The reader cannot have failed to remark how these love-locks and periwigs facilitated the disguise of one sex for the other, so often assumed by characters in old plays, and on which the chief interest or plot of a piece frequently turned. Thus, when Julia, in “The Two Gentlemen of Verona,” desires her maid, Lucetta, to provide her with “such weeds as may beseem some well-reputed page.” Lucetta answers, “Why, then, your ladyship must cut your hair.”
Julia.—No, girl; I’ll knit it up in silken strings,
With twenty odd conceited true-love knots:
To be fantastic, may become a youth
Of greater time than I shall show to be.
A periwig favored the escape of the Duke of York, afterwards James II., from St. James’s Palace in 1648, who luckily “shifted into gentlewoman’s clothes,” got on board a Dutch vessel below Gravesend, and landed safely in Holland. The hostess at Middleburgh, where the prince slept by the way, wondered much that “the young gentlewoman would not let the maids help her to bed.”
As a companion picture to the love locks of the gentlemen, the ladies adorned themselves with artificial ringlets, cunningly inserted amid the true; and heart-breakers (accroche-cœur), arranged with studied and most killing aim. The female coiffure of the Stuart period has always been much admired, with its soft clustering curls and semi-transparence, the effect of a peculiar friz. Some of the portraits of that era, the hair arranged with true feminine taste, gracefully shadowing a complexion of the utmost delicacy, are studies of female loveliness, which, once seen, are not easily forgotten.
Some years ago, the body of Charles the first was discovered at Windsor, and it is said the late Sir Henry Halford and George IV. were the only persons to whom it was shown. Sir Henry cut off a lock of the king’s hair, and made Sir Walter Scott a present of a part, which he had set in virgin gold, the word “Remember” surrounding it in highly relieved letters.
Whiskers were still in fashion at the French court. The king, Turenne, Corneille, Moliere, and the chief men of note were proud to wear them. “It was then,” says a grave encyclopedist, “no uncommon thing for a favourite lover to have his whiskers turned up, combed, and dressed by his mistress; and hence a man of fashion took care always to be provided with every little requisite, especially whisker-wax. It was highly flattering to a lady to have it in her power to praise the beauty of the lover’s whiskers, which, far from being disgusting, gave his person an air of vivacity, and several even thought them an incitement to love.” What would our gallant Drake have thought of this effeminacy, who, after he had burned Philip’s fleet at Cadiz, in sailor’s phrase called it “singeing the king of Spain’s whiskers.”
The Roundheads were mercilessly ridiculed in ballads, and pelted with poetry in every style of doggerel, till finally gibetted for the amusement of posterity by the author of Hudibras. The nick-name of Roundheads, we are told, arose from their putting a round bowl or wooden dish upon their heads, and cutting their hair by the edges or brim of the bowl. The bowl may, or may not, have been in use for this purpose, but nothing could exceed the ugliness of the Puritan crop.