The Scottish national dress, the quilted Highland Dress, was created only in the 17th century. It was around that time that the members of a family began to wear a particular quilted pattern as a sign of their belonging to the same clan. In Edinburgh in 1822 King George IV was wearing a tartan when he paid the first visit of a British monarch to Scotland in 100 years. In the 1840s Queen Victoria introduced the Highland Dress to the English Court. In this symbolical gesture she combined her romantic love of Scotland with the political speculation of counteracting Scottish seperatists and strengthening Scotland’s ties with the British Union. For herself and her family she chose the colours of the „Royal Stewart”, the tartan of the dethroned House of Stuart, whose legitimate heiress she deemed herself to be.