Colonel Russell's regiment, being the King's own regiment of Guards, and raised specially for the protection of his person, obtained precedence not unnaturally of its earlier rival, and presently, by absorbing the handful of gallant men who had refused to surrender at Dunkirk Dunes, established its claim to represent the defeated cavaliers, as the Coldstream represent the victorious Roundheads, in the long contest of the Civil War. It is the regiment once called the First Guards, and now the Grenadier Guards, and it has known little of defeat since it ceased to fight against its countrymen.
The two troops of Life-Guards--the first the King's, commanded by Lord Gerard, the second the Duke of York's own--took precedence in like manner of Monk's Life-Guard; and after long existence as independent troops, blossomed at last into the First and Second regiments of Life-Guards that now stand at the head of our Army list. They were composed of men of birth and education, and for more than a century were rightly called gentlemen of the Life-Guards. Cromwell too had possessed such a guard, for he knew the value of gentlemen who had courage, honour, and resolution in them. Thus they stood apart from Lord Oxford's regiment of horse, which is still known to us from the colour of its uniform by its original name of the Blues. This corps was almost certainly made up of disbanded troopers of the New Model, of which there was no lack at that time in England;[203] while its colonel brought to it traditions of still earlier days in the honoured name of Vere.
But there was yet another regiment to be gathered in from the battlefield of Dunkirk Dunes, this time not from the defeated but from the victorious army. In view of the peril of the King from Vernier's insurrection, Lewis the Fourteenth was requested to restore to him the regiment of Douglas, the representative of the Scots Brigade of Gustavus Adolphus; and this famous corps, having duly arrived in the year 1662, became the Royal or Scots regiment, and took the place which it still occupies at the head of the infantry of the Line under the old title of the Royal Scots. It returned to France in 1662 and did not return permanently to the English service until 1670, but it retained its precedence and it retains it still.