Was Queen Elizabeth I Vain? The Bizarre Blue Starch Fashion Law That Says She Was
Tudor Fashion Police Alert: The Color That Could Land You in Prison
In 1595, Queen Elizabeth I issued one of the strangest fashion proclamations in Tudor England: she banned ruffs tinted with blue starch, and threatened anyone who violated the order with prison.
Yes, imprisonment. For wearing a ruff that was tinted blue.
This bizarre Elizabethan fashion law was one of a number of royal sumptuary laws controlling what people wore, how they displayed wealth, and where they stood in the Elizabethan pecking order. But the blue starch proclamation presents an Elizabethan secret more personal to Elizabeth herself: Why did Elizabeth care?
In Elizabethan England, the Queen regulated religion. She regulated speech about succession. She regulated foreign policy and who had her permission to go abroad for how long.
And apparently, she also regulated what your laundress used to stiffen your enormous collar.
⚔️ Queen Elizabeth I’s Fashion Police Declare War on Blue Starch
Here is the puzzling gem of a proclamation, from May of 1595:
“Her Majesty’s pleasure is that no blue starch shall be used or worn by any of her Majesty’s subjects whatsoever.”
Clear enough, especially the “whatsoever.” But, what exactly was England doing that required a royal crackdown on blue starch?
Quite a lot, apparently.
On May 28, 1595, Sir John Spencer, a wealthy clothworker, then serving as Lord Mayor of London, issued orders to the city’s aldermen enforcing the Queen’s “no blue starch” command. Most of her sartorial laws, also known as sumptuary laws, dictated what fabrics and colors individuals could wear based on their social status. But this went further. It applied to everyone who was a subject: duchesses (there were no dukes in 1595) to commoners. That meant everyone, but the Queen herself.
This was no casual fashion advice whispered about court.
Officials were ordered to send representatives to every household in their ward to inform residents that blue starch was now forbidden.
Not enough?
Parsons and ministers were also instructed to announce the ban from their pulpits. Imagine going to church expecting a sermon about salvation and hearing:
"Also, by order of Her Majesty, thy collars and cuffs shall no longer be blue."
And when reports reached the Queen that some rebellious souls continued starching their ruffs in the forbidden shade?
She escalated the battle.
In June 1595, Elizabeth made it clear that anyone caught using blue starch on any visible linen could be imprisoned.
Yes. Prison. For aggressively fashionable neckwear.
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😱 The Dangerous Allure of the Blue Ruff
If you think this sounds absurd, Elizabethan fashion had many such moments. From squeezing farthingales through tight doorways to alarming beauty practices, you can explore some of the era’s greatest sartorial crimes in Five Pieces of Elizabethan Ladies' Court Fashion We're Secretly Glad to Leave Behind!.
For some surprisingly elegant menswear that will have the ladies fanning themselves, try Five Swoon-Worthy Pieces of Elizabethan Men's Fashion We Wish We Could Revive.
Fashionable Elizabethans had begun tinting starch pale blue using smalt, a cobalt-based pigment made from ground blue glass. The starch, sometimes mixed with egg whites, was worked into elaborate pleated collars known as goffered ruffs or bands.
The result? Sharp architectural pleats with a faint blue tint that made skin appear paler and smoother.
And therein may have been the peculiarly “Elizabethan” problem.
At court, youth, beauty, and complexion were currency. And who was the person always expecting to hear that she was the most youthful and radiant at court?
(Ahem.) Guess who.
By 1595, the sixty-two-year-old Queen had spent decades constructing her own carefully managed visual and virginal mythology, including covering the scars on her face left by the smallpox that had almost killed her decades before. She had relied heavily for years on cosmetics that damaged her skin further.
Poets and courtiers continually hailed her as the fairest woman alive, as Venus, the goddess of beauty, as the moon goddess Cynthia come to earth. But if younger and more attractive faces at court could also use blue-tinted ruffs to make their complexions appear even brighter and fairer, where did that leave her?
Oh, Vanity, thy name is Elizabeth Tudor!
Only Shakespeare seemed willing to puncture his queen’s bubble of eternal youth and beauty when he wrote Sonnet 130:
My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips' red;
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
Although the Sonnet wasn’t published until after her death, image control feels very Elizabethan, doesn’t it?
📜 It Wasn’t Just a War on Blue
Elizabeth also frowned on other suspicious colored starches, although perhaps she did not turn as green with envy over them.
Yellow starch raised eyebrows because it was associated with flashy foreign fashions and later became notorious. Anne Turner, a Jacobean widow helped popularize yellow starched ruffs before she was executed in the sensational poisoning scandal surrounding Sir Thomas Overbury in 1615. In a final flourish of theatrical justice, she was reportedly hanged wearing the very yellow ruff she had helped make fashionable.
Pink and mauve starch intimated that you were trying excessively hard in a society where clothing was tied to rank, and color was tied to luxury and ambition. Whatever you wore, it announced who you were in the Elizabethan pecking order, provided that you were never grander, and certainly not younger-looking, than the Queen of England.
🗝️ The Real Elizabethan Secret
This seemingly absurd proclamation really wasn’t only about one woman’s vanity. It was about control. The Tudor state repeatedly inserted itself into private life through:
what people could wear
what fabrics they could buy
what colors they could display
what religion they could practice
what books they could read
whom they could marry
and occasionally, apparently, what they could do to their collars
It was the same government that used . . .
Massive spy and surveillance networks that sometimes caught and sometimes missed the plots hatching right under the Queen’s nose:
Folded, coded, and expertly sealed letters designed to keep other peoples’ noses out of private correspondence:
And court life as perpetual theatrical performance, even when life-and-death foreign policy was on the line:
But the ridiculous disproportion between crime and punishment here tells us something else. It tells us Elizabeth was vain and jealous enough to want to control how attractive those around her looked when compared to herself.
What endless flattery can do to a woman’s ego, especially if she is Queen of England!
🤿 For the Deeper Dive into More Secrets About Good Queen Bess
Think declaring using blue starch criminal activity was surprising? You might enjoy a few more glimpses behind the magnificent facade of Gloriana:
Want to discover the next Elizabethan Secret about Good Queen Bess?
