More 1809 Spaniards

Yesterday I was pleased to welcome back the two battalions of the Regimiento La Reina from their trip to be painted by the excellent Lee. Not only that, but I now also have some mounted colonels painted up, including the new mounted command figures for the existing Regimiento Africa.

After a short frenzy of varnishing and basing, here are the two regiments on parade. At present they look a little odd since they have uncut flagpoles - the flags and finials are still to come, but I hope you will see that my little 1809 army is beginning to take shape. The Reina boys have purple facings here, Africa black. Figures are NapoleoN, apart from the hat-waving colonel, who is a Falcata casting, and the other mounted officers, which are conversions of my own.

Next up will probably be Irlanda, in blue and yellow, and maybe some light infantry.

Thank you, Lee - very much!

A Useful Oddity – the Scruby Artillery Horse

More on the Ongoing Background Artillery Project (OBAP)

I’m working away to get a bit more progress on my dreadful backlog of Napoleonic limbers -  especially those of the French and their allies – which always nags away at me, and takes up space in the project boxes which could be used for something more pleasing.

Having said which, the limbers and other artillery and logistical vehicles are pleasing enough when they do get completed, but since they are not a priority (i.e. my rules mostly don’t strictly require them to be present) this is a very rare event indeed.

This last week I’ve been preparing some French limber teams for painting. Some of these castings are very small "25mm" from Jack Scruby Miniatures (these days, that means Historifigs), and their artillery horses are strange objects – I rather like them, not least because for many years they were really all you could get in metal 1/72-ish apart from vintage Hinton Hunt (which got prohibitively expensive) and Kennington (whose artillery horse is one of their “Pantomime” jobs, with short shins and an odd gait).

Your hoof-bone's connected to your knee-bone

Note the cunningly twisted draught lines, to simplify casting

Working with the Scruby horse is a bit of a challenge – the master is sculpted with the left front hoof attached to the right knee, and the draught lines twisted through a surprising angle and attached to the tail and the right rear leg – all in the interests of simplifying the mould lines. In its starting configuration the horse does not look very promising, but a bit of fiddling and sawing and twisting and it sort of works. This is not made any easier by Historifigs’ insistence on using an unusually hard, brittle alloy which neither bends nor files very easily, and is known to snap in moments of stress.

The four pairs and drivers nearest the camera are Scrubies - my lacerated
fingers will recover, please don't send flowers

Some I prepared earlier - some French caissons from my last big push on the OBAP
- as always with Scruby 25mm, they paint up better than you think they are going to

I’ve managed to produce another 4 pairs of Scruby horses with drivers this time, and it took me some time to achieve this. They should start getting painted next week. Next batch of painting is (I think) 4 British limber horse pairs (Lamming), 8 French (4 Scruby and 4 of the lovely, but expensive, Art Miniaturen), complete with limbers and cannon (mostly Hinchliffe 20, but some of the guns are of obscure origin – they may be Rose with wheel swaps) and a bunch of Peninsular, stovepipe-hatted Royal Artillery gunners for the Allied siege train (these are NapoleoN castings, but may also include some Kenningtons if SHQ send me some in time).

The gunners are for a series of 3 batteries of 10” howitzers – which is far more than the real Royal Artillery had available in the Peninsular War, but they look good.

Anyway, more of all this sometime in the future. This morning’s excitement is merely a glimpse of the Chinese puzzle which is the Scruby artillery horse. A casting which was designed to be converted before it could be used.

Painting - Mules...

In response to emails from Ludovico, Martin P, Martin S, Louis and Francis, here is the new mule train.  Not hugely attractive, but potentially useful. They are versatile, since they are capable of representing any nation in the Peninsula, or of splitting into smaller trains.

I would prefer it if they weren't all in step, but this is only a toy army, after all.

