The Royal Scots Navy — Scotland's Pre-Union Naval Tradition

The West Highland galley (birlinn) tradition — a distinct sea-power

Before, alongside and in tension with any centralised crown navy, Scotland's most sustained maritime-military tradition lay in the west. As N.A.M. Rodger observes, late-medieval Scotland participated in two related maritime worlds: in the west, a galley-warfare tradition rooted in the Viking sea-lordships of the Highlands and Islands and, before them, the sea-power of Dál Riata; in the east, the common northern-European sail-driven tradition.

The characteristic vessel was the birlinn (Scottish Gaelic bìrlinn) or West Highland galley — a clinker-built, single-masted, oared-and-sailed descendant of the Norse longship, which replaced the steering-board with a stern rudder from the late 12th century. A 1615 report to the Privy Council distinguished galleys (18–20 oars) from birlinns (12–18 oars), with three men per oar. The vessel survives in Scottish heraldry as the lymphad (from Gaelic long fhada, "long ship"), notably in the arms of the Lord of the Isles.

The dominant power here was the MacDonald Lord of the Isles, whose descent from Somerled gave them a fleet that let them act as near-independent kings, playing off the kings of Scots, Norway and (after 1266) England. This sea-power was real and militarily significant — Robert I's success in the Wars of Independence depended partly on calling on Islesmen's ships — but it was not a "royal navy." It was a regional, kin-based system frequently deployed against the Scottish crown.

Its decline was political. James IV forfeited the Lordship of the Isles in 1493, and thereafter crown policy — expeditions in 1493, 1495, 1498 and the artillery-backed campaign of 1504 that battered island fortresses into submission — deliberately broke the autonomous naval power of the west. Rodger has suggested the 1504 campaign, in which some island fortresses could only be attacked from seaward, may mark the end of medieval galley warfare in the British Isles and the beginning of naval artillery warfare. The galley lingered in clan use into the 17th century, but as an independent military force the tradition was over.

(This tradition should not be conflated with crown naval power; the two are distinct.)

James IV's navy and the Great Michael — the one great exception

The reign of James IV (1488–1513) is the one period of genuine, sustained royal investment in a Scottish battlefleet, and it is the origin of most popular ideas about a "Scottish navy." James inherited a world in which the crown had ships only occasionally — his father James III had relied on the merchant-privateer Andrew Wood of Largo, whose armed ships Yellow Carvel and Flower defeated English incursions in the Firth of Forth in 1489 and off the Tay in 1490. Before the 16th century, as one account puts it, "Scotland had no navy in the accepted sense": when the king needed an armed vessel he contracted a merchant who already owned one.

James changed this. He founded a harbour at Newhaven (1504) and ordered Andrew Aytoun to build a dockyard at the Pools of Airth (1506), and fortified Inchgarvie in the upper Forth. Over the reign he acquired a total of 38 ships by building, buying and taking prizes, founding two new dockyards in the process. Naval spending became, in Macdougall's phrase, James's "greatest single item of expenditure from the early 1500s"; Macdougall's assessment (in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography) is that James's "lavishing of money on a royal navy (probably more than £100,000 Scots)" was spectacular.

The flagship of this programme was the carrack Great Michael, laid down around 1507 under the direction of Sir Andrew Wood and the French master shipwright Jacques Terrell, and launched at Newhaven on 12 October 1511. She was, on the consensus of modern scholars, genuinely the largest ship afloat at the time, of roughly 1,000 tons burthen and "with twice the original displacement of her English contemporary Mary Rose, which was launched in 1509 and completed in 1510." She marked a real design shift — built specifically to carry a main armament of heavy artillery. Contemporary poet William Dunbar wrote of the carpenters and shipwrights at work on the king's ships.

On the famous specifications, caution is essential (see also Caveats). The dramatic figures repeated everywhere — 240 feet long, walls 10 feet thick, 300 sailors plus 120 gunners plus up to 1,000 soldiers — derive overwhelmingly from Robert Lindsay of Pitscottie's Historie and Cronicles of Scotland, written decades later and famously colourful. Pitscottie's text describes her as "XII scoir of futtis of length and XXXV futte withtin the wallis" (240 feet long, 35 feet within the walls) with walls so thick "that na canon could gang throw hir." Macdougall, whose James IV is the standard biography, warns in his preface that Pitscottie "may have misinterpreted most of the events of this reign." A literal 240-foot length is physically inconsistent with a ~1,000-ton carrack (far longer than ships of the line 150 years later) and is best treated as chronicle exaggeration; a realistic overall length for a ship of that tonnage is on the order of 150–180 feet, the figure given in modern reference accounts.

What is documented, from the Accounts of the Lord High Treasurer of Scotland, is the crushing cost: the Michael is reckoned, in the standard scholarly figure drawn from those accounts, to have cost around £30,000 Scots to build, against roughly £8,000 for the Margaret. That was close to a full year's royal revenue — the Treasurer's annual receipts rose from about £4,500 in 1496–97 to some £28,000 by 1512, with total royal receipts perhaps £44,500 by 1513 — and Macdougall stresses James was able to "double, perhaps even treble" royal income over the reign, so the ship swallowed a very large fraction of the crown's resources however one measures it.

