Small national contingents are always fun to do, regardless of the period. They help to break up the monotony of painting the ‘main players’ and they also add a bit of fun to scenarios when they’re exceptionally good or exceptionally bad. I’ve always been very partial to a ‘minor player’, be it the various Confederation of the Rhine contingents and foreign legions of Napoleon’s Grande Armée, or the ultimate expression of the type, the Reichsarmee; an entire army of ‘minor players’! Consequently, the tiny Army of Schaumburg-Lippe-Bückeburg was an absolute ‘must have’ for my ‘Western Allied’ army of the Seven Years War.

Friedrich Wilhelm Ernst Graf zu Schaumburg-Lippe (1759)
As it happens, life did imitate art in this in instance, as Frederick William Ernst Count of Schaumburg-Lippe (Friedrich Wilhelm Ernst Graf zu Schaumburg-Lippe in German, commonly known as William/Wilhelm) deliberately made his contingent ‘essential’ to the Allied effort against France.
The future Count of Schaumburg-Lippe was born on 9th January 1724 in London, to Countess Margarete Gertrud von Oyenhausen, the illegitimate daughter of King George I, making him the grandson of the King, who recognised him as such and attended his christening at the Chapel of St James’ Palace.
The young William was the younger of two brothers and was educated in Germany, Switzerland, the Netherlands and France, before commencing his military career as a Cadet and then Ensign in the British Life Guards. He excelled in his academic and military studies and spoke five languages fluently, though in 1742 his overseas education was cut short as he was forced to return home to Bückeburg Castle, following the death of his older brother George William in a duel.

Friedrich Wilhelm Ernst Graf zu Schaumburg-Lippe (1770)
With William now the sole surviving heir, his father (then a general officer in the service of the Netherlands who had previously served with the Prussian Army during the Wars of Spanish and Polish Succession) wanted to keep him close at hand and so in 1743 brought him on campaign during the War of Austrian Succession, where he experienced combat at the Battle of Dettingen. In 1745, William was commissioned into Imperial service as a volunteer and fought in Italy under the Duke of Lobkowitz.
On 25th October 1748 (seven days after the formal end of the War of Austrian Succession), William’s father died and the title of Count of Schaumburg-Lippe passed to William. However, he didn’t remain in his county for long, instead joining the service of the freshly-victorious King Frederick II of Prussia in order to gain further military experience from the greatest warrior-king of the age. While there he also became friends with Voltaire and also found time to travel to Austria and Hungary.
Being very much a ‘Man of the Enlightenment’, Count William became a talented engineer, specialising in the design of fortifications and artillery systems. He knew that Schaumburg-Lippe’s tiny army could not hope to operate independently, so it was utterly pointless to follow the traditional pattern of building a balanced force of horse, foot and guns. He needed to make Schaumburg-Lippe essential to a coalition and to that end uniquely established his army as being primarily a corps of artillery. The Schaumburg-Lippe artillery system (especially the 12-pounders) was regarded as absolutely superb. He also established a military academy, where all young officers were to be trained first as artillerymen (among his graduates during the 1770s was a young Hanoverian by the name of Gerhard Johann David von Scharnhorst, who would become the architect of the reformed Prussian Army following the disaster of 1806 and who cited his experiences at the Schaumburg-Lippe Military Academy as being among the primary drivers of his own military theories).
Consequently, when war was once again imminent, Count William was commissioned into the Hanoverian Army with the rank of Generalfeldzeugmeister (equivalent of full General of artillery, engineers or infantry) and appointed as commander of the Hanoverian artillery arm. Following his brilliant handling of the artillery at Minden, he was appointed by Prince Ferdinand of Brunswick to take overall command of all Allied artillery. This appointment paid off at Warburg the following year, when Count William’s superb handling of the British light artillery (where they essentially acted as horse artillery) gave tremendous support to the Marquess of Granby’s great cavalry attack.

Granby’s attack at Warburg, 1760, supported by Count William’s British artillery acting as ‘gallopers’.
The only other elements of Count William’s army were the single-battalion Bückeburg Infantry Regiment (whose primary task would be to defend the guns in the field), a small Corps of Engineers and Miners, two companies of Grenadiers (tasked as headquarters and baggage guards) and the ‘Corps of Carabiniers’ (tasked with engaging in the Petit-Guerre of scouting and raiding; the Grenadiers were also sometimes used to support the Carabiniers in the field). The Carabiniers were divided into the small, esoterically-uniformed squadron of Horse-Carabiniers (of two companies) and the even smaller company of rifle-armed Foot-Carabiniers, more commonly referred to as Jäger.

