Exactly 200 years ago, on Thursday 15 August, 2022, George IV landed at Leith, near Edinburgh, for a three-week ‘jaunt’. Arriving, he was dressed in naval uniform, but displayed himself to the Scottish capital dressed in tartan, and it’s that image of his visit that has remained in popular imagination. To mark the bicentenary, Maggie Craig looks back on this remarkable event.
King George IV was the first reigning British monarch in almost 200 years to visit Scotland. Delayed by adverse weather as he sailed up the east coast in August 1822, he was still at sea when the first of several colourful parades took place. This was the ceremonial transfer of the Honours of Scotland – the Scottish crown jewels – from Edinburgh Castle to the Palace of Holyroodhouse.
All over Edinburgh, scaffolding was being erected to allow the expected crowds to see the monarch. On Castle Hill, one platform big enough to accommodate 2,000 spectators had yet to be finished.
That didn’t stop people scrambling up onto it to get a better view of fluttering blue and white saltires, tartan plaids, pipers, drummers – and the Scottish crown.
As the procession headed out of Edinburgh Castle through Castle Hill, the platform keeled over. Frantic efforts were made to free those trapped under the wooden planks. At least two of them died. Others suffered life-changing injuries.
Horrified though people were, the mood was that the accident should not dampen enthusiasm for the much-anticipated royal visit. Nor did it. When George stepped ashore at Leith three days later two weeks of celebration began.
The symbolic presentation to the King of the keys to Edinburgh was followed by receptions at Holyroodhouse, Sunday service in St Giles Cathedral, balls at the Assembly Rooms, banquets, a review of local militias on Portobello beach and a royal command performance of Rob Roy at Edinburgh’s Theatre Royal.
At a ‘drawing-room’ in Holyroodhouse, George managed to salute 457 ladies with a kiss on the cheek in less than two hours. By and large the ladies were underwhelmed. Still, they’d had fun ordering court dresses for the occasion. The royal visit was a money-maker for tailors, dressmakers and weavers.
The pageant master was literary superstar Sir Walter Scott, the ‘Wizard of the North’ and arguably the godfather of Scottish tourism. In the few hectic weeks he had to organise the jamboree he wrote and published a pamphlet.
Its snappy title was Hints Addressed to the Inhabitants of Edinburgh, and Others, in Prospect of His Majesty’s Visit. By an Old Citizen. Highland dress was highly recommended.
Despite the partial ban which followed the 1745 Jacobite Rising, Scottish regiments in the British army continued to wear kilts. The history of specific clan tartans is a contested one. Be that as it may, weavers Wilsons of Bannockburn, founded in 1760, continued to weave undefined tartans in different colours and patterns throughout and after the ban. These became fashionable long before 1822.
Scott persuaded some Highland chiefs to bring men to Edinburgh dressed not only in kilts and plaids but also armed in “the proper Highland fashion – steel-wrought pistols, broadsword, and dirk”.
Not everyone approved. The Edinburgh Advertiser sniffily commented that Edinburgh seemed to be having “a fit of tartan”. The Scotsman complained it was: “As if nothing were Scottish but what is Highland.”
Others observed that only 80 years before the sight of the armed tartan-clad soldiers of the Jacobite army occupying the Scottish capital had terrified its citizens.
That Highlanders were being encouraged to march through Edinburgh while the Clearances were in full swing was beyond ironic. At the same time as Elizabeth, Duchess of Sutherland was having her tenants cleared from Strathnaver to make way for more profitable sheep, she proudly sent a contingent of those tenants to Edinburgh. She wrote to Scott that their fine appearance would show that what were termed ‘improvements’ were to the benefit of people who were being burned out of their crofts.
George IV was not a popular king. Indifferent to the plight of the poor, deaf to the mounting clamour for political reform, he was widely considered to have treated his wife Queen Caroline very badly. Two years before the Edinburgh visit, his government’s response to the Scottish Radical Rising was brutal.
