I’ve been running a Peninsular War 1808 campaign based around Bailen for our club, and this has been a great opportunity to grow the ranks of my Spanish army. In my earlier posts I’ve shown pics of the units built around the excellent Battle Honours figures by Tony Barton. This post covers some of the Old Glory and Blue Moon figures I use. Click the photos for larger versions.

This battalion is mostly based on the Old Glory SPN3 Spanish Volunteer infantry pack – the gentlemen with the top hats. The kneeling figure to the right of the drummer is a wounded Mexican from the Blue Moon Alamo range. The leftmost chap in the rear rank is from the Battle Honours BBR5 Line infantry in campaign dress pack. Old Glory SPN1 Spanish Regulars has provided the soldier with a bicorne in the rear rank. The Old Glory figures suffer from extremely fragile bayonets, which luckily does not matter when one is portraying poorly equipped troops.

Here I’ve used some figures from the Blue Moon AWI range, 15AMR-45 Continentals Advancing, Assorted Dress and Hats (the figures at the righ, wearing floppy hats and tricornes). Most of these figures are perfectly fine for this period in my opinion, and even the leather jerkin some of the chaps wear does not look out of place amongst all the brown cloth.

I painted roughly 90 figures in one batch using three different brown colours but varying which peace of kit or clothing gets which shade. The figures were then dipped and some highlights were added. This created a mass of troops that have a bit of variety, but mostly looks, well… brown.

The next unit is an example of the one-off units I’m painting. These are the Regimiento de Buenos Aires, which was captured by the British before the Peninsular war, and repatriated with British kit to fight the French. They unfortunately ended up being decimated at the battle of Medina de Rioseco when French cavalry charged their flank. They also ended up being the scapegoat for that debacle. The flag with the silver corners is based on a modern reconstruction of their banner, which may or may not be accurate. The good thing with the Spanish is that you can always blame the lack of sources for your artistic decisions.

No Spanish army for the War of Independence would be complete without some sort of spiritual cheer-leader troupe. I rummaged around my boxes and found an old baggage element of Essex monks I painted maybe a decade ago for DBM Middle Franks. And off to war against Napoleon they went in their mobile “prayer-werfer” !