Painting - a Little Command Tidying-Up

While assembling some heavyweight shipments of soldiers to go away to be worked on by painters who actually know what they are doing, I've also been doing some fiddling away of my own, finishing off some odd figures that have been in the To Be Painted pile for far too long. None of them is going to win any prizes, but it is satisfying to get a bit of the backlog cleared.

First thing I did was finish off my Peninsular War mule train - it's only taken me about 40 years to get around to having one of these. Pack and draught animals are always a bit of a thankless undertaking; since I always put off painting them, I have usually forgotten that they are mostly just a mass of harness and strapping and bits tied on, all of which requires a bit of care to make them look half-decent.

That was last week. This week I have mostly been finishing off some missing generals for my other French Peninsular Army (which is sort of the Army of the Centre, or the North, or Aragon, or any and all of these as occasion demands). Two of these are Art Miniaturen castings, for the cavalry - nominally Generals Treillard (with the white "division" border to his base) and Maupoint (brown for "brigade), and the other is an old Minifigs 20mm OPC figure, who started life as one of several Marshal Neys which I have, and will be a spare General de Division for the Army of Portugal, or anyone else who needs one.

Here they are - glad to have got them finished - feels like more progress than it really is. Once again, my photographs show the blue uniforms as rather paler than they look in the flesh - my camera has outsmarted me again. [I don't mind so much if my camera is smarter than me - it hurts more when I am out-thought by the electric kettle…]

Since the Aragon role is not comfortable for King Joseph (who is the incumbent command figure for this other army), I am also thinking of having an extra figure for Marshal Suchet - the real motivation here is that I have a very nice little mounted ADC in hussar uniform who will paint up very colourfully as Suchet's sidekick, Captain Gaultier, on the 2-figure C-in-C stand. That's down the road a piece - next painting job for me is a group of British infantry intended for digging trenches in the siege game. These will be armed with shovels and pickaxes, and mounted on the house-standard brown "mud" stands (for sieges). After that there is more artillery equipment, and a refurb job on a very elderly unit of Garrison French chasseurs a cheval, who will need some improvised command. Don't hold your breath.

Les Oreilles de Truie

1/17eme Léger, at long last - Les Higgins figures with a few interlopers in the
Command section - Qualiticast and Kennington, and the nonchalant eagle bearer in
the bicorn hat was previously (hush) a Falcata Spaniard...

After much muttering and retouching, and re-correcting of corrections, the first (and probably only) battalion of the 17eme Léger is ready for The Cupboard.

Refinishing these fine fellows has taken a lot of time and a lot of fiddling about – they will henceforth be known, not as “Napoleon’s Incomparables”, nor “Un contre huit”, nor even “Les Chasseurs du Diable”, but as “Les Oreilles de Truie” – the sows’ ears, in commemoration of the fact that they never quite made it into the Silk Purse section.

In fact I’m fairly pleased with them, and am especially pleased that I have finished the beggars. Perhaps at long last I may have learned that touching up a so-so buy on eBay cannot achieve miracles, and that – whether I like the idea or not – a complete paint job from bare metal will almost always give a better result, with probably less effort and certainly a lot less irritation.

Whatever, here they are, and it’s hardly their fault their military career with me got off to a bad start… 

Touching & Retouching - Sows' Ears & Silk Purses

There are a few real life distractions going on at present, and I’m recovering from a major refurb effort on some bought-in ECW figures. As a result I have been doing very little painting for a few weeks, and have only just started on another retouching job, which I can pick up or put down as time permits in the evenings.

This time it is a French Napoleonic light infantry battalion. I didn’t need or expect to have another of these, but they were on eBay, and they looked quite nice…

I should have them finished in a few days, but at present they are progressing more slowly than I had hoped, and – a recurring theme for the past 15 years or so – yet again I find that I am surprised by the manner in which simple refurb jobs never turn out to be what you thought they were going to be. You would think I would get the hang of this – it isn’t a problem, but constantly being surprised by the same phenomenon is worth thinking about, at least. My grandmother used to maintain that every day you learn something, but that it is not good if it is always the same thing.

