FREAKS OF FASHION.
CHAPTER III.
We will now conduct the reader, who has condescended to accompany us thus far, through the succeeding centuries and complete our illustrations of the fashion of bygone times.
Cæsar describes the Britons as having long flowing hair, and a beard on the upper lip only. A bust in the British Museum, one of the Townley marbles, supposed by some to represent Caractacus, may be taken as a good example of the fashion of hair worn by the British chieftains. The hair is parted along the crown of the head, and disposed on each side of the face and down in the neck in thick bold masses. Immense tangled moustaches, reaching sometimes to the breast, completed the hirsute ornaments of the tattooed Briton. Strabo says, in his time the inhabitants of the Scilly Islands had long beards, like goats. Dion Cassius alludes to the long yellow hair of Boadicea flowing over her shoulders, which sufficiently indicates the coiffure of that undaunted heroine.
The Anglo Saxons considered fine hair as the most becoming of personal ornaments, and took every pains to dress it to the greatest advantage. Aneurin, the Welch bard, says, the warriors wore a profusion of hair, and were as proud of it as the women, decking it with beads and ornaments. It was worn long, and parted on the forehead, falling naturally on the shoulders; the beard of ample growth, and forked. To have the hair cut entirely off was considered a great disgrace—a mode of punishment inflicted upon criminals. Adhelm, bishop of Sherbone, who wrote in the eighth century, describes a maiden as having her locks delicately curled by the iron of those adorning her. The clergy were obliged to shave the crowns of their heads, and to keep their hair short to distinguish them from the laity. Again and again the denunciations of the clergy were directed against the practice of wearing long hair, but with partial results; the old Teutonic love of flowing locks was too strong to be extinguished by the threatenings of the Church.
When the Gauls were ruled by native sovereigns, none but nobles and priests were allowed to wear long beards. A close shaven chin was a mark of servitude. In the days of Charlemagne, kings rivalled each other in the length and majesty of their beards. Eginhard, secretary to Charlemagne, describes the old race of kings as coming to the Field of Mars in a carriage drawn by oxen, and sitting on the throne with their flowing beards and dishevelled locks. So sacred a thing was a king’s beard, that three of the hairs enclosed in the seal of a letter or charter were considered the most solemn pledge a king could offer.
The Danes, like the Anglo Saxons, took great pride in their hair; and the English women, we are told, were not a little captivated with some Danish officers, who especially delighted in combing and tending their hair: and we read of one Harold with the fair locks, whose thick ringlets reached to his girdle.
The Normans, at the time of the Conquest, not only shaved the upper lip and the entire face, but also cropped close or shaved the back of the head. Harold’s spies, unacquainted with so singular a custom, on the approach of the Conqueror’s forces, reported that his army was composed of priests, and not soldiers. Holinshed states that after the Conquest the English were ordered to shave their beards and round their hair, after the Norman fashion. When William returned to Normandy, he took with him some young Englishmen, as hostages: the French greatly admired their long beautiful curls. The Normans and Flemings, who accompanied the Conqueror, were too solicitous about their good looks to be long restricted to the stunted growth prescribed by military rule. All classes soon indulged in the forbidden luxury, and, as is usually the case, the reaction was extreme; so much so, that William of Malmesbury who makes complaint of the cropping of his countrymen in the previous reign, reprobates the immoderate length of the hair in the time of Rufus.
The prevailing sin of unshorn locks and curled moustaches had long been a grievous scandal in the eyes of the clergy. Councils were held at Limoges, in 1031; by Gregory VII. in 1073, and again at Rouen in 1095; on this much discussed grievance. Anselm, archbishop of Canterbury refused his benediction to those who would not cut their hair. And Serlo, bishop of Seez, when Henry was in Normandy, seems to have taken the matter literally into his own hands. Observing that the king and courtiers were moved by his zeal and eloquence, when preaching against this extravagant profusion of hair, he pulled out a pair of scissors, and docked the whole congregation, king and all, on the spot. A royal edict to the like effect was immediately issued. St. Wulstan, bishop of Worcester, took a somewhat singular method of enforcing his commands. When anyone knelt to receive his blessing, he would snip off a lock of their hair, throwing it in their face, and bidding them to cut off the rest, or perish in perdition.
