Between 1550 and 1650 the government in Scotland, whether as the monarch or as the Privy Council acting in the royal name, permitted more than sixty levies of troops to fight in continental Europe. This occurred throughout the period of study but with peaks in the 1570s and the 1620s-1640s, corresponding with periods of fighting in the Low Countries and later in the Germanic lands in the Thirty Years War (1618-1648). This is summarized in Table 6.1. As the raising of soldiers to fight overseas also took place before and after these dates and as there were unofficial levies, despite attempts to stop them for fear of unrest or political embarrassment, the true extent of recruitment of men to fight overseas may never be fully known. The size of a licensed levy varied considerably, from as few as sixty men in the licences granted to Patrik Murray on 25 March 1602 for service in the Low Countries and to Thomas Moffat on 23 July 1635 for Swedish service in Prussia, to as many as several thousands. In at least some instances, for example for the 3,000 men each to Robert Earl of Nithsdale, Alexander Lord Spynie, and James Sinclair of Murkle on 3 April 1627 for Danish service, these ambitious targets were not reached; and in the case of others, for example to Robert Stewart for Poland in 1623, very little, if any, recruiting took place. The more usual figures mentioned in the licences are 200 or 300 men. With a proviso in mind about the accuracy and reliability of these figures, it has been estimated that during the Thirty Years War (1618-1648), when the recruitment of soldiers for overseas service was at its height, as many as 50,000 Scotsmen bore arms in European conflicts.

It can be argued that the term “mercenary” is not appropriate in describing these men. The term current in Scotland in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was the phrase “waged men of war” – in Scots, “wageit men of weare” or variants of it. “Mercenary” remains, however, a convenient word to describe the soldiers who were fighting for a commander or a political state other than that which from their place of birth or normal residence could be deemed their own, and it is used here in this sense.