00:08:41.080and dress in the same clothes each day
00:08:42.720until they were totally worn out from use.
00:08:44.900So it's not just a man who didn't wear the trendy fashions of the time.
00:08:49.320He was wearing the same thing until it fell apart on him.
00:08:55.000Yes, they just didn't really hold a lot of interest.
00:08:58.260But what's really quite curious is we know that he paid attention to what other people were wearing.
00:09:04.880He did a lot to monitor what people could wear at court, but also was fascinated by what other people wore.
00:09:12.940the Duke of Buckingham, George Villiers, who he had a very special connection with. He took a lot
00:09:19.160of interest in what he was wearing. And George was considered to be the most fashionable man
00:09:24.480in England at the time and the most attractive man. So that just brings out the contrast even
00:09:30.040more with this incredibly stylish duke and then a quite frumpy looking king. But James also loved
00:09:37.280to jewellery, and he could elevate his rather uninspiring clothes with some pretty impressive
00:09:43.200pieces of jewellery, a lot of which he brought with him from Scotland, and then a lot he inherited
00:09:49.260from Elizabeth I. So he had a very broad arsenal of jewellery that he could use.
00:09:57.960You also mentioned that he chose to pad his clothing as sort of a makeshift,
00:10:02.820bulletproof vest sort of thing. Can you talk about that?
00:10:05.880Yeah, so it was very popular for men to pad their clothes in a certain way. The late Tudor, early Stuart period was very much about creating strange shapes on the human body and distorting the natural shape of the human body.
00:10:24.220and that was the same for men and women so men would often cinch in their waists or pad their
00:10:29.840trousers and their their doublets but there seems to definitely have been a very different style
00:10:36.140that the king was using because people were looking at him and going this just doesn't look
00:10:40.240right and so that's where people began to say well he is a very paranoid man and this is to
00:10:47.720sort of protect himself. So his approach to fashion was, if he was forced to consider fashion,
00:10:56.380was for the most practical purposes. He didn't care about being 100% in keeping with the trends
00:11:03.720of the time. He didn't care enough to make sure that his padding resembled the padding that other
00:11:08.860men were using and that it exclusively served the role that he needed it to.
00:11:15.060So you mentioned that people were talking about what he was wearing. And so for James as an
00:11:19.460example, but just for everyone, especially pre 20th century people you talk about in your book,
00:11:25.360what sorts of sources were you looking at to learn about? Because portraits tell one side
00:11:29.780of the story, but you've got people describing what they think about the monarch. So are you
00:11:34.060looking at letters and diaries? Yes, letters are very, very helpful. Dispatches from foreign
00:11:41.900ambassadors that's often the best way to learn about what people were wearing because you think
00:11:48.160in the court is the British Royal Court it's a closed circuit everybody's seeing the same sort
00:11:53.280of fashions every single day and so they might not necessarily note the details of it but in a
00:11:58.420time where each country is really developing very distinct styles and you really had to go out of
00:12:05.600your way if you wanted to tap into what other countries were doing these foreign ambassadors
00:12:10.640would come to James's court and they would see him and they would see the other courtiers and
00:12:16.760they would describe in a lot more detail how they looked how they dressed and how they behaved so
00:12:22.300that's the most valuable source for finding out how people viewed fashion at that time and then
00:12:29.860a little bit more slightly harder to dissect is looking at inventories and looking at specifically
00:12:36.080what these people owned and using that to validate or debunk what we see in portraits.