The effigies of Henry and his Queen Matilda, at Rochester Cathedral, show the style of hair worn in those days. The king is represented with the beard trimmed round, and hair flowing in carefully-twisted ringlets upon his shoulders and down his back. The queen’s hair descends in two long plaits to the hips, and terminates in small curls. These plaits were sometimes encased in silk, and bound round with ribbon.
Whatever changes were effected by the zeal of the clergy, it is certain that the fops in Stephen’s reign had not conformed to their teachings. Historians describe their effeminate ringlets: and when these were not sufficiently ample, recourse was had to false hair.
In France, the denunciations of the clergy were as little heeded as in England. Louis VII., however, sacrificed his hair to save his conscience; he shaved himself as close as a monk, and disgusted his pleasure-loving queen, Eleanor of Guienne, by his denuded aspect and asceticism. Eleanor bestowed her favors upon another, was divorced, and subsequently gave her hand and dower—the fair provinces of Guienne and Poitou—to Henry, duke of Normandy, afterwards king of England—the first of the Plantaganets. In Henry’s reign the old Norman custom, of shaving the beard closely, was revived.
During the absence of Richard Cœur de Lion, closely trimmed hair and shaven faces were the fashion; but, towards the close of this reign, short beards and moustaches reappeared.
In king John’s reign curled hair was so much the fashion, that the beaux seldom appeared with any covering on their head, that their flowing locks might be everywhere admired. The king himself, and the nobles of his party, wore beard and moustaches, out of contempt, it is said, for the discontented barons. His effigy in Worcester Cathedral has the beard closely trimmed, and moustaches.
Curls and a shaven face, denote the gentlemen in the days of Henry III.; the ladies wear the hair turned up and confined in a caul.
Crispness of the hair and beard (which was curled with the nicest care) was the favourite fashion at the court of Edward Longshanks. His successor, as we may judge from the effigy at Gloucester, wore the beard carefully curled, and the hair cut square on the forehead, which hung in wavy ringlets below the ears. Can it be true that the beard of this wretched king suffered the indignity we read of in history? Did Maltravers order the king to be shaven with cold water from a dirty puddle, while on a journey near Carnarvon; and the poor king,
“Fallen, fallen, fallen, fallen,
Fallen from his high estate,”
bursting into tears exclaim, “Here at least is warm water on my cheeks, whether you will or not.” Beards at that time were seldom worn but by aged persons, officers of state, and knights templars.
Edward III. on his tomb at Westminster, is figured with a noble beard, which would not have disgraced the chin of some old Greek in the heroic ages.
In Richard the Second’s reign, we notice the hair of the ladies caught up prettily in a gold fret or caul, the hair usually surmounted by some ornament in jewelry, in the form of a chaplet, as described by Chaucer:
“And everich on her head
A rich fret of golde, which withouden drede
Was full of stately net stones set,
And every lady had a chapelet.”
The king, as appears from his effigy, wore flowing curls, confined by a narrow fillet round the temple; his beard and moustache short, from which two small tufts depended on each side of the chin. The “Canterbury Tales” furnish admirable sketches by a master-hand in illustration of our subject. The squire, “a lover and a lusty bachelor,” is pictured “with lockés curl’d as they were laid in press;” the franklin had a beard
“White was his beard as is the dayesy;”
the merchant—
“A merchant was there with a forked beard;”
and the sumpnour,
“With sealled browes, black and pilled beard.’
The Pardoner had hair as yellow as wax,
But smooth it hung, as doth a strike of flax;
By ounces hung his lockés that he had,
And therewith he his shoulders overspread,
Full thin it lay by culpons, on and on.
*****
No beard had he, no ever none should have,
As smooth it was as it were newe shave.”
The “shipman,” we know not if he had “the long gray beard, and glittering eye,” of The Ancient Mariner, but
“With many a tempest had his beard been shaken;”
the miller’s beard,
“As any sow or fox, was red,
And thereto broad, as though it were a spade;”
and the Reve—
“The Revé was a choleric man,
His head was shav’d as nigh as ever he can;
His hair was by his earés round yshorn;
His top was decked like a priest beforn.”
