Back in Black: The Button-Hole Controversy

Regimental "A really well-made buttonhole is the only link between Art and Nature." - Oscar Wilde

Button tape. The distinguishing mark on any redcoat regimental.

Ok, sure, there are plenty of factors that range from the cut of the tails to the metal and the design of the buttons. But really, the biggest identifying factor in a unit of the 18th c. coats is undoubtedly "The Braid".

Braid, or "tape" as it is sometimes called today, varied from regiment to regiment and helped to identify, at a glance, what unit the soldier was a member of. These braids differed widely in style and colors, ranging from the simple to the complex.

Admiral Rodney of the Royal Navy, 1791 (NMM)

Whether called tape, ribbon, braid, whatever word you choose to describe it, when we talk about this feature of 18th c. coat we are describing the lacing that is done to denote rank and regimental affiliation.

Old military paintings are something we have a love-hate relationship with. It's amazing that we have records of these officers, cast on canvas for eternity and for our edification and education!

On the other hand... they are almost exclusively of officers. And the thing about officers is they often had their own rules and standards for what their uniforms looked like. And even if there was a uniform standard, officers high enough in the ranks that could afford their portraits ALSO were given a much more "relaxed" standard that was often open to "customization".

All that to say, your average rank-and-file soldier is not often represented in the artwork that survives. On the rare occasion we get one, there is such a variation between regiments that it can be tricky to pin down exactly what a certain coat looked like as we've discussed before. And so we are left to try and sift through documents to make the best lemonade out of the lemons we have.

This led us to one question in particular as we began digging.

"What did our tape look like?"

Many coats of the 17th made in years past feature a black stripe in a white braid. Indeed, even the painting we are basing much of our visual research on shows the officer with a black stripe around his button-holes. But many of the written documents we started out with never mentioned the black stripe. In fact, they simply list the braid used as "white" or refer to the facing colors, no mention of the braid at all.

Some examples of this:

"The Cloathing of the Serjeants Corporals and Private Men Colour of the Facings and Lappels: The Prince of Wales's black with half lappels The Kings's blue with half lappels The Queen's blue with half lappels The 17th white with half lappels The 18th white with half lappels..."

- The Discipline of the Light Horse by Cpt. Hinds, 1778

Or, infuriatingly, they skimp on the detail for a common trooper, (as with the excerpt from the book above,) and later in the book mention details not relating to a general trooper.

"Colour of the Lace on the Cloaths of the Trumpeters The Prince of Wales's the King's and Queen's Royal lace blue and yellow The 17th white with a black edge ."

- The Discipline of the Light Horse by Cpt. Hinds, 1778

Now, that is helpful when trying to recreate a musician's coat, but as we know a musician's coat is an entirely different beast all together, this does little to help us solve the question of a troopers lacing design.

Coronation portrait of George III by Allan Ramsay, 1762

Even the Royal Warrant given to the cavalry troops by His Majesty King George III in 1768, the excerpts pertaining to the 17th indicate no mention of the black being integrated into the lace.

"The button-holes of the coats of the Dragoon Guards, Dragoons, and Light Dragoons, to be of a very narrow yellow, buff or white braid, and set on as hereafter specified. Those of the Horse to be of plain twist."

- The Royal Clothing Warrant of 1768 (Cavalry)

So this leads to a conundrum. We want to be as true to history as possible, and so if a document says "white" it should be white until other documentation shows otherwise with a degree of certainty we can live with.

Well, thanks to our friend Don N. Hagist, Editor, Journal of the American Revolution, we have a few more pieces to help us in our quest.

As the show Outlander has swept the world by storm, there is a line many fans of the show and books will remember Governor Tryon telling Jamie Fraser; "There is the Law...and then there is what is done..."

Military documents of the time were sometimes compiled into "Army Lists" and published in a volume set. These lists help give us clues as to what the military was actually doing at the time they were written. Thanks to Hagist, we've got not one, but two references in contemporary army lists that shed light on what was done during the war.

The first is dated to 1775, when the war first broke out. Since the 17th arrived in Boston on the 24th of May, 1775, it is reasonable to say these were the uniforms the 17th were wearing when they stepped off the ship on the warf in the Americas. As it says below, the soldiers of the 17th were wearing "Red [coats] f[aced] wh[ite], white Furn[iture], white Lace with a black edge."

Again, another list describes the same coat in 1782, during what would have been the Yorktown campaign and the closing days of the war. "Red, [faced] white, white furn[iture], wh[ite] lace with a black edge."

So again, "There is the law, and then there is what is done."

While the Royal Warrants do not specify anything other than white lace, we can see from these lists that from the start of the war, all the way to the end, what was done was that the regiment as a whole, from the musicians and officers to the troopers, was sporting a white lace buttonhole with black trim. This lace would have also been used on the accent braidwork on the coats, such as the chevrons on the arms as well as the tails.

But that's another wormhole to dive into later.