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Documentatieblad werkgroep Achttiende eeuw. Jaargang 1984 (1984)

Documentatieblad werkgroep Achttiende eeuw. Jaargang 1984

(1984)– [tijdschrift] Documentatieblad werkgroep Achttiende eeuw–rechtenstatus Auteursrechtelijk beschermd

Vorige Volgende

The Scottish brigade in the service of the Dutch Republic, 1689 to 17821*

Scottish, English, and Irish soldiers first assisted the cause of Dutch independence in 1572 when a semi-official expedition under Sir Thomas Morgan, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, and Sir Roger Williams fought alongside the polyglot forces of William of Orange. Although most of these troops returned to Great Britain two years later, numerous British volunteers, mercenaries, and auxiliaries continued to serve under the Orangist flag until Queen Elizabeth I decided upon formal intervention in the Netherlands in 1585. In that year the Earl of Leicester conducted five thousand Englishmen into the northern Netherlands to be joined in 1593 by a corps of 6,400 Scots. Together, the survivors of Leicester's division and the newly-arrived Scots were referred to as the Anglo-Dutch Brigade and during the course of the Thirty Years' War they were formally organised into six infantry regiments, three English and three Scottish. In the absence of a British standing army, the Anglo-Dutch Brigade provided many of the officers for the armies of Parliament and Charles I during the English Civil Wars. The Brigade itself continued in Dutch service until 1665 when the outbreak of the second war between England and the Dutch Republic led to the recall of the three English regiments and their amalgamation into the standing army of Charles II. Despite this, the three Scottish regiments were allowed to remain overseas. Following the conclusion of the third and final Anglo-Dutch War in 1674, disbanded soldiers and officers from the English, Scottish, and Irish armies gravitated across the North Sea and formed three new English regiments, once again bringing the Anglo-Dutch Brigade upto full strength. When the accession of the catholic James II was challenged by Charles II's illegitimate son, the Duke of Monmouth, in 1685, the regular forces in England and Scotland were so weak that the new king asked for the temporary return of the three English regiments. As a precaution, the Scottish regiments also

sailed to England but all of the Anglo-Dutch troops arrived too late to see any action either against Monmouth or the Earl of Argyll in Scotland. Late in 1685, the six regiments returned to the Netherlands yet within less than three years the Anglo-Dutch Brigade had ceased to exist.2

During the short sojourn of the six regiments in England in 1685, James II had found himself less than happy with the political and religious sympathies of the majority of the officers and men. Crammed with Scottish and English republicans and exclusionists, extreme protestants, and every manner of anticatholic extremist, to James the Brigade seemed little more than a nest of vipers over whom he had no direct control. By 1685, it was recognised that the six regiments were a part of the Dutch army, paid and equipped by the Seven Provinces, and that their first duty and loyalty was towards their paymasters. The officers, in fact, only took an oath of fealty to the States-General and were not required to take the English oaths of supremacy and allegiance demanded by the Test Act of 1673. However, if the sovereign of England had sufficient occasion he could summon the Brigade into the British Isles to assist him in an emergency; at the termination of any such crisis it was understood that the Brigade would be allowed to return to the United Provinces. These sane arrangements which provided the Dutch with an élite corps of between five and six thousand men and the king of England with a reserve of trained troops whose upkeep cost him nothing, were enshrined in a convention which had been drawn up by William of Orange and the Earl of Ossory, then commanding the Brigade, in 1678. Unfortunately, this only received the diplomatic status of a private compact between the stadtholder and the commander of the Brigade and was never ratified by the States-General although James II regarded the conditions as binding upon both parties. Ultimately the rather loose and imprecise terms suited James II and the States-General giving them a freedom of manoeuvre of which they were both to take advantage in 1688. The whole question of the Brigade might have been easier to solve if the six regiments had been genuinely composed of Scotsmen and Englishmen but they were not. French Huguenots, Germans, Dutchmen and Irishmen were to be found amongst both officers and soldiers, men who owed little or no allegiance to James II and who regarded the Brigade as a part of the Dutch army and not as a section of the British armed forces on loan to the Seven Provinces. As relations between William of Orange and his father-in-law steadily deteriorated after the false honeymoon of 1685, the Anglo-Dutch Brigade became a bone of increasing contention. James viewed it as nothing more than a militarised magnet for the miriads of political and religious opponents to his regime who were sheltered in the repel-