But here we must part company with the pilgrims, and proceed on our way.
During the reign of Henry IV., there occurred a marked change of fashion; the hair was now closely cropped round the head. The king retained the beard and moustaches; but, his successor, Henry V., discarded them, and, in his reign, even military men seldom wore moustaches, and none but old men had beards. A kind of horned head-dress was in favour with females, which Lydgate, the monk of Bury, ridicules:
“Horns were given to beasts for defence;
A thing contrary to feminity—
but “feminity” heeded not.
Men’s faces were all closely shaven in the time of Henry VII.; and certain turban-like and heart-shaped head-dresses, worn by females, were now of such unusual width, that we are told the doors of the palace at Vincennes had to be altered to admit the Queen of Charles VII., Isabella of Bavaria, when in full dress. At Paris, the horned head-dresses were doomed to perish in the flames. In 1429, a famous cordelier, one Thomas Conecte, preached in the church of St. Genevieve, for nine days in succession, to some thousands of auditors, against the pomps and vanities of this wicked world; and, in a fit of enthusiasm, fires were lighted, the men flung their dice and cards into the flames, and the women their monstrous head-dresses, tails, and other articles of finery. A somewhat similar head-dress, however, survives to this day among the peasantry about Rouen, Caen, &c.; and the steeple head-dress of the fifteenth century is exactly represented by the Cauchoise, still worn in Normandy.
Again in the reign of Edward IV., another change occurs, and the hair is suffered to hang in profusion over the ears in large thick masses, called “side locks,” covering the forehead, and drooping over the eyes in a very awkward manner—a fashion which scarcely varied during the remaining years of the Plantaganets.
Leland, in his description of the pageants at the marriage of Elizabeth to Henry VII., relates how the Queen was royally apparelled, “her fair yellow hair hanging down plain behind her back, with a caul (or net-work) of pipes over it, and a circlet of gold, richly garnished with precious stones, upon her head.” To wear the hair at full length on the shoulders was the approved fashion for a bride—Anne Boleyn was so attired at her nuptials—and the fashion was very generally followed by unmarried females. The men vied with the fair sex in the length of their flowing curls, and the dandies, especially, loaded their shoulders with a rich profusion. Louis XII. of France had a very magnificent chevelure, till disease compelled him to take refuge in a wig.
It is almost as needless to say ought of “bluff king Hal,” as to describe the current coin of the realm. He is a sort of Blue Beard, and the tragical story of his wives is known to everybody. He it was, who, in his royal will and pleasure, issued a peremptory order that the heads of his attendants and courtiers should be polled. We may be sure that short crops were soon in fashion. The Venetian ambassador at the English court writes, that when Henry heard that the king of France wore a beard, he allowed his, also, to grow, which, being somewhat red, had the appearance of golden hair. Henry was then about twenty-nine years of age.
Francis the First, who was wounded in a tournament, had to submit to the loss of his locks; so the pliant courtiers parted with theirs, which set the fashion of cropping the hair very close.
We have seen how bishops, in olden time, laid violent hands on their flocks, and imposed penalties on the laity, for too successfully cultivating their curls. But the sight of a bishop in danger of being shaved by his colleagues is a curiosity. We give the story as we find it in Southey’s “Omniana:” “Guillaume Duprat, bishop of Clermont, who assisted at the council of Trent, and built the college of the Jesuits at Paris, had the finest beard that ever was seen. It was too fine a beard for a bishop; and the canons of his cathedral, in full chapter assembled, came to the barbarous resolution of shaving him. Accordingly, when next he came to the choir, the dean, the prevot, and the chantre approached with scissors and razors, soap, basin, and warm water. He took to his heels at the sight, and escaped to his castle of Beauregard, about two leagues from Clermont, where he fell sick, from vexation, and died.”
Hastening onward, we come to the days of good Queen Bess—and foremost is the figure of the queen herself—
“The cynosure of neighbouring eyes.”
