Introduction
In 1715, for the second time in thirty years, a Dutch army landed on the shores of Britain in defence of the ‘happy Constitution in Church and State’.Footnote 1 Summoned by King George I in accordance with the conditions of the alliance with the Dutch Republic, it was composed of ten infantry battalions, of which four were Swiss serving in the Dutch army by agreement of their cantons, and one dragoon regiment.Footnote 2 They disembarked first in Hull and the Thames ports, and then proceeded on to Edinburgh.Footnote 3 They arrived there in December, missing the stalemate at Sheriffmuir, but giving the government army the advantage it needed to advance on the Jacobites at the end of January 1716.Footnote 4 They then joined in the pursuit of the rapidly-disintegrating Jacobite army into the north-east, where they established garrisons from the beginning of February. By the end of March, the first regiments had begun to depart for the south, with the last leaving Scotland in May of that year.Footnote 5 Thus, for five months, Scotland was occupied by a foreign army protecting the Hanoverian succession and all that meant in Scotland: not least the Presbyterianism of the national Kirk.
This peculiar episode in British history has not received much attention from historians. Until recently, those tackling the 1715 Jacobite Rising mentioned the presence of foreign forces only briefly, often neglecting even a reference in their index.Footnote 6 The exception has been Daniel Szechi’s chapter on civil-military relations in the aftermath of the ‘Fifteen’, the 1715 armed attempt to install the Roman Catholic Stewart claimant on the British throne, which examined military looting and the civilian revenge taken on a Dutch baggage train by an Edinburgh mob in March 1716.Footnote 7 The broader lack of scholarly coverage is perhaps owing to the absence of these troops from the crucial battles in November 1715, or to the location of key sources in foreign archives.Footnote 8 A Scottish newspaper particularly interested in the foreign forces, and explicitly aimed at a readership of Kirk ministers, the Glasgow Courant, appears also to have gone unnoticed.Footnote 9 This lack of scholarship is all the more surprising when one considers that by January 1716 the Dutch forces composed more than half of the duke of Argyll’s army, forming 6,000 of his roughly 11,000 men.Footnote 10 They must surely have entered the consciousnesses of Scottish Hanoverians and churchmen, especially in the areas where they were stationed.
The neglect may also reflect the nascent state of scholarship in another area to which this article hopes to contribute: that of the Jacobites’ Whig rivals. The work of Chris Whatley has long emphasized the axiomatic opposition of the Scots Kirk to predominantly Episcopalian Jacobitism, as has Jeffrey Stephen’s study of the church during this period.Footnote 11 This article aims to support and complement their research by examining how Scottish churchmen responded to the deployment of these foreign forces to their lands, and thus better to understand the worldview and identity of Scottish Presbyterian Hanoverianism. Indeed, this episode offers a fascinating opportunity to consider not only the relationship between the church and the military, but also between the church and a foreign military force in early eighteenth-century Europe: that is, it makes it possible to investigate how the Kirk supported a foreign force in garrisoning its own nation. Likewise, the local influence of these forces in the aftermath of the Rising has not hitherto been considered, and this article aims also to offer a contribution in this area.
As a sizable force of troops stationed in Scotland, religion was from the outset likely to be a serious factor in their reception. This was explicitly acknowledged in the selection of forces: although the Reformed States-General of the Dutch Republic did permit Catholic soldiers to enlist in its army, care was taken that no regiment with an extensive Catholic presence be sent to Britain.Footnote 12 While in 1745, some Dutch troops sent to England reportedly surprised locals by seeking Catholic mass, there do not appear to be any Scottish accounts witnessing this in 1715–16: the force may have worn a Protestant face, or perhaps Scottish Whigs were prepared to turn a blind eye.Footnote 13 This Protestant appearance was reinforced by the choice of the permanent Swiss regiments, which had been established in the Dutch States’ army in the 1690s and were recruited, by treaty, from Swiss Protestant cantons.Footnote 14 Three – Stürler’s, Chambrier’s and May’s – were contracted with the Reformed canton of Bern, while Schmitt’s was formed by Reformed or Huguenot officers who had left French service after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685), and was supported by Graubünden.Footnote 15 There were no Swiss Catholic companies, and by the terms of the capitulation with Bern, Catholics were banned from every company but one, which allowed them only in small numbers.Footnote 16 As such, the Swiss regiments in Dutch service were a particularly Protestant force, which probably helped Scottish ministers to downplay the possibility of Catholic soldiers in Dutch ranks, and instead to emphasize these forces, whatever their nationality, as co-religionists sent by the Dutch Republic.
