Page:EB1911 - Volume 07.djvu/258

Rh portraits of Henry VII., a low-crowned cap whose upturned brim is nicked at one side. A few sober men wear coats differing little from the short gown of forty years before. Among ladies the butterfly head-dress and the steeple cap passed out of fashion, and a grave headgear comes in which has been compared with a dog-kennel, a hood-cap thrown over head and shoulders, the front being edged with a broad band which was often enriched with needlework, the ends falling in lappets to the breast. This band is stiffened until the face looks out as from the open gable-end of a house. The gown is simple in form, close-fitting to the body, the cuffs turned up with fur and the skirts long. A girdle is worn loosely drawn below the waist, its long strap letting the metal pendant fall nearly to the feet. Long cloaks, plainly cut, are gathered at the neck with a pair of long cords, like tasselled bell-pulls. While Henry VIII. is spending his father’s hoards we have a splendid court, gallantly dressed in new fashions. His own broad figure, in cloth of gold, velvet and damask, plaits, puffs and slashes, stiff with jewels, is well known through scores of portraits, and may stand for the high-water mark of the modes of his age. The Hampton Court picture of the earl of Surrey is characteristic of a great lord’s dress of a somewhat soberer style (see fig. 38). The king, proud of his own broad shoulders, set the fashion to accent this breadth, and it will be seen that the earl’s figure, leaving out the head and hose, all but fills a perfect square. Such men have the air of playing-card knaves. Surrey’s cap is flat, with a rich brooch and a small side-feather. His short doublet of the new style is open in front to show a white shirt covered with black embroidery whose ruffles cover his wrists. His over-garment or jerkin has vast sleeves, rounded, puffed and slashed. Under the doublet are seen wide trunk-breeches. He goes all in scarlet, even to the shoes, which are of moderate size. The girdle carries a sword with the new guard and a dagger of the Renascence art, graced with a vast tassel. All is in the new fashion, nothing recalling the earlier century save the hose and the immodest braguette which, seen in the latter half of the fourteen-hundreds, is defiantly displayed in the dress and armour of this age of Henry VIII. Even the hair follows the new French mode and is cropped close. Other fashionable suits of the time give us the tight doublets, loose upper sleeves and trunk hose as a mass of small slashes and puffs, a fashion which came in from the Germans and Switzers whom Henry saw in the imperial service. Such clothing goes with the shoes whose broad toes are slashed with silk, and the wide and flat caps with slashed edges, bushed with feathers, which headgear was often allowed to hang upon the shoulders by a pair of knotted bonnet-strings, while a skull-cap covered the head. With all this fantasy the dress of simpler folk has little concern, and a man in a plain, short-skirted doublet, with a flat cap, trunk breeches, long hose and plain shoes, has nothing grotesque or unserviceable in his attire. The new sumptuary laws, which were not allowed to become a dead letter, had their influence in restraining middle-class extravagance. No man under a knight’s degree was to wear a neck-chain of gold or gilded, or a “garded or pinched shirte.” Brooches of goldsmith’s work were for none below a gentleman. Women whose husbands could not afford to maintain a light horse for the king’s service had no business with gowns or petticoats of silk, chains of gold, French hoods, or bonnets of velvet. This French hood is the small bonnet, two of whose many forms may be seen in the best-known portraits of Mary of England and Mary, queen of Scots—a cap stiffened with wires. With its introduction the fashionable skirt began to lose its graceful folds and to spread stiffly outward in straight lines from the tight-laced waist, the front being open to show a petticoat as stiff and enriched as the skirt. The neck of the gown, cut low and square, showed the partlet of fine linen pleated to the neck. In the days of Edward VI. and Queen Mary the dress of most men and women loses the fantastic detail of the earlier Tudor age. In the dress of both sexes the joining of the sleeve to the shoulder has, as a rule, that large puff which stage dressmakers bestow so lavishly upon all old English costumes, but otherwise the woman’s gown and hood and the man’s doublet, jerkin and trunk hose are plain enough, even the shoes losing all the fanciful width. Mary, indeed, added to the statute book more stringent laws against display of rich apparel, laws that would fine even a gentleman of under £20 a year if silk were found in his cap or shoe. Small ruffs, however, begin to appear at the neck, and most wrists are ruffled. The ruff, which began simply enough in the first half of this century as a little cambric collar with a goffered edge, is for all of us the distinguishing note of Elizabethan dress. It grew wide and flapping, therefore it was stiffened upon wires and spread from a concealed frame, row on row of ruffs being added one above the other until the wearer, man or woman, seemed to carry the head in a cambric charger. Starch, cursed as a devilish liquor by the new Puritan, gave it help, and English dress acquired a deformity which can only be compared with the great farthingale or with the last follies of the wig. The skirt of a woman of fashion, which had already begun to jut from the waist, was drawn out before the end of Elizabeth’s reign at right angles from the waist until the dame had that air of standing within a great drum which Sir Roger de Coverley remarked in the portrait of an ancestress. Elizabeth herself, long-waisted and of meagre body, set the fashions of her court, other women pinching their waists into the long and straight stomacher ending in a peak before. She herself followed her father’s taste in ornament, and on great days was set about like the Madonna of a popular shrine with decorations of all kinds, patterns in pearl, quiltings, slashings, puffings and broidery, tassels and rich buttons. Among men the important change is the disappearance of the last of the long hose, all men taking to trunk-hose and nether-stocks or stockings, while their doublets tend to follow the same long-waisted fashion as the bodices of the women, whose doublets and jerkins, buttoned up the breast, bring the Puritan satirists against them. Of these satirists Philip Stubbes is the best-known, his Anatomie of Abuses, published in 1583, being a very wardrobe of Elizabethan fashions, although false or dyed hair, the ruff and its starch, and the ear-rings worn by some women and many men draw his hottest anger. William Harrison sings on a like note about the same time, declaiming especially against the mutability of fashion, declaring that the imported Spanish, French and German guises made it easier to inveigh against such enormities than to describe the English attire with any certainty. For him women were become men, and men transformed into monsters. “Neither was it ever merrier with England than when an Englishman was known abroad by his own cloth and contented himself at home with his fine carsey hosen and a mean slop; his coat, gown and cloak of brown, blue or puke, with some pretty furniture of velvet or fur and a doublet of sad tawny or black velvet or other comely silk, without such cuts and garish colours as are worn in these days, and never brought in but by the consent of the French, who think themselves the gayest men when they have most diversities of jags and change of colours about them.” He adds that “certes of all estates our merchants do least alter their attire ... for albeit that which they wear be very fine and costly, yet in form and colour it representeth a great piece of the ancient gravity appertaining to citizens and burgesses.” But as for the “younger sort” of citizens’ wives, Harrison finds in their attire “all kind of curiosity ... in far greater measure than in women of a higher calling.”

The coming of King James is not marked by any sudden change of attire, most of the Elizabethan fashions running on into his reign. The tight doublet has stiff wings at the shoulders, close sleeves and short skirt. The many fashions of breeches are still