While upon these times I may add, that when Elizabeth made Knights of the Garter those great noblemen, the Duc de Montmorenci, and the Lords Burleigh, Chandos, Essex, and Grey of Wilton, the Queen distinguished her favourite Burleigh from the rest, by buckling the garter about his knee herself; and this is said to have been the first occasion on which this personal favour was conferred by the hands of a female sovereign, and to have given rise to the exclamation, first uttered by the offended prudes, of “’Ods Stars and Garters!”
I have read somewhere of stockings made out of the human hair, and how the pretty conceit was adopted by lovers who were willing to entangle their legs, as well as heart, in their mistresses’ tresses. To be once more statistical and useful, I have to add for your information, that although we no longer export anything but cotton yarns, instead of the manufactured article, to Saxony, our general export is still large; saving of silk stockings, of which we send abroad annually only some 60,000 pairs. Two hundred and fifty thousand dozen pairs of cotton stockings go abroad annually to deck foreign legs, and about half that amount of worsted,—the latter being generally sold by weight. Finally, I conclude with the remarkably interesting statistical fact, that a lady always takes off her left stocking last!
The possibility that this bit of statistical darning may excite a blush on susceptible cheeks, reminds me of another fashion to which I will now advert, under the title at the head of the following chapter. Having got down to the feet, and shoes having been already incidentally noticed, we will again mount upward.
“MASKS AND FACES.”
“Il faut ôter les masques des choses aussi bien que des personnes.”—Montaigne.
Francis Bacon somewhere remarks that politeness veils vice just as dress masks wrinkles. Perhaps this saying of his was founded on the circumstance, that Queen Elizabeth not only wore dresses of increasing splendour with increasing age, but that she also used occasionally to appear masked on great gala occasions. The mode thus royally given, was not however very speedily or generally followed. The introduction of masks as a fashion appears to have “obtained,” as old authors call it, only about the year 1660. Pepys, in 1663, says that he went to the Royal Theatre, and there saw Howard’s comedy of ‘The Committee’ (known to us in its new form and changed name of ‘The Honest Thieves’). He designates it as “a merry but indifferent play, only Lacy’s part, an Irish footman, is beyond imagination.” Among the company were Viscount Falkenberg, or Falconbridge, with his wife, the third daughter of Cromwell. “My Lady Mary Cromwell,” he goes on to say, “looks as well as I have known her, and well clad; but when the house began to fill, she put on her vizard, and so kept it on all the play; which of late is become a great fashion among the ladies, which hides their whole face. So,” he adds,—and it shows, does that sighed-forth “So!” the melancholy consequence of leading wives into temptation,—“So to the Exchange, to buy things, with my wife; among others a vizard for herself.”
Certainly that pretty precisian, Mary Cromwell, in a vizard at the play, sounds oddly; one would as soon expect to hear of Mrs. Chisholm at a Casino! No wonder Mrs. Pepys admired her!
But Mrs. Pepys was not very long content with her English vizard; for six months after we find the little man, her husband, recording—“To Covent Garden, to buy a maske at the French house, Madame Charett’s, for my wife.” The taste of Mrs. Pepys was doubtless influenced by the example of the court, “where six women, my Lady Castlemaine and Duchess of Monmouth being two of them, and six men, the Duke of Monmouth, and Lord Arran, and Monsieur Blanfort (Lord Feversham) being three of them, in vizards, but most rich and antique dresses, did dance admirably and most gloriously.” What Pepys thought of the fashion and the time is seen again by a sighing comment—“God give us cause to continue the mirth!”
The fashion was still in full force in 1667; and to what purpose it was used, and to what purpose it might be abused, may be seen in the following extract.