Scots in Swedish Thirty Years’ War service.
John Seton and his musketeers were still in Bohemia. After
occupying the town of Prachatice and the country as far east as Neuhaus, they
had been forced back by the advancing Imperial armies to Wittingau (now Trebon)
and had been there since September. In July 1621 only two places held out
against the Imperial forces: Wittingau and Tabor, where a Captain Remes
Romanesco was in command. Seton kept his mixed force of locals, Scots and
Germans on a tight rein, something for which he gained favour among the civil
population, although in February 1621 he had threatened to pillage the burghers
unless they provided him with some funds. That the ordinary inhabitants of
Wittingau preferred such a soldier to the kind of marauder they might have
found themselves stuck with is indicated by the fact that they warned him of an
impending Imperial attack in time to allow him to mount a surprise ambush to
thwart it. At the beginning of April he had replied in writing to one
invitation to surrender:
My dear sir, I have received from bugleman Antonia Banzio
your estimable letter in which you inform me that Tabor has returned to
obedience to His Imperial Majesty and request me to do the same. I am unhappy
that a place such as Tabor, which so bravely defended itself against your
forces, was obliged to surrender, and I may also say that the defenders
conducted themselves with valour. It is my wish to conduct myself in a like
manner, and since I have promised my king my loyalty unto death, my only
course, if I do not wish to deserve the name of liar, is to declare that, as a
testimony to my loyalty, I wager my life on the struggle. Awaiting whatever war
may bring, I remain, etc.
Seton’s defence was brave but finally futile and at last, on
23 February 1622, he surrendered on terms: the defenders and the people of
Wittingau were granted a full pardon and confirmed in their lives and
possessions. Seton later found service in the French army. His stand was not
the last hurrah of the Bohemian cause: that honour belongs to the town of
Kladsko, under the command of Franz Bernhard von Thurn, which resisted until
October.
The Spanish army, under Ambrogio Spinola, gained control of
almost all the Rhineland during the autumn of 1620, cutting off garrisons loyal
to Frederick in Frankenthal, Mannheim and Heidelberg. English troops led by Sir
Horace Vere, a thousand men who had crossed from Gravesend in May, formed the
core of the defence in the former two fortresses, while a mixed Dutch–German
contingent occupied Heidelberg. On 25 October Mansfeld relieved Frankenthal and
then crossed the Rhine to winter his troops in Alsace. As was typical of the
period, Mansfeld was content to allow his troops to live off the land, by
plundering every village and settlement they came upon. Refugees streamed into
Strasbourg to escape the pillaging soldiers, bringing with them typhus, which
wreaked its own havoc on the displaced peasants. The Imperial forces, under
Tilly, meanwhile wintered in the Upper Palatinate until campaigning resumed in
the following year. Disturbed by the presence of Spanish troops in the
Rhineland and sympathetic to their fellow-Calvinist Frederick, still in their
eyes the king of Bohemia, the leaders of the German states of Brunswick and
Baden-Durlach came out for his cause and put armies in the field. Frederick
himself joined Mansfeld at Germersheim in April, just in time to witness a
repulse of an Imperial advance at Mingolsheim. For the rest of the season the
Spanish/Imperial forces and the Protestant armies played a game of manoeuvre in
the Rhineland, shifting warily across the country, enjoying local victory and
temporary advantage. The trend, however, was against success for Mansfeld. When
the Baden-Durlach forces were cut off by the Imperialists at Wimpfen, the
mercenary commander crossed the Neckar and moved north, trying to outrace Tilly
to the Main. At Höchst, a few miles to the west of Frankfurt, the Brunswick
army suffered a crushing defeat on 20 June. In September Frederick’s capital,
Heidelberg, fell to Tilly’s army, and in November Sir Horace Vere abandoned
Mannheim. Frankenthal held out until March 1623. The whole of the Rhineland now
lay in Imperial hands.
The truce between the Netherlands and Spain had expired in
1621 and Spinola had renewed his offensive against the rebellious republic. At
this time there were two Scottish foot regiments in the Dutch army, a senior
one commanded by Sir William Brog and the other by Sir Robert Henderson.
Spinola’s first actions were to occupy the province of Jülich, on the
Dutch–German frontier, and carry out a surprise attack on the Dutch camp at
Emmerich on a Saturday morning, as a result of which Sir William Balfour was
taken prisoner for a time and had to be ransomed.
A stir was created in Scotland when it was learned that
Archibald Campbell, seventh Earl of Argyll, was recruiting for the Spanish
cause – the Privy Council noted the ‘disgust’ of the people, who were decidedly
pro-Dutch – and a Spanish galleon was attacked when it anchored in Leith Roads.