00:12:44.740Okay, so that's a beautiful, beautiful segue into the next topic that I wanted to talk to you about,
00:12:51.220which is James's wife, Anne of Denmark, because the way you describe the necklines of her dresses
00:12:56.520is not how she looks in her portraiture. No, and that's really interesting. So we have this
00:13:03.000frumpy dowdy very serious king but his wife was incredibly glamorous Anne of Denmark was a very
00:13:12.260theatrical woman she loved culture and the arts and she expressed that in her clothes she inherited
00:13:18.960a lot of clothes from Elizabeth I and she used them as much as she could turning them into
00:13:25.100costumes for court performances or adapting them to wear in her daily life and she took a lot of
00:13:32.660pleasure in taking part in this world of fashionable expression that her husband had
00:13:39.220shunned. And one of the things that people, especially foreign visitors, found particularly
00:13:44.120shocking about her clothes was her extremely low necklines. In fact, I think it was the
00:13:50.760Venetian ambassador reported back that the neckline of her dresses was so low they exposed0.94
00:13:56.700her chest bare down to the pit of her stomach. And we also know that it was very popular at
00:14:02.400at the British Royal Court to paint veins onto their chest and to tint their nipples darker.
00:14:09.460So the chest was a source of pride for women in the English court, but it was a bit surprising
00:14:16.140for foreign visitors. And it was really Anne who was spearheading this, probably because
00:14:22.480she enjoyed court masks so much, which were the most popular form of court entertainment.
00:14:28.520and you would often see quite revealing costumes there and she would take part in those masks and
00:14:35.060then she would also bring that a little bit of that back into her daily clothes but yeah you
00:14:40.620get a bit of a sense of that from her portraits they are quite busty but nothing like what we
00:14:45.360see described in these letters but if you go and have a look at the royal funeral effigies that are
00:14:54.520They're on display in Westminster Abbey, but you can see them very easily online.
00:15:00.700You will get a bit more of an understanding of how Anne wore her clothes.
00:15:04.900Most royals, when they died, would have a life-size, either wooden or wax sculpture of themselves placed by their tomb so people could come and pay their respects.
00:15:15.920And those effigies would be dressed in their actual clothes or replicas of their actual clothes.
00:15:22.280and Anne's is made of wood and the clothes no longer exist that that it was dressed in but
00:15:28.820you can see where they've painted the the neckline so it would be painted so only the areas that you
00:15:34.880could see under the clothes would be painted and you can see how low her neckline would have been
00:15:41.780and it cuts below below her nipple so you would have been able to see everything so you get a lot
00:15:48.280more an understanding of just how liberally exposed the chess was in that period okay and
00:15:56.060that also brings us to someone else I was really excited for that to see you mention in your book
00:16:00.680um which is Frances Howard that was one of the first episodes I ever did of my podcast0.84
00:16:05.380and what caught my attention about her as a sort of obscure courtier of the time was the neckline
00:16:11.840the first time I saw the portrait I was just like whoa who is this person and why is that
00:16:15.440her neckline on her portrait and then I read this
00:16:18.280story and read about the murder and everything. So, but then you talk also about the yellow roughs.0.98
00:16:24.520Can you, from your point of view as a fashion historian, Frances's story.
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00:19:32.160Yes, well, like I mentioned briefly earlier, James I, he tried to ban a lot of fashion trends and things that maybe annoyed him or didn't look too good for his reputation.0.68
00:19:46.820And one of those things was the Yellow Ruff because of its connection to this huge murderous plot, a massive court scandal that happened right under his nose.0.54
00:19:57.960And he was sort of being dragged along through it as collateral damage.0.73
00:20:03.960And the story, a very brief summary of the story was Frances Howard, who was a very young girl.
00:20:11.860She got married to her first husband when she was still a teenager.
