"Like the cut and origins of the kilt, the design and
provenance of the patterns known as tartan are highly contentious." [Collins
Encyclopaedia of Scotland, 1994, edited by John Keay & Julia Keay]
Colonel Archibald Campbell Fraser (1736-1815), who
succeeded his half-brother Lieutenant General Simon Fraser (1726-1782) in
the Lovat estates, on his first appearance in the House of Commons in
1782, played a prominent role in supporting the motion by the Marquis of
Graham, later Duke of Montrose, for the Repeal of the Unclothing Act
and legalizing the use of Highland dress. Following the death of Archibald
Campbell Fraser of Lovat, without legitimate surviving issue, the Lovat
estates in Inverness-shire were inherited by Thomas Alexander Fraser of
Strichen (1802-1875), Aberdeenshire, as nearest heir male through his
descent from Alexander Fraser, 4th Lord Lovat (1527-1557). In
1837 he was created Baron Lovat in the Peerage of the United Kingdom, and
in 1857 proved his claim to the Scottish title as 14th Lord
Lovat.
Although they cannot agree on the origins, most
scholars and historians credit the influential novelist/poet Sir Walter
Scott (1771-1832) with romanticizing the history of tartans. Scott, along
with Major General David Stewart of Garth (1772-1829), masterminded the
state visit of George IV, who became the first reigning monarch to visit
Scotland since the time of Charles II. King George appeared in kilt and
plaid for the royal visit in 1822, for which the firm of Wm. Wilson & Sons
of Bannockburn manufactured about 150 tartans.
About
this time two brothers, John Sobieski Stolberg Stuart (c1795-1872) and
Charles Edward Stuart (c1799-1880) arrived in Scotland, claiming to be the
grandsons of Bonnie Prince Charlie (1720-1788) by Louise of Stolberg
(1752-1824), to whom he was briefly married. Charles Edward Louis John
Casimir Silvester Severino Maria Stuart, born 31st December
1720, was 51 when he married the 19 year-old Louise Maximiliana Emmanuela,
eldest of four daughters of the widowed Princess of Stolberg-Gedern.
By Clementina Walkinshaw, the Prince had a daughter
Charlotte who was living with her mother in a convent in Paris in March
1783 when, believing himself to be dying, he declared Charlotte his heir,
at the same time formally legitimizing her and styling her Duchess of
Albany. The Prince, however, recovered, and sent for his daughter to come
and live with him in Florence. Charlotte had managed from the shelter of
her convent to give birth to no less than three children, two girls and a
boy, by Prince Ferdinand Maximilian de Rohan, Archbishop of Bordeaux and
later of Cambrai, the youngest of whom was Charles Edward (1784-1851).
Charlotte left the children to be looked after by her mother while she
went to Florence to live with her father, caring for him until he died 31st
January 1788. Charlotte died from cancer the following year and her mother
died in Switzerland in November 1802, just fifty-six years after that
wintery week in 1746, when she later came to believe, she and the Prince
first plighted their troth at Bannockburn and she, in her own words, ‘was
undone’. - Bonnie Prince Charlie (1988) by Fitzroy Maclean. [Sir
Fitzroy Maclean, K.T. (1911-96) married, in 1946, as his second wife, the
Hon. Veronica Fraser, widow of Lieut. Alan Phipps and sister of Simon
Christopher Joseph Fraser, 17th Lord Lovat (1911-95).]
Fraser of Lovat listened sympathetically to the
brothers and indulged their pretension. In 1838 he offered them a house on
the 60 acre island of Eilean Aigas, where they learned Gaelic and produced
several collections of verse. In 1842 they published their ‘ancient’ work
on clan tartans Vestiarium Scoticum, which formed the basis for the
development of modern tartan.
