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A dance commissioned from the Society and devised by
Roy Goldring
to celebrate the 350th anniversary in 1983 of Scotland’s oldest regiment. Along with all the other Scottish regiments, The Royal Scots have been merged into The Royal Regiment of Scotland with most of its traditions being carried on by the 1st Battalion of that regiment
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The Royal Scots
When
The Reel of The Royal Scots
was devised,
The Royal Scots (The Royal Regiment), The First Regiment of Foot
were the oldest regular regiment in the British army; it was founded in 1633, after king Charles I allowed Sir John Hepburn to raise 1200 men in Scotland for service under king Louis XIII of France. At the time the Thirty-Years War was raging on the continent, and since 1625 Hepburn, together with other Scots, had been fighting for the Swedish king Gustav Adolphus until the two fell out in 1632. Hepburn also took along other Scottish units in the Swedish army and, together with other Scots who were already in France, by 1635 ended up with around 8,000 men.
The regiment, which recruited mainly in Edinburgh, the Lothians, and Tweeddale, participated in almost all campaigns of the British army, fought honourably from Tangier 1680 up to WWII, and after that saw action in Palestine, Korea, Egypt, Cyprus, Yemen, and Northern Ireland. In 2006, it was amalgamated with the
King’s Own Scottish Borderers
to form the
Royal Scots Borderers
, and was declared the
Royal Regiment of Scotland
together with the other Scottish regiments (the
Royal Highland Fusiliers (Princess Margaret’s Own Glasgow and Ayrshire Regiment)
, the
Black Watch
, the
Highlanders (Seaforth, Gordons and Camerons)
, and the
Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders
), where they formed the
1st Battalion
. In 2021, this ended up in a new formation, the
Ranger Regiment
, which also includes soldiers from the
Royal Welsh
and
Royal Irish Regiments
. The regimental museum is in Edinburgh Castle.
The regiment’s nickname,
Pontius Pilate’s Bodyguard
, goes back to a dispute in the 17th century, where the Scots argued with the French Picardy regiment about which of the two was the older one – the
Royal Scots
, as we said, had only officially been established in 1633, but saw themselves in the tradition of older Scottish units in France back to the 13th century, while the Picardy Regiment was founded in 1562. There are different versions of the story, but the most common one says that the French told the Scots that if they were really so old, they must be Pontius Pilate’s bodyguard, upon which the Scots retorted that if
their
regiment had been on duty during and after the crucifixion of Christ, the Holy Sepulchre would not have been found empty.
From “Anselm's Notes on Dances”, by Anselm Lingnau
(Used by permission.)