Marston says:
“Another, he
Her silver-handled fan would gladly be.”
Forty pounds were often given for a fan in Elizabeth’s time. Bishop Hall, in his “Satires,” in 1597, says:
“While one piece pays her idle waiting man,
Or buys a hood, or silver-handled fan.”
The fan of the Countess of Suffolk resembles a powder-puff.
But gentlemen carried fans in those days. We find in a manuscript in the Ashmolean Museum, at Oxford, the following allusion: “The gentlemen then had prodigious fans, as is to be seen in old pictures, like that instrument which is used to dry feathers, and it had a handle at least one half as long, with which their daughters oftentimes were corrected. Sir Edward Cole, Lord Chief Justice, rode the circuit with such a fan, and William Dugdale told me he was witness of it.” The Earl of Manchester also used such a fan. “But the fathers and mothers slasht their daughters, in the time of their besom-discipline, when they were perfect women.” Both fashions have happily passed away. Lords Chief Justices no longer “slash” their daughters, nor do they carry fans.
Of Catharine de Braganza (1664) we read that she and her maids walked from Whitehall in procession to St. James’s Palace through the park in glittering costume of silver lace in the bright morning sunshine. Parasols being unknown in England at that era, the courtly belles used the gigantic green shading-fans, which had been introduced by the Queen and her Portuguese ladies, to shield their complexions from the sun, when they did not wish wholly to obscure their charms by putting on their masks. Both were in general use in this reign. The green shading-fan is of Moorish origin, and for more than a century after the marriage of Catharine of Braganza was considered an indispensable luxury by our fair and stately ancestral dames, who used them in open carriages, in the promenade, and at prayers, where they ostentatiously screened their devotions from public view by spreading them before their faces while they knelt.
But China and Japan—the home of fans—are waiting to be let in! and as soon as the India trade was opened by Catharine’s marriage treaty, there entered the carved ivory fan, the light bamboo and palm-leaf, the paper fan, the silk folding fan, mounted on beautiful Japanese sticks; all came to England about this time.