00:20:16.240so she was incredibly young and the marriage wasn't particularly happy neither of them really
00:20:21.560wanted to be married to each other and so they eventually applied for an annulment and it was
00:20:26.800successful and during that time Francis had met and fell in love with another man and she decided
00:20:33.940this was going to be her shot at happiness so she begins to pursue this relationship with this new
00:20:40.000gentleman, the Earl of Somerset. And it's all going perfectly well until one of the Earl's
00:20:47.700friends, a man called Sir Thomas Overbury, begins to complain about Frances and speculate about her
00:20:54.720chastity and whether she is as virtuous as she's making herself out to be, and basically tries to
00:21:02.240sabotage the marriage going ahead, which Frances is livid about. And at first she tries to sort of0.97
00:21:09.640ruin Thomas Overby socially in order to get him out of the equation and stop him from
00:21:15.700influencing her prospective husband. But it doesn't work very well. And so she turns to
00:21:22.980murder as the solution. And she calls on quite a few different people to help her. And they try0.60
00:21:30.720quite a few different methods to try and poison Sir Thomas. But the really sad thing is, one of
00:21:38.440the women who was involved that Frances Howard roped in was her maidservant, Anne Turner.
00:21:45.340So Anne Turner was very well known in court for helping with affairs and giving scandalous1.00
00:21:54.780couples the opportunity to meet away from prying eyes. And so she was considered to be a very0.90
00:22:02.080trustworthy person, which is probably why Francis turned to her for help. And it was Anne Turner who
00:22:09.800was helping to smuggle poisonous tarts and treats and things to Sir Thomas Overby, which eventually
00:22:17.180contributed to his death. And so when this was taken to court, when Sir Thomas's death was
00:22:23.180finally investigated, Francis was found guilty, but because of her status, she was spared
00:22:29.120execution, but those who had helped her, who were not of such a high status, they were sentenced to
00:22:37.500death, including Anne Turner. One of the things that Anne was really famous for was creating the
00:22:45.660yellow starched ruff, where saffron would be added to the starching process, which is what gave
00:22:52.700ruffs their structure and allowed them to reach these epic proportions and stand upright.
00:22:59.120which was very popular at the time. And it was obviously very expensive. So it's considered to
00:23:04.140be a real luxury. And so lots of people at court wore Anne's yellow ruffs. And as the court case
00:23:13.020sort of gathered more and more attention, it became a real sensation. More and more people
00:23:18.720began to wear these yellow ruffs because they just enjoyed following this story. And this really
00:23:24.780annoyed King James because he saw it as sort of almost like a mockery. He had allowed this scandal
00:23:31.900to play out in his court, which he's supposed to control and be the guardian of. And he was being
00:23:39.020dragged through. He was being slandered for not upholding a good standard in his court. So he
00:23:45.900decided he wanted these banned. And when Anne Turner was executed, the executioner allegedly
00:23:54.320attended wearing a yellow starched ruff and yellow cuffs, potentially as a little bit of a dig at her
00:24:03.880and her character. There is a rumour that I've seen repeated in quite a few books that Anne herself
00:24:09.840wore a yellow ruff to her execution as like an act of defiance but a lot of primary sources
00:24:17.440say otherwise and say that she was very sort of solemn and very respectful and and sort of praying
00:24:26.220for her forgiveness so I don't think Anne was wearing them but I reckon the executioner probably
00:24:31.120was and was making a little bit of a dig at her but that did sort of quell the the craze after
00:24:38.160that. And it really represented the shortcomings of the court and the way that people viewed the
00:24:43.600court as being a little bit lecherous and seedy and contributed to the chaos that unfolded in the
00:24:50.660royal world during the Civil War. It added to this idea that maybe the monarchy is not what we need
00:24:58.460it to be. And maybe they're not the right people to be leading us. Well, and also just showing the
00:25:04.300fact that James tried to ban the yellow roughs and just no one paid attention kind of speaks to1.00
00:25:09.920like how much influence did he personally even have, you know? Yeah, because during the Tudor0.99
00:25:15.960times and even before that, royals would enact sumptuary laws, which were used to make sure that
00:25:23.020people weren't able to dress above their station, even if they could afford to do so. It was mainly