This was an age ever memorable for the choicest wits, and, we need not scruple to add, BEARDS. These were of every variety of cut, size, and colour; and certain professions were distinguished by particular beards. The cathedral beard, long and square-trimmed, which fell upon the breast, was worn by divines of the English church; the broad spade-beards and steeletto beards by soldiers: the former in favour with the Earl of Essex, the latter with Lord Southampton. There were, likewise, hammer-shaped beards, like the Roman T, similar to the formidable beard of the present Emperor of France; the pique devant, forked, needle, and tile-shaped beard; and round, trimmed beards, “like a glover’s paring-knife.”
Taylor, the Water-Poet, who had a curious cork-screw beard of his own, in his “Whip for Pride,” thus flagellates the whole race:
Now a few lines to paper I will put,
Of men’s beards strange and variable cut;
In which there’s some do take as vain a pride
As almost in all other things beside.
Some are reaped most substantial as a brush,
Which make a natural wit known by the bush.
Some seem as they were starched stiff and fine,
Like to the bristles of some hungry swine;
And some (to set their love’s desire on edge)
Are cut and pruned like a quick-set hedge.
Some like a spade, some like a fork, some square,
Some round, some mowed like stubble, some stark bare;
Some sharp stiletto-fashion, dagger-like,
That may, with whispering, a man’s eye out pike;
Some with the hammer cut, or Roman T,
Their beards extravagant reformed must be;
Some with the quadrate, some triangle fashion,
Some circular, some oval in translation,
Some perpendicular in longitude,
Some like a thicket for their crassitude;
That heights, depths, breadths, triform, square, round,
And rules geometrical, in beards are found;
Besides the upper lip’s strange variation,
Corrected from mutation to mutation;
As ’twere from tithing unto tithing sent,
Pride gives Pride continual punishment.
Some (spite their teeth) like thatch’d eaves downward grows,
And some grow upwards in despite their nose.
Some their mustachios of such length do keep,
That very well they may a manger sweep!
Which in beer, ale, or wine, they drinking plunge,
And suck the liquor up as ’twere a sponge;
But ’tis a sloven’s beastly Pride, I think,
To wash his beard when other men may drink.
And some (because they will not rob the cup)
Their upper chaps like pot-hooks are turned up.
The Barbers, thus, (like Tailors) still must be
Acquainted with each cuts variety.
The word beard, in former times, was understood to comprehend what we now distinguish as beard, whiskers and moustaches. The colour of the beard was considered of much importance, and dyed, when needful, of the desired hue. Bottom, who was to act the part of Pyramus, “a most gentleman-like man,” says, “I will discharge it in either your straw-coloured beard, your orange-tawny beard, your purple-in-grain beard, or your French-crown-colour beard, your perfect yellow,” nor must we omit the most venerable of all, “a sable silvered.” There was, also, the yellow, or Cain-coloured beard; and the red, or Judas-beard, formerly supposed to indicate a treacherous nature.
Beards of very noble proportions were worn at the era of the Reformation. We may instance Calvin, Beza, Peter Martyr, Fox, Cranmer, and John Knox, whose beard reached to his girdle. Possibly this length of beard was encouraged as much out of opposition to the Romish church, as from any real reverence for so patriarchal a fashion. Sully’s or Lord Burleigh’s beard may be taken as the finest growth to which statesmen have attained. The poets Spencer, Shakspere, and Beaumont, present fine patterns for their tuneful brethren; and scholars, if they despair of acquiring the erudition of a Scaliger, a Buchanan, or a Buxtorf, may resemble these old worthies in their plenitude of beard. Every painter is familiar with glorious old Titian’s beard, with Reuben’s and Vandyke’s.
And looking back through the vistas of past ages, the monarchs of the intellectual world are, for the most part, distinguishable by their handsome beards. Henry the Fourth, of France, could boast of a splendid beard; but his successor, Louis XIII., was without, and the pliant courtiers, in deference to the smooth face of royalty, gave up wearing beards. Sully, however, retained his, much to the amusement of some jesting spirits about the court. The old man, indignant at such treatment, observed to the king, “Sire, your father, of glorious memory, when he wished to consult me on state affairs, bade the fools and jesters leave his presence.”