John Telfer Dunbar in History of Highland Dress
[1961] quotes from a manuscript entitled Clan Tartans [1871]
written by Campbell of Islay, a Gaelic scholar who lived in the Highlands
and had a great knowledge of Highland dress:
"Campbell [author of Tales of the West Highlands]
refers to his ‘old friend John Sobieski Stuart, Count d’Albanie who first
caused me to be arrayed in Highland Costume in 1825’. In this volume he
wrote, ‘I do not believe that the distinctions which are now made as to
Clan Tartans ever prevailed at all, till Tartan became an important
manufacture in Scotland in the reign of George the 4th.’ Eleven
years later, in 1882, he underlined this contention. The brothers were his
friends but, as a scholar, he could not accept their Vestiarium
Scoticum, despite having known them for fifty years."
The following is taken from Memoirs of a Highland
Lady, the autobiography of Elizabeth Grant of Rothiemurchus afterwards Mrs
Smith of Baltiboys 1797-1830, edited by Lady Strachey [1911]:
"The year 1825… And we had those strange brothers whose
real name I can’t remember, but they one day announced that they were
Stuarts, lineally descended from Prince Charles, out of respect to whose
wife, who never had a child, the elder brother assumed the name of John
Sobieski; the younger brother was Charles. Nobody was more astonished at
this assumption than their own father, a decent man who held some small
situation in the Tower of London. The mother was Scotch; her people had
been in the service of the unfortunate Stuarts in Italy, and who can tell
if she had not some right to call herself connected with them?
"Her sons were handsome men, particularly John Sobieski,
who, however, had not a trace of the Stuart in his far finer face. They
always wore the Highland dress, kilt and belted plaid, and looked
melancholy, and spoke at times mysteriously. The effect they produced was
astonishing; they were ‘feted’ to their hearts’ content; for several years
they actually ‘reigned’ in the north country. At last they made a mistake
which finished the farce.
"Fraser of Lovat had taken them up enthusiastically,
built them a villa on an island in the Beauly Firth, in the pretty garden
of which was a small waterfall. Here Mrs Charles Stuart sat and played the
harp like Flora MacIvor, and crowds went to visit them. They turned Roman
Catholic, to please their benefactor, I suppose, and so lost caste with
the public. Poor Mrs Charles was a meek little woman, a widow with a small
jointure whom the ‘Prince,’ her husband, had met in Ireland. I do not know
what had taken him there, for no one knew what his employment had
originally been. Prince Sobieski had been a coach painter - not the panel
painter, the heraldic painter - and most beautifully he finished the coats
of arms."
James Thomson was born in 1825 at Rothes, Moray, son of
James Thomson and Mary Stuart.
In Recollections of a Speyside Parish [1902],
the author writes about having witnessed the horrific events of the Muckle
Spate of 1829 as a lad not yet five years old in Aberlour, and his brief
meeting with the Stuart brothers.
"One of my most vivid recollections of the early days
of Queen Victoria’s reign was a visit of the two men who represented
themselves as legitimate grandsons of the Pretender, and were known as the
Princes of Eilean Aigas. Their names were John Sobieski and Charles Edward
Stuart. It is well known that Prince Charles Edward Stuart left behind him
no legitimate offspring.
"Amongst other gentlemen’s residences that they visited
in Strathspey was Elchies. I was fortunate in being told to direct them by
a footpath through the woods to Boat of Elchies. The coin that one of them
put in my hand as I parted with them was long treasured by me as a
priceless gift, to be worn some day upon my breast ‘when the auld Stuarts
got their ain again,’ for had not my own mother’s forebears, one a
Macdonald and the other a Stuart, followed the Prince and fought for him
on the fatal field of Culloden? But alas! The halo that surrounded the
name of bonnie Prince Charlie became dimmer and more dim as the years of
Her Majesty’s reign passed by. Our early delusions die hardly. How we
cling to them, even when the scales are fallen from our eyes! We are loth
to give them up. Had I lived in the days of my great-grandfathers, I
certainly would have done what they did, followed ‘the Prince.’ But I know
now what I did not know when the Queen began her reign, that the man whose
name stirred up within one emotions of loyalty and piety showed eventually
that he was devoid of all virtues that make even poor men great."