How, then, did Scottish Presbyterians interact with the Dutch forces who had been deployed to Scotland to support them? In exploring this question, this article owes a debt to recent scholarship on international Protestant solidarity. As has been examined for the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Scotland and the Dutch Republic were firmly established as Calvinist states, and they shared in the strong internationalist tradition amongst Calvinist Reformed churches.Footnote 17 However, recently, historians of early eighteenth-century England, Huguenots and the Netherlands have been increasingly drawn to contemporary conceptions of a broader Protestant identity, hardened against the shared threat of Louis XIV, to challenge views of the era as one of rational, secular state-conflict.Footnote 18 Tony Claydon has powerfully articulated the identification of the English church, public and political class with what has been termed ‘the Protestant International’, while Andrew C. Thompson has likewise studied the principle of ‘the Protestant Interest’, the contemporary term referring to the Protestant world and its imperatives.Footnote 19 No examination of Scottish engagement has yet been undertaken. As such, the deployment of 6,000 co-religionists to Scotland offers not only an opportunity to gain insight into the worldview of anti-Jacobite Presbyterian ministers, but also an avenue to investigate church-military relations between co-religionists of different nationalities, at a time when the primacy of the nation-state has been traditionally emphasized.Footnote 20
There is also a historiography of Scottish-Dutch interaction to which this article contributes. Ginny Gardner has examined the large Scottish Presbyterian so-called ‘exile community’ before the Revolution of 1688–9, which was centred on the Scottish churches in the Netherlands.Footnote 21 Esther Mijers has illuminated the profound academic connections between the Scots and the Dutch, while John Childs has revealed the continuing relevance of the Scots Brigade in Dutch service, which represented a Scottish-Dutch military relationship stretching back to 1572.Footnote 22 By 1716, Scots had also fought alongside the Dutch in two major wars against the French: the Nine Years’ War (1688–97) and the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–14), which the Scottish Kirk supported with fasts, thanksgivings and military chaplains.Footnote 23 In the latter conflict, almost half of the roughly 10,000 Scottish troops on the continent had been on the Dutch establishment, and the Dutch paid three Presbyterian Kirk ministers to act as their chaplains.Footnote 24 Whereas for troops on the English establishment, Scottish ministers had to compete with English clergy for Scottish military chaplaincies, under the Dutch, the Kirk had a monopoly.Footnote 25 The Church of Scotland and the Dutch army thus already had a well-established relationship through the wars against Louis XIV, which, as will be seen, was further cemented by their shared opposition to the British government which aimed to end that war through 1710–14.
To explore cooperation between the Scots Kirk and Dutch forces in 1715–16 then, it will first be necessary to examine the crisis leading up to the Rising, which conditioned how the foreign forces were received. We shall then consider confessional relations on the ground, charting Presbyterian-foreign engagement in the parishes, before tackling the Dutch forces’ engagement with the confessional conflict underpinning the Jacobite Rising: the Presbyterian-Episcopalian controversy.Footnote 26 Ultimately, not only did the presence of foreign forces manifest an international Reformed Protestant alliance that Kirk ministers had long imagined, but, after the intensified confessional controversies of 1710–14, their presence presented a non-Anglican face to the government which could be mobilized in both rhetorical and, after they arrived in 1716, physical defence of Scotland’s Presbyterian Kirk.
Background: The Crisis of 1710–14
As the Scots Kirk endured the attacks of the Tory-dominated Parliament of 1710–14, its ministers set their sights on allies across the sea: both the Electress Sophia of Hanover, designated Protestant successor to the British throne, and the Dutch Republic. In the 1710 general elections, a Tory majority was swept to power in the British Parliament, which pursued a pro-Episcopalian agenda in Scotland (despite the efforts of the new Tory chief minister, Robert Harley), and aimed to end the War of the Spanish Succession by coercing the Dutch Republic into accepting Anglo-French terms.Footnote 27 Scottish Presbyterians were only too prepared to narrate these events together as a Tory-Episcopalian plot against non-Anglican Protestantism.
