Extract from The Royal Scots: A Concise History

Chapter 1
Pontius Pilate's Bodyguard

Whatever hand history might choose to deal to The Royal Scots in the future, it cannot change one unassailable fact; they are the oldest regiment in the British Army with a history of service to 17 British monarchs - from King Charles I to Queen Elizabeth II - and a list of battle honours which stretches back to the seventeenth century. One other irrefutable fact gives colour to the regiment's story: because it has its origins in European service it has also served two French kings, Louis XIII and Louis XIV. No other British regiment can lay claim to such a legacy, although two English regiments, 5^th Foot (later Royal Northumberland Fusiliers) and 6^th (later Royal Warwickshire Fusiliers) began their careers in Dutch service. Until The Royal Scots amalgamated with The King's Own Scottish Borderers in 2006 to form the 1^st battalion of The Royal Regiment of Scotland it was numbered 1^st in the army's order of precedence and stood in the honoured position, 'Right of the Line'. At the time of its transformation, it was also one of only four British line infantry regiments which could lay claim to never having been amalgamated during the army's many periods of change between the seventeenth and twenty-first centuries. The others were The Green Howards (19^th), The Chesire Regiment (22^nd) and The Kings Own Scottish Borderers (25^th).

However, it is the longevity of The Royal Scots which gives it its special place in military history. It can trace its origins back to 1633, when Sir John Hepburn of Athelstanefod, an experienced soldier in French service, received a warrant from the Privy Council of Scotland, issued under the authority of King Charles I, to raise 1,200 recruits in Scotland. The King signed the documents on 28 March, the date which marks the regiment's foundation; precisely, it was also the year when the new King of Britain agreed to come north from London to be crowned in his Scottish capital. it was a decision which had long been anticipated in Scotland, for Charles had spent most of his childhood in London, having been taken there as a child when his father assumed the English throne to become King James I of Britain. After succeeding his father in 1625, Charles made it clear that he had little time for his northern subjects and made few attempts to understand them or to give substance to their political and religious aspirations. There was also a question of style. Despite his heritage - Charles could write and speak in his native Scottish tongue with the best of them - the Scots seemed to be an alien people, their nobles rough-mannered and uncouth, so different from the formality of the court in London with its ordered refinement and cultural pretensions. In short, Charles considered the Scots to be boorish, almost comically so, and he shied away from their over-familiarity, finding them backward, sullen and lacking in courtly manners.

All this might not have mattered had Charles felt any affection for Scotland or displayed some of his father's earthy hard-drinking and sly intelligence, which appealed to the Scots nobility, but as Angelo Correr, the Venetian envoy to London, noted after the succession, 'King James made much of the Scots while his son is close-fisted with them.' Nervous and unsure of himself, Charles could appear cold and aloof, character flaws which were heartily disliked by the Scots, who mistook his formal public manner for rudeness. It was not until July 1628 that the King gave any hint that he would travel to Edinburgh to be crowned and in the period that had passed since his accession the rumour had grown that, far from wanting to travel to Scotland, Charles had insisted that the Scottish crown should be brought to him in London. The rumours were untrue but they were believed and it was to be another five years before Charles made the journey to Edinburgh to be crowned in the bleak confines of Holyrood Abbey which had been carefully spruced up for the occasion.

In fact, from the moment he entered the city through the West Port on 15 June 1633 Edinburgh was en fête. The nymph Edina welcomed the King with the presentation of the keys, and the Lord Provost hand his councillors, clad in scarlet, were on hand to lead the royal retinue down the lavishly decorated main street, now known as the Royal Mile, towards the Royal Palace of Holyroodhouse. The elaborate and expensive pageantry was matched by the pomp and solemnity of the crowning of Charles two days later, which was organised by the Lord Lyon King of Arms, who was moved to say that it was 'the most glorious and magnifique coronation that was ever seen in this kingdom'. Perhaps it was too gaudily done for, far from assuaging everyone's feelings, the coronation ceremony seemed to contain too many elements which were deemed to be 'popish'. The service was conducted by Archbishop Spottiswood, and the Bishop of Brechin delivered the sermon, but both these pre-eminent church leaders were obliged to wear English vestments, and the proceedings, which lasted four hours, seemed to be more Anglican than Presbyterian in nature. The Aberdeen chronicler John Spalding noted with some distaste that the alter had been covered with 'a rich tapestry wherein the crucifix was curiously wrought; and as these bishops who were in service passed by this crucifix they were seen to bow to their knee and beck, which, with their habit, was noticed, and bred great fear of inbringing of Popery'.

From the very outset of its existence Hepburn's new regiment had connections not just with the British royal family but also with the House of Stewart, the Scottish royal house since 1371 when Robert II came to the throne of Scotland. All this mattered because the regiment's first experience of war was not in Charles's service but in the service of Louis XIII of France. It was not a unique arrangement: the men whom Hepburn began recruiting in the year of Charles I's Scottish coronation were following an old tradition, fighting as mercenaries in European wars in French, Danish, Swedish or Spanish service. To them, war was a lucrative national industry which had the added bonus that it could be exported. Scots made good fighters and in common with many other minorities on Europe's fringes - the Croat cavalry in Count Wallenstein's imperial army, for example - they exported their skills to the highest bidder, becoming soldiers of fortune who gave good value for money. During the Thirty Years War, which was still being fought at the time of the foundation of The Royal Scots, at least 25,000 Scots were in the service of Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden, while half as many fought for King Louis XIII of France, often confronting their fellow countrymen on the field of battle, neither giving quarter nor expecting to receive it. The experience of fighting in foreign service had begun 200 years earlier when John Stewart of Darnley led a Scots army which fought the French in their perennial wars against England (known to history as the Hundred Years War) and as a result a Garde Ecossaise came into being, with the Stewarts, by then ennobled as Lords of Aubigny, as their hereditary commanders. Their 'high military reputation' was confirmed by chroniclers such as Henry Torrens and Jean Froissart, who spoke of them as 'bold, hardy and much inured to war in a national sense' and later, in the nineteenth century, the novelist Sir Walter Scott wrote admiringly of them in his novels Quentin Durward and The Legend of Montrose. Scott also wrote his own tribute in words which get to the heart of the matter by explaining the reasons for the love of soldiering abroad entertained by his fellow countrymen:

