This first volume will give the present designation, the past history, and the succession of Captains of the whole of the Companies of the seven Battalions formed during the last century and of the old troops of the Royal Horse Artillery. In the succeeding volumes, the same course will be pursued with regard to the later Battalions. These stories will be all the more precious now, as the importance of the Battery as a tactical unit has been so distinctly recognized by His Royal Highness the Duke of Cambridge within the last few months, and its responsibility and value as a command have been so recently and generously marked by the present Secretary of State for War. * * * * * The author does not pretend to underrate the difficulties of the task which he has undertaken—difficulties which cannot be realized by those who see merely these inadequate results of his labours. Not the least was the difficulty of knowing where to begin. The Regimental organization is comparatively recent; and had he confined his labours to the last one hundred and sixty years, his task would have been greatly lessened, and yet he might have said with literal truth that he had written a History of the Royal Artillery. But surely in any History worthy of the name there were antecedent circumstances which could not be left unnoticed, such as the circumstances which brought about the birth of the Regiment, the blunders and failures which marked the old system in England as wrong and foolish, and the necessity, which gradually dawned, of having in the country a _permanent_, instead of a _spasmodic_ force of Artillery. Repudiating, therefore, the notion that the Regiment's History should commence with its first parade, how far was he to penetrate in his antiquarian researches? There was a danger of wearying his reader, which had to be avoided fully as carefully as the risk of omitting necessary information, for a history—to be useful in awakening _esprit de corps_— should be _read_, not shelved as a work of reference. It is in this part of his labours that the author has to appeal for the greatest indulgence, because writing, as he has generally done, with all his documents and authorities round him for reference, he may unconsciously have omitted some details most necessary to the reader; or with some picture clearly present to his own mind as he wrote, he may have given light and shade which had caught his own fancy, and omitted the outlines without which the picture will be almost unintelligible.