How Katherine of Valois was wooed by Henry V. may be seen in Shakspeare. The record is probably as true as much that is penned down by those other poets, the chroniclers. She is the second Queen of England who passed from the couch of a king to that of a soldier; and Katherine founded a new line of sovereigns when she gave her hand to Owen Tudor. Like all Frenchwomen, she dressed with taste; and she deserved a better fate than to be left, as her body was, during so many years, a spectacle for sightseers in Westminster Abbey. Her corpse, removed from her tomb during repairs, in the reign of her grandson, Henry VII., was never restored. It became mummified, and, in a coffin with a loose lid, was open to the eye and touch. People kissed it for twopence, until the year in which Louis XVI. was beheaded, and thrones began to tumble. The Revolution showing to what complexion royalty might come, the body of Katherine was deemed no longer profitable as a morsel, nor indeed as an investment, to those self-denying men, the Dean and Chapter. At the end of the last century, when it became the fashion to sweep away kings and queens, and nobody would pay to see their wretchedly-dressed mummies, the body of Katherine of France was unceremoniously swept off, too, into the general dust-hole covered by Westminster Abbey.
When old King René married his daughter Margaret of Anjou to Henry VI., he did what many modern fathers do, and spent upon the festival a sum which would have served the bride and bridegroom for household expenses for a year. Margaret possessed little but the clothes in which she stood; and she remains known as the most indifferently clad and the worst-fated of all our sovereign ladies. But she was a woman of too much heart and intellect to care more about coifs and kirtles than they deserved.
It was one of her maids of honour, Elizabeth Woodville, who shared the throne of Edward IV.,—a mésalliance in every respect, and unfortunate to all parties. She however astonished the good people of Reading by the “bravery” of her attire, when she first appeared there as England’s Queen.
Anne of Warwick’s whole reign with Richard III. was one of almost uninterrupted sickness, and she more often wore the garb of the invalid than the costume of a queen. The daughter of Elizabeth Woodville, the good Elizabeth of York, wife of Henry VII., was a lady who was never better dressed than at her coronation banquet in Westminster Hall, where the King was a spectator and not a guest. She sat in a kirtle of purple velvet, furred with ermine bands in front; and the Lady Katherine Gray and Mistress Ditton went under the table, and sat at the Queen’s feet; while the Countesses of Oxford and Rivers knelt on each side, and now and then “held a kerchief before her Grace.” The milliners especially prayed for benison on this Queen, and justly; for never had the dressmakers so fair and so faithful a patroness. She was provident of what she well paid for; and Elizabeth did not think it beneath her to pay sixteen pence to her tailor, Robert Addington, “for mending eight gowns of divers colours, for the Queen’s Grace, at 2d. apiece.” She also occasionally pawned her plate, when she was pressed for money; but altogether she was not an improvident Queen.
Elizabeth’s young daughter, Mary, sometime Queen of France, but who ultimately died Duchess of Suffolk, was a sportive child in a cumbrous dress. At four years of age she was provided, according to a warrant still existing, with kirtles of tawny damask and black satin; gowns of green and crimson velvet, edged with purple tinsel; and, as if to show that only outside appearance was cared for, lined with nothing more costly than simple black buckram. She was the widow, almost as soon as she was the wife, of Louis XII.; and, after a marriage of some two months’ duration, she expressed her grief by retiring to the Hôtel de Cluny, where, clothed in white, and confined in a darkened apartment lighted by wax tapers, she kept mourning state during six long, heavy weeks.
Of the wives of Henry VIII. it is told that Katherine of Arragon entered London wearing “a broad round hat.” She rose at five, and she used to say that dressing-time was murdered time; and she wore the habit of St. Francis of the third order, of which she was a member, beneath her ordinary attire. Anne of Boleyn was a lady of another quality. She was as long at her mirror as any modern maiden of them all; and, when arrayed for conquest, perhaps no woman was ever more decidedly armed against the peace of mankind. Her costume was almost daily varied, the only permanent fashion being the hanging sleeve, to conceal the double tip of the little finger of her left hand; and the kerchief over the neck, on which was a slight mark, which she had worn from her birth. Of course, kerchief collar-bands and hanging sleeves were adopted by all who recognized in Anne the undisputed Queen of Fashion.
