Alice Morse Earle

“ His portrait shows clumsy armor and showy rings, a great jewel and a vast tie of gauze ribbon on one arm; on the other a cord with many aglets; he wears marvellously embroidered, slashed, and bombasted breeches, tight hose, a heavily jewelled, broad belt; and a richly fringed scarf over one shoulder, and ridiculous garters at his calf. It is so absurd, so vain a dress one cannot wonder that sensible gentlemen turned away in disgust to so-called Puritan plainness, even if it went to the extreme of Puritan ugliness. ”

“ It is a record of a life which was indeed pure as crystal; a life so retiring, so quiet, so composed, so unvarying, a life so remote from any gentlewoman’s life to day that it seems of another ether, another planet, as well as of another century. But it is useful for us to know it, notwithstanding its background of gloomy religionism and its air of unreality; for it helps us to understand the character of Puritan women and of Philip Stubbes. ”

“ This exquisite group shows Charles, the Prince of Wales (aged seven) , with his arm on the head of a great dog; he is in the full garb of a grown man, a Cavalier. His suit is red satin; the shoes are white, with red roses. Mary, demure as in all her portraits, is aged six; she wears virago-sleeves made like those of Margaret Gibbes, with hanging sleeves over them, a lace stomacher, and cap, with tufts of scarlet, and hair curled lightly on the forehead, and pulled out at the side in ringlets, like that of her mother, Henrietta Maria. ”

“ A Steinkirk was a white cravat, not knotted, but fastened so loosely as to seem folded rather than tied, twisted sometimes twice or thrice, with one or both ends passed through a buttonhole of the coat. Ladies wore them, as well as men, arranged with equal appearance of careless negligence; and the soft diagonal folds of linen and lace made a pretty finish at the throat, as pretty as any high neck-dressing could be. ”

“ Be the story of the saving of John Smith by Pocahontas a myth or the truth, it forever lives a beautiful and tender reality in the hearts of American children. Pocahontas was not the only Indian squaw who played a kindly part in the first colonization of this country. There were many, though their deeds and names are forgotten; and there was one Indian woman whose influence was much greater and more prolonged than was that of Pocahontas, and was haloed with many years of exciting adventure as well as romance. ”

“ You must look at this queen with her colorless meagre person lost in a dress monstrous in size, yet hung, even in its enormous expanse of many square yards, with crowded ornaments, tags, jewels, laces, embroideries, gimp, feathers, knobs, knots, and aglets, with these bedizened rankly, embellished richly. You must see her talking in public of buskins and gowns, love-locks and virginals, anything but matters of seriousness or of state; you must note her at a formal ceremonial tickling handsome Dudley in the neck; watch her dancing, “most high and disposedly” when in great age ”

“ I have ever deemed the sleeve an important part both of a man’s coat and a woman’s gown. The tailor in the old play, The Maid of the Mill, says, “O Sleeve! O Sleeve! I’ll study all night, madam, to magnify your sleeves!” By its inelegant shape a garment may be ruined. By its grace it accents the beauty of other portions of the apparel. In these pictures of Puritan attire, it has proved able to make or mar the likeness to the real dress. ”

“ He had some of these guards of gold lace taken from the seams of one of his wife’s old gowns to overlay the seams of one of his own cassocks and rig it up for wear, just as he took his wife’s old muff, like a thrifty husband, and bought her a new muff, like a kind one. Not such a domestic frugalist was he, though, as his contemporary, the great political economist, Dudley North, Baron Guildford, Lord Sheriff of London, who loved to sit with his wife ripping off the old guards of lace from her gown, “unpicking” her gown, he called it, and was not at all secret about it. ”

“ When you think of the Plymouth of that year, its few houses and inhabitants, its desperate struggle to hold its place at all as a community, the narrow means of its citizens, the comparatively scant wardrobes of the wives and daughters, this restriction as to mask-wearing seems a grim jest. They were for sale in Salem and Boston, black velvet masks worth two shillings each; but these towns were more flourishing than Plymouth. And New York dames had them, and the planters’ wives of Virginia and South Carolina. ”

