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.