English Costume Part 23

'As the holy grouth grene with ivie all alone Whose flowerys cannot be seen and grene wode levys be gone, Now unto my lady, promyse to her I make From all other only to her I me betake.

Adew myne owne ladye, adew my specyall Who hath my hart trewly, be sure, and ever shall.'

So, with songs and music of his own composition, comes the richest man in Europe to the throne of England. Gay, brave, tall, full of conceit in his own strength, Henry, a king, a Tudor, a handsome man, abounding in excellence of craft and art, the inheritance from his father and mother, figures in our pageant a veritable symbol of the Renaissance in England.

He had, in common with the marvellous characters of that Springtime of History, the quick intelligence and all the personal charm that the age brought forth in abundance. In his reign the acc.u.mulated ma.s.s of brain all over the world budded and flowered; the time gave to us a succession of the most remarkable people in any historical period, and it is one of the triumphs of false reasoning to prove this, in England, to have been the result of the separation from the Catholic Church. For centuries the Church had organized and prepared the ground in which this tree of the world's knowledge was planted, had pruned, cut back, nursed the tree, until gradually it flowered, its branches spread over Christian Europe, and when the flowering branch hanging over England gave forth its first-fruits, those men who ate of the fruit and benefited by the shade were the first to quarrel with the gardeners.

In these days there lived and died Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, Durer, Erasmus, Holbein, Copernicus, Luther, Rabelais, and Michael Angelo, to mention a few men of every shade of thought, and in this goodly time came Henry to the English throne, to leave, at his death, instead of the firm progress of order inst.i.tuted by his father, a bankrupt country with an enormously rich Government.

You may see for the later pictures of his reign a great bloated ma.s.s of corpulence, with running ulcers on his legs and the blood of wives and people on his hands, striding in his well-known att.i.tude over the festering slums his rule had produced in London. Harry, _Grace a Dieu_!

The mental picture from our--costume--point of view is widely different from that of the last reign. No longer do we see hoods and cowls, brown, gray, white, and black in the streets, no longer the throngs of fine craftsmen, of church-carvers, gilders, embroiderers, candle-makers, illuminators, missal-makers; all these served but to swell the ranks of the unemployed, and caused a new problem to England, never since solved, of the skilled poor out of work. The hospitals were closed--that should bring a picture to your eyes--where the streets had been thronged with the doctors of the poor and of the rich in their habits, no monks or lay brothers were to be seen. The sick, the blind, the insane had no home but the overhung back alleys where the foulest diseases might acc.u.mulate and hot-beds of vice spring up, while in the main streets Harry Tudor was carried to his bear-baiting, a quivering ma.s.s of jewels shaking on his corrupt body, on his thumb that wonderful diamond the Regale of France, stolen by him from the desecrated shrine of St. Thomas a Becket.

[Ill.u.s.tration: {A man of the time of Henry VIII.; collar; ruff}]

[Ill.u.s.tration: A MAN OF THE TIME OF HENRY VIII. (1509-1547)

He wears the club-toed shoes, the white shirt embroidered in black silk, the padded shoulders, and the flat cap by which this reign is easily remembered.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: {A man of the time of Henry VIII.; breeches}]

There are two distinct cla.s.ses of fashion to be seen, the German-Swiss fashion and the English fashion, a natural evolution of the national dress. The German fashion is that slashed, extravagant-looking creation which we know so well from the drawings of Albert Durer and the more German designs of Holbein. The garments which were known as 'blistered' clothes are excessive growths on to the most extravagant designs of the Henry VII. date. The shirt cut low in the neck, and sewn with black embroidery; the little waistcoat ending at the waist and cut straight across from shoulder to shoulder, tied with thongs of leather or coloured laces to the breeches, leaving a gap between which showed the shirt; the universal pouch on the breeches often highly decorated and jewelled. From the line drawings you will see that the sleeves and the breeches took every form, were of any odd a.s.sortment of colours, were cut, puffed, and splashed all over, so that the shirt might be pushed through the holes, looking indeed 'blistered.'

[Ill.u.s.tration: {A man of the time of Henry VIII.}]

The shoes were of many shapes, as I have shown, agreeing in one point only--that the toes should be cut very broad, often, indeed, quite square.

Short or hanging hair, both were the fashion, and little flat caps with the rim cut at intervals, or the large flat hats of the previous reign, covered with feathers and curiously slashed, were worn with these costumes.

Cloaks, as you may see, were worn over the dress, and also those overcoats shaped much like the modern dressing-gown.

It is from these 'blistered,' padded breeches that we derive the trunks of the next reign, the slashings grown into long ribbon-like slits, the hose puffed at the knee.

