CHAPTER IIDRESS OF THE NEW ENGLAND MOTHERSIhave expressed a doubt that the dress of Cavalier and Puritan varied as much as has been popularly believed; I feel sure that the dress of Puritan women did not differ from the attire of women of quiet life who remained in the Church of England; nor did it vary materially either in form or quality from the attire of the sensible followers of court life. It simply did not extend to the extreme of the mode in gay color, extravagance, or grotesqueness. In the first severity of revolt over the dissoluteness of English life which had shown so plainly in the extravagance and absurdity of English court dress, many persons of deep thought (especially men), both of the Church of England and of the Puritan faith, expressed their feeling by a change in their dress. Doubtless also in some the extremity of feeling extended to fanaticism. It is always thus in reforms; the slow start becomes suddenly a violent rush which needs to be retarded and moderated, and it always is moderated. I have referred to one exhibition of bigotry in regard to dress which is found in the annals of Puritanism; it is detailed in the censure and attempt at restraint of the dress of Madam Johnson, the wife of the Rev. Francis Johnson, the pastor of the exiles to Holland.There is a tradition that Parson Johnson was one of the Marprelate brotherhood, who certainly deserved the imprisonment they received, were it only for their ill-spelling and ill-use of their native tongue. The Marprelate pamphlet before me as I write had an author who could not even spell the titles of the prelates it assailed; but called them “parsones, fyckers and currats,” the latter two names being intended for vicars and curates. The story of Madam Johnson’s revolt, and her triumph, is preserved to us in such real and earnest language, and was such a vital thing to the actors in the little play, that it seems almost irreverent to regard it as a farce, yet none to-day could read of it without a sense of absurdity, and we may as well laugh frankly and freely at the episode.When the protagonist of this Puritan comedy entered the stage, she was a widow—Tomison or Thomasine Boyes, a “warm” widow, as the saying of the day ran, that is, warm with a comfortable legacy of ready money. She was a young widow, and she was handsome. At any rate, it was brought up against her when events came to a climax; it was testified in the church examination or trial that “men called her a bouncing girl,” as if she could help that! Husband Boyes had been a haberdasher, and I fancy she got both her finery and her love of finery in his shop. And it was told with all the petty terms of scandal-mongering that might be heard in a small shop in a small English town to-day; it was told very gravely that the “clarkes in the shop” compared her for her pride in apparel to the wife of the Bishop of London, and it was affirmed that she stood “gazing, braving, and vaunting in shop doores.”Now this special complaint against the Widow Boyes, that she stood braving and vaunting in shop doors, was not a far-fetched attack brought as a novelty of tantalizing annoyance; it touches in her what was one of the light carriages of the day, which were so detestable to sober and thoughtful folk, an odious custom specified by Stubbes in hisAnatomy of Abuses. He writes thus of London women, the wives of merchants:—“Othersome spend the greater part of the daie in sittyng at the doore, to shewe their braveries, to make knowen their beauties, to behold the passers by; to view the coast, to see fashions, and to acquaint themselves of the bravest fellows—for, if not for these causes, I know no other causes why they should sitt at their doores—as many doe from Morning till Noon, from Noon till Night.”Other writers give other reasons for this “vaunting.” We learn that “merchants’ wives had seats built a purpose” to sit in, in order to lure customers. Marston inThe Dutch Courtesansays:—“His wife’s a proper woman—that she is! She has been as proper a woman as any in the Chepe. She paints now, and yet she keeps her husband’s old customers to him still. In troth, a fine-fac’d wife in a wainscot-carved seat, is a worthy ornament to any tradesman’s shop. And an attractive one I’le warrant.”This handsome, buxom, bouncing widow fell in love with Pastor Johnson, and he with her, while he was “a prisoner in the Clink,” he having been thrown therein by the Archbishop of Canterbury for his persistent preaching of Puritanism. Many of his friends “thought this not a good match” for him at any time; and all deemed it ill advised for a man in prison to pledge himself in matrimony to any one. And soon zealous and meddlesome Brother George Johnson took a hand in advice and counsel, with as high a hand as if Francis had been a child instead of a man of thirty-two, and a man of experience as well, and likewise older than George.George at first opened warily, saying in his letters that “he was very loth to contrary his brother;” still Brother Francis must be sensible that this widow was noted for her pride and vanity, her light and garish dress, and that it would give great offence to all Puritans if he married her, and “it (the vanity and extravagance, etc.) should not be refrained.” There was then some apparent concession and yielding on the widow’s part, for George for a time “sett down satysfyed”; when suddenly, to his “great grief” and discomfiture, he found that his brother had been “inveigled and overcarried,” and the sly twain had been married secretly in prison.It must be remembered that this was in the last years of Elizabeth’s reign, in 1596, when the laws were rigid in attempts at limitation of dress, as I shall note later in this chapter. But there were certain privileges of large estate, even if the owner were of mean birth; and Madam Johnson certainly had money enough to warrant her costly apparel, and in ready cash also, from Husband Boyes. But in the first good temper and general good will of the honeymoon she “obeyed”; she promised to dress as became her husband’s condition, which would naturally mean much simpler attire. He was soon in very bad case for having married without permission of the archbishop, and was still more closely confined within-walls; but even while he lingered in prison, Brother George saw with anguish that the bride’s short obedience had ended. She appeared in “more garish and proud apparell” than he had ever before seen upon the widow,—naturally enough for a bride,—even the bride of a bridegroom in prison; but he “dealt with her that she would refrain”—poor, simple man! She dallied on, tantalizing him and daring him, and she was very “bold in inviting proof,” but never quitting her bridal finery for one moment; so George read to her with emphasis, as a final and unconquerable weapon, that favorite wail of all men who would check or reprove an extravagant woman, namely, Isaiah iii, 16et seq., the chapter called by Mercy Warren“... An antiquated pageThat taught us the threatenings of an Hebrew sageGainst wimples, mantles, curls and crisping pins.”I wonder how many Puritan parsons have preached fatuously upon those verses! how many defiant women have had them read to them—and how many meek ones! I knew a deacon’s wife in Worcester, some years ago, who asked for a new pair of India-rubber overshoes, and in pious response her frugal partner slapped open the great Bible at this favorite third chapter of the lamenting and threatening prophet, and roared out to his poor little wife, sitting meekly before him in calico gown and checked apron, the lesson of the haughty daughters of Zion walking with stretched-forth necks and tinkling feet; of their chains and bracelets and mufflers; their bonnets and rings and rich jewels; their mantles and wimples and crisping-pins; their fair hoods and veils—oh, how she must have longed for an Oriental husband!Petulant with his new sister-in-law’s successful evasions of his readings, his letters, and his advice, his instructions, his pleadings, his commands, and “full of sauce and zeal” like Elnathan, George Johnson, in emulation of the prophet Isaiah, made a list of the offences of this London “daughter of Zion,” wrote them out, and presented them to the congregation. She wore “3, 4, or even 5 gold rings at one time” Then likewise “her Busks and ye Whalebones at her Brest were soe manifest that many of ye Saints were greeved thereby.” She was asked to “pull off her Excessive Deal of Lace.” And she was fairly implored to “exchange ye Schowish Hatt for a sober Taffety or Felt.” She was ordered severely “to discontinue Whalebones,” and to “quit ye great starcht Ruffs, ye Muske, and ye Rings.” And not to wear her bodice tied to her petticoat “as men do their doublets to their hose contrary to I Thessalonians, V, 22.” And a certain stomacher or neckerchief he plainly called “abominable and loathsome.” A “schowish Velvet Hood,” such as only “the richest, finest and proudest sort should use,” was likewise beyond endurance, almost beyond forgiveness, and other “gawrish gear gave him grave greevance.”Mrs. William Clark.Mrs. William Clark.But here the young husband interfered, as it was high time he should; and he called his brother “fantasticall, fond, ignorant, anabaptisticall and such like,” though what the poor Anabaptists had to do with such dress quarrels I know not. George’s cautious reference in his letter to the third verse of the third chapter of Jeremiah made the parson call it “the Abhominablest Letter ever was written.” George, a bit frightened, answered pacificatorily that he noted of late that “the excessive lace upon the sleeve of her dress had a Cover drawn upon it;” that the stomacher was not “so gawrish, so low, and so spitz-fashioned as it was wont to be”; nor was her hat “so topishly set,”—and he expressed pious gladness at the happy change, “hoping more would follow,”—and for a time all did seem subdued. But soon another meddlesome young man became “greeved” (did ever any one hear of such a set of silly, grieving fellows?); and seeing “how heavily the young gentleman took it,” stupid George must interfere again, to be met this time very boldly by the bouncing girl herself, who, he writes sadly, answered him in a tone “very peert and coppet.” “Coppet” is a delightful old word which all our dictionaries have missed; it signifies impudent, saucy, or, to be precise, “sassy,” which we all know has a shade more of meaning. “Peert and coppet” is a delightful characterization. George refused to give the sad young complainer’s name, who must have been well ashamed of himself by this time, and was then reproached with being a “forestaller,” a “picker,” and a “quarrelous meddler”—and with truth.During the action of this farce, all had gone from London into exile in Holland. Then came the sudden trip to Newfoundland and the disastrous and speedy return to Holland again. And through the misfortunes and the exiles, the company drew more closely together, and gentle words prevailed; George was “sorie if he had overcarried himself”; Madam “was sure if it were to do now, she would not so wear it.” Still, she did not offer her martinet of a brother-in-law a room to lodge in in her house, though she had many rooms unused, and he needed shelter, whereat he whimpered much; and soon he was charging her again “with Muske as a sin” (musk was at that time in the very height of fashion in France) and cavilling at her unbearable “topish hat.” Then came long argument and sparring for months over “topishness,” which seems to have been deemed a most offensive term. They told its nature and being; they brought in Greek derivatives, and the pastor produced a syllogism upon the word. And they declared that the hat in itself was not topish, but only became so when she wore it, she being the wife of a preacher; and they disputed over velvet and vanity; they bickered over topishness and lightness; they wrangled about lawn coives and busks in a way that was sad to read. The pastor argued soundly, logically, that both coives and busks might be lawfully used; whereat one of his flock, Christopher Dickens, rose up promptly in dire fright and dread of future extravagance among the women-saints in the line of topish hats and coives and busks, and he “begged them not to speak so, andso loud, lest it should bringmany inconveniences among their wives.” Finally the topish head-gear was demanded in court, which the parson declared was “offensive”; and so they bickered on till a most unseemly hour, tillten o’clock at night, as “was proved by the watchman and rattleman coming about.” Naturally they wished to go to bed at an early hour, for religious services began at nine; one of the complaints against the topish bride was that she was a “slug-a-bed,” flippantly refused to rise and have her house ordered and ready for the nine o’clock public service. The meetings were then held in the parson’s house, and held every day; which may have been one reason why the settlement grew poorer. It matters little what was said, or how it ended, since it did not disrupt and disband the Holland Pilgrims. For eleven years this stupid wrangling lasted; and it seemed imminent that the settlement would finish with a separation, and a return of many to England. Slight events have great power—this topish hat of a vain and pretty, a peert and coppet young Puritan bride came near to hindering and changing the colonization of America.Lady Mary Armine.Lady Mary Armine.I have related this episode at some length because its recounting makes us enter into the spirit of the first Separatist settlers. It shows us too that dress conquered zeal; it could not be “forborne” by entreaty, by reproof, by discipline, by threats, by example. An influence, or perhaps I should term it an echo, of this long quarrel is seen plainly by the thoughtful mind in the sumptuary laws of the New World. Some of the articles of dress so dreaded, so discussed in Holland, still threatened the peace of Puritanical husbands in New England; they still dreaded many inconveniences. In 1634, the general court of Massachusetts issued this edict:—“That no person, man or woman, shall hereafter make or buy any Apparell, either Woolen, or Silk, or Linen, with any Lace on it, Silver, Gold, or Thread, under the penalty of forfeiture of said clothes. Also that no person either man or woman, shall make or buy any Slashed Clothes, other than one Slash in each Sleeve and another in the Back. Also all Cut-works, embroideries, or Needlework Caps, Bands or Rails, are forbidden hereafter to be made and worn under the aforesaid Penalty; also all gold or silver Girdles Hat bands, Belts, Ruffs, Beaver hats are prohibited to be bought and worn hereafter.”Fines were stated, also the amount of estate which released the dress-wearer from restriction. Liberty was given to all to wear out the apparel which they had on hand except “immoderate great sleeves, slashed apparell, immoderate great rails, and long wings”—these being beyond endurance.In 1639 “immoderate great breeches, knots of riban, broad shoulder bands and rayles, silk roses, double ruffles and capes” were forbidden to folk of low estate. Soon the court expressed its “utter detestation and dislike,” that men and women of “mean condition, education and calling” should take upon themselves “the garb of gentlemen” by wearing gold and silver lace, buttons and points at the knee, or “walk in great boots,” or women of the same low rank to wear silk or tiffany hoods or scarfs. There were likewise orders that no short sleeves should be worn “whereby the nakedness of the arms may be discovered”; women’s sleeves were not to be more than half an ell wide; long hair and immodest laying out of the hair and wearing borders of hair were abhorrent. Poor folk must not appear with “naked breasts and arms; or as it were pinioned with superstitious ribbons on hair and apparell.” Tailors who made garments for servants or children, richer than the garments of the parents or masters of these juniors, were to be fined. Similar laws were passed in Connecticut and Virginia. I know of no one being “psented” under these laws in Virginia, but in Connecticut and Massachusetts both men and women were fined. In 1676, in Northampton, thirty-six young women at one time were brought up for overdress chiefly in hoods; and an amusing entry in the court record is that one of them, Hannah Lyman, appeared in the very hood for which she was fined; and was thereupon censured for “wearing silk in a fflonting manner, in