A Brief History of the Tudor Age (18 page)

Men of all classes wore caps, bonnets and hats at all times, for
they were hardly ever bareheaded. The husbandmen and artisans wore small round woollen bonnets; fashionable
noblemen and gentlemen wore felt hats of various shapes, and occasionally adorned with a high crest of feathers. All men wore their caps and hats indoors and at meals. They only removed them when
they retired alone or with their family in the privacy of their houses. Then they removed their gowns or jerkins and their doublets, and put on what they called their nightgown, which was very like
a modern dressing gown. But even when wearing their nightgowns Tudor men were not bareheaded, for having removed their hats they immediately put on their nightcaps, which were fairly tight-fitting
bonnets, and often elaborately embroidered. They wore their nightcaps all the evening, but removed them and replaced them with simple linen caps when they went to bed. When Henry VIII said:
‘Three may keep counsel if two be away; and if I thought that my cap knew my counsel I would cast it into the fire and burn it’, this was because his cap was nearly always on his head,
even when he was alone, working in his closet.

Men only removed their hats in the presence of a superior, or otherwise as a sign of respect. Nobles and all other men removed their hats in the King’s presence, though the King very often
gave them permission to replace them on their heads. Servants and labourers removed their hats in the presence of their masters or of any gentleman; and nobles and gentlemen did the same in the
presence of a nobleman or gentleman of superior rank to their own. An etiquette book of the middle of the fifteenth century, which was widely read and followed during the Tudor Age, insisted that
servants must always be bareheaded when serving at table, and that this rule must be followed by the chief butler and steward of a gentleman or nobleman’s household, and by nobles and
gentlemen, however high their rank might be, when ceremoniously serving the King at his dinner table. They also usually removed their hats at the mention of the King’s name. When anyone
received a letter from the King which was
delivered to him by a messenger, it was the practice for him to remove his cap and kneel as he took the letter.

Thomas Cromwell, the son of a blacksmith in Putney, who rose to be a solicitor, the confidential agent of Cardinal Wolsey, Henry VIII’s Secretary of State, the King’s Vicegerent in
ecclesiastical affairs, Lord Cromwell of Oakham, Lord Privy Seal, and Earl of Essex, expected everyone to treat him with the respect due to his rank; but during the spring and summer of 1540 he was
engaged in a desperate power struggle with the Catholic faction of Gardiner and the Duke of Norfolk, in which first one side and then the other seemed to be coming out on top. Henry finally
authorized Norfolk to arrest Cromwell on a charge of high treason at a meeting of the Privy Council on the morning of 10 June and send him as a prisoner to the Tower. When Cromwell arrived for the
meeting, he and the other Privy Councillors, who for so long had treated him with the greatest respect, stood outside in the courtyard waiting to go into the Council chamber. A gust of wind blew
off Cromwell’s cap. He expected all the other councillors to take off their own caps as long as he was bareheaded; but none of them did so. Cromwell said: ‘A strong wind, my lords, to
take off my cap and not take off yours.’ He must have been expecting the worst as he went to take his place at the Council table. Then Norfolk called out: ‘Cromwell, do not sit there; a
traitor does not sit with gentlemen.’ Norfolk arrested him on a charge of high treason and tore the collar of St George from his neck; and all the other councillors insulted and buffeted him
as he was dragged to the barge which was to take him to the Tower. He was beheaded seven weeks later.

Men removed their hats to salute a lady, and often did so even to a lady of inferior rank. When Shakespeare wrote his play
Richard II
, he was thinking of the customs of 1595, not of
1399, when he made Richard II sneer at Bolingbroke, the future King Henry IV, who was trying to curry favour with the common people: ‘Off goes his bonnet to an oyster-wench.’ In Henry
VIII’s reign, contemporary observers considered it to be a sign of the
King’s great courtesy to ladies that he always removed his cap when he addressed them.