lant Netherlands. As far as William was concerned, the presence of the Brigade in the Dutch army gave his uncle a useful lever in the internal affairs of the Republic as well as the potential to emasculate the Dutch army at any time by the withdrawal of one of its most experienced and important bodies of troops. Bearing in mind that William was convinced that James II was sliding towards a French alliance, this latter point assumed greater and greater weight in his calculations. The decision by James on 14/24 March 1688 to recall the Brigade into England met with the silent approval of his nephew. James neither expected nor managed to persuade a majority of the officers to begin fresh careers in the British Isles but just over one hundred well-trained officers did obey the royal summons, slightly more than one-third of the total number of officers in the six regiments. In the Netherlands, the recall had the effect of cleansing the Brigade of all catholics and those of dubious loyalty to the house of Orange, enabling William to transform the regiments from a liability into a central instrument in his plans for the invasion of England.3

The Anglo-Dutch Brigade came to an end and the Scottish Brigade came into being the moment that Major-General Hugh Mackay led his men ashore at Torbay on 5/15 November 1688. The three English regiments were permanently embraced within the British army but the three Scottish formations went back to the Netherlands after the signatures had been appended to the Treaty of Ryswijk in 1697 accompanied by three new Scottish corps to replace the lost English contingent. These additional regiments were disbanded in 1717 and for the remainder of the eighteenth century, apart from a short period during the War of the Austrian Succession, the Scottish Brigade in the Dutch service consisted of just three regiments of infantry.

It was not solely the number of regiments which declined after 1688 but also the political role of the Brigade. In the days of Charles II when royal impecuniousness and insistent parliamentary pressure had obliged the king to maintain a small skeleton standing army, the Anglo-Dutch Brigade, along with the garrisons in Tangier and the colonies, had been politically and militarily indispensable enabling him to maintain an action-tested reservoir of troops upon which he could call in a crisis but which was always beyond the reach of parliament. By seizing the initiative from the naive parliament of 1685, James II made his finances so secure that he was able to increase the regular army in England dramatically thus reducing his reliance upon foreign-based reserves. Undoubtedly, this was a major factor in the decision to recall the Brigade in 1688 as it was no longer a military or a political necessity to the crown. From an isolationist foreign policy before 1688, the accession of William and Mary brought England into the forefront of European

power politics and wars. Although the majority of Englishmen still retained a pathological loathing for regular martial establishments, Britian's involvement in European and colonial wars made a sizeable standing army an essential part of her governmental equipment. No Hanoverian king of England had to rely upon a few thousand soldiers secreted away in a foreign country. The abdication of James II and the election of William of Orange to the English throne greatly improved relations between England and the United Provinces removing at a stroke the whole thorny problem of the English, Irish, and Scottish refugees in the Netherlands. The Brigade was no longer needed as the focus of attention for all those who were opposed to later Stuart despotism. The political function of the Brigade came to a halt in 1688. For the remainder of its life until the dissolution in 1782, the Scottish Brigade was a purely military formation. Why it continued for as long as it did is a question not easily answered.

Two types of mercenary soldier were recognised by the eighteenth century: the ordinary mercenary who was hired either as an individual or in a formed unit on a short-term contract and the auxiliary who was hired on a long-term basis usually from a friendly power. Both Great Britain and the Dutch Republic made extensive use of mercenaries during the eighteenth century partly in an effort to save their own, native manpower from decimation in war and thus preserve their own trades and manufactures but also because this policy helped to minimise the opposition to a standing army which was seen on both sides of the North Sea as an instrument for possible attempts at the introduction of arbitrary government. At one time or another during the eighteenth century, the States-General hired soldiers from Brandenburg-Prussia, Brunswick, Hesse, Württemberg, Saxony, Sweden, Holstein, Hanover, Denmark, the Palatinate, and a host of smaller German states. Well over half the Dutch army was composed of rented foreigners. Yet, the Scottish Brigade never fell into the category of mercenaries, mere ‘subsidie-troepen’.4 They were ‘super auxiliaries’ after the fashion of the Swiss and Irish corps in the French service. Because of their loyalty and length of service - the Scottish troops had been in Dutch pay for longer than the actual Dutch army - they were treated as belonging to the regular infantry and revelled in the title of ‘Old Royal Troops’, a factor which had much to do with the manner in which they were treated by the States-General and the British government. If the Scottish regiments sometimes had cause to complain over their pay and conditions, as did their co-auxiliaries, the Swiss regiment, it was as nothing when compared with the grievances of the straightforward mercenary soldiers.

