“There is such a confuse mingle mangle of apparell and such preponderous excess thereof, as every one is permitted to flaunt it out in what apparell he has himself or can get by anie kind of means. So that it is verie hard to know who is noble, who is worshipful, who is a gentleman, who is not; for you shall have those who are neither of the nobilytie, gentilitie, nor yeomanrie goe daylie in silks velvets satens damasks taffeties notwithstanding they be base by byrth, meane by estate and servyle by calling. This a great confusion, a general disorder. God bee mercyfull unto us.”
This regard of dress was, I take it, the regard of the Puritan reformer in general; it was only excess in dress that was hated. This was certainly the estimate of the best of the Puritans, and it was certainly the belief of the New England Puritan. It would be thought, and was thought by some men, that in the New World liberty of religious belief and liberty of dress would be given to all. Not at all!—the Puritan magistrates at once set to work to show, by means of sumptuary laws, rules of town settlement, and laws as to Sunday observance and religious services, that nothing of the kind was expected or intended, or would be permitted willingly. No religious sects and denominations were welcome save the Puritans and allied forms—Brownists, Presbyterians, Congregationalists. For a time none other were permitted to hold services; no one could wear rich dress save gentlefolk, and folk of wealth or some distinction—as Stubbes said, “by being in some sort of office”
We shall find in the early pages of this book frequent references to Stubbes’s descriptions of articles of dress, but his own life has some bearing on his utterances; so let me bear testimony as to his character and to the absolute truth of his descriptions. He was held up in his own day to contempt by that miserable Thomas Nashe who plagiarized his title and helped his own dull book into popularity by calling it The Anatomie of Absurdities; and who further ran on against him in a still duller book, An Almand for a Parrat. He called Stubbes “A MarPrelate Zealot and Hypocrite” and Stubbes has been held up by others as a morose man having no family ties and no social instincts. He was in reality the tenderest of husbands to a modest, gentle, pious girl whom he married when she was but fourteen, and with whom he lived in ideal happiness until her death in child-birth when eighteen years old. He bore testimony to his happiness and her goodness in a loving but sad and trying book “intituled” A Christiall Glasse for Christian Women. It is a record of a life which was indeed pure as crystal; a life so retiring, so quiet, so composed, so unvarying, a life so remote from any gentlewoman’s life to day that it seems of another ether, another planet, as well as of another century. But it is useful for us to know it, notwithstanding its background of gloomy religionism and its air of unreality; for it helps us to understand the character of Puritan women and of Philip Stubbes. This fair young wife died in an ecstasy, her voice triumphant, her face radiant with visions of another and a glorious life. And yet she was not wholly happy in death; for she had a Puritan conscience, and she thought she must have offended God in some way. She had to search far indeed for the offence; and this was it—it would be absurd if it were not so true and so deep in its sentiment of regret. She and her husband had set their hearts too much in affection upon a little dog that they had loved well, and she found now that “it was a vanitye”; and she repented of it, and bade them bear the dog from her bedside. Knowing Stubbes’s love for this little dog (and knowing it must have been a spaniel, for they were then being well known and beloved and were called “Spaniel-gentles or comforters”—a wonderfully appropriate name), I do not much mind the fierce words with which he stigmatizes the vanity and extravagance of women. I have a strong belief too that if we knew the dress of his child-wife, we would find that he liked her bravely even richly attired, and that he acquired his wonderful mastery of every term and detail of women’s dress, every term of description, through a very uxorious regard of his wife’s apparel.
Sir Richard Saltonstall.
Of the absolute truth of every word in Stubbes’s accounts we have ample corroborative proof. He wrote in real earnest, in true zeal, for the reform of the foolery and extravagance he saw around him, not against imaginary evils. There is ample proof in the writings of his contemporaries—in Shakespere’s comparisons, in Harrison’s sensible Description of England, in Tom Coryat’s Crudities—and oddities—of the existence of this foolishness and extravagance. There is likewise ample proof in the sumptuary laws of Elizabeth’s day.
It would have been the last thing the solemn Stubbes could have liked or have imagined, that he should have afforded important help to future writers upon costume, yet such is the case. For he described the dress of English men and women with as much precision as a modern reporter of the modes. No casual survey of dress could have furnished to him the detail of his description. It required much examination and inquiry, especially as to the minutiae of women’s dress. Therefore when I read his bitter pages (if I can forget the little pet spaniel) I have always a comic picture in my mind of a sour, morose, shocked old Puritan, “a meer, bitter, narrow-sould Puritan” clad in cloak and doublet, with great horn spectacles on nose, and ample note-book, penner, and ink-horn in hand, agonizingly though eagerly surveying the figure of one of his fashion-clad women neighbors, walking around her slowly, asking as he walked the name of this jupe, the price of that pinner, the stuff of this sleeve, the cut of this cap, groaning as he wrote it all down, yet never turning to squire or knight till every detail of her extravagance and “greet cost” is recorded. In spite of all his moralizing his quill pen had too sharp a point, his scowling forehead and fierce eyes too keen a power of vision ever to render to us a dull page; even the author of Wimples and Crisping Pins might envy his powers of perception and description.
The bravery of the Jacobean gallant did not differ in the main from his dress under Elizabeth; but in details he found some extravagances. The love-locks became more prominent, and shoe-roses and garters both grew in size. Pomanders were carried by men and women, and “casting-bottles.” Gloves and pockets were perfumed. As musk was the favorite scent this perfume-wearing is not over-alluring. As a preventive of the plague all perfumes were valued.
Since a hatred and revolt against this excess was one of the conditions which positively led to the formation of the Puritan political party if not of the Separatist religious faith, and as a consequence to the settlement of the English colonies in America, let us recount the conditions of dress in England when America was settled. Let us regard first the dress of a courtier whose name is connected closely and warmly in history and romance with the colonization of America; a man who was hated by the Pilgrim and Puritan fathers but whose dress in some degree and likeness, though modified and simplified, must have been worn by the first emigrants to Virginia across seas—let us look at the portrait of Sir Walter Raleigh. He was a hero and a scholar, but he was also a courtier; and of a court, too, where every court-attendant had to bethink himself much and ever of dress, for dress occupied vastly the thought and almost wholly the public conversation of his queen and her successor.