Separate pairs of sleeves were worn with the waistcoats, or with the petti-cotes, a favourite sleeve tr.i.m.m.i.n.g being broad velvet bands.

The invention sprang, as usual, from necessity, by vanity to custom.

In 1477 the Swiss beat and routed the Duke of Burgundy at Nantes, and the soldiers, whose clothes were in rags, cut and tore up his silk tents, his banners, all material they could find, and made themselves clothes of these odd pieces--clothes still so torn and ragged that their shirts puffed out of every hole and rent. The arrival of the victorious army caused all the non-fighters to copy this curious freak in clothes, and the courtiers perpetuated the event by proclaiming blistering as the fashion.

The other and more usual fashion springs from the habit of clothes in bygone reigns.

Let us first take the shirt A. It will be seen how, in this reign, the tendency of the shirt was to come close about the neck. The previous reign showed us, as a rule, a shirt cut very low in the neck, with the hem drawn together with laces; these laces pulled more tightly together, thus rucking the material into closer gathers, caused the cut of the shirt to be altered and made so that the hem frilled out round the neck--a collar, in fact. That this collar took all forms under certain limitations will be noticed, also that thick necked gentlemen--Henry himself must have invented this--wore the collar of the shirt turned down and tied with strings of linen. The cuffs of the shirt, when they showed at the wrist, were often, as was the collar, sewn with elaborate designs in black thread or silk.

Now we take the waistcoat B. As you may see from the drawing showing the German form of dress, this waistcoat was really a petti-cote, a waistcoat with sleeves. This waistcoat was generally of richly ornamented material (Henry in purple satin, embroidered with his initials and the Tudor rose; Henry in brocade covered with posies made in letters of fine gold bullion). The material was slashed and puffed or plain, and dependent for its effect on the richness of its embroidery or design of the fabric. It was worn with or without sleeves; in most cases the sleeves were detachable.

[Ill.u.s.tration: {Two types of sleeve; eight hats for men}]

The coat C. This coat was made with bases like a frock, a skirted coat, in fact; the material used was generally plain, of velvet, fine cloth, silk, or satin. The varieties of cut were numerous, and are shown in the drawings--open to the waist, open all the way in front, close to the neck--every way; where the coat was open in front it generally parted to show the bragetto, or jewelled pouch. It was a matter for choice spirits to decide whether or no they should wear sleeves to their coats, or show the sleeves of their waistcoats. No doubt Madame Fashion saw to it that the changes were rung sufficiently to make hay while the sun shone on extravagant tastes. The coat was held at the waist with a sash of silk tied in a bow with short ends.

Towards the end of the reign, foreshadowing the Elizabethan jerkin or jacket, the custom grew more universal of the coat with sleeves and the high neck, the bases were cut shorter to show the full trunks, and the waistcoat was almost entirely done away with, the collar grew in proportion, and spread, like the tail of an angry turkey, in ruffle and folded pleat round the man's neck.

[Ill.u.s.tration: A MAN OF THE TIME OF HENRY VIII. (1509-1547)

This is the extreme German-English fashion. In Germany and Switzerland this was carried to greater lengths.]

The overcoat D is the gown of the previous reign cut, for the dandy, into a shorter affair, reaching not far below the knee; for the grave man it remained long, but, for all, the collar had changed to a wide affair stretching well over the shoulders. It was made, this collar, of such stuff as lined the cloak, maybe it was of fur, or of satin, of silk, or of cloth of gold. The tremendous folds of these overcoats gave to the persons in them a sense of splendour and dignity; the short sleeves of the fashionable overcoats, puffed and swollen, barred with rich _applique_ designs or bars of fur, reaching only to the elbow, there to end in a hem of fur or some rich stuff, the collar as wide as these padded shoulders, all told in effect as garments which gave a great air of well-being and richness to their owner.

[Ill.u.s.tration: {A man of the time of Henry VIII.}]

Of course, I suppose one must explain, the sleeves varied in every way: were long, short, full, medium full, according to taste.

Sometimes the overcoats were sleeveless. Beneath these garments the trunks were worn--loose little breeches, which, in the German style, were bagged, puffed, rolled, and slashed in infinite varieties. Let it be noticed that the cutting of slashes was hardly ever a straight slit, but in the curve of an elongated S or a double S curve. Other slashes were squared top and bottom.

[Ill.u.s.tration: {Three men of the time of Henry VIII.}]

All men wore tight hose, in some cases puffed at the knee; in fact, the bagging, sagging, and slashing of hose suggested the separate breeches or trunks of hose.

[Ill.u.s.tration: A WOMAN OF THE TIME OF HENRY VIII. (1509-1547)

A plain but rich looking dress. The peculiar head-dress has a pad of silk in front to hold it from the forehead. The half-sleeves are well shown.]

