I like being in the safety of MPSIMS, where no relevant fact is really never asked of me, only my addle-pated opinion on subjects like " What was the last movie you saw as a virgin?" (Answer: F*ck if I know)
Anyways, Welcome to Shirley’s Brain Fart Du Jour.
The Three or Four Musketeers. Everyone knows that they are french and they fought to save the King from Richelieu ( Charleton Heston before the NRA, but I digress.) Sword fights and gallantry, etc.
[Voice from the back of the room]" What the hell is your point, Shirley? "
Here is my question, in the the hell was the other “team” called. You know. The damn limey Brit Bastards. Obviously they were not Musketeers, as that name was already taken and they probably had to go by some other name ( O. Henry’s, The Paydays, yuck yuck)
But seriously, when the Musketeers would lay eyes on the british, how would they finish this sentance,
" Oh look, its the [insert name here] Time to go to work."
I could look this up, but frankly I will only get lost in the search and end up in some weird earl that has nothing to do with anything that I started out with.
I believe their main cinematic opponent was the Cardinal’s Guard, ie Cardinal Richelieu’s personal bodyguards. But like the King’s Musketeers, these soldiers were French not British.
PS - I’m still waiting for a Dumas film to cast Michael Palin as Richelieu.
Although Dumas played up their swordsmanship, they were called musketeers because they were armed with muskets. It’s a generic term and it would be perfectly possible for them to see their opponents and exclaim, “Mon Dieu! It’s those dirty rotten British musketeers back for more taunting!”
Then they would fart (petard) in their general direction.
In the book (pieces of dead tree pulp smeared with ink; people of my age may dimly remember these), the Musketeers’ (all of them, not just the three/four principal ones) main opponents were indeed named as Cardinal Richelieu’s Guards, at least the ones they were usually getting into brawls and duels with. That only happens twice in the book, though.
The Big Four also duel with four English gentlemen (who are not part of any permanent group, however, and therefore don’t have any collective name), and get involved with the Psycho Bitch from Hell™, Lady de Winter, whose checkered history eventually reveals her to be French (although she married an Englishman), and who arguably gives them more trouble than everyone else in the novel put together.
(N.B.: Richelieu wasn’t the sort of guy who anyone (in their right mind, anyway) would sit down and have a beer with, but he wasn’t quite as bad as Dumas makes him out to be. Tréville was no saint, either, but Dumas decided for dramatic reasons to give him a good spin, and Richelieu a bad one.)