CHAPTER V.

'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.