"Single Royalist Dragoon Regiment" Topic

If you were to model one, and only one, regiment of Royalist dragoons, which would you pick?

Ancillary, which Royalist dragoon regiment saw the most action in the greatest numbers?

(I'd rather not model several different troops/companies under different commands which is where most of my research is pointing – though that option may, in the end, be irresistible.)

Depends which army you're representing, surely? If the foot and horse you've painted up are Oxford Army regiments, then Ussher's/Washington's dragoons might be a good choice, but they'd look a little inappropriate if everything else in the army were from Hopton's or Newcastle's forces.

Funny you should ask about Royalist. I'm also trying to determine which to do.

I am finishing up a troop of Okey's Dragoons at the moment for use with Pikeman's Lament.

Mark

Well, given how little we know about individual dragoon regiments' uniforms from year to year, and about their respective guidons, you could probably do a unit in your favourite colour, and then call it whatever you like for whichever Battle or campaign you are doing. However, if you want to be a bit more systematic, you might like to Google the BCW regimental project, which has most of what we know about the various regiments.

Mollinary

Often they were deployed at troop, not regimental, level.

Wow, that BCW project is a great reference. Thanks for sharing that.

Mark

For Royalist dragoons that site isn't very instructive as most of the entries reveal nothing but the name of the Colonel.

However, it does amuse me that in the Notes under Henry Crow's Regiment of Dragoons it simply says, "A rather obscure regiment." And now I know more about it than most of the other regiments listed.

Hi there,

Tim from BCW Regimental wiki here, many thanks for the kind words. Here are Royalist dragoons link though I'd echo previous posters in that I went for Usshers/Washington's too.

As for the wiki – all volunteers are very welcome ;-)

Hi Flashman, yes its still pretty much at the first stage of getting 'skeleton' pages up for the majority of units. The plan/pious hope is that in time they'll be filled in by anyone who has found out anything about them. Always a work in progress and for some units there's next to nothing recorded, so 'obscure' sounded about right to me.

Don't get me wrong – I love the site – there just is so little known about the Royalist dragoons. It's been immensely helpful on the infantry side and Parliamentary dragoons were better documented.

Too right Flashman, lots of the Royalist dragoons listed there are the odd troops attached to Colonel x's cavalry regiment. I thought it best to include them as 'dragoon units' but often little is known of what they got up to independently or alongside their 'parent' cavalry regiment.

Proper dragoon regiments seem to have tailed off in popularity after 1643, no doubt anyone with a horse wanted to be a cavalryman in the fond hope of a pay rise! What surprised me was just how many dragoons were in the Bishops' Wars armies.

Give this link a try for details of Washingtons/Prince Maurices dragoons: link

And here are some photo's of the unit I painted in blue uniform for a customer a couple of years ago.

There are more pics on my blog: link