Jonkoping Regiment and Magnus Stenbock

The basing department has come up trumps again with another unit. More on the workbench for her but the first of these is a Swedish infantry regiment, Jonkopings. This is an early war unit with a distinctive Karpus, black front plate piped white. For a change all of the figures are from a single range, in this case from the Warfare miniatures range of figures. Despite all the advice that the grenadiers didnt wear their mitres on campaign I could not resist adding these, sorry!

Jonkopings were a provincial infantry unit recruited from Swedes in a  particular county (Jonkoping is in the South of Sweden) and fought in some of the larger battles so are a really useful unit, as a bonus I already had the flag too, which again is very colourful and again is from Warfare miniatures. They fought in the Polish campaign against the Saxo-Poles and Russians and then accompanied Charles into Russia to fight at Poltava, re-raised they fought again at Helsingborg under Stenbock and later at Stralsund.

Photography not quite as good as usual for some reason so apologies. Above shot from above showing the Virtual three ranks I try to achieve with the basing.

I particularly like the pikeman to the right leaning nonchalantly on his pike waiting for something to happen.

Close ups can be a little unforgiving, especially as I find the Warfare figures fine features dont always suit my painting style (or should that be ability?)

Alongside the Jonkopings let me introduce General Magnus Stenbock. Again a Warfare miniature, I have pinched a generals horse from the earlier grand alliance range as its suitably heroic.

Stenbock was a general with a good record, defeating the Danes at Helsingborg (along with the Jonkopings regiment above) before defeating another much larger force of Danes and Saxons at Gadesbusch in Northern Germany.

I do like this model which is why I did it first out of the pack of three, again though I am not sure I have done it justice entirely. Still it looks OK.

The model is based on a famous painting of Stenbock leading his hastily raised troops to victory at Helsingborg, the painting has blue saddle cloth and holsters, but another image from nearer the time shows these as yellow and as they look more striking I have gone with this.

We have a game tonight so hopefully both of these will see action and I can report back to you at the weekend with how the game went.

I also hope to share the finished Livonians before I break up for my Summer holiday, the basing department promises them middle of next week so just in time. This year I have a cunning plan. The finance department has wanted a cruise for a while now, which I have not been sure about. So I agreed as long as it was a Baltic cruise. Yes I will be visiting the seat of the Great Northern War as a "favour" to my wife!

I will share some of the thoughts on where we might go whilst there. Limited of course by timings of the cruise liner.

Thanks for reading, see you all soon.