The right Honourable Ferdinand—Lord Fairfax.
Mrs. Lucy Hutchinson was the wife of a Puritan gentleman, who was colonel in Cromwell’s army, and one of the regicide judges. She wrote a history of her husband’s life, which is one of the most valuable sources of information of the period wherein he lived, the day when Cromwell and Hampden acted, when Laud and Strafford suffered. In this history she tells explicitly of the early use of the word Roundhead:—
“The name of Roundhead coming so opportunely, I shall make a little digression to show how it came up: When Puritanism grew a faction, the Zealots distinguished themselves by several affectations of habit, looks and words, which had it been a real forsaking of vanity would have been most commendable. Among other affected habits, few of the Puritans, what degree soever they were, wore their hair long enough to cover their ears; and the ministers and many others cut it close around their heads with so many little peaks—as was something ridiculous to behold. From this custom that name of Roundhead became the scornful term given to the whole Parliament Party, whose army indeed marched out as if they had only been sent out till their hair was grown. Two or three years later any stranger that had seen them would have inquired the meaning of that name.”
It is a pleasure to point out Colonel Hutchinson as a Puritan, though there was little in his dress to indicate the significance of such a name for him, and certainly he was not a Roundhead, with his light brown hair “softer than the finest silk and curling in great loose rings at the ends—a very fine, thick-set head of hair.” He loved dancing, fencing, shooting, and hawking; he was a charming musician; he had judgment in painting, sculpture, architecture, and the “liberal arts.” He delighted in books and in gardening and in all rarities; in fact, he seemed to care for everything that was “lovely and of good report.” “He was wonderfully neat, cleanly and genteel in his habit, and had a very good fancy in it, but he left off very early the wearing of anything very costly, yet in his plainest habit appeared very much a gentleman.” Such dress was the best of Puritan dress; just as he was the best type of a Puritan. He was cheerful, witty, happy, eager, earnest, vivacious—a bit quick in temper, but kind, generous, and good. He was, in truth, what is best of all,—a noble, consistent, Christian gentleman.
Those who have not acquired from accurate modern portrayal and representation their whole notion of the dress of the early colonists have, I find, a figure in their mind’s eye something like that of Matthew Hopkins the witch-finder. Hogarth’s illustrations of Hudibras give similar Puritans. Others have figures, dull and plainly dressed, from the pictures in some book of saints and martyrs of the Puritan church, such as were found in many an old New England home. My Puritan is reproduced [here]. I have found in later years that this Alderman Abel of my old print was quite a character in English history; having been given with Cousin Kilvert the monopoly of the sale of wines at retail, one of those vastly lucrative privileges which brought forth the bitterest denunciations from Sir John Eliot, who regarded them as an infamous imposition upon the English people. The site of Abel’s house had once belonged to Cardinal Wolsey; and it was popularly believed that Abel found and used treasure of the cardinal which had been hidden in his cellar. He was called the “Main Projector and Patentee for the Raising of Wines.” Unfortunately for my theory that Abel was a typical Puritan, he was under the protection of King Charles I; and Cromwell’s Parliament put an end to his monopoly in 1641, and his dress was simply that of any dull, uninteresting, commonplace, and common Englishman of his day.
Mr. Alderman Abell and Richard Kilvert, the two maine Projectors for Wine, 1641.
Another New England man who is constantly called a Roundhead is Cotton Mather; with equal inconsequence and inaccuracy he is often referred to, and often stigmatized, as “the typical Puritan colonist,” a narrow, bigoted Gospeller. I have open before me an editorial from a reputable newspaper which speaks of Cotton Mather dressed in dingy, skimped, sad-colored garments “shivering in the icy air of Plymouth as he uncovered his close-clipped Round-head when he landed on the Rock from the Mayflower.” He was in fact born in America; he was not a Plymouth man, and did not die till more than a century after the landing of the Mayflower, and, of course, he was not a Roundhead. Another drawing of Cotton Mather, in a respectable magazine, depicts him with clipped hair, emaciated, clad in clumsy garments, mean and haggard in countenance, raising a bundle of rods over a cowering Indian child. Now, Cotton Mather was distinctly handsome, as may be seen from his picture [here], which displays plainly the full, sensual features of the Cotton family, shown in John Cotton’s portrait. And the Roundhead is in an elegant, richly curled periwig, such as was fashionable a hundred years after the Mayflower. And though he had the tormenting Puritan conscience he was not wholly a Puritan, for the world, the flesh, and the devil were strong in him. He was much more gentle and tender than men of that day were in general; especially with all children, white and Indian, and was most conscientious in his relations both to Indians and negroes. And in those days of universal whippings by English and American schoolmasters and parents, he spoke in no uncertain voice his horror and disapproval of the rod for children, and never countenanced or permitted any whippings.