Sir Thomas More’s beard but narrowly escaped the stroke of the axe which ended the career of that illustrious man. The story is told thus: Sir Thomas More at his execution, having laid his head upon the block, and perceiving that his beard was extended in such a manner that it would be cut through by the stroke of the executioner, asked him to adjust it properly upon the block; and when the executioner told him he need not trouble himself about his beard, when his head was about to be cut off, “It is of little consequence to me,” said Sir Thomas, “but it is a matter of some importance to you that you should understand your profession, and not cut through my beard, when you had orders only to cut off my head.”
Ulmus of Padua wrote a folio volume on the Beard, as he well might, if the length of his discourse were proportioned to the noble beards it was his privilege to illustrate, and the dignity and gravity of the subject he had to discuss. Hotoman wrote a “Treatise,” and Pierius Valerianus an “Eulogium” on beards. Those of Italy and Spain alone are worthy of a separate treatise. Many an Arab would rather lose his head than part with his beard—it is part of his religion to honour it; he swears by his beard: and Mahommed, we are told, never cut his. In Spain, in old times, it was held in like reverence: an insult to the beard could only be wiped out with blood. The seated corpse of the Cid—so runs the story—knocked down a Jew who dared to offend against its majesty by touching but a hair of the beard. It was reserved for the pencil of Velasquez to give immortality to the martial beards of Spain, which flourished proudly, and grew fiercely, amid the strife and smoke of battles. The decline and fall of the Spanish beard is attributed to Philip V. and his courtiers, in whose reign it was abolished. Many a brave Spaniard felt the privation keenly; and it became a common saying, “Since we have lost our beards, we seem to have lost our souls.”
The Longobardi, or Lombards, have made themselves a place in history; and stubborn enough they proved at times, as Frederic I., the renowned old Barbarossa, found to his cost. And was there not the terrible Blue Beard—that incarnation of villainy and bloodthirstiness of our childhood. Who has forgotten the beards of the Persian kings, interwoven with gold; or the long white beard of the old Laconian mentioned by Plutarch, who being asked why he let it grow so long, replied, “It is that seeing continually my white beard, I may do nothing unworthy of its whiteness?” Fuller, however, says, “Beard was never the true standard of brains;” nor of valour either, if we may trust Bassanio:
“How many cowards, whose hearts are all as false
As stairs of sand, wear yet upon their chins
The beards of Hercules and frowning Mars;
Who inward search’d, have livers white as milk;
And these assume but valour’s excrement,
To render them redoubted.”
There seems, at all times to have been a sinister protest, in some quarter or other, against the presumed arrogance of the beard—a lurking spirit of revolt, engendered possibly of envy, against the supremacy of its reign. Even the would-be-philosopher of old did not go unchallenged, as we may guess from the sharp rebuke administered in the memorable words, “Video barbam et palliam; philosophum nondum video.” And, indeed, if the truth must be spoken, there are faces to which it lends no dignity. A mean and contemptible nature, hid behind a potent beard, is a miserable disguise. The affectations of a gentleman are but trifles. Raleigh wore stays, and was a great dandy; but he was something more—an elegant poet, an accomplished gentleman, and a gallant soldier. But the abuse of a good thing is no argument for its disuse. We grieve to think of the degradation of this manly ornament, and put no faith in
“those ambiguous things that ape
Goats in their visage, women in their shape;”
and would fain hope that a return to the “flat faces,”
“such as would disgrace a screen,”
is next to impossible.
“Now, a beard is a thing which commands in a king,
Be his sceptre ne’er so fair;
When the beard wears the sway, the people obey,
And are subject to a hair.
“’Tis a princely sight and a grave delight
That adorns both young and old;
A well thatch’d face is a comely grace,
And a shelter from the cold.”
Even our playing cards look the better for the beards; how richly are the kings furnished—what a winning aspect it gives them.
“Behold four kings, in majesty revered,
With hoary whiskers and a forked beard.”