After Henry had divorced Catherine of Aragon and married Anne Boleyn, he was very angry that his daughter Mary refused to acknowledge that his marriage to her mother was void and that she
herself was illegitimate. He forced Mary to serve as a lady-in-waiting to her baby sister, Elizabeth, the daughter of Anne Boleyn. In January 1534, when Elizabeth was four months old, Henry visited
her at Hatfield in Hertfordshire. He played with her, but did not visit Mary, who was confined to her room at the top of the house. Mary had always been fond of her father, who had loved her when
she was a child, and as Henry was leaving she looked out of her window in order to see him as he was mounting his horse in the courtyard. Several of the courtiers who were escorting the King
noticed her at her window, but thought it would be wise not to salute her. Then Henry looked up and saw her. He coolly but courteously raised his cap to salute her before he rode away; and all the
courtiers then followed his example, and took off their caps to her.

Women of all classes wore long dresses reaching to their ankles or trailing on the ground, as they did in every period of history before 1920; but lower-class women, when working in the fields
or doing the housework, sometimes wore their dresses just a little shorter, an inch or two above their ankles, or kilted them up a little to be able to walk more freely. These women often rolled up
their sleeves to the elbows when they were working; but no noble lady or gentlewoman, or merchant’s wife or daughter, wore short sleeves, for throughout the whole of the Tudor Age
women’s sleeves, whether loose or tight-fitting, always reached to the wrist.

At the beginning of the Tudor Age women wore under their gowns a dress which comprised the bodice and skirt called the ‘kirtle’. The neckline was low and square-cut, and became lower
and wider between 1500 and 1530. On their heads women wore a tight-fitting undercap, and over it the gable hood, which by 1500 had replaced the butterfly headdress of Edward IV’s reign.
The gable hood reached to the shoulders, and went half-way down the back, behind. It completely covered the hair.

Fashions in women’s dress changed very little during the first forty years of the sixteenth century, except that Anne Boleyn, who had been educated at the French court, replaced the gable
hood by the French hood after 1525. The French hood was worn at the back of the head, and stretched down the back like the gable hood; but the front of the head was uncovered, and revealed the hair
of upper-class ladies for the first time for three hundred years. After the execution of Anne Boleyn, the French hood went out of fashion at court, where Jane Seymour reintroduced the gable hood;
but it was now worn with the lappets turned up instead of hanging down on the shoulders. This new variety of the gable hood, like the French hood, was always worn over the undercap.

The fall of Anne Boleyn did not exclude the French hood for long. It was back at court soon after 1540, and was being worn by the King’s daughters, the Lady Mary and the Lady
Elizabeth.

Unmarried women sometimes wore their hair loose and flowing, which normally married women never did, though Cranmer wrote that Anne Boleyn came ‘in her hair’ to her coronation.
Unmarried working-class women wore their hair flowing over their shoulders and fastened only by a ribbon; but married working-class women covered their hair with a simple linen headdress, and
continued to do so while upper-class married ladies were allowing their hair to be seen under the French hood.

At the beginning of the Tudor Age, men wore their hair shoulder-length, usually parted in the middle. They were clean-shaven, as they had been for the previous seventy-five years since beards
went out of fashion in about 1410. In 1510 all the Kings in Western Europe were clean-shaven – the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian, King Ferdinand of Spain, King Louis XII of France and young
King Henry VIII of England, as his father Henry VII had been. Hair was a little shorter than in 1485; it still
covered the ears and reached to the collar, but did not flow on
to the shoulders.

When Louis XII died on New Year’s Day 1515, his young cousin Francis, Duke of Angoulême, became King Francis I at the age of twenty. He set out to dazzle Christendom by establishing
a brilliant court as well as by a victorious campaign in Italy, and he grew a beard. Henry VIII was impressed by Francis I, and was eager to outshine him. When he spoke to the Venetian ambassador
on May Day 1515 at an outdoor party in the woods near Blackheath, he asked him about the new French King: ‘Is he as tall as I am? Is he as stout? What sort of legs has he?’ Then,
opening the front of his doublet, he showed the calf of his leg to the ambassador and said: ‘Look here, and I have also a good calf to my leg.’ He was interested to hear that Francis
had grown a beard, but did not immediately follow his example.

In 1517 he decided to improve his relations with France, and entertained Francis’s envoys at some outstandingly lavish banquets at Greenwich. A treaty of friendship was signed in October
1518, and it was agreed that Henry and Francis should meet. During the discussions about the plans for the meeting, Henry told the French ambassador that he would grow a beard, so that he and
Francis could compare their beards when they met. Francis expressed his pleasure about this, and proposed to Henry that they should both promise not to shave off their beards until they met at
‘the interview’.

