The Highlands and Islands of Scotland

by A. R. Hope Moncrieff

There need be little doubt that the costume would be modified to military exigencies on the raising of the Highland regiments between the rebellions of 1715 and 1745. The kilt of those days appears to have been more “cutty,” giving greater freedom to the limbs than now, when it ought to touch the knee-cap, and its wet edge may cause sore rubs on unhardened skin, as poor John Brown found when, for once in a way, sent out walking in his philabeg livery. The sporran, used as a pouch, may originally have been an apron for decency’s sake, and took its present showy form in military trappings. Rob Roy’s is said to have been armed with a pistol that would go off in hands trying to open it without knowing the trick. A “snuff-mill” is mentioned as one of the appendages in Georgian days. The broad bonnet, apparently a Flemish importation, belonged to Lowland as well as Highland Scotland; its ornamental border of dice is said to come from the fesse chequée in the Stuart arms, and to have been introduced as a Cavalier distinction from the plain blue bonnets of the Roundheads. All over Scotland, too, was worn the plaid, now shrunk in military use to little more than an ornament of the “garb of old Gaul,” but in its full size capable of mantling the body from head to heels. The ostrich plumes of Highland regiments are, of course, modern excrescences, yet developed from the feathers that marked the rank of chief and duinewassal. The ribbons behind the bonnet are vain survivals of appendages which had a practical use in tightening or loosening it, and might be drawn down as ear-flaps. But the clansmen of old time probably went bare-headed, as barefoot but for thin brogues of hide, that made no pretence of being waterproof, and soon wore out upon metalled roads. Your wild Highlandman was sure to carry a dirk, like a butcher’s knife, with as many other lethal weapons as he could come by; and if he had no buskins in which to stick his skene-dhu, he might keep it handy in his sleeve or a fold of his plaid. Silver buttons, Stewart of Garth says, were worn by those who had them, with the purpose of providing means for a decent funeral in very probable case of need. As to the gewgaws that now go with this dress, they must have been very exceptional when Burt describes a Highlander’s plaid as commonly fastened by something like a fork or a skewer. The same writer dwells on bare limbs frequently disfigured by itch as a most unromantically displeasing feature of a costume which he, for his part, found “far from acceptable to the eye.”

After Culloden, the wearing of the Highland dress was strictly prohibited, the clansmen stripped of their beloved tartans along with their arms. But it proved as ill to take the kilt as the breeks off a Highlander. This attempt against half-national sentiment only went to endear to the Celt his airy chequered garb; and the courts had to deal with knotty cases like that of a mountaineer who stitched up his kilt in the middle and pleaded that such a divided skirt met the requirements of the law. Likely young men caught in the kilt were handed over to the regiments in which they could wear it unblamed. There is one comic case of a negro lad taken up for displaying the tartan livery of his master, in which he may have resembled that battalion of Hindoo Highlanders whom the Guicowar of Baroda provided with pink silk fleshings as groundwork for their exotic array. Perhaps Humphrey Clinker is not to be taken as a sober authority, on which we learn that when condemned to breeches by Act of Parliament, “the majority wear them, not in their proper places, but on poles, or long staves, over their shoulders.” The law seems not to have been thoroughly enforced over the Highlands, and it became a dead letter before being repealed, when the Pretender took to swilling himself out of any risk of heroism. Now it’s

Up wi’ the bonny blue bonnet,

The kilt and the feather and a’!

But at that time the philabeg was as the smock frock of an English peasant. One would affectionately remonstrate with Mr. Neil Munro, who, in the seventeenth century, makes a gently-born hero “put on his kilt for town.” A chief or gentleman commonly wore trews of tartan, as Prince Charlie did at Edinburgh, where on one occasion his “Highland garb” is reported as including “red velvet breeches”; and Waverley assumed the Highlander in trews to the approval of his mentor, the Baron of Bradwardine. Much farther back, for an excursion into the Highlands, “FitzJames” had equipped himself with three ells of Highland tartan at 4s. 4d. the ell, “to be hose to the king’s grace”; and there is reason to suppose that the wearing of the trews was common in his day. In the same century we have a note of “breekis” supplied to Argyll’s son, whose pedagogue seems to have gone gowned in a plaid, as became humbler station. A kilt, indeed, does not lend itself to horsemanship. The supporters of Highland coats of arms are sometimes represented as wearing one the kilt (occasionally marked as the “servile” dress), the other trews, which latter Mr. David MacRitchie (Scottish Historical Review, July 1904) insists on as the true form of Celtic garb, handed down from the most ancient times, and would have proud Sassenachs know that they took the use as the name of trousers from the race they despised as half naked. Quoting Defoe, who describes trews-wearing Highland soldiery as “like a regiment of merry Andrews ready for Bartholomew Fair,” he boldly suggests that Harlequin may belong to the clan of Celtic jugglers. But this writer appears a true Celt in his love for lost causes and costumes. When bayonets began to prick tartans, at all events, a belted plaid was the common wear of henchmen and gillies: in the Lowlander’s eyes, as Macaulay says, the dress of a thief. And even a smart thief’s sweetheart could boast of her Gilderoy—

He never wore a Hieland plaid,

But costly silken clothes!

Highlanders of rank living among their dependants would sometimes affect the popular garment, as an English squire may show himself in corduroys; and queer figures they would have cut to our eyes, when arrayed in what Boswell took for the true style of a Highland gentleman, “purple camlet kilt, a black waistcoat, a short green cloth coat bound with gold cord, a yellowish bushy wig, a large blue bonnet with a gold thread button.” Even the clergy in the far north occasionally vested themselves in the philabeg; an Anglican bishop has struck Highlanders with surprise as one who superfluously wore both kilt and trews, though not in the blue and white pattern recognised as the clerical tartan.

In our time the fashion has swung round; and it is the Scottish aristocracy who now cherish a dress in which youngsters look so well, while unwise strangers too are tempted to bedeck themselves in such unfamiliar gauds. I shall never forget the figure an old friend of mine used to cut, who died a bearded Uhlan before the walls of Paris, but in youth was moved to assume grand-maternal tartans as setting for the typical aspect of a German student, round smooth face, gold spectacles, long straight hair, and all. I have seen an Italian prince, too, in this disguise, but thus he made no model for Salvator Rosa. If a foreigner take to the “garb of old Gaul,” it is seldom he can live up to it. Cucullus non facit monachum. “The white-kneed Cockney, conscious of his kilt” may indeed be suspected half a mile off. (“How white your knees are!” a recent novelist makes one of his characters say admiringly to the hero in Highland dress.) I was about to lay it down that this “garment of terrible possibilities” cannot be worn becomingly without youthful usage; but I refrain on consideration that most of the soldiers who swing their tartans so bravely have been fettered in breeks till they took the king’s shilling.