CHAPTER XXVI
.
GEORGE I. AND II.
----
GEORGE I.
"Wisdom with periwigs, with cassocks grace, Courage with swords, gentility with lace."--_Connoisseur._
The accession of the House of Hanover brought but little change either in the fashions or the fabrics. In 1717 the King published an edict regarding the hawking of lace, but the world was too much taken up with the Old Pretender and the court of St. Germains; the King, too, was often absent, preferring greatly his German dominions.
We now hear a great deal of lace ruffles; they were worn long and falling. Lord Bolingbroke, who enraged Queen Anne by his untidy dress--"she supposed, forsooth, he would some day come to court in his nightcap"--is described as having his cravat of point lace, and his hands hidden by exaggerated ruffles of the same material. In good old Jacobite times, these weeping ruffles served as well to conceal notes--"poulets"--passed from one wary politician to another, as they did the French sharpers to juggle and cheat at cards.
Lace continued the mania of the day. "Since your fantastical geers came in with wires, ribbons, and laces, and your furbelows with three hundred yards in a gown and petticoat, there has not been a good housewife in the nation,"[1044] writes an indignant dramatist. The lover was made to bribe the Abigail of his mistress with a piece of Flanders lace[1045]--an offering not to be resisted. Lace appeared {352}at baptisms,[1046] at marriages, as well as at burials, of which more hereafter--even at the Old Bailey, where one Miss Margaret Caroline Rudd, a beauty of the day, tried for forgery, quite moved her jurors to tears, and nigh gained her acquittal by the taste of her elegantly-laced stomacher, the lace robings of her dress, and single lace flounce, her long pendulous ruffles, hanging from the elbow, heard, fluttering in her agitation, by the court; but, in spite of these allurements, Margaret Caroline Rudd was hanged.
Every woman, writes Swift,[1047] is
"In choosing lace a critic nice, Knows to a groat the lowest price."
Together, they
"Of caps and ruffles hold the grave debate, As of their lives they would decide the fate."
Again, he says:--
"And when you are among yourselves, how naturally, after the first compliments, do you entertain yourselves with the price and choice of lace, apply your hands to each other's lappets and ruffles, as if the whole business of your life and the public concern depended on the cut of your petticoats."[1048]
Even wise Mrs. Elizabeth Montague, who wrote epistles about the ancients, and instead of going to a ball, sat at home and read Sophocles, exclaims to her sister--"Surely your heroic spirit will prefer a beau's hand in Brussels lace to a stubborn Scævola without an arm."
PLATE LXXXIV.
[Illustration: JOHN LAW, THE PARIS BANKER, Author of the Mississippi Scheme, 1671-1729.--In cravat of Point de France, between 1708-20. Painted by Belle. National Portrait Gallery.
Photo by Walker and Cockerell.]
_To face page 352._
{353}In the middle of the nineteenth century it was the fashion that no young lady should wear lace previous to her marriage. In the reign of George II. etiquette was different, for we find the Duchess of Portland presenting Mrs. Montague, then a girl, with a lace head and ruffles.
Wrathfully do the satirists of the day rail against the expense of
"The powder, patches, and the pins, The ribbon, jewels, and the rings, The lace, the paint, and warlike things That make up all their magazines,"[1049]
and the consequent distress of the lace merchants, to whom ladies are indebted for thousands. After a drawing-room, in which the fair population appeared in "borrowed," _i.e._, unpaid lace,[1050] one of the chief lacemen became well-nigh bankrupt. Duns besieged the houses of the great:--
"By mercers, lacemen, mantua-makers press'd; But most for ready cash, for play distress'd, Where can she turn?"[1051]
The _Connoisseur_, describing the reckless extravagance of one of these ladies, writes:--"The lady played till all her ready money was gone, staked her cap and lost it, afterwards her handkerchief. He then staked both cap and handkerchief against her tucker, which, to his pique, she gained." When enumerating the various causes of suicide, he proposes "that an annual bill or report should be made out, giving the different causes which have led to the act." Among others, in his proposed "Bill of Suicide," he gives French claret, French lace, French cooks, etc.
The men, though scarcely coming up to the standard of Sir Courtly Nice,[1052] who has all his bands and linen made in Holland and washed at Haarlem, were just as extravagant as the ladies.
{354}GEORGE II.
