What Charlton called a “queue wig” might have been any wig with a tail—or even with two, like this double pigtail. The tails were usually bound tightly with black ribbon, though sailors used leather. A single queue, braided but not bound, with a large bow at the top and a small bow at the bottom, was known as a “Ramillies wig” after the battle at that place (1706). The wearer of a Ramillies often doubled the end of the queue back up to the wig and held it with a comb or ribbon.
In the “bag wig” the long hair at the back was simply tied inside a black taffeta bag, usually with a rosette of black ribbon for decoration. In England and France this style, like so many others, was carried to such an extreme that the bag eventually covered the wearer’s entire shoulders. The exaggeration at least had the virtue of protecting his clothing from the pomade and powder of the wig. It was going out of fashion in Virginia by Charlton’s time. Note the small strap and buckle on the wig.
By the time of Diderot’s Encyclopedia, the “square wigs” shown here were the nearest remnants of the full-bottomed wigs that had gone out of style about 1740. These last can still be seen, however, in portraits of royalty and nobility of the seventeenth century and early years of the eighteenth, and of course the style still holds for English judges when they are on the bench.
This, incredibly, was called a “natural wig,” and was supposed to resemble the wearer’s own hair. It fell down behind in long, straight locks, ending either with a single roll, or tapering away into a series of ringlets.
The resemblance between this “knotted wig” and its distant predecessor, the full-bottomed wig, may not be apparent at first glance. The flowing locks of the full-bottomed and campaign wigs (the latter having two long curls falling to the front of each shoulder) were inconvenient to travelers, sportsmen, and soldiers. So they adopted the habit of knotting up the curls on both sides and tying together those in back; eventually this expedient became a style in its own right, but with a single corkscrew curl in back.