“[Oliver] Cromwell famously preferred ‘a plain russet-coated captain that knows what he fights for, and loves what he knows, than that which you call a gentleman and is nothing else’; he put his soldiers into russet, a sturdy greyish or reddish-brown woolen cloth (the original homespun), which became a metaphor for godly simplicity, in the same way that wool and cotton were to be linked to “democracy” during the French Revolution.”

—Aileen Ribeiro, Fashion and Fiction: Dress in Art and Literature in Stuart England, 2005.