Restoration, p.16
Restoration, page 16
When it came to everyday attire, there was a casually ostentatious eroticism about many women’s clothes, whether or not they were available for hire, which spoke volumes about the lasciviousness of the court. Bosoms accentuated by deliberately tight bodices could be part-concealed by a piece of neckwear known as a ‘pinner’, a sort of scarf that nonetheless left a certain amount of décolletage on show. Even the skirt was designed specifically to allow tantalizing glimpses of the petticoat and underskirts beneath it.
Some women’s dress made them instantly famous – or notorious, as in the case of the writer and natural philosopher Margaret Cavendish, the duchess of Newcastle. Her free-thinking outlook was mirrored in her highly individual dress sense. Sometimes she donned breeches and a Cavalier hat, with such masculine attire reinforced by her refusal to shave an allegedly noticeable amount of facial hair. But at other times she could take sartorial conventions to an absurd level; when she visited the Royal Society in 1667, she was accompanied by an eight-foot train on her gown, borne by six attendants. She was content to scandalize – one evening she visited the theatre in a dress in antique style that bared her breasts – or simply to mystify. The diarist Philibert de Gramont in his (admittedly unreliable) memoirs recounted an occasion when ‘as I was getting out of my chair, I was stopped by the devil of a phantom in masquerade… it is worthwhile to see her dress; for she must have at least sixty ells* of gauze and silver tissue about her, not to mention a sort of pyramid upon her head, adorned with a hundred thousand baubles.’ Charles reportedly did not blink an eye, merely saying, ‘I am ready to wager that it was the Duchess of Newcastle.’
*
Fine clothes might have created a veneer of style and beauty, but the physical realities of life in 1666, including such disfiguring conditions as smallpox or syphilis, meant that looking one’s best was often difficult. Diseases often left unsightly blemishes and pockmarks upon faces. Both sexes applied cosmetics in generous quantities, made up of a variety of bizarre substances that could include everything from urine and extract of crushed snail to white lead and rosewater. Egg white was often used, but this had the disadvantage that it set hard, and subsequently cracked, or alternatively faded to an unpleasant grey colour. An especially popular concoction was ‘water of talc and pearl’, a mixture made up of an Arabian mineral, the ‘talc’, and ground pearls. This would be slathered all over faces, hands and any other exposed body part. Eyes were tinted and artificially brightened with belladonna drops,† female facial hair was treated with such would-be depilatories as cat dung mixed with vinegar and lips were painted red with a crude crayon. Excessive rouging, however, was regarded as vulgar; Pepys criticized his cousin’s wife for it, declaring that she was ‘still very pretty, but paints red on her face, which makes me hate her’.
Even as the plays of the time mocked courtesans and fops – the latter personified by the character Sir Fopling Flutter in Etherege’s The Man of Mode, for example – who spent huge sums and effort on delicate beauty products, there seemed an ever-growing appetite for more elaborate ways of concealing one’s true identity. The quacks and beauty doctors rubbed their hands and set up shop, claiming that eyebrows could be shaped, hands whitened, foreheads lifted and wrinkles removed, all with the aid of ‘natural’ products. Old wives’ tales were revived and taken as gospel; oil of vitriol* was said to lighten hair, May dew was believed to be a beauty product and a powder made of snuff, tobacco, gum and myrrh was used as a crude toothpaste. Cheeks were filled out with small balls known as ‘plumpers’, which were made of cork or cloth, and were designed to guard against skin looking drawn and tight.
And there were those who died in the pursuit of beauty. At least one great lady of the time succumbed to mercury poisoning, having used so much of it as a cosmetic on her face that she was killed by it. If all else failed, there was one sure-fire, if rather ostentatious, means of covering pox scars, namely the application of small patches made of velvet or leather. Shaped as stars, crescents and even small animals, these ‘beauty spots’, also known as ‘mouches’, were worn by men and women alike. The faces of some, among them Barbara Castlemaine, were almost overwhelmed by beauty marks.
