Of Beards and Men: The Revealing History of Facial Hair (19 page)

Archibald Montgomerie, the thirteenth Earl of Eglinton, was not a particularly unusual or gifted member of the Scottish nobility, but his rather ordinary opinions are what make his actions in 1838 so significant. Like many aristocrats of his day, he was alarmed by the pace of social and political change engulfing nineteenth-century Europe. When he announced plans to host a medieval tournament at his faux-gothic castle in Scotland, complete with pageantry, banquets, armor, jousts, and mock battles, he was doing little more than channeling his class resentment against modernity. A major reform of Parliament in 1832 had greatly reduced the power of the aristocracy and increased that of middle-class reformers. The tournament was intended to counter these developments and provide some cheer for a fading nobility. At a time when Sir Walter Scott’s 1819 novel,
Ivanhoe,
entranced readers across Europe with the romance of medieval chivalry, it only seemed right that the real-life aristocracy should reclaim its heritage.
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Dozens of aristocratic gentlemen from around Britain responded to Eglinton’s call to train with broadsword and lance. Eventually, thirteen fought in the tournament in August 1839, arrayed in what they believed to be authentic armor and weapons. These retro knights completed their costume with thoroughly unmodern full beards. On the appointed day, thousands of spectators from around the country—many also wearing period costumes—poured onto the castle grounds in excited anticipation. The festivities began with a grand parade of knights and retainers escorting the ‘‘queen of beauty,” Lady Seymour, to the lists. Unfortunately, it was at this moment that the skies opened, drenching participants and onlookers alike. A chilled and rapidly diminishing
crowd watched the desultory procession slosh through a sea of mud, modern umbrellas obscuring the medieval splendor. After a slow, muddy joust, the remaining festivities were canceled. It seemed a telling fiasco. The romantic excesses of Eglinton’s joust were just as foolish and irrelevant as leftist dreams on a Paris barricade. Even the young Queen Victoria laughed when she read about the ridiculous scene.
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Mere rain was not enough, however, to dampen ebullient conservative gentlemen like Lord Eglinton and his friends. When the weather cleared a few days later, the parade and joust were restaged for a smaller but drier crowd. Notable painters were present to capture sunlit images of chivalry reborn. Their glamorous work appeared in several commemorative books, which failed to mention the earlier mud. The lasting importance of the tournament lay in the publication of dreamy images of shimmering, bearded knights fighting for age-old virtues of loyalty, honor, and courage. Paintings of the Eglinton tournament contributed to a growing cavalcade of bearded heroism adorning the halls of the great country houses, as well as the houses of Parliament.

Most of the gentlemen who bought suits of armor and grew beards for the Eglinton tournament soon shaved them off again. It was playacting, after all. But another sort of aristocratic facial hair had far more staying power: the cavalry mustache. Even before Eglinton staged his tournament, the mustache had become the essential accouterment of martial panache. Over time, the style filtered upward into the European aristocracy, and downward into the rank and file of Europe’s armies. Prince Albert, the consort of Queen Victoria, modeled a notable example of the military-aristocratic mustache. Good thing too, for it helped him win the queen’s heart.

It was like a fairy tale. Long, long ago, the young princess of a great kingdom resentfully turned away old and dull suitors in hopes that a handsome prince would appear to sweep her off her feet. She was Princess Victoria of Great Britain, who became Queen Victoria at age eighteen in 1837. She resisted pressures to marry, insisting that, like Queen Elizabeth of old, she would remain single for the foreseeable future.

Victoria’s great vulnerability, however, was her youth and inexperience. After several public relations blunders, she had managed to make herself unpopular with both officialdom and the public. One of these faux pas was to publicly accuse a lady of her court of adultery, when in fact the unfortunate woman was bloated, not by pregnancy, but by a malignant tumor that soon killed her. Victoria was not politically astute and too often proved petty and impetuous. To those around her, and to her subjects at large, she seemed badly in need of a guiding hand.

