Antiquaries in the Age of Romanticism: 1789-1851 - Queen Mary ...

Prebble points out, was just about to start work on Quentin Durward, the story of a
Scottish archer in the French royal bodyguard and there was doubtless a connection
between his plan for the novel and his decision to transform the existing Company of
Archers, a gentleman’s sporting and dining club dating back to the later seventeenth
century, into a band of medieval bowmen in Lincoln green, complete with quivers and
arrows. There was at this point a complete symmetry in the exchange between fact and
fiction.
The climax of the visit was the gathering of the clans, a ‘Highland Ball’ at the
Assembly rooms. This was the single most influential event of the tour and its legacy was
the most enduring. It was the Ball that forged a link between Scottish dress and tartan and
promoted the idea, quite unknown in 1745, of individual clan tartans associated with
particular families. As Prebble and Hugh Cheape have made clear this was the moment
that established ‘the kilt as the national dress of all Scotsmen, should they so desire’ and
established the fashion for individual named tartans. 71 ‘Highland dress’ was a condition
of entry. Yet the plaid was seldom if ever seen in Edinburgh at the time. Most lowlanders
would never have thought of wearing it and it would have been regarded as outlandish by
the citizens of the capital. As Lockhart wrote:
With all respect and admiration for the noble and generous qualities which our countrymen of the Highland
clans have so often exhibited, it was difficult to forget that they had always constituted a small, and almost
always an unimportant part of the Scottish population. 72
They were, however, the romantic, or as Lockhart put it the ‘picturesque’ part. 73 A
Highland revival was already beginning in antiquarian circles and despite some initial
demur Scott’s effective creation of a Scottish national costume with the capacity for
personal variants was soon wildly successful with both polite society and with
manufacturers, for it gave new life to the foundering cloth industry in Scotland. 74 Well
71 Prebble, The King’s Jaunt, p.103.
72 Lockhart, Life of Sir Walter Scott, p. 481.
73 Lockhart, Life of Sir Walter Scott, p. 481.
74 See Cheape, Tartan: the highland habit, pp. 63-69.
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