A plain but rich looking dress. The peculiar head-dress has a pad of silk in front to hold it from the forehead. The half-sleeves are well shown.] The shoes were very broad, and were sometimes stuffed into a mound at the toes, were sewn with precious stones, and, also, were cut and puffed with silk. [Illustration: {A man of the time of Henry VIII.}] The little flat cap will be seen in all its varieties in the drawings. The Irish were forbidden by law to wear a shirt, smock, kerchor, bendel, neckerchor, mocket (a handkerchor), or linen cap coloured or dyed with saffron; or to wear in shirts or smocks above seven yards of cloth. To wear black genet you must be royal; to wear sable you must rank above a viscount; to wear marten or velvet trimming you must be worth over two hundred marks a year. Short hair came into fashion about 1521. [Illustration: {Three men of the time of Henry VIII. (torso only); three types of shoe; two types of boot; a cod-piece}] So well known is the story of Sir Philip Calthrop and John Drakes the shoemaker of Norwich, who tried to ape the fashion, that I must here allude to this ancestor of mine who was the first of the dandies of note, among persons not of the royal blood. The story itself, retold in every history of costume, is to this effect: Drakes, the shoemaker, seeing that the county talked of Sir Philip's clothes, ordered a gown from the same tailor. This reached the ears of Sir Philip, who then ordered his gown to be cut as full of slashes as the shears could make it. The ruin of cloth so staggered the shoemaker that he vowed to keep to his own humble fashion in future. No doubt Sir Philip's slashes were cunningly embroidered round, and the gown made rich and sparkling with the device of seed pearls so much in use. This man's son, also Sir Philip, married Amy, daughter of Sir William Boleyn, of Blickling, Norfolk. She was aunt to Queen Anne Boleyn. THE WOMEN One cannot call to mind pictures of this time without, in the first instance, seeing the form of Henry rise up sharply before us followed by his company of wives. The fat, uxorious giant comes straight to the front of the picture, he dominates the age pictorially; and, as a fitting background, one sees the six women who were sacrificed on the political altar to pander to his vanity. Katherine of Aragon--the fine and noble lady--a tool of political desires, cast off after Henry had searched his precious conscience, after eighteen years of married life, to find that he had scruples as to the spirituality of the marriage. Anne Boleyn, tainted with the life of the Court, a pitiful figure in spite of all her odious crimes; how often must a ghost, in a black satin nightdress edged with black velvet, have haunted the royal dreams. And the rest of them, clustered round the vain king, while in the background the great figures of the time loom hugely as they play with the crowned puppets.