“ I told him that God seems to have created our hair as a test, to see whether we can bring our minds to be content at what he gives us, or whether wewould be our own carvers and come back to him for nothing more. We might dislike our skin or nails, as he disliked his hair; but in our case no thanks are due to us that we cut them not off; for pain and danger restrain us. Your duty, said I, is to teach men self-denial. I told him, further, that it would be displeasing and burdensome to good men for him to wear a wig, and they that care not what men think of them, care not what God thinks of them. ”

“ Though Puritan influence on dress simplified much of the flippery and finery of the days of Elizabeth and James, and the refining elegance of Van Dyck gave additional simplicity as well as beauty to women’s attire, which it retained for many years, still there lingered throughout the seventeenth century, ready to spring into fresh life at a breath of encouragement, many grotesqueries of fashion in men’s dress which, in the picturesque sneer of the day, were deemed meet only for “a changeable-silk-gallant.” ”

“ I had a baffled thought after examining it that I knew less of Puritan dress than without it. I see that they gather up their gowns for walking after a mode known in later years as washerwoman style. And by that very gathering up we lose what the drawing might have told us; namely, how the gowns were shaped in the back; how attached to the waist or bodice; and how the bodice was shaped at the waist, whether it had a straight belt, whether it was pointed, whether slashed in tabs or laps like a samare. The sleeve, too, is concealed, and the kerchief hides everything else. ”

“ The Roman could wear a robe but of a single color; he could wear in embroideries not more than half an ounce of gold; and, with what seems churlishness he was forbidden to ride in a carriage. At that time, just as in later days, dress was made to emphasize class distinction, and the clergy joined with the magistrates in denouncing extravagant dress in both men and women. The chronicles of the monks are ever chiding men for their peaked shoes, deep sleeves and curled locks like women, and Savonarola outdid them all in severity. ”

“ Some of the ministers of the colony, terrified by the Indian outbreaks, gloomily held the vanity and extravagance of dames and goodwives as responsible for them all. Others, with broader minds, could discern that both the open and the subtle influence of good clothes was needed in the new community. They gave an air of cheerfulness, of substance, of stability, which is of importance in any new venture. For the governor’s wife to dress richly and in the best London modes added lustre to the governor’s office. ”

“ Let us regard first the dress of a courtier whose name is connected closely and warmly in history and romance with the colonization of America; a man who was hated by the Pilgrim and Puritan fathers but whose dress in some degree and likeness, though modified and simplified, must have been worn by the first emigrants to Virginia across seas—let us look at the portrait of Sir Walter Raleigh. ”

“ But this unknown Frenchwoman has a dress as precisely like Madam Padishal’s and Madam Stoddard’s as are Doucet’s models of to-day like each other. All have the whisk of rich straight-edged lace, and the tiny knots of velvet ribbon. All have the sleeve knots, but the French portrait is gay in narrow red and buff ribbon.
Doubtless many have formed their notion of Puritan dress from the imaginary pictures of several popular modern artists. It can plainly be seen by any one who examines the portraits in this book that they are little like these modern representations. ”

“ But we all know that the beaver disappeared suddenly from our forests; and as a sequence the beaver hat was no longer available for common wear. It still held its place as a splendid, feather-trimmed, rich article of dress, a hat for dress wear, and it was then comely and becoming. Within a few years, through national and state protection, the beaver, most interesting of wild creatures, has increased and multiplied in North America until it has become in certain localities a serious pest to lumbermen. We must revive the fashion of real beaver hats—that will speedily exterminate the race. ”

“ Knee-breeches edged with points or fringes or ribbons met the tops of wide, high boots of Spanish leather, which often also turned over with ruffles of leather or lace. Within-doors silken hose and shoes with rich shoe-roses of lace or ribbon were worn. A great hat, broad-leafed, often of Flemish beaver, had a splendid feather and jewelled hatband. A rich sword-belt and gauntleted and fringed gloves were added. A peaked beard with small upturned mustache formed a triangle, with the mouth in the centre, as in the portrait of General Waller. ”