Jane Seymour, who married Anne’s husband the day after he had beheaded Anne herself, was far from having the taste of her predecessor. She enjoyed the better fortune of dying a natural death, and Henry wept for her, poor man! because he lost the opportunity of otherwise disposing of her. When Anne of Cleves first presented herself to him, she was attired in abundance of petticoats, “after the Dutch fashion.” The King was horrified at such fashion, but sturdy Anne wore more petticoats, in the same national mode, on her wedding-day; nor was it till the morrow that she put off her national dress and assumed one shaped according to the English mode, and which, we are told, made her look more tolerable than she was before. She had the most splendid wardrobe of all Henry’s Queens, with the worst taste in dress. She was fonder of experimental cooking than of dress,—was more made for a buxom hostess than a Queen, and was most fortunate as Queen when she laid down her dignity and retired with a pension, and a neck secured against the King’s violent affection for it. Katherine Howard was in most things her very opposite, in taste for dress as well as in observance of duty; and Katherine Parr, the sixth wife, was superior to both. The first Protestant Queen of England and preserver of Cambridge University was not only a scholar but a “very woman,”—in which phrase I recognize one with a whole string of virtues and accomplishments. She was a perfect mistress of the needle (Queen Adelaide herself was not a greater); and her taste in dress was shown by her uniting magnificence of material with simplicity of form. She was the third of our Queens who descended from royalty to wed with a “mere nobleman;” but as Lady Seymour, good Queen Katherine was still the Queen of Hearts, and when the ivy peered into her coffin at Sudeley Chapel, and wound a wreath about her unconscious head, she gained a crown which caused her less uneasiness than that she had worn as living Queen.
It is a trait worth noticing, both in Mary Tudor and in the times, that she purchased six bonnets at £1 apiece, and two frontlets at 10s., at the shop of Lady Gresham, the actual Lady Mayoress, who was a near relation of the Boleyns. So that Mary was not ashamed of humble relations, nor a Lady Mayoress too proud to keep a shop. This was when Mary was only the “Lady Mary,” or Princess. When she became Queen she was not disinclined to wrap her dignity in all the glory, gold and brocade could give it. Her taste was not always of the best, and young ladies will shudder as they hear that when Mary was married, she marred a superb wedding costume, à la Française, by wearing a black scarf and scarlet shoes! True, young ladies, this was worse than burning Protestants;—which, after all, she sanctioned less from inclination than that she had bloody men around her, who put compulsory strain upon her tastes and feelings. For one Dr. Cahill, who gloats over the “glorious idea” of massacring Protestants, there were a score then, not only with the inclination but the power to give it effect; which, fortunately, our friend of gloomy notoriety does not possess.
I have above said, the “shop” of Lady Gresham. Until the 10th or 12th of Elizabeth there were but few silk-shops at all in London, and those were invariably kept, or served, by females. The supply too was very scanty. Stowe, the antiquarian tailor, says that citizens’ wives in general were then constrained to wear knit caps of woollen yarn; silver thread, lace, and silk being very scarce, and only the very wealthy being able to purchase garments of which these materials formed a part; and even then, the husbands of ladies who desired to deck themselves in costly apparel, were obliged to prove that they were “gentlemen by descent.”
When the Princess Elizabeth lost her mother, her wardrobe, which was none of the most brilliant before, became of very mean condition. Lady Bryan wrote to Cromwell that “she hath neither gown nor kirtle, nor petticoat, nor no manner of linen, nor forsmocks, nor kerchiefs, nor rails (night-dresses), nor body stichets, nor handkerchiefs, nor sleeves, nor mufflers, nor biggins” (the last two signifying day caps and night caps), and the whole list showing that the little lady was as ill provided for as any villein’s daughter in the land. No wonder that she was at an early period smartly touched by rheumatism. When she came to the court of Edward VI. she was remarkable for the simplicity of her dress; it was religiously grave, as prescribed by the polemical ‘Journaux des Modes’ edited by Calvinistic divines. Dr. Aylmer, in his ‘Harbour for Faithful Subjects,’ says:—“The King, her father, left her rich clothes and jewels; and I know it to be true, that in seven years after his death she never in all that time looked upon that rich attire and precious jewels but once, and that against her will; and that there never came gold or stone upon her head till her sister forced her to lay off her former soberness, and bear her company in her glittering gayness; and then she so bore it that all might see that her body carried what her heart disliked. I am sure that her maidenly apparel which she used in King Edward’s time, made the noblemen’s wives and daughters ashamed to be dressed and painted like peacocks, being more moved with her most virtuous example than all that ever Paul or Peter wrote touching the matter.”