Hairstyles, like dress, were strongly influenced by royal and courtly practice. Charles was dark-haired (and accordingly referred to as a ‘black man’ as far back as 1651, when he was on the run across England) and it was because of his influence that the most desirable hair colour was brunette or black. Blondes and redheads either had to resign themselves to their natural colouring, or attempt a primitive means of dyeing it, which could involve anything from a tincture of lime and ‘a powder of gold’ to a barberry or saffron wash. At best, this would be an effective short-term option; at worst it would kill the hair’s roots and lead to baldness.
Women devoteded a great deal of care and attention to their locks. In the interests of enhancing their beauty, they put themselves through agonizing sessions with ivory or bone combs or heated curling tongs, which often resulted in singed hair. As ever at the Restoration court, fashion trumped practicality at every turn. Those who did not wish to endure such discomfort simply purchased extra locks of human hair, which they would tie to their heads with concealed threads, or attach to grand and elaborate wigs. Only a small number of women donned such wigs; most liked to accentuate their hair with a variety of ribbons and curls. The vogue of the day was for corkscrew curls, worn over and above the ears and with the hair pushed up into a bun at the back.
Beards, so popular in the reign of Charles I, were rare by 1666. Few men had the skill or equipment to shave themselves at home, so would head to the barbers, whose presence was announced by the red and white striped poles that hung outside their premises. However, they were less competent than they should have been, and nicks and more serious cuts were commonplace. Those who did not wish to expose themselves to the risk of a daily visit to the barber would have to put up with a few days’ worth of stubble. Pepys, upon shaving for the first time after the Great Fire, wrote on 17 September, ‘Lord! How ugly I was yesterday, and how fine today!’ Moustaches were worn occasionally – Charles cultivated one, as can be seen in contemporary portraits of him by Lely and John Michael Wright – but the fashion was for them to be thin and carefully maintained rather than bushy.
What lay under the clothes and make-up was generally less appealing than their beautified exteriors. People smelled, especially when it was hot, although such was the general odour of the city that individual aromas may have gone unnoticed. There was a substantial difference between the attention paid to ‘external’ parts of the body, such as the hands and face (and sometimes feet), which were washed and rewashed with near-obsessive attention to detail, using soap that had been imported from Spain or Italy, and the ‘hidden’ areas, which were only occasionally rubbed down with a cloth that had been doused in herbs or water. Washing of the more private parts of the body might take place in public baths such as Agnes-le-Clair in Tabernacle Square or Queen Elizabeth’s in Charing Cross; the latter was so called because Elizabeth I was said to have had one of her annual baths there. These places were closer to saunas than to conventional tubs, enabling visitors to sweat away their various layers of filth and grime; Pepys described them as a ‘hothouse’ where one would take a ‘sweat’. He was cynical about the benefits of cleanliness, writing of his wife attending the steam baths that ‘she now pretends to a resolution of being hereafter very clean. How long it will hold I can guess.’ She had her revenge, denying him the marital bed until he had washed himself with warm water.
There is evidence that people availed themselves of early forms of underarm deodorant; Hannah Woolley recommended that armpit sweat was combated with a mixture of white wine and rosewater boiled with the spice cassia lignum, which was to be applied to the newly plucked axilla. The ingredients involved, however, were rare and expensive and so this was not an everyday remedy.
Laundry was similarly sporadic. Some households followed a comparatively modern once-a-week washing cycle; but for some of the largest houses in town, it was a twice-yearly occurrence. The most basic, and ineffectual, means of washing clothing was simply to dunk it in a nearby river, but this was next to useless, given that river water was often filthy, especially if it was drawn from the Thames.