Argyll gave out that the destination of the twenty companies he sought to raise
was Sicily, to fight the Turks, but, as he had been sticking his toe into
Spanish affairs for some time, suspicions were not allayed. On a visit to Rome
in 1597 he had become an ardent Catholic and had married the daughter of a
prominent English Catholic family. In 1618 he expressed the wish to visit
Spain, ostensibly for his health but really to gather Spanish gold for his
debt-burdened estate. Spain was equally interested in the earl, as his lands in
Argyll offered men and an invasion route into Britain. In February 1619 the
burgesses of Edinburgh labelled Argyll a traitor. He took service in the
Spanish army in the Low Countries, even visiting Madrid in the autumn of 1619,
but he saw no fighting and finally changed tack and tried to restore himself to
Stuart favour. Spain was also interested in the clan Donald, the traditional
enemy of Argyll and his Campbells. A few Donald individuals, such as Sir James
Macdonald of Dunnyveg and Ranald Og, a relation of the Keppoch bard Iain Lom,
were in the Low Countries under a Spanish flag, and other Highlanders may have
been among the contingents of Irish mercenaries, but there was no large-scale
recruiting among the clans. Relatively few Scots in fact served in the Habsburg
forces in the Low Countries. There were three captains in Brussels in 1619:
James Maitland, Lord Lethington; William Carpenter and Robert Hamilton, both of
whom had been with Semple at Lier.
The composition of Spinola’s army, as estimated by the Dutch
government in August 1624, illustrates the cosmopolitan nature of the forces
now contesting across Europe. The Spanish commander had at his disposal 12,000
High Dutch [Germans], 4,000 Spanish and Portuguese, 5,600 Italians, 6,800 Walloons,
2,200 Bourguinions [Burgundians] and 3,000 English, Scots and Irish (probably
mostly the latter). With these motley thousands, Spinola initiated in 1622 a
siege of Bergen-op-Zoom, an important port and commercial town on the North
Brabant coast, where the garrison was under the command of Sir Robert
Henderson. The defending troops included English, Scots and Dutch, and it was
one of the former who noted: ‘They [the Dutch] mingle and blend the Scottish
among them, which are like Beans and Peas among Chaff. These [Scots] are sure
men, hardy and resolute, and their example holds up the Dutch.’ Early in the
siege, Henderson fell while leading a large sally against the attackers. ‘He
stood all the fight in as great danger as any common soldier, still encouraging,
directing, and acting with his Pike in his hand. At length he was shot in the
thigh.’ Henderson was carried to safety but he died soon afterwards, impressing
all who saw him with his bravery. Command of his regiment was passed to his
brother, Sir Francis.
As with the siege of Ostend some years before, the assault
on Bergen assumed the nature of ‘a publique Academie and Schoole of warre, not
only for the Naturalls of the Countrie, but for the English, Scots, French, and
Alamines [Germans], who being greedie of militarie honour, resoirted thither in
great numbers’. This notion of honour seems to have led men into acts of great
bravery, if not foolhardiness. The near-contemporary English historian William
Crosse wrote of a typical incident: ‘the English and Scottes being jealous of
their honours, and unwilling that any Nation should be more active than
themselves, resolved to assault the Spaniard works which they had made . . .
and to give them a Camisado the night following. They effected this assault
accordingly with their Musket shot and fire-balles, by which they forced the
Enemies to forsake their Trenches, after they had lost many men in the fight.’
News of the siege came to Mansfeld and he set off westward
to Bergen’s assistance. The mercenary commander’s army was not in very good
shape by this time, suffering from hunger and ill-armed, but he made good
speed. ‘When the Count departed from Manheim he was sixteene or seventen
thousand strong Horse and Foot of all Nations . . . and his Foot were all
Musketiers, there being few or no Pikes among them.’ The greater part of
Mansfeld’s force was mounted and this, combined with a lack of gear, enabled
them to move fast, via Saverne and through ‘the Straits and Fastnesses of
Alsatia, the Wildes and Woldes of Loraine’. Among them were the Scots under Sir
Andrew Gray’s command. They came through Sedan and crossed the Sambre at
Marpont on 27 August and two days later reached the small village of Fleurus,
six miles from Namur. The speed of the march had taken the Spanish completely
by surprise but they recovered sufficiently to attempt to intercept Mansfeld
here. The mercenary army battered its way through and continued towards Bergen,
finally rendezvousing with Dutch forces. By now ‘the Mansfelders were not above
sixe thousand strong that could ride or stand under their Armes, and those wre
for the most part Horse, all or the greatest part of their Foot being either
slaine in the battell of Fleurie, or disbanded in their long march out of the
Palatinate.’ But Spinola was also enduring heavy losses and the threat of a
desperate relief force on its way was enough to make him call off the siege of
Bergen.
