Sir Walter Raleigh.
To understand Raleigh’s dress, you must know the man and his life; to comprehend its absurdities and forgive its follies and see whence it originated, you must know Elizabeth and her dress; you must see her with “oblong face, eyes small, yet black; her nose a little hooked, her lips narrow, her teeth black; false hair and that red,”—these are the striking and plain words of the German ambassador to her court. You must look at this queen with her colorless meagre person lost in a dress monstrous in size, yet hung, even in its enormous expanse of many square yards, with crowded ornaments, tags, jewels, laces, embroideries, gimp, feathers, knobs, knots, and aglets, with these bedizened rankly, embellished richly. You must see her talking in public of buskins and gowns, love-locks and virginals, anything but matters of seriousness or of state; you must note her at a formal ceremonial tickling handsome Dudley in the neck; watch her dancing, “most high and disposedly” when in great age; you must see her giving Essex a hearty boxing of the ear; hear her swearing at her ministers. You must remember, too, her parents, her heritage. From King Henry VIII came her love of popularity, her great activity, her extraordinary self-confidence, her indomitable will, her outbursts of anger, her cruelty, just as came her harsh, mannish voice. From her mother, Anne Boleyn, came her sensuous love of pleasure, of dress, of flattery, of gayety and laughter. Her nature came from her mother, her temper from her father. The familiarity with Robert Dudley was but a piece with her boisterous romps in her girlhood, and her flap in the face of young Talbot when he saw her “unready in my night-stuff.” But she had more in her than came from Henry and Anne; she had her own individuality, which made her as hard as steel, made her resolute, made her live frugally and work hard, and, above all, made her know her limitations. The woman, be she queen or the plainest mortal, who can estimate accurately her own limitations, who is proof against enthusiasm, proof against ambition, and, at a climax, proof against flattery, who knows what she can not do, in that very thing finds success. Elizabeth was and ever will be a wonderful character-study; I never weary of reading or thinking of her.
The settlement of Massachusetts was under James I; but costume varied little, save that it became more cumbersome. This may be attributed directly to the cowardice of the king, who wore quilted and padded—dagger-proof—clothing; and thus gave to his courtiers an example of stuffing and padding which exceeded even that of the men of Elizabeth’s day. “A great, round, abominable breech,” did the satirists call it. Stays had to be worn beneath the long-waisted, peascod-bellied, stuffed doublet to keep it in shape; thus a man’s attire had scarcely a single natural outline.
We have this description of Raleigh, courtier and “servant” of Elizabeth and victim of James, given by a contemporary, Aubrey:—
“He looked like a Knave with his gogling eyes. He could transform himself into any shape. He was a tall, handsome, bold man; but his naeve was that he was damnably proud. A good piece of him is in a white satin doublet all embroidered with rich pearls, and a mighty told me that the true pearls were nigh as big as the painted ones. He had a most remarkable aspect, an exceeding high forehead, long faced, and sour eie-lidded, a kind of pigge-eie.”
We leave the choice of belief between one sentence of this personal description, that he was handsome, and the later plain-spoken details to the judgment of the reader. Certainly both statements cannot be true. As I look at his portrait, the “good piece of him” [here], I wholly disbelieve the former.
