Tag Archives: Tudors

October 24, 2021

Teaching with Holbein

By daseger

A new exhibition featuring the works of Hans Holbein the Younger opened at the J. Paul Getty Museum this week, and it will be traveling to the Morgan Library and Museum after the new year. It happens that this very week Holbein was very much on my mind: various of his works had popped up, as they always do, in several of my classes, and he appears in reference and image in the proofs for my forthcoming book as well. I have always depended on Holbein: his images have enabled me to illustrate so many aspects and avenues of my teaching fields, from the Renaissance to the Reformation to the Scientific Revolution and everything in between. His 1533 masterpiece The Ambassadors is a visual key to all three topics, and I generally devote an entire class to it.

National Gallery, London.

I’m not that special: anyone armed with the essential knowledge of the era’s cultural history could turn The Ambassadors into a class: there’s just so much in it and to it! This particular painting is not included in the Getty exhibition, but each and every Holbein painting has a tale to tell, even if it’s just a singular portrait with (deceptively) little embellishment. I suppose Holbein is best known for his paintings of the Tudor Court, and the exhibition includes the portraits of Thomas Cromwell and Richard Southwell as well as one of my favorites, that of Mary, Lady Guildford, the wife of Henry VIII’s comptroller, Sir Henry Guildford. Holbein was a great painter of women in general, and “capturing their character” (the subtitle of the exhibition) in particular, but I do wonder why he chose the stern Lady Guildford rather than the more amused one captured in one of the studies for the portrait. In either case, you can easily see that both Lady Guildfords are far from the serene Renaissance ladies we generally see: they are feisty and fun.

Frick Collection, St. Louis Art Museum and Kunstmuseum Basel; The Getty Exhibition.

Of course, students love the gossipy history of Henry VIII and his six wives, of which at least two were painted by Holbein. Students love anecdotes, and Holbein allows you to illustrate them. But you’ve got to be careful: an anecdote can be a dangerous thing, remembered better than the larger issue/trend/event it is designed to illustrate. A case in point is the “story” behind Holbein’s portrait of Anne of Cleves, painted when he was dispatched to Germany to render a likeness as Henry was considering the Protestant princess for his fourth bride in 1539. The story goes that Holbein was so charmed by Anne that he made her more attractive than she really was, thereby convincing Henry to go along with the marriage by proxy only to declare “I like her not!” and seek an annulment the moment he laid eyes on her in England. I don’t think Holbein had time to be charmed by Anne, and we can see that he lavished more attention on her dress than her face in the portrait. In any case, Thomas Cromwell the courtier, diplomat, and by now manifest Protestant had far more influence over the German marriage, and he lost his head over it in the next year.

Jane Seymour (Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien), Anne of Cleves (The Louvre), and (perhaps) Katherine Howard (Royal Collection Trust).

The royal portraits are not included in the Getty exhibition, but there are several striking portraits of Tudor courtiers that I’m looking forward to seeing in person, including that of Southwell and an anonymous falconer or Portrait of a Gentleman with a Hawk. I also love Holbein’s portraits of merchants, who characterize his era in so many ways, and there are several in the exhibition though not my favorite, the Portrait of Georg Giese. It’s all in the details: Holbein enables us to grasp the practice of various endeavors with his little slips of papers, instruments and objects. He amplified the importance of literacy in his age as well as the ars nova of printing by including so many words in his paintings (so perfectly rendered: see Bonifacius Amerbach in the exhibition), engaging in printmaking himself, and designing printers’ devices and ornamental title pages. With Holbein we can also explore the roles of the Renaissance public intellectuals like Thomas More and Erasmus of Rotterdam, the latter represented in the exhibition by both Holbein’s portrait and the title page engraving by Albrecht Dürer based on it. All of this is fairly straightforward stuff: I haven’t even delved into the next layer of Renaissance symbolism, in lavish display in many of Holbein’s works. Layers and layers of images, words, and meanings.

Portrait of a Gentleman with a Hawk, Mauritshuis; Portrait of Georg Giese, Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin; Bonifacius Amerbach and device of printer Johannes Froben, Kunstmuseum Basel; the exhibition catalog, Holbein: Capturing Character, edited by Anne T. Woollett.