The King’s hedonistic lifestyle had taken its toll on his body. Fashion claimed another victim when he wore a kilt in what we now know as Royal Stewart tartan.
His unsightly legs were covered in flesh-coloured pantaloons and his kilt was much too short. David Wilkie’s portrait flatters; contemporary cartoonists had fun.
Despite all this, George was given a warm welcome in Edinburgh. Crowds turned out in their thousands to catch a glimpse of him. Rich and poor travelled there by coach, canal boat or on foot. He was affable and appreciative in return, often emotional too, moved to tears.
When he accompanied the Honours of Scotland back to Edinburgh Castle he went up onto the Half Moon Battery. “Good God!” he said. “What a fine sight!” Which it is, even in the rain through which he was seeing it. Taking off his hat, he waved it above his head, acknowledging the crowds watching him as he was watching them.
Perhaps this was part of what drew so many to Edinburgh that August. Scotland’s history, traditions and treasured symbols were being ‘seen’, by Scots themselves as much as anyone else. Scott had shaped the visit with that in mind.
Vehemently opposed to political reform and horrified by the Radical Rising, his aim was to showcase shared history and heritage around which all Scots could unite. Convinced that the Union with England safeguarded Scotland’s prosperity, he believed that Union had to be one of equal partners. The markers of national identity showed that Scotland was a kingdom, not a province: and a kingdom needed a king.
In Hints, he presented George IV as a Scottish king, descended from the great Robert the Bruce and with Stewart blood running through his veins. This made the monarch “our kinsman… In short, we are the CLAN, and our King is THE CHIEF.” By some mental alchemy, this also made George a Jacobite king, heir to Bonnie Prince Charlie.
The final event of the visit was a lavish breakfast at Hopetoun House, the beautiful Adam mansion on the Firth of Forth. Turtle soup, grouse and chilled champagne for the gentry inside the house, ale and cold cuts for hundreds of estate workers, tenants and locals in the grounds.
George was then rowed out to the royal yacht from nearby Port Edgar and sailed back south.
Two hundred years on, Scott’s passionate belief that Scotland should not be a junior partner in the Union has taken modern Scots in a different direction to the one he favoured, to the current and ongoing resurgence of support for independence.
The past few decades have also seen renewed enthusiasm throughout Scotland for the wearing of tartan and the kilt. Despite the ironies, the romantic image presented by the Wizard of the North continues to be cherished at home and abroad, a hugely attractive and globally recognized marker of Scottish identity.
We’re Come to See the King by Maggie Craig, a concise history of the 1822 visit, will be published in the early autumn.
Much of her novel One Sweet Moment is set against the visit.
Further reading: The King’s Jaunt by John Prebble.
Her Damn’ Rebel Bitches and Bare-Arsed Banditti were reissued in new editions on 10 March, 2022.
Maggie is a historian and novelist. She’s written a number of features for Historia, including:
The Scottish Radical Rising of 1820
1719: the forgotten Jacobite rising
The Battle of Killiecrankie
Damn’ Rebel Bitches: Research Then and Now
For more about Edinburgh at this time, look at Rediscovering Edinburgh’s New Town in which Sara Sheridan writes about researching her novel The Fair Botanists, set in Summer 1822 in the run-up to George’s visit.
Images:
- Equipt for a Northern Visit, satirical print, 1822: Scottish National Portrait Gallery (CC by NC)
- The Procession at the Castle Esplanade during George IV’s visit to Edinburgh 1822 after William Home Lizars (detail): Scottish National Portrait Gallery (CC by NC)
- Geordie and Willie “keeping it up” – Johnny Bull pays the piper!! by George Cruikshank, 1822: © The Trustees of the British Museum
- An incident during the visit of George IV to Edinburgh by David Wilkie, 1822: Scottish National Portrait Gallery (CC by NC)
- George IV by David Wilkie, 1829: Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2022
- The Entrance of George IV at Holyroodhouse by David Wilkie, 1822–30: Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2022
