But return we to the metal badge which has caused this diversion to so gloomy a subject as crime and punishment. It was simply an oblong plate about three and one-half inches long, of humble metal—pinchbeck, or alchemy—but plated heavily with gold, therefore readily mistaken for solid gold; upon it the telltale initials “P P” had been stamped with a die, while smaller letters read “St. J. Psh.” These confirmed my immediate suspicions, for I had seen an order of relief for a stricken wanderer—an order for two weeks’ relief, where the wardens of “St. J. Psh.” ordered the sheriff to send the pauper on—to make him “move along” to some other parish. This gold badge was not unlike the metal badges worn on the left arm by “Bedlam beggars,” the licensed beggars of Bethlehem Hospital, the half-cured patients of that asylum for lunatics.
The owner of this badge with ancient letters had not idly accepted them, or jumped at the conclusion that it was a decoration of honor for his ancestor. He had searched its history long, and he had found in Hall’s Chronicles of the Pageants and Progress of the English Kings ample reference to similar letters, but not as pauper’s badges. Indeed, like many another well-read and intelligent person, he had never heard of pauper’s badges. He read:—
“In this garden was the King and five with him apparyelled in garments of purpull satyn, every edge garnished with frysed golde and every garment full of posyes made of letters of fine gold, of bullion as thick as might be. And six Ladyes wore rochettes rouled with crymosyn velvet and set with lettres like Carettes. And after the Kyng and his compaignions had daunsed, he appointed the Ladies, Gentlewomen, and Ambassadours to take the lettres off their garments in token of liberalyte. Which thing the common people perceiving, ranne to them and stripped them. And at this banket a shypman of London caught certayn lettres which he sould to a goldsmith for £;3. 14s. 8d.”
All this was pleasing to the vanity of our friend, who fancied his letters as having taken part in a like pageant; perhaps as a gift of the king himself. We must remember that he believed his badge of pure gold. He did not know it was a base metal, plated. He proudly pictured his forbears taking part in some kingly pageant. He scorned so modern and commonplace a possibility as a society like Knights of the Golden Horseshoe, which was formed of Virginian gentlefolk.
It plainly was a relic of some romance, and in the strangely picturesque events of the early years in this New World need not, though a pauper’s badge, have been a badge of dishonor. What strange event or happening, or scene had it overlooked? Why had it been covered with its golden sheet? Was it in defiance or in satire, in remorse, or in revenge, or in humble and grateful recognition of some strange and protecting Providence? We shall never know. It was certainly not an agreeable discovery, to think that your great-grandmother or grandfather had probably been branded as a public pauper; but there were strange exiles and strange paupers in those days, exiles through political parties, through the disfavor of kings, through religious conviction, and the pauper of the golden badge, the pauper of “St. J. Psh.,” may have ended his days as vestryman of that very church. Certain it was, that no ordinary pauper would have, or could have, thus preserved it; and from similar reverses and glorifying equally base objects came the subjects of half the crests of English heraldry.
Pocahontas.
The likeness of Pocahontas ([here]) is dated 1616. It is in the dress of a well-to-do Englishwoman, a woman of importance and means. This portrait has been a shock to many who idealized the Indian princess as “that sweet American girl” as Thackeray called her. Especially is it disagreeable in many of the common prints from it. One flippant young friend, the wife of an army officer, who had been stationed in the far West, said of it, in disgust, remembering her frontier residence, “With a man’s hat on! just like every old Indian squaw!” This hat is certainly displeasing, but it was not worn through Indian taste; it was an English fashion, seen on women of wealth as well as of the plainer sort. I have a score of prints and photographs of English portraits, wherein this mannish hat is shown. In the original of this portrait of Pocahontas, the heavy, sombre effect is much lightened by the gold hatband. These rich hatbands were one of the articles of dress prohibited as vain and extravagant by the Massachusetts magistrates. They were costly luxuries. We find them named and valued in many inventories in all the colonies, and John Pory, secretary of the Virginia colony, wrote about that time to a friend in England a sentence which has given, I think to all who read it, an exaggerated notion of the dress of Virginians:—
“Our cowekeeper here of James citty on Sundays goes accoutred all in ffreshe fflaminge silke, and a wife of one that had in England professed the blacke arte not of a Scholler but of a Collier weares her rough beaver hatt with a faire perle hatband, and a silken sute there to correspond.”