If Walls Could Talk

by Lucy Worsley

  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 offende
d her new compatriots beyond measure with her décolletage. (‘Such an over-dressed, bare-bosomed, painted eyebrowed 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.

  The secrets of the perfect figure revealed, c.1810

  Shaping the body is not just a feminine phenomenon. In the mid-eighteenth century, Richard Campbell mockingly described Londoners’ dependence on what he called their ‘Shape Merchants’. Men of fashion had no ‘Existence than what the Taylor, Milliner, and Perriwig-Maker bestow upon them’. Stripped of their clothes, they appeared to be ‘quite a different Species’, rather like ‘Punch, deprived of his moving Wires, and hung up upon a Peg’. George IV – brandy-swilling, bewigged, heavily made-up and slightly mad – was likewise a constant wearer of corsets. His baby corset, designed to encourage a straight figure, remains in the Royal Ceremonial Dress Collection at Kensington Palace. His adult corset, which doesn’t survive, was designed to hold in his fat and to help him to walk. (The idea that medieval knights wore corsets, sadly, is based on the mistranslation of a Latin word. They didn’t.) In the generation after George IV’s, chest padding created the silhouette favoured for a gentleman seen in profile. This discreet addition to the manly chest was even adopted by Prince Albert, and can be seen inside a military outfit of his at the Museum of London.

  But ladies’ shapes gave away so much more about their status. A country girl, arriving fresh off the stagecoach in Georgian London, quickly found new friends suspiciously keen to ‘help’ her lose her bumpkin ways:

  An awkward Thing, when first She came to Town;

  Her Shape unfashion’d, and her Face unknown:

  She was my Friend, I taught her first to spread

  Upon her Sallow Cheeks th’Enliv’ning Red.

  Of course, the naive country girl ended up working as a prostitute, like her friend who narrates the poem. A Georgian prostitute in prints and cartoons – and presumably in real life too – indicates her availability by lifting up one side of her skirt and showing her ankle.

  The tight-laced stays necessary for eighteenth-century female costume were difficult to put on alone; in fact, one wonders how working women without maids managed. But there were short cuts. For a start, you might simply sleep in your stays rather than going to the trouble of taking them off. Also, it is actually possible to lace yourself up by running one string down from the top, and the other up from the bottom. You can tighten yourself at the mid-point by reaching over your right shoulder and under your left, grabbing the two strings and pulling them in a diagonal movement.

  It was Victorian ladies who suffered the tightest lacing. A book of Advice to a Wife (1853) suggests that one should not lace to fewer than twenty-seven inches; to go down to the widely desirable twenty-one was to sacrifice ‘comfort, health and happiness’. It was hard to persuade women to take off their stays, even under the most extreme conditions. The same writer makes the point that ‘the stays should not be worn’ during labour. (Women in childbirth nevertheless expected to wear a chemise, petticoat and nightgown, with a ‘broad bandage’ round the abdomen.)

  Stays for women can be excruciatingly painful, and Victorian ladies’ manuals make recommendations for treating flesh rubbed raw and other superficial wounds. Archaeologists at the Museum of London have studied the malformation of the skeleton caused by Victorian tight lacing. They have also noticed that shoes had a crippling effect on the bones of the feet before shoes specifically designed for the left and right feet were introduced in the early nineteenth century, when shaped cobblers’ lasts came into use.

  The invention of the liberty bodice in the late nineteenth century saw the beginning of the end of body-shaping as an essential part of women’s daily life; it had passed out of men’s lives long before. In the twentieth century, the bra and girdle replaced the stays; then the girdle too eventually disappeared. But still teenagers longed for the underwear that would mark maturity: ‘Are you there God?’ prayed Judy Blume’s fictional adolescent in 1978. ‘It’s me, Margaret. I just told my mother I want a bra. Please help me grow God. You know where.’

