A Puritan Dame.
When I ponder on the conditions of life in Ipswich at the time these letters were written—the few good houses, the small amount of tilled land, the entire lack of all the elegancies of social life; when I think upon the proximity and ferocity of the Indian tribes and the ever present terror of their invasion; when I picture the gloom, the dread, the oppression of the vast, close-lying, primeval forest,—then the rich articles of dress and elaborate explanation of the modes despatched by John Hall to his mother would seem more than incongruous, they would be ridiculous, did I not know what a factor dress was in public life in that day.
Poor Madam Symonds dreaded deeply lest The Plague be sent to her in her fine garments from London; and her dutiful son wrote her to have no fear, that he bought her finery himself, in safe shops, from reliable dealers, and kept all for a month in his own home where none had been infected. But she must have had fear of disaster and death more intimately menacing to her home than was The Plague.
She had seen the career of genial Master Rowlandson, a neighbor’s son, full of naughtiness, fun, and life. While an undergraduate at Harvard College he had written in doggerel what was termed pompously a “scandalous libell,” and he had pinned it on the door of Ipswich Meeting-house, along with the tax-collector’s and road-mender’s notices and the announcement of intending marriages, and the grinning wolves’ heads brought for reward. For this prank he had been soundly whipped by the college president on the College Green; but it did not prevent his graduating with honor at the head of his class. He was valedictorian, class-orator, class-poet—in fact, I may say that he had full honors. (I have to add also that in his case honors were easy; for his class, of the year 1652, had but one graduate, himself.) The gay, mischievous boy had become a faithful, zealous, noble preacher to the Puritan church in the neighboring town of Lancaster; and in one cruel night, in 1676, his home was destroyed, the whole town made desolate, his parishioners slaughtered, and his wife, Esther Rowlandson, carried off by the savage red-men, from whom she was bravely rescued by my far-off grandfather, John Hoar. Read the thrilling story of her “captivation” and rescue, and then think of Madam Symonds’s finery in her gilt trunk in the near-by town. For four years the valley of the Nashua—blood-stained, fire-blackened—lay desolate and unsettled before Madam Symonds’s eyes; then settlers slowly crept in. But for fifty years Ipswich was not deemed a safe home nor free from dread of cruel Indians; “Lovewell’s War” dragged on in 1726. But mantuas and masks, whisks and drolls, were just as eagerly sought by the governor’s wife as if Esther Rowlandson’s capture had been a dream.
There was a soured, abusive, intolerant old fellow in New England in the year 1700, a “vituperative epithetizer,” ready to throw mud on everything around him (though not working—to my knowledge—in cleaning out any mud-holes). He was not abusive because he was a Puritan, but because “it was his nature to.” He styled himself a “Simple Cobbler,” and he announced himself “willing to Mend his Native Country, lamentably tattered both in the upper Leather and in the Sole, with all the Honest Stitches he can take,” but he took out his aid in loud hammering of his lapstone and noisy protesting against all other footwear than his own. I fancy he thought himself another Stubbes. I know of no whole soles he set, nor any holes he mended, and his “Simple” ideas are so involved in expression, in such twisted sentences, and with such “strange Ink-pot termes” and so many Latin quotations and derivatives, that I doubt if many sensible folk knew what he meant, even in his own day. His words have none of the directness, the force, the interest that have the writings of old Stubbes. Such words as nugiperous, perquisquilian, ill-shapen-shotten, nudistertian, futulous, overturcased, quaematry, surquedryes, prodromie, would seem to apply ill to woman’s attire; they really fall wide of the mark if intended as weapons, but it was to such vain dames as the governor’s wife that the Simple Cobbler applied them. Some of the ministers of the colony, terrified by the Indian outbreaks, gloomily held the vanity and extravagance of dames and goodwives as responsible for them all. Others, with broader minds, could discern that both the open and the subtle influence of good clothes was needed in the new community. They gave an air of cheerfulness, of substance, of stability, which is of importance in any new venture. For the governor’s wife to dress richly and in the best London modes added lustre to the governor’s office. And when the excitement had quieted and the sullen Indian sachem and his tawny braves stalked through the little town in their gay, barbaric trappings, they were sensible that Madam Symonds’s embroidered satin manteau was rich and costly, even if they did not know what we know, that it was the top of the mode.
Governor Symonds’s home in Ipswich was on the ground where the old seminary building now stands; but the happy married pair spent much of the time at his farm-house on Argilla Farm, on Heart-Break Hill, by Labor-in-vain Creek, which was also in Ipswich County. This lonely farm, so sad in name, was the only dwelling-place in that region; it was so remote that when Indian assault was daily feared, the general court voted to station there a guard of soldiers at public expense because the governor was “so much in the country’s service.” He says distinctly, however, concerning the bargain in the purchase of Argilla Farm, that his wife was well content with it.
Penelope Winslow.
There were also intimate personal considerations which would apparently render so luxurious a wardrobe unnecessary and unsuitable. The age and health of the wearer might generally be held to be sufficient reason for indifference to such costly, delicate, and gay finery. When Madam Symonds was fifty-eight years old, in 1674, her son wrote, “Oh, Good Mother, grieved am I to learn that Craziness creeps upon you, yet am I glad that you have Faith to look beyond this Life.” Craziness had originally no meaning of infirmity of mind; it meant feebleness, weakness of body. Her letters evidently informed him of failing health, but even that did not hinder the export of London finery.