Indeed, it appeared to Kirk ministers that in targeting the Scots Kirk the Tory party was laying the foundations for a restoration of episcopacy to Scotland, and, potentially, the Pretender.Footnote 28 Despite the re-establishment of Presbyterianism in 1690, Scottish Episcopalianism remained strong, especially in the north-east, where even as late as the 1710s many parishes had never been held by a Presbyterian minister, but had continued to have Episcopalian incumbents who had either taken the compromise of 1695, or who had intruded into vacant churches since.Footnote 29 By 1703, there were 649 Presbyterian parish ministers in Scotland, but at least 154 Episcopalians holding churches under protection of law, excluding illegal intruders, although this number had decreased by 1715 as Presbyterian commissions made substantial gains.Footnote 30 From the 1690s, however, some Scottish Episcopalians turned towards the liturgy of the Church of England, which encouraged English sympathy for their conditions under the Presbyterian Kirk.Footnote 31 After the Parliamentary Union of 1707, this was repaid with toleration in 1711, confirmed in 1712, which created legal Episcopalian meeting-houses, provided that their clergy abjured the Pretender.Footnote 32 Episcopalian influence resurged in the north-east, so that by 1712 the Episcopal diocese of Aberdeen had thirty-nine clergy, and Presbyterians were concerned that there was a close relationship between juring Episcopalians and their nonjuring brethren who refused to abjure the Pretender.Footnote 33 To make matters worse, in 1712 Parliament also passed the Patronage Act, which seriously impeded the Kirk’s plan to reclaim churches as Episcopalian incumbents died out, since pro-Episcopalian patrons could obstruct the process.Footnote 34 Though proposed by Scottish Episcopalian Tory members, both the Toleration and the Patronage Act were opposed by the majority of Scottish members in the Commons, and relied on English Tory votes.Footnote 35 The government had to appear publicly supportive of these measures.Footnote 36 Through these measures, the Kirk’s national mission was not only given a potentially permanent block, but fears also arose for the Presbyterian establishment of the church itself, and towns such as Glasgow began to stockpile arms.Footnote 37 The invasion of the English liturgy was not only a deeply emotional issue for Presbyterians, but also a constitutional one.Footnote 38 Put starkly, these impositions on the Kirk were seen as violations of the 1707 Acts of Union: the tendrils of the Church of England seemed to be tightening around Scotland.
These Scottish grievances were joined to those of the Dutch by the Tories’ secret negotiations with France, which saw Britain abandon its continental allies to a deadly French counter-attack culminating in the battle of Denain in 1712.Footnote 39 The government had thus threatened the Church of Scotland with overthrow, while also enabling French advances against the Dutch, the leading Reformed power in Europe. Presbyterian ministers therefore understood there to be a particular alliance between the Scots and the Dutch, even before the foreign troops arrived in Scotland. In 1713, the General Assembly refused to recommend observance of a national thanksgiving for the Peace of Utrecht, which was widely seen as having been gained through a betrayal of the Dutch: even the leading minister William Carstares, who usually strove for harmonious kirk-state relations, spoke against the treaty.Footnote 40 The Presbyterian minister and diarist Robert Wodrow recorded that very few ministers kept a thanksgiving fast.Footnote 41 Their Episcopalian rivals, in contrast, observed a thanksgiving fast and published a loyal address, which articulated implicit denunciations of the Dutch Republic.Footnote 42 In Presbyterian areas, denunciations of the peace were nailed to Kirk doors, and in 1713 the Commission of the General Assembly published a Seasonable Warning. Footnote 43 In the strongest possible terms, this document denounced the spread of the English service into Scotland as a ‘yoke which neither we, nor our fathers, were ever able to bear’, and rallied support for ‘the reformed Churches abroad’, so recently abandoned.Footnote 44 Wodrow recorded that it was translated into ‘High and Low Dutch, and French’ for distribution in the Dutch Republic and the wider Protestant world.Footnote 45
Like other Presbyterians, Wodrow was already appreciative of Dutch hostility to the Tory government. He reported that in Leiden, a Dutch professor lamented to his Scottish students the ‘bloody’ threat the high church Tories posed to the ‘Reform’d Interest’, a body of which Scotland and the Dutch Republic were part; one student had even taken a copy of these words to Scotland to show his countrymen.Footnote 46 George Ridpath, the London-based Scottish journalist, in his Letter from an Elder to a Minister of the Church of Scotland (1713) went further, emphasizing not only that ‘the Protestant Interest is in hazard of being destroy’d’ by the Peace of Utrecht, but that the government’s agenda was that ‘all the Foreign Protestant Churches, with the Church of Scotland … are Unchurch’d’.Footnote 47 The Scottish Whigs put the hated peace, together with the danger to the Kirk, front and centre in their election campaigns against the government.Footnote 48 Presbyterian Scots thus came to see themselves more and more as associated with the threatened Reformed corner of the ‘Protestant Interest’, of whom the Dutch were the foremost representatives.