The man favored by her relatives for this role was Albert, her slightly younger cousin. The son of a German duke, he was amiable, reliable, studious, and, most helpfully, amenable to the prospect of marrying a foreign cousin he barely knew. Victoria was unconvinced. Though she agreed, under pressure, to host Albert and his elder brother at Windsor Castle in the fall of 1839, she warned her pushy relatives that she would not commit to marrying anyone for at least two or three more years. She had met Albert once several years earlier, and liked him well enough, but now she was queen, and she feared losing the power of initiative that she so thoroughly enjoyed.

All this changed suddenly when, on a bright fall evening, Albert was ushered into the castle. Victoria was smitten. Writing in her journal that first night, she gushed that Albert was “quite charming, and so excessively handsome, such beautiful blue eyes, and exquisite nose, and
such a pretty mouth with delicate moustachios and slight but very light whiskers; a beautiful figure, broad in the shoulders and a fine waist; my heart is quite going . . . “
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A few days after this breathless confession, she sketched a portrait of Albert that captured her adoration. To the queen, her mustachioed and whiskered prince was the very image of manly perfection. Abandoning her former self-control, she proposed to Albert and he accepted.

It is no exaggeration to say that the marriage of Victoria and Albert was one of the more important events in European history. Albert proved to be a steady and wise counselor. Together, Victoria and Albert established a tone of sobriety and earnestness suitable to their pious and industrious subjects, and Albert’s attention to technology and industry helped to keep the monarchy relevant in modern times. They raised a large family, and their descendants sat on thrones throughout Europe. The last German kaiser and the last empress of Russia were their grandchildren. None of this great legacy was obvious at the start, of course. Victoria was still unpopular when she married in 1840, and so was her choice of husband. To many of her subjects, Albert was yet another foreign fortune-seeker insinuating himself at the top of society in order to live sumptuously at Britain’s expense. The occasional rough treatment the new couple received in the press is a reminder that the vitriol of today’s tabloids is nothing new. One broadsheet circulating in the streets before the wedding rhymed:

A sure sign of Albert’s un-English ways was his mustache, which was like a foreign language to the public. He did not look like an English aristocrat, banker, or businessman, who might wear prominent side-whiskers but nothing more. Whether or not Albert’s continental style would find favor on the imperial isle, only time would tell.

The new Prince Consort’s mustache may have seemed foreign, but it was not unprecedented in Britain. Elite cavalry units—the Horse
Guards, Life Guards, and Tenth Royal Hussars—all sported the fur caps and long black mustaches typical of hussar cavalry units throughout Europe. It is this military mustache tradition that was the ultimate inspiration of the German aristocratic mustache, and thus Albert’s hairstyle. The original hussars were Hungarian cavalry units of the seventeenth century, whose fearsome looks and bold tactics were widely imitated by other European armies. The Napoleonic Wars helped spread the hussar style to Western Europe and to western art. One of the best-known renderings of hussar bravado is Theodore Gericault’s painting
An Officer of the Imperial Horse Guards Charging
(
figure 8.5
). Hair is key to the heroism and dash of this Napoleonic officer. There is the horse’s mane and tail, the leopard-pelt saddle, the fur hat, and, of course, the fearsome mustache.

