HEPBURN, SIR JOHN (c. 1598-1636), Scottish soldier in the Thirty Years' War, was a son of George Hepburn of Athel staneford near Haddington. In 162o and in the following years he served in Bohemia, on the lower Rhine and in the Netherlands, and in 1623 he entered the service of Gustavus Adolphus, who, two years later, appointed him colonel of a Scottish regiment of his army. He took part with his regiment in Gustavus's Polish wars, and in 1631, a few months before the battle of Breitenfeld he was placed in command of the "Scots" or "Green" brigade of the Swedish army. At Breitenfeld it was Hepburn's brigade which delivered the decisive stroke. He remained with Gustavus until the battle of the Alte Veste near Nuremberg. He then entered the French service, and raised two thousand men in Scotland for the French army, to which force was added in France the historic Scottish archer bodyguard of the French kings. The Royal Scots (Lothian) regiment (late 1st Foot) represents in the British army of to-day Hepburn's French regiment, and indirectly, through the amalgamation referred to, the Scottish contingent of the Hundred Years' War. Hepburn's claim to the right of the line of battle was bitterly resented by the senior French regiments. In Hepburn took part in the campaigns in Alsace and Lorraine In 1635 Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar, on entering the French service, brought with him Hepburn's former Swedish regi ment, which was at once amalgamated with the French "regiment d'Hebron," the latter thus attaining the unusual strength of 8,300 men. Sir John Hepburn was killed at the siege of Saverne on July 8, 1636. He was buried in Toul cathedral. Hepburn was a sincere Roman Catholic, and is said to have left Gustavus owing to a jest about his religion.
See James Grant, Memoirs of Sir John Hepburn (1851).