Last week I had the real pleasure of organising a tour of Parliament for more than a dozen young officers of the Coldstream Guards Regiment of the Household Division of the British Army.
The history of the Coldstream Guards and the Houses of Parliament goes hand in hand. The regiment itself is the oldest serving infantry regiment in the British Army and can trace its long and illustrious history back to the English Civil War, where Oliver Cromwell authorised Colonel George Monck to form the regiment which became part of Parliament’s New Model Army.
It was following the abdication of Oliver Cromwell’s son, Richard, in the year 1660 that the regiment began its association with the border settlement of Coldstream. At the end of the Interregnum Colonel Monck gave his support to the Restoration of the Monarchy and it was the river crossing at Coldstream the regiment used when it marched south to London from Scotland. A year later, on 14th February 1661 the regiment symbolically laid down its arms as part of the New Model Army and instantly took them up again as a Royal Regiment becoming The Lord General’s Regiment of Foot Guards and entered the service of the Crown as the second senior regiment after the 1st Regiment of Foot Guards, later known as the Grenadier Guards.
When Colonel Monck died in 1670, the Earl of Craven took command of the regiment and it adopted a new name, the Coldstream Regiment of Foot Guards, paying tribute to the crossing point between Scotland and England.
Since the Seventeenth Century the Coldstream Guards have been one of the most prestigious regiments of the British Army and have taken part in every major conflict in this country’s history from the English Civil War right through to the World Wars as well as recent conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.
I regularly arrange tours of Parliament, an extraordinary World Heritage Site, for many of my constituents and special guests, and I was honoured to meet these fine soldiers and show them around the Palace of Westminster.