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A freelance fighter
Henceforth Rodrigo Diaz began to live that life of a soldier of fortune which has made him famous, sometimes fighting under the Christian banner, sometimes under Moorish, but always for his own hand.
Sir James Lumsden, a soldier of fortune under Gustavus Adolphus, who distinguished himself in the Thirty Years' War, was born in the parish of Kilrenny about 1598.
His sermons attracted wide attention in that community, and he gained a considerable reputation as a theologian and a controversialist by his publication in 1814 of a volume entitled Defence of Christianity, written in answer to a work, The Grounds of Christianity Examined (1813), by George Bethune English (1787-1828), an adventurer, who, born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was in turn a student of law and of theology, an editor of a newspaper, and a soldier of fortune in Egypt.
But he was suspected as a Mazzinian and a soldier of fortune by the higher Piedmontese officers, and they insisted on his being courtmartialled for his operations under Ramorino (who had been tried and shot).
In the first (1660-1663) the royal commissioner to parliament was the earl of Middleton, a soldier of fortune who had been in arms for the Crown as late as 1655, who had been excommunicated by the kirk, and was determined to keep down the preachers.