XX PREFACE. family debts, that Patrick Gordon makes his first appearance.

Passages from the diary of General Patrick Gordon of Auchleuchries : A.D. 1635-A.D. 1699"

XX



PREFACE.



family debts, that Patrick Gordon makes his first appearance.^^ He
was then a boy of fifteen, on the eve of setting out to seek his
fortune as a foreign mercenary, according to the fashion of a time
which taught the country gentleman, however needy, to look
on trade with contempt^ Twenty years of successful service
enabled the thrifty soldier to pay off one heavy encumbrance.^* He
discliarged another in no long time afterwards f and when, he died,
Auchleuchrie£ was freed of all but one inconsiderable bond. But
its release was to be short lived. The cloud of ' wadsets' soon began
to thicken again, and before Gordon had been thirty years in his



3'' Appendix, no. 41, p. 209.

3" Gordon's kinsman, Robert Gordon of
Straloch, in his Description of Aberdeenshire,
•written about 1650, says: ' Negotiatio
urbanis relinquitur : meliores (magno suo
malo) id vitae genus, ut natalibus suis impar,
dedignantur ; unde inopia multis ; cui
levandae, ad tractanda arma se accingunt,
quae, multis locis apud exteros, Belgas prae-
sertim, Gcrmanos et Gallos, semper amieam
et illis adamatam gentem, a multis annis,
cum laude, exorcuerunt; ingeniis, enim,
acribus et fervidis, sive Musis sive Marti se
mancipent, non leviter proficiunt.' — (Prae-
fecturarum Aberdonensis et Banfiensis De-
scriptio, in Collections for a History of the
Shires of Aberdeen and Banff, p. 6.)

France and Flanders were the first fields
in which the Scottish mercenaries dis-
tinguished themselves. The earlier years
of the se\enteenth century drew them to
Germany, then the great tlieatre of European
war. But they hart long before carried their
arms to the banks of the Nile on one side,
and to the shores of the Baltic on the other.
So early as 1310, a younger son of Hume of
Fast Castle was high in the service of the
Mameluke Sultan at Cairo. In 1319, the
Scottish Privy Council authorised the King
of Denmark to levy soldiers in Scotland for
his war against Sweden. The Danish King
had Scottish troops again in his pay in 1372.



In 157.3, there was a Scottish regiment, com-
manded by Sir Archibald Ruthven of For-
teviot, in the service of the King of Sweden,
then at war with the Czar of Muscovy.
Before 1391, Russia had Scottish mercenaries
in her own ranks. — (Proceedings of the
Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, vol. ii.
part ii., pp. 160, 161 ; Acta Dominorum
Concilii, vol. xxxii. fol. 179, MS. General
Register House ; Epistolae Regum Scoto-
rum, vol. i. p. 313 ; Registrum Secreti Con-
cilii, 1371-1572, p. 169, MS. General Re-
gister House : Giles Fletcher's Russe Com-
monwealth, ft'. 39, 40. 55.)

Before the middle of the sixteenth
century, Scotland had begun to pour out
another class of adventurers — those wander-
ing traders who, in Gordon's day, as we see
from the earlier pages of his Diary, swarmed
throughout all the Polish provinces. Sir
John Skene speaks of ' the Scottesmen of the
realme of Polonia' so early a? 1369.' — (De
Verborum Significatione, voce ' Pede-pul-
verosus.') Not long afterwards they were of
such numbers and importance that a Scottish
Consul — Patrick Gordon of Braco —was sent
to Dantzic for their protection. He was the
only officer of his class of whom Scotland could
boast, with the old exception of the Conserva-
tor of Scottish Privileges in the Netherlands.

*a Appendix, no. 48, p. 211.

a» Appendix, no. 54. p. 214.