alien Act (1705), threatening to treat Scots as foreign nationals and to embargo Scottish trade unless Scotland opened union negotiations or settled the succession by 25 December 1705. Combined with financial inducements over Darien losses, this pressure helped drive the two kingdoms toward the 1707 Acts of Union established.

1707 — absorption, not disbandment

At the Union, Scotland's military establishment consisted of seven regiments of infantry, two of horse or dragoons, one troop of Horse Guards, and fortress artillery at Edinburgh, Stirling and Dumbarton castles. These units were absorbed directly into the new British Army, not disbanded. Existing Scottish regiments retained their identity and continuity into the combined establishment — the Royal Scots as the senior line regiment, the Scots Guards among the Foot Guards, the Royal Regiment of Scots Dragoons (the "Scots Greys") among the cavalry, and others. Further Scottish and particularly Highland regiments were newly raised for British service from the 1740s (the Black Watch being the first official Highland regiment, in 1740) — a distinct, later development, not a continuation of the pre-Union establishment. The popular belief that the Scottish army was "disbanded" at the Union is therefore a myth that this card actively corrects established.

Soldiers Abroad: the Numbers

Steve Murdoch and Esther Mijers, in the Oxford Handbook of Modern Scottish History (2012), set out the pattern of Scottish military migration after the Reformation. After 1560 the Garde Écossaise declined from a full regiment to a symbolic guard of about a hundred men, and Protestant Scots looked elsewhere, though religion never fully decided who served whom. Thousands joined the Dutch Revolt against Spain from 1568. The Scots Brigade in the Dutch Republic, nicknamed "the Bulwark of the Republic", lasted until the Fourth Anglo-Dutch War of 1780 and was finally "nationalised" as a Dutch regiment in 1782, the last regular Scottish force on the Continent. Its ultimate loyalty was to the British Crown, which could call it home.

Scandinavia drew the largest numbers. About 1,600 Scots were levied for Sweden in the 1570s, followed by an unbroken stream of companies and regiments. By 1648 some 30,000 Scots had fought in Germany for Sweden, though high losses meant far fewer were in service at any one time. In France, the Régiment de Douglas was formed from the remnants of about 10,000 Scots who enlisted in the 1630s and 1640s. Murdoch and Mijers point out that there were probably twice as many Scottish soldiers in Scandinavian service in 1627–30 alone as there were Scottish commercial migrants in the Americas and Poland-Lithuania combined over the whole seventeenth century.

Later political crises kept the flow going. After Cromwell's conquest in 1651, English authorities offered foreign service to Scots still in arms instead of prison, leading to another Scandinavian enlistment in 1655–56. By Queen Anne's reign about 2,000 Scots served in the Dutch navy and merchant fleet. Jacobite exiles after 1689, 1716 and 1746 served as far afield as Russia, Prussia, Sweden and France, where Scottish units existed until the 1770s; the Russian navy sometimes held Jacobites and Hanoverian Scots at the same time.

• The Scots Brigade served the Dutch Republic for over two centuries and was only turned into a Dutch regiment in 1782.
• Scotland's earliest sports legislation was military policy: the 1424 Football Act and the golf bans of 1457, 1471 and 1491 existed to stop men neglecting compulsory archery practice "for the common good and for the defence of the country."
• The kings of France were guarded by a Scottish bodyguard, the Garde Écossaise, for over four centuries — from about 1418 until 1830.
• Steve Murdoch's research suggests roughly 50,000 Scots — about 20 per cent of the adult male population — served against the Habsburgs during the Thirty Years' War, one of the largest military emigrations in Europe.
• The Scottish general who trained the Covenanting army, Alexander Leslie, had risen to the rank of field marshal in the Swedish army before returning home.
• For a decade after 1651, Scotland had no army of its own at all — it was garrisoned and governed by Cromwell's occupying forces.
• Scottish soldiers wore grey, not red, until 1684, when red cloth was first imported from England to match the English army.
• The office of Lord High Constable of Scotland — nominally supreme battlefield commander since 1314 — still exists today, but purely as a ceremonial dignity.
• At Killiecrankie in 1689 a fleeing government soldier, Donald McBane of Balfour's Regiment, leapt some 18 feet (5.5 metres) across the River Garry to escape the Jacobites; he later recounted the feat in his 1728 book The Expert Sword-man's Companion, and the spot is still called the Soldier's Leap.

1. "The Scots Army" was not one continuous institution. It was a sequence of distinct systems — medieval levy, Covenanting armies, Restoration standing army — with a genuine break in 1651–1660 when Scotland had no army of its own. Presenting an unbroken institution from the Middle Ages to 1707 is inaccurate.
2. Pre-modern numbers are estimates, not counts. Figures for the Highland Host (c. 8,000–10,000), Dunbar casualties (Cromwell's claim of 3,000 killed versus Balfour's "8 or 900") and Killiecrankie vary significantly between sources and should be treated as best estimates.
3. Regimental founding dates are lineage traditions. The Royal Scots (1633) and Scots Guards (1642) "trace their lineage to" these dates by convention; this is not the same as demonstrably unbroken corporate existence, and the Dunbar "4,000 officer purge" figure is itself a documented exaggeration — around 80 officers were actually dismissed.
4. The Lord High Constable's supreme command was largely nominal by the 17th century. Real operational command lay with appointed generals and Privy Council war committees; the office endures today only as a ceremonial dignity.
5. The 40-day common-service obligation was inconsistently enforced. It was a genuine legal duty, but by the mid-16th century recruitment was increasingly difficult; full national mobilisation was an aspiration, not a reliable achievement.
6. The army was not "disbanded" at the Union. In 1707 it was absorbed into the British Army. This is the single most common misunderstanding about the pre-Union Scottish military, and it is actively corrected here.
7. "The Covenanters won because they had the veterans" is too simple. Veterans served on both sides; several of the most senior Scottish generals from Swedish service fought for Charles I. How much the Covenanters' success owed to Leslie's command and discipline, rather than to politics and money, is an interpretation, not a settled fact.
8. Army sizes for 1639–40 vary. Figures for the Second Bishops' War range from about 20,000 to about 23,000, and for the Royalists at Newburn from about 4,500 to 5,000.