Ruffs may literally be said to have gone out with James I. His son Charles is represented on the coins of the two first years of his reign in a stiff starched ruff;[[947]] in the fourth and fifth we see the ruff unstarched, falling down on his shoulders,[[948]] and afterwards, the falling band (Fig. 128) was generally adopted, and worn by all classes save the judges, who stuck to the ruff as a mark of dignity and decorum, till superseded by the peruke.[[949]]
Plate LXXXI.
Elizabeth, Princess Palatine, Granddaughter of James I., 1618-1680.—Probably about 1638. By Gerard Honthorst. National Portrait Gallery.
Photo by Walker and Cockerell.
To face page 326.
Fig. 128.
Falling Collar of the Seventeenth Century.—(After Abraham Bosse.)
Even loyal Oxford, conscientious to a hair's-breadth—always behind the rest of the world—when Whitelock, in 1635, addresses the Quarter Sessions arrayed in the new fashion, owned "one may speak as good sense in a falling band as in a ruff." The change did not, however, diminish the extravagance of the age. The bills for the King's lace and linen, which in the year 1625 amounted to £1,000, in course of time rose to £1,500.[[950]] Falling bands of Flanders bone lace and cut-work appear constantly in the accounts.[[951]] As the foreign materials are carefully specified (it was one of these articles, then a novelty, that Queen Anne of Denmark "bought of the French Mann"), we may infer much of the bobbin or bone lace to have been of home produce. As Ben Jonson says, "Rich apparel has strong virtues." It is, he adds, "the birdlime of fools." There was, indeed, no article of toilet at this period which was not encircled with lace—towels, sheets, shirts, caps, cushions, boots (Fig. 129), cuffs (Fig. 130)—and, as too often occurs in the case of excessive luxury, when the bills came in money was wanting to discharge them, Julian Elliott, the royal lace merchant, seldom receiving more than half her account, and in 1630—nothing.[[952]] There were, as Shakespeare says,