With the Regency came a vicious change. The Prince Regent paid incessant attention to dress—both to his own and that of others. He was proud of his figure, which, indeed, was a fine one till it was ruined by excess, and he loved to display it in closely fitting dress. Nor was he content until he got his father’s army buttoned up to the limit of endurance and disfigured by headgear of appalling dimensions. The easy open collar and Ramillies tie were replaced by an upright fence of buckram and a leather stock. It would be hardly credible, were there not abundant evidence in the correspondence of the Horse Guards to prove it, that while Wellington was absorbed in manœuvring against immensely superior forces in Spain, he had to give attention to correspondence about changes in the dress of the army, not with a view to making it more comfortable and workmanlike, but in order to gratify the caprice of the Prince Regent. No man ever gave less thought to niceties of tailoring than Lord Wellington (as he was at that time). His views are set forth in a letter to the Military Secretary who had consulted him about the uniform to be prescribed for those regiments of Light Dragoons which the Prince Regent had desired the Duke of York (recently reinstated as Commander-in-Chief) to convert into Hussars.
‘Freneda, 6th November, 1811.
‘... There is no subject of which I understand so little [as military uniforms], and, abstractedly speaking, I think it indifferent how a soldier is clothed, provided it is in an uniform manner, and that he is forced to keep himself clean and smart, as a soldier ought to be. But there is one thing I deprecate, and that is any imitation of the French in any manner. It is impossible to form an idea of the inconvenience and injury which result from having anything like them, either on horseback or on foot.[5] Lutyens and his piquet were taken in June because the 3rd Hussars had the same caps as the French Chasseurs-à-cheval and some of their Hussars, and I was near being taken on September 25 from the same cause. At a distance or in action colours are nothing; the profile and shape of a man’s cap, and his general appearance, are what guide us; and why should we make our people look like the French?... I only beg that we may be as different as possible from the French in everything. The narrow tops of our infantry, as opposed to their broad top caps, are a great advantage to those who are to look at long lines of posts opposed to each other.’
Two years later, at the battle of Vitoria, the justice of Wellington’s views about the soldier’s uniform received apt illustration. Wellington on that day kept the Light Division and 4th Division under his immediate command. The 3rd and 7th Divisions, under Picton and Lord Dalhousie, were to join him in order to complete the centre of the line, but they had difficult ground to traverse, and were late. The Zadora flowed swift and deep in front of the French position. A countryman having informed Wellington that the bridge of Tres Puentes was unguarded, Kempt’s riflemen were sent forward to seize it, which they did, and went so far up the heights on the farther side that they were able to establish themselves in shelter of a crest well in rear of a French advanced post. There they lay, until Wellington’s line was completed by the arrival of ‘old Picton, riding at the head of the 3rd Division, dressed in a blue coat and a round hat, swearing as loudly all the way as if he wore two cocked ones.’[6] The 7th Division came up at the same time, and while they were deploying the enemy opened fire upon them. Kempt immediately drew his riflemen from their shelter and took the French batteries in flank, thereby enabling the 3rd Division to cross the bridge of Mendoza without loss. But the dark uniforms of the Rifles deceived the British on the other side of the river into the belief that they were French. A battery opened upon them and continued pounding them with round shot and shrapnel till the advance of Picton’s Division revealed the blunder.
Wellington’s warning against copying the uniforms of other nations received little attention. After 1815, when he was in command of the Army of Occupation in Paris, it was decided to arm four regiments of cavalry with lances, a most effective weapon which had not been carried by British troops since the seventeenth century. One would have supposed that the lance might be wielded as effectively by a man dressed as a light dragoon or a hussar as in any other rig; but the Prince Regent hailed the innovation as an opportunity for an entirely new costume. Consequently the 9th, 12th, 16th and 23rd Light Dragoons were put into a Polish dress, modified in such manner as to agree with his Royal Highness’s sartorial taste.
‘An officer of rank commanding one of the Lancer regiments was ordered to attend the Prince Regent to fit the new jacket on him. The tailor, with a pair of scissors, was ordered to cut smooth every wrinkle and fine-draw the seams. The consequence was that the coats of the private soldiers, as well as those of the officers, were made so tight they could hardly get into them; the freedom of action was so restricted that the infantry with difficulty handled their muskets, and the cavalry could scarcely do the sword exercise.’
The cuirass had been discontinued in the British cavalry since 1794, when it had been found most unsuitable for active service in the Netherlands. But it was far too showy a piece of goods to escape the Prince Regent’s attention. Accordingly the three regiments of Household Cavalry were made to appear at his coronation in 1820 in steel cuirasses and burnished helmets, with enormous combs of bearskin; the latter, as Colonel Luard caustically observes, rendering it impossible for a man to deliver the sixth cut in the sword exercise of that day. The cuirass and helmet remain, with the unwieldy jack-boots and leather breeches, an effective, if archaic, part of a theatrical pageant which Londoners have learnt to love; but as the equipment of a modern soldier the costume is ludicrously inapt and very costly. In an era when war has become more terrible and more intensely destructive than in any previous age, and at a time when the whole resources of the nation are strained for the country to hold its own, it may well be asked whether money might not be more profitably employed than in causing the splendid men of the Household Cavalry to masquerade in such attire as would be grotesque to imagine them wearing in modern warfare.