an offensive way, not only before but when she stood Psented. Not only in Ordinary but Extraordinary times.” These girls were all fined; but six years later, when a stern magistrate attempted a similar persecution, the indictments were quashed.The Tub-preacher.The Tub-preacher.It is not unusual to find the careless observer or the superficial reader—and writer—commenting upon the sumptuary laws of the New World as if they were extraordinary and peculiar. There appeared in a recent American magazine a long rehearsal of the unheard-of presumption of Puritan magistrates in their prohibition of certain articles of dress. This writer was evidently wholly ignorant of the existence of similar laws in England, and even of like laws in Virginia, but railed against Winthrop and Endicott as monsters of Puritanical arrogance and impudence.In truth, however, such laws had existed not only in France and England, but since the days of the old Locrian legislation, when it was ordered that no woman should go attended with more than one maid in the street “unless she were drunk.” Ancient Rome and Sparta were surrounded by dress restrictions which were broken just as were similar ones in more modern times. The Roman could wear a robe but of a single color; he could wear in embroideries not more than half an ounce of gold; and, with what seems churlishness he was forbidden to ride in a carriage. At that time, just as in later days, dress was made to emphasize class distinction, and the clergy joined with the magistrates in denouncing extravagant dress in both men and women. The chronicles of the monks are ever chiding men for their peaked shoes, deep sleeves and curled locks like women, and Savonarola outdid them all in severity. The English kings and queens, jealous of the rich dress of their opulent subjects, multiplied restrictions, and some very curious anecdotes exist of the calm assumption by both Elizabeth and Mary to their own wardrobe of the rich finery of some lady at the court who displayed some new and too becoming fancy.Old Venice Point Lace.Old Venice Point Lace.Adam Smith declared it “an act of highest impertinence and presumption for kings and rulers to pretend to watch over the earnings and expenditure of private persons,” nevertheless this public interference lingered long, especially under monarchies.These sumptuary laws of New England followed in spirit and letter similar laws in England. Winthrop had seen the many apprentices who ran through London streets, dressed under laws as full of details of dress as is a modern journal of the modes. For instance, the apprentice’s head-covering must be a small, flat, round cap, called often a bonnet—a hat like a pie-dish. The facing of the hat could not exceed three inches in breadth in the head; nor could the hat with band and facing cost over five shillings. His band or collar could have no lace edge; it must be of linen not over five shillings an ell in price; and could have no other work or ornament save “a plain hem and one stitch”—which was a hemstitch. If he wore a ruff, it must not be over three inches wide before it was gathered and set into the “stock.” The collar of his doublet could have neither “point, well-bone or plait,” but must be made “close and comely.” The stuff of his doublet and breeches could not cost over two shillings and sixpence a yard. It could be either cloth, kersey, fustian, sackcloth, canvas, or “English stuff”; or leather could be used. The breeches were generally of the shape known as “round slops.” His stockings could be knit or of cloth; but his shoes could have no polonia heels. His hair was to be cut close, with no “tuft or lock.”Queen Elizabeth stood no nonsense in these things; finding that London ’prentices had adopted a certain white stitching for their collars, she put a stop to this mild finery by ordering the first transgressor to be whipped publicly in the hall of his company. These same laws, tinkered and altered to suit occasions, appear for many years in English records, for years after New England’s sumptuary laws were silenced.Notwithstanding Hannah Lyman and the thirty-six vain Northampton girls, we do not on the whole hear great complaint of extravagance in dress or deportment. At any rate none were called bouncing girls. The portraits of men or women certainly show no restraint as to richness in dress. Their sumptuary laws were of less use to their day than to ours, for they do reveal to us what articles of dress our forbears wore.While the Massachusetts magistrates were fussing a little over woman’s dress, the parsons, as a whole, were remarkably silent. Of course two or three of them could not refrain from announcing a text from Isaiah iii, 16et seq., and enlarging upon the well-worn wimples and nose jewels, and bells on their feet, which were as much out of fashion in Massachusetts then as now. It is such a well-rounded, ringing, colorful arraignment of woman’s follies you couldn’t expect a parson to give it up. Every evil predicted of the prophet was laid at the door of these demure Puritan dames,—fire and war, and caterpillars, and even baldness, which last was really unjust. Solomon Stoddard preached on the “Intolerable Pride in the Plantations in Clothes and Hair,” that his parishioners “drew iniquity with a cord of vanity and sin with a cart-rope.” The apostle Paul also furnished ample texts for the Puritan preacher.Rebecca Rawson.Rebecca Rawson.In the eleventh chapter of Corinthians wise Paul delivered some sentences of exhortation, of reproof, of warning to Corinthian women which I presume he understood and perhaps Corinthian dames did, but which have been a dire puzzle since to parsons and male members of their congregations. (I cannot think that women ever bothered much about his words.) For instance, Archbishop Latimer, in one of the cheerful, slangy rallies to his hearers which he called sermons, quotes Paul’s sentence that a woman ought to have a power on her head, and construes positively that a power is a French hood. This is certainly a somewhat surprising notion, but I presume he knew. However, Roger Williams deemed a power a veil; and being somewhat dictatorial in his words, albeit the tenderest of creatures in his heart, he bade Salem women come to meeting in a veil, telling them they should come like Sarah of old, wearing this veil as a token of submission to their husbands. The text saith this exactly, “A woman ought to have power on her head because of the angels,” which seems to me one of those convenient sayings of Paul and others which can be twisted to many, to any meanings, even to Latimer’s French hood. Old John Cotton, of course, found ample Scripture to prove Salem women should not wear veils, and so here in this New World, as in the Holland sojourn, the head-covering of the mothers rent in twain the meetings of the fathers, while the women wore veils or no veils, French hoods or beaver hats, in despite of Paul’s opinions and their husbands’ constructions of his opinions.An excellent description of the Puritan women of a dissenting congregation is inHudibras Redivivus;it reads:—“The good old dames among the restWere all most primitively drestIn stiffen-bodyed russet gownsAnd on their heads old steeple crownsWith pristine pinners next their facesEdged round with ancient scallop-laces,Such as, my antiquary says,Were worn in old Queen Bess’s days,In ruffs; and fifty other waysTheir wrinkled necks were covered o’erWith whisks of lawn by granmarms wore.”The “old steeple crowns” over “pristine pinners” were not peculiar to the Puritans. There was a time, in the first years of the seventeenth century, when many Englishwomen wore steeple-crowned hats with costly hatbands. We find them in pictures of women of the court, as well as upon the heads of Puritans. I have a dozen prints and portraits of Englishwomen in rich dress with these hats. The Quaker Tub-preacher, shownhere, wears one. Perhaps the best known example to Americans may be seen in the portrait of Pocahontashere.Authentic portraits of American women who came in theMayfloweror in the first ships to the Massachusetts Bay settlement, there are none to my knowledge. Some exist which are doubtless of that day, but cannot be certified. One preserved in Connecticut in the family of Governor Eaton shows a brown old canvas like a Rembrandt. The subject is believed to be of the Yale family, and the chief and most distinct feature of dress is the ruff.It was a time of change both of men’s and women’s neckwear. A few older women clung to the ruffs of their youth; younger women wore bands, falling-bands, falls, rebatoes, falling-whisks and whisks, the “fifty other ways” which could be counted everywhere. Carlyle says:—“There are various traceable small threads of relation, interesting reciprocities and mutabilities connecting the poor young Infant, New England, with its old Puritan mother and her affairs, which ought to be disentangled, to be made conspicuous by the Infant herself now she has grown big.”These traceable threads of relation are ever of romantic interest to me, and even when I refer to the dress of English folk I linger with pleasure with those whose lives were connected even by the smallest thread with the Infant, New England. One such thread of connection was in the life of Lady Mary Armine; so I choose to give her picturehere, to illustrate the dress, if not of a New Englander, yet of one of New England’s closest friends. She was a noble, high-minded English gentlewoman, who gave “even to her dying day” to the conversion of poor tawny heathen of New England. A churchwoman by open profession, she was a Puritan in her sympathies, as were many of England’s best hearts and souls who never left the Church of England. She gave in one gift £500 to families of ministers who had been driven from their pulpits in England. The Nipmuck schools at Natick and Hassamanesit (near Grafton) were founded under her patronage. The life of this “Truly Honourable, Very Aged and Singularly Pious Lady who dyed 1675,” was written as a “pattern to Ladies.” Her long prosy epitaph, after enumerating the virtues of many of the name of Mary, concludes thus:—“The Army of such Ladies so DivineThis Lady said ‘I’ll follow, they Ar-mine.’Lady Elect! in whom there did combineSo many Maries, might well say All Ar-mine.”A pun was a Puritan’s one jocularity; and he would pun even in an epitaph.It will be seen that Lady Mary Armine wears the straight collar or band, and the black French hood which was the forerunner, then the rival, and at last the survivor of the “sugar-loaf” beaver or felt hat,—a hood with a history, which will have a chapter for the telling thereof. Lady Mary wears a peaked widow’s cap under her hood; this also is a detail of much interest.Another portrait of this date is of Mrs. Clark (seehere). This has two singular details; namely, a thumb-ring, which was frequently owned but infrequently painted, and a singular bracelet, which is accurately described in the verse of Herrick, written at that date:—“I saw about her spotless wristOf blackest silk a curious twistWhich circumvolving gently thereEnthralled her arm as prisoner.”I may say in passing that I have seen in portraits knots of narrow ribbon on the wrists, both of men and women, and I am sure they had some mourning significance, as did the knot of black on the left arm of the queen of King James of England.We have in the portrait shown as a frontispiece an excellent presentment of the dress of the Puritan woman of refinement; the dress worn by the wives of Winthrop, Endicott, Leverett, Dudley, Saltonstall, and other gentlemen of Salem and Boston and Plymouth. We have also the dress worn by her little child about a year old. This portrait is of Madam Padishal. She was a Plymouth woman; and we know from the inventories of estates that there were not so many richly dressed women in Plymouth as in Boston and Salem. This dress of Madam Padishal’s is certainly much richer than the ordinary attire of Plymouth dames of that generation.This portrait has been preserved in Plymouth in the family of Judge Thomas, from whom it descended to the present owner. Madam Padishal was young and handsome when this portrait was painted. Her black velvet gown is shaped just like the gown of Madam Rawson (shownhere), of Madam Stoddard (shownhere), both Boston women; and of the English ladies of her times. It is much richer than that of Lady Mary Armine or Mrs. Clark.The gown of Madam Padishal is varied pleasingly from that of Lady Mary Armine, in that the body is low-necked, and the lace whisk is worn over the bare neck. The pearl necklace and ear-rings likewise show a more frivolous spirit than that of the English dame.Another Plymouth portrait of very rich dress, that of Elizabeth Paddy, Mrs. John Wensley, faces this page. The dress in this is a golden-brown brocade under-petticoat and satin overdress. The stiff, busked stays are equal to Queen Elizabeth’s. Revers at the edge of overdress and on the virago sleeves are now of flame color, a Spanish pink, but were originally scarlet, I am sure. The narrow stomacher is a beaded galloon with bright spangles and bugles. On the hair there shows above the ears a curious ornament which resembles a band of this galloon. There are traces of a similar ornament in Madam Rawson’s portrait (here); and Madam Stoddard’s (here) has some ornament over the ears. This may have been a modification of a contemporary Dutch head-jewel. The pattern of the lace of Elizabeth Paddy’s whisk is most distinct; it was a good costly Flemish parchment lace like Mrs. Padishal’s. She carries a fan, and wears rings, a pearl necklace, and ear-rings. I may say here that I have never seen other jewels than these,—a few rings, and necklace and ear-rings of pearl. Other necklaces seem never to have been worn.Elizabeth Paddy Wensley.Elizabeth Paddy Wensley.We cannot always trust that all the jewels seen in these portraits were real, or that the sitter owned as many as represented. A bill is in existence where a painter charged ten shillings extra for bestowing a gold and pearl necklace upon his complaisant subject. In this case, however, the extra charge was to pay for the gold paint or gold-leaf used for gilding the painted necklace. In the amusing letters of Lady Sussex to Lord Verney are many relating to her portrait by Van Dyck. She consented to the painting very unwillingly, saying, “it is money ill bestowed.” She writes:—“Put Sr Vandyke in remembrance to do my pictuer well. I have seen sables with the clasp of them set with diamonds—if those I am pictured in were done so, I think it would look very well in the pictuer. If Sr Vandyke thinks it would do well I pray desier him to do all the clawes so. I do not mene the end of the tales but only the end of the other peces, they call them clawes I think.”This gives a glimpse of a richness of detail in dress even beyond our own day, and one which I commend to some New York dame of vast wealth, to have the claws of her sables set with diamonds. She writes later in two letters of some weeks’ difference in date:—“I am glad you have prefalede with Sr Vandyke to make my pictuer leaner, for truly it was too fat. If he made it farer it will bee to my credit. I am glad you have made Sr Vandyke mind my dress.” ...