ions, had hampered the
movements of commerce; it was natural that fashion should instinctively
rebel against restraint. The honest burgher's vrow of Middelburg or
Enkhuyzen claimed the right to make herself as grotesque as Queen
Elizabeth in all her glory. Sumptuary laws were an unwholesome part of
feudal tyranny, and, as such, were naturally dropping into oblivion on
the free soil of the Netherlands. It was the complaint therefore of
moralists that unproductive consumption was alarmingly increasing.
Formerly starch had been made of the refuse parts of corn, but now the
manufacturers of that article made use of the bloom of the wheat and
consumed as much of it as would have fed great cities. In the little
village of Wormer the starch-makers used between three and four thousand
bushels a week. Thus a substantial gentlewoman in fashionable array might
bear the food of a parish upon her ample bosom. A single manufacturer in
Amsterdam required four hundred weekly bushels. Such was the demand for
the stiffening of the vast ruffs, the wonderful head-gear, the elaborate
lace-work, stomachers and streamers, without which no lady who respected
herself could possibly go abroad to make her daily purchases of eggs and
poultry in the market-place.

"May God preserve us," exclaimed a contemporary chronicler, unreasonably
excited on the starch question, "from farther luxury and wantonness, and
abuse of His blessings and good gifts, that the punishment of Jeroboam,
which followed upon Solomon's fortunate reign and the gold-ships of Ophir
may not come upon us."

The States of Holland not confounding--as so often has been the case--the
precepts of moral philosophy with those of political economy, did not,
out of fear for the doom of Jeroboam, forbid the use of starch. They
simply laid a tax of a stiver a pound on the commodity, or about six per
cent, ad valorem; and this was a more wholesome way of serving the State
than by abridging the liberty of the people in the choice of personal
attire. Meantime the preachers were left to thunder from their pulpits
upon the sinfulness of starched rues and ornamental top-knots, and to
threaten their fair hearers with the wrath to come, with as much success
as usually attends such eloquence.

There had been uneasiness in the provinces in regard to the designs of
the queen, especially since the States had expressed their inability to
comply in full with her demands for repayment. Spanish emissaries