If Walls Could Talk: An Intimate History of the Home (7 page)

The nature of people’s undergarments is a subject to which we can gain a surprising amount of access. Even the chivalrous,
ancient and Noble Order of the Garter actually takes its name from an attempt to cover up a lady’s very public wardrobe malfunction: Edward III created the order’s motto when he chided some courtiers with the words ‘
Honi soit qui mal y pense
’ (‘Evil be to he who evil thinks’) when they rudely laughed at the Countess of Salisbury’s garter accidentally falling to the floor.

Indeed, underwear has often been put deliberately on display. This can be a sexually predatory action, common to the lacy-shirted male Cavalier courtiers in the 1630s through to the young urban males of today showing their Calvin Klein underpants above low-slung jeans. And Monica Lewinsky discovered that even the most powerful man in America could be reduced to a jelly by the sight of an intern’s thong.

Generally speaking, though, to have visible underwear is regrettable. A young French housewife was addressed in the closing years of the fourteenth century in the advice book
Le Ménagier de Paris
. She was commanded to cover up carefully:

be mindful that the collar of your shift, or your camisole, or of your robe or surcoat does not slip out one over the other, as happens with drunken, foolish, or ignorant women.

Yet to receive someone while imperfectly dressed can even mean that you respect them greatly, and the supremely self-confident Winston Churchill would famously chat to his staff while naked in his bath. On the morning of 17 June 1520, during the conference near Calais being held to celebrate their friendship, Francis I of France appeared unexpectedly in Henry VIII’s bedchamber. He personally handed the English king his shirt as a sign of the close intimacy between the nations of England and France. (This tactful gesture was necessary because Francis had defeated Henry in a bout of wrestling a few days previously, and his brother king was in a royal sulk.)

In Henry VIII’s case, it was usually an Esquire of the Body who would help the king into his shirt in the privacy of his bedchamber. Henry would emerge ‘loosely dressed’ and enter
his privy chamber, a more public room, next door. Here, his Yeomen of the Wardrobe would have his outer clothes ready, and his Grooms would hand them to the more senior Gentlemen of the bedchamber. It was this latter group who would actually dress the king. The Grooms were warned to handle the king’s garments with great reverence, and not to ‘lay hands upon the royal person, or intermeddle with dressing’, except to warm clothes before the fire.

In innumerable royal bedrooms, it was a trusted and often noble servant who had the responsibility of warming the king’s shirt ‘before the fire, & hold the same till we are ready to put it on’, words which come from the bedchamber rules of William III. When Horace Walpole visited the French court of Louis XV in 1765, he found the king’s public dressing had become so well-established and ritualised that it was almost a tourist attraction: ‘You are let into the King’s bedchamber just as he has put on his shirt; he dresses and talks good-humouredly to a few.’ Yet even this unusually tolerant king had his limits: he would ‘glare at strangers’.

The same dressing ceremonies were also found in the bedchambers of important ladies. John Evelyn, the seventeenth-century diarist, recorded how he was once invited into a bedchamber to see Charles II’s mistress, the Duchess of Portsmouth, ‘in her morning loose garment, her maids combing her, newly out of her bed, his majesty and the gallants standing about her’. Many other gallants and cronies of the king had also gathered to see the pleasant and titillating sight.

A little later at the British court, Queen Anne was also semi-publicly dressed by her extensive bedchamber staff. They descended in rank from the Mistress of the Robes, to the Ladies of the Bedchamber (aristocrats one and all), to the Women of the Bedchamber, to the dressers, hairdressers, and finally, the Page of the Backstairs.

The items of the queen’s clothing were also ranked from high
to low, and the participants were only allowed to touch garments appropriate to their status. So, the Lady of the Bedchamber put on the queen’s shift, which went right next to her skin and was considered to be highly important. The Lady also handed the queen her fan at the end of the whole process, and that was the limit of her involvement. More menial work – lacing the queen into her stays, putting on her hoops and fastening her dress – was done by the Women of the Bedchamber and the dressers, and the Page’s lowly role was limited to putting on her shoes. The Mistress of the Robes had the least physically demanding but most high-status job of all: she handed the queen her jewels. One pities the queen, standing cold and vulnerable in the centre of this dance of ceremony.

