In the pictures, The Return of the Mayflower and The Pilgrim Exiles, the masculine dress therein displayed is very close to that of the real men of the times. The great power of these pictures is, after all, not in the dress, but in the expression of the faces. The artist has portrayed the very spirit of pure religious feeling, self-denial, home-longing, and sadness of exile which we know must have been imprinted on those faces.
The lack of likeness in the women’s dress is more through difference of figure and carriage and an indescribable cut of the garments than in detail, except in one adjunct, the sleeve, which is wholly unlike the seventeenth-century sleeve in these portraits. I have ever deemed the sleeve an important part both of a man’s coat and a woman’s gown. The tailor in the old play, The Maid of the Mill, says, “O Sleeve! O Sleeve! I’ll study all night, madam, to magnify your sleeves!” By its inelegant shape a garment may be ruined. By its grace it accents the beauty of other portions of the apparel. In these pictures of Puritan attire, it has proved able to make or mar the likeness to the real dress. It is now a component part of both outer and inner garment. It was formerly extraneous.
In the reign of Henry VIII, the sleeve was generally a separate article of dress and the most gorgeous and richly ornamented portion of the dress. Outer and inner sleeves were worn by both men and women, for their doublets were sleeveless. Elizabeth gradually banished the outer hanging sleeve, though she retained the detached sleeve.
Sleeves had grown gravely offensive to Puritans; the slashing was excessive. A Massachusetts statute of 1634 specifies that “No man or woman shall make or buy any slashed clothes other than one slash in each sleeve and another in the back. Men and women shall have liberty to wear out such apparell as they now are provided of except the immoderate great sleeves and slashed apparel.”
Virago-sleeve.
Size and slashes were both held to be a waste of good cloth. “Immoderate great sleeves” could never be the simple coat sleeve with cuff in which our modern artists are given to depicting Virginian and New England dames. Doubtless the general shape of the dress was simple enough, but the sleeve was the only part which was not close and plain and unornamented. I have found no close coat sleeves with cuffs upon any old American portraits. I recall none on English portraits. You may see them, though rarely, in England under hanging sleeves upon figures which have proved valuable conservators of fashion, albeit sombre of design and rigid of form, namely, effigies in stone or metal upon old tombs; these not after the year 1620, though these are really a small “leg-of-mutton” sleeve being gathered into the arm-scye. A beautiful brass in a church on the Isle of Wight is dated 1615. This has long, hanging sleeves edged with leaflike points of cut-work; cuffs of similar work turn back from the wrists of the undersleeves. A Satyr by Fitzgeffrey, published the same year, complains that the wrists of women and men are clogged with bush-points, ribbons, or rebato-twists. “Double cufts” is an entry in a Plymouth inventory—which explains itself. In the hundreds of inventories I have investigated I have never seen half a dozen entries of cuffs. The two or three I have found have been specified as “lace cuffs.”
George Fox, the founder of Quakerism, wrote with a vivid pen; one of his own followers said with severity, “He paints high.” Some of his denunciations of the dress of his day afford a very good notion of the peculiarities of contemporary costume; though he may be read with this caution in mind. He writes deploringly of women’s sleeves (in the year 1654); it will be noted that he refers to double cuffs:—
“The women having their cuffs double under and above, like a butcher with his white sleeves, their ribands tied about their hands, and three or four gold laces about their clothes.”