In the early part of the eighteenth century the continuation of the Scottish Brigade suited all parties. The United Provinces and Great Britain were joined in alliance during the wars against Louis XIV and in the War of the Austrian Succession making the loan of the Scottish soldiers sound political and military sense. Also, the maintenance of the Dutch barrier in the Austrian Netherlands was as much in the British interest as it was advantageous to the Dutch and the loan of the Brigade was a recognition of this fact, a diplomatic gesture which was significant but financially cheap.5 Not until the onset of the Seven Years' War did this cosy arrangement begin to reveal disquieting weaknesses. Even in the heat of the War of the Austrian Succession, Britain and the Netherlands had not seen eye-to-eye over the fiscal aspects of their military cooperation but during the ensuing European upheaval relations quickly soured. Dutch neutrality removed most of the reasons for a close liaison between the two powers and called into question the position of the Brigade. Despite the fact that the officers took their oath of loyalty to the States-General and not to the king of Great Britain, it was generally expected that the three regiments would be instructed to return to England in 1756, a prophesy which proved incorrect. On the death of stadtholder William IV in 1751, his widow, Princess Anne, daughter of George II of Great Britain, acted as regent for her infant son, William V. The Scottish Brigade had always been associated with the house of Orange and it was on Anne's entreaty that her father decided not to recall the Scottish regiments in 1756. Afraid that the anti-Orange factions within the republic might seize upon a minority as an opportunity to rid themselves once more of their ancient leaders, Anne wanted the military assurance of the Brigade in order to protect her own and her son's interests.

Family affection did not last for long. Anne's ignorance of statecraft and the general feebleness of the Orange restoration, which had been effected in 1747, made the Scottish troops themselves seem a more worthwhile goal than bolstering up the ineffectual Orangist cause. Until the Seven Years' War, Britain had not consistently exploited Scotland as a recruiting ground for its own armies but after the suppression of the final Jacobite rising in 1746, the government in Westminster looked to Scotland as the solution to the manpower crisis brought about by its manifold military commitments. The traditional ease with which the British government had allowed recruiters from across the North Sea to take men from north of the border was suddenly withdrawn. Not only was the Scottish Brigade deprived of any chance of action but it had to sit in garrison towns in the Netherlands slowly filling its ranks with Dutchmen, Walloons, and Germans. An anonymous proposal, emanating from London, was put forward in 1758 to

split the Brigade in half allowing those who wished to serve King George to return home and those whose roots were firmly embedded in Dutch soil to remain. Not wishing to be seen to favour Great Britain in any way that might jeopardise their neutrality, the States-General rejected the scheme. In the following year the case was expressed more strongly.

The Scotch Brigade that serve in Holland, having been prevented from recruiting, are, by this means, become an useless burden to the States-General. His Majesty is very desirous of availing himself of the service of one part of them and if this is complied with would consent that the regiments remaining in Holland should be recruited (in Scotland), which would put those regiments in a condition to serve. It is therefore His Majesty's pleasure, that you should forthwith propose to Prince Louis (of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel), that one half of the Scottish corps should enter into His Majesty's service and to be employed in Germany, under the command of Prince Ferdinand (of Brunswick); and if this is complied with His Majesty will consent that the regiments remaining in Holland should recruit in Scotland which His Majesty can in no other way consent to.6

This approach was again turned down and the eleven thousand men of the Scottish Brigade were sentenced to watch a major European war from the sidelines.7

In July 1763, the Scottish officers drew up a long memorial and presented it to the secretary of war in Westminster. They were worried in case the ban on recruiting in Scotland, which had been imposed by the War Office, presaged the dissolution of the Brigade and they were at pains to highlight its value and usefulness. The loyalty of the Scottish soldiers to the crown of Great Britain was, they asserted, proven. Not one man or officer had been tempted into the service of the Pretender in 1745, a marked improvement over the Jacobite rebellion of 1715 when a number of officers had deserted to the cause of James III. Although great play was made of the past glories won by the three regiments and their previous role as an ‘officer seminary’, the memorial was a backward-looking document without arguments or prospects for the future. Obviously depressed and uneasy, the officers felt that they no longer enjoyed the honoured status of ‘British auxiliaries’ but were ignored by both the British and the Dutch governments and left ‘to languish’ in a foreign state.8 The officers were in a hopeless position, enmeshed in a military institution which was irrelevant and out-of-date. In the period when both states had followed similar foreign policies within Europe and were prepared to support one another materially in international conflicts, then the loan of the

