"Business Casual" for the 18th Century Highlander

As part of the English destruction of Highland society, the wearing of traditional Highland dress was strictly prohibited upon pain of imprisonment or banishment overseas. This hit pretty hard.

"The mountain people had no other clothes but the tartan plaid and kilt. Without them they would go naked. They did the only thing they could do at that moment. They dyed the tartan black and brown. They sewed their kilts between their legs to make breeches. . . .

"Thus Bonnie Prince Charlie's rebellion ended in a bad joke, with his clansmen in ragged breeches and their women dipping tartan plaids into vats of dye and mud. . . . there was resistance to the Act. Some Highlanders ignored it, a few taking to the hills rather than abandon the dress or accept humiliating compromises. Others carried tartan plaids beneath their coats, draping themselves with them when there were no soldiers about. Some wore strips of coloured cloth about their waists, blue, green and red, pleated like the kilt and worn over comic trews. When caught they were of course imprisoned. Caught again they were transported. Some were shot by the soldiers who had once hunted for the Prince, for fugitives or for arms, but who now searched the glens for rags of woven cloth.

". . . in the beginning, the law against the wearing of Highland dress or the tartan was firmly imposed and the penalties were scrupulously applied, but as the years passed it staggered and died beneath its own inertia. It had served its purpose, however. When the proscription was lifted in 1782 there was no enthusiastic return to the tartan or the kilt. A Proclamation went round the glens:

'This is declaring to every man, young and old, Commons and Gentles, that they may after this put on and wear the Trews, the little Kilt, the Doublet and Hose, along with the Tartan Kilt, without fear of the Law of the Land or the jealousy of enemies . . .'

"But the old attachment to the Highland dress had died in a generation, the old patterns (if they had ever had more than an area significance) were forgotten. Forgotten, too, was the skill of making dyes from the herbs on the hills. The clans were no longer, their true identity had gone with the broadsword and their chiefs, and the wearing of the kilt was an affectation for gentlemen or for those who joined His Majesty's Highland Regiments. It was not until forty years later still, when George IV (a post-Rebelliono Jacobite) came to Scotland and dressed himself in a ridiculous uniform of scarlet kilt, plaid, bonnet, eagle feathers, broadsword, dirk and skean dhu that a romantic and extravagant interest in the Highland dress was born. Walter Scott was hard at work creating his Gothic picture of the Highlands, helped by many Lowland gentlemen whose ancestors had regarded the clansmen as savages. Tartans were invented and ascribed to this clan or that, a religious devotion being paid to setts that would not have been recognized by any Highlander who charged at Culloden. Sentiment spins enduring lies. When Victoria's humourless German consort designed a tartan that was used on the carpets, furnishings and wallpaper at Balmoral all interest in the parti-coloured cloth should have been killed by a giggle. But it was not.

"The banning of their dress took from the clans their pride and their sense of belonging to a unique people. The abolition of the hereditary jurisdictions of their chiefs, which followed, destroyed the political and social system that had held them together."

--pages 311-14