Men of Mackay's Regiment in the service of Gustavus Adolphus during the Thirty Years War
Military enterprisers and contractors in Ireland found it
easy to practise their trade because the English lords deputy and provincial
governors made life difficult for idled soldiers. The death of Lord Mountjoy in
1606 deprived Tyrone and the other Irish earls and chieftains of a sympathetic
ear in the Irish government. The enfranchisement of the inhabitants of Ulster
as English subjects in 1605 effectively deprived the Irish lords and chieftains
in that province of their authority and contributed to the flight of the earls
in 1606. The president of the province of Munster, Sir George Carew, declared
his intention 'to hunt' the idled soldiers, and he proposed employing Catholic
prisoners of war to fight the remaining rebels so that they might consume one
another. Any who remained after this sweep through the woods and bogs could be
dispatched to the Indies, Virginia or the Low Countries, where 'three parts of
four were likely never to return'. The English Privy Council discouraged
sending them to the States' Army, but did not care if they went to the Spanish
Army of Flanders. The further away the better was the rule that English
officials followed, and voyages to the Indies were ideal since tropical conditions
exacted such a high toll.
Recruiting policies throughout the Three Kingdoms appear to
have been driven by official concerns for domestic stability regardless of the
impact on foreign relations. Thus, contractors for the Spanish Army of Flanders
were allowed to recruit in Ireland even though this was prejudicial to Dutch
interests. Recruiting for the Spanish army was briefly prohibited following the
discovery of the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, but by 1606 at least four Spanish
recruiting parties were busy in Ireland because Dublin Castle assigned a higher
priority to cleansing Ireland of swordsmen. James I also encouraged English
Catholics to serve in the Spanish army, despite the fact that this facilitated
communications of Catholic recusants in England with their friends and kinsmen
in Flanders, permitted young men from English Catholic families to be educated
overseas and made it easier for priests, disguised as soldiers, to return home.
While it was lawful for subjects of the king of England to serve in foreign
armies, it was made a felony to leave the country for that purpose without
first having sworn an oath not to be reconciled to the pope and not to be a
party to any conspiracy or plot against the king. For their part the Spaniards
never missed an opportunity to subvert the king's subjects. Thus, William
Trumbull wrote to Sir Dudley Carleton from Brussels in 1619 that Archibald
Campbell, seventh earl of Argyll, who was scorned at home, was 'caressed' by
the Spaniards and given an annual pension of £1,500. The Irish earls and their
gentlemen retainers who went to Flanders found a welcome from kinsmen who had
already settled there and a government which was happy to educate-and
indoctrinate-their sons.
The number of men from the British Isles who volunteered,
were recruited by military enterprisers and contractors or were impressed for
service in the various armies of mainland Europe during the Thirty Years War
was at least 55,000 and may have totalled as many as 80,000. The number of
Englishmen was between 10,000 and 15,000; the total of the Irish probably
exceeded 15,000; and the Scots, who appear to have been everywhere, certainly
numbered at least 25,000, but could have been as numerous as 50,000. The dates
of the Thirty Years War as usually given are, of course, arbitrary and merely
represent the widening of a number of conflicts; nor did the Peace of
Westphalia (1648) end the conflict between France and Spain, in whose armies
substantial numbers of soldiers from Scotland and Ireland served. Perhaps as
many as 20,000 Irish soldiers had already fought in the Spanish Army of Flanders
between 1586 and 1611.
Although only 4,000 Irish were serving in that army in 1623,
one must remember that wastage rates of 50 per cent a year when armies were in
the field were not unusual. As many as 25,000 Irishmen, assigned to seven
regiments, probably served in the French army between 1635 and 1664.
Twenty-five thousand soldiers from Scotland seems like a great many, since this
would represent one-tenth of the adult male population of Scotland, yet there
is good reason for thinking that such a figure is a low estimate. Twenty-five
thousand soldiers from the British Isles served with the Swedish army during a
three-year period between 1629 and 1631. The Swedish army at one time had
thirteen Scottish regiments, each with an authorized strength of 1,008 men.
Donald Mackay, first Lord Reay, the busiest of all Scottish military
enterprisers, alone recruited 10,000 Scots for the Swedish army between 1629
and the mid-1630s. The Danish army employed 10,000 to 12,000 Scots and English
soldiers before its participation in the Thirty Years War collapsed. Because of
poverty, as many as 100,000 Scots (10 per cent of the total population)
emigrated from Scotland in the early seventeenth century, and Allan Macinnes
estimates that half of them were soldiers.
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