Four More 18mm ECW Royalist Horse Regiments

These four recently completed regiments represent the last of the Royalist harquebusiers, making six units in total. The figures are again all Eureka with standards by Wargames Designs:

The first is the Queen's Regiment of Horse:

I did these in predominantly blue coats to contrast with the red of the King's Lifeguard. As most would know there is a lot of uncertainty over Civil War coat colours and saddlecloths etc., but I found a source which suggested blue so that was good enough for me:

The 10/12mm standards fit these figures nicely, even though they are a scale down:

The second regiment is the red-coated Lord Moylneux's horse:

The next two regiments are comprised of slightly more dynamic charging figures and mounts, with the first being Prince Rupert's Horse:

The man and his dog aren't included here. I have three Prince Rupert and Boye figures which I will be completing separately along with the other command figures I have n the queue, with one based for DBR and the other two for the For King and Parliament rulesets:

The last regiment is Sir Richard Astley's Horse:

I chose Sir Richard Astley's regiment partly because it has a distinctive standard, but mainly because it amused to paint one commanded by an 80's pop synth star:

I have three Royalist regiments left in the queue comprised of two dragoon units and a small contingent of cuirassiers. While the latter is quite conjectural I'll paint them up as the King's Gentlemen Pensioners who may have been so armoured. The dragoons will be a big task as I'll have to do both mounted and dismounted figures along with horseholders, so my plan is to defer them for the time being while I complete my planned six units of Parliamentary harquebusiers. 

First Two 18mm ECW Royalist Horse Regiments

With the recent completion of my Dark Ages Welsh I was keen to get stuck back into my 18mm English Civil War project. Having completed all the foot and artillery for the Royalists, Parliamentarians and Scottish Covenanters I put it on hold for a couple of years while I delved into the American War of Independence. With the three armies so close to completion though it makes sense to get stuck back into them and see whether I can complete the horse and command elements in a final burst.

First off the queue then are two regiments of Royalist horse, the King's Lifeguard and behind them Sir Thomas Tyldesley's Regiment:

While there is much uncertainty over coat colours, portraying the King's Lifeguard in red coats seemed a fairly safe bet:

Although I deviated from this for the command figures:

And threw in a few buff coats for the troopers:

Sir Thomas Tyldesley's Regiment was apparently a mix of coat colours, so I varied these between buff, rawhide and dark brown:

As with the foot and artillery, the figures are all Eureka which are terrific to paint and I think come up nicely:

I struck a small problem with the Wargames Design cavalry standards in that the 15mm version is far too large for the cornet's pole. The foot flags fit those figures perfectly so this is an issue with the pole rather than the flags. 

Instead of replacing the poles with wire I decided therefore to order the 10/12mm version of these standards which fit the pole vertically perfectly. They do perhaps look a little on the small side from the horizontal perspective, but I am generally happy with the result:

A quick count reveals I have another twenty regiments across the three armies to complete, along with fifteen command elements and around the same number of dismounted dragoon elements. Much more than I thought I had, but I'm going to give it a real push between now and Christmas to see how far I can get.

18mm English Civil War Artillery

With sixteen pieces in all, I decided to tackle the English Civil War artillery for the Royalist, Parliamentarian and Scottish Covenanter armies in one large batch. I generally do not enjoy painting the artillery pieces themselves; the crew are fine, but I find gun carriages and wheels a bit fiddly and uninteresting. However, the Eureka models are quite nice which took away much of the boredom:

I gave the Royalists and Parliamentarians six pieces each, comprised of two cannons, two culverins and two sakers:

And allocated two culverins and two sakers to the Scots

I did half the pieces in plain wood, but gave the Parliamentarians and Royalists two red carriages and the Royalists two in blue, just to brighten things up a little. I put in a bit of extra effort to paint streaks on the carriages and wheels to give the effect of wood grain. The models themselves had a wood effect, but not enough that it rendered itself easily to dry-brushing.

Speaking of bright, the blue looks very bright here but thankfully is a little duller to the naked eye:

I also completed a few petard stands, one for each army. I'm not quite sure when these will be used, and received one from Eureka as a free gift anyway, but they might come in handy as an objective or for a siege game at some point:

That is it for the artillery and I now just have sixteen regiments of cavalry and three of dragoons across the three armies to go. I have decided to paint the bulk of the horses first but, once that is done, hope to be able to roll them off the production line reasonably quickly.

Last three regiments of 15mm ECW Royalist Foot

With only three regiments of foot out of the total of eight Royalist foot left to go, I decided to tackle them in one hit so I can clear the decks and make a start on the Parliamentarian foot. The last three regiments are Stradling's, the Duke of York's and Hopton's regiments of foot, dressed in red, white and blue coats respectively:

Painting three different coat colours kept things interesting and provided the motivation to keep going:

Here is an individual picture of Stradling's regiment of foot:

The blue-coated Hopton regiment:

And finally, the Duke of York's regiment:

I also completed two more elements of red-coated pike which will live with the King's Lifeguard of Foot, in case I want to increase the ratio of pike in any of the red-coated regiments:

That's the Royalist foot completed, with 392 figures in total:

I have some dismounted dragoons still ahead and if I have a few spare pikemen left over after doing the Parliamentary foot I'll probably add a couple of elements for the Royalist regiments.

Next up however will be a few more WWII ships, which represents another slight diversion from the ECW project. This is mainly because another gaming friend of mine is interested in playing a few games of 'Nimitz', the new WWII ruleset from Sam Mustafa. The perfect excuse to delve into the lead pile and dust off a few more boxes from GHQ.

18mm ECW Oxford and Apsley's Regiment of Foot

Two more Royalist red-coated regiments completed in the Oxford and Sir Allen Apsley's regiment of foot:

I did both of these at the same time in three batches of 32 figures each and seemed to fly through them, always the case when I am enjoying a project. I found myself constantly misnaming Apsley's regiment as 'Aspley', the name of a suburb a bit further out here in Brisbane, and even accidentally put the wrong label on even though I had immediately reprinted it with the correct spelling (but have since replaced the label below with the correct one):

The flags are from Maverick Models and the flag for the Oxford Regiment is equally as exciting as that for Apsley's Regiment:

As we know, in the Napoleonic era soldiers would lay their life on the line in defence of their standard, but I'm not sure many would have been equally as bothered in the English Civil War. The shotte are the same as the figures for the other regiments, with the Oxford regiment apparently having been issued with red breeches which I painted on about two thirds of the figures for that unit:

I went with the pike forward pose for these two regiments just to add a bit of variety. These are nice poses as they are at slightly different angles which provides a nice irregular look, and yet they don't stick into the backs of the figures in front of them:

That's five regiments and 240 figures completed for this project to date:

The order for the remaining Medieval German figures needed to complete that army has arrived so I have returned to that project to now complete it. In many ways this is a shame as I was really moving at a cracking pace through these ECW figures, but hope that the same motivation will be there when I return to them in a few weeks' time.