These records of royal dressing rituals reveal that a striking number of people were involved. The number of participants may sound excessive, and you might assume that many of them were mere flunkeys and hangers-on. But it wasn’t just dressing which was subject to overstaffing: in 1512, the Earl of Northumberland had twenty servants on duty in his great chamber, or living room, in the morning, eighteen in the afternoon, and no less than thirty in the evening. Yet a vast entourage became (and remains) an indicator of a person’s power and status. All this would be completely dwarfed by the absolute monarchies of the Baroque period: when Louis XIV moved his household from place to place, 30,000 horses were required to transport his people and possessions. Even people of lower status could never be satisfied with the number of servants they had. Elizabeth Spencer, who wanted her husband to stump up the wages for an additional ‘gentlewoman’, or female companion, wrote in 1594 that ‘it is an undecent thing’ for her sole existing ‘gentlewoman to stand mumping alone’.

But there was another reason for all the servants: you simply couldn’t get into your clothes without someone else to help. Until buttons were invented in the fourteenth century, you needed an
extra pair of hands to fasten up your ‘points’ (the holes through which a string was threaded to attach the sleeves to the body of a gown). The batman to a medieval knight was essential to ‘help to array him, truss his points, stick up his hose, and see all things be cleanly about him’. A medieval treatise recommends that a lord’s ‘chamberlain’, or chamber servant, should act as stylist as well as dresser. ‘Before he goes out’, the chamberlain is advised, ‘brush busily about him, and whether he wear satin, sandal, velvet, scarlet or grain, see that all be clean and nice.’

Not surprisingly, such body servants brushing their bosses in their bedchambers also became close friends. There was a moving scene after Lucius Cary, 1st Viscount Falkland, was killed in battle in 1643. Only his chamberlain could identify his master’s corpse upon the field: ‘they could not find his Lordship’s body; it was stripped and trod-upon and mangled, so there was one that waited upon him in his chamber would undertake to know it from all other bodies, by a certain Mole his lordship had in his Neck, and by that mark did find it’.

On the other hand, the foppish ‘Macaronis’ of the 1780s crept into an unhealthy dependency on their personal servants, seeming to be ‘absolutely incapable of motion, till they have been wound up by their valets … if the valet happens to be out of the way, the master must remain helpless and sprawling in bed, like a turtle on its back upon the kitchen table’.

Our medieval knight wouldn’t have worn underpants as we know them today. Men wrapped the long tail of their shirts between their legs, or else wore something rather like a loose linen nappy. Early drawers begin to appear in the seventeenth century: long silk shorts with a slit in the back to facilitate a trip to the toilet. By the later 1660s, Charles II was wearing silk undershorts. William III, next king but one, had an almost garish taste in underwear. We know he favoured green socks and a red vest, items which remain in the costume collection at Kensington Palace today. Tiny in size for this minuscule king,
the vest has no front fastenings. It must have been pinned, or even sewn up, each time he wore it. Neither would have been uncommon in an age before zips.

Meanwhile, sixteenth-, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century female dress quite simply precluded wearing knickers. A huge hooped skirt meant that drawers were impractical if you needed to use the toilet without completely undressing. So ladies went commando, and squatted over a chamber pot when required. This meant that toilets were everywhere and nowhere. The bedchamber, an ante-room, even the street: all were potential places to go. (One could even use a chamber pot in bed, though it was more comfortable if it was ‘warmed, and the rim covered with flannel’.)

With the slimmer, looser, less cumbersome fashions of the Jane Austen or Regency period, though, women began to adopt the male fashion for wearing protective drawers beneath their lighter, diaphanous and potentially more revealing skirts. The earliest knickers had long legs, but even so were considered terribly racy. Lady Chesterfield, writing to her daughter around 1850, described a youth spent wearing ‘skirts that ended one inch above my ankles’, revealing the ‘frilled edges of those comfortable garments which we have borrowed from the other sex, and which all of us wear but none of us talk about’.

Despite their initially saucy reputation, drawers quickly went mainstream. Even Queen Victoria’s ladies-in-waiting got swept up in the craze. Here’s the Honourable Eleanor Stanley in 1859, describing how the Duchess of Manchester, climbing over a gate,

caught a hoop of her cage in it and went regularly head over heels … the other ladies hardly knew whether to be thankful or not that a part of her underclothing consisted in a pair of scarlet tartan knickerbockers which were revealed to the view of all the world in general.

