writes Mrs. Centlivre in A Bold Stroke for a Wife.
The black hood was worn long by Quaker women ere they adopted the beaver hat of the eighteenth century, and the poke-bonnet of the nineteenth century. [Here] is given a portrait of Hannah Callowhill Penn, a Quaker, the second wife of William Penn. She was a sensible woman brought up in a home where British mercantile thrift vied with Quaker belief in adherence to sober attire, and her portrait plainly shows her character. Penn’s young and pretty wife of his youth wears a fashionable pocket-hoop and rich brocade dress; but she wears likewise the simple black hood ([here]).
The dominance of this black French hood came not, however, through its wear by sober-faced, discreet English Puritans and Quakers, but through a French influence, a court influence, the earnestness of its adoption by Madame de Maintenon, wife of King Louis XIV of France. The whole dress of this strange ascetic would by preference have been that of a penitent; but the king had a dislike of anything like mourning, so she wore dresses of some dark color other than black, generally a dull brown. The conventual aspect of her attire was added to by this large black hood, which was her constant wear, and is seen in her portraits. The life at court became melancholy, dejected, filled with icy reserve. And Madame, whether she rode “shut up in a close chair,” says Duclos, “to avoid the least breath of air, while the King walked by her side, taking off his hat each time he stopped to speak to her”; or when she attended services in the chapel, sitting in a closed gallery; or even in her own sombre apartments, bending in silence over ecclesiastic needlework,—everywhere, her narrow, yellow, livid face was shadowed and buried in this black hood.
Madame de Miramion.
Her strange power over the king was in force in 1681, and, until his death in 1715, this sable hood, so unlike the French taste, covered the heads of French women of all ages and ranks. The genial, almost quizzical countenance of that noble and charitable woman, Madame de Miramion, wears a like hood.
This French hood is prominent everywhere in book illustrations of the eighteenth century and even of earlier years. The loosely tied corners and the sides appear under the straw hats upon many of the figures in Tempest’s Cryes of London, 1698, such as the Milk woman, the “Newes” woman, etc., which publication, I may say in passing, is a wonderful source for the student of everyday costume. I give the Strawberry Girl on this page to show the ordinary form of the French hood on plain folk. Misson’s Memories, published also in 1698, it gives the milkmaids on Mayday in like hoods. The early editions of Hudibras show these hoods, and in Hogarth’s works they may be seen; not always of black, of course, in later years, but ever of the same shape.
