Meantime we obtained fresh importations from abroad. Anne came with the Queen of Richard II.; Elizabeth from the German connections of Elizabeth Woodville’s mother, Jaquetta of Luxemburg; Gertrude was taken from Germany; Francis and Frances caught from France; and Arthur was revived for his eldest son by the first Tudor; Jane instead of Joan began, too, in the Tudor times.
But when the Reformation came, the whole system of nomenclature received a sudden shock. Patron saints were thrown to the winds; and though many families adhered to the hereditary habits, others took entirely new fashions. Then, Camden says, began the fashion of giving surnames as Christian names; as with Guildford Dudley, Egremont Ratcliffe, Douglas Sheffield; and in Ireland, Sidney, as a girl’s name, in honour of the lord deputy, Sir Henry, the father of Sir Philip, from whom, on the other hand, Sydney became a common English boy’s name.
Then, likewise, the classical taste came forth, and bestowed all manner of fanciful varieties; Homer, Virgil, Horatius, Lalage, Cassandra, Diana, Virginia, Julius, &c., &c., all are found from this time forward; and here and there, owing to some ancestor of high worth, specimens have been handed on in families.
The more pious betook themselves to abstract qualities; Faith, Hope, Charity, Prudence and Patience, Modesty, Love, Gift, Temperance, Mercy, all of which, even to the present day, sometimes are used, but chiefly by the peasantry, or in old Nonconformist families.
Between the dates 1500 and 1600 began the full employment of Scripture names, chosen often by opening the Bible at haphazard, and taking the first name that presented itself, sometimes, however, by juster admiration of the character. Thus began our use of Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, Rachel, Joseph, Benjamin, Josiah, Gershom, Gamaliel, &c.; and others more quaint and peculiar. The Puritan clergy absolutely objected to giving unedifying names. A minister was cited before Archbishop Whitgift for refusing to christen a child Richard. The Bible was ransacked for uncommon names only found in the genealogies, and parish registers show the strangest varieties, such as Hope still, Dust and Ashes, Thankful, Repent, Accepted, Hold-the-Truth, &c. These were chiefly given at the baptisms in the latter days of Elizabeth and the reign of James I. They were the real, not assumed, names of the Ironsides, but they were not perpetuated. A man called Fight-against-Sin would have too much pity for his son to transmit such a name to him. Original is, however, a family name still handed on in Lincolnshire. Probably it was at first Original Sin. The most curious varieties of names were certainly used in the 17th century. The register of the scholars admitted to Merchant Taylors' school between 1562 and 1699 shows Isebrand, Jasper, Jermyn, Polydore, Cæsar, Olyffe, Erasmus, Esme, Ursein, Innocent, Praise, Polycarpe, Tryamour, and a Sacheverell, Filgate, admitted in 1673.
Comparatively few of these Puritan names were used in Scotland; but several were for sound’s sake adopted in Ireland as equivalents; Jeremiah for Diarmaid; Timothy for Tadhgh; Grace for Graine.
Charles was first made popular through loyalty to King Charles I., who had received it in the vain hope that it would be more fortunate than the hereditary James, itself brought into Scotland seven generations back by a vow of Annaple Drummond, mother of the first unfortunate James. English registers very scantily show either Charles or James before the Stuart days, but they have ever since been extremely popular. Henrietta, brought by the French queen, speedily became popular, and with Frances, Lucy, Mary, Anne, Catherine, and Elizabeth, seem to have been predominant among the ladies; but all were contracted, as Harriet, Fanny, Molly, Nanny, Kitty, Betty. The French suppression of the Christian name considerably affected the taste of the Restoration; noblemen dropped it out of their signature; the knight’s wife discarded it with the prefix Dame; married daughters and sisters were mentioned by the surname only; young spinsters foolishly adopted Miss with the surname instead of Mistress with the Christian; but the loss was not so universal as in France, for custom still retained the old titles of knights and of the daughters and younger sons of the higher ranks of the nobility. The usual fashion was, in imitation of the French, for ladies to call themselves and be addressed in poetry by some of the Arcadian or romantic terms, a few of which have crept into nomenclature; Amanda, Ophelia, Aspasia, Cordelia, Phyllis, Chloe, Sylvia, and the like.
The love of a finish in a was coming in with Queen Anne’s Augustan age. The soft e, affectionate ie or y, that had been natural to our tongues ever since they had been smoothed by Norman-French, was twisted up into an Italian ia: Alice must needs be Alicia; Lettice, Letitia; Cecily, Cecilia; Olive, Olivia; Lucy, Lucinda; and no heroine could be deemed worthy of figuring in narrative without a flourish at the end of her name. Good Queen Anne herself had an a tacked on to make her ‘Great Anna’; Queen Bess must needs be Great Eliza; and Mary was erected into Maria; Nassau had lately been invented for William III.’s godchildren of both sexes; and Anne, after French precedent, made masculine for his successor’s godsons. Belinda, originally the property of the wife of Orlando, was chosen by Pope for his heroine of Rape of the Lock; Clarissa was fabricated out of the Italian Clarice by Richardson; and Pamela was adopted by him out of Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia, as a recommendation to the maid-servant whom he made his heroine; and these, as names of literature, all took a certain hold. Pamela is still not uncommon among the lower classes.
In the mean time the House of Brunswick had brought in the regnant names of German taste—George, of which, thanks to our national patron, we had already made an English word, Frederick, Ernest, Adolphus—a horrible English Latinism of good old German, Augustus, an adoption of German classic taste; and, among the ladies, generally clumsy feminines of essentially masculine names—Caroline, Charlotte, Wilhelmina, Frederica, Louisa, together with the less incorrectly formed Augusta, Sophia, and Amelia.
This ornamental taste flourished, among the higher classes, up to the second decade of the nineteenth century, when the affectations, of which it was one sample, were on the decline, under the growing influence of the chivalrous school of Scott, and of the simplicity upheld by Wordsworth. The fine names began to grow vulgar, and people either betook themselves to the hereditary ones of their families, or picked and chose from the literature then in fashion.