The strategic point is stark: Scotland built a magnificent fleet it could not afford to keep. After James IV and much of the nobility died at Flodden on 9 September 1513, maintenance became untenable. The Michael was sold to Louis XII of France on 2 April 1514 for 40,000 livres — well below her build cost — and renamed La Grande Nef d'Écosse. Most historians follow George Buchanan's account that the French then let her rot at Brest; Macdougall (1991) raised the possibility she survived to feature in the 1545 Solent campaign, but this is speculative.

The Lord High Admiral of Scotland and the Admiralty Court

The senior naval office of the kingdom was the Lord High Admiral of Scotland, one of the Great Officers of State. It probably originated in the early 15th century (the reign of James I) and carried real power: command of the king's ships and sailors, inspection of ports, harbours and coasts, and the authority to appoint judges in maritime causes, exercised through vice-admirals and admirals-depute (later "judge admirals").

The office became hereditary and passed through noble families: it was held by the Earls of Bothwell in the 15th–16th centuries and the Earls/Dukes of Lennox in the 17th, and was later among the heritable offices Charles II granted to his illegitimate son Charles Lennox, 1st Duke of Richmond and Lennox. The last holder before Union was David Wemyss, 4th Earl of Wemyss (Lord High Admiral 1706–1714).

The office's judicial arm was the High Court of Admiralty of Scotland, a distinct legal institution handling maritime civil, criminal and prize matters — disputes over charter parties, freight, wrecks, seamen's wages, piracy trials and, in wartime, the "condemnation" of prizes. Its earliest surviving records date from 1557, convened under the Earl of Bothwell's authority, in Edinburgh or Leith. Its jurisdiction ran over all maritime causes "below a river's first bridge," though it was inferior to the Court of Session and its criminal reach was contested by the Court of Justiciary. The court's records are held today by the National Records of Scotland (reference AC); the earliest have been published as the Acta Curiae Admirallatus Scotiae, 1557–1561/2 (Stair Society, 1937).

Post-Flodden decline: privateering and hired vessels

After 1513, and for nearly two centuries, Scotland had no permanent royal battlefleet. Instead, naval effort ran on two improvised channels: hired or requisitioned merchantmen pressed into royal service in wartime, and above all privateering under letters of marque and reprisal — private vessels licensed by the crown (or the Admiral) to attack enemy shipping and keep the prizes, subject to Admiralty adjudication.

This was not marginal. Steve Murdoch's The Terror of the Seas? argues that historians long neglected Scotland's many privateers because they resembled pirates, and insists on the legal distinction between the licensed privateer and the criminal pirate. During the 1540s "Rough Wooing" period, Scots waged a highly profitable privateering campaign; James V, meanwhile, built a new harbour at Burntisland (1542) and used naval power chiefly for expeditions to the Isles and to France.

The Union of Crowns (1603) ended Anglo-Scottish naval conflict but drew Scottish merchantmen into England's foreign wars, exposing them to enemy privateers. Under Charles I a squadron of three ships was bought in 1626, and Scots privateers ranged widely: the 1627 expedition to the Bay of Biscay (the Île de Ré campaign), voyages to the West Indies, and the 1629 capture of Quebec, in which privateer fleets under Lochinvar and William Lord Alexander took part.

Seventeenth-century Scottish privateering and the wars of the mid-century

Privateering was Scotland's most significant and economically substantial form of maritime warfare in this era. During the Bishops' Wars (1639–40), Charles I tried to blockade Scotland while Scottish privateers took English prizes. After the Covenanters allied with the English Parliament, they established two patrol squadrons — the "Scotch Guard" — for the Atlantic and North Sea coasts, initially manned largely with English ships but Scottish money and men, becoming more Scottish over time.

Scottish naval forces could not withstand Cromwell's navy; when Scotland became part of the Commonwealth in 1653, its ships and crews were split up among the Commonwealth fleet. After the Restoration, Scottish seamen won some protection against arbitrary impressment, but a fixed quota of conscripts for the English Royal Navy was levied from the sea-coast burghs, and Royal Navy patrols became routine in Scottish waters even in peacetime. In the Second (1665–67) and Third Anglo-Dutch Wars (1672–74), "a very large number of Scottish captains, at least as many as 80 and perhaps 120, took letters of marque, and privateers played a major part in the naval conflict of the wars" — including Clyde and Glasgow merchant-captains. Scotland's separate Admiralty Court continued to adjudicate prizes throughout.

1707: what was actually "absorbed"?

The honest answer is: very little in the way of ships. In the 1690s two small naval efforts appeared. The Company of Scotland assembled a fleet of five ships — including Caledonia and St Andrew, built or chartered in Holland and Hamburg — for the Darien scheme (1698); the venture failed and only one ship returned. Separately, to protect commerce during the Nine Years' War, Scotland bought three purpose-built warships from English builders in 1696: Royal William (a 32-gun fifth rate) and the smaller Royal Mary and Dumbarton Castle (24 guns each, described as frigates). Thomas Gordon was the last commander of the Royal Scots Navy. The scale gap is captured in a single comparison: by 1697 the English Royal Navy had 323 warships, while Scotland was still dependent on merchantmen and privateers.