“I am glad you have got home my pictuer, but I doubt he has made it lener or farer, but too rich in jewels, I am sure; but ’tis no great matter for another age to thinke mee richer than I was. I wish it could be mended in the face for sure ’tis very ugly. The pictuer is very ill-favourede, makes me quite out of love with myselfe, the face is so bigg and so fat it pleases mee not at all. It looks like one of the Windes puffinge—(but truly I think it is lyke the original).”I am struck by a likeness in workmanship in the portraits of these two Plymouth dames, and the portrait of Madam Stoddard (here), and succeeding illustrations of the Gibbes children. I do wish I knew whether these were painted by Tom Child—a painter-stainer and limner referred to by Judge Samuel Sewall in his Diary, who was living in Boston at that time. Perhaps we may find something, some day, to tell us this. I feel sure these were all painted in America, especially the portraits of the Gibbes children. A great many coats-of-arms were made in Boston at this time, and I expect the painter-stainer made them. All painting then was called coloring. A man would say in 1700, “Archer has set us a fine example of expense; he has colored his house, and has even laid one room in oils; he had the painter-stainer from Boston to do it—the man who limns faces, and does pieces, and tricks coats.” This was absolutely correct English, but we would hardly know that the man meant: “Archer has been extravagant enough; he has painted his house, and even painted the woodwork of one room. He had the artist from Boston to do the work—the painter of faces and full-lengths, who makes coats-of-arms.”It is hard to associate the very melancholy countenance shownherewith a tradition of youth and beauty. Had the portrait been painted after a romance of sorrow came to this young maid, Rebecca Rawson, we could understand her expression; but it was painted when she was young and beautiful, so beautiful that she caught the eye and the wandering affections of a wandering gentleman, who announced himself as the son of one nobleman and kinsman of many others, and persuaded this daughter of Secretary Edward Rawson to marry him, which she did in the presence of forty witnesses. This young married pair then went to London, where the husband deserted Rebecca, who found to her horror that she was not his wife, as he had at least one English wife living. Alone and proud, Rebecca Rawson supported herself and her child by painting on glass; and when at last she set out to return to her childhood’s home, her life was lost at sea by shipwreck.The portrait of another Boston woman of distinction, Mrs. Simeon Stoddard, is givenhere. I will attempt to explain who Mrs. Simeon Stoddard was. She was Mr. Stoddard’s third widow and the third widow also of Peter Sergeant, builder of the Province House. Mr. Sergeant’s second wife had been married twice before she married him, and Simeon Stoddard’s father had four wives, all having been widows when he married them. Lastly, our Mrs. Simeon Stoddard, triumphing over death and this gallimaufry of Boston widows, took a fourth husband, the richest merchant in town, Samuel Shrimpton. Having had in all four husbands of wealth, and with them and their accumulation of widows there must have been as a widow’s mite an immense increment and inheritance of clothing (for clothing we know was a valued bequest), it is natural that we find her very richly dressed and with a distinctly haughty look upon her handsome face as becomes a conqueror both of men and widows.The straight, lace collar, such as is worn by Madam Padishal and shown in all portraits of this date, is, I believe, a whisk.The whisk was a very interesting and to us a puzzling article of attire, through the lack of precise description. It was at first called the falling-whisk, and is believed to have been simply the handsome, lace-edged, stiff, standing collar turned down over the shoulders. This collar had been both worn with the ruff and worn after it, and had been called a fall. Quicherat tells that the “whisk” came into universal use in 1644, when very low-necked gowns were worn, and that it was simply a kerchief or fichu to cover the neck.We have a few side-lights to help us, as to the shape of the whisk, in the form of advertisements of lost whisks. In one case (1662) it is “a cambric whisk with Flanders lace, about a quarter of a yard broad, and a lace turning up about an inch broad, with a stock in the neck and a strap hanging down before.” And in 1664 “A Tiffany Whisk with a great Lace down and a little one up, of large Flowers, and open work; with a Roul for the Head and Peak.” The roll and peak were part of a cap.Mrs. Simeon Stoddard.Mrs. Simeon Stoddard.These portraits show whisks in slightly varying forms. We have the “broad Lace lying down” in the handsome band at the shoulder; the “little lace standing up” was a narrow lace edging the whisk at the throat or just above the broad lace. Sometimes the whisk was wholly of mull or lawn. The whisk was at first wholly a part of woman’s attire, then for a time it was worn, in modified form, by men.Madam Pepys had a white whisk in 1660 and then a “noble lace whisk.” The same year she bought hers in London, Governor Berkeley paid half a pound for a tiffany whisk in Virginia. Many American women, probably all well-dressed women, had them. They are also seen on French portraits of the day. One of Madam de Maintenon shows precisely the same whisk as this of Madam Padishal’s, tied in front with tiny knots of ribbon.It will be noted that Madam Padishal has black lace frills about the upper portion of the sleeve, at the arm-scye. English portraits previous to the year 1660 seldom show black lace, and portraits are not many of the succeeding forty years which have black lace, so in this American portrait this detail is unusual. The wearing of black lace came into a short popularity in the year 1660, through compliment to the Spanish court upon the marriage of the young French king, Louis XIV, with the Infanta. The English court followed promptly. Pepys gloried in “our Mistress Stewart in black and white lace.” It interests me to see how quickly American women had the very latest court fashions and wore them even in uncourtlike America; such distinct novelties as black lace. Contemporary descriptions of dress are silent as to it by the year 1700, and it disappears from portraits until a century later, when we have pretty black lace collars, capes and fichus, as may be seen on the portraits of Mrs. Sedgwick, Mrs. Waldo, and others later in this book. These first black laces of 1660 are Bayeux laces, which are precisely like our Chantilly laces of to-day. This ancient piece of black lace has been carefully preserved in an old New York family. A portrait of the year 1690 has a black lace frill like the Maltese laces of to-day, with the same guipure pattern. But such laces were not made in Malta until after 1833. So it must have been a guipure lace of the kind known in England as parchment lace. This was made in the environs of Paris, but was seldom black, so this was a rare bit. It was sometimes made of gold and silver thread. Parchment lace was a favorite lace of Mary, Queen of Scots, and through her good offices was peddled in England by French lace-makers. The black moiré hoods of Italian women sometimes had a narrow edge of black lace, and a little was brought to England on French hoods, but as a whole black lace was seldom seen or known.Ancient Black Lace.Ancient Black Lace.An evidence of the widespread extent of fashions even in that day, a proof that English and French women and American women (when American women there were other than the native squaws) all dressed alike, is found in comparing portraits. An interesting one from the James Jackson Jarvis Collection is now in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. It is of an unknown woman and by an unknown artist, and is simply labelled “Of the School of Susteman.” But this unknown Frenchwoman has a dress as precisely like Madam Padishal’s and Madam Stoddard’s as are Doucet’s models of to-day like each other. All have the whisk of rich straight-edged lace, and the tiny knots of velvet ribbon. All have the sleeve knots, but the French portrait is gay in narrow red and buff ribbon.Doubtless many have formed their notion of Puritan dress from the imaginary pictures of several popular modern artists. It can plainly be seen by any one who examines the portraits in this book that they are little like these modern representations. The single figures called “Priscilla” and “Rose Standish” are well known. The former is the better in costume, and could the close dark cloth or velvet hood with turned-back band, and plain linen edge displayed beneath, be exchanged for the horseshoe shaped French hood which was then and many years later the universal head-wear, the verisimilitude would be increased. This hood is shown on the portraits of Madam Rawson, Madam Stoddard, Mistress Paddy, and others in this book. Rose Standish’s cap is a very pretty one, much prettier than the French hood, but I do not find it like any cap in English portraits of that day. Nor have I seen her picturesque sash. I do not deny the existence in portraits of 1620 of this cap and sash; I simply say that I have never found them myself in the hundreds of English portraits, effigies, etc., that I have examined.It will be noted that the women in the modern pictures all wear aprons. I think this is correct as they are drawn in their everyday dress, but it will be noted that none of these portraits display an apron; nor was an apron part of any rich dress in the seventeenth century. The reign of the apron had been in the sixteenth century, and it came in again with Anne. Of course every woman in Massachusetts used aprons.Early inventories of the effects of emigrant dames contain many an item of those housewifely garments. Jane Humphreys, of Dorchester, Massachusetts, had in her good wardrobe, in 1668, “2 Blew aprons, A White Holland Apron with a Small Lace at the bottom. A White Holland Apron with two breathes in it. My best white apron. My greene apron.”In the pictures,The Return of the MayflowerandThe Pilgrim Exiles, the masculine dress therein displayed is very close to that of the real men of the times. The great power of these pictures is, after all, not in the dress, but in the expression of the faces. The artist has portrayed the very spirit of pure religious feeling, self-denial, home-longing, and sadness of exile which we know must have been imprinted on those faces.The lack of likeness in the women’s dress is more through difference of figure and carriage and an indescribable cut of the garments than in detail, except in one adjunct, the sleeve, which is wholly unlike the seventeenth-century sleeve in these portraits. I have ever deemed the sleeve an important part both of a man’s coat and a woman’s gown. The tailor in the old play,The Maid of the Mill, says, “O Sleeve! O Sleeve! I’ll study all night, madam, to magnify your sleeves!” By its inelegant shape a garment may be ruined. By its grace it accents the beauty of other portions of the apparel. In these pictures of Puritan attire, it has proved able to make or mar the likeness to the real dress. It is now a component part of both outer and inner garment. It was formerly extraneous.In the reign of Henry VIII, the sleeve was generally a separate article of dress and the most gorgeous and richly ornamented portion of the dress. Outer and inner sleeves were worn by both men and women, for their doublets were sleeveless. Elizabeth gradually banished the outer hanging sleeve, though she retained the detached sleeve.Sleeves had grown gravely offensive to Puritans; the slashing was excessive. A Massachusetts statute of 1634 specifies that “No man or woman shall make or buy any slashed clothes other than one slash in each sleeve and another in the back. Men and women shall have liberty to wear out such apparell as they now are provided of except the immoderate great sleeves and slashed apparel.”Virago-sleeve.Virago-sleeve.Size and slashes were both held to be a waste of good cloth. “Immoderate great sleeves” could never be the simple coat sleeve with cuff in which our modern artists are given to depicting Virginian and New England dames. Doubtless the general shape of the dress was simple enough, but the sleeve was the only part which was not close and plain and unornamented. I have found no close coat sleeves with cuffs upon any old American portraits. I recall none on English portraits. You may see them, though rarely, in England under hanging sleeves upon figures which have proved valuable conservators of fashion, albeit sombre of design and rigid of form, namely, effigies in stone or metal upon old tombs; these not after the year 1620, though these are really a small “leg-of-mutton” sleeve being gathered into the arm-scye. A beautiful brass in a church on the Isle of Wight is dated 1615. This has long, hanging sleeves edged with leaflike points of cut-work; cuffs of similar work turn back from the wrists of the undersleeves. ASatyrby Fitzgeffrey, published the same year, complains that the wrists of women and men are clogged with bush-points, ribbons, or rebato-twists. “Double cufts” is an entry in a Plymouth inventory—which explains itself. In the hundreds of inventories I have investigated I have never seen half a dozen entries of cuffs. The two or three I have found have been specified as “lace cuffs.”George Fox, the founder of Quakerism, wrote with a vivid pen; one of his own followers said with severity, “He paints high.” Some of his denunciations of the dress of his day afford a very good notion of the peculiarities of contemporary costume; though he may be read with this caution in mind. He writes deploringly of women’s sleeves (in the year 1654); it will be noted that he refers to double cuffs:—“The women having their cuffs double under and above, like a butcher with his white sleeves, their ribands tied about their hands, and three or four gold laces about their clothes.”Ninon de l’Enclos.Ninon de l’Enclos.There were three generations of English heralds named Holme, all genealogists, and all artists; they have added much to our knowledge of old English dress. Randle Holme, the Chester herald, lived in the reign of Charles II, and increased a collection of manuscript begun by his grandfather and now forming part of the Harleian Collection in the British Museum. He wrote also theAcademy of Armoury, published in 1688, and made a vast number of drawings for it, as well as for his other works. His note-books of drawings are preserved. In one of them he gives drawings of the sleeve which is found on every seventeenth-century portrait of American women which I have ever seen. He calls this a virago-sleeve. It was worn in Queen Elizabeth’s day, but was a French fashion. It is gathered very full in the shoulder and again at the wrist, or at the forearm. At intervals between, it is drawn in by gathering-strings of narrow ribbons, or ferret, which are tied in a pretty knot or rose on the upper part of the sleeve. One from a French portrait is givenhere. Madam Ninon de l’Enclos also wears one. This gathering may be at the elbow, forming thus two puffs, or there may be several such drawing-strings. I have seen a virago-sleeve with five puffs. It is a fine decorative sleeve, not always shapely, perhaps, but affording in the pretty knots of ribbon some relief to the severity of the rest of the dress.Stubbes wrote, “Some have sleeves cut up the arm, drawn out with sundry colours, pointed with silk ribbands, and very gallantly tied with love knotts.” It was at first a convention of fashion, and it lingered long in some modification, that wherever there was a slash there was a knot of ribbon or a bunch of tags or aglets. This in its origin was really that the slash might be tied together. Ribbon knots were much worn; the early days of the great court of Louis XIV saw an infinite use of ribbons for men and women. When, in the closing years of the century, rows of these knots were placed on either side of the stiff busk with bars of ribbon forming a stomacher, they were calledechelles, ladders.The Ladies’ Dictionary(1694) says they were “much in request.”This virago-sleeve was worn by women of all ages and by children, both boys and girls. A virago-sleeve is worn by Rebecca Rawson (here), and by Mrs. Simeon Stoddard (here), by Madam Padishal and by her little girl, and by the Gibbes child shown later in the book.A carved figure of Anne Stotevill (1631) is in Westminster Abbey. Her dress is a rich gown slightly open in front at the foot. It has ornamental hooks, or frogs, with a button at each end—these are in groups of three, from chin to toe. Four groups of three frogs each, on both sides, make twenty-four, thus giving forty-eight buttons. A stiff ruff is at the neck, and similar smaller ones at the wrist. She wears a French hood with a loose scarf over it. She has a very graceful virago-sleeve with handsome knots of ribbon.It is certain that men’s sleeves and women’s sleeves kept ever close company. Neither followed the other; they walked abreast. If a woman’s sleeves were broad and scalloped, so was the man’s. If the man had a tight and narrow sleeve, so did his wife. When women had virago-sleeves, so did men. Even in the nineteenth century, at the first coming of leg-of-mutton sleeves in 1830et seq., dandies’ sleeves were gathered full at the armhole. In the second reign of these vast sleeves a few years ago, man had emancipated himself from the reign of woman’s fashions, and his sleeves remained severely plain.Small invoices of fashionable clothing were constantly being sent across seas. There were sent to and from England and other countries “ventures,” which were either small lots of goods sent on speculation to be sold in the New World, or a small sum given by a private individual as a “venture,” with instructions to purchase abroad anything of interest or value that was salable. To take charge of these petty commercial transactions, there existed an officer, now obsolete, known as a supercargo. It is told that one Providence ship went out with the ventures of one hundred and fifty neighbors on board—that is, one hundred and fifty persons had some money or property at stake on the trip. Three hundred ventures were placed with another supercargo. Sometimes women sent sage from their gardens, or ginseng if they could get it. A bunch of sage paid in China for a porcelain tea-set. Along the coast, women ventured food-supplies,—cheese, eggs, butter, dried apples, pickles, even hard gingerbread; another sent a barrel of cider vinegar. Clothes in small lots were constantly being bought and sold on a venture. From London, in November, 1667, Walter Banesely sent as a venture to William Pitkin in Hartford these articles of clothing with their prices:—£s.