The Press and Military Conflict in Early Modern Scotland

Abstract

A soldier fights for three separate but sometimes associated reasons: for duty, for payment and for cause. Nathianiel Hawthorne once said of valour, however, that 'he is only brave who has affections to fight for'. Those soldiers who are prepared most readily to risk their lives are those driven by political and religious passions. From the advent of printing to the present day the printed word has provided governments and generals with a means to galvanise support and to delineate both the emotional and rational reasons for participation in conflict. Like steel and gunpowder, the press was generally available to all military propagandists in early modern Europe, and so a press war was characteristic of outbreaks of civil war and inter-national war, and thus it was for those conflicts involving the Scottish soldier. Did Scotland's early modern soldiers carry print into battle? Paul Huhnerfeld, the biographer of the German philosopher and Nazi Martin Heidegger, provides the curious revelation that German soldiers who died at the Russian front in the Second World War were to be found with copies of Heidegger's popular philosophical works, with all their nihilism and anti-Semitism, in their knapsacks. 1 The evidence for such proximity between print and combat is inconclusive for early modern Scotland, at least in any large scale. Officers and military chaplains certainly obtained religious pamphlets during the covenanting period from 1638 to 1651. The major Scottish regiments of the Low Countries, raised in 1586, 1603 and 1628 in order to fight the Spanish, had a number of chaplains, the longest serving being Andrew Hunter who ministered to the soldiers from 1590 to 1630. Hunter was in 1604 in debt to the great Edinburgh bookseller and printer Andro Hart (c.1565-1621), a committed presbyterian who had even been a 'puritan' spy for Queen Elizabeth. It is most likely that Hunter was providing his regiment with liturgical printed matter and in particular printings of the Confession of Faith. Like William Wallace, the elder and factor of Veere in Zeeland (Scotland's staple port), who took it upon himself in 1618 and 1619 to buy Scottish Psalters for his church and Scottish merchant community, Hunter had clear print obligations. As for English language bibles, though expensive to the ordinary soldier, the Low Countries was awash with English language editions from the late 1620s. 2 Military chaplains were, like blacksmiths, specialists whose weapons were not swords or muskets. Their importance to military campaigns was quite specific, even though most specialists surely carried weapons for use in emergencies. Thus it was for booksellers and more especially printers who, of course, were skilled in the art and science of printing. Some book traders did enlist as ordinary soldiers, as did the Edinburgh bookseller Andrew Symers who joined the Jacobite army in 1745. Part-time soldiering was also taken up: the printer George Mosman (f.1685-1707) was a captain in the Edinburgh militia in the 1690s. 3 Others had a background of...