00:25:28.880to control merchant classes who were accumulating more money. And they weren't super strictly
00:25:36.120enforced, but they were followed. But it was actually James who got rid of these sumptuary
00:25:43.340laws when he came to power in England. So he was sort of commanding people to stop wearing things,
00:25:51.700but he never tried to enshrine it officially in law, which may have contributed to why people
00:25:56.580didn't always follow it he often would try to instruct churches to preach against things that
00:26:05.540he disagreed with he had lots of opinions about women's fashion at the time he didn't like how
00:26:10.660it was becoming increasingly more masculine so he instructed churches to preach against that but
00:26:17.120that didn't work either and it just became more and more masculine and formed the basis for
00:26:21.780the next stage of women's fashion so he you know as much as he didn't care about fashion
00:26:29.020he he did there was clearly some part of him who appreciated that for other people it has a lot of
00:26:37.060power and he still needs to try and and control the world of fashion in some way so the final
00:26:44.640thing that I couldn't miss the opportunity to discuss with you. So I haven't done an episode
00:26:51.140about Charles II, but I have talked about his mistresses a bit. And in so doing, I think I was
00:26:56.880told by somebody from the UK about a particular wig that Charles II allegedly had. And you talk
00:27:07.160about it in your book so can you explain what what that is yes so according to legend king
00:27:14.720charles ii had a wig made out of his mistress's pubic hairs and this isn't it's sort of a small
00:27:21.780little wig by any means at this time a wig meant sort of far below the shoulders big thick bushy
00:27:28.980lion's mane style wig so immediately that's quite a shocking image to picture in your head
00:27:36.940And the legend goes that when Charles was in exile during the interregnum, when the monarchy was briefly abolished and he began sleeping with lots of women, he would take clippings of their pubic hair and would have it made into a wig.
00:27:55.360And he would do this over a long period of time and eventually had this full head of hair.
00:28:01.440At the time, these wigs were called periwigs.
00:28:03.280And then the legend is that he gave it to one of his friends, the Earl of Moray, who passed it down through his family for generations, like a very strange relic, essentially.
00:28:15.980And one of the Earl's descendants used it to create a club, a drinking club in Scotland called the Whig Club.
00:28:25.980And drinking clubs were very, very popular, especially amongst upper class men.
00:28:31.760you would meet together you would drink you would socialize but because there were so many of them
00:28:37.140people often wanted to have a gimmick and the wig club it was an offshoot of a very infamous club0.72
00:28:44.700called the beggars benison and their niche was anything to do with sex and vulgarity they would0.89
00:28:51.920commission artworks and glassware and things like that that were made using in the shape of genitals
00:29:00.020and things like that so the wig club was a an offshoot of this and their gimmick was that they
00:29:06.360had this wig that was made of the pubic hairs of king charles ii's mistresses and they had some
00:29:13.400very strange rituals that they would do with this wig if you joined the club the ceremony that you
00:29:19.700had to complete was putting the wig on kissing it and vowing that you were going to add to the wig
00:29:27.040with pubic hair from your own romantic escapades and then downing a pint from a tankard shaped like1.00
00:29:35.760a penis. So it sounds all in all like a very fun club. And it went on for quite some time. It was1.00
00:29:42.340very famous. But eventually in the early 19th century, drinking clubs lost their popularity
00:29:47.820and the wig club disbanded. It gets a little bit murky after that. We don't know who had ownership
00:29:54.660of the wig. It was last seen in a lawyer's office in Edinburgh in the 1930s. But the wig has since
00:30:03.740gone missing. We have the box that it was in with the wig stand, a sort of carved head of Charles
00:30:10.280II that it would have sat on, along with lots of sources that mention the wig and talk about it
00:30:17.680it being real but that's that's all we really have left of it and now historians have had a lot
00:30:24.960of debate about we know the wig itself was real and existed but is the story that went along with
00:30:31.160it is that true um and it's quite possible that the story was fabricated by the wig club in order
00:30:38.880to give them a gimmick that had some kind of royal pedigree and charles ii obviously as a royal
00:30:47.420with a very famous reputation as a womanizer,
00:30:51.040he's the perfect person to try and tie yourself to.
