218 ARMY UNIFORMS PAST AND PRESENT 



tingent would be clothed in his liveries. Pitscottie 

 describes in deliciously quaint phrase the famous scene 

 at Lauder when Archibald Douglas, fifth Earl of Angus, 

 earned his sobriquet of Bell-the-Cat. He tells how the 

 luckless Thomas Cochrane, newly created Earl of Mar, 

 rode down to the kirk where the disaffected lords were 

 in conclave, at the head of three hundred men all 

 dressed in his livery of white doublets with black bands. 

 Cromwell was the first ruler of England who succeeded 

 in what several of his predecessors had failed in main- 

 taining a standing army. At one time he had 80,000 

 men under arms, with some degree of uniformity in 

 the dress of cavalry and infantry. It consisted mainly 

 in buff coats, with breast and back pieces, iron caps and 

 other defensive armour. But that army was disbanded 

 after the Restoration, and it was not until the reign 

 of William in. that a standing army was finally 

 established, and colonels commanding regiments, being 

 allowed a sum sufficient for clothing the men, were 

 required to do so according to sealed pattern. 



Throughout the eighteenth century the British 

 soldier's dress, though fantastic, was, on the whole, 

 both picturesque and comfortable. In cut, it con- 

 formed pretty closely to the fashion prevailing among 

 civilians, though there occurred an interval when 

 George n. inflicted upon his Guards regiments the 

 preposterous conical hat, copied from the Prussian 

 Guards of Frederick the Great. This disfiguring head- 

 gear did not last very long, and gave place before the 

 end of the century to the three-cocked hat of the style 

 called, I believe, Nivernois or Kevenhuller. 



