Gunner, Musketeer and Horse Grenadier: Three Trades in One Army, 1690s (EVM0060)

Three men from the same decade who do not belong to the same institution

It looks like a uniform study, and it is — but the three figures on this plate are not three ranks of one organisation. They are three different answers to the question of how an army gets made, standing side by side in the 1690s, during the War of the Grand Alliance. Each one belongs to a different arrangement, and two of the three would be unrecognisable to a soldier a century later.

The musketeer belongs to a man, not to a country

He is in Huntingdon’s Regiment of Foot — and that is the regiment’s whole name. British regiments were called after their colonels, who raised them, clothed them and effectively owned them, and the name changed when the colonel did. A unit could be raised for a war, carry three names in ten years and be disbanded at the peace. Numbered regiments with permanent identities only arrive in 1751. The coat he wears was paid for out of his colonel’s pocket, against deductions from his own pay.

The gunner is not, strictly speaking, a soldier

The man with the sponge staff served the guns, but in this period British artillery did not belong to the army: it belonged to the Board of Ordnance, a separate civil department that also ran the fortresses and the engineers. Trains of artillery were raised for a campaign and broken up when it ended, and the gunners went home. The permanent Royal Regiment of Artillery is founded only in 1716 — a generation after this plate. The most technical arm on the battlefield was the least permanent thing on it.

The horse grenadier is an experiment that did not last

The third figure is the strangest: a cavalryman whose weapon is a bomb. Horse grenadiers existed in the British Household Cavalry between 1687 and 1788 — men who rode to a position, dismounted or not, and threw grenades. John Evelyn saw them in 1683 and described them as «habited after the Polish manner, with long picked caps, very fierce and fantastical.» The tall cap is not decoration: a broad-brimmed hat catches the arm of a man throwing overhand, so the grenade troops of every European army ended up in caps, and the cap outlived the grenade by two centuries.

Why three trades and not three ranks

What holds the plate together is that these men were paid, clothed, recruited and disbanded by three different mechanisms in the same war. An army in the 1690s was an assembly of separate arrangements that happened to march in the same direction — and the century that follows is largely the story of turning those arrangements into a single institution: permanent artillery, numbered regiments, uniform clothing supplied by the state.

What the illustrator is committed to here

A plate like this has nowhere to hide. There is no action to carry the eye, so everything rests on cut, colour and equipment being right: the shape of the cap, the way the match case and grenade pouch hang, the sponge staff and its length, the facings that identify one colonel’s regiment rather than another’s. The French side of these same wars is in EVM0061.