"'How well this ribband's glass becomes your face,' She cries in rapture; 'then so sweet a lace! How charmingly you look!'" --Lady M. W. Montagu. _Town Eclogues._
For court and state occasions Brussels lace still held its sway.
In the reign of George II. we read how, at the drawing-room of 1735, fine escalloped Brussels laced heads, triple ditto laced ruffles,[1053] lappets hooked up with diamond solitaires, found favour. At the next the ladies wore heads dressed English, _i.e._, bow of fine Brussels lace of exceeding rich patterns, with the same amount of laced ruffles and lappets. Gold flounces were also worn.
Speaking of the passion for Brussels lace, Postlethwait indignantly observes:--"'Tis but a few years since England expended upon foreign lace and linen not less than two millions yearly. As lace in particular is the manufacture of nuns, our British ladies may as well endow monasteries as wear Flanders lace, for these Popish nuns are maintained by Protestant contributions."[1054]
Patriotism, it would appear, did come into vogue in the year 1736, when at the marriage of Frederick, Prince of Wales, the bride is described as wearing a night-dress of superb lace, the bridegroom a cap of similar material. All the laces worn by the court on this occasion are announced to have been of English manufacture, with the exception of that of the Duke of Marlborough, who appeared in point d'Espagne. The bride, however, does not profit by this high example, for shortly after we read, in the _Memoirs of Madame Palatine_, of the secretary of Sir Luke Schaub being drugged at Paris by an impostor, and robbed of some money sent to defray the purchase of some French lace ruffles for the Princess of Wales.
{355}It was of native-made laces, we may infer, Mrs. Delany writes in the same year:--"Thanks for your apron. Brussels nor Mechlin ever produced anything prettier."
It appears somewhat strange that patriotism, as regards native manufactures, should have received an impulse during the reign of that most uninteresting though gallant little monarch, the second George of Brunswick.[1055] But patriotism has its evils, for, writes an essayist, "some ladies now squander away all their money in fine laces, because it sets a great many poor people to work."[1056]
Ten years previous to the death of King George II. was founded, with a view to correct the prevalent taste for foreign manufactures,[1057] the Society of Anti-Gallicans, who held their quarterly meetings, and distributed prizes for bone, point lace, and other articles of English manufacture.[1058]
This society, which continued in great activity for many years, proved most beneficial to the lace-making trade. It excited also a spirit of emulation among gentlewomen of the middle class, who were glad in the course of the year to add to a small income by making the finer kinds of needle-point, which, on account of their elaborate workmanship, could be produced only in foreign convents or by {356}persons whose maintenance did not entirely depend upon the work of their hands.
Towards the year 1756 certain changes in the fashion of the day now again mark the period, for--
"Dress still varying, most to form confined, Shifts like the sands, the sport of every wind."
"Long lappets, the horse-shoe cap, the Brussels head, and the prudish mob pinned under the chin, have all had their day," says the _Connoisseur_ in 1754. Now we have first mention of lace cardinals; trollopies or slammerkins[1059] come in at the same period, with treble ruffles to the cuffs; writers talk, too, of a "gentle dame in blonde lace," blonde being as yet a newly-introduced manufacture.
Though history may only be all false,[1060] as Sir Robert Walpole said to that "cynic in lace ruffles," his son Horace, yet the newspapers are to be depended upon for the fashion of the day, or, as Lady Mary would say, "for what new whim adorns the ruffle."[1061]
The lace apron,[1062] worn since the days of Queen Elizabeth, continued to hold its own till the end of the eighteenth century, though some considered it an appendage scarcely consistent with the dignity of polite society. The anecdote of Beau Nash, who held these articles in the strongest aversion, has been often related. "He absolutely excluded," says his biographer, "all who ventured to appear at the Assembly Room at Bath so attired. I have known him at a ball night strip the Duchess of Queensberry, and throw her apron on one of the hinder benches among the ladies' women, observing that none but Abigails appeared in white aprons; though that apron was of the costliest point, and cost two hundred guineas."[1063]
{357}George II. did his best to promote the fabrics of his country, but at this period smuggling increased with fearful rapidity. It was a war to the knife between the revenue officer and society at large: all classes combined, town ladies of high degree with waiting-maids and the common sailor, to avoid the obnoxious duties and cheat the Government. To this subject we devote the following chapter.
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