Scottish Brigade had some relevance but, after 1756, Anglo-Dutch relations steadily deteriorated ending in open war in 1780. It was no good talking of the sizeable contribution which the Scots had made to the creation and maintenance of the United Provinces or of the heroic feats of arms at St. Denis in 1678 and Bergen-op-Zoom in 1747. Politically, the idea of the Brigade had become unattractive.9

In 1779, the Scottish officers offered their swords to the British government and stated their willingness to help their native country to fight half of Europe and the North American colonists rather than sit idly in Dutch garrisons. Since 1757, the Scottish officers had been in a more independent position. An act of parliament of that year had required them, for the first time, to swear joint oaths of fidelity: one to the States-General and, in addition, the oaths of supremacy and allegiance which were taken before the British minister in The Hague who then registered them with the War Office in London. This reform, slight in itself, did allow the officers a flexibility of loyalty which had not been present before 1757, a factor which certainly smoothed the procedure of the final recall in 1782.10 To the chagrin of the officers, the War Office virtually ignored their request and when Britain and the Dutch Republic went to war one year later, the Scottish Brigade was placed in an embarrassing and impossible situation. The States-General marched the three regiments away from the coast to the inland garrisons of Grave, Venlo, Maastricht, and Namur11 and set about solving the problem of the Brigade once and for all. On 18 November 1782, their high mightinesses ordered the Scottish officers to take an oath abjuring all other allegiances on pain of forfeiting their commissions. In addition, the regiments were put into Dutch uniforms; the playing of the ‘Old Scots March’ was forbidden; officers had to wear orange sashes, sport Dutch gorgets, and shoulder Dutch spontoons; regimental colours and coats of arms were altered; and orders were to be given in Dutch and not English. In effect, the three regiments were nationalised and taken into the Dutch army, lock, stock, and barrel. Officers were given six weeks in which to make up their minds. As in 1688, approximately one-third of the officers returned to Britain but virtually no private soldiers or non-commissioned officers. Again, as had been the case both in 1665 and in 1688, they were not given a choice, the States-General having no wish to lose experienced and well-trained troops in the midst of a war. The only method of escape for the ranker was desertion. Before the deadline for the officers' decisions had expired, Britain and the United Provinces signed a truce but there were no second thoughts and the Brigade was not reformulated. Neither, it is interesting to note, was there any pressure from Great Britain for a reconsideration.12 Although the dissolution of the Brigade in 1782

was different from the two, previous recalls of the Anglo-Dutch troops into England in 1665 and 1688 in that the decision was taken by the Dutch and not by the Westminster government, it was similar in being tacitly supported on both sides of the North Sea.

A permanent institution with a history of over two hundred years, the Scottish Brigade acquired a distinct character. At least until 1756, when the British army began to draw heavily upon Scottish reserves of manpower, the Dutch service was an extremely attractive proposition for Scotsmen. The infertility of the soil and the general backwardness in social and economic development had long induced Scotsmen to seek their fortunes with the sword and nearly every European army in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries possessed more than its fair share of itinerant Scots.13 Yet the Dutch service was different. Whereas nearly all the opportunities open to Scotsmen took the form of mercenary engagements, usually wartime levies which were disbanded on the cessation of hostilities, the Scottish Brigade in the Netherlands offered a security closely akin to that enjoyed by a regular formation in a standing army. Also, compared to France, Austria, Russia, Sweden, or Poland, the Netherlands were relatively close to Scotland making the Dutch service seem a little less like distant exile. The officer corps of the Brigade was very much a family affair. During peacetime, the number of commissions in the Brigade varied between one hundred and twenty and one hundred and fifty and although there was always considerable expansion in time of war, these extra commissions were recognised as impermanent and liable to immediate reduction on the signature of peace. The basic three regiments of the Brigade offered few opportunities to newcomers. Brigade officers tended to send their sons into their own regiments, first as cadets and then as ensigns. The Stedmans, the Halketts, the Cunninghams, the Stuarts, the Douglases, the Mackays, the Lillingstones, the Colyears, the Lamys, and many, many more, all made careers out of the Brigade, generation succeeding generation. This tended to make the Brigade somewhat inward-looking and cliquish. Partially, this was offset by the cosmopolitan nature of the military in the Netherlands with the large numbers of foreign troops from Sweden, Switzerland, and Germany but army life was very much a regimental affair and encouraged a narrow-minded outlook. Most of the officers retained an affection for Scotland, even though many had been born and brought up in the Low Countries, yet this patriotism was more theoretical than real. Without doubt, the majority of the commission-holders were proud of their ancestry and over-aware of the debt which the Seven Provinces owed to the Scottish forces but very few demonstrated a desire to return to their homeland when opportunities arose. Even in the period after 1755 when the

