Scottish Soldiers in Swedish and Dutch Service: The Scots Brigade and the Thirty Years' War

Each major claim carries one of three labels. established means supported by primary records, official bodies or several independent reliable sources. shared means the core fact is sound but sources disagree on details, dates or interpretation. traditional means widely repeated but not traceable to a primary or independent source.

The main source for this card is Steve Murdoch and Alexia Grosjean's Alexander Leslie and the Scottish Generals of the Thirty Years' War (2014), which draws on Swedish muster rolls, Danish chancery records and Scottish privy council warrants. Totals of men are estimates built up from levy warrants and musters, and many levies were never filled. The authors' arguments, that the Scots were not mere mercenaries and that their part in the war has been underestimated, are labelled Shared. Names are a further trap: Scots in Swedish service often appear in German forms, such as Mohr for More and Duwall for Macdougall.

A kingdom of soldiers without a standing army

established Late sixteenth-century Scotland had no standing army but a great many armed men. Lords raised followers through kinship and bonds of manrent, and the crown required men aged sixteen to sixty to show their weapons at local musters called wapinschaws. The Scottish government used foreign service in three ways: to feed men in hungry years, to remove troublesome ones, and to help allies. In 1573 Mary's former supporters were sent to Sweden while the regent's men went to the Dutch.

shared The historians Steve Murdoch and Alexia Grosjean, in Alexander Leslie and the Scottish Generals of the Thirty Years' War (2014), argue that most Scots served abroad with royal sanction, as part of Stuart foreign policy, rather than as freelance mercenaries. Many officers named Elizabeth of Bohemia, Charles I's sister, as their cause. Some did fight only for pay; Sir James Turner admitted it openly. Catholic Scots such as William Gunn and Sir John Hepburn served in Protestant armies, which shows that loyalty to the Stuarts could count for more than religion.

The Scots Brigade in the Dutch Republic

established Major recruitment for the Dutch revolt began in December 1572. The first levy, under Henry Balfour, was largely destroyed at the siege of Haarlem. Between 1577 and 1579 seventeen separate warrants to levy for the Low Countries were issued. The force settled at a notional 3,000 men in three regiments, known as the Scots Brigade. During the Twelve Years' Truce from 1609 it was cut to two regiments under Sir William Brog and Lord Buccleuch.

established James VI treated the brigade as a reserve of his own. In 1610 he drew Scots from it for the British force at the siege of Jülich, where Colonel Robert Henderson was praised, and in 1620 he sent John Seton's 1,200-man regiment from it to defend his daughter in Bohemia. Seton held out at Třeboň until 1622. Back in the Netherlands, the brigade helped hold Bergen-op-Zoom in 1622, where Henderson was killed, fought at Breda and at Maastricht in 1632, and lost about 600 men taken prisoner at Kallo in June 1638.

established The Dutch valued the Scots, and the brigade earned the name "the Bulwark of the Republic" after the siege of Bois-le-Duc. But they never let a Scot become a general. They refused James VI's nomination of Lord Buccleuch as "General of Scots" in 1604, while the English brigade had such a title. Promotion stopped at colonel. For ambitious officers this was a reason to move to Sweden, where there was no such ceiling.

established The brigade outlasted the Thirty Years' War. It was refilled from Scotland in 1639 under James Erskine, John Kilpatrick and Lord Almond, and in 1648 still had three regiments. In 1686 Hugh Mackay of Scourie became major general of all six British regiments in Dutch service, and in 1688 he led them to Britain for William of Orange.

shared The end date varies. Murdoch and Grosjean say the brigade remained a permanent part of the Dutch army until the outbreak of the Fourth Anglo-Dutch War in 1780. Other historians date its end as a Scottish body to 1782, when its regiments were made fully Dutch.

Sweden: an unofficial alliance

established Scottish service in Sweden began on a large scale in 1572, when Archibald Ruthven took about 1,600 men there. It went badly: in 1574 it was reported that not 500 of them were left alive, and Ruthven died in a Swedish prison. From the Swedish civil war of 1598–99 onwards, Scottish units were a permanent part of the Swedish army, even though James VI's alliance with Denmark should have forbidden it. Sweden was underpopulated and open to foreigners; about 100 Scots were ennobled there in the early modern period, most of them officers.