Henry grew a beard; it was gold in colour, less red than the hair on his head. But Catherine of Aragon did not like him with a beard, and persuaded him to shave it off. When Francis heard that
Henry had shaved off his beard, he was disappointed, and reminded him of his promise; but he understood when Henry explained that he had shaved it off to please his Queen. He agreed with Henry that
in matters of this kind, the wishes of the ladies must always prevail.

During the next seven years, Henry grew a beard on more than one occasion, but always shaved it off soon afterwards, perhaps to please Catherine. According to John Stow, who wrote
his
Annals
thirty years later, Henry ordered all his courtiers, on 8 May 1535, to cut their hair short, and set the example by having his own hair cut short and growing a
beard; but in fact many courtiers were still clean-shaven and wearing their hair covering their ears for some time after this. Henry himself has a beard, and very short hair, fully revealing the
ears, in the portrait of him which was probably painted by Joos van Cleve in 1536, when he was forty-five, and in the well-known portrait by Holbein a few years later. Edward VI already had very
short hair when he was Prince of Wales. Henry’s brother-in-law, the Duke of Suffolk, and Sir Thomas Wyatt, the poet and ambassador, both grew long beards before they died in 1545 and 1542;
and the Earl of Surrey, who was beheaded on Henry’s orders at the age of thirty in 1547, wore a beard. But Suffolk, Wyatt and Surrey all had hair covering their ears. William Fitzwilliam,
Earl of Southampton, had long hair and was clean-shaven in 1542. Sir John Russell, who was created a peer in 1539 and Earl of Bedford in 1550, wore a long beard, and had short hair with the ears
visible, as did several other courtiers and gentlemen when they were painted by Holbein before he died in November 1543; but the Duke of Norfolk, Thomas Cromwell and Sir Thomas Elyot are
clean-shaven in Holbein’s portraits, and the bottoms of their ears are hardly visible beneath their hair, though the hair barely reaches the collar.

Cromwell did not approve of any unconventional man who grew his hair longer than this accepted length. John Foxe, who greatly admired him, recorded an incident in his
Book of Martyrs
,
not to show how arbitrarily Cromwell exercised his power, but in praise of his sense of propriety. Once when he was walking in the street he met a servingman who had hair hanging over his
shoulders. Cromwell asked him whether his master had ordered him to wear his hair so long, or what other reason he had for doing this. When the man replied that he had made a vow not to cut his
hair, Cromwell said that he would not force him to break his vow, but that he would stay in prison until he decided to do so. The man was imprisoned in the Marshalsea
and not
released until his master had persuaded him to cut his hair to the conventional length.

The clergy and men of letters remained clean-shaven; but Sir Thomas More seems to have grown a beard in the Tower in the last months of his life before his execution in 1535, though the story
that he asked the executioner not to cut off his beard, as the beard had not committed high treason, is almost certainly fictitious. In Europe priests had begun to wear beards by this time. Pope
Julius II was wearing a beard as early as 1512, though this was most unusual at the period. Clement VII, who had earlier been clean-shaven, wore one in 1532, as did his successor, Paul III.
Cardinal Pole had a long beard.

In England, the most authentic portrait of Gardiner shows him clean-shaven. Cranmer was still clean-shaven when Flicke painted his portrait in July 1545; but when Henry VIII died, he decided to
grow a beard to show his grief at the King’s death. A portrait of Cranmer painted during the reign of Edward VI shows him with a long white beard, and he has a beard in the contemporary
pictures of his martyrdom at the stake in 1556. His colleagues, the Protestant bishops and martyrs Nicholas Ridley and Hugh Latimer, had beards; and the picture of the martyrdom of another leading
Protestant bishop, John Hooper, in 1555 shows him with a closely cut beard. After 1550, beards were worn by most noblemen and gentlemen for the next hundred years. Under Mary and Elizabeth they
were usually worn from the ears, and cut short and to a point; but older men sometimes wore their beards long, like Lord Burghley. A few noblemen and gentlemen, like Philip Howard, Earl of Arundel
and Sir Philip Sidney, were clean-shaven as late as 1580. By 1550, most noblemen and gentlemen had cut their hair shorter, revealing the ears. Hair then remained very short for forty years; but by
1590, a few fashionable young men had again begun to grow it long, sometimes reaching to the shoulders.