rds, like tasselled
bell-pulls. While Henry VIII. is spending his father's hoards we have a
splendid court, gallantly dressed in new fashions. His own broad figure,
in cloth of gold, velvet and damask, plaits, puffs and slashes, stiff
with jewels, is well known through scores of portraits, and may stand
for the high-water mark of the modes of his age. The Hampton Court
picture of the earl of Surrey is characteristic of a great lord's dress
of a somewhat soberer style (see fig. 38). The king, proud of his own
broad shoulders, set the fashion to accent this breadth, and it will be
seen that the earl's figure, leaving out the head and hose, all but
fills a perfect square. Such men have the air of playing-card knaves.
Surrey's cap is flat, with a rich brooch and a small side-feather. His
short doublet of the new style is open in front to show a white shirt
covered with black embroidery whose ruffles cover his wrists. His
over-garment or jerkin has vast sleeves, rounded, puffed and slashed.
Under the doublet are seen wide trunk-breeches. He goes all in scarlet,
even to the shoes, which are of moderate size. The girdle carries a
sword with the new guard and a dagger of the Renascence art, graced with
a vast tassel. All is in the new fashion, nothing recalling the earlier
century save the hose and the immodest _braguette_ which, seen in the
latter half of the fourteen-hundreds, is defiantly displayed in the
dress and armour of this age of Henry VIII. Even the hair follows the
new French mode and is cropped close. Other fashionable suits of the
time give us the tight doublets, loose upper sleeves and trunk hose as a
mass of small slashes and puffs, a fashion which came in from the
Germans and Switzers whom Henry saw in the imperial service. Such
clothing goes with the shoes whose broad toes are slashed with silk, and
the wide and flat caps with slashed edges, bushed with feathers, which
headgear was often allowed to hang upon the shoulders by a pair of
knotted bonnet-strings, while a skull-cap covered the head. With all
this fantasy the dress of simpler folk has little concern, and a man in
a plain, short-skirted doublet, with a flat cap, trunk breeches, long
hose and plain shoes, has nothing grotesque or unserviceable in his
attire. The new sumptuary laws, which were not allowed to become a dead
letter, had their influence in restraining middle-class extravagance. No
man under a knight's degree was to wear a neck-chain of gold o