This, then, was the politico-religious context for the Scottish Kirk’s reception of the foreign forces. The Scottish Episcopalians were resurgent, and able to mobilize English votes in the British Parliament.Footnote 49 Union with England now seemed to many ministers more a danger than a safeguard, and in the 1713 elections, the Scottish Whigs won a large majority campaigning on its abolition.Footnote 50 The Presbyterians looked for support to the ‘Protestant International’: to their aggrieved co-religionists in the Netherlands and to the Hanoverian successor (now, after Sophia’s death in June 1714, Elector George of Hanover), who had promised to protect the Presbyterian Kirk.Footnote 51 It is therefore perhaps little surprise that, after George succeeded to the throne and the 1715 Rising broke out, the earl of Ilay wrote to the new Whig government: ‘if there is any assistance to be had from the Elbe, it is certain, that foreign or German Troops which might give some umbrage in England would be more popular here by far than the English themselves’.Footnote 52
The Protestant International on the Ground
Did this perspective then survive the arrival of the foreign troops? Were Scottish Presbyterian churchmen disillusioned by the ardours of military occupation, or did they continue to conceive of these forces as their co-religionists? To investigate these questions, it is necessary to trace Scottish engagement with the foreign forces, which ranged from fasts in the parishes to rhetorical defences, and to investigate their emphasis on what they viewed as their shared confession. What is seen from such an analysis is that not only did churchmen continuously advocate for the foreign forces as Protestant allies, but that they conceived of them as a particularly pro-Presbyterian confessional alliance, which highlights the distinct international ties of the Scots Kirk inside the British union.
Even before the arrival of the foreign forces, the Kirk was already interpreting the 1715 Jacobite Rising in international terms. In November 1715, synods and presbyteries across Scotland held fasts, fearing that the Rising placed ‘the whole reformation in Europe in the greatest danger’.Footnote 53 Throughout the Rising, Scottish newspapers prophesized an imminent reignition of Protestant-Catholic confessional conflict on the continent, especially endangering the Dutch, Swiss Protestants and Huguenots.Footnote 54 At the same time, they reminded their readers that the Dutch forces in Scotland were ‘brave Fellows, and not afraid of the rebels’; and the Kirk agreed.Footnote 55 On 12 January 1716, the presbytery of Edinburgh held a fast, praying that ‘the Lord would bless all his majesties forces particularly those in this Land both natives and foreigners’, as well as their generals: a Dutchman, two Huguenots, one Swede and one Swiss.Footnote 56 They were, affirmed the notice, fighting in defence of ‘Our Holy Religion’.Footnote 57 As a presbytery fast, this notice was read in all churches in Edinburgh, and was recorded as kept in each.Footnote 58 This was particularly relevant as a large contingent of foreign troops had just passed through the city.Footnote 59 The Kirk was eager to include these troops in their prayers, as they fought a conflict the Kirk believed to be important for the fate not only of Scotland, but of the whole of Europe.
The international stakes of this conflict were brought home most visibly in the presence of foreign forces in Scottish churches. While it is unclear whether foreign troops kept the fasts of the Scots Kirk, Protestant members of these forces certainly attended parish churches. At St Cyrus, outside Montrose, a Swiss brigadier apologized to the minister, James Leslie, ‘that he could not stay above three-quarters of ane hour’ at one of his services.Footnote 60 His officers attended during the two weeks they were in winter quarters, and Leslie preached to ‘Some Swees [Swiss] officers, and some heads of families’ on 12 February 1716.Footnote 61 In the week of the recapture of the town, largely by Dutch and Swiss forces, the minister opted to preach to his international congregation on Exodus 14: 13, ‘For the Egyptians whom ye have seen to-day, ye shall see them no more for ever’ (AV), with the town’s deliverers present in the Kirk.Footnote 62 In recapturing Montrose and St Cyrus, the Swiss had also reclaimed the parish churches, which had been intruded into by a local Episcopalian, John Lamy, since October 1715.Footnote 63 As the foreign forces reversed the Jacobite deposition of Presbyterian ministers across Fife and Perthshire, they also appeared to be aiding Presbyterians directly in their own local confessional struggle.Footnote 64 This was celebrated in the History of the Late Rebellion (1718), written by the Presbyterian minister Peter Rae, who explained that it was only as a result of the advance of the foreign forces into Fife that Presbyterian ministers had been able to return safely to their parishes.Footnote 65 Rae’s history included forty parish ministers among its subscribers: it addressed a considerable section of Presbyterian opinion.Footnote 66 This account of the presence of the Dutch and Swiss forces in the parishes not only reinforced the conception of an international-confessional struggle, but also confirmed the sense of partnership between Scottish Presbyterianism and the military forces of the Dutch Republic.