At Union on 1 May 1707, these three vessels and their crews transferred to the Royal Navy. Because the Royal Navy already had larger ships of similar names, the Scottish frigates were renamed: Royal William became HMS Edinburgh (a 32-gun fifth rate, lost in 1709), Royal Mary became HMS Glasgow (sold 1719), while HMS Dumbarton Castle kept its name (captured by the French in 1708). That was the entirety of the "fleet" absorbed.

The institutional transition matters more than the ships. By the Acts of Union 1707, all admiralty jurisdictions were placed under the Lord High Admiral of Great Britain (or the Commissioners of the Admiralty). The office of Lord High Admiral of Scotland was, in effect, superseded — though the Vice-Admiral of Scotland, commissioned by the Crown, continued to appoint the Judge Admiral (until 1782) and admirals-depute and to rank as an Officer of the Crown. The Admiralty Court of Scotland itself continued to function until it was abolished in 1830, a striking survival of a distinct Scottish maritime-legal institution long after the political union.

The contrast with the army (Card #1) is the key point. Scotland brought seven regiments into the new British Army in 1707 — a substantial, professional standing land force. It brought into the Royal Navy three small frigates. The idea that a significant "Scottish navy" was absorbed in 1707 in the way the army was is a misconception: there was almost nothing there to absorb.

Cross-references

Later Scottish naval institutions and industries have their own cards in this Defence series and are treated only in passing here: Scapa Flow (the Orkney fleet anchorage), Rosyth Naval Base, HMNB Clyde/Faslane, the Arctic Convoys, Clyde warship building, and Carron Ironworks and the carronade. All post-date the Union and belong to the history of the Royal Navy and British shipbuilding, not the Old Scots Navy.

• The Great Michael reputedly consumed the timber of much of Fife. Pitscottie claimed she used up "all the woods of Fife except Falkland wood," plus timber imported from France, Norway and the Baltic — a vivid exaggeration, though the foreign timber imports are genuine.
• Scotland's warship names live on in the Royal Navy. HMS Edinburgh and HMS Glasgow both began as vessels of the Royal Scots Navy (Royal William and Royal Mary), renamed at Union in 1707.
• The Great Michael sold for less than she cost. Built for around £30,000 Scots, she was sold to France in 1514 for 40,000 livres — a "bargain price" that reflected how badly post-Flodden Scotland needed the cash.
• A privateer became Lord High Admiral. Andrew Wood of Largo, who began as a Leith merchant and privateer, rose to hold the office of Lord High Admiral of Scotland.
• The birlinn is on coats of arms worldwide. The West Highland galley survives heraldically as the "lymphad," appearing not only in Scottish arms but in the coats of arms of New Zealand and New Brunswick.
• Scotland's Admiralty Court outlived its parliament by 123 years. Though political union came in 1707, the distinct Scottish High Court of Admiralty was not abolished until 1830.
• Scots helped capture Quebec in 1629. Scottish privateer fleets took part in the capture of Quebec from the French — it was later returned under a peace treaty.
• The only surviving birlinn is a modern replica. The Aileach, built in 1991 and now housed at Kildonan Museum in South Uist, is the sole full replica of a West Highland galley; the historic vessels have all been lost.

• "Scotland had a great navy." For most of its history it did not. Outside the James IV peak, Scotland had no standing royal battlefleet; naval effort was small, intermittent and carried by privateers and hired ships. Treating the Old Scots Navy as an equivalent of the English Tudor–Stuart fleet is a serious distortion of scale — recall that England had 323 warships by 1697.
• The Great Michael's dimensions. The dramatic figures — 240 feet long, 10-foot-thick walls, crew of 300 plus 120 gunners plus 1,000 soldiers — come from Robert Lindsay of Pitscottie's chronicle, written decades later, which Macdougall warns "may have misinterpreted most of the events of this reign." Her ~1,000-ton size and status as the largest ship afloat are accepted, but the literal 240-foot length is regarded as exaggerated; ~150–180 feet is more realistic. Report these numbers as traditional, not documented.
• The Great Michael at the Solent (1545). The claim she survived to help sink the Mary Rose in 1545 is a hypothesis floated by Macdougall (1991), not established fact; the older tradition (George Buchanan) has her left to rot at Brest.
• The Somerled "80 galleys" and Hakon's "200 ships." These fleet numbers come from saga and chronicle traditions and should be treated as indicative rather than precise.
• The West Highland galley tradition was not the "Scottish navy." It was a distinct, kin-based regional sea-power, frequently deployed against the crown, and broken by the crown after 1493. Conflating it with royal naval power is a common error.
• "A Scottish navy was absorbed in 1707." Only three small frigates and their crews passed to the Royal Navy, and the Admiralty jurisdiction moved to the Lord High Admiral of Great Britain. There was no substantial fleet to absorb — a very different situation from the army's seven regiments. Overstating the 1707 naval "absorption" is the single most common misconception on this topic.