Scotland and the Low Countries 1124–1994 by Grant G. Simpson

Author:Grant G. Simpson [Simpson, Grant G.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Europe, Great Britain, Scotland, Social Science, Archaeology, Social History
ISBN: 9781788854313
Google: EfpPEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Birlinn
Published: 2022-01-01T16:17:45+00:00

8

SCOTS IN THE WARS OF THE LOW COUNTRIES, 1572–1648

Hugh Dunthorne

Preserved in the Royal Library in Brussels is a manuscript volume of ballads, written in the early years of the seventeenth century by Willem de Gortter and illustrated with the author’s own watercolour drawings. De Gortter was a native of Mechelen in the southern Netherlands and his hook seems to have been intended for the city’s Chamber of Rhetoric, a characteristic institution of many Low Countries towns at this time, combining the functions of a debating club, a literary circle and a dramatic society. The members of these chambers were often liberal or even radical in their political and religious attitudes; and it was probably in order to recall the time, not many years earlier, when Mechelen itself had been a radical city that de Gortter put his collection of verses together. In the early stages of the Revolt of the Netherlands, Mechelen had been one of the first cities of the south to give its support to William of Orange in resisting the Spanish regime in the Low Countries, and as a result it had been ferociously sacked by the duke of Alva in October 1572. For a dozen years thereafter it held on to a precarious independence, surviving as an embattled city between the opposing armies, until its final and permanent surrender to the Prince of Parma in 1585.1

Born in that year, Willem de Gortter evidently came to regard the 1570s and early 1580s as the heroic period of his city’s recent history. So it is interesting – especially in the context of the present volume – to find that among the contemporary heroes whose memory he chose to celebrate in his book were several Scottish soldiers. Some of these men can be identified from the coats of arms included in the drawings that decorate the manuscript. The ensigns depicted on folio 10 (plate 1), for example, belong (in the case of the figure on the right) to the company of Captain Thomas Newton, commissioned in November 1577, and (in the case of that on the left) to a company commanded by a member of the Wemyss family. Others are actually named in the text, as with the ‘Capiteyn Bleyre en Capiteyn Gordon’ who appear on folio 5 (plate 2) and who, according to the couplet at the head of the page, ‘served under Stuart’s colonelship at the time [before 1585] when Mechelen was a friend to the States’. They are probably to be identified with James Blair and Alexander Gordon, both officers in the regiment of Colonel William Stewart of Houston, who received a commission from the States of Holland in the mid-1570s.2

De Gortter further emphasized the Scots’ contribution to the Netherlands cause by drawing attention to particular military engagements in which their role had been prominent. One such was the battle of Rijmenant (a village to the south-east of Mechelen), fought on Lammas day (1 August) 1578, when the valour and fury of the Scots contingent had

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