Yet Kirk sources also indicate a level of apprehension and highlight the tensions that accompanied the occupation. The St Cyrus kirk session reported that at services which were attended by the Swiss, fewer of the laity turned out, for ‘they could not stay from their houses for fear they should be spoiled and plundered’.Footnote 67 William Trail, minister of Benholm in Kincardineshire, wrote that in his parish: ‘the Dutch and Swiss were very rude, and did considerable damage, by carrying away clothes and money … and shooting hens and sheep’.Footnote 68 As recognized by Daniel Szechi, the Dutch and Swiss troops quickly acquired a reputation for looting, and this occasioned the ransacking of their baggage train by an Edinburgh mob in March 1716.Footnote 69 Many Presbyterians, however, pointed to the supposed success of the officers in countering their troops’ thievery: ministers did not cease to advocate for their co-religionists.Footnote 70 William Trail counterbalanced his comments on the foreign forces by explaining that their behaviour was largely owing to necessity, as the Jacobite army had stripped the countryside.Footnote 71 Likewise, he reflected, although ‘our armies … looked upon all on this side [i.e. the north of the] Forth as an enemy’s country’, they nevertheless ‘looked upon Presbyterian ministers as almost the only friends they had’. Not only were the Dutch troops confessional allies to Scottish Presbyterians, he argued, they were far less destructive than the Jacobites had been.Footnote 72 The seizure of property by armed forces was endemic in the early eighteenth century and often affected friend and foe alike. This case may therefore have represented continuity with the foreign forces’ behaviour in the War of the Spanish Succession.Footnote 73
William Trail was not alone in seeking to counter reports of bad behaviour on the part of Dutch and Swiss troops. The anonymous Whig-Presbyterian author of the News-Letters lambasted reports of foreign looting as ‘inumerable lies’ by Jacobite agents, intended to provoke mobs against the foreign forces who, because of their lack of English, were easy targets.Footnote 74 He lamented the Edinburgh ransack of the Dutch baggage train, occasioned, in his view, by Jacobite subversion: ‘so we trate our freinds’, he complained.Footnote 75 Some Presbyterian writers, at least, were firmly committed to defending their allies’ reputations. Likewise, Presbyterians were sincerely glad to see foreign forces in areas threatened by the Jacobites, despite any problems those troops might (or might not) have brought. In Leslie, as the Jacobites withdrew, the town’s Whigs petitioned for a garrison, which was provided in the form of two hundred and fifty ‘Dutch and Switzers’. When these troops attempted to depart, discovering the absence of the enemy, the local people ‘almost forced them to leave fifty Switzers with us, which they did … so that we began to think ourselves safe’.Footnote 76 Similarly in 1719, Arbroath, which had been garrisoned by foreign forces during the ‘Fifteen’, requested the return of troops to protect the minister and the Presbyterian community, in case the situation got out of hand.Footnote 77 Thieves perhaps all armies were, but threatened Presbyterians preferred foreign forces to the Jacobites. Nonetheless, the variety of local and confessional attitudes make it extremely difficult to postulate a ‘national’ opinion about the Dutch and Swiss troops.
This raises the question of the influence of this endorsement in broader Scottish society. While it is difficult to know how well the Kirk’s sermons and fasts were received, it is important to consider the influence of the church in supporting the military garrisons. As Phil McCluskey has shown in the continental context, the local church was often vital for securing peaceful relations with an occupying force.Footnote 78 The situation was no different in Scotland, where, as G. D. Henderson put it, ‘the importance of the pulpit can scarcely be over-estimated’, being the ‘chief source of all information and instruction on all matters of local, national, moral, and spiritual concern’.Footnote 79 Jacobite officers also attested to the power of the Kirk’s clergy. Macintosh of Borlum lamented that, for lowland Presbyterians, ‘Parish Ministers are the only Sett of men they believe: They do all with them’.Footnote 80 It was therefore also important for the foreign forces to be known to be supportive of Presbyterianism, as the legally recognized church of the regime they defended, while Presbyterian ministers advocated for the foreign forces to their laities in a mutually beneficial arrangement. The importance of Kirk ministers in forming Scottish-Hanoverian opinion has been particularly noted by Chris Whatley, and their frequent references to the Rising’s European importance must have been reinforced by the presence of the Dutch and Swiss troops.Footnote 81 Both the Kirk and the consciousness of a shared Calvinism played an important role in welcoming the foreign forces as co-religionists, and in ensuring the public did the same. In so doing, this international religious perspective influenced the tone of Scottish Hanoverianism and supported a conception of their cause as the twin defence of Presbyterianism in Scotland, and Protestantism in Europe.