When the lively Beatrice exclaims, “I could not endure a husband with a beard on his face,” and is reminded she may light on one without, the alternative seems by no means pleasing; for she replies, “What shall I do with him? dress him with my apparel, and make him my waiting gentleman? He that hath a beard is more than a youth, and he that hath none is less than a man.” And we take it, though the lady tells us she was born to speak “all mirth, no matter” she has given expression to the opinion of her own sex very naively. It was one of those consistent contradictions so in character with the delightful absurdities of lovers, for some sighing swains to part with “the old ornament of their cheeks;” some say, to give a more youthful appearance to those who stood in need of it; and adopted by others from the merciful consideration which swayed the heart of Bottom, when he resolved “to roar like a sucking dove,” not to “fright the ladies.” When the repentant Benedick turned lover, his beard was fated to stuff tennis-balls. To pluck a hair from the beard of the great Cham, at the bidding of some fair inamorata, was obviously an easy and agreeable duty to the knights of old romance. But what shall we say to those giants’ coats
“Made from the beards of kings.”
Once upon a time, by the exigencies of war, John de Castro was compelled to leave one of his whiskers in pledge with the inhabitants of Goa, as security for a thousand pistoles, which he needed to carry on the siege. A general’s whiskers valued at 2,000 pistoles! Everything, in short, has its use,
A barbe de fol apprend-on à raire.
In Elizabeth’s reign periwigs made their appearance, and were worn very generally by ladies of rank. Paul Hentzner, writing of the queen, then in her sixty-seventh year, says she wore false hair, and that red, with a small crown on her head. False hair of different colours was worn on different occasions by the same person: sometimes the queen appeared in black hair.
Mary Queen of Scots had black hair; but in some of her portraits she is represented with light hair, and, in accordance with the fashion of her day, she frequently wore borrowed locks of different colours. Knollys, in a letter to Cecil, makes mention of one “Mistress Mary Seaton, greatly praised by the queen, and one of the finest buskers to be seen in any country. Among other pretty devices, she did set a curled hair upon the queen that was said to be a perewyke, that showed very delicately; and every other day she hath a new device of head-dressing without any cost, and yet setteth forth a woman gayly well.” Hair-powder first came into fashion in 1590.
Puttenham, in his “Art of Poesie,” says, “Now again at this time the young gentlemen of the court have taken up the long haire trayling on their shoulders, and think this more decent, for what respect I should be glad to know.” Curling the points of their beards and moustaches was a favourite style with the young men of fashion. The ladies wore the hair curled, frizzled, and crisped, and underpropped with pins and wires, and so tortured into the most fantastic shapes: we read, also, of cauls of hair set with seed-pearls and gold buttons.
In the days of our British Solomon there were first-rate coxcombs and exquisites; and some so solicitous about the beauty of the outward man, that, when they walked abroad, they carried a looking-glass “in a tobacco box or dial set.” Towards the close of this reign, the hair of females was combed back in a roll over the forehead, and on this a small hood.
In France, when Louis XIII. came to the throne, he was too young to have a beard. For a time the beard was unfashionable; but whiskers were much in favour with gallants, and thought to be greatly admired by their lady-loves.
The peaked beard of Charles I., so well known from the portraits by Vandyke, introduces us to the troubled times of the Cavaliers and Roundheads. The aversion of the latter to the flowing curls of the Royalists was extreme, and led to the adoption of the Puritanical crop, which, as a mere negation and opposed to every principle of beauty, was doomed in turn to be discarded with ineffable contempt. One would wish to speak with all respect of the stout ironsides who fought at Marston Moor and Naseby; but the silly crusade, encouraged by some of the meaner sort against the beautiful creations of art, has done more to estrange men’s minds from the noble principles they upheld with their swords, than the united acclaim of their preachers could effect in their behalf. The “love-locks” of the court gallants were especially hateful to the Puritans. Sometimes a single lock of hair, tied at the end with silk ribbon in bows, was allowed to fall on the chest; others wore two such love-locks, one on each side of the head, which, at times, reached to the waist. Prynne wrote a book expressly against them, on “The Unloveliness of Love-locks;” and in 1643 appeared Dr. Hall’s tract “On the Loathsomeness of Long Hair,” wherein he complained that “some have long lockes at their eares, as if they had four eares, or were prick-eared; some have a little long locke onely before, hanging down to their noses, like the taile of a weasall; every man being made a foole at the barber’s pleasure, or making a foole of the barber for having to make him such a foole.” And in Lyly’s play of Midas, it is asked, “Will you have a low curl on your head, like a ball, or dangling locks, like a spaniel? Your moustachioes sharp at the ends, like a shoemaker’s awl, or hanging down to your mouth, like goats’ flakes? Your love-locks wreathed with a silken twist, or shaggy to fall on your shoulders?”
