Hannah Callowhill Penn.
Doubtless some of the Pilgrim Mothers wore bonnets like this one of Anne Basset’s, especially if the wearer were a widow, when there was also an under frontlet which was either plain, plaited, or folded, but which came in a distinct point in the middle of the forehead.
This cap, or bandeau, with point on the forehead, is precisely the widow’s cap worn by Catherine de Medicis. She was very severe in dress, but she introduced the wearing of neck-ruffs. She also wore hoods, the favorite head-covering of all Frenchwomen at that time. This form of head-gear was sometimes called a widow’s peak, on account of a similar peak of black silk or white being often worn by widows, apparently of all European nations. Magdalen Beeckman, an American woman of Dutch descent ([here]), wears one. The name is still applied to a pointed growth of hair on the forehead. It has also been known as a headdress of Mary Queen of Scots, because some of her portraits display this pointed outline of head-gear. It continued until the time of Charles II. It is often found on church brasses, and was plainly a head-gear of dignity. A modified form is shown in the portrait of Lady Mary Armine.
Stubbes in his Anatomie of Abuses gives a notion of the importance of the French hood when he speaks of the straining of all classes for rich attire: that “every artificer’s wife” will not go without her hat of velvet every day; “every merchant’s wife and meane gentlewoman” must be in her “French hood”; and “every poor man’s daughter” in her “taffatie hat or of wool at least.” We have seen what a fierce controversy burned over Madam Johnson’s “schowish” velvet hood.
An excellent account of this black hood as worn by the Puritans is given in rhyme in “Hudibras Redivivus,” a long poem utterly worthless save for the truthful descriptions of dress; it runs:—
“The black silk Hood, with formal pride
First roll’d, beneath the chin was tied
So close, so very trim and neat,
So round, so formal, so complete,
That not one jag of wicked lace
Or rag of linnen white had place
Betwixt the black bag and the face,
Which peep’d from out the sable hood
Like Luna from a sullen cloud.”
It was doubtless selected by the women followers of Fox on account of its ancient record of sobriety and sanctity.
“Are the pinch’d cap and formal hood the emblems of sanctity? Does your virtue consist in your dress, Mrs. Prim?”