officers pressed for a recall, they were really expressing a soldierly desire to see some action in order to break up the monotony of garrison life rather than demonstrating a heartfelt love for the British Isles. Tied though the Brigade was to its Dutch allegiance, each individual officer was free to resign his commission at any time and seek an opening in the British army. Very few took advantage of this possibility largely because all commissions in the British, peacetime army had to be purchased and most of the Scottish officers in the Netherlands were financially poor. Commissions and promotion within the Brigade were decided on merit not money. On the break-up of the regiments in 1782, only one-third of the total number of officers decided to begin a new career in the British Isles; the majority were more Dutch than Scottish and quite content to continue in the same ranks in slightly different uniforms giving orders in a language which they already spoke fluently.

The same generalisations cannot be made of the soldiers, at least until 1756. Because there were thirty men to every officer, the greater number involved forbids an intimate acquaintance with the rankers. As death and desertion rapidly thinned the ranks and necessitated annual, if not bi-annual, replacements, the turnover in privates and noncommissioned officers was infinitely higher than amongst the officers, leading to regular influxes of fresh, Scottish blood. All of this tended to make the rank-and-file more obviously Scottish than their officers but after the outbreak of the Seven Years' War this state of affairs gradually altered. Regardless of the numerous Scottish soldiers who married Dutch and Flemish women, following the removal of recruiting rights in Scotland in 1756, the three regiments were obliged to fill their muster rolls with Dutchmen, Frenchmen, Walloons, and Germans. It is scarcely surprising that very few Scottish soldiers returned to Great Britain in 1782; there were very few left.14 By 1782, the Scottish Brigade deserved that title only in terms of its officer corps. It had developed into a polyglot formation, typical of most of the Dutch army and the dissolution of the three regiments in 1782 enabled the States-General to regularise and legalise a situation which had already occurred - namely the absorption of the Scottish regiments into the regular army of the Seven Provinces.

Gentlemen who were well-endowed with land did not, as a general rule, resort to a professional, military career and certainly nearly all of the Scottish officers, from the lowliest ensign to the most senior colonel, had little income apart from their army pay. John Stedman tells of his acquaintance Alexander Campbell, the adjutant of Colonel John Stuart's foot, whose wife died and left him with umpteen children and only his thin army pay-packet.15 Stedman himself was perpetually short of money as was his father, a retired major. On the other hand,

the security of tenure which the Brigade gave to its incumbents and the paucity of opportunity for promotion, however talented the candidate, led to a discernible indolence amongst the officers and a frequent lack of attention to duty. Detailed records were kept of the state of James Wood's regiment of foot, one of those which was eventually disbanded in 1717. In May 1712, it was as near full-strength as it was possible for a formation to be in wartime. Between 1715 and 1717, the colonel and the lieutenant-colonel were never with the regiment leaving command entirely in the hands of the major; three or four of the captains were on semi-permanent leave and, on average, the regiment hardly ever possessed more than half its complement of private soldiers.16 Officers who were sent by their regiments on the yearly recruiting-drive in Scotland frequently overstayed their official time-limits and had to be summoned back to duty by angry letters from the council of state. So sloppy had matters become in 1771 that John Stuart's regiment, whilst in garrison in Deventer, allowed the officers on night-duty to leave their posts and go home to bed handing over responsibility to the senior sergeants. In order to keep up appearances and appease the civil magistrates, the sleeping officers had to yawn their way back to their posts in time for the beating of reveille.17 Ensign John Stedman, a junior subaltern on whom a great deal of company and regimental administration ought to have been devolved, was often absent on extended furloughs of three and four months, touring around the Netherlands enjoying himself. None of this was unique to the Scottish Brigade. With scarcely any exceptions, the transition from mercenary-based armies to national standing armies and the concurrent changeover from command by virtue of social standing to command by merit and royal authority, took a long time to achieve and was still incomplete by the end of the eighteenth century. Added to this was the fact that there was not enough for the officers and men to do. Simple weapons and simple tactics meant that a minimum of training and exercising was sufficient to maintain a battalion in fighting trim, even in the vaunted Prussian army where soldiers only drilled in the morning and were usually off-duty for the remainder of the day. Most contemporary armies solved this problem by permitting the rank and file to take on outside work as tradesmen or labourers but no evidence has been forthcoming as to whether the Scottish soldiers in Dutch pay were allowed this concession. It would seem incredible if they were not. Shunted from fortress town to fortress town once every six or twelve months, more from the need to spread the financial load fairly between the seven provinces than from any military or strategic consideration, the officers and soldiers were bored and idle, filling in their days by drinking, quarrelling, and gambling.18 The fact that foreign regiments