In contrast, there are relatively few references to the English in the Scottish Hanoverian propaganda of 1715–16 when compared to mentions of the foreign forces. This seems to reflect the secular and confessional controversies between England and Scotland, which had only intensified since the Union. Rae’s History of the Late Rebellion played up the strength of English Tory Jacobitism, as opposed to the steadfast Hanoverianism of Scottish Presbyterians and continental Protestants.Footnote 82 Ballads in the penny press referred to the duke of Argyll’s army as a ‘Conjunct Company, Both of Scots and Dutch Men’, omitting any mention of the various English regiments included in that army.Footnote 83 This was to be a victory for the Reformed – and for King George I and the English Whigs, seen as their allies in the ‘Protestant international’ – united in the Presbyterian imagination not least by their shared sufferings at the hands of the previous government.Footnote 84 Across Scotland, Presbyterian ministers and courts continued to comment on – and inveigh against – the use of the English liturgy among the Jacobites.Footnote 85 In resisting the Jacobite foe, which together with elements in the Church of England was seen as threatening to overturn the Presbyterian Kirk, the Reformed Dutch and Swiss were obvious allies. These foreigners prayed as Calvinists, whether in Scottish churches or with their own chaplains, while English army officers frequently attended tolerated Episcopalian meeting-houses rather than the Kirk’s parish churches, or welcomed Episcopalians to their regimental chapels.Footnote 86 When they did attend the Kirk, there was a risk they would not respect Calvinist mores: the Rev. William Veitch, minister of Dumfries, chastised English officers who attempted to bow, in the Anglican fashion, during one of his services.Footnote 87 This affinity between the Scots, the Dutch and the Swiss presents a counterpoint to Linda Colley’s interpretation that a common Protestant response to a foreign ‘other’ pushed the Scottish and English populations together: the Scots Presbyterians were also pushed by their differences from the English towards the Dutch and the Swiss.Footnote 88 In the confessional terms of a more international early eighteenth century, it was rather the English – and the Episcopalians – who were an ‘other’, while the foreign forces were co-religionists who belonged to a sister Reformed church within the broader Protestant community. Ministers were quite prepared to overlook heterodox Dutch religious culture in this moment of crisis.Footnote 89 This fellow-feeling also sheds light on the motives and worldview of Scottish Hanoverians in 1715–16: the Rising in Scotland occurred in a wider European context in which the state and military forces of the Dutch Republic accorded the Presbyterian Kirk the legitimacy of the broader Protestant world.
The Dutch in the North-East: The Downfall of Episcopacy
That the Dutch were received as co-religionist allies by the Presbyterian Kirk raises the question of how they interacted with Scotland’s other major religious community: the Scottish Episcopalians. It has long been acknowledged that in the aftermath of 1715–16, the Presbyterian Kirk, now legally able to target Episcopalians for their conduct in the Rising, began a systematic purge of Episcopalian incumbents, intruders and schoolmasters, and sought, largely successfully, to acquire churches which had been held by Episcopalians since before the Revolution.Footnote 90 What does not appear to have been considered is that, in the immediate aftermath, there was a strong presence of foreign forces throughout the region.Footnote 91 If the foreign troops could show themselves to be allies to the Scots Kirk through positive support in its parishes, so too could they do so by their treatment of the Kirk’s rivals, the Episcopalians. The Dutch and Swiss forces’ engagement with the Episcopalians will here be explored through an investigation of their garrison in the north-east. This highlights not only the Presbyterian-military cooperation in the aftermath of the 1715–16 uprising, but also the humiliation and intimidation of Episcopal clergy by the foreign forces. In this area, the Dutch and Swiss forces conformed to their depiction as particular friends of the Scottish Kirk, even playing a role in the reassertion of Presbyterian authority in the heartland of Episcopacy by proceeding against the Kirk’s rivals, often under Presbyterian direction.