The starting point for buying old figures always involves the same decision point – the figures are suitable, and either

(A) they are cheap enough – or rare enough – to justify a full strip-and-start-again job, or

(B) they are nice enough as they are to fit in with just a little touch-up and some new bases

...and it goes wrong immediately from that point.

I am the man who once bought some really pretty Nassau infantry from eBay, and had them in the Nitromors within a day when I saw what the paint job was really like close up. I am also the man who stripped and repainted a fairly expensive pre-owned cavalry unit when I realized that the paint had been “professionally” applied to castings which still had the original flash on them. There are many tales like this – in fact almost all of my repainted units involved a post-delivery reclassification from (B) to (A) to some extent or other.

The present battalion of Frenchies are typical. They looked super on eBay – Les Higgins figures, painted in a plain, old-fashioned style similar to mine own – they would fit right in. A bit of an indulgence to add yet another unit of lights, but hey. There was an early setback when it came to light that the seller had counted them incorrectly, and the batch was 3 figures smaller than advertised. OK – we sorted that out. So I had 15 chasseurs (they even had their bayonets) plus an officer, all painted. My bold friend and ally Iain came up with another 3 unpainted figures to provide some carabiniers, I added a charging officer and a hornist (both by Qualiticast) from the spares box, a mounted colonel by Kennington and an improvised eagle bearer, really a Falcata Spaniard. Bingo – a battalion, as defined by the house standards. More painting than I had had in mind, but fine.

And then you sit down with the painting glasses and the bright lights, and line up the selected paint pots in the right order, and get fresh water pots, and a good coffee, and put on the music (Debussy and Sarah Vaughan and Steely Dan, this week…) and take a deep breath, and then the truth starts to filter through.

It’s pointless to analyze absolutely everything, but I think I retouch things for a number of reasons:

(1) The paint is damaged

(2) The uniform details are incorrect

(3) The paintwork does not please me, for any reason at all (it’s easier to change them now than live for years with the wish that I had changed them)

(4) Wow – now that I get a good look, that white paint is pretty yellow – better sort that out

(5) …and those red plumes have faded very badly…

(6) …and any combination of the above…

These Vallejo paints are much better...

This particular batch have failed on points (2) to (4), and it is now clear that they were once expertly painted, but subsequently touched up by a less skilled artist. In the list of ouches there is a classic bad decision – the later painter decided to improve things by applying white piping to the edges of the dark blue turnbacks (on dark blue coats). Mistake. Inaccurate contrasting piping sticks out like a sore thumb – spoils the whole thing. I probably could not have done any better myself, but I wouldn’t have attempted it. I firmly believe that no piping at all looks superior to bad piping – I shall ensure that the prominent piping around the lapels is done as well as I can, but in an inconspicuous spot such as the turnbacks (and these are 20mm figures, in modern terms) it is better not to bother. I have now obliterated the piping – anyone who knows it should be there will see it anyway…

They’ll be ready soon – I’m so unprepared that I’ll have to find a suitable identity for them, so they can have a proper flag. Great stuff, but will I have learned anything? – probably not.

The Spaniards of 1809

This is all a bit of an about-face, since I have previously decided – and justified – that I would use an unexpected supply of bicorned Spanish infantry to provide units of Urban Militia to supplement my post-1811 army, rather than starting to tinker with adding battalions of white-uniformed chaps from 1809, however attractive they might be.

The decision was fairly easy, since I couldn’t possibly expect to collect enough figures to make a decent 1809 army, and since the earlier and later versions of the Spanish army don’t really mix very comfortably. Well, not for me.

Since then I have very quickly obtained a pile of figures – remainder stocks of NapoleoN and Falcata still existed, if you ferreted about a bit, and someone unloaded a stack of unpainted figures on eBay. Suddenly – to my considerable surprise – a proper 1809 army is a real possibility. Amazing what you can achieve when (because?) you are not really trying. OK – let’s be honest – they may not be much of a prospect for winning battles, but they should be beautiful. The white uniform introduced in 1805 is a great favourite of mine.