In middle-class and well-to-do homes, the household linens were placed in a large barrel-shaped tub, the so-called ‘buck tub’, into which a mixture of lye made of beech ash and animal urine was poured, followed by a vigorous rinsing with cold water. No soap was used. When this operation had been performed, the now sodden linens would be beaten and hung up in the garden in the summer, or in the kitchen in winter, and left to dry. Alternatively, there were a small number of professional laundry services, known as ‘whitsters’, who specialized in washing, bleaching and whitening.*
*
Where you lived in 1666 depended on where you could find work and how much money you could afford to pay for a home. A middle-class house in London of the time probably had between three and six rooms in total, although in the country such houses tended to be larger, boasting up to ten rooms. These were not generally high: a man of average height, around 5 feet 6 inches (1.6 m) at the time, could easily touch the ceiling with his hand. Two or three of these rooms would be on the ground floor, with the main area of the house – the so-called parlour or hall – being where meals were eaten and where domestic activities such as washing and cooking took place. The central focus of many of the living rooms was the fireplace, which was the house’s main source of both light and heat. Coal rather than wood was now used, which caused difficulties as many of the hearths had originally been designed to burn timber. Coal burnt at a lower temperature, and, as a result, fireplaces generated a good deal of smoke, necessitating regular cleaning to prevent the rooms being covered in ash and soot; it also left an unpleasant smell throughout the home. When it came to lighting, candles had the advantage of being portable, but they lasted little time and also could set fire to hanging cloths or tapestries if left unattended, or if a sudden gust of wind knocked them over. Many preferred to use enclosed iron lanterns, which reduced the danger of fire considerably.
Keeping one’s status among the neighbours was important; in addition to the cushions and soft furnishings that vendors such as Philip Harman could supply, collecting valuable items, such as china or ornaments, was considered a mark of attainment. These special objects were kept in a small closet or ‘cabinet’ in the parlour and shown to visitors on special occasions. Meanwhile, mirrors were expensive and normally consisted of a hotchpotch of small pieces of glass that were crudely placed together; this differed from the Continent, where mirror glass was used to decorate rooms in grandiose ways.
Upstairs were the ‘chambers’ or bedrooms, which had to house servants, children and adults. These were often cramped and squalid, normally comprising of a crudely subdivided ‘great chamber’, as Pepys referred to his upper floor. The bed was the main item of furniture in these rooms, consisting of four posts which supported a thick, straw-stuffed undermattress, then a wool or feather-stuffed top mattress, then sheets, with blankets and sometimes furs kept on top for warmth. To allow some privacy, curtains were normally suspended around the posts, allowing them to be drawn. (Nobody would want to be caught in carnal congress by a servant – or indeed by one’s husband or wife, if entertaining another lover.) It was, however, considered normal for the servant to sleep in the same room as their employer, on what would be either a humble folding bed or, in the poorer households, a straw mattress on the ground, sometimes without even a blanket.
Houses had no bathrooms as such, meaning that the chamber pot saw a great deal of use. No particular effort was made to be discreet in such matters, regardless of the wealth and privilege of the house; men and women urinated in corners and in convenient pots. In September 1664 Pepys records walking in on Lady Sandwich ‘blushing’ while she was ‘doing something upon the pot’, which led to much mutual embarrassment as Pepys attempted to continue his conversation as if nothing had happened. John Evelyn, meanwhile, bemoaned the constant spitting inside and outside the house, which required both domestic and street spittoons.
When it came to interior decoration, houses were embellished in a variety of ways, whether with wall paintings (which often consisted of bright and garish depictions of biblical scenes and allegorical figures), wallpaper, which had been reintroduced in London in 1660 after being curtailed for being ‘frivolous’ during the Protectorate, and tapestries and silk screens for the wealthiest. These came in a variety of colours, shapes and sizes, and were cut up and redistributed as was believed appropriate round the house. The overall effect would have been overwhelming and perhaps even confusing; the home furnishings of the middle-class home of the 1660s were all too rarely marked by restraint or consistency. Walls were panelled either with oak, which was expensive and scarce, or pine, which was cheaper but less durable.
Such furnishings were a significant drain on household resources. The average income of a middle-class family was somewhere between £50 and £200 a year, depending on the amount of patronage and custom that they managed to attain. Fifty pounds was generally thought to be a barely adequate amount to support a family, which typically consisted of between four to five living children and their parents. For those who enjoyed an income of more than £200 a year, such as Pepys, a good standard of living, rich in fine dress and domestic comfort, awaited. For those who earned less than £50, the Restoration brought no relief, just the continued realization of a drab, hand-to-mouth existence unameliorated by the trappings of wealth. It is their story that remains largely unwritten, owing to the illiteracy of the participants, but it is one that casts the grandeur and fancifulness of the time into particularly sharp contrast.
