The regiment that became the 33rd Foot was raised in 1702 by George Hastings, 8th Earl of Huntingdon, in and around Gloucester, to fight in the War of the Spanish Succession. Like other regiments of the day, it took its name from its colonel, so it began life as Huntingdon’s Regiment. It changed name each time the colonel changed, becoming Leigh’s, Duncanson’s and then Wade’s Regiment. George Wade, later a field marshal and famous for his military roads in Scotland, was colonel from 1705 to 1717.
Within months of being raised, the regiment joined the Duke of Marlborough’s army in Flanders. In 1704 it was sent to Portugal with the expedition supporting the Archduke Charles’s claim to the Spanish throne. In May 1705 it attacked the Spanish border town of Valencia de Alcántara, where its colonel, Robert Duncanson, was mortally wounded leading the assault. The regiment fought through the hard Iberian campaigns that followed, and at the disastrous Battle of Almanza in 1707 it suffered heavy losses, with the survivors taken prisoner. It had re-formed in Britain by 1710.
When the war ended, the regiment went to garrison Ireland in 1713. Like much of the army it was disbanded in March 1714, but it was raised again the following year. From 1715 it spent fifteen years in England, apart from a brief part in raids on the Spanish coast in 1719. A long tour of Ireland followed from 1730. Its colonels in these years included Henry Hawley (1717–1730), Robert Dalzell (1730–1739) and John Johnson (1739–1753).
In 1742 the regiment returned to the Continent for the War of the Austrian Succession. On 27 June 1743, at Dettingen, it fought in the army personally led by King George II, and it won its first battle honour there. In 1745 the Jacobite rising brought it home to face the rebellion in Scotland. By 1746 it was back in Flanders, and it fought at Rocoux in 1746 and Lauffeld in 1747.
From 1749 to 1753 the regiment garrisoned the island of Minorca. During this time, in 1751, the army stopped naming regiments after their colonels and numbered them by seniority instead. From then on the regiment was officially the 33rd Regiment of Foot.
The 33rd was in England when the Seven Years War began in 1756. In 1758 it took part in the raids on the French coast at St Malo and Cherbourg. That same year its second battalion became a regiment in its own right, the 72nd Foot. The 33rd itself then moved to Germany to join the allied army fighting the French. In 1760 a young lieutenant named James Webster joined the regiment. He would serve in it for the rest of his life.
In 1766 the 33rd got the colonel whose name would be tied to it for the next forty years: Charles, Earl Cornwallis. He remained colonel until 1805. In the early 1770s the regiment served again in Minorca and then in the West Indies. In April 1774 James Webster became its lieutenant colonel and took day-to-day command. Under him the 33rd became one of the best-trained and best-disciplined regiments in the British Army, and it would come to be called “The Pattern”: the standard other regiments should aim for. Its red coat with matching red facings and the officers’ silver lace marked it out on parade. This was the regiment that would sail for America with Cornwallis in early 1776.