portraits of Henry VII., a low-crowned cap whose upturned brim
is nicked at one side. A few sober men wear coats differing little
from the short gown of forty years before. Among ladies the
butterfly head-dress and the steeple cap passed out of fashion,
and a grave headgear comes in which has been compared with a
dog-kennel, a hood-cap thrown over head and shoulders, the
front being edged with a broad band which was often enriched
with needlework, the ends falling in lappets to the breast.
This band is stiffened until the face looks out as from the open
gable-end of a house. The gown is simple in form, close-fitting
to the body, the cuffs turned up with fur and the skirts long. A
girdle is worn loosely drawn below the waist, its long strap
letting the metal pendant fall nearly to the feet. Long cloaks,
plainly cut, are gathered at the neck with a pair of long cords,
like tasselled bell-pulls. While Henry VIII. is spending his
father’s hoards we have a splendid court, gallantly dressed in new
fashions. His own broad figure, in cloth of gold, velvet and
damask, plaits, puffs and slashes, stiff with jewels, is well known
through scores of portraits, and may stand for the high-water
mark of the modes of his age. The Hampton Court picture of the
earl of Surrey is characteristic of a
great lord’s dress of a somewhat
soberer style (see fig. 38). The king,
proud of his own broad shoulders,
set the fashion to accent this
breadth, and it will be seen that
the earl’s figure, leaving out the
head and hose, all but fills a perfect
square. Such men have the air of
playing-card knaves. Surrey’s cap
is flat, with a rich brooch and a
small side-feather. His short
doublet of the new style is open in
front to show a white shirt covered
with black embroidery whose ruffles
cover his wrists. His over-garment
or jerkin has vast sleeves, rounded,
puffed and slashed. Under the
doublet are seen wide trunk-breeches.
He goes all in scarlet,
even to the shoes, which are of
moderate size. The girdle carries
a sword with the new guard and a
dagger of the Renascence art, graced
with a vast tassel. All is in the
new fashion, nothing recalling the earlier century save the
hose and the immodest braguette which, seen in the latter
half of the fourteen-hundreds, is defiantly displayed in the
dress and armour of this age of Henry VIII. Even the hair
follows the new French mode and is cropped close. Other
fashionable suits of the time give us the tight doublets, loose
upper sleeves and trunk hose as a mass of small slashes and puffs,
a fashion which came in from the Germans and Switzers whom
Henry saw in the imperial service. Such clothing goes with the
shoes whose broad toes are slashed with silk, and the wide and
flat caps with slashed edges, bushed with feathers, which headgear
was often allowed to hang upon the shoulders by a pair of
knotted bonnet-strings, while a skull-cap covered the head. With
all this fantasy the dress of simpler folk has little concern, and
a man in a plain, short-skirted doublet, with a flat cap, trunk
breeches, long hose and plain shoes, has nothing grotesque or
unserviceable in his attire. The new sumptuary laws, which
were not allowed to become a dead letter, had their influence in
restraining middle-class extravagance. No man under a knight’s
degree was to wear a neck-chain of gold or gilded, or a “garded or
pinched shirte.” Brooches of goldsmith’s work were for none
below a gentleman. Women whose husbands could not afford to
maintain a light horse for the king’s service had no business with
gowns or petticoats of silk, chains of gold, French hoods, or bonnets
of velvet. This French hood is the small bonnet, two of whose
many forms may be seen in the best-known portraits of Mary of
England and Mary, queen of Scots—a cap stiffened with wires.
With its introduction the fashionable skirt began to lose its
graceful folds and to spread stiffly outward in straight lines from
the tight-laced waist, the front being open to show a petticoat as
stiff and enriched as the skirt. The neck of the gown, cut low and
square, showed the partlet of fine linen pleated to the neck. In
the days of Edward VI. and Queen Mary the dress of most men
and women loses the fantastic detail of the earlier Tudor age.
In the dress of both sexes the joining of the sleeve to the shoulder
has, as a rule, that large puff which stage dressmakers bestow so
lavishly upon all old English costumes, but otherwise the woman’s
gown and hood and the man’s doublet, jerkin and trunk hose are
plain enough, even the shoes losing all the fanciful width. Mary,
indeed, added to the statute book more stringent laws against
display of rich apparel, laws that would fine even a gentleman of
under £20 a year if silk were found in his cap or shoe. Small
ruffs, however, begin to appear at the neck, and most wrists are
ruffled. The ruff, which began simply enough in the first half of
this century as a little cambric collar with a goffered edge, is for
all of us the distinguishing note of Elizabethan dress. It grew
wide and flapping, therefore it was stiffened upon wires and spread
from a concealed frame, row on row of ruffs being added one above
the other until the wearer, man or woman, seemed to carry the
head in a cambric charger. Starch, cursed as a devilish liquor by
the new Puritan, gave it help, and English dress acquired a
deformity which can only be compared with the great farthingale
or with the last follies of the wig. The skirt of a woman of fashion,
which had already begun to jut from the waist, was drawn out
before the end of Elizabeth’s reign at right angles from the waist
until the dame had that air of standing within a great drum
which Sir Roger de Coverley remarked in the portrait of an
ancestress. Elizabeth herself, long-waisted and of meagre body,
set the fashions of her court, other women pinching their waists
into the long and straight stomacher ending in a peak before.
She herself followed her father’s taste in ornament, and on great
days was set about like the Madonna of a popular shrine with
decorations of all kinds, patterns in pearl, quiltings, slashings,
puffings and broidery, tassels and rich buttons. Among men the
important change is the disappearance of the last of the long hose,
all men taking to trunk-hose and nether-stocks or stockings,
while their doublets tend to follow the same long-waisted fashion
as the bodices of the women, whose doublets and jerkins,
buttoned up the breast, bring the Puritan satirists against them.
Of these satirists Philip Stubbes is the best-known, his Anatomie
of Abuses, published in 1583, being a very wardrobe of Elizabethan
fashions, although false or dyed hair, the ruff and its starch, and
the ear-rings worn by some women and many men draw his
hottest anger. William Harrison sings on a like note about
the same time, declaiming especially against the mutability
of fashion, declaring that the imported Spanish, French and
German guises made it easier to inveigh against such enormities
than to describe the English attire with any certainty. For him
women were become men, and men transformed into monsters.
“Neither was it ever merrier with England than when an Englishman
was known abroad by his own cloth and contented himself
at home with his fine carsey hosen and a mean slop; his coat,
gown and cloak of brown, blue or puke, with some pretty
furniture of velvet or fur and a doublet of sad tawny or black
velvet or other comely silk, without such cuts and garish colours
as are worn in these days, and never brought in but by the
consent of the French, who think themselves the gayest men
when they have most diversities of jags and change of colours
about them.” He adds that “certes of all estates our merchants
do least alter their attire ... for albeit that which they wear
be very fine and costly, yet in form and colour it representeth
a great piece of the ancient gravity appertaining to citizens
and burgesses.” But as for the “younger sort” of citizens’
wives, Harrison finds in their attire “all kind of curiosity ... in
far greater measure than in women of a higher calling.”
 | |
| Fig. 39.—An English Lady. From a brass of 1605. | Fig. 40.—An English Lady of rank in 1643. After Hollar. |
 |
| Fig. 41.—The English Countrywoman of 1643. After Hollar. |
The coming of King James is not marked by any sudden change of attire, most of the Elizabethan fashions running on into his reign. The tight doublet has stiff wings at the shoulders, close sleeves and short skirt. The many fashions of breeches are still 17th century.
