Some years ago I happened to be at that most picturesque old city of WÜrzburg on a showery May market-day. The window of my hotel commanded the square. The moment that the first sprinkle came over the busy scene of market women and chafferers, the whole square suddenly flowered like a vast garden. Every woman at her stall expanded an enormous umbrella, and these umbrellas were of every dye—crimson, blue, green, chocolate, and—yes, there was even one of marigold yellow, under which the huckstress crouched as beneath a mighty inverted eschscholtzia. Nor were these umbrellas all selfs, as horticulturists describe monotoned pansies; for some were surrounded with a perfect rainbow of coloured lines as a border; and others were wreathed about with a pattern of many-hued flowers. Presently, out came the May sun, and, presto, every umbrella was closed and folded and laid aside: the flower garden had resolved itself into a swarm of busy marketers.

On reaching Innsbruck, I lighted on an umbrella-maker’s shop under one of the arcades near the Golden Roof of Frederick with the Empty Pockets. I saw suspended before the vault in which the man dwelt or did business, umbrellas the exact reproductions of what I had seen at WÜrzburg—red, green, brown, blue, even white—lined with pink, like mushrooms: and for the sum of about fifteen shillings I became the happy possessor of one of these articles, which I proceed to describe. The covering was of a brilliant red, and imprinted round it was a wreath of flowers and foliage, white, yellow, blue, and green; around the ferule also was a smaller wreath similar in colour and character. This cover was stretched on canes, such canes as are well known in schools; and the canes were distended by twisted brass strainers, rising out of a sliding tube of elaborately hammered brass, through which passed the stick of the umbrella. The whole, when expanded, measured nearly five feet, and was not extraordinarily heavy, nothing like the weight of a gig-umbrella. Walking under it was like walking about in a tent, taking the tent with one; and walking under it in the rain filled one with sanguine hopes that the day was about to mend, so surrounded was one with a warm and cheerful glow. On a hot climb over a pass, when I spread this shelter above my head against the sun, I felt that I must appear to the shepherds on the high pastures like a migratory Alpine rose.

I met with no inconvenience whatever from my umbrella till I reached Heidelberg on my way home, and innocently walked with it under my arm in the Castle gardens on Sunday afternoon. Then I found that it provoked attention and excited astonishment. Such an umbrella had its social level, and that level was the market-place, not the Castle gardens; it was sufferable as spread over an old woman vending sauerkraut, but not as carried furled in the hand of a respectably dressed gentleman. So much comment did my umbrella occasion that it annoyed me, spoiled the pleasure of my walk, and I accepted the offer of a friend to relieve me of it. He took my umbrella and thrust it up his back under his coat, and with crossed arms to the rear, hugged it to his spine. But even so it was not to escape observation, for the black handle, crooked, appeared below his coat, a fact to which I was aroused as I dropped behind my friend, by the exclamations of a nursemaid: “Ach Tausend! the Herr has a curly tail!” and then of a Professor, who, beckoning some students to him, said: “Let us catch him—the Missing Link, homo caudatus.”

On reaching England, the great scarlet-crimson (it was neither exactly one nor exactly the other) umbrella was consigned to the stand in the hall. Those were not the days when ladies spread red parasols above their bonnets, and had sunshades to match their gowns: in those days all parasols were brown or black; consequently the innovation of a red umbrella would be too great, too startling for me to attempt. But one morning—it was that on which the Duke and Duchess of Edinburgh made their entry into London after their marriage—I started early to drive to the station and go to town and join the sightseers. It may be in the recollection of those who were out that day that snow fell. Early in the morning in the country there was a good deal of snow, so much, that I thought I might safely take my Tyrolese umbrella to cover me in my gig. I intended to furl it before I reached the station and such places where men do congregate. It was remarkable that although the snow spoiled the picturesque effect of the procession in Regent’s Street by making the redcoats draw on their overcoats, it induced me to unfurl my marvellous red travelling tent—which is an instance, may be, of the compensation there is in nature.

