We now hear a great deal of lace ruffles; they were worn long and falling. Lord Bolingbroke, who enraged Queen Anne by his untidy dress—"she supposed, forsooth, he would some day come to court in his nightcap"—is described as having his cravat of point lace, and his hands hidden by exaggerated ruffles of the same material. In good old Jacobite times, these weeping ruffles served as well to conceal notes—"poulets"—passed from one wary politician to another, as they did the French sharpers to juggle and cheat at cards.
Lace continued the mania of the day. "Since your fantastical geers came in with wires, ribbons, and laces, and your furbelows with three hundred yards in a gown and petticoat, there has not been a good housewife in the nation,"[[1044]] writes an indignant dramatist. The lover was made to bribe the Abigail of his mistress with a piece of Flanders lace[[1045]]—an offering not to be resisted. Lace appeared at baptisms,[[1046]] at marriages, as well as at burials, of which more hereafter—even at the Old Bailey, where one Miss Margaret Caroline Rudd, a beauty of the day, tried for forgery, quite moved her jurors to tears, and nigh gained her acquittal by the taste of her elegantly-laced stomacher, the lace robings of her dress, and single lace flounce, her long pendulous ruffles, hanging from the elbow, heard, fluttering in her agitation, by the court; but, in spite of these allurements, Margaret Caroline Rudd was hanged.
Every woman, writes Swift,[[1047]] is
"In choosing lace a critic nice,
Knows to a groat the lowest price."
Together, they
"Of caps and ruffles hold the grave debate,
As of their lives they would decide the fate."
Again, he says:—
"And when you are among yourselves, how naturally, after the first compliments, do you entertain yourselves with the price and choice of lace, apply your hands to each other's lappets and ruffles, as if the whole business of your life and the public concern depended on the cut of your petticoats."[[1048]]