While Mansfeld stayed with his troops, Sir Andrew Gray
crossed to England to seek further assistance from the Stuart monarchy. He
alarmed James when he was brought into the royal presence still wearing his
customary weapons – sword, dagger and a pair of pistols – but he was appointed
a colonel and prepared to lead a force of English mercenaries to rejoin his
colleagues in Europe. Before this was to happen, however, Spinola laid siege in
1624 to the town of Breda, where towards the end of the year plague cut a
swathe through the inhabitants, reducing the population by a third.
Mansfeld himself crossed the Channel in March 1624 to take
command of the new English levies for the war, with the aim of recovering the
Palatinate for Frederick and his Stuart spouse. Britain saw very high
recruitment for the continent in the latter half of 1624 – including 6,000 for
the Low Countries and 12,000 for Mansfeld. In November Alexander Hamilton was
appointed as an infantry captain and ordered to lead his men to Dover by
Christmas Eve, and presumably other contingents were given similar
instructions. Initially the plan was to land the men in France, through which
country they would be allowed to pass to join the campaign to recover the
Palatinate. At the last moment, however, fearing a counter-invasion of Spanish
troops from the Low Countries, the French withdrew permission, and Mansfeld had
no choice but to sail north to find a landing at Flushing. As the Dutch were
equally unwilling to allow such a large body of undisciplined troops ashore
under the control of Mansfeld, a commander they did not fully trust, the fleet
of ships, almost one hundred in number, was left swinging at its anchor chains
for two weeks at the end of February. The raw levies, described by William
Crosse as ‘the dregges of mankind . . . the verie lees of the baser multitude .
. . the forlorne braune and skurfe of human societie’, suffered dreadfully from
cold, hunger and thirst and began to die in their hundreds. The Dutch provided
some food but it was not enough. A few taken for dead and dumped overboard
recovered in the cold sea and were able to swim ashore to start a new life.
More commonly, corpses were washed up with all the consequent risk of disease.
Mansfeld was caught in a terrible dilemma: he could not provide for his troops
and equally he could not simply let men ashore for fear of desertion, although
a few escaped anyway and joined the enemy. One of the infantry regiments was
commanded by Sir Andrew Gray but, as the recruitment had taken place in the
south of England, there were probably few Scots among the wretched rank and
file, whose fate was as undeserved as it was typical of what could befall the
common soldier. At last Mansfeld was able to land his men, but that was not the
end of their woes.
The Dutch wanted to employ them in the relief of Breda but
after this town fell to the Spanish at the end of May they had no further use
for Mansfeld and simply wanted rid of him and his men as fast as possible.
Mansfeld led them through Brabant to Cleves on the Dutch–German border, losing
men daily through desertion. By this time, the unlucky mercenary commander had
only about half of his original strength but he struggled on against tremendous
odds, betrayed by those who had undertaken to supply him. Back in Scotland, the
Privy Council issued a warrant to Sir James Leslie to travel about the country
to levy another 300 foot soldiers to serve under Mansfeld. Leslie’s recruits
eventually rendezvoused with Mansfeld’s main body in north-western Germany. At
last, at the end of the year, the survivors found some food and rest in the
bishopric of Münster, around the town of Dorsten. Before long, though, Mansfeld
had to lead them further north, through Lingen, Haselünne on the River Hase,
Cloppenburg and at last to Emden, extorting supplies as he went, his men
passing through each district like a swarm of locusts. The prospect of having
to feed mercenaries led the citizens of Emden to open sluice gates and to flood
land in an effort to deter them, but this only angered Mansfeld, who had
endured so much in the cause he fought for, and he held the town to ransom for
130,000 reichsthaler, until finally the King of Denmark stepped in to settle
matters and provide a degree of security for the bedraggled remnants of the
army.
The fate of Sir Andrew Gray remains obscure but he seems to
have remained in the Netherlands before returning to Scotland and then, in
1630, going to France. With a band of followers, John Hepburn went north to
offer his services to Gustavus Adolphus; he was welcomed and made a colonel in
command of a regiment. Hepburn was to prove to Gustavus Adolphus that the royal
judgement had not been misplaced, and opened a new chapter in the story of the
Scottish soldiers in Europe.
