The Puritanic fashions of dress, manners, and speech still continued in the City. While the Court party wore their hair long and curled, the Puritans cropped theirs close; they drawled in their speech; they interlarded their discourse with texts and allusions to Scripture; they still, though the power had gone from them, denounced all sorts of merry-makings, all sports, all festivals and games as damnable; still they continued to find their chief joy and solace at a sermon. There was reason for this; for while their thoughts were mainly occupied with twisting texts into the support of their favourite doctrines, the preacher, who was engaged in exactly the same pursuit, gave them materials for the maintenance of their doctrines, or for discussion and controversy afterwards. The women, it is said, took down the principal points in shorthand, being as much interested and as keen in controversy as the men.
I do not know any period in which it could not be said that the dress of the gallants and courtiers, as well as that of the ladies, was not extravagant and costly. Certainly the dress of the gallants in the seventeenth century, except for the fifteen years of Puritan austerity, was costly and extravagant enough to please any one. It does not appear, however, that the extravagance in dress descended to the City or to the City madams. In the time of Elizabeth the excessive adornment of the latter was the subject of many satirical pens. Under Charles II. the sobriety of the men, still more or less under Puritan influence, was reflected in the quiet dress of the women. As for the Court ladies, Evelyn observes that they paint; Pepys finds patches coming in with the Restoration; he also notices, but without admiration, the hair frizzed up to the ears; in 1662 he says they began to wear perukes—by which I understand some addition to their own hair; next year he observes the introduction of the vizard. In July 1663 he witnesses the riding of the King, Queen, and Court in Hyde Park. “The King and the Queen, who looked in this dress, a white-laced waistcoat and a crimson short petticoat, with her hair dressed à la négligence, mighty pretty, and the King rode hand in hand with her. Here was also my Lady Castlemaine [who] rode among the rest of the ladies: but the King took, methought, no notice of her.... She looked mighty out of humour, and had a yellow plume in her hat, which all took notice of, and yet is very handsome.... I followed them up into Whitehall and into the Queen’s presence, where all the ladies walked, talking and fiddling with their hats and feathers, and changing and trying one another’s by one another’s head and laughing.... But above all Mrs. Stewart in this dress, with her hat cocked and a red plume, with her sweet eye, little Roman nose and excellent taille, is now the greatest beauty I ever saw, I think, in my life.”
An English Lady of quality
Lady of the Court of England
From contemporary engravings by Hollar.
I do not propose to dwell upon the changes of fashion, because the alterations in a sleeve, or in the length of a lady’s waist, would carry us too far and would be of little profit. But there was one change in fashion which one must not pass over, because it exercised an influence upon the whole national character. This was the introduction of the peruke, perruque, or wig. Ladies began to wear wigs, presumably, as they do now, to conceal the ravages of time, and the falling off of the natural hair. Malcolm is of opinion that the wig was a natural reaction against the Roundhead rule. For the Roundheads cropped their hair and the Cavaliers wore it long in curls. Therefore, he who had a scanty supply of curls, or was bald, to escape being taken for one of the opposite camp, put on a wig; next he excited envy by the fulness and length of his curls; finally all wore wigs, and the fashion set in which lasted a hundred years, and, as regards the clergy, for nearly two hundred years. A good deal might be said for the use of a wig. It was, to begin with, an age when the heads of all the lower classes, servants and working people, were always filled with vermin—one learns that even so late as a hundred years ago it was almost impossible to keep the children of quite respectable people clean in this respect. Next, the time and trouble of having the head dressed and the curls twisted—for not even a Cavalier could always depend upon a natural curl—were saved by sending the wig to the hairdresser. Again, when everybody wore a shaven face, the adoption of the wig went far to conceal and disguise one’s age. Baldness there was none, nor any grey hairs. A man generally had two wigs; a new wig of ordinary make cost about three guineas, but one might pay a great deal more for a superior wig. “Forty guineas a year,” cries an indignant writer, “for periwigs, and but ten to a poor chaplain.” The wigs were at first an imitation of a man’s own hair in colour, with some exaggeration in length; and although cleanliness was one reason for their introduction, they had to be sent to the barbers occasionally in order to be freed from vermin. After the Plague, for a long time, nobody would buy a wig for fear of infection. The fashion was, of course, carried to ridiculous lengths; Lord Foppington, in the Relapse, is said to have a periwig down to his knees; he also says that a periwig should be to a man like a mask to a woman; nothing should be seen but his eyes.” The various kinds of wig belong to the eighteenth century, in which they are treated more fully.
