Thus, honoured beyond
their English comrades, the Scots of Sir Andrew Gray guarded the
Bohemian king until after the battle of Prague, where, on the 8th
November 1620, his relation Maximilian, duke of Bavaria, at the head
of the imperial troops, defeated him, and stripped him in one day of
the kingdom of Bohemia and the Palatine Electorate. Four thousand
Bohemians were slain; and on that day began, in grim earnest, the
long and terrible war of Thirty Years. There, on the White Mountain,
the electoral hat and the proffered crown were both torn from his
brow; and being, like too many of his race, better suited for the
banquet than the battle field, the Elector fled like a coward to the
plains of Silesia, and thence successively to Denmark, to Holland,
to England, and to France. His queen, Elizabeth Stuart, endured
great hardship in his rapid flight. When compelled to quit the great
lumbering coach in which she had followed the army, she sprang on
horseback behind Ensign Hopton, a young cavalier of good family, who
"trailed a pike,” as the phrase was, in the English band of Sir
Horace Vere.
He conveyed her to Breslau; and it was ever afterwards the ensign’s
proudest boast, that, in her saddest extremity, "he had served and
protected the Scottish Queen of Bohemia.”
Thus, abandoned by the prince whose fortunes they had followed, Sir
Andrew Gray’s bands formed part of the force rallied by Ernest,
count of Mansfeldt, under whom they performed many brilliant
actions; and, after retreating from the Palatinate, they were
employed in Germany and Alsace.
In 1622, the Scottish companies under Colonels Sir Andrew Gray and
Henderson, and the Captains John Hepburn and Hume, defended
Bergen-op-Zoom, the strong fortress which secures the intercourse
between Holland and Zealand, and bars the way to Spanish Brabant. It
had high walls and deep trenches, flanked by demi-lunes and other
fortifications; a strong half-moon faced the road to Antwerp; the
Zoom filled its ditches, which were strong and deep, and bristling
with many a grim tier of iron ordnance. Eleven other forts lay
between it and the sea, strengthened with stockades and so many
batteries, that the Dutch deemed Bergen impregnable.
In the summer of that year, the Marquis de Spinola, having left
thirty thousand men to keep the conquered Palatinate in awe,
invested this city, and assaulted it with all his energies. The
cannonading began on the 23d July; Baglioni attacked it on the
south, and Borgia on the north; the garrison met them in the
breaches, and the Scottish bands fought bravely.
Colonel Sir John Henderson, (son of the Laird of Fordel in Fifeshire,)
one of their officers, was slain here, and left a numerous family in
Scotland; but, by a will made before the death-shot struck him, all
his money and property were divided among them.
There, too, is old Morgan, with his English brigade, gave them their
hands full, and many of the enemy fell on every side; for it is a
great disadvantage for living bodies to fight against dead walls.”
The garrison fired “two hundred thousand cannon shot” on the
Spaniards, who on the approach of Prince Maurice (in whose army the
great Turenne of future fields was serving as a subaltern) were
compelled to raise the siege and retire, leaving twelve thousand men
slain in the trenches behind them.
The Elector, now a fugitive, by the hollow advice of his
father-in-law, James VI., dismissed his only real defender, the
Count Mansfeldt, and in Holland awaited his own fate from the mercy
of the victorious Emperor, with whom all the princes of the Union
had made peace; thus leaving those soldiers of fortune, whom
Mansfeldt had led from the Palatinate, destitute alike of purpose,
pay, and employment. That wandering noble had now under his banner a
strong force of many thousands, all well-armed and well-trained
men—resolute, determined, and inured to every hardship incident to
war.
The cause of the discomfited Elector had not alone made these
condottieri draw the sword; so neither could his order to disband
make them sheath it. War was their object, and it was quite the same
to most of them, with whom, or against whom, they waged it.
Thus was the Protestant religion almost entirely rooted out of
Bohemia; the electoral dignity torn from the Palatine family; and
thus—until Gustavus drew his sword—were the liberties of Germany
overthrown. The artful policy of the Spaniards had lulled King James
so fast asleep, says Welwood, that it was remarked "that neither the
cries of his daughter nor her children, nor the solicitations of his
people, could awaken him.”
