Monro, His expedition with the worthy Scots regiment (called Mac-Keyes-regiment) levied in August 1626

"This is a classic text from the Thirty Years War. The book also encapsulates so much about why the war is so complex. Monro was depicted by Walter Scott as the archetypal mercenary, as Dugald Dalgetty in A Legend of Montrose . He’s a Scotsman, but he serves the Danes and then the Swedes and he then returns to fight in the British civil wars. In this book, he’s very explicit about his motives. He believes he’s serving the Stuart dynasty because the point of his intervention was to restore James I’s daughter and son-in-law to their position as the Electress and Elector Palatine. He sees himself as a professional soldier and he sees himself as a Protestant. The book is a succession of alternating chapters. One chapter recounts his own experiences and gives a very good insight into the life of an officer and the events of the war, and then the next chapter will be a reflection on ideas of duty which bring in these themes about military professionalism and dynastic and religious loyalties. England is one of the major powers that is not directly involved in the Thirty Years War, but they actually send as many troops to the continent as the Swedes do. They do so in a piecemeal fashion, usually by permitting another power to recruit or occasionally organizing an expedition that was sent in support of one of the belligerents, but without making Britain itself directly a belligerent. Monro goes out in one of these expeditionary forces in the mid-1620s. Monro’s book is, I think rightly, viewed as a very early regimental history. He’s also a well-known figure because he plays a role subsequently as a senior commander in the British civil wars. It is surprisingly readable. Anyone who can access Early English Books Online (EEBO), for example, can access it online either in its original format or as a Word document. There’s a very good—quite expensive, unfortunately—modern critical edition. It’s 17th-century English, but it’s full of arresting anecdotes and turns of phrase. It’s really a very, very good read."