Keep Your Powder Dry

Today's post takes a look at a very exciting release from Partizan, that focuses on the flags of the Scottish Covenanters.  Regular readers may well spot a plethora of Scottish related posts over the rest of 2025 - guess where the ECWtravelogue is going on holiday this year... For transparency please note, whilst I do occasionally get sent books to review, I bought this volume with my own money. Nor do I get any commission for recommending any reading materials... which is a real shame... First some background... The Covenanting Armies continually changed its allegiances during the Wars of the Three Kingdoms to support whichever 'side' they thought would further their cause. This book focuses upon the period 1648-1650, where they threw their support behind Charles I, as Engagers, then behind Charles II after the Treaty of Breda. The Engagers had negotiated with the imprisoned Charles I who promised the Covenanters his support of the Presbyterian cause; this effectively star...

Irish flags... a conundrum. I knew that a number of flags were recorded, but without any reference to allocation to particular regiments. I also remember reading one internet reference that stated that each flag had two different sides. But I'd never come across the source material supporting this claim, or even a secondary source that described/illustrated the flags thus. Until now... But first a little bit of flag nomenclature (which if you want to impress people you can call vexillology). If you cut a flag down its middle and spread it out on a table, positioning the pole sleeve in the middle, the left hand side is the 'reverse' and the right hand side is the front of the flag, or 'obverse'. Regular readers, hello all twenty of you, will have realised that clothing issue 'floats my boat', I'm not really very good on flags. Most of my flag knowledge is gleaned from secondary sources, and the handful of more readily accessible primary sources.  The sour...

The first of the bonus regiments of foot. Regular readers (hello all eight of you) will have spotted some halberdiers and command figures feature in the Which Figures Part 2 post and wondered what became of them... I shall start with what we know about Tillier's, hopefully dispelling a few wargamer facts™ in the process. Raised in Ireland from Dublin garrison detachments of Ormond’s army in 1643, they returned to England in February 1644. Don't be confused about the 'raised in Dublin' bit, these men were in the main English or Welsh. They would skirmish at Market Drayton; fight at Newark; possibly take Longford House and Tong Castle; march north with Rupert and storm Stockport, Bolton, take Liverpool, before fighting at Marston Moor where by all accounts they took very heavy losses. The Regiment was practically raised anew and would go on to the siege of Montgomery Castle, and battle of Montgomery. They stormed Leicester; fought at Naseby, again taking heavy losses. Re...

As I was about to post about the Tower Hamlet's Regiment of the London Trained Bands, and about to go down my usual ranty rabbit hole about coat colours I thought it better to write a general post about Trained Bands. This got out of hand a little and became the coat colours series, without even touching upon the Trained Bands.  When I first started my ECW project I took at face value lots of information from what I believed to be 'trusted' sources: it only took a little  cursory reading to quickly realise that many of these 'trusted' sources replicate the same errors. Which is why my original Tower Hamlet's Regiment wore red coats and carried the 'wrong' flag. They were quickly given the correct flag, but the red coat issue was slowly nagging me. They have since been rechristened John Birch's, and the Tower Hamlets LTB has been raised anew. This post is a bit more than  Coat Colours Part 5 Introduction   Part 1  Parliamentarian coat colours Part ...

Part three of the KeepYourPowderDry guide to Civil War flags and colours looks at where we can see illustrated examples of Civil War flags, and also where we can get some for our armies. But first a plea to editors, authors and publishers of future volumes concerning flags of the Civil Wars: please push the boat out with your production values - books of flags need colour illustrations! First off we have to consider the three volume series English Civil War Flags and Colours from Partizan: Volume 1 covers the English Foot, Volume 2 Scots Colours, and Volume 3 the Bill Carmen collection. These volumes state the primary source material for the flag designs illustrated. Volume 1 was written by Peachey and Prince who intended to write a second volume (they make several references to it in the text of Volume 1) but it never made its way into print.  The latest reprint of Volume 1, earlier versions have a different cover Volume 1 has an absolute wealth of information ins...

Part two of the KeepYourPowderDry guide to Civil War flags and colours looks at evidence - surviving flags, and contemporary records. Surviving Flags There is a watchett (blue green) piles wavy ensign in the collection at the  National Army Museum   (not on display), which very little is known about. One source claims it predates the Civil Wars (early 1630s), whereas NAM currently believe it dates from 1688 and belonged to Prince William of Orange (before he became King William III) Picture courtesy of the National Army Museum Of course, the ensign belonging to Sir John Gell's Regiment of Foot takes pride of place in the refurbished NAM. I have read that when the museum was conserving Gell's flag, and the museum was undergoing major refurbishment, that it was planned to alternate display of the two flags in the NAM collection. Antony House  in Plymouth, have a yellow ensign on display with black lion devices (possibly belonging to Alexander Car...

This is the first of three KeepYourPowderDry guides to Civil War flags. This part looks at the rationale and rules why Civil War flags looked like they did. Not often I get to channel my inner Dr Sheldon Cooper, I doubt it will ever happen again. All of what follows is conjecture, and in some cases fairly tenuous at best. We don't actually know what conventions were used, if they were universally applied, or how they worked. Much of what we know is based upon the reporting of London Trained Band musters, and the partial records and correspondence of Alexander Venner who made flags for several Parliamentarian regiments. Only 3 other known flags follow the same system as the London regiments, so you can see how the word 'conjecture' might well be doing a lot of heavy lifting. Nobody wrote down the answers to our questions, and the evidence that we have is too small a sample to make blanket deductions. With that caveat firmly in mind... To understand Civil War flags we need ...