I can’t resist a short postscript to the two previous posts on the subject: Hats and Mrs Thatcher, and Hats and procedure, posted about a year ago. Outside Parliament, William Brock was fined, presumably in the 1580s, for keeping his hat on; in his old age Sidney Wortley Montagu was described as ‘a large, rough-looking man, with a huge, flapped hat, seated majestically in his elbow chair, talking very loud and swearing boisterously at his servants’. Sir Francis Seymour in 1735 was alleged to have refused to take off his hat in front of the king. Thomas William (‘Billy’) Coke, MP for Derby 1818-26, was (wrongly) credited with the invention of the ‘billycock’ hat. Hylton Joliffe, MP for Petersfield for much of the period 1802-34, was famous as a sportsman and for the size and shape of his hat. Shortly after becoming Lord Cobham in 1749, Richard Grenville, at a reception given by his wife, spat for a bet into the hat of one of the guests, who made Lord Gob’em, as he was now called, write him a formal apology.
Hats, a postscript
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