The Symbolism of Gloves in the 17th Century

By Deborah Swift

In The Gilded Lily, Jay Whitgift, the dashing but dangerous man-about-town, gives Ella, my feisty maid, a pair of gloves. As I researched the sort of gloves that Ella might have worn I re-connected with the idea that gloves often had a symbolic meaning. Their unmistakable form, and their manner of taking on an individual’s body shape so that they appear to be part of the person even when they’re off, must be why they have attained such social and psychological significance. And this is why I chose them as an intimate gift.

Gloves were made mostly of leather, suede or kidskin, which would stretch to fit the hand. Black ones were worn at funerals, and those attending would be expected to wear them. Relatives of the deceased would often supply black gloves for the poorer members of the congregation for fear of the shame of un-gloved mourners.

Yellow was worn for hunting and blood-sports, and white at balls or social occasions, and for the aristocracy who could afford servants to keep them clean. Hands dressed in with pale kid gloves looked manifestly unacquainted with work, and this was desirable for the upper classes.

In the 16^th and 17^th century  women would go to bed wearing gloves filled with marigold cream to whiten and soften their hands. Glovers often scented their gloves - common perfumes were cinnamon or cloves, but the most costly gloves were scented with musk, civet, ambergris, and spirit of roses.

Eighteenth-century Irish "chickenskin" gloves were even thinner and smoother than kid. They were cut from the skins of aborted calves, and so fine that they came folded into the shell of a walnut.

Margaret Visser – The Way We Are.

chicken skin gloves so small they can fit in a walnut shell (linked to BBC article)

Not sure I like that idea, it sounds very grim!

As with a handshake, in the 17th century gloves meant faith in the transaction or confidence in the person, so transactions of land or property could be made by handing over the symbol of a glove.

The tradition of “throwing down the gauntlet”, has survived in language at least, where a knight might challenge another to a duel by casting a glove at his feet – the glove being a symbol of hand to hand combat. In my third novel, A Divided Inheritance, Zachary Deane is challenged to a duel in just this way.

Judges often used to wear gloves as a symbol that their hands were unsullied by the criminals they had jurisdiction over. Gloves "lined" with money were famous as formal bribes and judges and other high up members of society often received far too many pairs of gloves to use them all; for this reason, many fine specimens survive. These are often highly decorative, with gold braid, embroidery and sumptuous beading, as in this example. The poorer gloves, such as the ones Ella is given, that would be worn for warmth, rarely survive.

The wardrobe accounts for Charles I record the making of more than
1,000 pairs of gloves during a three-year period. Picture from the V&A museum

In the 16^th and 17^th centuries so much etiquette developed around them that men’s gloves in particular grew wider and more decorative as they were so often carried rather than worn. It was taboo to offer to shake a hand wearing gloves, or to accept a gift in a glove. Nor was it acceptable to remove them with the teeth. Approaching an altar in Church, men had to remove their gloves, and the right glove had to be removed when coming into the presence of a social superior as a mark of respect. The keeping on of your gloves indicated that you retained power by declining physical contact, whereas the removal meant you deferred to a higher position. Gloves were also to be put off when playing cards (to deter cheating, I suppose) or when eating.

From the symbolic use of gloves the custom grew up of presenting them to people of distinction on special occasions. For example, when Queen Elizabeth visited Cambridge in 1578 the vice chancellor offered her a

" a paire of gloves, perfumed and garnished with embroiderie and goldsmithe's wourke, price 60s." 

Up until quite recently women always carried matching handbags and gloves, like this picture from the 1940's - a style now only seen as a remnant at weddings, or with the royal family who, as befitting their perceived status, keep on their gloves in public.

In The Gilded Lily, Ella is delighted by her new gloves, which her sister Sadie dismisses scornfully as “trumpery”.

I originally wrote this post for  Grace Elliott's blog, thanks to her for allowing its second outing!

