'THE BULWARK OF HOLLAND.'
And now while the lovers are waiting in hope, while the General is
'nursing his wrath to keep it warm,' and determined upon their
separation; and while Maurice Morganstjern is plotting what mischief
he may work them, we shall briefly tell the story of the Scots
Brigade, and how it came to be called 'the Bulwark of Holland.'
Lewie Baronald, his uncle the General, and all others belonging to
the Scots Brigade, had a good right to be proud of doing so, as it
had a glorious inheritance of military history, second only to that
of the 1st Royal Scots; and though its memory should have been
immortal, its records now lie rotting in a garret of the Town House
of Amsterdam; and even in Scotland little is remembered of it, save
its march:
'The Lowlands o' Holland
Hae parted my love and me.'
Yet the drums of that Brigade have stirred the echoes of every city
and fortress between the mouths of the Ems in the stormy North Sea,
and the oak forests of Luxembourg and the Ardennes; and between the
ramparts of Ostend and the banks of the Maese and Rhine.
In 1570 the fame of Maurice, Prince of Nassau, drew to his standard
many of those Scots whose swords were rendered idle by peace with
England, and it was by their aid chiefly, that he drove out his
Spanish invaders. Among those who took with them the bravest men of
the Borders, were that Sir Walter Scott of Buccleugh who exasperated
Queen Elizabeth by storming the Castle of Carlisle; his son Walter,
the first Earl of Buccleugh; Sir Henry Balfour of Burleigh; Preston
of Gourton; Halkett of Pitfiran, and other commanders, named by
Grose, Stewart, Hay, Douglas, Graham, and Hamilton.
These formed the original Scots Brigade in the army of Holland, and
some of the battalions must have been kilted, as Famiano Strada, the
Jesuit, states that at the battle of Mechlin they fought
'naked'--_nudi pugnant Scoti multi_.
In 1594, on the return of the States ambassadors, whither they had
gone to congratulate James VI. on the birth of his son, they took
back with them 1,500 recruits for the Brigade, which five years after
fought valiantly in repelling the Spaniards at the siege of Bommel.
The year 1600 saw its soldiers cover themselves with glory at the
great battle of the Downs, near Nieuport, and in the following year
at the siege of Ostend, which lasted three years, and in which
100,000 men are said to have perished on both sides, and where so
many of Spinola's bullets 'stuck in the sandhill bulwark that it
became like a wall of iron, and dashed fresh bullets to pieces when
they hit it;' and so great was the valour of the Brigade at the siege
of Bois-le-Duc, that Frederick Henry, Prince of Orange, styled it
'The Bulwark of the Republic.'
It consisted then of three battalions--those of Buccleugh, Scott, and
Halkett.
The bestowal of some commissions on Dutch officers caused much
discontent during the time of the Prince of Orange, afterwards
William III., with whom (after being demanded by James VII. without
effect in 1688) the Brigade came over to Britain for a time, and
served at the siege of Edinburgh Castle and the battle of
Killiecrankie.
In 1747, by the slaughter at Val and the terrible siege of
Bergen-op-Zoom, the Brigade was reduced to only 330 men, but the
_Hague Gazette_ records how they drove the French from street to
street, and of all the glory won thus, the greatest fell to two
lieutenants named Maclean, the sons of the Laird of Torloisk, who
were complimented by Count Lowendhal, who commanded the enemy, by
whom they were taken.
The men of the Brigade were ever good soldiers, yet strict and
God-fearing Presbyterians, who would rather have had their
peccadilloes known to a stern General like Kinloch, than to the
regimental chaplain.
And it might be said of this Brigade, as it used to be said of the
Scots Greys, that the members of it retained a kind of regimental
dialect coeval with the days of its formation, when the language was
rather different from the present Scotch; so, in the Irish brigades
of France and Spain the strongest and purest old Irish was found to
the last.
As a sequel to this brief account of the Brigade in Holland, we may
sum up the story of its service in the British army--though that
service was brilliant--in little more than a paragraph.
After a long and angry correspondence between the Governments of
Holland and Britain, the Brigade--save some fifty officers who had
formed ties in Holland, or elected to remain there--was transferred
to the service of the latter, when a rupture took place between them
at the time of the American War, and was taken to Edinburgh, clad in
the Dutch uniform, and about 1794, it adopted the red coat, and there
in George's Square, when drawn up under Generals Dundas and Kinloch,
received its new colours at the hands of the Scottish
Commander-in-Chief, when it was numbered as the 94th Regiment; and
under these colours it fought gallantly at Seringapatam, winning the
elephant as a badge; at the storming of Ciudad Rodrigo, and in all
the battles of the Peninsular War, after which it was disbanded at
Edinburgh in 1818.
Then another 94th was embodied five years afterwards, on which
occasion, as we tell in our novel, 'The King's own Borderers,' 'the
green standard of the old Brigade of immortal memory was borne
through the streets from the Castle of Edinburgh by a soldier of the
Black Watch,' thus identifying the new regiment with the old; but now
even the number of the former has passed away, as under the new and
helplessly defective army organisation scheme, it is muddled up with
the 88th Regiment under a new name.
And now, having told what the 'Bulwark of Holland' was, we shall
return to the fortunes of Lewie Baronald and his _fiancée_ Dolores.