Some New Ordinance

Another day and another retinue for the Lancastrian cause. 
And a couple of guns.

This time Lionel Welles, 6th Baron Welles has turned up to lend his support to King Henry VI and brought a pair of cannon with him, one of which came to me unexpectedly.

I did Welles' retinue a bit different to my previous retinues. Instead of doing a unit of bill & bow and a separate unit of dismounted men at arms I've just done a single unit of retinue with a few dismounted knights incorporated into the central base of billmen. This way I don't need a separate command base with Welles on it. I just included him in the unit itself.

I'll do a few more units like this. One of the bonuses of doing more units this way is that I can include more variety in the livery and banners and therefore...More colour! I'm quite happy with Welles' livery. I's not great but at arms length is looks nice and stands out. At this point, I think I'll be doing Sir Andrew Trollop next.

The Ordinance:

This first one is a Perry model that I ordered a couple of months back. Most folks interested in this era will be familiar with this piece. It's a nice little model and came out looking okay. As with all of my cannon I've given them a sort of generic look livery-wise so that they can be used with either Lancaster or York (when the time comes to start a Yorkist army).

The other cannon came to me on a recent visit to Eureka Miniatures. I haven't visited for a while and I was chatting with Nic and I mentioned that my current project is Wars of the Roses. Low and behold! He pulled out a tray full of WotR's figures that don't appear on the Eureka website. I bought a few figures, this gun, some horses and some other odds and ends.

This is a great model. The gun itself is cast very clean with great detail and was very easy to prep and paint. The crew are of varying quality from great to average.

The Master Gunner is a lovely figure and my painting doesn't do it justice. The guy with the cannon ball (doing the shot put) is a bit odd but has plenty of character. I like the bloke with the sponge, he looks like he emulating the boss just like a true toady would behave.

There is also a figure with a hand bellows and a fire. A nice figure to add interest. I took 4 different photo's of this model because most people will not have seen this piece before. I'm sure if you emailed Eureka to ask for it, you'd be able to get one of these models.

Thanks for reading. I'm working on something special for my next post.

Bye for now.

Ian KH