The shoes were very broad, and were sometimes stuffed into a mound at the toes, were sewn with precious stones, and, also, were cut and puffed with silk.

[Ill.u.s.tration: {A man of the time of Henry VIII.}]

The little flat cap will be seen in all its varieties in the drawings.

The Irish were forbidden by law to wear a shirt, smock, kerchor, bendel, neckerchor, mocket (a handkerchor), or linen cap coloured or dyed with saffron; or to wear in shirts or smocks above seven yards of cloth.

To wear black genet you must be royal; to wear sable you must rank above a viscount; to wear marten or velvet tr.i.m.m.i.n.g you must be worth over two hundred marks a year.

Short hair came into fashion about 1521.

[Ill.u.s.tration: {Three men of the time of Henry VIII. (torso only); three types of shoe; two types of boot; a cod-piece}]

So well known is the story of Sir Philip Calthrop and John Drakes the shoemaker of Norwich, who tried to ape the fashion, that I must here allude to this ancestor of mine who was the first of the dandies of note, among persons not of the royal blood. The story itself, retold in every history of costume, is to this effect: Drakes, the shoemaker, seeing that the county talked of Sir Philip's clothes, ordered a gown from the same tailor. This reached the ears of Sir Philip, who then ordered his gown to be cut as full of slashes as the shears could make it. The ruin of cloth so staggered the shoemaker that he vowed to keep to his own humble fashion in future. No doubt Sir Philip's slashes were cunningly embroidered round, and the gown made rich and sparkling with the device of seed pearls so much in use.

This man's son, also Sir Philip, married Amy, daughter of Sir William Boleyn, of Blickling, Norfolk. She was aunt to Queen Anne Boleyn.

THE WOMEN

One cannot call to mind pictures of this time without, in the first instance, seeing the form of Henry rise up sharply before us followed by his company of wives. The fat, uxorious giant comes straight to the front of the picture, he dominates the age pictorially; and, as a fitting background, one sees the six women who were sacrificed on the political altar to pander to his vanity. Katherine of Aragon--the fine and n.o.ble lady--a tool of political desires, cast off after Henry had searched his precious conscience, after eighteen years of married life, to find that he had scruples as to the spirituality of the marriage. Anne Boleyn, tainted with the life of the Court, a pitiful figure in spite of all her odious crimes; how often must a ghost, in a black satin nightdress edged with black velvet, have haunted the royal dreams. And the rest of them, cl.u.s.tered round the vain king, while in the background the great figures of the time loom hugely as they play with the crowned puppets.

[Ill.u.s.tration: {Eight stages in the evolution of the hood}]

The note of the time, as we look at it with our eyes keen on the picture, is the final evolution of the hood. Bit by bit, inch by inch, the plain fabric has become enriched, each succeeding step in an elaboration of the simple form; the border next to the face is turned back, then the hood is lined with fine stuff and the turnover shows this to advantage; then the sides are split and the back is made more full; then a tag is sewn on to the sides by which means the cut side may be fastened off the shoulders. The front is now stiffened and shaped at an angle, this front is sewn with jewels, and, as the angle forms a gap between the forehead and the point of the hood, a pad is added to fill in the vacant s.p.a.ce. At last one arrives at the diamond-shaped head-dress worn in this reign, and, in this reign, elaborated in every way, elaborated, in fact, out of existence. In order to make the head-dress in its 1509 state you must make the white lining with the jewelled turnover as a separate cap. However, I think that the drawings speak for themselves more plainly than I can write.

[Ill.u.s.tration: {Four types of head-dress for women}]

Every device for crowding jewels together was used, criss-cross, in groups of small numbers, in great ma.s.ses. Pendants were worn, hung upon jewelled chains that wound twice round the neck, once close to the neck, the second loop loose and pa.s.sed, as a rule, under the lawn shift. Large brooches decorated the bodices, brooches with drop ornaments, the body of the brooch of fine gold workmanship, many of them wrought in Italy. The shift, delicately embroidered with black silk, had often a band of jewellery upon it, and this shift was square cut, following the shape of the bodice.

The bodice of the gown was square cut and much stiffened to a box-like shape. The sleeves of the gown were narrow at the shoulders, and after fitting the arm for about six inches down from the shoulders, they widened gradually until, just below the elbow, they became square and very full; in this way they showed the false under-sleeve. This under-sleeve was generally made of a fine rich-patterned silk or brocade, the same stuff which formed the under-gown; the sleeve was a binding for the very full lawn or cambric sleeve which showed in a ruffle at the wrist and in great puffs under the forearm. The under-sleeve was really more like a gauntlet, as it was generally held together by b.u.t.toned tags; it was puffed with other coloured silk, slashed to show the shift, or it might be plain.