“ The word coat, meaning a garment for men for covering the upper part of the body, has been in use for centuries; but of very changeable and confusing usage, for it also constantly meant petticoat. The garment itself was a puzzle, for many years; most bewildering of all the attire which was worn by the first colonists was the elusive, coatlike over-garment called in shipping-lists, tailors’ orders, household inventories, and other legal and domestic records a doublet, a jerkin, a jacket, a cassock, a paltock, a coat, a horseman’s coat, an upper-coat, and a buff-coat. ”

“ We are wont to think of our Puritan forbears, indeed we are determined to think of them, garbed in sombre sad-colored garments, in a life devoid of color, warmth, or fragrance. But sad color was not dismal and dull save in name; it was brown in tone, and brown is warm, and being a primitive color is, like many primitive things, cheerful. Old England was garbed in hearty honest russet, even in the days of our colonization. Read the list of the garments of any master of the manor, of the honest English yeoman, of our own sturdy English emigrants from manor and farm in Suffolk and Essex. ”

“ The Stuarts wore a pointed beard, carefully trimmed, and a mustache; but the natural beard seems to have disappeared with the ruff. Charles II clung for a time to a mustache; his portrait by Mary Beale has one; but with the great development of the periwig came a smooth face. This continued until the nineteenth century brought a fashion of bearded men again; a fashion which was so abhorred, so reviled, so openly warred with that I know of the bequest of a large estate with the absolute and irrevocable condition that the inheritor should never wear a beard of any form. ”

“ Even in the first years the settlers paid close attention to their attire, to its richness, its elegance, its modishness, and watched narrowly also the attire of their neighbors, not only from a distinct liking for dress, but from a careful regard of social distinctions and from a regard for the proprieties and relations of life. Dress was a badge of rank, of social standing and dignity; and class distinctions were just as zealously guarded in America, the land of liberty, as in England. The Puritan church preached simplicity of dress ”

“ The Boston gentlewoman of 1660 would not have been ill dressed or out of the mode in the dress worn by her grandmother when she landed in 1625.
Petty details were altered in woman’s dress—though but slightly; the change of a cap, a band, a scarf, a ruffle, meant much to the wearer, though it seems unimportant to us to-day. Men’s dress, we know from portraits, was unaltered for a time save in neckwear and hair-dressing, both being of such importance in costume that they must be written upon at length. ”

“ An hereditary honor and privilege granted to one of my ancestors was that he might wear his hat before the king.
It is somewhat difficult to find out the exact date when the wearing of hats by men within-doors ceased to be fashionable and became distinctly low bred. We can turn to contemporary art. In 1707 at a grand banquet given in France to the Spanish Embassy, a ceremonious state affair with the women in magnificent full-dress, the men seated at the table and in the presence of royalty wore their cocked hats—so much for courtly France. ”

“ One of these trumperies came through the excessive use of ribbons, a use which gave much charm to women’s dress, but which ever gave to men’s garments a finicky look. Beribboned doublets came in the butterfly period, between worm and chrysalis, between doublet and coat; beribboned breeches were eagerly adopted.
Shown here is the copy of an old print, which shows the dress of an estimable and sensible gentleman, Sir Thomas Orchard, with ribbon-edged garments and much galloon or laces. It is far too much trimmed to be rich or elegant. ”

“ One such thread of connection was in the life of Lady Mary Armine; so I choose to give her picture here, to illustrate the dress, if not of a New Englander, yet of one of New England’s closest friends. She was a noble, high-minded English gentlewoman, who gave “even to her dying day” to the conversion of poor tawny heathen of New England. A churchwoman by open profession, she was a Puritan in her sympathies, as were many of England’s best hearts and souls who never left the Church of England. ”

“ In this portrait of the two Bowdoin children, the entire dress is given. Seldom are the shoes shown. These are interesting, for the boy’s square-toed black shoes with buckles are wholly unlike his sister’s blue morocco slippers with turned-up peaks and gilt ornaments from toe to instep, making a foot-gear much like certain Turkish slippers seen to-day. Her hair has the bedizenment of beads and feathers, which were worn by young girls for as many years as their mothers wore the same. The young lad’s dress is precisely like his father’s. ”