  Before we finish with underwear, we need to make a detour into the curious history of the pocket. The variety and quality of the items in her handbag provide a particularly intimate snapshot of a modern woman’s daily life. The handbag’s predecessor was an even more intimate item: the tie-on pocket or pouch worn around the waist (of the type that Lucy Locket lost, and that Kitty Fisher found).

  A Berlei corseted girdle from the 1940s

  Some thieves specialised in stealing these particular items: ‘My chief dexterity was in robbing the ladies. There is a peculiar delicacy required in whipping one’s hand up a lady’s petticoats and carrying off her pockets,’ boasted one (fictional) pickpocket. Putting an intrusive hand into a lady’s pocket was often used as a metaphor for seduction. In the 1760s, though, in line with a general explosion in the number of consumer goods of all sorts made suddenly available, handbags began to appear for carrying purses, fans, combs and shopping money. The days of the pocket as a separate item from the skirt were numbered. The Times of 1799 mentioned ‘the total abjuration of the female pocket’, and handbags quickly became known as ‘Indispensables’.

  The pocket became sewn into a skirt, and the handbag went from strength to strength. But both remain private places where their owners’ needs, desires and aspirations are all laid bare. They have that in common with the room called the closet.

  5 – Praying, Reading and Keeping Secrets

  All is but vanitie.

  Painted motto in a seventeenth-century

  closet at Bolsover Castle, Derbyshire

  Ever ‘closeted’ yourself away to do something private? If so, you were referring to a room whose purpose has faded away, rather like the appendix in the human body: the closet.

  The bedchamber was originally a place of prayer and study as well as sleep. Then architecturally ambitious Tudors began to construct an extra little room adjoining it called the closet. Richly decorated and often incorporating cupboards for the storage of treasures, these funny little rooms became a dead end in architectural history. For a couple of centuries, though, they provided the most intimate and private space in a house. The closet was used for solitary activities – for praying, reading, meditating – or for storing precious art, musical instruments and books.

  Towards the end of the Middle Ages, as literacy spread, we come across a novelty: people willingly spending time by themselves. This new trend for solitude, linked to the rise of reading, called for new, small and private rooms. The allure of seclusion is expressed in a poem written by Charles, Duc d’Orléans, while prisoner in the Tower of London. In 1440, this duc (the nephew of the king of France) was imprisoned after the British victory at Agincourt. He is perhaps the first recorded person to suffer from the agonising but creative melancholy which would become so common in the Romantic age, but which seems quite out of place in the medieval. His homesick, miserable condition made him want to mope about alone:

  Tristesse

>   M’ si longuement tenu en son pouvoir

  Que j’ai totalement relégué ma Joie.

  Il vaut mieux que je m’écarte de mes semblables:

  Celui qui est pris d’affliction ne peut qu’embarrasser.

  [Sadness has held me in its power so long

  that I have cast off Joy completely.

  It is better that I separate myself from my fellow man.

  He who is afflicted can only embarrass.]

  The seventeenth-century writer Margaret Cavendish, sitting at her desk in her private closet, her ideas swirling round her head

  Closets, these new rooms for solitude, also developed out of a tradition of prayer. As the Bible’s Book of Matthew put it, ‘when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut the door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly’. Indeed, the forerunner to the closet was the private oratory, like the one just off Edward III’s bedchamber at the Tower of London (plate 4).

  If your house wasn’t big enough or grand enough to contain a special, dedicated closet, you could make do with other rooms. The seventeenth-century London wood-turner, diary fiend and depressive Nehemiah Wallington had a strong Puritan faith which forced him to frequent prayer. His writings give an unusual insight into the mind of an introspective and religious man of the middling sort. One winter night, he had something of an epiphany in his ‘garret’, which he’d been using as a kind of closet:

  I went up into the high garret to pray as I was used to do: and I found a great deal of comfort in prayer and when I had done praying I went to the garret window, and looked up unto heaven … seeing the stars God’s glorious creatures [I began] meditating what a glorious place heaven is.