At present I have enough figures for some 18 battalions of line infantry, 4 of light, 4 of grenadiers, plus an adequate supply of generals, command figures and some very natty sappers. Some of my existing (post 1811) army will slot right in – particularly the light cavalry and the voluntarios in round hats. I am negotiating (haltingly) with a supplier in Spain for some 1809 artillery and cavalry, and am looking very seriously at the Kennington Spaniards – these last are just a tad small compared with the NapoleoN and Falcata boys, but self-contained units from a single manufacturer will be fine; Kennington do very nice artillery crews and line infantry. All sorts of possibilities are shaping up.

Thus far I’ve sent two 2-battalion regiments of infantry to be painted (Africa and Reina), but it now behoves me to sit down with the order of battle for the real Army of the Centre from early 1809 (which I have managed to correct and re-engineer by painstaking comparison of various sources) and plan exactly which bits of it will make up my new army.

The idea – to start with – will be to have infantry divisions each containing (typically) 2 x 2 battalion regiments of line (or guard), 2 or 3 battalions of lights, 2 battalions  of provinciales (dressed in white like the line, but all with red facings), 1 combined battalion of grenadiers and a foot battery. How many such divisions is possible or even sensible I have yet to decide – 3 might be a decent effort – I’d like 4, but that’s not feasible at present, so I’ll maybe go for a Vanguard Divn, a Reserve (with the guards in) and a Line Divn.

Having made some token show of top-down planning, I can now get back to the fun business of drooling over which uniforms I fancy! My sketch OOB includes 2 battalions of the Guarda Real, 1 of the Walloon Guards and 1 of the Regimiento Irlanda, this last in their sky blue with yellow facings, so that should all be a good colourful addition. The grenadier battalions will mostly be converged from the relevant companies of all the regiments in a division, so mixed facings will be the order of the day. I am contemplating the painting of the ornately embroidered bags on the grenadiers’ bearskins with a little alarm…

There’s no rush – I’ll just work away at building the army, and when they reach some kind of critical mass they can start doing some fighting. Pictures will appear here from time to time as parts are completed.

Cavalry is interesting – I have 2 regiments of light cavalry from my existing Spanish army who will be perfectly fine in the earlier period, and two regiments of irregular lancers, just right for Baylen. My friend Goyo is working to get me some cavalry figures which will work well as Line Cavalry (in blue) or dragoons (in yellow – I always wanted some yellow dragoons!).

Just a labour of love, really.

Spanish Drummers - some dubiety

As far as I can tell, the drummers didn't dress like this

The next unit of my 1809 Spanish army up for painting is the Regimiento de la Reina, whose uniform is well documented, but I have had a bit of a goose chase trying to identify what their drummers wore.

It seems likely that the Spanish line infantry would have worn a mix of uniforms by 1809, with some units still wearing the blue 1802 kit, most wearing the 1805 white coats, and a proportion of makeshift outfits using the ubiquitous local brown cloth, but I'm trying for something very close to the official appearance for Reina. Drummers? - don't ask. A lot of vagueness abounds - a couple of sources state that the drummers wore anything the colonel fancied, which may or may not be true, but doesn't help much. I've recently obtained a French book about the Battle of Ocana, which includes some very nice uniform plates by Peter Bunde, and I've also done some study of the Spanish items in Bunde's catalogue, and it seems that drummers had a standard uniform - dark blue with red facings - regardless of the unit's facing colour.

That's what I'm going for at the moment - artwork here is taken from the Ocana book, featuring Bunde's plates. Any inside info on Spanish drummers will be most welcome - most of the illustrations of painted models on the internet (including catalogue pics from figure manufacturers) show infantry drummers dressed the same as the rest of the regiment - maybe some of them did?