For members of regiments that adopted the hussar style, a dark upper lip was absolutely required. In 1806, the hussar name and uniform were introduced into Britain when the Tenth Light Dragoons, at the Prince of Wales’s command, became the Tenth Royal Hussars. With this name change came new uniforms and mandatory mustaches.
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Before long, the old look seemed mundane, and other military units adopted elements of the new mode. A general order in 1830 attempted to halt this proliferation and limit mustaches to Life Guards, Horse Guards, and Hussars, so that these elite forces might be appropriately distinguished. Demand was so great, however, that military commanders soon buckled. The same was true in France, where in 1833 permission was granted for all French soldiers to wear mustaches.
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By midcentury, virtually all cavalrymen in Europe, and most regular army officers, exhibited the fierce face of a Hungarian raider.
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The justification for this trend was the idea that facial hair, along with grandiose uniforms, struck fear into the hearts of enemies, and thus was a sort of weapon.
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The cavalry, with its speed and noise, was the original vehicle of “shock and awe” tactics, and an impressive get-up was deemed critical to its arsenal. One way mustaches helped, no doubt, was by making men appear older than they really were. Many cavalrymen too young to grow impressive facial hair faked it. Jean-Baptiste Marbot, who was a seventeen-year-old French hussar, recounts in his memoirs that he used black wax to paint on the required look.
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This was not uncommon. An anonymous writer to the
Times
of London complained in 1828 about the cost in time and money of procuring
and maintaining fake mustaches for Life Guardsmen. All mustaches had to be a uniform black color, so men of any other coloring, if they could grow one at all, had to use dye.
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Though Prince Albert’s mustache was uncommon in the British nobility, it granted him an appropriately military and conservative aspect. It also imparted a manly charm and flair that could cause a
young queen to take leave of her senses. Before she met Albert, Victoria had laughed at the romantic follies of the Eglinton tournament, but now her attitude shifted. Just three years after Eglinton, the Queen hosted a rare fancy-dress ball at Buckingham Palace for two thousand guests. The theme was chivalry, and Albert and Victoria appeared in the guise of the medieval king Edward III and Queen Philippa. The
Times
of London declared it one of the most magnificent royal entertainments since the seventeenth century.
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Soon afterword, Albert gave his wife for her birthday a small portrait of himself in armor, painted by Robert Thorburn, which became her favorite likeness of her husband. In her own words, it gave Albert “the gravest manliest look.”
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The medieval Albert was a charming fantasy. With his tall bearing, mustache, and whiskers, he carried it off well. The trick to being a modern prince, it would seem, was to embrace technology, innovation, and change, but to look medieval.

In spite of Albert’s growing popularity, and the widespread adoption of mustaches by military officers throughout Europe, there was a concerted effort in every European country to limit mustaches to the military. Officers and aristocrats hoped to reserve the mustache as a distinctive mark of their class. Meanwhile, guardians of middle-class respectability denounced it as arrogant and rebellious on civilian men. When young clerks in Paris presumed in 1817 to sport mustaches and the
mouche
(a small tuft of hair on the chin), they faced widespread derision in the press and on the vaudeville stage.
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Some firms positively outlawed such displays. In 1818, an English commentator in a respectable journal complained that “the dandyism of the moustache [is] incongruous and coxcombish when pasted on the English countenance.”
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In Spain, the mustache was reserved for military men, and even ordinary soldiers were denied the right to wear them before 1845.
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The king of Bavaria published an ordinance in 1838 forbidding civilians to wear mustaches, under threat of arrest and forcible shaving.
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Outside the regimented life of military men, hair on the lip retained the taint of foolish arrogance, dandyism, or worse. In Prussia in 1840, nineteen-year-old Friedrich Engels, the future collaborator with communist theorist Karl Marx, enjoyed a special thrill in growing a mustache while a university student. He gloried in its power to shock respectable society, including his own parents. For a time he deliberated
about making things worse by adding a Renaissance-style romantic beard, but he decided against it. He enticed his friends “with the courage to defy philistinism and grow a mustache” to sign a pledge to do so in time for a mustache celebration party.
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He felt very daring in all this, and he liked the attention it brought him. Engels never turned back from this first rebellion against middle-class respectability, later becoming the fully bearded communist icon of history. Marx himself followed a similar path, making good use of his immense black beard as a symbol of defiance.

By the 1840s, bearded and mustachioed liberals and socialists throughout Europe were facing off against the traditional order. In France, there was alarm about the spread of facial hair and rebellion among the working classes. A Paris police report in 1840 lamented that “we see with pain many individuals belonging to the working class, in blouses, with beard and moustache, apparently spending more time on politics than their labours, reading republican newspapers and detestable pamphlets published for distribution among them so as to lead them astray and gradually push them in the most deplorable direction.”
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Britain witnessed the fearful appearance of insurrectionary hair among its two most disgruntled populations: the industrial working class and the Irish. Daniel O’Connell, the leader of the campaign for Irish self-government, got a big laugh in 1843 when he described to one of his audiences a letter he received from Galway (western Ireland), “wherein police had orders to watch the arrival of any ship, coach, car or foreign looking personage in that town, particularly any who wore mustachios.” The crowd roared when O’Connell cast a significant glance at his son Daniel, who sported a “very well-curled and promising moustache of a sanguinary and
farouche
character.”
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