The Royal Fuzileers were raised in 1685 at the Tower of London to act as guards to the train of artillery. Fusils were, during the seventeenth and eighteenth century, light muskets. Originally, fusilier soldiers were armed with fusils instead of matchlock or flintlock muskets. Fusilier regiments were composed of soldiers armed only with fusils, unlike line regiments which comprised both musketmen and pikemen.
During the first century of its existence, the Royal Fuzileers used the archaic form of spelling of the word fusilier which I have used throughout this website. The modern spelling fusilier was not formally adopted until the late 1780s. Upon reaching the history of the Regiment from the beginning of the French Revolutionary Wars, I shall begin using the modern spelling.
The Royal Fuzileers were the seventh line infantry regiment by seniority in the British Army, and thus were also called the 7th Regiment of Foot. This title persisted until 1881.
The Regiment served in the European campaigns under Marlborough and throughout the early to mid-eighteenth century. It was granted a battle honour for its participation in the Siege of Namur in 1695.
The Revolutionary War:
While under the colonelcy of General Lord Robert Bertie, the Royal Fuzileers were posted to the Colony of Quebec in 1773. They were intended to replace the 8th (King's) Regiment which had been part of the Colony's garrison since the early 1760s. However, with civil disorder in Massachusetts, the Governor General, Sir Guy Carleton, retained both regiments so that he could send two regiments to Boston to reinforce that City's garrison. The 7th Royal Fuzileers, the 8th King's, and the 26th Regiment (the Cameronians), formed the garrison of Quebec at the beginning of the Revolutionary War in 1775.
Nine of ten companies of the Regiment were captured at Fort St. John, Fort Chambly, and Montreal in the autumn of 1775. The remaining company formed the only regular unit in the garrison of the City of Quebec during the siege of 1775 to 1776.
In May, 1776, the rebel garrison of Iles-des-Cedres surrendered to a largely native army under the command of Captain George Forster of the 8th (King's) Regiment. As part of the surrender terms, the rebels entered a convention in which they agreed to exchange prisoners on a man-for-man basis. The intention was to exchange captured rebels for the men of the 7th and 26th Regiments taken in 1775. However, the rebel Congress dishonestly repudiated the convention and tried to avoid complying. Eventually the prisoners from the Royal Fuzileers were released in December, 1776 in exchange for rebels captured in the 1776 campaigns around New York City.
The Regiment was reformed at New York City and made up from the survivors of the Quebec Siege, the exchanged prisoners, and new drafts from Britain and other regiments. At the same time, General Lord Robert Bertie conveyed the colonelcy to Lieutenant General Richard Prescott.
In 1777, the Regiment was sent to reinforce the British garrison of Philadelphia. It arrived in time to participate in General Sir Henry Clinton's withdrawl across New Jersey to New York, and fought at the Battle of Monmouth Courthouse in June, 1778. For the remainder of 1778 and 1779, the Regiment formed part of the garrison of New York.
In 1780, a large British army under the command of General Sir Charles Cornwallis sailed from New York and besieged and captured the City of Charleston in the Colony of South Carolina. The Regiment served with this army and throughout the Southern Campaigns, but suffered heavy casualties at the Battle of Cowpens in January, 1781. The survivors of the Battle were sent back to New York City, but the shattered regiment was never successfully reformed until after it returned to England in 1783.
Garrison Duty:
Upon their return to England, the Royal Fuzileers saw their name formalized as the 7th Regiment of Foot (Royal Fusiliers), and in 1788 the colonelcy was conveyed to His Royal Highness Prince Edward, the Duke of Kent. The Duke of Kent was the third son of King George III and was the father of Queen Victoria. He held the rank of Field Marshal in the British Army, and was also a Knight of the Garter. An aficionado of military uniforms, HRH the Duke of Kent quickly enacted strict uniform regulations which resulted in the Royal Fusiliers becoming one of the smartest-uniformed and most fashionable regiments in the Army.
In 1789, the Regiment was sent to join the Gibraltar garrison and the following year, it returned to garrison Quebec. While in the Canadas, a second battalion was formed. The first battalion remained in the Canadas until 1806, when it returned to Europe to participate in the Napoleonic Wars. The second battalion returned to Europe in 1809.
