Oh GUEST of 11:31 AM on 28 June, do you perhaps consider the word "mercenary" to be pejorative? I do not; it simply describes troops raised by a leader to whom they give their primary loyalty, and who takes them so embodied into a foreign army. Sometimes that arrangement is formally concluded between states, as with the Swiss. (I am, in fact, descended from a family of Swiss mercenaries that had brothers in the British and French armies at the same time while those nations were at war. The first of my ancestors to arrive in Canada was one of Haldimand's officers in Wolfe's army.) And sometimes that arrangement is concluded less formally, as between the MacDonells of Glengarry or the Frasers and Whitehall -- complicated, as I said, by the military occupation of Scotland and the divisions in Scottish society after the '45.

At that time, the clan levies of Scotland were only beginning to evolve into the Highland regiments of the Imperial period. It's frankly difficult to draw a firm distinction between:
* a Swiss regiment of landless men raised by the government of their canton and contracted out to the British Army for a campaign in Quebec to earn money to support their families in Switzerland, and
* a Scottish chief's regiment with tacksmen for officers and its ranks filled with cottars, handed over to the British Army for a campaign in Quebec so their valour and fighting skill would rehabilitate relations with the Crown, and their pay could support their families in Scotland.

The motivations were the same: to send fit men who would otherwise compete for scarce land and perhaps get into trouble to soldier for a distant power and thus earn credit and trust from that power as well as hard cash.