In February 1716, an unnamed Aberdeen Presbyterian wrote to a friend in the south-west of Scotland, who published the letter:
We now possess both churches [St Machar and St Nicholas], we have also gotten another 2, Fittie and Neig. There is a Dutch Minister preaches to the Swiss and Dutch in the Trinity Kirk here. There was not one Episcopal Meeting in Town these 2 Sabbaths last, and now there is not one Episcopal Minister to be seen in these Bounds, which could not be said since the Reformation.Footnote 92
While he may have been slightly overstating Episcopalian absence, the change was certainly decisive, and it seems that the foreign forces played a hitherto unexplored role in bringing this about.Footnote 93 Though the army’s duties were more generally to disarm and seize rebels, a number of Episcopalians and their clergy had served in the Jacobite ranks, or had observed the thanksgiving prayers of the Jacobite claimant to the throne.Footnote 94 The Lord Justice clerk, Adam Cockburn of Ormiston, was especially alarmed by the Episcopal clergy, whose meeting-houses he considered the ‘nursery of Jacobitism’, and, where permitted by the Toleration Act, he endeavoured to close them.Footnote 95 Similarly, the restored Whig magistrates of Aberdeen and Dundee were certainly not friendly to episcopacy.Footnote 96 From early February 1716, both towns were largely garrisoned by foreign forces, as were Montrose, Perth, Arbroath and Coupar Angus, where interim magistrates could be – and were – appointed on the recommendation of local presbyteries.Footnote 97
It is perhaps little surprise that these foreign forces appear to have been used to disrupt Episcopalian worship. The ‘Trinity Kirk’ referred to in the letter of the West-Country Intelligence, was the ‘Tarnty Kirk’ chapel of the Incorporated Trades House of Aberdeen, the main guild.Footnote 98 As Kieran German has shown, the Incorporated Trades were a hotbed of Jacobitism in the city, and had for years heard the services of the nonjuring Episcopalian Andrew Burnet in that chapel, even threatening to intrude him into a vacant benefice by force during the confessional crisis of 1710–14.Footnote 99 By assigning that church to the foreign forces, the Aberdeen magistrates ensured that the Incorporated Trades would be closely watched, preventing the return of Burnet. Thomas Blackwell, a Presbyterian minister, soon began to hold Presbyterian services in Trinity Kirk, claiming it for Presbyterianism.Footnote 100 The Dutch and Swiss forces also appear to have been involved in dealing with Episcopalian clergy at the time when the city was taken: the Episcopalian tract, the Representation of the State of the Church in North-Britain (1718), claimed that the Dutch Major-General Montese had initially granted protection to an elderly Episcopalian clergyman, Alexander Livingston of Old Deer, only for a group of soldiers, probably under Montese’s command, to attempt to arrest him; finding him fled, they ransacked and looted his house.Footnote 101 General Cadogan used Dutch looting as a method of intimidation in the Highlands, but Montese may not have been responsible for the alleged betrayal of his word.Footnote 102 Serving under him was the infamous Patrick Strachan of Glenkindy, an Argathelian Whig in close contact with local presbyteries, who was said to have frequently used troops to threaten and depose Episcopalian clergy.Footnote 103 The foreign forces quartered in Aberdeen thus found themselves drawn into local confessional conflict: they were used not only to legitimize the Kirk, but also to suppress those deemed to be its enemies.
Between Aberdeen and Perth, Dutch and Swiss forces made up a significant portion of the troops available to the Presbyterian Lieutenant-Colonel Charles Cathcart, who was placed in charge of that region.Footnote 104 The Rev. William Trail of Benholm reported that Cathcart was a ‘very great mercy to the interest here’, taking ‘special heed from whom he receives his information’, probably Presbyterian ministers.Footnote 105 However, Trail’s correspondence also reveals the importance of foreign forces in his operations. He wrote to Wodrow that Cathcart had sent south twenty-eight prisoners, including the highly influential Episcopalian clergyman, Dr George Garden, and ‘two or three Episcopal ministers besides’ under guard of ‘a party of horse, and some Swiss foot’. A postscript indicates that Trail had heard of the capture of another Episcopal preacher before he could dispatch the letter.Footnote 106 Cathcart certainly assigned Swiss troops from Chambrier’s regiment to take other parties of Episcopalian prisoners south also.Footnote 107 The foreign forces were thus used to serve the interests of the Kirk in their local rivalry with the Episcopalians. Likewise, the language used in Presbyterian depositions of Episcopalians reflected the sense of broader confessional conflict in areas garrisoned by foreign troops: Episcopalian clergy were deposed on the grounds that they had ‘deserted the Protestant Cause’.Footnote 108 The foreign forces, perceived as representatives of continental Protestantism, appeared clearly opposed to the Episcopalians: indeed, most probably reflecting the views of Presbyterian informants, Major-General Montese believed that ‘generally all the Episcopalians are for the Pretender’.Footnote 109
The opposition of the foreign forces to the Episcopalians is further evidenced by their humiliation of the Episcopal clergy. One arrested Episcopalian clergyman, the Rev. John Alexander of Kildrummy, wrote to his wife how he and those with whom he had been held prisoner, suffered ‘all the mock pomp and outrage [that] could be offered to Clergiemen’.Footnote 110 Together with the Episcopalian clergyman Dr George Garden, each guarded ‘by a Dutch Souldier’, they were exhibited in the streets of Dundee for ‘a long hour, [to the] derision of the whiggish mob of that town’.Footnote 111 In this way, the Dutch and Swiss forces were presenting their alliance with the Kirk publicly, and facilitating, or even encouraging, Presbyterian reprisals. Alexander’s party was then taken to Cupar, where they were joined by three further arrested Episcopal clergymen, and suffered ‘a deal of indignities and insulting over us, by the ill natured mob’ at the Cross.Footnote 112 When they reached more moderate Edinburgh, the crowds were less hostile and more sympathetic.Footnote 113 Alexander testified that his treatment had not been due to indifferent private soldiers, but thanked God he was ‘got out of the hands of the Swiss and Dutch’, and freed from the harassment of their ‘boisterous officers’.Footnote 114 The officers of the foreign forces were the architects of humiliation: officers who, as discussed above, were expected to pray, and had prayed, with the Presbyterians.
