Omniana/Volume 2/Hats

by Robert Southey

214. Hats.

The grandfather of Brown, the famous head of the Puritans, is said to have enjoyed the same Grandee privilege as Earl Strongbow. Fuller^[1] says he had seen a charter granted to this Francis Brown by King Henry VIII.(the 16th of July, in the 18th of his reign) and confirmed by Act of Parliament, giving him leave to put on his cap, in the presence of the King, or his heirs, or any Lord spiritual or temporal in the land, and not to put it off but for his own ease and pleasure. This is a strange story, and though Henry VIII. made some of the strangest laws that ever entered into the head of a capricious and wanton tyrant, it seems very unlikely that he, of all our Kings, should have granted such a privilege to a man of whom nothing else is remembered. But Fuller says he had seen the charter; he was used to examine records, and therefore not liable to be deceived in them, and there seems no imaginable reason why such a charter should have been forged.

Few things occasioned more torment to the Quakers than the unlucky discovery of George Fox, that "the Lord forbad him to put off his hat to any man, high or low." "For though," says their faithful historian, "it was pretended that this putting off of the hat was but a small thing, which none ought to scruple; yet it was a wonderful thing to see what great disturbance this pretended small matter caused among people of all sorts; so that even such that would be looked upon as those that practised humility and meekness, soon shewed what spirit they were of, when this worldly honour was denied them. It is almost unspeakable," he says elsewhere, "what rage and fury arose, what blows, pinchings, beatings, and imprisonments they underwent, besides the danger they were sometimes in of losing their lives for these matters."

A Frenchman attached to the embassy in Spain in the year 1659, who published an account of his travels in that country ten years afterwards, says that at the Queen's levee, every lady might have two gallants attending her, who were permitted, or rather expected, to remain covered before her Majesty, on the presumption that they were tan embevecidos, that they forgot every thing but their mistress.

 

1. Church History, Book ix. p. 167.