00:30:54.980So we don't know 100% if that wig was really made
00:31:08.720so who he reigned in the early 19th century,
00:31:11.380when he took his famous trip to Scotland,
00:31:14.720he was either shown or learnt about the wig.
00:31:17.420And he decided, because he was a big fan of the Stuarts, he was going through a phase where he was just very obsessed with the fact that he had Scottish lineage and he was connected to the Stuarts and also Charles II, he decided he was going to make his own version of the wig.
00:31:35.100so he began a collection of pubic hair it's a very measly collection it does still exist it's
00:31:41.660at the university of saint andrews museum and it's a tiny little snuff box with a few ginger
00:31:47.800pubes inside and a little letter that says who it was collected by so even if the wig itself
00:31:56.220was not made of pubic hairs it people were obsessed with the idea that it was and they
00:32:03.140were willing to commit to believing it. And it's just an absolutely ridiculous story.0.96
00:32:12.000I love that you put this in your book. I love the, it's just, you know, because other parts0.65
00:32:17.400of your book, you're explaining like, oh, this is, you know, the monarchy and here's,
00:32:20.980I don't know, but it just, your book combines these really, and I guess like your TikTok does
00:32:25.440as well, just kind of like weird stories, but with history. And then, I don't know,
00:32:30.040that's the sort of story i don't think anyone who who hears it is going to ever forget0.79
00:32:33.780the wig club yeah and and i i love talking about when the royals have done scandalous things with
00:32:43.220their fashion or things that we because today the royals we see them as being this sort of paragon
00:32:48.660of conservative dressing and being very prim and proper but their ancestors definitely definitely
00:32:55.460weren't and one of my biggest pet peeves when it comes to fashion history is when people
00:33:02.120perpetuate the idea that we're on sort of a downward slope from this glorious past where
00:33:10.080everyone was incredibly sensible and had perfect etiquette and you know everyone fell in line and
00:33:18.700conformed with society and if they didn't they were sort of shoved to the sides or punished and
00:33:24.560now we're at this time where women can wear what they want and show off what they want and people0.95
00:33:29.060can play with their gender expression and oh it's terrible terrible because really that's not how
00:33:34.440how it's been that's not what fashion history looks like people have always enjoyed finding
00:33:40.460new ways to express themselves and they've always looked for ways to be shocking and provocative
00:33:46.260or to set new trends or to just follow trends and to stick to the status quo we haven't changed an
00:33:53.760awful lot since then and it's a really harmful rhetoric to suggest otherwise no exactly and the
00:34:00.360often when I'm doing my podcast I love when I find details about fashion or what people
00:34:05.760would wear because like you said it really humanizes the person in a way to just picture like
00:34:11.260especially a royal like they chose this outfit for a reason and isn't that interesting and what does
00:34:16.520that say about them and it makes them not seem just like oh a face on a coin or something it
00:34:21.660makes them seem like an interesting layered person yeah and i think the royals really throughout
00:34:27.500history everyone has put that kind of thought into the clothes that they buy and the clothes that
00:34:32.360they wear but the royals did it sort of to the absolute maximum because for most of history all
00:34:38.480eyes were on them so they knew that everything they wore had to send messages and it's very
00:34:43.420interesting to see how that plays out in the modern monarchy because they've almost backed
00:34:47.400themselves into a corner now where we're so used to reading very intricate messages in their
00:34:53.320clothing that they they can't afford to stop because if they do we're still going to keep
00:34:59.480looking for for meaning in what they're wearing and we might find meanings that they they don't
00:35:04.200intend and that could be detrimental to them in their public image so that's something that
00:35:09.860they've had to really hold on to yeah i'm not gonna there's not time to get into the modern0.96
00:35:16.740monarchy but i just wanted to say one thing that i sometimes think of when any of the the women of
00:35:21.960the royal family today wear anything you someone can be like oh this is an ode to princess diana
00:35:27.080because princess diana wore every color and pattern imaginable so it's like every every time
00:35:33.740any of them wear anything it's like oh well princess diana one time wore a blue dress with
00:35:37.300stripes it's like yes but i can't imagine that amount and also why would they want to evoke
00:35:45.080anyway so it's people read into everything yeah yeah so your book is coming out I mean at the
00:35:52.860time that this interview comes out which is in like two weeks it will be out people can get it
00:35:57.420the royal wardrobe yes it's so exciting I'm sure it'll be interesting too to see because it's been
00:36:04.280out in the UK but what difference or you know what sort of responses people are going to have
00:36:08.760in North America versus the UK and what. Yeah, I know a lot more of my followers are from North
00:36:15.260America. I think maybe it's because you guys have, you're a little bit further away from the royal
00:36:21.600family. You don't have to deal with the difficult side of them. You can just sort of enjoy from a
00:36:28.360distance. So maybe that's where the fascination comes from. And so people can keep up with you.
