The English Brothers Who Forged Scotland

Somewhere in Edinburgh this week, a clerk at the Scottish Register of Tartans is logging a new "traditional" pattern — perhaps the 150th or so this year, possibly for an overseas corporation that has commissioned a sett of its own.[S5] The Register is a statutory body, created by an Act of the Scottish Parliament in November 2008 and administered by the Keeper of the Records of Scotland.[S5] Its authentication framework — the entire conceptual apparatus of "setts," "clans," "family tartans" — descends in a straight line from a book a British peer-reviewed journal called a forgery in 1847.[S3]

That book was the Vestiarium Scoticum. The men who wrote it were brothers from Surrey.

What Highlanders actually wore

Before 1746, Highland weavers worked with what was locally available: vegetable dyes, the wool to hand, and patterns that varied by district rather than by clan.[S7] The modern small-kilt itself was, on the standard account, designed in the 1720s by an English Quaker industrialist named Thomas Rawlinson to clothe his ironworks employees.[S7] The notion that each named family owned a specific identifying pattern — that a MacGregor sett differed by ancestral right from a Campbell sett — appears, on the same account, to be a nineteenth-century construction.[S7]

That account is now contested. Hugh Cheape and other scholars writing in From Tartan to Tartanry argue that some clan-district associations did exist before 1822, and that the Highland Society of London was already soliciting tartan samples from chiefs as early as 1815.[S9][S8] The picture is messier than a clean "wholesale invention." But the messiness only matters because the cleaner story — the one most people in Edinburgh tourist shops are buying into — is itself built on a forgery.

The thirty-six-year blackout

After Culloden, Parliament passed the Dress Act 1746, which from 1 August 1747 banned plaid, philabeg, kilt, trews and shoulder-belts in Scotland on pain of six months' imprisonment for a first offence and transportation to the colonies for a second.[S11] One category of person was exempted: soldiers of the Crown. The new Highland regiments wore tartan continuously through the proscription, which is part of why their regimental setts — Black Watch and the rest — became the templates onto which later "clan" tartans were retro-fitted.[S11]

The Act was repealed in 1782, after lobbying by the Highland Society of London (founded 1778).[S11] By that point thirty-six years had passed — long enough for living memory of pre-ban civilian weaving to lapse in most districts.[S11]

Into that vacuum walked Walter Scott, George IV, and a textile firm in Bannockburn.

1822: the pageant

Sir Walter Scott was pageant master of George IV's three-week visit to Edinburgh in August 1822 — the first time a reigning monarch had set foot in Scotland in almost two hundred years.[S6] Scott's pamphlet Hints Addressed to the Inhabitants of Edinburgh decreed that at the Highland Ball "no Gentleman is to be allowed to appear in any thing but the ancient Highland costume."[S6] Lowland gentry and clan chiefs had a few weeks to come up with one.

Most of them placed orders with William Wilson & Sons of Bannockburn. Wilson's Key Pattern Book of 1819 already held over two hundred setts, most originally labelled by number or town name rather than by clan.[S12] A tabulation around 1822 shows thirty "Highland clan" tartans, thirteen family tartans, and twelve district patterns — a thin clan-tagged slice of a much larger industrial portfolio.[S12] The "clan" naming was a small, fast rebrand of a working pattern book.

Scott himself, it should be said, was sceptical of the deeper claim. He later publicly rejected the idea that Lowlanders had ever worn clan tartans.[S2] The choreographer of the pageant was, in private, a doubter of the mythology the pageant was producing.

