Wilton, Mary Margaret Stanley Egerton; Wilton, Mary Margaret Stanley Egerton [Editor]: The art of needle-work from the earliest ages: including some notices of the ancient historical tapestries (London: Henry Colburn Publishers, 1841)

NEEDLEWORK IN COSTUME

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and painted like peacocks ; being more moved with
her most virtuous example than with all that ever
Paul or Peter wrote touching that matter. Yea, this
I know, that a great man’s daughter (Lady Jane
Grey) receiving from Lady Mary, before she was
queen, good apparel of tinsel, cloth of gold and velvet,
laid on with parchment-lace of gold, when she saw it,
said, ‘ What shall I do with it?’ ‘ Marry I’ said a
gentlewoman, ‘wear it.’ ‘Nay,’ quoth she, 4 that
were a shame, to follow my Lady Mary against
God’s Word, and leave my Lady Elizabeth, which
followeth God’s Word.’ And when all the ladies,
at the coming of the Scots’ Queen Dowager, Mary
of Guise, (she who visited England in Edward’s
time), went with their hair frownsed, curled, and
double-curled, she altered nothing, but kept her old
maidenly shame-facedness.”
And there is a print from a portrait of her when
young, in which the hair is without a single orna-
ment, and the whole dress remarkably simple.
Yet this is the lady whose passion for dress in
after life could not be sated ; to whom, or at least
before whom (and the Queen was not slow in ap-
propriating and resenting the hint*), Latimer,
Bishop of London, thought it necessary to preach
on the vanity of decking the body too finely; and
who finally left behind her a wardrobe containing
three thousand dresses. A modern fair one may
wonder how such a profusion of dresses could be
* “ Her Majesty told the ladies, that if the Bishop held more
discourse on such matters, she would fit him for heaven; but he
should walk thither without a staff, and leave his mantle behind
him.”
L