With Wellington in the Peninsula:
The Royal Fusiliers returned to a Europe that was fundamentally different than it had been when they had left. The French Revolution had evolved into a dynastic war in which Napoleon Bonaparte, a general of singular military genius, attempted to extend his family's domination of France to the rest of Europe. State after state had been overwhelmed by his armies, and monarchs who had considered Bonaparte to be a disreputable Corsican adventurer found themselves negotiating humiliating peace treaties with him.
The British Army entered the fray against Bonaparte in the Iberian Peninsula. Britain sent an army to support England's oldest ally, Portugal, and to assist Spanish nationalists. An open rebellion had begun in Spain after Bonaparte deposed the Spanish king and replaced him with his brother, Joseph Bonaparte. The original British army, led by Sir John Moore, was badly defeated. It fought through a vicious retreat against Bonaparte's armies, but survived to defend Lisbon. After Moore's death, a new British general was sent to replace Moore. He was Anglo-Irish and had learned his trade fighting the French and their allies in India. He was Arthur Wellesley, not yet the Duke of Wellington.
After serving with expeditionary forces which captured the Danish city of Copenhagen in 1807 and the French island colony of Martinique in 1809, the Royal Fusiliers joined Wellesley's army and campaigned throughout the Peninsula. The Regiment was subsequently awarded a battle honour for the Martinique campaign.
In the Peninsula, the two battalions of the Regiment served together with a battalion of the 23rd Royal Welch Fusiliers in the famed Fusilier Brigade. The Regiment gained battle honours at Talavera (1809), Busaco (1810), Albuera (1811), the siege of Badajos (1811), the siege of Ciudad Rodrigo (1812), Salamanca (1812), Vittoria (1813), Roncesvalles (1813), San Sebastien (1813), Orthes (1814) and Toulouse (1814).
New Orleans:
After the Battle of Toulouse, Bonaparte capitulated to the mass armies of his Russian, Prussian, Austrian and British enemies. Deposed and sent to the Mediterranean island of Elba, Bonaparte's career seemed to be finished and the Bourbon dynasty was returned to the throne of France. The British government wasted little time in dispatching large numbers of British regiments to North America, where modest British armies had been defending the colonies of Upper Canada and Lower Canada from the expansionist ambitions of the United States. The 7th Royal Fusiliers were sent to form part of a joint naval and military expedition intended to capture the port of New Orleans, a city which had been French, then Spanish, and had only become part of the United States as recently as 1803.
This expedition was intended to seal the fate of the American war effort. The Americans had been repeatedly defeated in the field in the Canadas and further humiliated with the capture and burning of Washington D.C. in 1814. The British Government saw the capture of New Orleans as an opportunity to pick up a strong bargaining chip in the peace negotiations which were slowly attempting to end the War. Regrettably, the expedition was neither strong enough in terms of naval forces nor in terms of military forces to capture the City, but were large enough that their defeat would be a major victory for American arms.
Unknown to the forces on the ground, a peace treaty was signed in the Belgian City of Ghent on Christmas Eve, 1814. Shortly afterwards, the British Army under the command of Major General Sir Edward Pakenham attempted to storm American entrenchments outside New Orleans. The British Army was defeated and suffered heavy casualties, including Pakenham himself. Of all the regiments, the Royal Fusiliers were least engaged. As a result of the defeat, the Royal Navy conducted a skillful evacuation, leaving the American army under General Andrew Jackson in control of New Orleans. It was the last battle of the War of 1812, and one of the few major American victories.
Waterloo:
The Royal Fusiliers returned to Europe, where in March Bonaparte had escaped from Elba and returned to Paris. The French Army sent to arrest him defected to him instead, and Bonaparte was restored to the French throne. As quickly as his armies rejoined him, Bonaparte's enemies returned to the field against him. He was defeated at Waterloo by Wellington and the Prussian General Blucher in June, 1815. The Royal Fusiliers arrived in Europe too late to participate in the battle, although their old comrades from the Fusiliers Brigade, the 23rd Royal Welch Fusiliers, won the battle honour for Waterloo.