Leaving Eilean Aigas in 1846, the Stuart brothers were
to spend the rest of their lives researching their alleged royal lineage,
before returning to Scotland, to be buried in the churchyard at Eskadale,
up the river from their old island home. St Mary’s at Eskadale was the
first post Reformation Roman Catholic church built in the country [1826].
Thomas Alexander Fraser, 14th Lord Lovat (1802-1875) and
subsequent generations of the Frasers of Lovat have been buried at
Eskadale.
Eilean Aigas eventually passed to the eldest son of the
late Sir Hugh Fraser and Lady Antonia (Packenham) Fraser, who sold it
about 1994. Lady Antonia Fraser, the author, is now married to playwright
Harold Pinter.
Highland Dress
The Edinburgh Libraries and Museums Committee published
Two Centuries of Highland Dress, a brochure prepared by J. Telfer
Dunbar as a guide to the exhibition of the collection which he gifted to
the City in 1950.
"During the period of proscription the Highland dress
was worn by the Highland regiments, and when it could be worn once more by
the civilian the great majority of the Highlanders could not afford to
make the change. The dress then became a ‘costume’ adopted by Highlander
and Lowlander alike, its style being based on the military patterns and
mainly worn by those who could afford what became a romantic costume for
the ballroom and the meetings of the many newly founded Highland
Societies. When King George IV visited Scotland in 1822 the ‘Scottish
dress’ rose to its greatest peak of popularity but it had by then
degenerated considerably from the dignified clothing of our ancestors.
This degeneration also applied to their weapons. When they ceased to be
fighting weapons and became mere ornaments they lost their former grace
and became displays of silverware and large cairngorm stones."
One of the soldiers who served with the Fraser
Highlanders in Canada during the Seven Years War between Britain and
France (1757-63) was Duncan McCraw (1739-1803). Barbara Fraser
(c1757-1824) was the widow of Hector Morrison, a British loyalist believed
to have lived at Kortright’s Patent, Tryon County, New York prior to the
American Revolution (1775-83). In 1779 the widow Morrison, with her
children, fled to the refugee camp at Yamachiche, married McCraw and
raised a second family. As part of the introduction to the genealogy of
his ancestor, Yvan Goulet has written about Scotland, and he wanted some
advice about how to describe the various articles of Highland dress. He
noted that during the occupation of Paris in 1816 [after the Napoleonic
Wars], the Highlanders proved to be very popular, especially to the women,
whose curiosity knew no bounds.
Qu’y a-t-il sous le philibeg ou kilt ?
Après Waterloo, les Alliés occupèrent une grande partie
du territoire français : Anglais, Prussiens, Russes, Autrichiens, même
Badois, Bavarois, Hessois, Suisses, Piémontais. Les Britanniques, très
disciplinés, occupaient Paris. Parmi eux, les Highlanders étaient tout
particulièrement populaires. Une gravure en montre un, grand gaillard; le
vent soulève un pan de son kilt jusqu’au trois quarts de la cuisse. À son
côté, genou en terre, une jeune femme regarde… en admiration.
Chercherait-t-elle la présence de quelque vêtement de dessous ?
L’empereur
de Russie, lui, fit venir au palais de l’Élysée un sergent, un cornemuseur
et un simple soldat, en provenance des 42ème, 79ème et 92ème régiments. Il
s’intéressa surtout aux bas, aux guêtres et aux jambes du sergent Thomas
Campbell. L’écrivain John Telfer Dunbar rapporte qu’après avoir pincé la
peau de l’homme—pensant qu’il portait quelque chose sous le kilt—il releva
ledit kilt "pour être sûr de son affaire".
Neil Fraser, président de la Société Clan Fraser du
Canada, écrit, relativement au port du costume à notre époque: "Sous-vêtement
highland: tres difficile à décrire - étant donné la rareté des éléments
d’information". Il raconte aussi que Madame St-John, consul de Jamaïque à
Toronto, lors d’une visite au château d’Édimbourg, glissa un £5.00 à un
highlander placé en sentinelle pour voir ce qu’il portait sous le kilt—et
il accepta. Elle déclara, avec un grand éclat de rire : "Ç’a été ma
dépense la plus avantageuse à Édimbourg !"