It was a time of change both of men’s and women’s neckwear. A few older women clung to the ruffs of their youth; younger women wore bands, falling-bands, falls, rebatoes, falling-whisks and whisks, the “fifty other ways” which could be counted everywhere. Carlyle says:—
“There are various traceable small threads of relation, interesting reciprocities and mutabilities connecting the poor young Infant, New England, with its old Puritan mother and her affairs, which ought to be disentangled, to be made conspicuous by the Infant herself now she has grown big.”
These traceable threads of relation are ever of romantic interest to me, and even when I refer to the dress of English folk I linger with pleasure with those whose lives were connected even by the smallest thread with the Infant, New England. One such thread of connection was in the life of Lady Mary Armine; so I choose to give her picture [here], to illustrate the dress, if not of a New Englander, yet of one of New England’s closest friends. She was a noble, high-minded English gentlewoman, who gave “even to her dying day” to the conversion of poor tawny heathen of New England. A churchwoman by open profession, she was a Puritan in her sympathies, as were many of England’s best hearts and souls who never left the Church of England. She gave in one gift £500 to families of ministers who had been driven from their pulpits in England. The Nipmuck schools at Natick and Hassamanesit (near Grafton) were founded under her patronage. The life of this “Truly Honourable, Very Aged and Singularly Pious Lady who dyed 1675,” was written as a “pattern to Ladies.” Her long prosy epitaph, after enumerating the virtues of many of the name of Mary, concludes thus:—
“The Army of such Ladies so Divine
This Lady said ‘I’ll follow, they Ar-mine.’
Lady Elect! in whom there did combine
So many Maries, might well say All Ar-mine.”
A pun was a Puritan’s one jocularity; and he would pun even in an epitaph.
It will be seen that Lady Mary Armine wears the straight collar or band, and the black French hood which was the forerunner, then the rival, and at last the survivor of the “sugar-loaf” beaver or felt hat,—a hood with a history, which will have a chapter for the telling thereof. Lady Mary wears a peaked widow’s cap under her hood; this also is a detail of much interest.
Another portrait of this date is of Mrs. Clark (see [here]). This has two singular details; namely, a thumb-ring, which was frequently owned but infrequently painted, and a singular bracelet, which is accurately described in the verse of Herrick, written at that date:—
“I saw about her spotless wrist
Of blackest silk a curious twist
Which circumvolving gently there
Enthralled her arm as prisoner.”
I may say in passing that I have seen in portraits knots of narrow ribbon on the wrists, both of men and women, and I am sure they had some mourning significance, as did the knot of black on the left arm of the queen of King James of England.
We have in the portrait shown as a frontispiece an excellent presentment of the dress of the Puritan woman of refinement; the dress worn by the wives of Winthrop, Endicott, Leverett, Dudley, Saltonstall, and other gentlemen of Salem and Boston and Plymouth. We have also the dress worn by her little child about a year old. This portrait is of Madam Padishal. She was a Plymouth woman; and we know from the inventories of estates that there were not so many richly dressed women in Plymouth as in Boston and Salem. This dress of Madam Padishal’s is certainly much richer than the ordinary attire of Plymouth dames of that generation.