Waterloo 1815 - New Set of Napoleonic Highlanders

[Mai Strac]

First pictures scottish and cromwell cavalry

http://www.flickr.com/photos/37119735@N ... 309589246/

[Duron QelDroma]

Wow, these really look nice!

[Peter]

These are really made to stand in a square! Thanks for sharing!

[tom s]

cromwells cavalry has separate pieces?

[Uwe]

Nice figures, good sculpting. But still just another set of Napoleonic Highlanders...

I like the ECW cavalry!

cheers
uwe

[steve_pickstock]

First pictures scottish and cromwell cavalry

http://www.flickr.com/photos/37119735@N ... 309589246/

The Scots Officer is going to be very popular, but for the rest of the set - no marching figure?

As for the ECW cavalry - mixed. Overall very nice but there are some interesting aspects to these. Apart from the horses which seems to be stock Italeri/Waterloo poses, and I really wish the sculptor would look at real horses.

• I don't recall ever having seen any representation of ECW cavalry with saddle bags. I'm not saying they didn't have them all I'm saying is that I haven't seen them in Cruso or Cavendish or any other extant source. Even the wonderful Eduard Wagner doesn't show them. ECW and 30YW cavalry tended to fight set-piece battles and would get rid of 'baggage' before they went into action. Even when fighting raids outside of the campaigning season they didn't operate so far from their home bases that they needed saddle bags. Also not 100% convinced by the scalloped edge to the saddle cloth.
• Pistols - the figures are molded with the butts of the pistols towards them in the holsters. Pistol butts generally faced away from the rider as it's easier to draw the pistol from the holster by reaching over the horse's neck turning the wrist round so the back of the hand faced outwards and then draw the pistol.
• Skirts of the coats - too many and too fine folds. The equipment on these figures is based on the Littlecote house collection originally from Wiltshire and now in the Tower Armouries at Leeds. Alexander Popham's troopers were equipped with a helmet, corselet of back and breast plate, baldrick and carbine sling of buff unfinished leather and a buff coat. As here -
  
  the skirts of the coat are made of belt thickness leather - it doesn't fold the same way as cloth - in fact it doesn't really fold or crease at all, but it would allow the figures to be painted as wearing woolen coats (a buff-coat such as the one in the picture cost the same as a horse and not everyone wore one).
• Helmets - all the helmets have re-inforced 'pots' and are single bar face-guard zischagge style helmets. If these are supposed to be Cromwell's insides I would have expected a number of triple barred face-guards.
• Trumpeter and Cornet are both okay except painting the cornet is going to be difficult with it all folded like that.

Note Popham's Horse were exceptionally well equipped - I think there is a troop's worth of this equipment - so I have always taken it to mean that Popham had his troop very well equipped and other soldier's in his regiment were less so. And there is no reason to assume that Oliver Cromwell didn't do something similar but I would say that these figures are perhaps a bit too well equipped for the bulk of ECW and 30YW arquebusier style cavalry