Regimiento de Africa

And so it starts. The first 2-battalion regiment of the new 1809 extension to my Spanish army for the Guerra de la Independencia is based up and fitted with magnets, and waiting for its colonels and flags. Super paint job by Lee, as ever.

I'll set up some better pictures of this army as it develops. I hope to have mounted colonels ready in a few weeks.

An odd moment occurred as I was putting these chaps away in one of my box files (light blue for Spain). I have more files on order, so they are temporarily housed with the irregular cavalry, which may cause some outrage in the ranks. When I put them in this file, I was astonished to see that the magnets didn't work. A slow motion film would show me, stupidly, trying a few times to see if the properties of physics would suddenly start working again - like Eeyore putting his burst balloon in the honey pot. I even started to have some wild ideas that it wasn't working because it was the wrong box, and somehow the magnets knew. Eventually, of course, I realised that I must have run out of steel paper at some time, and this particular file was only half floored with the stuff, so all I had proved was that magnets don't stick to cardboard, which the world already knows. Except maybe Rod (private joke)...

In my own defence, I have to point out that it was pretty early in the morning, and I now have the kettle on for some coffee. It's good to have these experiences from time to time.

Anyway - Regto de Africa. I think the next up will be De la Reina. Thanks again, Lee. Oh yes, the figures are by NapoleoN (now OOP), and the colonels will be conversions.

As a complete digression, I was intrigued by this photo - does anyone understand this?

ECW - Mac Colla

Alasdair Mac Colla Chiotaich Mac Domhnuill (1610-47)

With some approximation in the tartan trews department, I have painted up the Mac Colla – otherwise known to you and me as Ali MacDonald – yet another figure I have assembled from Tumbling Dice parts. Alasdair was born at Colonsay, in the Inner Hebrides, the son of Col Chiotaich MacDonald – “Col the Left Handed”. Col was known as Colkitto, in Anglicised form, a name by which Nigel Tranter also refers to the son, Alasdair, in the Montrose novels. One would hesitate to suggest that Mr Tranter was mistaken, so let us assume that Alasdair was known as Colkitto as a sort of patronym.

Alasdair spent much of his life in Ireland, and he was appointed to command the Irish brigade which was sent over to Scotland to fight for the Royalist cause in the Civil War, joining forces with the Marquis of Montrose. Mac Colla is a bit nearer to the Warhammer end of things than I am used to – you will find a lot of stuff about him on the internet, frequently (apparently) confused with Conan the Barbarian, and representing a type of superhuman Celtic warrior hero much loved by American chaps with beards, many of whom would not know a Celt if they fell over one. 

The real Alasdair seems to have been a big, strong fellow – brave but sometimes a bit hasty. A head-banger, no doubt. He left Montrose, officially to raise more troops in the western highlands, but became distracted by the pursuit of his family’s traditional feud with the Campbells, who were – needless to say – staunch Covenanters.

My figure is simpler and calmer than most representations of this trusted lieutenant of Montrose.

ECW - The Marquis of Montrose

I'm not sure that Dame CV Wedgwood would fancy my version much

Since my armies for the campaigns of Montrose are pretty close to ready now, I need to provide a few leaders and a few more frame guns to fill in some remaining gaps. Since we are hardly spoiled for choice of specialty figures in 20mm, I'm having to raid the spares boxes for bits and pieces. Here is the Marquis himself, assembled from various Tumbling Dice bits and an SHQ horse.

He looks slightly more Neanderthal than his portrait, but those artists always took pains to flatter their clients, as we know. His personal standard (all right, actually the King of Scotland's flag, but Montrose used it as his personal standard) is carried on a separate base, which is unusually fiddly for me, but gives the advantage that I can use the Marquis's figure as someone else if I do it this way. Cheapskate Productions' corporate strategy in action once again.

Next on the bottle tops will be an improvised Alasdair Mac Colla, also from TD bits, which will require me to attempt some rough approximation to tartan. I failed to find any tartan paint in the Games Workshop catalogue, so I guess I'll have to try it the old fashioned way.

