To the article, “Anecdotes of Fashions,” (see Vol.  I., p. 216) we may add, that in England a taste for splendid dress existed in the reign of Henry VII.; as is observable by the following description of Nicholas Lord Vaux.  “In the 17th of that reign, at the marriage of Prince Arthur, the brave young Vaux appeared in a gown of purple velvet, adorned with pieces of gold so thick, and massive, that, exclusive of the silk and furs, it was valued at a thousand pounds.  About his neck he wore a collar of SS, weighing eight hundred pounds in nobles.  In those days it not only required great bodily strength to support the weight of their cumbersome armour; their very luxury of apparel for the drawing-room would oppress a system of modern muscles.”

In the following reign, according to the monarch’s and Wolsey’s magnificent taste, their dress was, perhaps, more generally sumptuous.  We then find the following rich ornaments in vogue.  Shirts and shifts were embroidered with gold, and bordered with lace.  Strutt notices also perfumed gloves lined with white velvet, and splendidly worked with embroidery and gold buttons.  Not only gloves, but various other parts of their habits, were perfumed; shoes were made of Spanish perfumed skins.

Carriages were not then used;[17] so that lords would carry princesses on a pillion behind them, and in wet weather the ladies covered their heads with hoods of oil-cloth:  a custom that has been generally continued to the middle of the seventeenth century.  Coaches were introduced into England by Fitzalan Earl of Arundel, in 1580, and at first were only drawn by a pair of horses.  The favourite Buckingham, about 1619, began to have them drawn by six horses; and Wilson, in his life of James I., tells us this “was wondered at as a novelty, and imputed to him as a mastering pride.”  The same arbiter elegantiarum introduced sedan-chairs.  In France, Catherine of Medicis was the first who used a coach, which had leathern doors and curtains, instead of glass windows.  If the carriage of Henry IV. had had glass windows, this circumstance might have saved his life.  Carriages were so rare in the reign of this monarch, that in a letter to his minister Sully, he notices that having taken medicine that day, though he intended to have called on him, he was prevented because the queen had gone out with the carriage.  Even as late as in the reign of Louis XIV. the courtiers rode on horseback to their dinner parties, and wore their light boots and spurs.  Count Hamilton describes his boots of white Spanish leather, with gold spurs.

Saint Foix observes, that in 1658 there were only 310 coaches in Paris, and in 1758 there were more than 14,000.