The full dress of Queen Anne’s time was perhaps never seen to more advantage than at the grand soirées which the obese lady gave in that conservatory at Kensington which, as Defoe says, she was afterwards pleased to turn into a summer supper-room. The well-known old building was indeed divided into three rooms,—a ball-room, with a drawing and music-room on either side. The Corinthian pillars, the elegant friezes, and the niches for statues bearing girandoles, are yet to be seen. The Queen came to the parties given in this modest Trianon in a chair, by the gate on the north-west of the palace. Concerts, balls, and illuminated galas al fresco, were the usual entertainments; and to witness them the wealthy public were admitted, on condition of their appearing in full dress;—the ladies patched, feathered, sacked, or hooped; the gentlemen in three-cornered hats, velvet coats with stupendous skirts, powder on the head, a bodkin across the loins, and two inches of heel to give increase of dignity. Where the Broad Walk now exists there was then a railing; and through this the mobility,—worse dressed, but probably not less washed, than their betters,—looked on at the genteel people who glided about the gardens in brocaded robes, hoops, fly-caps, and fans.
Indifferent as Anne’s clothing was, there were terrible squabbles, touching the cast-off garments, between the Duchess of Marlborough, who was Mistress of the Robes, and the bed-chamber women and dressers. These complained that they only received very old mantuas, and sacks, and gowns, petticoats, commodes, head-clothes, and mantes, from the Duchess, who kept all the best of the old clothes, they said, for her own wear. Her Grace, in return, rated them as hussies; told them that she had a right to all, and that they could claim none, although she gave, out of her liberality, more than they deserved. Nay, she so well distributed the cast-off garments among the subaltern ladies, that of petticoats and other habits left, she had, as she protested, “only two or three for my own service.” Such was the delicacy of a ducal Mistress of the Robes in the palmy days of Queen Anne.
“Mistress” indeed she was, and what a virago to boot! Witness the incident when Anne was entering St. Paul’s, the Duchess at her side, to render thanks for the great victory achieved at Oudenarde. The Duchess of Marlborough had had the royal jewels newly set for that especial day; and sublime was her horror, as the royal carriage ascended Ludgate-hill, at observing that the Queen had no jewels at all about her. The vicinity to Billingsgate lent power to the vituperative eloquence of the offended wife of the General whose valour had won the victory. The Queen, for once, was not an iota less vituperatively eloquent than her Mistress of the Robes. As they mounted the steps, and entered the cathedral, they flew at one another with winged words, that fly swiftly, and wound where’er they fall. Anne’s voice was by far the louder; and for every thrust of the Duchess’s tongue, she fired a volley of asseverations that made the lieges long to tear the “Mistress’s” robes from her own back. That lady saw as much herself, and became alarmed; but, like a skilful general, she had the last shot, and fairly battered the Queen into silence, as she attempted to renew the contest in the royal pew, by the imperative order to “hold your tongue!”—“don’t answer me!”—and poor Anne obeyed.
But if Anne claimed the privilege of dressing as she pleased, she was angry if the necessary etiquette was disregarded by others. When Eugene of Savoy came over here in 1712, to uphold, as well as he could with his one hand, the war-faction against the Queen, he marvellously offended her by appearing in her august presence in a tie-wig. Mr. Secretary St. John, who presented him, wore a periwig so huge that he perfectly extinguished therewith the illustrious stranger whom he held by the hand. Eugene had been forewarned that the Queen could not bear to look upon a man unless he were covered with a full-bottomed periwig. Eugene carelessly, and not truthfully, answered, as he stood in the royal antechamber, “I don’t know what to do; I never had a long periwig in my life; and I have sent to all my valets and footmen to know if any of them have one, that I might borrow it; but no one has such a thing.” And so the Prince was conducted to the Queen, who thought more of the tie-wig on his head than she did of the gallant heart that beat within his “plaguy yellow and literally ugly” person.
Queen Anne, on the death of Prince George of Denmark, wore black and white, with a mixture of purple in some part of her dress. The precedent was taken from that worn by Mary Queen of Scots for the Earl of Darnley. Mourning, with such variety in it, was, after all, better than none. The Pope’s nieces, for instance, never wear mourning, not even for their nearest relatives. The Romans account it so great a happiness for a family to have a Pope in it, that they think no calamity whatever ought to be permitted to afflict his Holiness’s kindred! On the other hand, the dowager Empresses of Germany were accustomed never to leave off their mourning, and even their apartments were hung with black till their death. I will just add, that the French Queens, previous to the era of Charles VIII., wore white upon the decease of the King. They were thence called “Reines blanches.” In later days, the state mourning of the French court was purple. Consequently, when Anne wore white, black, and purple, in mourning for her departed lord, she put on the suits of woe sanctioned by the practice of three different courts.
Sophia Dorothea, the wife of George I., was the second of the royal consorts of England who never visited our shores. For allowing Count Königsmark to kiss her hand, her jealous husband murdered the Count, and shut the lady up in prison for more than thirty years. In her youth she was a charming person, charmingly dressed. The most touching circumstance of her long captivity was her weekly appearance, all clad in white, at the communion-table of the chapel of her prison-house, the Castle of Alden, where she partook of the sacrament, made solemn asseveration of her innocence, and forgave her enemies.
The process of dressing Marie Antoinette, it will be seen in another page, was at times a splendid misery. That of Queen Caroline, the wife of George II., was a splendid mockery. Horace Walpole describes a scene as having taken place in Queen Anne’s tiring-room, which really occurred in that of the sovereign lady of the second George. This exemplary Queen dressed and transacted her early worship at one and the same moment. She and her nymphs were in one room, the chaplain solus in another. Occasionally these nymphs, in their discretion, closed the door. Whenever this occurred, the chaplain, liberal Whiston, ceased to pray, and meditated on the mysteries proceeding within. This observance nettled the Queen, and did not please her ladies. One of the latter, on re-opening the door one morning, and finding the chaplain had not progressed in his duties while he had been shut out, angrily inquired, “Why did you stop?” “I stopped,” said Whiston, “because I do not choose to whistle the word of God through the key-hole.”
It is not to be wondered at, since queens afforded such examples of laxity, that fine ladies followed with alacrity the unseemly fashion. Miss Strickland notices the fact, that great ladies had, in the days upon which we are treating, a bad custom of proceeding with the affairs of the toilet during prayers; which was severely satirized, says the fair historian, in one of the old plays of that era, “where the fashionable belle is described preparing for her morning toilet, by saying her prayers in bed to save time, while one maid put on her stockings, and the other read aloud the play-bill.”
The consort of George III., the “good” Queen Charlotte, lived in a transition time, and wore the costumes of two separate centuries. The little lady lacked taste; and though she set the fashion to loyal maids and matrons, seldom became the robes she wore. But at the worst of these periods she displayed more taste, and, what is better than taste, more personal cleanliness, than her daughter-in-law, the coarse wife of the heartless George IV. Queen Adelaide was simply a lady. Expensive dresses were her abhorrence; and she never put on a robe of state without a sigh at the cost. In any sphere of life she would have been a thoroughly tidy, honest, careful housewife.