“1 Paire Pinck Colour’d mens hose1610 Paire Mens Silke Hose, 17s per pair81010 Paire Womens Silke Hose, 16s per pair11210 Paire Womens Green Hose6101 Pinck Colour’d Stomacher made of Knotts3101 Pinck Colour’d WastcoteA Black Sute of Padisuay. Hatt,Hatt band, Shoo knots &; trunk.The wastcote and stomacher are aVenture of my wife’s; the Silke Stockens mine own.”There remains another means of information of the dress of Puritan women in what was the nearest approach to a collection of fashion-plates which the times afforded.Lady Catharina Howard.Lady Catharina Howard.In the year 1640 a collection of twenty-six pictures of Englishwomen was issued by one Wenceslas Hollar, an engraver and drawing-master, with this title,Ornatus Muliebris Anglicanus. The severall Habits of Englishwomen, from the Nobilitie to the Country Woman As they are in these Times.These bear the same relation to portraits showing what was really worn, as do fashion-plates to photographs. They give us the shapes of gowns, bonnets, etc., yet are not precisely the real thing. The value of this special set is found in three points: First, the drawings confirm the testimony of Lely, Van Dyck, and other artists; they prove how slightly Van Dyck idealized the costume of his sitters. Second, they give representations of folk in the lower walks of life; such folk were not of course depicted in portraits. Third, the drawings are full length, which the portraits are not. Four of these drawings are reduced and shownhere. I giveherethe one entitledThe Puritan Woman, though it is one of the most disappointing in the whole collection. It is such a negative presentation; so little marked detail or even associated evidence is gained from it. I had a baffled thought after examining it that I knew less of Puritan dress than without it. I see that they gather up their gowns for walking after a mode known in later years as washerwoman style. And by that very gathering up we lose what the drawing might have told us; namely, how the gowns were shaped in the back; how attached to the waist or bodice; and how the bodice was shaped at the waist, whether it had a straight belt, whether it was pointed, whether slashed in tabs or laps like a samare. The sleeve, too, is concealed, and the kerchief hides everything else. We know these kerchiefs were worn among the “fifty other ways,” for some portraits have them; but the whisk was far more common. Lady Catharina Howard, aged eleven in the year 1646, was drawn by Hollar in a kerchief.There had been some change in the names of women’s attire in twenty years, since 1600, when the catalogue of the Queen’s wardrobe was made. Exclusive of the Coronation, Garter, Parliament, and mourning robes, it ran thus:—“Robes.Petticoats.French gowns.Cloaks.Round gowns.Safeguards.Loose gowns.Jupes.Kirtles.Doublets.Foreparts.Lap mantles.”In her New Year’s gifts were also, “strayt-bodyed gowns, trayn-gowns, waist-robes, night rayls, shoulder cloaks, inner sleeves, round kirtles.” She also had nightgowns and jackets, and underwear, hose, and various forms of foot-gear. Many of these garments never came to America. Some came under new names. Many quickly disappeared from wardrobes. I never read in early American inventories of robes, either French robes or plain robes. Round gowns, loose gowns, petticoats, cloaks, safeguards, lap mantles, sleeves, nightgowns, nightrails, and night-jackets continued in wear.I have never found the word forepart in this distinctive signification nor the word kirtle; though our modern writers of historical novels are most liberal of kirtles to their heroines. It is a pretty, quaint name, and ought to have lingered with us; but “what a deformed thief this Fashion is”—it will not leave with us garment or name that we like simply because it pleases us.Doublets were worn by women.“The Women also have doublets and Jerkins as men have, buttoned up the brest, and made with Wings, Welts and Pinions on shoulder points as men’s apparell is for all the world, &; though this be a kind of attire appropriate only to Man yet they blush not to wear it.”Anne Hibbins, thewitch, had a black satin doublet among other substantial attire.A fellow-barrister of Governor John Winthrop, Sergeant Erasmus Earle, a most uxorious husband, was writing love-letters to his wife Frances, who lived out of London, at the same time that Winthrop was writing to Margaret Winthrop. Earle was much concerned over a certain doublet he had ordered for his wife. He had bought the blue bayes for this garment in two pieces, and he could not decide whether the shorter piece should go into the sleeve or the body, whether it should have skirts or not. If it did not, then he had bought too much silver lace, which troubled him sorely.Margaret Winthrop had better instincts; to her husband’s query as to sending trimming for her doublet and gown, she answers, “When I see the clothI will send word what trimming will serve;” and she writes to London, insisting on “the civilest fashion now in use,” and for Sister Downing, who is still in England, to give Tailor Smith directions “that he may make it the better.” Mr. Smith sent scissors and a hundred needles and the like homely gifts across seas as “tokens” to various members of the Winthrop household, showing his friendly intimacy with them all. For many years after America was settled we find no evidence that women’s garments were ever made by mantua-makers. All the bills which exist are from tailors. One of William Sweatland for work done for Jonathan Corwin of Salem is in the library of the American Antiquarian Society:—£s.d.“Sept. 29, 1679. To plaiting a gown for Mrs.36To makeing a Childs Coat6To makeing a Scarlet petticoat with Silver Lace for Mrs.9For new makeing a plush somar for Mrs.6Dec. 22, 1679. For makeing a somar for your Maide10Mar. 10, 1679. To a yard of Callico2To 1 Douzen and 1/2 of silver buttons16To Thread4To makeing a broad cloth hatte14To makeing a haire Camcottcoat9To makeing new halfsleeves to a silk Coascett1March 25. To altering and fitting a paire of Stays for Mrs1Ap. 2, 1680, to makeing a Gowne for ye Maide10May 20. For removing buttons of yr coat.6Juli 25, 1630. For makeing two Hatts and Jacketts for your two sonnes19Aug. 14. To makeing a white Scarsonnett plaited Gowne for Mrs8To makeing a black broad cloth Coat for yourselfe9Sept. 3, 1868. To makeing a Silke Laced Gowne for Mrs18Oct. 7, 1860, to makeing a Young Childs Coate4To faceing your Owne Coat Sleeves1To new plaiting a petty Coat for Mrs16Nov. 7. To makeing a black broad Cloth Gowne for Mrs18Feb. 26, 1680-1. To Searing a Petty Coat for Mrs6—-—-—-Sum is, £;84s.10d.”From many bills and inventories we learn that the time of the settlement of Plymouth and Boston reached a transitional period in women’s dress as it did in men’s. Mrs. Winthrop had doublets as had Governor Winthrop, but I think her daughter wore gowns when her sons wore coats. The doublet for a woman was shaped like that of a man, and was of double thickness like a man’s. It might be sleeveless, with a row of welts or wings around the armhole; or if it had sleeves the welts, or a roll or cap, still remained. The trimming of the arm-scye was universal, both for men and women. A fuller description of the doublet than has ever before been written will be given in the chapter upon the Evolution of the Coat. The “somar” which is the samare, named also in the bill of the Salem tailor, seems to have been a Dutch garment, and was so much worn in New York that I prefer to write of it in the following chapter. We are then left with the gown; the gown which took definite shape in Elizabeth’s day. Of course no one could describe it like Stubbes. I frankly confess my inability to approach him. Read his words, so concise yet full of color and conveying detail; I protest it is wonderful.“Their Gowns be no less famous, some of silk velvet grogram taffety fine cloth of forty shillings a yard. But if the whole gown be not silke or velvet then the same shall be layed with lace two or three fingers broade all over the gowne or the most parte. Or if not so (as Lace is not fine enough sometimes) then it must be garded with great gardes of costly Lace, and as these gowns be of sundry colours so they be of divers fashions changing with the Moon. Some with sleeves hanging down to their skirts, trayling on the ground, and cast over the shoulders like a cow’s tayle. These have sleeves much shorter, cut up the arme, and pointed with Silke-ribons very gallantly tyed with true loves knottes—(for soe they call them). Some have capes fastened down to the middist of their backs, faced with velvet or else with some fine wrought silk Taffeetie at the least, and fringed about Bravely, and (to sum up all in a word) some are pleated and ryveled down the back wonderfully with more knacks than I can declare.”The guards of lace a finger broad laid on over the seams of the gown are described by Pepys in his day. He had some of these guards of gold lace taken from the seams of one of his wife’s old gowns to overlay the seams of one of his own cassocks and rig it up for wear, just as he took his wife’s old muff, like a thrifty husband, and bought her a new muff, like a kind one. Not such a domestic frugalist was he, though, as his contemporary, the great political economist, Dudley North, Baron Guildford, Lord Sheriff of London, who loved to sit with his wife ripping off the old guards of lace from her gown, “unpicking” her gown, he called it, and was not at all secret about it. Both men walked abroad to survey the gems and guards worn by their neighbors’ wives, and to bring home word of new stuffs, new trimmings, to their own wives. Really a seventeenth-century husband was not so bad. Note in myLife of Margaret Winthrophow Winthrop’s fellow-barrister, Sergeant Erasmus Earle, bought camlet and lace, and patterns for doublets for his wife Frances Fontayne, and ran from London clothier to London mantua-maker, and then to London haberdasher and London tailor, to learn the newest weaves of cloth, the newest drawing in of the sleeves. I know no nineteenth-century husband of that name who would hunt materials and sleeve patterns, and buy doublet laces and find gown-guards for his wife. And then the gown sleeves! What a description by Stubbes of the virago-sleeve “tied in and knotted with silk ribbons in love-knots!” It is all wonderful to read.We learn from these tailors’ bills that tailors’ work embraced far more articles than to-day; in theOrbis Sensualium Pictus, 1659, a tailor’s shop has hanging upon the wall woollen hats, breeches, waistcoats, jackets, women’s cloaks, and petticoats. There are also either long hose or lasts for stretching hose, for they made stockings, leggins, gaiters, buskins; also a number of boxes which look like muff-boxes. One tailor at work is seated upon a platform raised about a foot from the floor. His seat is a curious bench with two legs about two feet long and two about one foot long. The base of the two long legs are on the floor, the other two set upon the platform. The tailor’s feet are on the platform, thus his work is held well up before his face. Sometimes his legs are crossed upon the platform in front of him. The platform was necessary, or, at any rate, advisable for another reason. The habits of Englishmen at that time, their manners and customs, I mean, were not tidy; and floors were very dirty. Any garment resting on the floor would have been too soiled for a gentleman’s wear before it was donned at all.I have discovered one thing about old-time tailors,—they were just as trying as their successors, and had as many tricks of trade. A writer in 1582 says, “If a tailor makes your gown too little, he covers his fault with a broad stomacher; if too great, with a number of pleats; if too short, with a fine guard; if too long with a false gathering.”In several of the household accounts of colonial dames which I have examined I have found the prices and items very confusing and irregular when compared with tailors’ bills and descriptive notes and letters accompanying them. And in one case I was fain to believe that the lady’s account-book had been kept upon the plan devised by the simple Mrs. Pepys,—a plan which did anger her spouse Samuel “most mightily.” He was filled with admiration of her household-lists—her kitchen accounts. He admired in the modern sense of the word “admire”; then he admired in the old-time meaning—of suspicious wonder. For albeit she could do through his strenuous teaching but simple sums in “Arithmetique,” had never even attempted long division, yet she always rendered to her husband perfectly balanced accounts, month after month. At last, to his angry queries, she whimpered that “whenever she doe misse a sum of money, she do add some sums to other things,” till she made it perfectly correct in her book—a piece of such simple duplicity that I wonder her husband had not suspected it months before. And she also revealed to him that she “would lay aside money for a necklace” by pretending to pay more for household supplies than she really had, and then tying up the extra amount in a stocking foot. He writes, “I find she is very cunning and when she makes least show hath her wits at work; andsoto my office to my accounts.”Costumes of Englishwomen of the Seventeenth Century.Costumes of Englishwomen of the Seventeenth Century.CHAPTER IIIATTIRE OF VIRGINIA DAMES AND THEIR NEIGHBORS“Two things I love, two usuall thinges they are:The Firste, New-fashioned cloaths I love to wear,Newe Tires, newe Ruffes; aye, and newe Gestures tooIn all newe Fashions I do love to goe.The Second Thing I love is this, I weeneTo ride aboute to have those Newe Cloaths scene.“At every Gossipping I am at stillAnd ever wilbe—maye I have my will.For at ones own Home, praie—who is’t can seeHow fyne in new-found fashioned Tyres we bee?Vnless our Husbands—Faith! but very fewe!—And whoo’d goe gaie, to please a Husband’s view?Alas! wee wives doe take but small DelightIf none (besides our husbands) see that Sight”—“The Gossipping Wives Complaint,” 1611 (circa).
I
have expressed a doubt that the dress of Cavalier and Puritan varied as much as has been popularly believed; I feel sure that the dress of Puritan women did not differ from the attire of women of quiet life who remained in the Church of England; nor did it vary materially either in form or quality from the attire of the sensible followers of court life. It simply did not extend to the extreme of the mode in gay color, extravagance, or grotesqueness. In the first severity of revolt over the dissoluteness of English life which had shown so plainly in the extravagance and absurdity of English court dress, many persons of deep thought (especially men), both of the Church of England and of the Puritan faith, expressed their feeling by a change in their dress. Doubtless also in some the extremity of feeling extended to fanaticism. It is always thus in reforms; the slow start becomes suddenly a violent rush which needs to be retarded and moderated, and it always is moderated. I have referred to one exhibition of bigotry in regard to dress which is found in the annals of Puritanism; it is detailed in the censure and attempt at restraint of the dress of Madam Johnson, the wife of the Rev. Francis Johnson, the pastor of the exiles to Holland.