(Note that the light blue colour of the artillery uniforms shown here by Richard Knötel is wrong and should be dark blue – see the contemporary plate at the top of this article)
In 1762, the Seven Years War was about to spill over into Portugal. With the Portuguese Army in a dire state of neglect, the Portuguese Prime Minister, the Marqes de Pombal, requested that its long-standing ally Great Britain send an experienced soldier to take command and reform the army and Portugal’s defences. The officer would also need to have the authority to command the British troops who would form part of the army. King George III offered his cousin, Count William of Schaumburg-Lippe for the role. Pombal accepted the offer, appointed Count William to the post of Generalissimus (supreme commander of the army) and commissioned him with the Portuguese rank of Marechal-General.
Count William found his task to be severely complicated by the fact that a considerable number of senior Portuguese officers were illiterate, discipline was almost non-existent and desertion was rife. However, he set to work with his customary energy, concentrating the army in a training camp at Abrantes and establishing a new Portuguese Military Academy to educate its officers. He also set to work re-designing and improving Portugal’s fixed defences, most notably at Elvas. All this work, conducted in a remarkably short space of time, paid off during the period August-November 1762, when Spain finally launched its attack. Although there were no major pitched battles during what would be known as the Guerra Fantástica, three Spanish invasion attempts were repulsed before the Convention of Versailles ended the war. Count William returned to Germany and in gratitude, was appointed by King George III to the British rank of Field Marshal.
It’s interesting that history repeated itself during the Napoleonic Wars, when Portugal engaged the services of Sir William Beresford to once again reform, reorganise and lead the Army of Portugal (although on that occasion, Sir Arthur Wellesley was appointed as Generalissimus).
After the war, Count William was widely and justly regarded as one of the foremost authorities on artillery, fortification and military theory and he finally found the time to get married in 1765 and to have a daughter in 1771. However, tragedy soon followed, with his daughter dying as an infant in 1774 and his wife dying in 1776. Count William himself died a short time afterwards, on 10th September 1777.
I must however confess that I haven’t yet painted a figure for Count William as senior artillery commanders are rarely represented on table, though I definitely will ready for when we finally play our ‘full fat’ version of Minden. But then there’s the question of what uniform to paint him in… The 1759 portrait at the top of this article shows him wearing what appears to be a version of his own Bückeburg Infantry Regimental uniform, though with gold buttons instead of the stipulated silver. It might alternatively be a Prussian or Brunswick uniform. His sash is silver, shot through with yellow or gold threads, matching the type worn by Brunswick officers (I’ve never found any description of a sash worn by Shaumburg-Lippe officers) and he wears the orange riband and breast-star of the Prussian Order of the Black Eagle. He also wears a very fashionable buff waistcoat and black breeches, both of which were de-rigeur among German noblemen of the time, in imitation of Frederick the Great.
The second, much later 1770 portrait seems to be his own fanciful design, featuring a red coat and smallclothes, all heavily laced in gold with buff turnbacks and decorated with the breast-star of the Prussian Order of the Black Eagle and an unidentified (presumably Portuguese) order of chivalry at his throat. This red uniform was probably designed to reflect his rank as a British and Hanoverian Field Marshal, though Britain had by then regulated general officers’ uniforms and they looked nothing like this! Most wargames figures I’ve seen of the great man use this later red uniform, but I think that the blue uniform would probably be the more likely mode of dress during the Seven Years War.
[In case you were wondering, the title is a reference to the BBC comedy series Blackadder, where Edmund Blackadder greets his Scottish Highlander cousin MacAdder, asking “And how is that might army, the Clan MacAdder?”, who replies “Aye, they’re both well.”]
Above: So here it is; the Mighty Army of Schaumburg-Lippe-Bückeburg on parade! 🙂 I’ve painted one 12-pounder battery, two 6-pounder batteries (each represented by a single model gun and crew) and the Bückeburg Infantry Regiment, as that is pretty much their maximum level of participation in any battle! The Grenadiers and Carabinier-Corps simply didn’t participate in any major battles and in any case, are too small to be represented at this organisational scale, so there’s no point in my painting them (not that there are any suitable figures for the Horse-Carabiniers in any case).
Above: I actually covered the Bückeburg Infantry Regiment in an earlier article on my Hanoverian infantry, but I’ve since changed the light blue Colonel’s Colour, in line with more recent research published in the excellent Kronoskaf article on the regiment.
Above: The Schaumburg-Lippe-Bückeburg Artillery wore a very simple uniform of a dark blue coat and breeches, with black ‘Swedish’ cuffs and neck-stock, red turnbacks, white ‘metal’, white waistcoat (also described as buff), white belts, a black belly-box and an unlaced hat with black cockade and white metal button. The Corps of Engineers & Miners wore exactly the same uniform, with the addition of a black collar. I’ve used part of my still-massive stash of Old Glory 15s Austrian gunners, as they’re perfect for the job.
For the guns I’ve used a couple of spare Old Glory 15s guns for the 6-pounders and a Eureka Miniatures Prussian 12-pounder. The historical carriage-colour is uncertain, but at Bückeburg Castle there is still an original Schaumburg-Lippe 12-pounder on its carriage, which is painted grey-white with black-painted iron fittings and apparently has been for generations, so that seems reasonable to assume that this was the original colour.
Anyway, that was a surprisingly large article for such a small army…
In the meantime, the lads and I have been playing more 1809 and I’ve been painting AB Figures Austrians like a man possessed, intending to play Aspern-Essling later in the year (I’ve painted the entire Austrian II Corps in just the last month and just have one more regiment each of German and Hungarian infantry, three dragoon regiments and some Austrian generals left to paint). However, a family tragedy sadly meant that our Marshal Bessières was unable to continue our Neumarkt game for the time being, so Andy and I broke out my Napoleonic ‘Reserve Collection’ and instead played yet another 1809 engagement; the Battle of Teugn-Hausen. A full scenario and battle-report will follow soon…