About the same time that the cuirass was inflicted upon the Household Cavalry, the sentry boxes in London and at Windsor Castle had to be increased in height in order to accommodate a new pattern of bearskin cap which had been approved for the Foot Guards. The old pattern, which had superseded the three-cocked hat at the end of the previous century, was a sensible affair of reasonable dimensions; but the army tailors, encouraged by the new King, were indefatigable in devising extravagance in uniforms, and the bearskin was made to shoot up several inches in height. ‘Ridicule,’ observed Colonel Luard, ‘subsides when the eye is no longer a stranger to the object of excitement; otherwise the little boys would run after the guardsmen when they appear in the streets of London, and shout at the overwhelming, preposterous, hideous bearskin caps.’ It is rumoured that the supply of the right sort of bear is now running short. It may not be too much to hope that, when our armies return victorious at the end of the war, the occasion may be marked by the invention of some uniform for the Brigade of Guards more comfortable and workmanlike than a skin-tight tunic and a grossly exaggerated fur-cap. Londoners, laudably conservative in what they have become used with, would be the less likely to murmur at the change, inasmuch as they have grown accustomed to see guard-mounting performed in forage-caps.
Among all the variety of uniforms of the British infantry, none has undergone so little change in the last hundred and fifty years as that of the Highland regiments. Well that it is so, for there is none other that so admirably sets off a soldier-like figure, none that stirs so much enthusiasm among the spectators at a field-day. So fully has this been recognised that a society has recently been formed to protest against and endeavour to remedy what is deemed the unmerited neglect of Lowland Scottish regiments, whereof the records certainly are no whit inferior in lustre to those of the Highland corps. It is complained that the Lowland regiments are always kept in the background; that Edinburgh, though a Lowland city, is invariably garrisoned by a Highland regiment, and that facilities for recruiting in Edinburgh and Glasgow are accorded to Highland regiments and refused to Lowland regiments. Much of this is unfortunately true; but the real reason for it exists in the greater popularity of the Highland uniform. No amount of protest or persuasion will prevail to make the general public take the same interest in a trousered regiment as in a kilted one. Might not the surest remedy be to put the Lowland regiments also into kilts? Purists will object that Lowlanders have no business to don the philabeg; but, for that matter, neither have they any business to wear tartan trews, which all the Lowland regiments do at the present time, besides being furnished with kilted pipers.[7] Then all Scottish regiments would be on an equal footing, and no material would remain for the present irritation. It is difficult to understand, impossible to explain, the emotion—involuntary, as all true emotion must be—roused, even in Saisneach breasts, by the sight of a Highland regiment marching to the skirl of the pipes. In order to illustrate it, let me lapse for a moment into the first person singular.
During Queen Victoria’s memorable progress through her metropolis in the Diamond Jubilee of 1897, I was seated with two ladies of my family in the stand set up for members of Parliament in Palace Yard. The long hours of waiting on that shining summer forenoon were enlivened by the march of many regiments, headed by their bands, passing to their appointed places in the route. It was a shifting pageant of stirring sight and sound. Presently, over Westminster Bridge came the Seaforth Highlanders stepping to the lively strains of The Muckin’ o’ Geordie’s Byre.[8] The effect was indescribable—the swing of kilts and sporrans, the dark waving plumes, the gallant but simple melody, thrilled all spectators. As for myself, I felt a big lump in my throat, and I was ashamed to feel something trickle down both cheeks. Yet am I a Lowland Scot, if anybody is; so far as I am aware, I can lay no claim to any strain of Celtic blood. If such an one was so deeply moved by the passing of a single Highland regiment, why should not all the Scottish regiments be clothed in the romantic garb of Old Gaul, with the desirable result of rendering the Lowland corps as well-beloved by the people as the Highlanders? If this were carried out, it would be esteemed a privilege by the former and a compliment by the latter. Objection on the score of economy would be raised because of the cost of the full-dress feather-bonnet, which, though picturesque, is but a tailor’s parody of the bonnet of the duine uasail. Let the Lowland regiments be content, then, with the Glengarry. Nobody who has seen a battalion of the London Scottish marching through Pall Mall, and listened to the comments of those who crowd to the club windows at the sound of the pibroch, will tell you that that fine corps would gain anything in soldierly appearance by wearing feather-bonnets. That head-dress was condemned in 1882, but in deference to Queen Victoria’s wishes it was restored. Its abolition had previously been hotly challenged in the House of Commons by certain perfervid Scots, one of whom volunteered a quaint explanation to an honourable member who had ventured to express some doubt about ostrich feathers being an appropriate ornament for a Scottish soldier. He gravely assured the House that the costume had its origin in Sir Ralph Abercromby’s Egyptian campaign in 1801, when the Highland soldiers picked up ostrich feathers in the desert and stuck them in their bonnets as a protection from the sun!