There is a tradition that Parson Johnson was one of the Marprelate brotherhood, who certainly deserved the imprisonment they received, were it only for their ill-spelling and ill-use of their native tongue. The Marprelate pamphlet before me as I write had an author who could not even spell the titles of the prelates it assailed; but called them “parsones, fyckers and currats,” the latter two names being intended for vicars and curates. The story of Madam Johnson’s revolt, and her triumph, is preserved to us in such real and earnest language, and was such a vital thing to the actors in the little play, that it seems almost irreverent to regard it as a farce, yet none to-day could read of it without a sense of absurdity, and we may as well laugh frankly and freely at the episode.
When the protagonist of this Puritan comedy entered the stage, she was a widow—Tomison or Thomasine Boyes, a “warm” widow, as the saying of the day ran, that is, warm with a comfortable legacy of ready money. She was a young widow, and she was handsome. At any rate, it was brought up against her when events came to a climax; it was testified in the church examination or trial that “men called her a bouncing girl,” as if she could help that! Husband Boyes had been a haberdasher, and I fancy she got both her finery and her love of finery in his shop. And it was told with all the petty terms of scandal-mongering that might be heard in a small shop in a small English town to-day; it was told very gravely that the “clarkes in the shop” compared her for her pride in apparel to the wife of the Bishop of London, and it was affirmed that she stood “gazing, braving, and vaunting in shop doores.”
Now this special complaint against the Widow Boyes, that she stood braving and vaunting in shop doors, was not a far-fetched attack brought as a novelty of tantalizing annoyance; it touches in her what was one of the light carriages of the day, which were so detestable to sober and thoughtful folk, an odious custom specified by Stubbes in hisAnatomy of Abuses. He writes thus of London women, the wives of merchants:—
“Othersome spend the greater part of the daie in sittyng at the doore, to shewe their braveries, to make knowen their beauties, to behold the passers by; to view the coast, to see fashions, and to acquaint themselves of the bravest fellows—for, if not for these causes, I know no other causes why they should sitt at their doores—as many doe from Morning till Noon, from Noon till Night.”
“Othersome spend the greater part of the daie in sittyng at the doore, to shewe their braveries, to make knowen their beauties, to behold the passers by; to view the coast, to see fashions, and to acquaint themselves of the bravest fellows—for, if not for these causes, I know no other causes why they should sitt at their doores—as many doe from Morning till Noon, from Noon till Night.”
Other writers give other reasons for this “vaunting.” We learn that “merchants’ wives had seats built a purpose” to sit in, in order to lure customers. Marston inThe Dutch Courtesansays:—
“His wife’s a proper woman—that she is! She has been as proper a woman as any in the Chepe. She paints now, and yet she keeps her husband’s old customers to him still. In troth, a fine-fac’d wife in a wainscot-carved seat, is a worthy ornament to any tradesman’s shop. And an attractive one I’le warrant.”
“His wife’s a proper woman—that she is! She has been as proper a woman as any in the Chepe. She paints now, and yet she keeps her husband’s old customers to him still. In troth, a fine-fac’d wife in a wainscot-carved seat, is a worthy ornament to any tradesman’s shop. And an attractive one I’le warrant.”
This handsome, buxom, bouncing widow fell in love with Pastor Johnson, and he with her, while he was “a prisoner in the Clink,” he having been thrown therein by the Archbishop of Canterbury for his persistent preaching of Puritanism. Many of his friends “thought this not a good match” for him at any time; and all deemed it ill advised for a man in prison to pledge himself in matrimony to any one. And soon zealous and meddlesome Brother George Johnson took a hand in advice and counsel, with as high a hand as if Francis had been a child instead of a man of thirty-two, and a man of experience as well, and likewise older than George.
George at first opened warily, saying in his letters that “he was very loth to contrary his brother;” still Brother Francis must be sensible that this widow was noted for her pride and vanity, her light and garish dress, and that it would give great offence to all Puritans if he married her, and “it (the vanity and extravagance, etc.) should not be refrained.” There was then some apparent concession and yielding on the widow’s part, for George for a time “sett down satysfyed”; when suddenly, to his “great grief” and discomfiture, he found that his brother had been “inveigled and overcarried,” and the sly twain had been married secretly in prison.
It must be remembered that this was in the last years of Elizabeth’s reign, in 1596, when the laws were rigid in attempts at limitation of dress, as I shall note later in this chapter. But there were certain privileges of large estate, even if the owner were of mean birth; and Madam Johnson certainly had money enough to warrant her costly apparel, and in ready cash also, from Husband Boyes. But in the first good temper and general good will of the honeymoon she “obeyed”; she promised to dress as became her husband’s condition, which would naturally mean much simpler attire. He was soon in very bad case for having married without permission of the archbishop, and was still more closely confined within-walls; but even while he lingered in prison, Brother George saw with anguish that the bride’s short obedience had ended. She appeared in “more garish and proud apparell” than he had ever before seen upon the widow,—naturally enough for a bride,—even the bride of a bridegroom in prison; but he “dealt with her that she would refrain”—poor, simple man! She dallied on, tantalizing him and daring him, and she was very “bold in inviting proof,” but never quitting her bridal finery for one moment; so George read to her with emphasis, as a final and unconquerable weapon, that favorite wail of all men who would check or reprove an extravagant woman, namely, Isaiah iii, 16et seq., the chapter called by Mercy Warren
“... An antiquated pageThat taught us the threatenings of an Hebrew sageGainst wimples, mantles, curls and crisping pins.”
I wonder how many Puritan parsons have preached fatuously upon those verses! how many defiant women have had them read to them—and how many meek ones! I knew a deacon’s wife in Worcester, some years ago, who asked for a new pair of India-rubber overshoes, and in pious response her frugal partner slapped open the great Bible at this favorite third chapter of the lamenting and threatening prophet, and roared out to his poor little wife, sitting meekly before him in calico gown and checked apron, the lesson of the haughty daughters of Zion walking with stretched-forth necks and tinkling feet; of their chains and bracelets and mufflers; their bonnets and rings and rich jewels; their mantles and wimples and crisping-pins; their fair hoods and veils—oh, how she must have longed for an Oriental husband!
Petulant with his new sister-in-law’s successful evasions of his readings, his letters, and his advice, his instructions, his pleadings, his commands, and “full of sauce and zeal” like Elnathan, George Johnson, in emulation of the prophet Isaiah, made a list of the offences of this London “daughter of Zion,” wrote them out, and presented them to the congregation. She wore “3, 4, or even 5 gold rings at one time” Then likewise “her Busks and ye Whalebones at her Brest were soe manifest that many of ye Saints were greeved thereby.” She was asked to “pull off her Excessive Deal of Lace.” And she was fairly implored to “exchange ye Schowish Hatt for a sober Taffety or Felt.” She was ordered severely “to discontinue Whalebones,” and to “quit ye great starcht Ruffs, ye Muske, and ye Rings.” And not to wear her bodice tied to her petticoat “as men do their doublets to their hose contrary to I Thessalonians, V, 22.” And a certain stomacher or neckerchief he plainly called “abominable and loathsome.” A “schowish Velvet Hood,” such as only “the richest, finest and proudest sort should use,” was likewise beyond endurance, almost beyond forgiveness, and other “gawrish gear gave him grave greevance.”
Mrs. William Clark.Mrs. William Clark.
Mrs. William Clark.
But here the young husband interfered, as it was high time he should; and he called his brother “fantasticall, fond, ignorant, anabaptisticall and such like,” though what the poor Anabaptists had to do with such dress quarrels I know not. George’s cautious reference in his letter to the third verse of the third chapter of Jeremiah made the parson call it “the Abhominablest Letter ever was written.” George, a bit frightened, answered pacificatorily that he noted of late that “the excessive lace upon the sleeve of her dress had a Cover drawn upon it;” that the stomacher was not “so gawrish, so low, and so spitz-fashioned as it was wont to be”; nor was her hat “so topishly set,”—and he expressed pious gladness at the happy change, “hoping more would follow,”—and for a time all did seem subdued. But soon another meddlesome young man became “greeved” (did ever any one hear of such a set of silly, grieving fellows?); and seeing “how heavily the young gentleman took it,” stupid George must interfere again, to be met this time very boldly by the bouncing girl herself, who, he writes sadly, answered him in a tone “very peert and coppet.” “Coppet” is a delightful old word which all our dictionaries have missed; it signifies impudent, saucy, or, to be precise, “sassy,” which we all know has a shade more of meaning. “Peert and coppet” is a delightful characterization. George refused to give the sad young complainer’s name, who must have been well ashamed of himself by this time, and was then reproached with being a “forestaller,” a “picker,” and a “quarrelous meddler”—and with truth.
During the action of this farce, all had gone from London into exile in Holland. Then came the sudden trip to Newfoundland and the disastrous and speedy return to Holland again. And through the misfortunes and the exiles, the company drew more closely together, and gentle words prevailed; George was “sorie if he had overcarried himself”; Madam “was sure if it were to do now, she would not so wear it.” Still, she did not offer her martinet of a brother-in-law a room to lodge in in her house, though she had many rooms unused, and he needed shelter, whereat he whimpered much; and soon he was charging her again “with Muske as a sin” (musk was at that time in the very height of fashion in France) and cavilling at her unbearable “topish hat.” Then came long argument and sparring for months over “topishness,” which seems to have been deemed a most offensive term. They told its nature and being; they brought in Greek derivatives, and the pastor produced a syllogism upon the word. And they declared that the hat in itself was not topish, but only became so when she wore it, she being the wife of a preacher; and they disputed over velvet and vanity; they bickered over topishness and lightness; they wrangled about lawn coives and busks in a way that was sad to read. The pastor argued soundly, logically, that both coives and busks might be lawfully used; whereat one of his flock, Christopher Dickens, rose up promptly in dire fright and dread of future extravagance among the women-saints in the line of topish hats and coives and busks, and he “begged them not to speak so, andso loud, lest it should bringmany inconveniences among their wives.” Finally the topish head-gear was demanded in court, which the parson declared was “offensive”; and so they bickered on till a most unseemly hour, tillten o’clock at night, as “was proved by the watchman and rattleman coming about.” Naturally they wished to go to bed at an early hour, for religious services began at nine; one of the complaints against the topish bride was that she was a “slug-a-bed,” flippantly refused to rise and have her house ordered and ready for the nine o’clock public service. The meetings were then held in the parson’s house, and held every day; which may have been one reason why the settlement grew poorer. It matters little what was said, or how it ended, since it did not disrupt and disband the Holland Pilgrims. For eleven years this stupid wrangling lasted; and it seemed imminent that the settlement would finish with a separation, and a return of many to England. Slight events have great power—this topish hat of a vain and pretty, a peert and coppet young Puritan bride came near to hindering and changing the colonization of America.
Lady Mary Armine.Lady Mary Armine.
Lady Mary Armine.
I have related this episode at some length because its recounting makes us enter into the spirit of the first Separatist settlers. It shows us too that dress conquered zeal; it could not be “forborne” by entreaty, by reproof, by discipline, by threats, by example. An influence, or perhaps I should term it an echo, of this long quarrel is seen plainly by the thoughtful mind in the sumptuary laws of the New World. Some of the articles of dress so dreaded, so discussed in Holland, still threatened the peace of Puritanical husbands in New England; they still dreaded many inconveniences. In 1634, the general court of Massachusetts issued this edict:—
“That no person, man or woman, shall hereafter make or buy any Apparell, either Woolen, or Silk, or Linen, with any Lace on it, Silver, Gold, or Thread, under the penalty of forfeiture of said clothes. Also that no person either man or woman, shall make or buy any Slashed Clothes, other than one Slash in each Sleeve and another in the Back. Also all Cut-works, embroideries, or Needlework Caps, Bands or Rails, are forbidden hereafter to be made and worn under the aforesaid Penalty; also all gold or silver Girdles Hat bands, Belts, Ruffs, Beaver hats are prohibited to be bought and worn hereafter.”
“That no person, man or woman, shall hereafter make or buy any Apparell, either Woolen, or Silk, or Linen, with any Lace on it, Silver, Gold, or Thread, under the penalty of forfeiture of said clothes. Also that no person either man or woman, shall make or buy any Slashed Clothes, other than one Slash in each Sleeve and another in the Back. Also all Cut-works, embroideries, or Needlework Caps, Bands or Rails, are forbidden hereafter to be made and worn under the aforesaid Penalty; also all gold or silver Girdles Hat bands, Belts, Ruffs, Beaver hats are prohibited to be bought and worn hereafter.”
Fines were stated, also the amount of estate which released the dress-wearer from restriction. Liberty was given to all to wear out the apparel which they had on hand except “immoderate great sleeves, slashed apparell, immoderate great rails, and long wings”—these being beyond endurance.
In 1639 “immoderate great breeches, knots of riban, broad shoulder bands and rayles, silk roses, double ruffles and capes” were forbidden to folk of low estate. Soon the court expressed its “utter detestation and dislike,” that men and women of “mean condition, education and calling” should take upon themselves “the garb of gentlemen” by wearing gold and silver lace, buttons and points at the knee, or “walk in great boots,” or women of the same low rank to wear silk or tiffany hoods or scarfs. There were likewise orders that no short sleeves should be worn “whereby the nakedness of the arms may be discovered”; women’s sleeves were not to be more than half an ell wide; long hair and immodest laying out of the hair and wearing borders of hair were abhorrent. Poor folk must not appear with “naked breasts and arms; or as it were pinioned with superstitious ribbons on hair and apparell.” Tailors who made garments for servants or children, richer than the garments of the parents or masters of these juniors, were to be fined. Similar laws were passed in Connecticut and Virginia. I know of no one being “psented” under these laws in Virginia, but in Connecticut and Massachusetts both men and women were fined. In 1676, in Northampton, thirty-six young women at one time were brought up for overdress chiefly in hoods; and an amusing entry in the court record is that one of them, Hannah Lyman, appeared in the very hood for which she was fined; and was thereupon censured for “wearing silk in a fflonting manner, in an offensive way, not only before but when she stood Psented. Not only in Ordinary but Extraordinary times.” These girls were all fined; but six years later, when a stern magistrate attempted a similar persecution, the indictments were quashed.
The Tub-preacher.The Tub-preacher.
The Tub-preacher.