The reader cannot have failed to remark how these love-locks and periwigs facilitated the disguise of one sex for the other, so often assumed by characters in old plays, and on which the chief interest or plot of a piece frequently turned. Thus, when Julia, in “The Two Gentlemen of Verona,” desires her maid, Lucetta, to provide her with “such weeds as may beseem some well-reputed page.” Lucetta answers, “Why, then, your ladyship must cut your hair.”
Julia.—No, girl; I’ll knit it up in silken strings,
With twenty odd conceited true-love knots:
To be fantastic, may become a youth
Of greater time than I shall show to be.
A periwig favored the escape of the Duke of York, afterwards James II., from St. James’s Palace in 1648, who luckily “shifted into gentlewoman’s clothes,” got on board a Dutch vessel below Gravesend, and landed safely in Holland. The hostess at Middleburgh, where the prince slept by the way, wondered much that “the young gentlewoman would not let the maids help her to bed.”
As a companion picture to the love locks of the gentlemen, the ladies adorned themselves with artificial ringlets, cunningly inserted amid the true; and heart-breakers (accroche-cœur), arranged with studied and most killing aim. The female coiffure of the Stuart period has always been much admired, with its soft clustering curls and semi-transparence, the effect of a peculiar friz. Some of the portraits of that era, the hair arranged with true feminine taste, gracefully shadowing a complexion of the utmost delicacy, are studies of female loveliness, which, once seen, are not easily forgotten.
Some years ago, the body of Charles the first was discovered at Windsor, and it is said the late Sir Henry Halford and George IV. were the only persons to whom it was shown. Sir Henry cut off a lock of the king’s hair, and made Sir Walter Scott a present of a part, which he had set in virgin gold, the word “Remember” surrounding it in highly relieved letters.
Whiskers were still in fashion at the French court. The king, Turenne, Corneille, Moliere, and the chief men of note were proud to wear them. “It was then,” says a grave encyclopedist, “no uncommon thing for a favourite lover to have his whiskers turned up, combed, and dressed by his mistress; and hence a man of fashion took care always to be provided with every little requisite, especially whisker-wax. It was highly flattering to a lady to have it in her power to praise the beauty of the lover’s whiskers, which, far from being disgusting, gave his person an air of vivacity, and several even thought them an incitement to love.” What would our gallant Drake have thought of this effeminacy, who, after he had burned Philip’s fleet at Cadiz, in sailor’s phrase called it “singeing the king of Spain’s whiskers.”
The Roundheads were mercilessly ridiculed in ballads, and pelted with poetry in every style of doggerel, till finally gibetted for the amusement of posterity by the author of Hudibras. The nick-name of Roundheads, we are told, arose from their putting a round bowl or wooden dish upon their heads, and cutting their hair by the edges or brim of the bowl. The bowl may, or may not, have been in use for this purpose, but nothing could exceed the ugliness of the Puritan crop.
“What creature’s this, with his short hairs,
His little band, and huge long ears,
That a new faith has founded?”
Even such brave and noble-minded adherents as Colonel Hutchinson could not escape the censure of their own party for not conforming in all respects to the vulgar notions of orthodoxy. His long and beautiful hair was looked upon with suspicion as betraying a certain lukewarmness in their cause. The Puritans even forbade the women to wear braided hair. And some of them, more zealous than the rest, made a vow not to trim their beards till the parliament had subdued the king, as did Sir Hudibras.