were subject to the fierce, Dutch military discipline and not to the codes of martial justice current in their homelands, did little to control Scottish tempers. On top of all this, officers with even a modicum of ambition suffered from perpetual frustration. Openings for promotion were rare and it was not uncommon to find lieutenants in their fifties or even their early sixties whilst young men remained ensigns for fifteen or twenty years before they had a chance to acquire a lieutenancy. In this slow current many junior officers must have rubbed their hands in macabre glee as they read the casualty lists after the battles of Roucoux and Laufeld or the sieges of Tournai and Bergen-op-Zoom, relishing the thought of some upward movement into the newly created vacancies.

From the point of view of recruitment, the Scottish Brigade had a great deal to offer the Dutch authorities. On 6 December 1746, the Commissioners of the States-General on Military Affairs reported that the Dutch regiments were experiencing grave difficulties in filling their ranks. In the first place the Dutch population was not large and had been under pressure from war recruiting for five years. A major recruiting ground in peacetime, the Austrian Netherlands, had been occupied by France whilst Dutch recruiting agents were not officially allowed to operate within the confines of the Holy Roman Empire. Unofficially they did spread their tentacles well into Germany but with little success as the area had been combed and raked by Prussia, Austria, and the German principalities themselves. Scotland was the only bright spot. It still offered a good recruiting base, the British government placed few obstacles in the way of the recruiting parties, and the Scottish Brigade was, consequently, an important element in the Dutch war effort. Clearly, the Dutch military commissioners were without detailed knowledge of the position in Scotland. Like the Seven Provinces, Scotland also had a small and widely dispersed population which made it difficult for the Brigade's recruiters to realise the large numbers of replacements which the three regiments required during wartime. These problems, which had been evident towards the end of the War of the Spanish Succession, were only solved by disbanding three of the existing six regiments and using the dismissed soldiers to complete the ranks of the remainder. Just as the Dutch commissioners were singing the praises of Scotland, the old fear of the political potential of the Scottish Brigade reared its head. With the wholehearted concurrence of the British government, the States-General passed a resolution on 2 April 1745 declaring that no Irishman or roman catholic could be recruited into the Brigade, in an effort to isolate the Scottish formation from the increasing signs of Jacobite activity in its homeland. In the wake of the brutal suppression of the rebellion of 1745, all recruits for the

three regiments had to be inspected by the commander-in-chief in Scotland, the Earl of Albemarle, to make sure that they were not ex-Jacobites or sympathisers with the Pretender's cause. No-one, neither British nor Dutch, wanted to run the risk that the Brigade might once again become a refuge for political exiles. During the Seven Years' War, Britain recruited so heavily from Scotland that even if the Scottish Brigade had been allowed to continue to draw men it would have experienced severe competition. By the 1770s, Scottish officers on leave in the United Provinces, the Austrian Netherlands, and Germany were constantly searching for suitable young men of any nationality to fill their depleted ranks. Until the great drought after 1756, Scottish recruiting parties from each of the three regiments had crossed the sea in October and November, stayed until the spring of the ensuing year and then escorted their new men from Leith to Rotterdam in April and May. Usually, in peacetime, the recruiters had to find between fifty and one hundred men every year for each regiment, a figure which gives an obvious guide to the numbers lost through death, desertion, and discharge.19

