Flags for the Earl of Sutherland's Regiment

All of the covenanter regiments that have been completed to date, with the exception of Sutherland's, have been done by Roy, and Roy hand-paints his flags on tin foil to terrific effect. Roy's method for flags was shared in a couple of earlier posts including a great tutorial on painting covenanter flags and a later 'gallery' of Covenanter Standards .

Anyone who has followed the Royalist progress knows that I prefer to prepare the flags on photoshop, print on paper and then fully re-paint the design and that is the same way I have approached Sutherland's flags.  They were both made in photoshop and can be printed for use in your own armies. 

The white sheet above is a Colonel's colour with the Sutherland coat of arms in the centre. There is no surviving description of Sutherland's Civil War colours, so this design is purely speculative. The Sutherland arms with there golden stars on a red field is actually an earlier version of the arms which predates the civil wars by over 100 years.

Prior to 1530 the Sutherland family went by the rather grand ancestral name of 'de Moravia', a Norman french rendering of Moray or Murray. Throughout this time, the arms of Sutherland was the 3 golden stars on a red field. 

In 1530 Elizabeth de Moravia, 10th Countess of Sutherland and only surviving heir, married Adam Gordon, son of George Gordon, the 2nd Earl of Huntly and ancestor of Royalist rabble rouser George Gordon, the 2nd Marquis of Huntly, Montrose's reluctant ally. By right of marriage the title of Earl of Sutherland passed to Adam Gordon, who became the 10th Earl of Sutherland. 

From 1530 until the 1800's the Sutherland Arms were actually quartered with Gordon of Huntly Arms. The Gordon Arms can be seen on the blog post for Gordon of Monymore's Regiment. However, given that I was going to place a small coat of arms in the centre of each sheet, I stuck to the simplicity of the original Sutherland Arms. Anyway, the Gordon's have had plenty of attention already, and are set to get a whole lot more when I get to the horse.

Copyright held by www.europeanheraldry.org

Anyone interested in seeing how the Sutherland Arms evolved over the years can see pictures of them at European Heraldry, an excellent online resource for flag designs.

The Earls of Sutherland were Gordons in name down to 1733, when William Gordon, the 17th Earl of Sutherland changed his surname to Sutherland to distance himself from the Gordon's of Huntly who were incurable Jacobites, and attracting a lot of unwanted attention from the government security apparatus for anyone thought to be associated with them.

The second flag is a traditional Scots Government company colour with blue field and white saltire. The absence of any contemporary record means this is also entirely speculative. Scots company colours of the time almost exclusively used the Scots Saltire, either full size or in the canton, however they were not always the traditional white cross on a blue field. 

Given the absence of information and the strong covenanting tendencies of the 13th Earl, I decided to use the traditional national flag colours. I have used an archaic text for the covenanter script which predates the standardisation of the text inscription in 1650. 

I have also added a Sutherland crest in the centre of the saltire. It was common at that time for nobles on both sides of the conflict to include an element of their family heraldry on their flags, and this flag, although speculative, follows contemporary design conventions.

More photos and information about this regiment can be found in the blog post on Sutherland's Regiment.