’Twas to stand fast
As long as monarchy should last;
But when the state should hap to reel
’Twas to submit to fatal steel.
These vow-beards were also worn by some staunch old Jacobites, to mark their love for the house of Stuart, who hoped to see the king recalled to the throne. The beard of Sir Hudibras has acquired a sort of historical importance, and, to do it justice, must be pictured at full length:
“His tawny beard was th’ equal grace
Both of his wisdom and his face;
In cut and die so like a tile,
A sudden view it would beguile;
The upper part whereof was whey,
The nether orange mix’d with grey.
This hairy meteor did denounce
The fall of sceptres and of crowns;
With grisly type did represent
Declining age of government,
And tell, with hieroglyphic spade,
Its own grave and the state’s were made.
Like Samson’s heart-breakers it grew,
In time to make a nation rue;
Though it contributed its own fall
To wait upon the public downfall.”
What befel this tawny beard we learn from the same faithful narrative of the knight’s adventures:
“At that an egg let fly,
Hit him directly o’er the eye,
And, running down his cheek, besmear’d
With orange tawny slime his beard;
But beard and slime being of one hue,
The wound the less appear’d to view.”
In this terrible plight he is visited by the widow, one of Job’s comforters, who begins her discourse with a commentary on beards, which must be our apology for inserting it here:
“If he that is in battle conquer’d
Have any title to his own beard,
Though yours be sorely lugg’d and torn,
It does your visage more adorn
Than if ’twere prun’d, and starch’d, and lander’d,
And cut square by the Russian standard.”
Butler has left us a portrait of Philip Nye’s Thanksgiving Beard, which must not be passed by unnoticed:
“This rev’rend brother, like a goat,
Did wear a tail upon his throat,
The fringe and tassel of a face,
That gives it a becoming grace;
But set in such a curious frame,
As if ’twere wrought in filograin,
And cut so e’en, as if’t had been
Drawn with a pen upon his chin:
No topiary hedge of quickset,
Was e’er so neatly cut, or thick-set.”
It has been seriously asserted that paste-board cases were invented to put over these beards at night, lest their owners should turn upon and rumple them in their sleep. The Puritans carried their hatred of long hair with them to their new homes across the Atlantic. In a code of laws which they published, among other curious regulations it is set forth, “that it is a shameful practice for any man who has the least care for his soul to wear long hair. As this abomination excites the indignation of all pious persons, we, the magistrates, in our zeal for the purity of the faith, do expressly and authentically declare, that we condemn the impious custom of letting the hair grow—a custom which we look upon to be very indecent and dishonest, which terribly disguises men, and is offensive to modest and sober persons, inasmuch as it corrupts good manners,” with much more to the like effect, in a strain of dreary verbiage and exhortation. Long hair, according to a Puritan poet, was nothing else than the banner of Satan displayed in triumph from a man’s head.
Milton’s beautiful hair, falling upon his shoulders in broad masses of clustering curls, and setting off features of rare beauty, is deserving of special honour. It is a question whether those sacred hairs were sacrilegiously handled by certain ruffianly overseers in 1790, during some repairs to the church of St. Giles, Cripplegate. If the body then exhumed, and presumed to be Milton’s, were in reality the earthly remains of our great poet, these “sapient, trouble-tombs,” after a carouse, (how wonderfully a parish feast smooths the way to some dirty job, so easily reconciled to the parochial mind), “cutting open the leaden coffin, found a body in its shroud, and, believing it to be that of the poet, they extracted the teeth, cut off the hair, which was six inches long, and combed and tied together, and then left the scattered remains to the grave diggers, who were permitted to exhibit them for money to the public. Mr. Philip Neve, of Furnival’s Inn, who published an account of the transaction, was strongly convinced that the body was that of Milton, although the hair and other circumstances favoured the opinion that it was the body of a woman.” Was anything more disgusting ever perpetrated in the days
“When Bradshaw bullied in a broad-brimmed hat,”
or since?
The Restoration of Charles II. ushered in The Age of Great Wigs—a subject of too much importance to be summarily disposed of, and which we purposely reserve for the next chapter.