Per Mare Per Terram

When you are really proud of a Battle Honour, you put it on your Regimental Colours, when you are exceptionally proud of it, you put it on your badges. For the Marines, this is Gibraltar, an Honour they wear to this day, so it makes sense to cover it here.

The most important change by this point is that the Marine regiments were wearing the red of the British Army. In fact, almost all of the uniform patterns between the Army and the Marines were identical due to the nature of raising and re-designating regiments over time. For example, Villier’s Regiment were raised as Marines, then later re-designated as Line Infantry and becoming the 31st Foot. In this way, Marine Regiments were not permanent and raised to requirement.

While I only found very poor quality pictures of such, as these regiments were much more of the Army style, the facing colours are of importance and, as with the Army regiments, were a way of telling each unit apart. The yellow in these images would be indicative of Villier’s regiment rather than just meaning ‘Marine’. Other regimental distinctiveness would be far too small to show up in gaming scales, so I won’t worry about it. It should be said, though, that the taping of the second image, opposed to the lack of such in the first, is quite possibly artistic license and I would suspect that the lack of taping around button holes would be the more accurate.

As for model suggestions, it goes without saying that the War of the Spanish Succession era British, or Grand Alliance, infantry are the way to go. Warlord does a plastic box set, though I am sure others do as well. The only complication would be headgear. I am am correct in my assumption of tri-corns, then the box would be fine as is, but the grenadier mitres used in the box would not be correct to those in the artwork I have presented here. So I would suggest sticking to tr-corns of the era unless you could find a source of those particular mitres from another company.