Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 3.djvu/414

400 dowager countess Villers were the leading stars of the court, the tone of morals must be low indeed.



Whilst the ladies were of this stamp we cannot expect the gentlemen to have been better, and there is no doubt but that the honours and wealth and royal favour heaped on such men as Somerset, Hay, Ramsay, and Buckingham, made debauchery and villainy quite fashionable. The character of Englishmen on their travels, Howell tells us, was expressed in an Italian proverb:—

An Italianised Englishman is a devil incarnate. This was said from the debauched conduct of our young men on their travels.

A Sedan

At home they were a contemptible mixture of foppery and profanity. Buckingham and the other favourites led the way. We have recorded the audacious behaviour of Buckingham at the courts of France and Spain, and the enormous foppery of his apparel. He had a dress of uncut white velvet, covered all over with diamonds, valued at eighty thousand pounds, a great feather of diamonds, another dress of purple satin covered with pearls, valued at twenty thousand pounds, and his sword, girdle, hatbands, and spurs were thickly studded with diamonds. He had besides these, five-and-twenty other dresses of great richness, and his numerous attendants imitated him according to their means. They began now to patch their faces with black plaister, because the officers who had served in the German wars wore such to cover their scars; and the ladies did the same. Duelling was now introduced, cheating at play was carried to an immense extent, and the dandy effeminacy of the cavaliers was unexampled. They had the utmost contempt of all below them, and any attempt to assume the style or courtesies of address which they appropriated to themselves, was resented as actual treason. The term Master or Mr. was only used to great merchants or commoners of distinction; and to address such as gentlemen or esquires would have roused all the ire of the aristocracy. In proceeding through the streets at night, courtiers only were conducted with torches, merchants with links, and mechanics with lanthorns.

Old London Lamp.

We may imagine the feeling with which the sober and religious puritans beheld all this, and the proud contempt with which their strictures were received. When the civil war broke out, which was a war of religious reform as much as of political, the puritans displayed a grave manner, a sober-coloured dress. and chastened style of speech; and the cavaliers, in defiance and contempt, swore, drank, and indulged in debauchery all the more, to mark their superiority to the, "sneaking roundhead dogs."

A Coach of the time of King Charles I.

Charles endeavoured to restrain this loose all indecent