More information about the history of gloves can be found at http://www.goleathergloves.com/history-of-gloves.htm

Deborah’s writing blog: www.deborahswift.blogspot.com

Twitter @swiftstory

Pearls Fit for Queens

Recently I wrote about the large pearl that King Charles I wore in his ear. It seems only fair to write about an equally famous pair of pearl earrings worn by his queen, and several others besides. Many legendary jewels of the past have disappeared through wars and revolution, or have been broken up, re-cut, and reset until they bear no resemblance to their original design. But these magnificent earrings, left, have miraculously survived with both pearls and diamonds intact, and with a tantalizing history to match.

The earrings first appear as part of the dower jewels of Marie de' Medici (1575-1642), the Italian princess who left her native Florence to wed the French king, Henry IV (1552-1610). The de' Medici family was old, powerful, and very wealthy, and the jewels that Marie brought with her astonished the French court. At this time, pearls were the most valuable of precious gems, rare accidents of nature acquired only at great risk and cost. The two almost perfectly matched droplet pearls in the new queen's favorite pair of pendant earrings were of a quality not been seen before in Paris. Other women at the court wore pearl drops (many ladies in 17th c. portraits are shown with them) but most of these pearls were coated glass. Marie's were real, and truly fit for a queen. She was painted wearing the earrings, right, in 1616 by Peter Paul Rubens.

When Marie's youngest daughter, the princess Henriette Marie (1609-1699), married the English King Charles I (1600-1649) in 1625, Marie gave the pearl earrings to her as a wedding gift. Henriette, too, was portrayed many times wearing the earrings, including this portrait of her, left, as a young wife, painted in 1632 by Sir Anthony van Dyck. Her marriage was a happy one, and blessed with many children. But the earrings brought Henriette no luck as the English queen. Her husband's unpopular politics eventually led to the disastrous civil war and the trial for treason that cost him his life. Henriette was forced to flee the country in 1644 soon after giving birth to their last daughter, leaving the baby behind. In exile in France with her sons, she was forced to gradually sell all her jewels first to help support her husband's army, and then, as a widow, to keep herself from poverty. Mementos of happier times, the pearl earrings were among the last jewels to go, finally being purchased by her nephew, the French King Louis XIV (1638-1714) in 1657.

The nineteen-year-old Louis had fallen desperately in love with eighteen-year-old Marie Mancini (1639-1715), the Italian niece of Cardinal Jules Mazarin, the king's primary minister. At first the match was approved both by the cardinal and Louis's widowed mother, and Louis presented the pearl earrings to Marie as his future queen. Marie's portrait, left, shows her wearing the pearls along with flowers in her hair. But politics intruded and the match was broken off, with Louis instead marrying the Spanish Infanta Maria Theresa, and Marie wed to the Roman Prince Lorenzo Onofrio Colonna. But Marie kept the king's pearls, and the earrings were by now so associated with her that they became known by her name, the Mancini Pearls.

No one is certain whether she left the earrings to one of her children, or sold them herself during her long life. In fact, there is no record of the pearls at all for nearly 250 years, until they appeared at Christie's auction house in New York in October, 1979. There they were sold to a private collector for $253,000, a price that almost seems reasonable considering all the history attached to them. They remain among the most famous jewels sold by Christie's, and are still featured on their website.

Now I know that pearls, however beautiful, are inanimate objects, and no more than the work of an irritated oyster. But don't you wish these earrings could tell their story, and repeat even a few of the confidences and endearments, promises and secrets once whispered into the ears that wore them?

The King's Pearl

Today pearls are among the most common of precious "jewels." But before the development of cultured pearls and farming in the early 20th c., all pearls were natural pearls. These rare treasures could be discovered only by accident and at considerable peril. Natural pearls had great mystique and luminous beauty as well as value, which made them favorites of queens – and kings.

One of the most famous pearls of the 17th c. belonged to King Charles I of England (1600-1649). While the origins of this single pearl earring are unknown, Charles is first shown wearing it in a miniature, left, as the fifteen-year-old Prince of Wales. The pearl soon became what fashion-folk today call a "statement piece", and one that he was seldom without.