Under Gray and Hepburn the Scots remained with Mansfeldt, who, after
some vain attempts to be received with his errant bands under the
banners of that emperor against whom they had warred, marched
without any object into Lorraine, where their excesses caused a
terror that reached even the heart of Paris. In Lorraine they waited
long for a leader to purchase their swords and services, until the
Dutch, being sorely pressed by the Spaniards under Spinola, offered
to take them into pay, upon which these cavaliers of fortune, with
drums beating and colours flying, marched in high spirits towards
the rich Netherlands.
"The Mansfeldters were twelve thousand strong, horse and foot.” The
cavalry had only pistols, the foot had muskets, but there was
scarcely a pike or corslet among them, for necessity had compelled
many to dispose of their arms and armour. To prevent these dangerous
visitors from entering Flanders, Spinola pushed forward a powerful
force, which intercepted them at Fleura in Hainault, eight miles
from Namur, where, on the 30th August 1622, there ensued a most
sanguinary battle, wherein the Scottish bands, led by Captains John
Hepburn, Hume, and Sir James Bamsay, are recorded to have evinced
the greatest bravery.
Under two distinguished cavaliers, Verdugo and Gonzalez de Cordova,
the Spaniards were well posted near the Sambre, with every
resolution to repel the advance of Mansfeldt’s condottieri.
The latter, perceiving a conflict unavoidable, drew up his soldiers
in order of battle, and exhorted them to conquer or die. Half armed,
and almost wholly starving, it seemed a rash and bold attempt for
those military wanderers to attack the splendidly-accoutred and
well-disciplined troops of Spain, fresh from their good quarters at
Brussels; but Mansfeldt and the gallant Bishop of Halbertstadt,
sheathed in complete armour, led them to the charge, and prodigies
of valour were performed. Mansfeldt surpassed even himself, and the
fighting bishop lost his bridle arm by a musket ball.
“Many gentlemen, both English and Scots, out of love to the Queen of
Bohemia, behaved themselves gallantly, and let the Spaniard know it
was more than an ordinary shocke they encountered; among whom Sir
Charles Bich, brother to the Earl of Warwick, was a principal
person; Sir James Hayes, Knevet, Hume, Heibum, and other commanders,
all striving for corrival-ship in bravery.”
The Spaniards remained masters of the field; but the retreat of
Mansfeldt was equal to a victory, for he broke through the
glittering columns of Cordova, and reached the frontiers in spite of
every effort to detain him. Entering Holland, where his appearance
compelled Spinola to raise the new siege of Bergen-op-Zoom, he
allowed his troops to recruit themselves for new enterprises in the
comfortable towns and peaceful villages of East Freizeland, where
their free quartering wearied even the patient Dutch, for they lived
on the best of everything, and paid all their scores with a roll on
the drum.
He hovered for a time on the banks of the Lower Rhine, where by lack
of pay and employment his army soon fell to pieces, and in 1623 was
totally disbanded.
Leaving the remnant of his Scottish followers, who had survived the
battles in Bohemia and that at Fleura, to seek, under the guidance
of the young Captain Hepburn, a new prince, and what was of more
importance, a new paymaster, in other lands, old Sir Andrew Gray
returned to Scotland. In 1624 he was in London seeking military
employment, and was presented to King James at the Theobalds. He
usually wore buff and armour, even in time of peace; and the timid
monarch if ever saw the grim veteran without emotions of uneasiness,
for, in addition to his long sword and formidable dagger, he always
wore a pair of iron pistols in his girdle. On one occasion, the
king, seeing him thus accoutred, "told him merrily, he was now so
fortified, that if he were but well victualled, he would be
impregnable."
He was appointed colonel in the force of twelve thousand English,
sent from Dover under Count Mansfeldt, in 1624, to Holland, where,
says Balfour, "the most pairt of them deyed miserablie with cold and
hunger." The scarcity of food and other necessaries brought on a
deadly pestilence, for in small transports they were “heaped one
upon another.” The poor soldiers died in thousands, and their bodies
lay in piles unburied on the shores of Zealand, where their limbs
and bowels were torn and eaten "by dogs and swine, to the horror of
the beholders.”
After this we hear no more of old Sir Andrew Gray, unless he be the
same who is mentioned by the Knight of Cromarty, in his list of
Scottish Colonels serving Louis XIII. of France. |