[naturalman1975]

Earlier tonight my FReeper friend informed me that the guards in England with the tall, fuzzy black hats are called the Grenadier Guards.

Well, seeing your are learning history and seem to be enjoying it, I'll add to that.

Some of the guards in England with the tall, fuzzy black hats (called the Bearskin, sometimes mistakenly called the Busby (which is a smaller hat)) are Grenadier Guards.

Others are Coldstream Guards, Scots Guards, Irish Guards, and Welsh Guards, and together they make up the five Guards Regiments or the Foot Guards (for a brief period during the First World War, there was a sixth Foot Guard Regiment, the Machine Gun Guards).

All five regiments wear the same red coat and bearskin uniform as their dress uniform, although they have slight differences (different badges, different coloured plumes in the bearskins and famously the buttons on the front are worn differently - Grenadiers wear their buttons singly, Coldstream Guards in pairs, Scots Guards in groups of three, Irish Guards in groups of four, and the Welsh Guards in Groups of five.)

[beaversmom]

Thanks! Found a Wiki link:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foot_Guards

My brain overfloweth tonight. :)

[X Fretensis]

Supposedly, the bearskins were picked up as souviners by the Grenadiers after they defeated Napoleon’s Old Guard at Waterloo. After the battle they were granted the privilege to wear them as part of the Grenadier uniform. That is the legend anyway.

[wally_bert]

Thank you for the education.