It is not unusual to find the careless observer or the superficial reader—and writer—commenting upon the sumptuary laws of the New World as if they were extraordinary and peculiar. There appeared in a recent American magazine a long rehearsal of the unheard-of presumption of Puritan magistrates in their prohibition of certain articles of dress. This writer was evidently wholly ignorant of the existence of similar laws in England, and even of like laws in Virginia, but railed against Winthrop and Endicott as monsters of Puritanical arrogance and impudence.
In truth, however, such laws had existed not only in France and England, but since the days of the old Locrian legislation, when it was ordered that no woman should go attended with more than one maid in the street “unless she were drunk.” Ancient Rome and Sparta were surrounded by dress restrictions which were broken just as were similar ones in more modern times. The Roman could wear a robe but of a single color; he could wear in embroideries not more than half an ounce of gold; and, with what seems churlishness he was forbidden to ride in a carriage. At that time, just as in later days, dress was made to emphasize class distinction, and the clergy joined with the magistrates in denouncing extravagant dress in both men and women. The chronicles of the monks are ever chiding men for their peaked shoes, deep sleeves and curled locks like women, and Savonarola outdid them all in severity. The English kings and queens, jealous of the rich dress of their opulent subjects, multiplied restrictions, and some very curious anecdotes exist of the calm assumption by both Elizabeth and Mary to their own wardrobe of the rich finery of some lady at the court who displayed some new and too becoming fancy.
Old Venice Point Lace.Old Venice Point Lace.
Old Venice Point Lace.
Adam Smith declared it “an act of highest impertinence and presumption for kings and rulers to pretend to watch over the earnings and expenditure of private persons,” nevertheless this public interference lingered long, especially under monarchies.
These sumptuary laws of New England followed in spirit and letter similar laws in England. Winthrop had seen the many apprentices who ran through London streets, dressed under laws as full of details of dress as is a modern journal of the modes. For instance, the apprentice’s head-covering must be a small, flat, round cap, called often a bonnet—a hat like a pie-dish. The facing of the hat could not exceed three inches in breadth in the head; nor could the hat with band and facing cost over five shillings. His band or collar could have no lace edge; it must be of linen not over five shillings an ell in price; and could have no other work or ornament save “a plain hem and one stitch”—which was a hemstitch. If he wore a ruff, it must not be over three inches wide before it was gathered and set into the “stock.” The collar of his doublet could have neither “point, well-bone or plait,” but must be made “close and comely.” The stuff of his doublet and breeches could not cost over two shillings and sixpence a yard. It could be either cloth, kersey, fustian, sackcloth, canvas, or “English stuff”; or leather could be used. The breeches were generally of the shape known as “round slops.” His stockings could be knit or of cloth; but his shoes could have no polonia heels. His hair was to be cut close, with no “tuft or lock.”
Queen Elizabeth stood no nonsense in these things; finding that London ’prentices had adopted a certain white stitching for their collars, she put a stop to this mild finery by ordering the first transgressor to be whipped publicly in the hall of his company. These same laws, tinkered and altered to suit occasions, appear for many years in English records, for years after New England’s sumptuary laws were silenced.
Notwithstanding Hannah Lyman and the thirty-six vain Northampton girls, we do not on the whole hear great complaint of extravagance in dress or deportment. At any rate none were called bouncing girls. The portraits of men or women certainly show no restraint as to richness in dress. Their sumptuary laws were of less use to their day than to ours, for they do reveal to us what articles of dress our forbears wore.
While the Massachusetts magistrates were fussing a little over woman’s dress, the parsons, as a whole, were remarkably silent. Of course two or three of them could not refrain from announcing a text from Isaiah iii, 16et seq., and enlarging upon the well-worn wimples and nose jewels, and bells on their feet, which were as much out of fashion in Massachusetts then as now. It is such a well-rounded, ringing, colorful arraignment of woman’s follies you couldn’t expect a parson to give it up. Every evil predicted of the prophet was laid at the door of these demure Puritan dames,—fire and war, and caterpillars, and even baldness, which last was really unjust. Solomon Stoddard preached on the “Intolerable Pride in the Plantations in Clothes and Hair,” that his parishioners “drew iniquity with a cord of vanity and sin with a cart-rope.” The apostle Paul also furnished ample texts for the Puritan preacher.
Rebecca Rawson.Rebecca Rawson.
Rebecca Rawson.
In the eleventh chapter of Corinthians wise Paul delivered some sentences of exhortation, of reproof, of warning to Corinthian women which I presume he understood and perhaps Corinthian dames did, but which have been a dire puzzle since to parsons and male members of their congregations. (I cannot think that women ever bothered much about his words.) For instance, Archbishop Latimer, in one of the cheerful, slangy rallies to his hearers which he called sermons, quotes Paul’s sentence that a woman ought to have a power on her head, and construes positively that a power is a French hood. This is certainly a somewhat surprising notion, but I presume he knew. However, Roger Williams deemed a power a veil; and being somewhat dictatorial in his words, albeit the tenderest of creatures in his heart, he bade Salem women come to meeting in a veil, telling them they should come like Sarah of old, wearing this veil as a token of submission to their husbands. The text saith this exactly, “A woman ought to have power on her head because of the angels,” which seems to me one of those convenient sayings of Paul and others which can be twisted to many, to any meanings, even to Latimer’s French hood. Old John Cotton, of course, found ample Scripture to prove Salem women should not wear veils, and so here in this New World, as in the Holland sojourn, the head-covering of the mothers rent in twain the meetings of the fathers, while the women wore veils or no veils, French hoods or beaver hats, in despite of Paul’s opinions and their husbands’ constructions of his opinions.
An excellent description of the Puritan women of a dissenting congregation is inHudibras Redivivus;it reads:—
“The good old dames among the restWere all most primitively drestIn stiffen-bodyed russet gownsAnd on their heads old steeple crownsWith pristine pinners next their facesEdged round with ancient scallop-laces,Such as, my antiquary says,Were worn in old Queen Bess’s days,In ruffs; and fifty other waysTheir wrinkled necks were covered o’erWith whisks of lawn by granmarms wore.”
The “old steeple crowns” over “pristine pinners” were not peculiar to the Puritans. There was a time, in the first years of the seventeenth century, when many Englishwomen wore steeple-crowned hats with costly hatbands. We find them in pictures of women of the court, as well as upon the heads of Puritans. I have a dozen prints and portraits of Englishwomen in rich dress with these hats. The Quaker Tub-preacher, shownhere, wears one. Perhaps the best known example to Americans may be seen in the portrait of Pocahontashere.
Authentic portraits of American women who came in theMayfloweror in the first ships to the Massachusetts Bay settlement, there are none to my knowledge. Some exist which are doubtless of that day, but cannot be certified. One preserved in Connecticut in the family of Governor Eaton shows a brown old canvas like a Rembrandt. The subject is believed to be of the Yale family, and the chief and most distinct feature of dress is the ruff.
It was a time of change both of men’s and women’s neckwear. A few older women clung to the ruffs of their youth; younger women wore bands, falling-bands, falls, rebatoes, falling-whisks and whisks, the “fifty other ways” which could be counted everywhere. Carlyle says:—
“There are various traceable small threads of relation, interesting reciprocities and mutabilities connecting the poor young Infant, New England, with its old Puritan mother and her affairs, which ought to be disentangled, to be made conspicuous by the Infant herself now she has grown big.”
“There are various traceable small threads of relation, interesting reciprocities and mutabilities connecting the poor young Infant, New England, with its old Puritan mother and her affairs, which ought to be disentangled, to be made conspicuous by the Infant herself now she has grown big.”
These traceable threads of relation are ever of romantic interest to me, and even when I refer to the dress of English folk I linger with pleasure with those whose lives were connected even by the smallest thread with the Infant, New England. One such thread of connection was in the life of Lady Mary Armine; so I choose to give her picturehere, to illustrate the dress, if not of a New Englander, yet of one of New England’s closest friends. She was a noble, high-minded English gentlewoman, who gave “even to her dying day” to the conversion of poor tawny heathen of New England. A churchwoman by open profession, she was a Puritan in her sympathies, as were many of England’s best hearts and souls who never left the Church of England. She gave in one gift £500 to families of ministers who had been driven from their pulpits in England. The Nipmuck schools at Natick and Hassamanesit (near Grafton) were founded under her patronage. The life of this “Truly Honourable, Very Aged and Singularly Pious Lady who dyed 1675,” was written as a “pattern to Ladies.” Her long prosy epitaph, after enumerating the virtues of many of the name of Mary, concludes thus:—
“The Army of such Ladies so DivineThis Lady said ‘I’ll follow, they Ar-mine.’Lady Elect! in whom there did combineSo many Maries, might well say All Ar-mine.”
A pun was a Puritan’s one jocularity; and he would pun even in an epitaph.
It will be seen that Lady Mary Armine wears the straight collar or band, and the black French hood which was the forerunner, then the rival, and at last the survivor of the “sugar-loaf” beaver or felt hat,—a hood with a history, which will have a chapter for the telling thereof. Lady Mary wears a peaked widow’s cap under her hood; this also is a detail of much interest.
Another portrait of this date is of Mrs. Clark (seehere). This has two singular details; namely, a thumb-ring, which was frequently owned but infrequently painted, and a singular bracelet, which is accurately described in the verse of Herrick, written at that date:—
“I saw about her spotless wristOf blackest silk a curious twistWhich circumvolving gently thereEnthralled her arm as prisoner.”
I may say in passing that I have seen in portraits knots of narrow ribbon on the wrists, both of men and women, and I am sure they had some mourning significance, as did the knot of black on the left arm of the queen of King James of England.
We have in the portrait shown as a frontispiece an excellent presentment of the dress of the Puritan woman of refinement; the dress worn by the wives of Winthrop, Endicott, Leverett, Dudley, Saltonstall, and other gentlemen of Salem and Boston and Plymouth. We have also the dress worn by her little child about a year old. This portrait is of Madam Padishal. She was a Plymouth woman; and we know from the inventories of estates that there were not so many richly dressed women in Plymouth as in Boston and Salem. This dress of Madam Padishal’s is certainly much richer than the ordinary attire of Plymouth dames of that generation.
This portrait has been preserved in Plymouth in the family of Judge Thomas, from whom it descended to the present owner. Madam Padishal was young and handsome when this portrait was painted. Her black velvet gown is shaped just like the gown of Madam Rawson (shownhere), of Madam Stoddard (shownhere), both Boston women; and of the English ladies of her times. It is much richer than that of Lady Mary Armine or Mrs. Clark.
The gown of Madam Padishal is varied pleasingly from that of Lady Mary Armine, in that the body is low-necked, and the lace whisk is worn over the bare neck. The pearl necklace and ear-rings likewise show a more frivolous spirit than that of the English dame.
Another Plymouth portrait of very rich dress, that of Elizabeth Paddy, Mrs. John Wensley, faces this page. The dress in this is a golden-brown brocade under-petticoat and satin overdress. The stiff, busked stays are equal to Queen Elizabeth’s. Revers at the edge of overdress and on the virago sleeves are now of flame color, a Spanish pink, but were originally scarlet, I am sure. The narrow stomacher is a beaded galloon with bright spangles and bugles. On the hair there shows above the ears a curious ornament which resembles a band of this galloon. There are traces of a similar ornament in Madam Rawson’s portrait (here); and Madam Stoddard’s (here) has some ornament over the ears. This may have been a modification of a contemporary Dutch head-jewel. The pattern of the lace of Elizabeth Paddy’s whisk is most distinct; it was a good costly Flemish parchment lace like Mrs. Padishal’s. She carries a fan, and wears rings, a pearl necklace, and ear-rings. I may say here that I have never seen other jewels than these,—a few rings, and necklace and ear-rings of pearl. Other necklaces seem never to have been worn.
Elizabeth Paddy Wensley.Elizabeth Paddy Wensley.
Elizabeth Paddy Wensley.
We cannot always trust that all the jewels seen in these portraits were real, or that the sitter owned as many as represented. A bill is in existence where a painter charged ten shillings extra for bestowing a gold and pearl necklace upon his complaisant subject. In this case, however, the extra charge was to pay for the gold paint or gold-leaf used for gilding the painted necklace. In the amusing letters of Lady Sussex to Lord Verney are many relating to her portrait by Van Dyck. She consented to the painting very unwillingly, saying, “it is money ill bestowed.” She writes:—
“Put Sr Vandyke in remembrance to do my pictuer well. I have seen sables with the clasp of them set with diamonds—if those I am pictured in were done so, I think it would look very well in the pictuer. If Sr Vandyke thinks it would do well I pray desier him to do all the clawes so. I do not mene the end of the tales but only the end of the other peces, they call them clawes I think.”
“Put Sr Vandyke in remembrance to do my pictuer well. I have seen sables with the clasp of them set with diamonds—if those I am pictured in were done so, I think it would look very well in the pictuer. If Sr Vandyke thinks it would do well I pray desier him to do all the clawes so. I do not mene the end of the tales but only the end of the other peces, they call them clawes I think.”
This gives a glimpse of a richness of detail in dress even beyond our own day, and one which I commend to some New York dame of vast wealth, to have the claws of her sables set with diamonds. She writes later in two letters of some weeks’ difference in date:—
“I am glad you have prefalede with Sr Vandyke to make my pictuer leaner, for truly it was too fat. If he made it farer it will bee to my credit. I am glad you have made Sr Vandyke mind my dress.” ...
“I am glad you have prefalede with Sr Vandyke to make my pictuer leaner, for truly it was too fat. If he made it farer it will bee to my credit. I am glad you have made Sr Vandyke mind my dress.” ...
“I am glad you have got home my pictuer, but I doubt he has made it lener or farer, but too rich in jewels, I am sure; but ’tis no great matter for another age to thinke mee richer than I was. I wish it could be mended in the face for sure ’tis very ugly. The pictuer is very ill-favourede, makes me quite out of love with myselfe, the face is so bigg and so fat it pleases mee not at all. It looks like one of the Windes puffinge—(but truly I think it is lyke the original).”