Her use of the word ‘cage’ for the crinoline is particularly striking, because these stiff hooped petticoats devised from steel, string or wood literally encaged women in the sense that
they restricted free movement. We all need to say thanks to the women who campaigned to end the nonsense of muffling ladies up in voluminous, unwieldy drawers and layers of petticoats. Amelia Jenks Bloomer, for one, has a worthy place in the women’s movement. It was actually her friend Libby Miller who designed the ‘bloomers’ which Amelia championed (really voluminous Turkish pants combined with an overskirt). They were said to be especially ‘fit for any sort of locomotion’, including the new bicycle. ‘Bicycling has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world,’ said the suffragette Susan B. Anthony in 1896. ‘I stand and rejoice every time I see a woman ride on a wheel. It gives women a feeling of freedom and self-reliance.’

Despite its reputation, the voluminous bloomer was far from risqué, and so was its promoter, Mrs Bloomer herself. A dedicated campaigner for lost causes, married to a Quaker, she was also a stalwart of the Ladies’ Temperance Society. She spoke against drink and in favour of bloomers at rallies all over the US (with limited success).

In Britain, the Rational Dress Society brought about similar change. It was formed in 1881 by Viscountess Harberton, and the following year a ‘Hygienic Wearing Apparel’ exhibition was held at Kensington Town Hall. As Lady Harberton wrote, ‘no growing girl or woman of child-bearing age should wear underclothes that exceed 7 lbs in weight’. One result was the liberty bodice, a kind of sleeveless vest intended to replace the corset; another was the 1920s passion for all kinds of frivolous, light and airy knickers, often made out of the new man-made fibres. (Robert Hooke in 1664 had the idea of spinning thread from ‘a glutinous substance’, like a silkworm did, but ‘artificial silk’ or ‘rayon’ was not made until 1905.)

Yet ultra-respectable women wore long drawers right into the twentieth century. Rosina Harrison, maid to the first female Member of Parliament, Lady Astor, remembers how ‘she was
particularly fastidious about her underwear. It was kept in sets in silk pouches which I had to make and decorate in his lordship’s racing colours, blue and pink … knickers fitting above the knee.’ Sobriety returned to underwear with the Second World War and the rise of the hated ‘black-outs’ (also known as ‘passion-killers’ or ‘boy-bafflers’), official-issue pants in khaki, navy or black that came with the knee-length skirts of women’s military uniforms. Many pairs remained unworn, and were only brought out, ironed, for kit inspections.

Once the knickers or drawers are on, the bizarre and intimate business of body-shaping demands attention. The part of the body most admired, or considered to be the most erogenous, has changed enormously over time. The male calf was much admired by the Tudors. ‘Look here! I have also a good calf to my leg,’ boasted Henry VIII, slapping his muscles. Naked female breasts made frequent appearances at the Stuart court, just as they had at the Minoan court of Crete. Yet two centuries later, poor Caroline of Brunswick, the mail-order wife of George IV, may have been acceptably dressed according to her native German fashion, but offended her new compatriots beyond measure with her décolletage. (‘Such an over-dressed, bare-bosomed, painted eye-browed figure one never saw!’)

In their bedroom mirrors ladies either cursed or blessed the biological background that gave them figures that either met or failed the approved fashion of their times. Sometimes the breasts were valued; sometimes not: the pendulum swung regularly from side to side. A seventeenth-century book of cosmetics contains a prescription to ‘keep the Breasts small’ and ‘hinder their growth’, and to ‘harden soft and loose Breasts’. The stomach was in vogue in the late 1200s: perhaps it was a fondness for fertile women that led artists to depict so many of them with their hips thrust forward and a bulging belly. In the early nineteenth century, William Wordsworth was dismayed by large breasts: one pair he encountered were like two ‘hay stacks,
protruding themselves upon the Spectator … you would have shrunk almost as with horror’ at the sight of them. Yet a low-slung bosom was essential to the Edwardian ‘pouter-pigeon’ look. The bottom was also something that came and went: indeed, the late-nineteenth-century craze for the bustle sent it off into the realms of outsize fantasy.