The British Grenadiers
musical composition
"The British Grenadiers" is a traditional marching song of British and Commonwealth military units whose badge of identification features a grenade, the tune of which dates from the 17th century. It is the regimental quick march of the Royal Artillery (since 1716), the Corps of Royal Engineers (since 1787), the Honourable Artillery Company (since 1716), the Grenadier Guards (since 1763), and the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers (since 1763). It is also an authorized march of the Royal Australian Artillery, the Royal Gibraltar Regiment, the Royal Regiment of Canadian Artillery, the Canadian Grenadier Guards, the Royal Regiment of Canada, and the Princess Louise Fusiliers. The standard orchestration for the military band was approved in 1762, when the Royal Artillery Band (initiated in 1557) became recognized officially, and for all other "grenade" regiments in 1763, when the remaining unofficial bands gained official status.
History
The exact origins of the tune are disputed but generally date to the early 17th century. It appears in John Playford's 1728 collection of dance tunes as "The New Bath", while Victorian musicologist William Chappell also suggested links to a 1622 work called "Sir Edward Nowell's Delight". The debate is best summarised by the composer Ernest Walker in 1907 who described the melody as "three centuries' evolution of an Elizabethan tune".
The melody was introduced into Great Britain as a military march during the 1689–1702 reign of William III and has similarities with one written for Prince John William of Friesland (1687–1711). Henry Grattan Flood suggested as another candidate the 1672 Dutch march "Wilhelmus van Nassouwe", which in turn was a reworking of a French version from 1568.
"The British Grenadiers" refers to grenadiers in general, not the Grenadier Guards Regiment, and all Fusilier units were entitled to use it.
“The British Grenadiers” enters the record as musical composition. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what British, Grenadiers and musical can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 17, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q999793. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1716, 1787, 1763 and 1762.
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This entry incorporates text from “The British Grenadiers” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.