The Scottish regiments were paid their subsistence money once every fifteen days with the balance of full pay being issued as and when the provincial treasuries felt able to withstand the shock. As a general rule, the pay of all three Scottish regiments was in arrear, often seriously so. Between 1697 and 1723, the colonels of the regiments, with the vague support of the British minister at The Hague, repeatedly petitioned the States-General for their just dues and demands. The States-General did its best by sending streams of letters to Holland, Guelderland, and Zeeland, which had the reputation of being the most parsimonious province, ordering them to pay the Scottish regiments in full but there was endless wrangling about the sums of money actually owed. The issue was made impossibly complex by the fact that the regiments were paid by the province in whose territory they were then quartered, an arrangement which made the computation of arrears over two decades an almost impossible task for a decentralised eighteenth century government. To add fuel to the fire, it was the pay of the three regiments which were disbanded in 1717 which was principally in dispute rather than that of the three, established battalions. Eventually, in 1720 and 1721, the parliament at Westminster took notice of the problem and referred it to the commissioners who were investigating the debts and arrears of pay within the British army itself. Their verdict, which was published in 1721, itemised debts of £ 64,000 owed by the Seven Provinces to the Scottish Brigade but again the Dutch were quick to cloud the issue by making reference to the enormously complicated division of financial responsibilities between

Britain and the United Provinces which had occurred during the War of the Spanish Succession. In the end it probably mattered but little as it would have been a hopeless task trying to pay an eighteenth century regiment six years after its disbandment. The whole exercise was cosmetic rather than realistic and the £ 64,000 was finally issued in the form of debentures which were quickly bought from the soldiers at discounts well below their face value by speculators. At governmental level, the assumption of the debt by the British government was a satisfactory solution but very little hard cash reached the pockets of the disbanded soldiers and junior officers. There is no point in castigating the Dutch government. All countries with large mercenary contingents in their armies tended to pay their own, native troops first and then let the foreigners squabble for the crumbs which were left; the French almost made this a policy during the financially difficult days of the Seven Years' War. In the Dutch army itself, the Swiss regiment was treated no better than the Scottish corps and many of the ‘subsidie troepen’ suffered considerable hardship.20

From the end of the War of the Spanish Succession to the dissolution of the Brigade in 1782, the three Scottish regiments spent their time in the fortresses of the southern United Provinces and in the barrier fortresses in the Austrian Netherlands. Breda, Ypres, Maastricht, Bergen-op-Zoom, Venlo, Namur, Heusden, Nijmegen, Sluys, and 's Hertogenbosch grew accustomed to the presence of Scottish soldiers. Apart from a short stay in Naarden in 1746 by Marjoribanks' regiment, which distinguished itself by a good deal of misbehaviour, the Scottish regiments were not deployed on the eastern or north-eastern frontier. Some of the more important fortresses boasted of barracks for the garrison companies but most did not possess such advanced facilities and both the officers and the soldiers had to find billets with the townspeople. Detailed instructions were issued to each regiment concerning the deportment of the troops, how much they were to pay for their food and lodging, and the disciplinary procedures to be followed if there were any complaints. Scottish troops behaved no better in their quarters than any other eighteenth century soldiers, quarrelling, fighting, stealing, and abusing civilians. Consisting as they did of dour covenanting protestants, the presence of the Scottish regiments in the largely catholic barrier towns did result in some friction. In 1719, Dutch troops in Venlo, including a number of Scottish soldiers, interfered with a catholic procession obliging the priests in future public ceremonies to carry the sacrament hidden beneath their robes.21

However much the Scottish Brigade formed a vital element in the Dutch army and however well-integrated with the Dutch community were the officers and some of the men, it was impossible for the Scots

to escape the fact that they were a foreign community. Perhaps the internationalism of the eighteenth century military profession helped to mitigate the worst effects of this isolation whilst the substantial Scottish populations in the major Dutch cities - Utrecht, The Hague, Rotterdam, and Amsterdam - provided some support for the Brigade.22 The officers and soldiers were well enough looked after within their regiments but life was often hard for their dependents. Scottish girls who had married soldiers in the Brigade and then moved to the Dutch Republic were especially hard-hit if their husbands were killed in action or died from disease. The Scottish community was sometimes able to offer support and comfort but not to Mrs. Mary King whose husband was killed at Ramillies in 1706; she had to leave the Netherlands with her two young cildren and seek help from her brother who lived in Brandenburg.23 Orphans were a constant problem. On 30 June 1762, Colonel John Stuart wrote to the States-General giving details of three orphans in his regiment whom the local orphanages refused to admit. In all three cases, the father had been a soldier in the regiment who had since died or deserted whilst the mothers were all dead. The council of state wrote to the municipal orphanages at Hulst and Tholen ordering them to admit the three Scottish children but it is more than possible to detect a distinct hostility both on the part of the States-General and the town authorities in Hulst and Tholen towards these burdensome, foreign infants. Despite the fact that two of the three mothers had been Dutch and not Scottish, the offspring of foreign soldiers were clearly unwelcome guests.24