“I am glad you have got home my pictuer, but I doubt he has made it lener or farer, but too rich in jewels, I am sure; but ’tis no great matter for another age to thinke mee richer than I was. I wish it could be mended in the face for sure ’tis very ugly. The pictuer is very ill-favourede, makes me quite out of love with myselfe, the face is so bigg and so fat it pleases mee not at all. It looks like one of the Windes puffinge—(but truly I think it is lyke the original).”
I am struck by a likeness in workmanship in the portraits of these two Plymouth dames, and the portrait of Madam Stoddard (here), and succeeding illustrations of the Gibbes children. I do wish I knew whether these were painted by Tom Child—a painter-stainer and limner referred to by Judge Samuel Sewall in his Diary, who was living in Boston at that time. Perhaps we may find something, some day, to tell us this. I feel sure these were all painted in America, especially the portraits of the Gibbes children. A great many coats-of-arms were made in Boston at this time, and I expect the painter-stainer made them. All painting then was called coloring. A man would say in 1700, “Archer has set us a fine example of expense; he has colored his house, and has even laid one room in oils; he had the painter-stainer from Boston to do it—the man who limns faces, and does pieces, and tricks coats.” This was absolutely correct English, but we would hardly know that the man meant: “Archer has been extravagant enough; he has painted his house, and even painted the woodwork of one room. He had the artist from Boston to do the work—the painter of faces and full-lengths, who makes coats-of-arms.”
It is hard to associate the very melancholy countenance shownherewith a tradition of youth and beauty. Had the portrait been painted after a romance of sorrow came to this young maid, Rebecca Rawson, we could understand her expression; but it was painted when she was young and beautiful, so beautiful that she caught the eye and the wandering affections of a wandering gentleman, who announced himself as the son of one nobleman and kinsman of many others, and persuaded this daughter of Secretary Edward Rawson to marry him, which she did in the presence of forty witnesses. This young married pair then went to London, where the husband deserted Rebecca, who found to her horror that she was not his wife, as he had at least one English wife living. Alone and proud, Rebecca Rawson supported herself and her child by painting on glass; and when at last she set out to return to her childhood’s home, her life was lost at sea by shipwreck.
The portrait of another Boston woman of distinction, Mrs. Simeon Stoddard, is givenhere. I will attempt to explain who Mrs. Simeon Stoddard was. She was Mr. Stoddard’s third widow and the third widow also of Peter Sergeant, builder of the Province House. Mr. Sergeant’s second wife had been married twice before she married him, and Simeon Stoddard’s father had four wives, all having been widows when he married them. Lastly, our Mrs. Simeon Stoddard, triumphing over death and this gallimaufry of Boston widows, took a fourth husband, the richest merchant in town, Samuel Shrimpton. Having had in all four husbands of wealth, and with them and their accumulation of widows there must have been as a widow’s mite an immense increment and inheritance of clothing (for clothing we know was a valued bequest), it is natural that we find her very richly dressed and with a distinctly haughty look upon her handsome face as becomes a conqueror both of men and widows.
The straight, lace collar, such as is worn by Madam Padishal and shown in all portraits of this date, is, I believe, a whisk.
The whisk was a very interesting and to us a puzzling article of attire, through the lack of precise description. It was at first called the falling-whisk, and is believed to have been simply the handsome, lace-edged, stiff, standing collar turned down over the shoulders. This collar had been both worn with the ruff and worn after it, and had been called a fall. Quicherat tells that the “whisk” came into universal use in 1644, when very low-necked gowns were worn, and that it was simply a kerchief or fichu to cover the neck.
We have a few side-lights to help us, as to the shape of the whisk, in the form of advertisements of lost whisks. In one case (1662) it is “a cambric whisk with Flanders lace, about a quarter of a yard broad, and a lace turning up about an inch broad, with a stock in the neck and a strap hanging down before.” And in 1664 “A Tiffany Whisk with a great Lace down and a little one up, of large Flowers, and open work; with a Roul for the Head and Peak.” The roll and peak were part of a cap.
Mrs. Simeon Stoddard.Mrs. Simeon Stoddard.
Mrs. Simeon Stoddard.
These portraits show whisks in slightly varying forms. We have the “broad Lace lying down” in the handsome band at the shoulder; the “little lace standing up” was a narrow lace edging the whisk at the throat or just above the broad lace. Sometimes the whisk was wholly of mull or lawn. The whisk was at first wholly a part of woman’s attire, then for a time it was worn, in modified form, by men.
Madam Pepys had a white whisk in 1660 and then a “noble lace whisk.” The same year she bought hers in London, Governor Berkeley paid half a pound for a tiffany whisk in Virginia. Many American women, probably all well-dressed women, had them. They are also seen on French portraits of the day. One of Madam de Maintenon shows precisely the same whisk as this of Madam Padishal’s, tied in front with tiny knots of ribbon.
It will be noted that Madam Padishal has black lace frills about the upper portion of the sleeve, at the arm-scye. English portraits previous to the year 1660 seldom show black lace, and portraits are not many of the succeeding forty years which have black lace, so in this American portrait this detail is unusual. The wearing of black lace came into a short popularity in the year 1660, through compliment to the Spanish court upon the marriage of the young French king, Louis XIV, with the Infanta. The English court followed promptly. Pepys gloried in “our Mistress Stewart in black and white lace.” It interests me to see how quickly American women had the very latest court fashions and wore them even in uncourtlike America; such distinct novelties as black lace. Contemporary descriptions of dress are silent as to it by the year 1700, and it disappears from portraits until a century later, when we have pretty black lace collars, capes and fichus, as may be seen on the portraits of Mrs. Sedgwick, Mrs. Waldo, and others later in this book. These first black laces of 1660 are Bayeux laces, which are precisely like our Chantilly laces of to-day. This ancient piece of black lace has been carefully preserved in an old New York family. A portrait of the year 1690 has a black lace frill like the Maltese laces of to-day, with the same guipure pattern. But such laces were not made in Malta until after 1833. So it must have been a guipure lace of the kind known in England as parchment lace. This was made in the environs of Paris, but was seldom black, so this was a rare bit. It was sometimes made of gold and silver thread. Parchment lace was a favorite lace of Mary, Queen of Scots, and through her good offices was peddled in England by French lace-makers. The black moiré hoods of Italian women sometimes had a narrow edge of black lace, and a little was brought to England on French hoods, but as a whole black lace was seldom seen or known.
Ancient Black Lace.Ancient Black Lace.
Ancient Black Lace.
An evidence of the widespread extent of fashions even in that day, a proof that English and French women and American women (when American women there were other than the native squaws) all dressed alike, is found in comparing portraits. An interesting one from the James Jackson Jarvis Collection is now in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. It is of an unknown woman and by an unknown artist, and is simply labelled “Of the School of Susteman.” But this unknown Frenchwoman has a dress as precisely like Madam Padishal’s and Madam Stoddard’s as are Doucet’s models of to-day like each other. All have the whisk of rich straight-edged lace, and the tiny knots of velvet ribbon. All have the sleeve knots, but the French portrait is gay in narrow red and buff ribbon.
Doubtless many have formed their notion of Puritan dress from the imaginary pictures of several popular modern artists. It can plainly be seen by any one who examines the portraits in this book that they are little like these modern representations. The single figures called “Priscilla” and “Rose Standish” are well known. The former is the better in costume, and could the close dark cloth or velvet hood with turned-back band, and plain linen edge displayed beneath, be exchanged for the horseshoe shaped French hood which was then and many years later the universal head-wear, the verisimilitude would be increased. This hood is shown on the portraits of Madam Rawson, Madam Stoddard, Mistress Paddy, and others in this book. Rose Standish’s cap is a very pretty one, much prettier than the French hood, but I do not find it like any cap in English portraits of that day. Nor have I seen her picturesque sash. I do not deny the existence in portraits of 1620 of this cap and sash; I simply say that I have never found them myself in the hundreds of English portraits, effigies, etc., that I have examined.
It will be noted that the women in the modern pictures all wear aprons. I think this is correct as they are drawn in their everyday dress, but it will be noted that none of these portraits display an apron; nor was an apron part of any rich dress in the seventeenth century. The reign of the apron had been in the sixteenth century, and it came in again with Anne. Of course every woman in Massachusetts used aprons.
Early inventories of the effects of emigrant dames contain many an item of those housewifely garments. Jane Humphreys, of Dorchester, Massachusetts, had in her good wardrobe, in 1668, “2 Blew aprons, A White Holland Apron with a Small Lace at the bottom. A White Holland Apron with two breathes in it. My best white apron. My greene apron.”
In the pictures,The Return of the MayflowerandThe Pilgrim Exiles, the masculine dress therein displayed is very close to that of the real men of the times. The great power of these pictures is, after all, not in the dress, but in the expression of the faces. The artist has portrayed the very spirit of pure religious feeling, self-denial, home-longing, and sadness of exile which we know must have been imprinted on those faces.
The lack of likeness in the women’s dress is more through difference of figure and carriage and an indescribable cut of the garments than in detail, except in one adjunct, the sleeve, which is wholly unlike the seventeenth-century sleeve in these portraits. I have ever deemed the sleeve an important part both of a man’s coat and a woman’s gown. The tailor in the old play,The Maid of the Mill, says, “O Sleeve! O Sleeve! I’ll study all night, madam, to magnify your sleeves!” By its inelegant shape a garment may be ruined. By its grace it accents the beauty of other portions of the apparel. In these pictures of Puritan attire, it has proved able to make or mar the likeness to the real dress. It is now a component part of both outer and inner garment. It was formerly extraneous.
In the reign of Henry VIII, the sleeve was generally a separate article of dress and the most gorgeous and richly ornamented portion of the dress. Outer and inner sleeves were worn by both men and women, for their doublets were sleeveless. Elizabeth gradually banished the outer hanging sleeve, though she retained the detached sleeve.
Sleeves had grown gravely offensive to Puritans; the slashing was excessive. A Massachusetts statute of 1634 specifies that “No man or woman shall make or buy any slashed clothes other than one slash in each sleeve and another in the back. Men and women shall have liberty to wear out such apparell as they now are provided of except the immoderate great sleeves and slashed apparel.”
Virago-sleeve.Virago-sleeve.
Virago-sleeve.
Size and slashes were both held to be a waste of good cloth. “Immoderate great sleeves” could never be the simple coat sleeve with cuff in which our modern artists are given to depicting Virginian and New England dames. Doubtless the general shape of the dress was simple enough, but the sleeve was the only part which was not close and plain and unornamented. I have found no close coat sleeves with cuffs upon any old American portraits. I recall none on English portraits. You may see them, though rarely, in England under hanging sleeves upon figures which have proved valuable conservators of fashion, albeit sombre of design and rigid of form, namely, effigies in stone or metal upon old tombs; these not after the year 1620, though these are really a small “leg-of-mutton” sleeve being gathered into the arm-scye. A beautiful brass in a church on the Isle of Wight is dated 1615. This has long, hanging sleeves edged with leaflike points of cut-work; cuffs of similar work turn back from the wrists of the undersleeves. ASatyrby Fitzgeffrey, published the same year, complains that the wrists of women and men are clogged with bush-points, ribbons, or rebato-twists. “Double cufts” is an entry in a Plymouth inventory—which explains itself. In the hundreds of inventories I have investigated I have never seen half a dozen entries of cuffs. The two or three I have found have been specified as “lace cuffs.”
George Fox, the founder of Quakerism, wrote with a vivid pen; one of his own followers said with severity, “He paints high.” Some of his denunciations of the dress of his day afford a very good notion of the peculiarities of contemporary costume; though he may be read with this caution in mind. He writes deploringly of women’s sleeves (in the year 1654); it will be noted that he refers to double cuffs:—
“The women having their cuffs double under and above, like a butcher with his white sleeves, their ribands tied about their hands, and three or four gold laces about their clothes.”
“The women having their cuffs double under and above, like a butcher with his white sleeves, their ribands tied about their hands, and three or four gold laces about their clothes.”
Ninon de l’Enclos.Ninon de l’Enclos.
Ninon de l’Enclos.
There were three generations of English heralds named Holme, all genealogists, and all artists; they have added much to our knowledge of old English dress. Randle Holme, the Chester herald, lived in the reign of Charles II, and increased a collection of manuscript begun by his grandfather and now forming part of the Harleian Collection in the British Museum. He wrote also theAcademy of Armoury, published in 1688, and made a vast number of drawings for it, as well as for his other works. His note-books of drawings are preserved. In one of them he gives drawings of the sleeve which is found on every seventeenth-century portrait of American women which I have ever seen. He calls this a virago-sleeve. It was worn in Queen Elizabeth’s day, but was a French fashion. It is gathered very full in the shoulder and again at the wrist, or at the forearm. At intervals between, it is drawn in by gathering-strings of narrow ribbons, or ferret, which are tied in a pretty knot or rose on the upper part of the sleeve. One from a French portrait is givenhere. Madam Ninon de l’Enclos also wears one. This gathering may be at the elbow, forming thus two puffs, or there may be several such drawing-strings. I have seen a virago-sleeve with five puffs. It is a fine decorative sleeve, not always shapely, perhaps, but affording in the pretty knots of ribbon some relief to the severity of the rest of the dress.
Stubbes wrote, “Some have sleeves cut up the arm, drawn out with sundry colours, pointed with silk ribbands, and very gallantly tied with love knotts.” It was at first a convention of fashion, and it lingered long in some modification, that wherever there was a slash there was a knot of ribbon or a bunch of tags or aglets. This in its origin was really that the slash might be tied together. Ribbon knots were much worn; the early days of the great court of Louis XIV saw an infinite use of ribbons for men and women. When, in the closing years of the century, rows of these knots were placed on either side of the stiff busk with bars of ribbon forming a stomacher, they were calledechelles, ladders.The Ladies’ Dictionary(1694) says they were “much in request.”
This virago-sleeve was worn by women of all ages and by children, both boys and girls. A virago-sleeve is worn by Rebecca Rawson (here), and by Mrs. Simeon Stoddard (here), by Madam Padishal and by her little girl, and by the Gibbes child shown later in the book.