Once the leaders are better advanced, I'll put in a group photo of the new forces in their current state.

ECW - Never Mind the Quality

Busy, busy

This morning I varnished 180 pre-owned foot figures for the English Civil War – that’s a further 4 Scottish regiments of foot plus 5 non-Scottish (who will be Irish and other things). Sometime over the weekend I shall “grass” the figure bases and mount them on MDF stands. Then I just have some finishing off jobs to do, including flags of various levels of cleverness and interchangeability, and then they can all go into the official Pink Box-Files and I can do Something Else.

The figures are not brilliant, but they are going to work out better than I expected, and I am warming to them as I proceed. They may not be the most beautiful figures I ever owned, but they will be useful, and – by golly – there’s heaps of them. Montrose, here we come. Any week now.

Subject 2 – Banks (yet again) – never mind the quality…

This is the middle of March, as you will have observed, and this is the time of year when I have to pretend that I have replaced my bank accounts with new ones, so that I may graciously be granted some non-zero rate of interest by institutions who (allegedly) make a profit by using our money to finance house-buyers or small businesses. Of course, we all know that neither of these groups of people actually exist in the UK, but we are expected to play this game to show willing.

This year I am finally losing patience, and am moving my savings (humble as they are) into National Savings and Investment (NS&I), which is effectively the UK Government, which means that guarantees become irrelevant, they will not try to sell me house insurance, and we shall no longer be required to play this yearly game of Let’s Pretend in order to qualify for interest.

I have no particular complaints about this process, other than to lament that NS&I appear to be almost as inept as their competitors. The Contesse phoned to see why her new account was taking so long to set  up, and the nice lady on the phone said “what is your membership number?”, to which the reasonable answer was “I don’t know, you haven’t sent me a welcome letter informing me of the number”.

The lady said, “Did you ask for a paperless account? (i.e. email only)”, to which the answer was “yes”. In that case, the Contesse was told, we cannot send you any letters.

In that case, the logic goes, how can I learn what my number is, so that I may access my account online and save the paperwork? This caused the lady a moment’s pause – obviously she had never reached this part of the script before.

What to do, she suggested, is write and pretend you have forgotten your membership number, and we will send you a letter and we can start all over again. Our distress over this development was temporary – about an hour later the postman delivered the aforementioned welcome letter, which had obviously been in the mail all the time. Phew. Not terrific, but survivable. Since this is the Government we are talking about here, we are filled with confidence for this new arrangement.

Yesterday, as part of this same migration, I decided to close my old Post Office account (which, oddly, is managed by the Bank of Ireland behind the wraps). The Post Office savings operation offers online banking, presumably because their customers (which used to include me) expect it, but they manage to present the online banking service in a way which minimizes all possible convenience or utility.

The account number appears on screen as, for example, ****3521 – this is so secure that not even the customer can see their own account number, only the last 4 digits. There are many things that you cannot do online with a Post Office account – in fact I am struggling to think of anything you actually can do with it online. If you give up and phone the call centre, the first thing they want to know is your account number. If you can only provide them with the last 4 digits that is no use at all – they refer you to a paper welcome letter you will have received two years earlier (in this case) which gives the full number. If you cannot find the letter, I guess you are soundly shafted.

I have hopes that NS&I will turn out to be OK – they are the last chance for the savings industry, as far as I am concerned. If they are as stupid as the rest of them, I swear I shall put what money I have left in a sweetie tin and keep it under the floorboards. Or just buy more soldiers.

ECW - Switchable Standard-Bearers

…and other cunning stuff.

The man himself - in Montrose High Street

Work on my windfall acquisition of second-hand ECW troops is going ahead – there is quite a lot to do, but it’s a factory process, and it’s mostly a matter of making time to sit down and get on with it, ensuring I have plenty of music to listen to.