As I drove along, I chanced on an umbrella-maker, trudging through the snow, head down, with a bundle of his manufacture under his arm. He neither saw nor heard the dogcart till it was close on him, when the driver shouted to him to stand aside. Then he started back, looked up, and I saw the change of expression in the man’s face, as his eyes took in the apparition above him of the expanded red umbrella, flower-wreathed and brass-mounted. The face had been inanimate; then, a wild enthusiasm or astonishment kindled it, and down into the snow at his feet fell the umbrellas he was carrying. I drove on, but looked back at intervals, and as long as he was in sight, I saw him standing in the road, with eyes and mouth open, hands expanded and every finger distended, and his umbrellas, uncollected, scattered about him in the snow.

These reminiscences of my remarkable umbrella lead me to say something of umbrellas in general.

I hardly think that the true origin, development, and, shall I say, degradation of the umbrella, is generally known. Yet it deserves to be known, for it supplies a graphic and striking condensation of vast social changes.

The umbrella comes to us from the East, from nations living under a burning sun, to whom shade is therefore agreeable. We can understand how the giving of shade came easily to be regarded as a symbol of majesty. In the apocryphal book of Baruch occurs the passage, “We shall live under the shadow of Nebucodonosor, king of Babylon, and under the shadow of Balthasar, his son.” Primitively, kings gave audience and delivered judgment seated under trees, not only because of the comfort of the shade, but also because of the symbolism. So, when Ethelbert, King of Kent, received St. Augustine, he was seated under an oak; and Wagner is quite right when, in the opening scene in Lohengrin, he makes King Pepin hold his court enthroned under a tree.

But when sovereigns took to receiving suitors and dispensing justice indoors, they transferred with them to within the symbol of the tree. Phylarchus, in describing the luxury of Alexander, says that the Persian kings gave audience under plane trees or vines made of gold and hung with emeralds, but that the magnificence of the throne of Alexander surpassed theirs. Curtius relates how the kings of India had golden vines erected in their judgment halls so as to overspread their thrones. The throne of Cyrus was over-canopied by a golden vine of seven branches. Firdusi describes a similar throne-tree at the festival given by Kai Khosru:

From the East, the idea or fashion was transplanted to Byzantium, and the emperors there had similar trees erected above their thrones overshadowing them. William of Rubruquis describes a great silver tree in the Palace of the Khan of the Tartars, in 1253, of which leaves and fruit, as well as branches, were of silver. But kings went about, and wherever they went their majesty surrounded them; and consequently, with the double motive of comfort and of symbolism, the umbrella was invented as a portable canopy or tree over the head of the sovereign.

The Greeks noticed and disapproved of the use of the umbrella.[23] Xenophon says that the Persians were so effeminate that they could not content themselves in summer with the shade afforded by trees and rocks, but that they employed portable contrivances for producing artificial shade. But when he says this, he most certainly refers to the kings, for they alone had the right to use umbrellas.

On Assyrian and Persepolitan reliefs we have an eunuch behind the sovereign holding an umbrella over him when walking, or when riding in his chariot, or when seated; on a bas-relief of Assur-bani-pal, however, the king is figured reclining under an overshadowing vine, which is probably artificial. Firdusi says of Minutscher: “A silken umbrella afforded shade to his head.”

M. de la LoubiÈre, envoy extraordinary from the French King in 1687 and 1688 to the King of Siam, says in his narrative that the use of the umbrella was granted by the sovereign to certain highly honoured subjects. An umbrella with several rings of very wide expansion was the prerogative of the king alone, but to certain nobles was granted by princely condescension the right to have their heads and faces screened from the sun by smaller shades. In his quaint old French, M. de la LoubiÈre says that in the audience-chamber of the king:—“Pour tout meuble il n’y a que trois para-sols, un devant la fenÊtre, Á neuf ronds, et deux Á sept ronds aux deux cÔtÉz de la fenÊtre. Le para-sol est en ce Pais lÀ, ce que le Dais est en celui-ci”—that is to say, a mark of the highest power.

