At Amsterdam may be seen the portrait of Princess Mary painted with her cousin, William of Orange, who became her child-husband. She had the happiest life of any of the five—if she ever could be happy after her father’s tragic death. In this later portrait she is a little older and sadder and stiffer. Her waist is more pinched, her shoulders narrower, her face more demure. His likeness is here given. The only marked difference in the dress of these children from the dress of the Gibbes children is in the lace; the royal family wear laces with deeply pointed edges, the point known as a Vandyke. The American children wear straight-edged laces, as was the general manner of laces of that day. An old print of the Duke of York when about seven years old is given ([here]). He carries in his hand a quaint racket.
The costume worn by these children is like that of plebeian English children of the same date. A manuscript drawing of a child of the people in the reign of Charles I shows a precisely similar dress, save that the child is in leading-strings held by the mother; and in the belt to which the leading-strings are attached is thrust a “muckinder” or handkerchief.
These leading-strings are seldom used now, but they were for centuries a factor in a child’s progress. They were a favorite gift to children; and might be a simple flat strip of strong stuff, or might be richly worked like the leading-strings which Mary, Queen of Scots embroidered for her little baby, James. These are three bands of Spanish pink satin ribbon, each about four or five feet long and over an inch wide. The three are sewed with minute over-and-over stitches into a flat band about four inches wide, and are embroidered with initials, emblems of the crown, a verse of a psalm, and a charming flower and grape design. The gold has tarnished into brown, and the flower colors are fled; but it is still a beautiful piece of work, speaking with no uncertain voice of a tender, loving mother and a womanly queen. There were crewel-worked leading-strings in America. One is prettily lined with strips of handsome brocade that had been the mother’s wedding petticoat; it is not an ill rival of the princely leading-strings.
Another little English girl, who was not a princess, but who lived in the years when ran and played our little American children, was Miss Campion, who “minded her horn-book”—minded it so well that she has been duly honored as the only English child ever painted with horn-book in hand. Her petticoat and stomacher, her apron, and cap and hanging sleeves and square-toed shoes are just like Margaret Gibbes’s—bought in the same London shops, very likely.
Not only did all these little English and American children dress alike, but so did French children, and so did Spanish children—only little Spanish girls had to wear hoops. Hoops were invented in Spain; and proud was the Spanish queen of them.
Velasquez, contemporary with Van Dyck, painted the Infanta Maria Theresa; the portrait is now in the Prado at Madrid. She carries a handkerchief as big as a tablecloth; but above her enormous hoop appears not only the familiar virago-sleeve, but the straight whisk or collar, just like that of English children and dames. This child and the Princess Marguerite, by Velasquez, have the hair parted on one side with the top lock turned aside and tied with a knot of ribbon precisely as we tie our little daughters’ hair to-day; and as the bride of Charles II wore her hair when he married her. French children had not assumed hoops. I have an old French portrait before me of a little demoiselle, aged five, in a scarlet cloth gown with edgings of a narrow gray gimp or silver lace. All the sleeves, the slashes, the long, hanging sleeves are thus edged. She wears a long, narrow, white lawn apron, and her stiff bodice has a stomacher of lawn. There is a straight white collar tied with tiny bows in front and white cuffs; a scarlet close cap edged with silver lace completes an exquisite costume, which is in shape like that of Margaret Gibbes. The garments of all these children, royal and subject, are too long, of course, for comfort in walking; too stiff, likewise, for comfort in wearing; too richly laced to be suitable for everyday wear; too costly, save for folk of wealth; yet nevertheless so quaint, so becoming, so handsome, so rich, that we reluctantly turn away from them.
The dress of all young children in families of estate was cumbersome to a degree. There exists to-day a warrant for the purchase of clothing of Mary Tudor, sister of Henry VIII, when she was a sportive, wilful, naughty little child of four. She wore such unwieldy and ugly guise as this: kirtles of tawny damask and black satin; gowns of green and crimson striped velvet edged with purple tinsel, which must have been hideous. All were lined with heavy black buckram. Indeed, the inner portions, the linings of old-time garments, even of royalty, were far from elegant. I have seen garments worn by grown princesses of the eighteenth century, whereof the rich brocade bodies were lined with common, heavy fabric, usually a stiff linen; and the sewing was done with thread as coarse as shoe-thread, often homespun. This, too, when the sleeve and neck-ruffles would be of needlework so exquisite that it could not be rivalled in execution to-day.
Many of the older portraits of children show hanging sleeves. The rich claret velvet dresses of the Van Cortlandt twins, aged four, had hanging sleeves. This dress is given in my book, Child Life in Colonial Days, as is that of Katherine Ten Broeck, another child of Dutch birth living in New York, who also wore heavy hanging sleeves.
The use of the word hanging sleeves in common speech and in literature is most interesting. It had a figurative meaning; it symbolized youth and innocence. This meaning was acquired, of course, from the wear for centuries of hanging sleeves by little children, both boys and girls. It had a second, a derivative signification, being constantly employed as a figure of speech to indicate second childhood; it was used with a wistful tender meaning as an emblem of the helplessness of feeble old age. The following example shows such an employment of the term.
In 1720, Judge Samuel Sewall, of Boston, then about seventy-five years of age, wrote to another old gentleman, whose widowed sister he desired to marry, in these words:—