Expand All | Collapse All

While the British crown employed a zero-tolerance policy on tartans throughout the three decades following the Jacobite rebellions, later generations of British monarchs embraced tartan fabrics, and helped make them more popular than ever. Credit for the growth in the popularity of clan tartans is primarily due to four people, each with an agenda of their own: Charles Hay Allan and John Allan, the so-called 'Sobieski Stuarts"; William Wilson of Bannockburn, the first commercial producer of tartan fabrics in the industrial age; and the ever-influential Queen Victoria herself. Let's examine the contributions of each.

• Charles Hay Allan and John Allan. Allan may have been their given surname, but these brothers/con artists went by the names of Charles Edward Stuart and John Sobieski Stolberg Stuart. Whatever name you choose to give them, the "Sobieski Stuarts" pretended to be descended from King Charles III, giving them entrance to the upper reaches of British society. No less than Lord Lovat fell for the con, and sponsored the brothers' extensive research into Highlands history. The product of this research was the 1842 publication of Vestiarum Scoticum (or "Scottish Dress"), the first book to include color plates of tartan patterns. Never the type to let historical fact ruin an otherwise exciting and marketable story, the "Stuart" brothers brazenly invented 70 patterns of their own, described in the book as "lost" clan tartans; the brothers fibbed that they had discovered illustrations of the patterns in a medieval manuscript, heroically rescuing the tartans from certain oblivion.
  
  The scam's piece de resistance turned Vestiarum Scoticum into one of the all-time classics in the storied history of publishing fraud. The authors boldly assigned each of the phony tartans to an existing Scottish clan, and when the book became a top-seller, each clan eagerly adopted the fraudulent tartan as its own, and began wearing that tartan regularly. The success of the book spawned imitators, as every person of Scottish descent became desperate to find out what "their" clan's tartan was. Other authors rushed to "discover lost tartans" and publish accounts linking their patterns with various clans across Scotland.

• William Wilson. Founded in 1765, William Wilson & Sons was located in a northern region not classified as being in Scotland, so the company was free to pursue production of tartan-patterned textiles without government restriction. As the first kiltmaker to master the art of executing perfect-every-time tartan patterns on the latest mechanical weaving equipment, Wilson & Sons was the only manufacturer capable of manufacturing standardized tartan patterns in significant quantities. The firm was ideally positioned to carve out a virtual monopoly in the market for tartan fabric, and for many years served as the primary supplier of tartan cloth to the military. Wilson designed scores of tartan patterns for the exclusive use of British regiments, which in turn ordered mass quantities of tartan cloth from Wilson & Sons to outfit their troops.
  
  Highland regiments figured prominently in battles of the Napoleonic Wars, and when wearing tartan became a popular way to support the troops, Wilson fully seized the opportunity. He accepted commissions from wealthy Scots to design custom patterns exclusive to them. Wilson invented hundreds of new tartans, which he documented in a reference manual called the 1819 Key Pattern Book. As he completed each new tartan design, Wilson cleverly named the patterns after towns and districts; and just as he had planned, the citizens of each town adopted the new tartan and wore it with a strong sense of civic pride.

• Queen Victoria. Eventually, even the Queen Herself got in on the act. She had a great fondness for anything Scottish, and insisted that any Scots visiting her be dressed appropriately, in their clan tartan and full regalia. Any clans without an official tartan were given every incentive to locate one quickly, further fueling the demand for tartan patterns. As long as you made sure your clan had a tartan, it really didn't matter where it came from--whether of the "long-lost" variety, fraudulent, custom-designed by Wilson & Sons, or even <gasp!> genuine.