established Sir James Spens of Wormiston, one of the failed Fife adventurers who had tried to plant Lewis in the 1590s, became colonel-in-chief of British troops in Sweden in 1608. During the Kalmar War of 1611–13 he raised about 2,000 Scots for Sweden while James VI officially sent troops to Denmark. About 300 of Spens's men were massacred at Kringen in Norway in 1612. Spens and his kinsman Sir Robert Anstruther, in Danish service, were hailed as the authors of the 1613 Treaty of Knäred. Spens held the title "General of British", later "General of Scots", until he died shortly after Lützen in 1632.

established A group of Scottish colonels rose through Gustav II Adolf's reorganised army in the 1620s. Patrick Ruthven, who left Scotland in 1609 partly because the name Ruthven had been banned after the Gowrie conspiracy, became colonel in 1621. Alexander Leslie served as his lieutenant colonel and became a colonel by 1623. When Gustav Adolf received the Order of the Garter in 1627, he knighted four Scottish colonels: Ruthven, Leslie, David Drummond and John Hepburn.

Denmark–Norway, 1625–29

established When Christian IV entered the war in 1625, Scotland supplied more officers to Denmark–Norway than any other country. Over 300 Scottish officers joined his army in four years, outnumbering Danish and Norwegian officers combined by about three to one. In March 1627 patents were issued for 9,000 Scots in three regiments under the Earl of Nithsdale, Lord Spynie and Lord Murckle. They joined the 2,000 to 3,000 men raised by Sir Donald Mackay, later Lord Reay, for Mansfeld's army and diverted to Denmark. The Scots fought under a Saltire with a Danish cross in the corner.

established Mackay's men held the Elbe crossing at Boitzenburg in July 1627 against Tilly, held Breitenburg Castle for seven days, and held the pass of Oldenburg for nine hours so that the rest of the army could escape. Christian IV wrote to Charles I that the Scots had served so faithfully that he would gladly take more.

shared The cost was terrible. Murdoch and Grosjean estimate that some 12,000 of the 13,700 Scots sent to Denmark were lost by the Treaty of Lübeck in 1629. They blame Lord Spynie's refusal to serve under the Catholic Nithsdale for scattering the Scots across the war instead of keeping them as one army.

Mackay's regiment and Monro's Expedition

established Mackay's regiment passed to Swedish service in 1629, after helping defend Stralsund in 1628. Robert Monro, one of its officers, published Monro, His Expedition with the Worthy Scots Regiment called Mac-Keyes in London in 1637. It covers the regiment's campaigns for Denmark and Sweden and ends with a forty-one-page guide to drill, company organisation and quartering. The Covenanters used it as a manual in 1640, and Monro reissued it in 1644 as The Scotch Military Discipline Learned from the Valiant Swede.

shared Monro insisted that he and his comrades fought for credit and for Elizabeth of Bohemia rather than for money, and noted that Mackay's men first served for bread and lodging, not pay. He was writing for a Scottish audience, and his account boasts of his nation, but its details often match Swedish and English records.

The Green Brigade and Breitenfeld

established Gustav Adolf landed in Pomerania in June 1630 with about 12,000 men, about a quarter of them Scots, in three regiments under Mackay, James Spens and James Macdougall. Murdoch and Grosjean count between sixteen and twenty Scottish colonels in the Swedish army at that moment; their book gives both figures. Around the turn of 1630–31 the "Green Brigade" was formed from the regiments of John Hepburn, James Lumsden, Donald Mackay and a still unidentified Colonel "Stargate", later joined by Spens's old regiment. It stormed Frankfurt an der Oder in 1631, with Hepburn, Monro and Lumsden leading the assault.

established At Breitenfeld in September 1631, after Gustav Adolf's Saxon allies fled, Hepburn commanded the three brigades of the reserve. Scottish musketeers formed up three ranks deep and fired together, and Monro's musketeers seized the Imperial guns. Monro recorded that the king thanked the brigade publicly. In 1632 Hepburn quarrelled with Gustav Adolf and left for France.

John Hepburn in France

established Hepburn raised a regiment for France in 1633, and became a maréchal de camp after the siege of La Mothe in 1634. His Régiment d'Hebron had a paper strength of over 8,000 men in forty-eight companies and absorbed many Scots from Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar's army. Hepburn was killed at the siege of Saverne in July 1636. His regiment passed to James Douglas and lived on in French service as the Régiment de Douglas.

shared Whether Hepburn became a Marshal of France is disputed. Murdoch and Grosjean say Louis XIII raised him to Maréchal de France in the spring of 1636, and the St Andrews SSNE database gives the rank too, though it dates it to March 1635. The Dictionary of National Biography calls him only a maréchal de camp, a brigadier-general's rank, and James Grant's 1851 Memoirs and Adventures of Sir John Hepburn treats the marshal's title as one of several errors told about him.