The Allens become the Stuarts

Two brothers were watching all of this with interest. John Carter Allen (1795–1872) and Charles Manning Allen (1802–1880) were the sons of Lieutenant Thomas Gatehouse Allen of the Royal Navy and Catherine Matilda Manning, daughter of the Rev. Owen Manning, historian of Surrey.[S1] The family's Surrey thread ran through Godalming and Frimley, not — as the popular debunking sometimes has it — Egham.[S1]

Around 1839 the brothers began telling a new story. Their father, they said, had not really been a middling naval officer. He had been the secret legitimate son of Bonnie Prince Charlie and Princess Louise of Stolberg-Gedern, smuggled to England as an infant by their (real) grandfather, Admiral John Carter Allen.[S1] On this footing they declared their father "de jure monarch of England in place of … Queen Victoria."[S1] They restyled themselves John Sobieski Stuart and Charles Edward Stuart, converted to Roman Catholicism, and accepted from Thomas Fraser, 12th Lord Lovat, a hunting lodge on Eilean Aigas, an island in the River Beauly in Inverness-shire.[S10] There they held court with pennants, seals and thrones.[S10]

The manuscript

In 1842 the brothers published, through William Tait of Edinburgh, a colour-illustrated luxury volume called the Vestiarium Scoticum, presented as a reproduction of a fifteenth- or sixteenth-century manuscript on clan setts.[S2][S4] The provenance story routed the original through a Douglas family copy and the library of the Scots College at Douay.[S4] A second edition followed in 1845.[S2]

The book conveniently confirmed that the clan-specific tartans Wilson's had been selling by mail for twenty years were in fact three centuries old.

The takedown

In 1847 the Quarterly Review, then one of Britain's heavyweight literary journals, ran an anonymous article titled "The Heirs of the Stuarts" in Volume 81.[S3] The authors — later identified as George Skene, a Glasgow professor, and the Rev. Dr Mackay, editor of the Highland Society's Gaelic Dictionary — went through the manuscript line by line.[S3] It used Scots spellings not in circulation before 1700.[S3] It referenced clan names that did not exist in 1571.[S3] No corroborating mention of the supposed original appeared in Cardinal York's papers or in the Scots College Douay's inventories — the very provenance chain the brothers had cited.[S3]

The brothers published a rebuttal in 1848.[S3] It did not move the needle on the textual evidence.

The chemical verdict came much later. The analytical chemist Stevenson Macadam — a lecturer and professor at the Edinburgh medical schools — eventually examined a 1721-dated copy of the manuscript, the so-called Cromarty MS, which the brothers had shown to Sir Thomas Dick Lauder in the late 1820s.[S2] Macadam reported that the document "bore evidence of having been treated with chemical agents in order to give the writing a more aged appearance than it is entitled to," and concluded that "the manuscript cannot be depended upon as an ancient document."[S2] His analysis was published in 1895 — by which time both brothers were dead (John in 1872, Charles in 1880).[S1]

The "manuscript" was not just textually anachronistic. It had been physically doctored to look old.

Why it stuck

By 1847 the forgery already had clear air to grow. William Wilson & Sons had a working market in clan-labelled bolts.[S12] The regimental setts — the only Highland dress legally worn during 1747–1782 — had given the whole project a real, continuous textile tradition to graft onto.[S11] And the academic case against it was a long way from being made.

Hugh Trevor-Roper, in his 1983 essay for The Invention of Tradition, called clan-specific tartans a "hallucination sustained by economic interest" and pinned much of it on the Sobieski Stuarts.[S7] Cheape and the Tartan to Tartanry school think Trevor-Roper overshot.[S8][S9] But even the revisionists do not defend the Vestiarium itself. They argue about how much clan-district association was already there before the brothers arrived, not about whether the brothers were lying.[S8][S9]

The register

The Scottish Register of Tartans Act 2008 created a statutory body to authenticate, record and protect tartans, absorbing at least seven thousand records from prior unofficial registers.[S5] Around 150 new entries are added each year, with overseas corporate registrations now routine.[S5] Each new sett is checked, named, and stamped onto the same conceptual furniture — clan, family, district — that the Quarterly Review demolished in 1847.[S3]

The English brothers from Godalming are 180 years dead. Their book is still the operating system.