In 1570 the Guard consisted of a hundred curassiers, or hommes-des-armes, a hundred archers of the corps, and twenty-five "keepers of the King's body,"--all Scottish gentlemen of noble descent and coat-armour. They saved the life of the tyrant Louis XI. at Liege, and at Pavia fought around the gallant Francis in a circle until _four_ only were left alive; and then, but not till _then_, the King fell into the hands of the foe. In gratitude for their long-tried faith and unmatched valour, they were vested with "all the honour and confidence the King of France could bestow on his nearest and dearest friends;" and thus, in a little band of Scottish Archers originated the fashion of standing armies, and the nucleus of the great permanent forces of France. "By this means," says an old Jacobite author, "our gentry were at once taught the rules of civility and art of war; and we were possessed of an inexhaustible stock of brave officers fit to discipline and to command our armies at home, and ever sure to keep up that respect, which was deservedly paid to the Scots' name and nation abroad." As Sir James Hepburn's regiment of Pikemen they returned to Scotland in 1633, being sent over by Louis XIII. to attend the coronation of Charles I. at Edinburgh. On the commencement of the great and disastrous civil war eight years after, they loyally adhered to the King, and were then by the Cavalier army first styled the _Royal Scots_. On the reverse of Charles's fortune and subversion of all order, they went back to France; and under Louis of Bourbon, Duc d'Enghien, shared in all the dangers and glories of that campaign on the frontiers of Flanders, so famous for ending in the utter destruction of the Spanish host, the death of the brave Condé de Fuentes, the fall of Thionville, Philipsburg, Mentz, Worms, and Oppenheim, till the waters of the Rhine reflected the flash of their armour; and there fell the veteran Hepburn with his helmet on his brow, and the flag of St. Andrew over him. Returning in 1678, they re-entered the Scottish army as the Earl of Dunbarton's foot; and eight years after served against the ill-fated Monmouth, and suffered severely, being attacked at Sedgemoor by his cavalry in the night, their position being discerned through the darkness by the glow of their lighted matches. At the Union in 1707, on the incorporation of the forces as the British establishment--and when Scottish blood and Scottish treasure were more than ever required to further the grasping aims and useless wars of that age--the Royals, in consequence of their high-standing in arms and venerable antiquity, were numbered as the _First_, or Royal Scots Regiment of Foot,--a title they have since maintained with honour, and on a hundred fields have upborne victoriously, the same silver cross which the brave Archers of Athole and the spearmen of Buchan unfurled so gloriously on the plains of Anjou, and at Verneuil, on the banks of the Aure.