In June 1829 the elder brother had shown a manuscript, containing tartan patterns and dated in 1721, to Sir Thomas Dick-Lauder who was much impressed by it, but Sir Walter Scott warned Dick-Lauder that the brothers ‘are men of warm imaginations ... of much accomplishment but little probity – that is, in antiquarian matters’. Sir Walter Scott, who died in 1832, had rejected the entire notion of clan tartans, saying that the ‘idea of distinguishing the clans by their tartans is but a fashion of modern date’. On behalf of the Society of Scottish Antiquaries he was shown a transcript of part of the brothers’ manuscript but from its language alone ‘indignantly declared his conviction that the MS itself must be an absolute fabrication’. Scott remembered seeing one of the brothers wearing the badge of High Constable of Scotland (as the Earls of Errol were), ‘which he could have no more right to wear than the Crown’. Dick-Lauder was himself an author of historical romances and had put up a monument to the Lauder family in Edinburgh showing a quite spurious descent, but one ‘as he wished it to be’.