On the 23rd July, 1601, 1500 of her men arrived from England, clad in _red cassocks_, to share in the siege of Ostend.--(History of the Siege.) Of these, says Stowe, 1000 were Londoners, and they are now represented by Her Majesty's 3rd Foot, or Kentish Buffs.
We find no trace of the national colours at the coronation of Charles I. as King of Scotland, in 1633, at Edinburgh, where he was escorted by the Gentlemen Pensioners, under the Earl of Suffolk, and the Yeomen of the Guard, under the Earl of Holland. We are told by Spalding that he was accompanied by "his ordinary English Guards, clad in his livery, having _brown velvet_ coats, side (_i.e._, close) to their hough, and beneath with boards of black velvet, and His Majesty's armes wrought in raised and embossed work of silver and gold upon the back and breast of ilk coat. This was the ordinary weed of His Majesty's Foot Guards." Those furnished by Edinburgh were clad in "white satin doublets, black velvet breeches, silk stockings, hats, feathers, and scarfs. These gallants had dainty muskets, pikes, and gilded partizans." On this auspicious occasion, all the Scottish peerage wore their usual robes of crimson velvet. In this King's reign, David Ramsay, who was an officer of Gustavus Adolphus, when appearing to fight a duel with Lord Reay, wore a coat of scarlet (according to Sanderson's "History of England"), so thickly laced with silver that the ground of the cloth was scarcely visible.
Singularly enough, scarlet was early adopted among the grim Scottish Covenanters. At the battle of Kilsythe, where Montrose routed their troops with great slaughter, we find that "the red-coat musketeers" were cut to pieces by Viscount Aboyne and his Gordons. It may be worth mentioning here that the chequer on the bonnets of our Highland regiments was first adopted by the clans under Montrose, as significant of the _fess-cheque_ of the House of Stuart. The great Marquis wore scarlet at his barbarous execution in Edinburgh, in 1650; and in the course of that year we find Sir James Balfour recording, in his "Memorialls of Church and Staite," that an English ship was made a prize by the Scots, who found in her "eleven hundred elles of broad clothe, seven hundred suites of made clothes, and als many _read cottes_, 250 carabines, 500 muskets, with powder and matches," being supplies for the troops of Cromwell, several of whose regiments appear, however, to have been clad in blue.