COLOURS OF THE ENGLISH CIVIL WAR

This is a highly complex subject and these pages can only scratch the surface of the subject. To anyone wishing to take the subject further I cannot recommend too highly the Publication 'English Colours of Foot' by Peachey and Prince.

The illustrations are simplified and clear, but not designed with downloading and printing off for wargames units. Some excellent 25mm and 15mm full colour flags are included with the Forlorn Hope rules, and more can be found in the Forlorn Hope Yahoo groups file section. For those of you with the eminent good sense to use 6mm, then a comprehensive range is available through Baccus.

As with lots of things about the ECW this area is obscured by myth, romance, conjecture treated as fact and plain ignorance. To sum up the main points.

1. What we actually know in terms of primary evidence about ECW Colours is very little indeed.
2. The 'systems' that people in the past have used to 'reconstruct' colours are often wrong
2. or misplaced.
3. The colour of a regiment's coat did NOT dictate the field colour or vice versa.
4. The fact a Colour was borne by a particular regiment in one year is no guarantee as to what
4. was used in preceding or subsequent years.
5. Because of reductions or amalgamations a formation may have been carrying a range of
5. Colours with different fields and differencing.

To show you what I mean. Many secondary sources, (Haythornthwaite and Gush to name two) will give the example of this colour belonging to John Lamplugh's regiment of Newcastle's Army.



The source for this is Brigadier Peter Young's book on Marston Moor, which is the first time it appears. The Brigadier seems to have 'designed' this colour based on the following premises:

- The regiment is recorded as having flown a yellow colour.
- Lamplugh had a cross fleury on his coat of arms therefore would have
- used it as 'difference'.

A leap of faith then gives the above colour. Fine as a piece of guesswork, but it has subsequently appeared as hard evidence in every secondary work on the subject since.

Now given the paucity of hard information that we have on the subject, wargamers will be forced to 'construct' flags and probably use a similar logic. I have had to resort to this myself, and as the logic runs both ways, there is no real information to prove you wrong. But please be aware that many of the reconstructions used by modern books and especially re-enactment groups are just that - reconstructions based on theory, and not accurate representations of a known historical artefact. There is nothing inherently 'wrong' in using a construct like the one above, the problem comes when it becomes accepted as being 'real' as opposed to being made up.

What I will attempt to do is depict as large a section as I feel able to of the KNOWN Colours and place them by year and army. We occasionally get notice of a number of colours probably all taken from one regiment. In such cases I will normally illustrate one example only. We often get references to 'Red' or 'Blue' regiments. Where this is the case I will display a plain flag with St George's cross in canton.

Army	Period	Link
Essex's Army	1642-1644	>>>>click here
Oxford Army	1642-1645	>>>>click here
Waller's Armies	1642-1644	not available
Hopton's Armies	1642-1644	not available
Newcastle's Army	1643-1644	not available