The Mahratta princes had the title of “Lords of the Umbrella.” The chÀta of these princes is large and heavy, and requires a special attendant to hold it, in whose custody this symbol of sovereignty reposes.

In Ava it seems to have been part of the royal title that the sovereign was “King of the White Elephant and Lord of Twenty-four Umbrellas.” In 1855 the King of Burmah directed a letter to the Marquis of Dalhousie in which he styles himself “His glorious and most excellent Majesty, reigning over the umbrella-wearing princes of the East.”

Among the Arabs the umbrella is a mark of distinction. Niebuhr says that it is a privilege confined to princes of the blood to use an umbrella.[24]

In the East the umbrella has come to be regarded as connected with royalty as much as the crown and the throne; and among the Buddhists it has remained so. Four feet from the throne of the Great Mogul, as described by Tavernier, were two spread umbrellas of red velvet fringed with pearls, the sticks of which were wreathed with pearls. Du Halde says that in the Imperial palace at Pekin there were umbrellas always ready for the Emperor; and when he rode out, a canopy was borne on two sticks over his head to shade him and his horse. Of Sultan Mohammed Aladdin we are told that he adopted insignia of majesty hitherto used in India and Persia and unknown in Islam; among these was a canopy or umbrella held over his head when he went abroad. Of one Sultan’s umbrella we are told that it was of yellow embroidered with gold and surmounted by a silver dove.

But as the umbrella was the symbol of majesty held over the king’s head, it behoved the royal palace to imitate the same, and by its structure show to all that it was the seat of majesty. Thus came into use the cupola or dome, and what was given to the king’s house was given also to the temples. In Perret and Chapui’s conjectural reconstruction of the temple of Belus, near Babylon, above the seven stages of the mighty pyramid, is the shrine of the god surmounted by a dome. In all likelihood this really was the apex of the pyramid; the dome was a structural umbrella held over the supreme god.

The great hall of audience of the Byzantine emperors was surmounted by a cupola. Two Councils of the Church, in 680 and 692, were held in it, and obtained their designation in Trullo from this fact. From the royal palace the cupola passed to the church, as the crown of the House of the King of Kings; and a dome was erected over the church of the Holy Sepulchre by Constantine, and over the church of the Eternal Wisdom by Justinian. But it had already been employed as the crown of a temple, not only in the Pantheon at Rome, but in the Tholos, the temple of Marnas or Dagon at Gaza.

The great dome or umbrella by no means excluded the lesser one beneath it, and kings’ thrones under cupolas were also over-canopied by structures of wood, or marble, or metal. Such a baldacchino is seen over the sun-god in a bas-relief at Sippar. It became common, and when of wood or metal, was sculptured, or when of textile work, was embroidered with leaf and flower-work, retaining a reminiscence of the original tree beneath which the king sat and held court. It also passed to the church, and became a subsidiary umbrella over the altar. Paul the Silentiary in the sixth century describes that in the Church of St. Sophia at Constantinople as a dome resting on four silver pillars. Constantine erected much the same sort of domed covering above the tomb of the Apostles in Rome.

In the catacombs, the vaulted chapels and the over-arched recessed tombs are all attributable to the same idea; nor has the original notion been lost in them, for they are frescoed over with vines, bays, and other foliage. The most beautiful instance is also the earliest, the squire crypt in the cemetery of PrÆtextatus, which dates from the second century. Here the entire vault is covered with trailing tendrils and leaves with birds perched on them. A couple of centuries later the original idea was gone, and we find, instead of a growing tree, only bunches and sprigs of flowers.

So!—the umbrellas that pass in the rain under the shadow of the mighty dome of St. Paul’s are its poor relations, and my flower-wreathed regenschirm preserves in its leafage a reminiscence of the original tree; and the old German woman sits and vends carrots under what was once the prerogative of the sovereign. Is this not a token that sovereignty has passed from the despot to the democracy?[25]