Charles's large teardrop-shaped pearl – an especially rare and desired shape –was made into a single dangling earring with a tiny gold crown as the cap, topped with an orb and cross that was most fitting for a future king. Since Queen Elizabeth's reign, fashionable English gentlemen had worn single earrings as a sign of courtly swagger and bravado, qualities that the young prince was woefully lacking: Charles was slight and short (only 5'3"), he limped from childhood rickets, he stammered, and he suffered from acute shyness. Perhaps the sizable jewel gave him the confidence that nature had not.

Whatever the reason, Charles wore the pearl for the rest of his life, and it appears in nearly every portrait of him, including one of him dressed casually for hunting, right. He developed into a style-conscious king who patronized the arts, and the single earring suited him in that capacity, too, as the romantic, cavalier king.

Unfortunately, while Charles was a very good patron to artists, architects, and composers, he proved to be a wretched king to his people, stubbornly unable to reconcile his subjects' desires and expectations with his own. After barely surviving two civil wars, he was captured by Parliamentary forces, tried, and found guilty of high treason. He was executed on 30 January 1649, beheaded with a single stroke of the ax on a scaffold before Whitehall Palace. He was still wearing the pearl earring as he placed his neck on the executioner's block.

Some later historians have been determined to give the execution a lurid, gory hysteria that no contemporary witness reported, and describe a howling mob surging forward to tear the precious jewel from the bloody, severed royal head.

Well, no. Even with regicide, this was still Puritan England, not Jacobin France.

Instead Charles's earring was respectfully removed when his head was sewn back to his body in preparation for burial. The earring was then sent as a final memento to his oldest daughter, Mary, Princess Royal (1631-1660), as Charles had requested. After Mary's death, the earring eventually found its way to one of the late king's most loyal supporters, William Cavendish, 1st Duke of Newcastle-upon-Tyne (1592-1672), who had also been entrusted with the education of Charles's son, the future King Charles II. Today the earring, bottom left, remains in the collection of the duke's home, Welbeck Abbey in Nottinghamshire, now owned by the Dukes of Portland.

Top left: Charles, Prince of Wales (later Charles I) by Isaac Oliver; the Berger Collection,

Denver Art Museum.

Top right: detail, Charles I, King of England, at the Hunt by Anthony van Dyck; the Louvre

Lower left: detail, Charles I, King of England, from Three Angles, by Anthony van Dyck; Windsor Castle, Royal Collection

Bottom right: Earring of Charles I, Harley Gallery, Welbeck, Worksop, Nottinghamshire

Dressing in Starlight

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I've recently discovered a historical wonderful blog: Two Nerdy History Girls, written by novelists Loretta Chase and Susan Holloway Scott.

Susan writes often about the 17th century, and most often about details of daily life, which I relish.

One of her recent posts had to do with gloves: Gloves for Show, Not for Snow. The details are delicious: gloves of white or cream perfumed leather, mittens of silk velvet with elaborately embroidered gauntlet cuffs decorated with spangles, pearls or beads.

A previous post on embroidered jackets — All That Glitters: Two Extraordinary Embroidered Jackets — notes that such richly-adorned, hand-decorated fabrics were common wear for the upper crust. Today, it's almost impossible to imagine the time that went into the creation of these works of art, and even more impossible to replicate: yet this is what a team of volunteers for the Plimoth Plantation in Plimoth, Massachusetts, did, in fact.

How many hours did it take to produce the embrodered jacket shown above? Four thousand —  two to three people working full-time for one year. Over two hundred and fifty people took part in this project: stitchers, lace makers, spanglers. The jacket was named Faith, because that's what it took to make it.

The project added greatly to the understanding of history, techniques and materials. It certainly has added to my own understanding. This short video of a woman wearing the jacket in candlelight shows what an evening fête must have been like in the 17th-century, the metalic threads catching the light as a woman moved by, like fireflies on a summer night. This video — click here — shows the same enchanting effect.

The Embroiderers' Story is a blog that documented the process. It makes me long to take up my hoop and needle, but for now, I'll content myself with clothing my characters in starlight.

Sandra Gulland

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Author of the Josephine B. Trilogy and Mistress of the Sun
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