Occasionally, the Scottish regiments found themselves in appalling conditions. After one year in garrison at Sluys, Colonel George de Villegas' Scottish regiment was in a sorry plight. Two hundred and fifty-four men were invalids and this total was increasing daily; seven soldiers had died during the past two days. The colonel stressed in his letter that this was the third tour of duty in Sluys for his regiment since 1729 and on each visit the battalion had lost a considerable number of men from diseases associated with the low, swampy lands around the estuary of the Schelde. Perhaps, Villegas thought, the Scotsmen, used as they were to pure mountain air, were particularly susceptible to the inclement atmosphere because the native troops in the Sluys garrison did not appear to be adversely affected. More likely it was because the Scottish regiment was lodged in leaking houses and meat was so expensive that the men had to live on bread and cheese. During the long winter months, the Dutch soldiers were able to go home on leave but this was impossible for the Scottish soldiers who had to remain at their post, live in damp accornmodation, and eat cold meals. Villegas maintained that Sluys had such a bad name that it was affecting recruiting efforts

in Scotland and mass desertions could not be long delayed. In the interests of all concerned, the colonel asked for his regiment to be relieved as quickly as possible and sent to a healthier station.25 Revered as fighters the Scottish troops may have been, flattered with the title of ‘Old Royal Troops’, but they were still foreigners and not indigenous soldiers. In battle they were usually in the heat of the action and suffered high casualties, particularly at Bergen-op-Zoom where two battalions were virtually wiped out; they were the last to be paid and over billets and social treatment they tended to be regarded as secondclass citizens. Not surprisingly, many of the common soldiers took matters into their own hands and deserted. A lucky few were able to acquire discharges from the service and swell the ranks of the Scottish community in the Netherlands, like Sergeant Peter Gardner who took over a public house in Heusden.26

Throughout the Dutch army, which was largely a mercenary concern, desertion in peacetime was a constant problem. Faced with long land frontiers to the east and south and with the majority of the army concentrated in the southern provinces and the land-locked barrier fortresses, desertion was simple. Namur stood just a half-an-hour's gentle stroll from the abbey of Malone inside the ‘safe’ territory of Liège. In Malone was an inn which specialised in harbouring deserters from Namur, was expert in organising the sale of arms and uniforms, and could arrange safe conduct for the deserters as far as Brussels. The governor of Namur periodically raided Malone but it did little to slow down the rate of desertion. Much of the desertion from eighteenth century armies was not the result of soldiers wishing to escape from the military life but really comes under the category of ‘bounty hunting’. Most armies offered a money payment to all deserters from other armies with no questions asked. Adventurous soldiers took full advantage of this and moved from one allegiance to another pocketing considerable sums of money. With armies of numerous nationalities infesting the Low Countries in peacetime, let alone in time of war, this represented a profitable way of life until, of course, the horrible day of reckoning. At Sluys, during the War of the Austrian Succession, the depleted Scottish regiment of Villegas was only too glad to take into its ranks deserters from the French armies of Maurice de Saxe and Loewendahl, some of whom deserted again as soon as they had received their bounty money. So serious was the problem that the States-General declared periodic amnesties during which deserters were permitted to return to their regiments without penalty. To add insult to injury, a certain ‘Le Mede’ set up shop within Namur itself and did his best to entice Scottish soldiers into the French army.27

In many ways, the Scottish Brigade in the eighteenth century was far less interesting as a political phenomenon than was its forerunner, the Anglo-Dutch Brigade, during the preceding one hundred years. Every effort was made by both the British and the Dutch governments to ensure that it did not assume another political disguise but remained as a strictly military entity. Although it is historically two-demensional after 1689, the Scottish Brigade serves as an illustration of the gradual decline of the mercenary and the auxiliary and the slow rise of the concept of a truly national army. As the eighteenth century progressed, the Scottish Brigade became steadily more outmoded as an institution, a useless embarrassment to both governments. lts final dissolution was a relief to politicians on both sides of the North Sea but it was also an epitaph to a redundant tradition in European military history.

 

John Childs, University of Leeds.


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