APPENDIX TO THE MARINE CORPS.
The following memoranda are appended to this narrative of the services of the Royal Marines, in order to show the relative positions in which the Marine regiments were placed, in respect to rank and precedence, with the regiments of Infantry, during the period the Marine regiments were borne on the establishment of the regular army, and the ground on which the present corps of Royal Marines have been authorised, when acting with the infantry of the line, to take their station next to the Forty-ninth regiment, according to the date of their formation in the year 1755, as shown in the following pages.
The rank of the several regiments of the British army was first regulated by a Board of General Officers assembled in the Netherlands, by command of King William III., on the 10th June, 1694.
Another Board of General Officers was assembled by order of Queen Anne, in 1713, to decide on the rank and precedence of regiments raised subsequently to 1694.
A third Board was assembled, by command of King George I., in 1715, for the same purpose.
These Boards recommended that English regiments raised in England, should take rank from the dates of their formation, and that English, Scots, and Irish regiments, raised for the service of a foreign power, should take rank from the dates of their being placed on the English establishment.
The Numerical Titles of regiments, as fixed on the principle laid down in the reports of the Boards of General Officers, above alluded to, were confirmed by the warrant issued by authority of King George II., dated 1st July, 1751,—and also by the warrant of King George III., dated 19th December, 1768, previously to which periods regiments were generally designated by the names of their Colonels.
1. The principle on which the Numerical Titles of regiments were fixed, having been thus established by Royal authority, the regiments of infantry which had been formed by King Charles II., on his Restoration to the Throne in 1660, and those which had been subsequently raised in the reigns of King James II. and of William III., were numbered according to the dates of being placed on the English establishment,—from the First, or Royal, regiment to the Twenty-seventh regiment.
2. The regiments of infantry, which had been added to the army in the reign of Queen Anne from the year 1702, and retained on the establishment after the Peace of Utrecht in 1713, commenced with the Twenty-eighth, and ended with the Thirty-ninth regiment.