The contempt of commerce entertained by young men having some pretence of gentility, the poverty of the country of Scotland, the national disposition to wandering and to adventure, all conduced to lead the Scots abroad into the military service of countries that were at war with each other.

The pattern continued throughout the sixteenth century and into the seventeenth, when the outbreak of the Thirty Years War created a fresh demand for soldiers that the Scots were able to exploit. (The war was fought between 1618 and 1648 between Europe's Protestant powers, backed by Catholic France, to contain the territorial ambitions of the Habsburgs.) During its course, the regimental rolls of the Swedish army were thick with the names of Scots who served as officers and regimental commanders. Amongst them was Hepburn, who entered Swedish service as a colonel in 1625. The son of a modest East Lothian landowner, he had left Scotland as a young man following a desultory education at St Andrews and had experience of fighting in Bohemia and the Netherlands before offering his sword to Gustavus Adolphus, the greatest of the Protestant military leaders. During the fighting in Prussia and Poland Hepburn distinguished himself as a tough fighting soldier, and after being knighted he became commander of Gustavus's 'green Brigade', which, in addition to his own regiment, contained a number of other Scottish formations including Mackay's Highlanders, raised earlier in the war by Sir Donald Mackay, another notable Scottish soldier of fortune.

The high-water mark of their contribution came outside the village of Breitenfeld, north of Leipzig, on 18 September 1631, when the Protestant army crushed the imperial forces led by the previously invincible Count Tilly in a dazzling victory. Suddenly it seemed that the threat of Catholic domination was at an end, that never again would the Protestant Germans have cause to fear the Habsburg armies which had laid waste to their country for so many unhappy years. Their celebrations were not misplaced, for this 'first great test and trail of the new tactics against the old, and therefore the first great land battle of the modern age', had introduced new and terrifying tactics to the battlefield. Gustavus Adolphus's army won because its mobile columns and concentrated firepower were too much for the cumbersome, static and will-drilled lines of eh imperial army. Breitenfeld was a declaration: the ponderous, slow-moving masses of imperial cavalry and infantry which had crushed their opposition underfoot could be defeated by the flexibility and firepower of manoeuvrable horsemen armed with matchlock pistols which were discharged at the gallop and usually at point-blank range.

Although the Swedish victory rattled the Habsburg cause it did not break it. In the following year Gustavus Adolphus hoped to reach Vienna but was forced to protect his rear from Wallenstein, now intent on forcing a battle which both men know would be decisive. Displaying his usual recklessness, Gustavus Adolphus one had his horse shot from under him and when rebuked by his courtiers he responded that there was no sense in keeping him in a box. His optimism seemed to be rewarded by further success. Tilly was mortally wounded at the River Lech and the Bavarian cities of Augsburg and Munich were soon in Swedish hands. Then, with winter fast approaching, came the fateful confrontation at Lützen.

Knowing that Wallenstein had been weakened by the absence of his main cavalry force under the command of Count Pappenheim, Gustavus Adolphus determined to press home the advantage, using the tactics that had served his army so well. This time, though, Wallenstein was waiting for him, with his musketeers hidden in a long ditch from which through could shoot upwards at the attacking Swedish cavalry charged over them. With his overstretched forces lined up in traditional formation, the cavalry on the wings, the infantry in the centre, he waited to receive the Swedish assault. In the hard-fought struggle which followed, the Swedish brigades succeeded in breaking the imperial line but amidst the smoke and confusion Gustavus Adolphus was fatally wounded while encouraging his men forward. The battle ended in a close-quarter struggle that left the Swedes victorious, but a dreadful cost.

As the news of the King's death filtered back through his army's rank and file in small shockwaves of grief, men hardened by battle had difficult fighting back their tears. For the Swedes it was a hammer blow. Gustavus Adolphus was their beloved ruler, the Lion of the North, the defender of the Protestant faith, a latter-day Gideon with seven armies and eighty thousand men under his command. For the others in his army, a curious collection of soldiers of fortune - English, German, Irish and Scots - the loss was equally grievous. He was their patron, a god of battles whom they knew to be fearless and resolute, a commander who had scattered the imperial forces of his previously invincible opponents: in the words of another Scots mercenary, Robert Monro, he was 'the King of Captains and the Captain of Kings... Illustrissumus amongst Generals'. However, Hepburn was not amongst the mourners. Once trusted as one of the bravest of Gustavus's brigade commanders, he had lost the confidence of the Swedish King prior to Lützen and had departed his camp with the reproachful words: 'And now sire never more shall this sword be drawn in your service; this is the last time I will ever serve so ungrateful a prince!' Ironically, the Scottish contingent was held in reserve during the battle, the first time had not been in the vanguard during the entire campaign in southern Germany.

© Trevor Royle