This is figure painting of a style I haven’t done much of for many years – the previous owner was a doctor, I understand; sadly, he passed away recently and his widow arranged for his enormous collection of figures to be presented to a local charity shop, who raised a considerable sum on eBay. I believe that there were over a hundred boxes of stuff, representing a huge range of periods and styles of warfare. I bought some of his ECW figures – mostly Scots and Irish type figures – and found, to my surprise, that they were flagged and organized to suit the campaigns of the Marquis of Montrose, which – by a complete coincidence – is exactly what I had in mind myself when I bought them.

The figures are mostly SHQ and Tumbling Dice, which fits right in with my existing armies, but they are painted in a way which I used to employ myself in the days when my main concern was to get as many soldiers ready for battle as I could, in the shortest time possible. They are, to use what I think is Mr Featherstone’s phrase, “effective in the mass” rather than individually exquisite. That is not to dismiss them as crude, you understand, but recently I have grown accustomed to commissioned paint jobs on my ECW chaps which make each man a little personality, and these new troops for the Montrose unpleasantness are not like that. The painting is OK, though I have a lot of rebasing to get on with, and the acreage of Humbrol gloss varnish is astonishing, but the overall impression is of a major invasion by a faceless horde which you wouldn’t wish to meet up with.

Somehow this fits quite well with my feelings about the Covenanters and their opponents – masses of rather dour, businesslike fellows in “hodden grey”, with blue bonnets. The Scots army, we must remember, was a national army, not a collection of individual units raised by wealthy or prominent individuals, so a mass-production approach is maybe appropriate.

The task in hand is to identify the figures I can use, organize them into sensible units, clean off the remains of the old basing, get the old tweezers busy removing the cat hairs which are tacked onto the old varnish (not embedded in the stuff, fortunately), wash everything, touch up any chips or outstandingly poor bits of painting, give a thorough application of Galeria acrylic matt varnish, paint the figure bases in the house Crested Moss #1 shade, stick them on new 60 x 60 MDF stands and prepare flags. When you get within tweezer range of someone else’s figures, it all gets very personal. While I’m tinkering away I find myself chatting idly to The Doc, as I refer to the previous owner, and Whiskers, as I have christened his cat.

A box of Scots - just the first of a big new contingent - no flags yet

I have already produced a unit of Scots horse, and I have enough figures for 6 regiments of bonneted Scottish foot, plus 5 of non-Scottish chaps of generally northern (grey/brown) appearance. The plan is that Montrose will get two of the first group (Strathbogie and Gordon of Monymore) plus three of the second (who will be his Irish Brigade), and the balance will be available to his opponents, as will my three existing Covenanter units. There are also 4 small units of highland levies, who are up for grabs to either side, depending on scenario.

Almost certainly not Whiskers

Flags are interesting. Those of Strathbogie and Gordon of Monymore, and of the Irish Brigade, are distinctively Royalist, but I do not wish to disqualify these units from being called up to pitch in on the other side in the Bishop Wars, or against the Marquis of Newcastle, or at Marston Moor, if need be, so I have come up with a Cunning Plan for flags. Montrose’s foot regiments will have their standard bearers elegantly tacked onto the bases with BluTak, and spare officers will be available with alternative flags, such that they may switch allegiance as required. The Scottish fellows (including the spares for Montrose’s people) are to have general-purpose Covenanter style colours, and the non-Scots (including the spares for Montrose’s Irish) will have generic English (Northumbrian) colours, appropriate to their faceless-mass role.

One of my generic Scots units will, of course, have a colour very similar to that of the Duke of Argyll, the cross-eyed, craven, dastardly villain of Dame Veronica Wedgwood’s very readable but extremely biased life of Montrose.

Booo! - Argyll, the Pantomime Villain

I have much work to do, but at least I now know what it is. It is a comfort to have plans to dovetail these new forces with North-of-England scenarios, since otherwise they might be seen as a distraction from my main effort, for which I haven’t yet produced a proper campaign in my intended Lancashire theatre.

What fun, what fun! More pictures will appear in due course.