A carved figure of Anne Stotevill (1631) is in Westminster Abbey. Her dress is a rich gown slightly open in front at the foot. It has ornamental hooks, or frogs, with a button at each end—these are in groups of three, from chin to toe. Four groups of three frogs each, on both sides, make twenty-four, thus giving forty-eight buttons. A stiff ruff is at the neck, and similar smaller ones at the wrist. She wears a French hood with a loose scarf over it. She has a very graceful virago-sleeve with handsome knots of ribbon.
It is certain that men’s sleeves and women’s sleeves kept ever close company. Neither followed the other; they walked abreast. If a woman’s sleeves were broad and scalloped, so was the man’s. If the man had a tight and narrow sleeve, so did his wife. When women had virago-sleeves, so did men. Even in the nineteenth century, at the first coming of leg-of-mutton sleeves in 1830et seq., dandies’ sleeves were gathered full at the armhole. In the second reign of these vast sleeves a few years ago, man had emancipated himself from the reign of woman’s fashions, and his sleeves remained severely plain.
Small invoices of fashionable clothing were constantly being sent across seas. There were sent to and from England and other countries “ventures,” which were either small lots of goods sent on speculation to be sold in the New World, or a small sum given by a private individual as a “venture,” with instructions to purchase abroad anything of interest or value that was salable. To take charge of these petty commercial transactions, there existed an officer, now obsolete, known as a supercargo. It is told that one Providence ship went out with the ventures of one hundred and fifty neighbors on board—that is, one hundred and fifty persons had some money or property at stake on the trip. Three hundred ventures were placed with another supercargo. Sometimes women sent sage from their gardens, or ginseng if they could get it. A bunch of sage paid in China for a porcelain tea-set. Along the coast, women ventured food-supplies,—cheese, eggs, butter, dried apples, pickles, even hard gingerbread; another sent a barrel of cider vinegar. Clothes in small lots were constantly being bought and sold on a venture. From London, in November, 1667, Walter Banesely sent as a venture to William Pitkin in Hartford these articles of clothing with their prices:—
There remains another means of information of the dress of Puritan women in what was the nearest approach to a collection of fashion-plates which the times afforded.
Lady Catharina Howard.Lady Catharina Howard.
Lady Catharina Howard.
In the year 1640 a collection of twenty-six pictures of Englishwomen was issued by one Wenceslas Hollar, an engraver and drawing-master, with this title,Ornatus Muliebris Anglicanus. The severall Habits of Englishwomen, from the Nobilitie to the Country Woman As they are in these Times.These bear the same relation to portraits showing what was really worn, as do fashion-plates to photographs. They give us the shapes of gowns, bonnets, etc., yet are not precisely the real thing. The value of this special set is found in three points: First, the drawings confirm the testimony of Lely, Van Dyck, and other artists; they prove how slightly Van Dyck idealized the costume of his sitters. Second, they give representations of folk in the lower walks of life; such folk were not of course depicted in portraits. Third, the drawings are full length, which the portraits are not. Four of these drawings are reduced and shownhere. I giveherethe one entitledThe Puritan Woman, though it is one of the most disappointing in the whole collection. It is such a negative presentation; so little marked detail or even associated evidence is gained from it. I had a baffled thought after examining it that I knew less of Puritan dress than without it. I see that they gather up their gowns for walking after a mode known in later years as washerwoman style. And by that very gathering up we lose what the drawing might have told us; namely, how the gowns were shaped in the back; how attached to the waist or bodice; and how the bodice was shaped at the waist, whether it had a straight belt, whether it was pointed, whether slashed in tabs or laps like a samare. The sleeve, too, is concealed, and the kerchief hides everything else. We know these kerchiefs were worn among the “fifty other ways,” for some portraits have them; but the whisk was far more common. Lady Catharina Howard, aged eleven in the year 1646, was drawn by Hollar in a kerchief.
There had been some change in the names of women’s attire in twenty years, since 1600, when the catalogue of the Queen’s wardrobe was made. Exclusive of the Coronation, Garter, Parliament, and mourning robes, it ran thus:—
“Robes.Petticoats.French gowns.Cloaks.Round gowns.Safeguards.Loose gowns.Jupes.Kirtles.Doublets.Foreparts.Lap mantles.”
“Robes.Petticoats.French gowns.Cloaks.Round gowns.Safeguards.Loose gowns.Jupes.Kirtles.Doublets.Foreparts.Lap mantles.”
In her New Year’s gifts were also, “strayt-bodyed gowns, trayn-gowns, waist-robes, night rayls, shoulder cloaks, inner sleeves, round kirtles.” She also had nightgowns and jackets, and underwear, hose, and various forms of foot-gear. Many of these garments never came to America. Some came under new names. Many quickly disappeared from wardrobes. I never read in early American inventories of robes, either French robes or plain robes. Round gowns, loose gowns, petticoats, cloaks, safeguards, lap mantles, sleeves, nightgowns, nightrails, and night-jackets continued in wear.
I have never found the word forepart in this distinctive signification nor the word kirtle; though our modern writers of historical novels are most liberal of kirtles to their heroines. It is a pretty, quaint name, and ought to have lingered with us; but “what a deformed thief this Fashion is”—it will not leave with us garment or name that we like simply because it pleases us.
Doublets were worn by women.
“The Women also have doublets and Jerkins as men have, buttoned up the brest, and made with Wings, Welts and Pinions on shoulder points as men’s apparell is for all the world, &; though this be a kind of attire appropriate only to Man yet they blush not to wear it.”
“The Women also have doublets and Jerkins as men have, buttoned up the brest, and made with Wings, Welts and Pinions on shoulder points as men’s apparell is for all the world, &; though this be a kind of attire appropriate only to Man yet they blush not to wear it.”
Anne Hibbins, thewitch, had a black satin doublet among other substantial attire.
A fellow-barrister of Governor John Winthrop, Sergeant Erasmus Earle, a most uxorious husband, was writing love-letters to his wife Frances, who lived out of London, at the same time that Winthrop was writing to Margaret Winthrop. Earle was much concerned over a certain doublet he had ordered for his wife. He had bought the blue bayes for this garment in two pieces, and he could not decide whether the shorter piece should go into the sleeve or the body, whether it should have skirts or not. If it did not, then he had bought too much silver lace, which troubled him sorely.
Margaret Winthrop had better instincts; to her husband’s query as to sending trimming for her doublet and gown, she answers, “When I see the clothI will send word what trimming will serve;” and she writes to London, insisting on “the civilest fashion now in use,” and for Sister Downing, who is still in England, to give Tailor Smith directions “that he may make it the better.” Mr. Smith sent scissors and a hundred needles and the like homely gifts across seas as “tokens” to various members of the Winthrop household, showing his friendly intimacy with them all. For many years after America was settled we find no evidence that women’s garments were ever made by mantua-makers. All the bills which exist are from tailors. One of William Sweatland for work done for Jonathan Corwin of Salem is in the library of the American Antiquarian Society:—
From many bills and inventories we learn that the time of the settlement of Plymouth and Boston reached a transitional period in women’s dress as it did in men’s. Mrs. Winthrop had doublets as had Governor Winthrop, but I think her daughter wore gowns when her sons wore coats. The doublet for a woman was shaped like that of a man, and was of double thickness like a man’s. It might be sleeveless, with a row of welts or wings around the armhole; or if it had sleeves the welts, or a roll or cap, still remained. The trimming of the arm-scye was universal, both for men and women. A fuller description of the doublet than has ever before been written will be given in the chapter upon the Evolution of the Coat. The “somar” which is the samare, named also in the bill of the Salem tailor, seems to have been a Dutch garment, and was so much worn in New York that I prefer to write of it in the following chapter. We are then left with the gown; the gown which took definite shape in Elizabeth’s day. Of course no one could describe it like Stubbes. I frankly confess my inability to approach him. Read his words, so concise yet full of color and conveying detail; I protest it is wonderful.
“Their Gowns be no less famous, some of silk velvet grogram taffety fine cloth of forty shillings a yard. But if the whole gown be not silke or velvet then the same shall be layed with lace two or three fingers broade all over the gowne or the most parte. Or if not so (as Lace is not fine enough sometimes) then it must be garded with great gardes of costly Lace, and as these gowns be of sundry colours so they be of divers fashions changing with the Moon. Some with sleeves hanging down to their skirts, trayling on the ground, and cast over the shoulders like a cow’s tayle. These have sleeves much shorter, cut up the arme, and pointed with Silke-ribons very gallantly tyed with true loves knottes—(for soe they call them). Some have capes fastened down to the middist of their backs, faced with velvet or else with some fine wrought silk Taffeetie at the least, and fringed about Bravely, and (to sum up all in a word) some are pleated and ryveled down the back wonderfully with more knacks than I can declare.”
“Their Gowns be no less famous, some of silk velvet grogram taffety fine cloth of forty shillings a yard. But if the whole gown be not silke or velvet then the same shall be layed with lace two or three fingers broade all over the gowne or the most parte. Or if not so (as Lace is not fine enough sometimes) then it must be garded with great gardes of costly Lace, and as these gowns be of sundry colours so they be of divers fashions changing with the Moon. Some with sleeves hanging down to their skirts, trayling on the ground, and cast over the shoulders like a cow’s tayle. These have sleeves much shorter, cut up the arme, and pointed with Silke-ribons very gallantly tyed with true loves knottes—(for soe they call them). Some have capes fastened down to the middist of their backs, faced with velvet or else with some fine wrought silk Taffeetie at the least, and fringed about Bravely, and (to sum up all in a word) some are pleated and ryveled down the back wonderfully with more knacks than I can declare.”
The guards of lace a finger broad laid on over the seams of the gown are described by Pepys in his day. He had some of these guards of gold lace taken from the seams of one of his wife’s old gowns to overlay the seams of one of his own cassocks and rig it up for wear, just as he took his wife’s old muff, like a thrifty husband, and bought her a new muff, like a kind one. Not such a domestic frugalist was he, though, as his contemporary, the great political economist, Dudley North, Baron Guildford, Lord Sheriff of London, who loved to sit with his wife ripping off the old guards of lace from her gown, “unpicking” her gown, he called it, and was not at all secret about it. Both men walked abroad to survey the gems and guards worn by their neighbors’ wives, and to bring home word of new stuffs, new trimmings, to their own wives. Really a seventeenth-century husband was not so bad. Note in myLife of Margaret Winthrophow Winthrop’s fellow-barrister, Sergeant Erasmus Earle, bought camlet and lace, and patterns for doublets for his wife Frances Fontayne, and ran from London clothier to London mantua-maker, and then to London haberdasher and London tailor, to learn the newest weaves of cloth, the newest drawing in of the sleeves. I know no nineteenth-century husband of that name who would hunt materials and sleeve patterns, and buy doublet laces and find gown-guards for his wife. And then the gown sleeves! What a description by Stubbes of the virago-sleeve “tied in and knotted with silk ribbons in love-knots!” It is all wonderful to read.
We learn from these tailors’ bills that tailors’ work embraced far more articles than to-day; in theOrbis Sensualium Pictus, 1659, a tailor’s shop has hanging upon the wall woollen hats, breeches, waistcoats, jackets, women’s cloaks, and petticoats. There are also either long hose or lasts for stretching hose, for they made stockings, leggins, gaiters, buskins; also a number of boxes which look like muff-boxes. One tailor at work is seated upon a platform raised about a foot from the floor. His seat is a curious bench with two legs about two feet long and two about one foot long. The base of the two long legs are on the floor, the other two set upon the platform. The tailor’s feet are on the platform, thus his work is held well up before his face. Sometimes his legs are crossed upon the platform in front of him. The platform was necessary, or, at any rate, advisable for another reason. The habits of Englishmen at that time, their manners and customs, I mean, were not tidy; and floors were very dirty. Any garment resting on the floor would have been too soiled for a gentleman’s wear before it was donned at all.
I have discovered one thing about old-time tailors,—they were just as trying as their successors, and had as many tricks of trade. A writer in 1582 says, “If a tailor makes your gown too little, he covers his fault with a broad stomacher; if too great, with a number of pleats; if too short, with a fine guard; if too long with a false gathering.”
In several of the household accounts of colonial dames which I have examined I have found the prices and items very confusing and irregular when compared with tailors’ bills and descriptive notes and letters accompanying them. And in one case I was fain to believe that the lady’s account-book had been kept upon the plan devised by the simple Mrs. Pepys,—a plan which did anger her spouse Samuel “most mightily.” He was filled with admiration of her household-lists—her kitchen accounts. He admired in the modern sense of the word “admire”; then he admired in the old-time meaning—of suspicious wonder. For albeit she could do through his strenuous teaching but simple sums in “Arithmetique,” had never even attempted long division, yet she always rendered to her husband perfectly balanced accounts, month after month. At last, to his angry queries, she whimpered that “whenever she doe misse a sum of money, she do add some sums to other things,” till she made it perfectly correct in her book—a piece of such simple duplicity that I wonder her husband had not suspected it months before. And she also revealed to him that she “would lay aside money for a necklace” by pretending to pay more for household supplies than she really had, and then tying up the extra amount in a stocking foot. He writes, “I find she is very cunning and when she makes least show hath her wits at work; andsoto my office to my accounts.”
Costumes of Englishwomen of the Seventeenth Century.Costumes of Englishwomen of the Seventeenth Century.
Costumes of Englishwomen of the Seventeenth Century.
“Two things I love, two usuall thinges they are:The Firste, New-fashioned cloaths I love to wear,Newe Tires, newe Ruffes; aye, and newe Gestures tooIn all newe Fashions I do love to goe.The Second Thing I love is this, I weeneTo ride aboute to have those Newe Cloaths scene.“At every Gossipping I am at stillAnd ever wilbe—maye I have my will.For at ones own Home, praie—who is’t can seeHow fyne in new-found fashioned Tyres we bee?Vnless our Husbands—Faith! but very fewe!—And whoo’d goe gaie, to please a Husband’s view?Alas! wee wives doe take but small DelightIf none (besides our husbands) see that Sight”—“The Gossipping Wives Complaint,” 1611 (circa).