CHAPTER II
DRESS OF THE NEW ENGLAND MOTHERS
have expressed a doubt that the dress of Cavalier and Puritan varied as much as has been popularly believed; I feel sure that the dress of Puritan women did not differ from the attire of women of quiet life who remained in the Church of England; nor did it vary materially either in form or quality from the attire of the sensible followers of court life. It simply did not extend to the extreme of the mode in gay color, extravagance, or grotesqueness. In the first severity of revolt over the dissoluteness of English life which had shown so plainly in the extravagance and absurdity of English court dress, many persons of deep thought (especially men), both of the Church of England and of the Puritan faith, expressed their feeling by a change in their dress. Doubtless also in some the extremity of feeling extended to fanaticism. It is always thus in reforms; the slow start becomes suddenly a violent rush which needs to be retarded and moderated, and it always is moderated. I have referred to one exhibition of bigotry in regard to dress which is found in the annals of Puritanism; it is detailed in the censure and attempt at restraint of the dress of Madam Johnson, the wife of the Rev. Francis Johnson, the pastor of the exiles to Holland.
There is a tradition that Parson Johnson was one of the Marprelate brotherhood, who certainly deserved the imprisonment they received, were it only for their ill-spelling and ill-use of their native tongue. The Marprelate pamphlet before me as I write had an author who could not even spell the titles of the prelates it assailed; but called them “parsones, fyckers and currats,” the latter two names being intended for vicars and curates. The story of Madam Johnson’s revolt, and her triumph, is preserved to us in such real and earnest language, and was such a vital thing to the actors in the little play, that it seems almost irreverent to regard it as a farce, yet none to-day could read of it without a sense of absurdity, and we may as well laugh frankly and freely at the episode.
When the protagonist of this Puritan comedy entered the stage, she was a widow—Tomison or Thomasine Boyes, a “warm” widow, as the saying of the day ran, that is, warm with a comfortable legacy of ready money. She was a young widow, and she was handsome. At any rate, it was brought up against her when events came to a climax; it was testified in the church examination or trial that “men called her a bouncing girl,” as if she could help that! Husband Boyes had been a haberdasher, and I fancy she got both her finery and her love of finery in his shop. And it was told with all the petty terms of scandal-mongering that might be heard in a small shop in a small English town to-day; it was told very gravely that the “clarkes in the shop” compared her for her pride in apparel to the wife of the Bishop of London, and it was affirmed that she stood “gazing, braving, and vaunting in shop doores.”
Now this special complaint against the Widow Boyes, that she stood braving and vaunting in shop doors, was not a far-fetched attack brought as a novelty of tantalizing annoyance; it touches in her what was one of the light carriages of the day, which were so detestable to sober and thoughtful folk, an odious custom specified by Stubbes in his Anatomy of Abuses. He writes thus of London women, the wives of merchants:—
“Othersome spend the greater part of the daie in sittyng at the doore, to shewe their braveries, to make knowen their beauties, to behold the passers by; to view the coast, to see fashions, and to acquaint themselves of the bravest fellows—for, if not for these causes, I know no other causes why they should sitt at their doores—as many doe from Morning till Noon, from Noon till Night.”
Other writers give other reasons for this “vaunting.” We learn that “merchants’ wives had seats built a purpose” to sit in, in order to lure customers. Marston in The Dutch Courtesan says:—