Nördlingen, Wittstock and the Scottish generals

established At Nördlingen in 1634 the Scots Brigade under the Catholic Colonel William Gunn held a captured sconce all day, but the battle was lost. The theologian John Durie reported that scarcely 200 of the brigade were left. Patrick Ruthven became a major general in 1632 and later lieutenant general; Alexander Leslie was made field marshal in January 1636 and won at Wittstock that October with James King commanding the cavalry of the left.

shared Murdoch and Grosjean identify eighteen Scottish generals in the war, fifteen of them in Swedish service. Only two were noblemen, the Earl of Nithsdale and the Marquis of Hamilton. They argue that Sweden ran a real meritocracy for Scots, and that Axel Oxenstierna trusted them more than other foreigners; in 1635 he wrote that the Scots were the most willing and tireless of his foreign officers.

Officers' networks

established Scottish officers brought their kin with them. Gabriel Oxenstierna complained in 1628 that every officer in the Småland regiment was a Scot. Ruthven's Småland regiment produced four generals: Ruthven, Leslie, Drummond and King. Leslie's Närke and Värmland regiment, though its soldiers were Swedes, carried a cadre of Scottish officers, including his son, his half-brother and several members of Major Thomas Thomson's family. In 1648 it still had a father and son named John Gordon, a Thomson and two Monipennys among its officers.

shared The authors compare these regiments to clans, with the colonel as a kind of chief and the regiments as septs of a military family abroad. Officers moved between units, placed sons and nephews, and protected each other's careers. Leslie used this network at Wittstock, posting trusted kinsmen in every part of the army.

Coming home, and staying on

established Between 1636 and 1639 Sweden lost over 300 Scottish officers, among them a field marshal and six generals, through death, retirement or return to Scotland. Many came home to officer Leslie's Covenanter army. Not all chose the Covenant: Patrick Ruthven, James King, John Ruthven and the Marquis of Hamilton served Charles I.

shared Murdoch and Grosjean reject the idea that Scottish service ended in 1639. The Covenanters sent new levies to the Dutch and French, and Leslie helped recruit for Sweden. In 1645 Royalist Scots in Danish-Norwegian service attacked Gothenburg, which Scots in Swedish service defended. In 1648 Scots commanded ten of the twenty-three native Swedish and Finnish infantry regiments, and Robert Douglas went on to become a Swedish field marshal in 1657.

• The Dutch never allowed a Scot to be a general, but the Swedes made fifteen of them generals.
• Scottish regiments in Danish service carried a Saltire with a Danish cross in the corner.
• Robert Monro's 1637 memoir doubled as a drill manual for the Covenanter army.
• Patrick Ruthven went to Sweden partly to keep a surname that was banned in Scotland.
• About 100 Scots were ennobled in early modern Sweden.
• In 1645 Scots in Danish and Swedish service fought each other at Gothenburg.

• Disputed: how many Scots fought in the Thirty Years' War. Steve Murdoch and Alexia Grosjean estimate about 50,000 in the anti-Habsburg armies, with several thousand more on the Imperial side. The figure is an estimate built up from levy warrants and musters, and many levies were never filled.
• Myth: the Scots were simply mercenaries. Murdoch and Grosjean argue that most served abroad with royal sanction as part of Stuart foreign policy, and many gave political or religious reasons. Some did fight only for pay.
• Myth: all Scots fought for Protestant powers. Catholic Scots such as William Gunn and Sir John Hepburn served in Protestant armies, and some Scots served France or the Imperial side.
• Myth: Scottish service abroad ended in 1639. The Covenanters sent new levies to the Dutch and French, and by 1648 Scots commanded ten of the twenty-three native Swedish and Finnish infantry regiments.
• Myth: the Dutch gave Scots high command. They refused James VI's nomination of a "General of Scots" in 1604, and promotion stopped at colonel. Sweden made fifteen Scots generals.
• Myth: the "Swedish" regiments had Swedish officers. Many native regiments were commanded by Scots, who brought their kin with them.
• Disputed: was Sir John Hepburn a Marshal of France? Murdoch and Grosjean, and the St Andrews SSNE database, say he was raised to the rank before his death at Saverne in July 1636. The Dictionary of National Biography records only the lower rank of maréchal de camp.
• Disputed: when the Scots Brigade ended. Murdoch and Grosjean say it remained a permanent part of the Dutch army until the Fourth Anglo-Dutch War broke out in 1780. Other historians date its end as a Scottish body to 1782, when its regiments were made fully Dutch.