00:36:34.280I'm sure you're going to have different interviews and events and things.
00:36:38.100And you're posting all that on your website, I assume?
00:37:20.580So Rosie's book, The Royal Wardrobe is now available in North America, as well as in the UK.
00:37:27.240And you can get that from wherever you like to get your books from, from the library or from
00:37:31.780your local bookstore. If you want to buy a copy from bookshop.org, there's a link in the show
00:37:37.840notes. And when you buy using that link, then a little bit of money goes to help support me
00:37:41.860and this podcast. But again, so she's on TikTok at The Royal Wardrobe, and she's on Instagram at
00:37:47.740Rosie H. Hart. And I'll put those links in the show notes as well, because she's such a fun
00:37:53.240person to follow. You can see she recently-ish posted a video visiting the Francis Howard
00:37:59.020portrait in the National Portrait Gallery, which just warmed my heart because I love to see people
00:38:04.200talking about my beloved Francis Howard. You can also follow me on Instagram at royalhistorypod.
00:38:12.880And I'm also on TikTok and I have been back there and using it a bit more recently.
00:38:18.140So there I'm just at vulgarhistory. And also I have a website, which is vulgarhistory.com.
00:38:26.500There's a form there if you want to contact me, if you have thoughts about this podcast or suggestions of people you'd like to hear me talk about or to talk to if there's an author or historian who you think, or if you yourself are an author or historian, you can reach out using the contact form there or also email me at vulgarhistorypod at gmail.com.
00:38:42.920We have merch available at vulgarhistory.com slash store, which takes you to a TeePublic store.
00:38:48.940If you're outside of the US, shipping tends to be better on Redbubble, where we also have merch
00:38:53.860at vulgarhistory.redbubble.com. And I do also want to mention that transcripts of recent episodes
00:39:01.420are available also on my website, vulgarhistory.com. And those are done by Aveline Malek of The Wordery.
00:39:06.840Thank you so much, Aveline, for making this podcast more accessible to people who prefer
00:39:11.320to read text. And we also have a Patreon. So you can support the podcast on Patreon at
00:39:18.620patreon.com slash Anne Foster Writer. And so what that is, is it's a service where you pledge some
00:39:25.780monthly amount and then you get benefits in return. So if you support the podcast at $1 a
00:39:31.240month, you get early ad-free access to all episodes. If you pledge $5 or more a month,
00:39:37.840you get access to bonus episodes as well. So that's Vulgar Peace Theater, where I talk about
00:39:42.580discussions of costume dramas with Alison Epstein and Lana Wood Johnson. There's also bonus episodes,
00:39:48.420a lot of them are So This Asshole, where I talk about gross men from history, and also other0.81
00:39:53.880things that are of interest. Like for instance, on Patreon a bit ago, I did an episode where0.91
00:39:58.780Alison joined me and we just talked about bush rangers, which are Australian sort of bandits.