Dining at home was as simple or as grand an affair as individual taste and finances dictated. The largest houses cooked joints of meat or fish on large spits in front of the fire in the kitchen, which were either turned by hand, by crude mechanical devices such as a primitive clockwork jack (as in Pepys’s home) or, in some wealthy homes, by the bizarre but practical expedient of putting a small but active dog, such as a spaniel, on a treadmill attached to the spit itself. Ovens, meanwhile, were simple structures built by or into fireplaces, heated by burning logs and designed to retain heat long enough to cook stews and small joints of meat. Preparation of more complex dishes, such as pies and pasties, tended to be the preserve of local butchers. Most people ate with forks, which were in common use by 1666, and the well-off ate from pewter plates; the poor continued to use cruder wooden dishes or bowls.
In cases where the cook was indisposed – or incompetent – there were a few other options available, at least for households in the larger towns. So-called ‘victualling houses’ supplied takeaway food, which a dishonest or lazy host or hostess might pass off as their own, and bakers were regularly called upon to finish cooking pies. Pepys’s diary entry for 10 July 1666 describes how, because of ‘the yard being full of women… coming to get money for their husbands and friends that are prisoners in Holland… my wife and I were afeard to send a venison-pasty that we have for supper tonight to the cook’s to be baked for fear of their offering violence to it; but it went, and no harm done’. Pepys set great store by the quality of the pies he consumed, noting with disappointment that he had had ‘a bad venison pasty’ at the naval contractor Sir William Rider’s house on 9 September. Poor food was always a possibility, even at the greatest of houses; the following week, Pepys visited the home of Admiral Sir William Penn, where he recorded that he had had ‘so sorry a dinner: venison baked in pans, that the dinner I have had for his lady alone hath been worth four of it’.
For a well-to-do household, the morning began with a feast that could have consisted of anything from oysters (then commonplace and dredged up from the Thames Estuary daily) and kippers to venison or turkey pie and sweetmeats, washed down with wine. For those with smaller appetites (and purses) bread and butter and weak or ‘small’ beer would start the day. Once breakfast was over, it was almost time for the main meal of the day, the midday lunch. This was an even larger affair that was intended to showcase the abilities of the cook and the wealth of the household to guests and visitors, or simply to feed everyone who happened to be at home at the time. In a grand house, lunch was eaten in the great parlour, the main downstairs space, which might have had a couple of partitioned rooms off it for visiting tradespeople and tutors to eat in. In a middle-class household, it was most likely to have taken place in a room that was becoming associated with eating, known as the ‘dining room’.
Lunch did not proceed along the linear lines we know today of starter, main course and then pudding. Everything would have been placed on the table at the same time and then eaten, or abandoned, including food left over from breakfast. The menu might have included ox tongues, stewed carp, roasted pigeons, lampreys, chicken or mutton. On a feast day, such as Christmas, even more substantial meals were taken; Pepys records that on Christmas Day 1666 he ate roast rib of beef and mince pies, noting that his wife was ‘desirous to sleep, having sat up til four this morning’ supervising the making of the pies by her maids.
Feasts were not limited to religious or secular festivals. Pepys held a ‘stone feast’ every year in early spring, to celebrate the successful removal of a painful gallstone in 1658. Although there is no record in his diary of his dinner in 1666, a particularly sumptuous spread was held on 4 April 1663:
Very merry at, before, and after dinner, and the more for that my dinner was great, and most neatly dressed by our own only maid. We had a fricasee of rabbits and chickens, a leg of mutton boiled, three carps in a dish, a great dish of a side of lamb, a dish of roasted pigeons, a dish of four lobsters, three tarts, a lamprey pie (a most rare pie), a dish of anchovies, good wine of several sorts, and all things mighty noble and to my great content.
