From MikeW: 28mm Louis XIV French Infantry Regiment - Late 17th Century

I am so pleased to have gotten this regiment done! They seem to have been on my work bench for weeks, waiting for me to get time to paint and finish them off.

As such, I realised how much I enjoy having time to paint miniatures and when that time gets squeezed, even when it is for very good reasons, it soon gets frustrating.

The full, 28 figure, regiment, in line of battle

Anyway I have done a number of similar french regiments in the past but during these lock down times I was scrambling to be able to pull together enough figures to enable me to field this unit.

This group of models represent Regiment Plessis-Prasin, which was formed in 1616 and was thus named in 1650, after August 1682 this the regiment was known as Regiment Poitou. As with most regiments of this period, and as with every country, they were named after their Colonel.

All the figures are from the North Star 1672 range, except for a single Dixon Miniature's pike man. At first I thought that its no good, I can't possibly have one figure taking a knee to receive cavalry whilst everyone else is standing at the ready.

Pike men on 2 x Half Bases, I'm guessing you can see the odd man out mentioned above!
Typically Dixon figures are a quite a lot shorter than the North Star figures,
this pose however, is the exception they are very comparable.

Then I remembered a story told to me by a couple of friends, Mike & Phil, who participated in English Civil War re-enactments, they'd dragged another mutual friend, John, along as a 'birthday treat'. During the height of the re-enactment, John and the guys were standing at the ready with their pikes, looking about and John spied a troop of enemy horse approaching them at a good pace.

He tried to tell the guys around him what was happening but as he was a 'newbie' they all ignored him, they were looking the other way, within moments the troop of horse were on them!

So my explanation for this one figure being at the ready to receive horse is that he has either misheard an order or he has seen what is coming and decided to protect himself.....

One wing of the regiment with musketeers, pike & command

And the other wing

So these figures were undercoated white and then given a grey base coat. Leggings, cuffs and linings were all blue so that made things relatively simple. I did add in a few guys with grey stockings to break-up the uniformity a little.

Hats were also grey - either light or dark grey and a few have black hats, again to reduce uniformity, all had blue hat ribbons.

Shaded using Army Painter Dark one Dip and then matt varnished with Windsor Newton's Acrylic Medium.

Command elements, each on a half stand,
enabling mix and match of command elements when fielding different regiments of the period,
flags can also be swapped in case I want to redeploy the regiment as another one

Officers, as was their want at the time, wore pretty much what the liked, so a variety of colours here with a few nods to the grey and blue uniforms of the rank and file. Drummers either wore reverse colours or wore the King's livery, I could not find reference to how this was done in the historical regiment so have gone for reverse colours. 

The Kings livery was blue coat and red leggings, cuffs and linings so if my guess proves to be wrong - it can easily be changed

Frontal view of musketeer base, 4 figures on a 40x40mm base

Another frontal view, highlighting the business end of the muskets

Rear view of a musketeer base

I decided to do all the pole-arms with this regiment as painted, parade ground items, obviously on campaign as shafts get broken and repaired they would be a natural wood colour. Not so here...

Two more half bases of pikemen - all at the ready.

A quick plug for the SYW Templates Blog site, they provide free to use flags for the SYW period - luckily for my purposes the french used the same flags in this earlier period as well.

Free to use standards, click for link