In a letter of Sir John Harrington's, we find the pay and clothing of Queen Elizabeth's troops in Ireland detailed at some length, but the colours are not stated. For an officer in winter, "a cassock of broad cloth, with bays, and trimmed with silk lace, 27s. 6d. A doublet of canvas, with silk buttons, and lined with white linen, costing 14s. 5d. Two shirts, three pairs of kersey stockings, three pairs of shoes of neat's leather, at 2s. 4d. per pair, and one pair of Venetians, of broad Kentish cloth with silver lace, at 15s. 4d."
On the 23rd July, 1601, 1500 of her men arrived from England, clad in red cassocks, to share in the siege of Ostend.—(History of the Siege.) Of these, says Stowe, 1000 were Londoners, and they are now represented by Her Majesty's 3rd Foot, or Kentish Buffs.
We find no trace of the national colours at the coronation of Charles I. as King of Scotland, in 1633, at Edinburgh, where he was escorted by the Gentlemen Pensioners, under the Earl of Suffolk, and the Yeomen of the Guard, under the Earl of Holland. We are told by Spalding that he was accompanied by "his ordinary English Guards, clad in his livery, having brown velvet coats, side (i.e., close) to their hough, and beneath with boards of black velvet, and His Majesty's armes wrought in raised and embossed work of silver and gold upon the back and breast of ilk coat. This was the ordinary weed of His Majesty's Foot Guards." Those furnished by Edinburgh were clad in "white satin doublets, black velvet breeches, silk stockings, hats, feathers, and scarfs. These gallants had dainty muskets, pikes, and gilded partizans." On this auspicious occasion, all the Scottish peerage wore their usual robes of crimson velvet. In this King's reign, David Ramsay, who was an officer of Gustavus Adolphus, when appearing to fight a duel with Lord Reay, wore a coat of scarlet (according to Sanderson's "History of England"), so thickly laced with silver that the ground of the cloth was scarcely visible.
Singularly enough, scarlet was early adopted among the grim Scottish Covenanters. At the battle of Kilsythe, where Montrose routed their troops with great slaughter, we find that "the red-coat musketeers" were cut to pieces by Viscount Aboyne and his Gordons. It may be worth mentioning here that the chequer on the bonnets of our Highland regiments was first adopted by the clans under Montrose, as significant of the fess-cheque of the House of Stuart. The great Marquis wore scarlet at his barbarous execution in Edinburgh, in 1650; and in the course of that year we find Sir James Balfour recording, in his "Memorialls of Church and Staite," that an English ship was made a prize by the Scots, who found in her "eleven hundred elles of broad clothe, seven hundred suites of made clothes, and als many read cottes, 250 carabines, 500 muskets, with powder and matches," being supplies for the troops of Cromwell, several of whose regiments appear, however, to have been clad in blue.
Balfour, at this period, mentions on several occasions the "four-tailled" coats of the Scottish infantry and artillery, which must have been something like the old Highland doublet now worn by our Highland corps.
At the Restoration, when forces were established in England and Scotland, each country having its separate guards, line, and artillery, scarlet was the colour almost uniformly adopted, save in one instance, when the King clothed in blue, faced with red, the Royal Regiment of English Horse Guards, which was embodied on the 26th August, 1661, under Aubrey, Earl of Oxford. These colours it still retains; but a corps of marines raised about the same time, oddly enough, wore yellow coats—the old Dutch uniform.*
* William III. had a regiment of Dutch Horse in London, styled the Blue Horse Guards; they returned to Holland on the 20th March, 1689, after which the present Oxford Blues got that appellation permanently.
On the 2nd April in the same year, 1661, the Scottish Life Guards rode through the city of Edinburgh "in gallant order," says Nicol the Diarist, "their carbines upon their saddles, and swords drawn in their hands. It pleased His Majesty to clothe their trumpeters and the master of the kettle-drum in very rich apparel." Colours were presented, and soon after the King gave to each gentleman a buff coat.
In February, 1683, General Sir Thomas Dalzell obtained from the Privy Council at Edinburgh a licence permitting the manufacturers at Newmills "to import 2536 ells of stone-grey cloth from England," for his dragoon regiment, the Scots Greys, which had been raised two years before—hence their costume, as well as their grey horses, may have led to their present well-known appellation. This grey cloth cost five shillings an ell.
In May of the same year, Colonel John Grahame of Claverhouse imported from England 150 ells of red cloth, 40 ells of white, and 550 dozen of buttons, for the use of the Life Guards, and the Council ordained that the uniform of the Scottish infantry should be "of such a dye as shall be thought fit to distinguish sojours from other skulking and vagrant persons, who have hitherto imitated the uniform of the King," and red was the dye so universally adopted that in 1685 we find 300 ells of it ordered by Captain Patrick Grahame for the City Guard of Edinburgh.