To the Episcopalians, the English troops appeared less hostile: Alexander described his English captors as ‘very civil and courteous’.Footnote 115 Indeed, the Representation of the State of the Church claimed that, by December 1716, ‘the Army was not Presbyterian, but rather well affected to the Liturgy’, and that Presbyterians’ efforts to unseat Episcopalians concomitantly slowed in the second half of the year.Footnote 116 The greatest change in the army’s composition had been the departure of the foreign forces in May 1716: to the Episcopalians, these foreign forces had seemed part of a Presbyterian army, operating under their influence. Indeed, although they only occupied Jacobite areas for three or four months, the Dutch and Swiss played an important role in providing the Presbyterians in this crucial period with a force with whom they could compel or intimidate Episcopalian clergy into fleeing their churches, or into attending Presbyterian church courts to be deposed. The Episcopalian clergyman James Small castigated Presbyterian ministers in 1719: in those short months, he said, ‘you made pretty good use of your Time’, compelling attendance during the immediate aftermath by ‘threatning to dragoon all who would not attend’ despite the Toleration Act.Footnote 117 That almost half of the troops involved would have been foreign Calvinists, influenced by Presbyterian ministers, magistrates and officers in this chaotic period, made this threat very potent indeed.Footnote 118 With the aid of their foreign co-religionists, the Presbyterians had begun successfully to bring the north-east under the sway of the national church, circumventing the hurdles posed by the previous Tory regime and potential Episcopalian sympathies of their southern compatriots.
Conclusion
In the context of on-going confessional controversy with Episcopalians, the Scots Kirk found allies in the Dutch and Swiss troops stationed in Scotland. Scottish Presbyterian churchmen understood themselves as members of a European cause, and their Presbyterian identity could encompass these foreign Protestant forces. The Scots Kirk received the troops, not as foreign invaders or occupiers, but as fellow members of a supranational religious community. Indeed, as they fought against a Jacobite force in large part confessionally closer to the Church of England, forces from de jure Reformed states provided the Scots Kirk with co-religionist allies without an English face. Scottish Presbyterians were able to use this relationship not only to legitimize their own establishment by the endorsement of foreign Protestant forces, but also to defeat the once-resurgent Episcopalians. Although, since the 1707 Union, Scotland had been part of a British state, the Scottish Kirk maintained its distinct confessional connection with the Dutch Republic and the Reformed Swiss. This was not a one-off situation. In 1719, during a less extensive deployment, local presbyteries prayed extensively for the Reformed world while hosting Dutch troops, and in 1746 the hereditary prince of the Reformed territory Hesse-Cassel, commanding Hessian troops, attended the Kirk’s General Assembly.Footnote 119 These remain areas for further research, as does the interaction of foreign military forces and local churches in Europe more generally. W. R. Ward illuminated the influence of the march of Swedish forces on the local confessional situation in Silesia, and Phil McCluskey has studied the impact of Gallican French troops in Ultramontanist Savoy, but much more remains to be done to explore this period of strong national churches, largely confessionalized militaries and enduring international allegiances.Footnote 120 As scholarship escapes the constraints of an (imaginary) rational, united state policy, study of the engagement of churches and foreign militaries could contribute to the study of the military as a form of diplomatic agent, a topic which Dorothée Goetze and Lena Oetzel have identified as deserving further research.Footnote 121 As this article has shown, armies could be religious actors as well as military ones: as representatives of their national churches, they helped to represent the international connections experienced by members of early eighteenth-century confessions.
In Scotland, the role of international religious solidarity presents a serious challenge to arguments which emphasize British unity against a ‘pre-dominantly Catholic Europe’.Footnote 122 It instead hints at a Scottish Hanoverianism which oriented itself around not only the Presbyterian Kirk, but also within the supranational politico-confessional world to which it belonged. Indeed, if the Jacobites had a European history, as a recent republication reminds us, so too did the Hanoverians.Footnote 123 The Scots Kirk was very aware of the European dimensions of the Rising, and its ministers welcomed the foreign forces that supported it accordingly. Examining relationships between the church and the military thus provides an important insight into the worldview of ministers in one of the precarious periods in the history of the Scots Kirk.
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