The Regent’s Tartan: How a Discontinued Pattern Became Clan MacLaren’s
The story of the MacLaren tartan begins with an unexpected connection between royal fashion and the clan traditions of Balquhidder. On 29 January 1820, at Windsor Castle, King George III died, blind and mad, after a reign of nearly sixty years. His son, who had been ruling in his place as Prince Regent since 1811, became King George IV that afternoon.
Two hundred and fifty miles to the north, in the weaving village of Bannockburn, the news created a small commercial problem.
The firm of William Wilson & Sons was the largest tartan manufacturer in the world. Its pattern books listed hundreds of setts, and many of them were named not for clans but for whatever might help them sell: towns, regiments, fashions, famous people. Among them was a handsome pattern the firm called Regent, in honour of the Prince who had been running the country. It was a dark blue tartan with bands of green and black, and, unusually, a single fine line of yellow.
As of 29 January there was no Regent. The name was obsolete. The cloth was still on the looms.
The levee
What happened next is one of the most revealing stories in the whole history of tartan, and the archives of the Scottish Tartans Authority tell it in a few dry sentences.
In August 1822 the new King came to Edinburgh, the first reigning monarch to visit Scotland since 1650. Sir Walter Scott organised the visit as a festival of Highland dress, and every clan chief who could was expected to appear at the royal levee at Holyroodhouse in his tartan, with a tail of clansmen behind him. The difficulty was that many chiefs did not know what their tartan was, because until that summer the question had never been urgent. They asked the weavers. The weavers looked in their books.
The chief of the MacLarens of Balquhidder was among those who needed a tartan. And the archive records that the MacLaren tartan was “adopted by the MacLarens at the time of the levee (1822),” that Wilsons “were producing it before 1820, but only under the name of Regent,” and that when the Regency ended “the name of the tartan then becoming outdated, but production of the sett continued.”
In other words, a discontinued fashion line was given a clan and a history in the same year, and the clan has worn it with pride ever since. Nobody was cheated. The MacLarens got a beautiful cloth, and the cloth got a family. That is more or less how a great many clan tartans came into being, and this one has the unusual virtue of a paper trail.
The archive adds a detail for the connoisseur. The MacLaren differs from the Ferguson only in having a yellow line where the Ferguson has white, and the two setts share “the unusual feature of an unbroken band of blue,” a broad stretch of plain blue uncrossed by any other colour. It has since been adopted, with the chief’s permission, by the Small Arms School Corps of the British Army.
Creag an Tuirc
The clan that took it up was old, small and battered. The MacLarens held the glen of Balquhidder, in the hills west of Callander, where Loch Voil lies under the Braes and the road ends. They claimed descent from an abbot of Achtow, and their gathering place was a rock above the village called Creag an Tuirc, the Boar’s Rock, which is also their war cry. Their crest is a lion’s head with a laurel wreath. Their motto is the name of the rock.
They had the misfortune to live next to the MacGregors. In 1558 the Privy Council recorded that MacGregors had descended on Balquhidder and killed a great many MacLarens, seizing their land. The MacGregors were still there two centuries later, and the most famous of them, Rob Roy, is buried in Balquhidder kirkyard. On the last day of his life, in 1734, it was a MacLaren who came to his door, the two families having lately quarrelled over a farm, and Rob Roy had himself lifted out of bed and armed so that no enemy should see him helpless. Neither side was ever quite comfortable with the other.
The MacLaren chiefs lost their lands and their standing, and the clan went without a recognised chief for a long time until the Lord Lyon confirmed Donald MacLaren of MacLaren and Achleskine in 1957. The clan gathers at Balquhidder still.
The blue band
Retailers who carry MacLaren tartan offer it in Modern, Ancient and Weathered colours, made to order as kilts, skirts, sashes and scarves, or sold by the yard. It is one of the most distinguished dark tartans in Scotland. It is also, because of that unbroken band of blue, one of the few where the customer has to make a real decision before the kilt is cut.
A kilt is pleated at the back, twenty-five or thirty folds, and there are two ways to fold a tartan. Pleated to the sett, each pleat is arranged so the pattern continues unbroken across all of them, as if the cloth lay flat. The back of the kilt then looks like the front. Pleated to the stripe, a single chosen line is centred on every pleat, so the back of the kilt shows that line over and over and the rest of the pattern only appears when the wearer moves.
With most tartans this is a matter of taste. With the MacLaren it changes the garment. Pleat it to the sett and the back is dark blue, green and black, with the yellow line flickering through. Pleat it to the stripe on the yellow line and the back becomes a field of fine gold threads on black and green. Pleat it, as some MacLarens do, on the centre of that great blue band, and the whole back of the kilt turns solid navy, plain as a naval uniform, and the pattern bursts out only when the pleats open in a walk or a dance. Three different kilts, from one cloth, and no way to change your mind afterwards.
Chicago, with a spreadsheet
Mike MacLaren is forty-six, a lieutenant in the Chicago Fire Department, and the kind of man who plans a barbecue on a spreadsheet. He is going to the clan gathering at Balquhidder next summer, the first of his family to go back since his great-grandfather left in 1908, and he has spent three weeks deciding how his kilt should be pleated.
He ordered it from Scottish Kilt, whose whole trade is the custom kilt, every one cut by hand to the customer’s own waist, hip and length, in any of more than five thousand tartans. He sent the three measurements the way they asked: waist at the navel, hips at the widest, waist to mid-kneecap. What he did not expect was the question that came back. Pleated to the sett, or to the stripe? And if to the stripe, which one?
He printed out the tartan. He read about the Regent, and the levee, and the blue band. He thought about the Boar’s Rock and about a lieutenant standing at the back of a hall in Balquhidder among two hundred MacLarens, and he asked himself what he wanted people to see when he turned round.
He chose the blue. Pleated on the centre of the unbroken band, so that from behind the kilt is plain navy, and when he walks, or dances, or turns to shake a hand, the green and the gold come out of it like a secret. His wife said it was the most Mike thing she had ever heard of: a man who wants to look plain from the back and turn out to have more going on.
“It’s the Regent’s tartan,” he told her. “They had it on the shelf with no name, and a whole clan walked in and took it. That’s my people. We’ll take a good thing that nobody’s using.”
The kilt arrived in seven weeks. He laid it face down on the bed and looked at the back. Thirty pleats of solid dark blue. He ran a hand across them and they opened, and the yellow showed.
Production of the sett continued
There is a lesson in the MacLaren tartan for anyone who imagines that clan cloth is ancient and unchanging. It was a fashion item named for a prince, it went out of date the day he became king, and it was rescued from obsolescence by a clan that needed something to wear to a party. The cloth did not change. Only the name on the shelf did.
Two centuries on, it is one of the handsomest dark tartans in the country, it carries the name of a real clan and a real glen, and it presents every man who orders a kilt in it with an honest decision about how he wants to be seen. That is a better inheritance than most tartans can offer, however old they claim to be.