7 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , , , , | posted in Art, Culture

August 22, 2020

Delights for Ladies

By daseger

This was one of those weeks that the book took precedence, so it was difficult for me to find the time to research a proper #SalemSuffrageSaturday post: it really has been time-consuming to find all those lost reformers, gentle ladies, and entrepreneurs—though the authors and artists are much easier. I have a few more I want to highlight before this commemorative year is over, but this week all I have is book for ladies, written by an Elizabethan author whom I am sure could not have conceived of universal suffrage in his wildest imagination even though he was a relatively progressive fellow for his time. Hugh Plat (1552?-1608) is featured in several of my chapters: his work was very wide-ranging. He wrote about agriculture and gardening, alchemy, engineering, medicine, and all sorts of little inventions meant to improve daily life: an everlasting “tube-like” victual called macaroni for seamen on long voyages, a prototype raincoat, cheaper candles and lanterns for the homes of “the poorer sort”, and even dentures! He was an absolute believer in the art of alchemy, not as some secret enterprise, but as a way to extract the inherent spirits and virtues out of natural substances, and make them more efficacious. He wanted to make English land more fertile, English homes lighter, and English bodies healthier. Plat can certainly be criticized for selling ineffective plague pills during the pandemic of 1593, and I’m still wrestling with that. There are two great books on Plat: Deborah Harkness’s The Jewel House. Elizabethan London and the Scientific Revolution and Malcolm Thick’s Sir Hugh Plat: the Search for Useful Information in Early Modern London. I’m grateful for both, as they are based on manuscript evidence which I can’t access as well as Plat’s many publications, but I need to find my own Hugh Plat.

Plat-Jewel-House

Plat’s major work, still being published nearly 50 years after his death.

The Jewel House of Art and Nature was popular, but a book aimed at the relatively new feminine audience was even more so: first published in 1602, Delights for Ladies, to adorn their Persons, Tables, Closets and Distillatories was published in 13 editions up until the middle of the seventeenth century, sometimes bound with a companion text, A Closet for Ladies and Gentlewomen, or the Art of preserving, conserving, and candying. The original is available here, and two editions were published in the twentieth century: one by the Trovillion Press in 1939 and another edited by historian G.E. Russell after World War II. I have a badly-beat-up Trovillion edition, which still manages to be a beautiful little book, and some day I am going to have a pristine one!

Plat Cover (2)

20200819_095505

20200819_095520

20200822_090633

Screenshot_20200822-094416_Chrome

Delights is a book of “still-room secrets” with which women could whip up precious potions and waters to take care of their daily needs and concerns. It is also a rather specialized cookbook, and general housekeeping book: you really understand that word—housekeeping—when you read it, as Plat’s concern here, also evident in his other books, is to preserve foodstuffs and keep them fresh for as long as possible. He detested spoilage and waste. So there are preserves that we would recognize today, including “marmelades” and “gellys” made from fruit, but also instructions on how to keep fish and meat for “many days”. The house also has to be kept clean and well-provisioned with both food, drink, and medicines for maladies minor and major. There is a lot of expensive sugar in this book, which obviously catered to early modern English tastes, but also indicates that this was certainly not a book for the “poorer sort”: Plat’s huswife, a term that came into use during his lifetime, was a “courteous gentlewoman” who could read. And what might be her personal concerns, besides provisioning her house? Something to keep her face fresh, clean, and spot-free, a lovely hand lotion, tooth paste, and a dye to return the chestnut or golden luster to her hair (or her husband’s beard). Something to help the “ytch” and take out stains from her garments and bedclothes. A pomander for the plague-time, and headache powders, and sweet-smelling perfumes for any time. The more things change………….

Plat Table (2)

Plat Rose Water (2)

Plat Dye

Plats Pimples

Plat Teech (3)

2 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , | posted in History

August 11, 2020

The Gardener’s Labyrinth

By daseger

I’m having this really neat synchronicity of research, writing and life right now, as I’m working on Chapter Three of my book, which is focused on Elizabethan horticulture. So I get up, water my garden, and then go upstairs into my study and read and write about English gardening texts from the sixteenth century. Or there is the alternative day: I get up, drink coffee, read and write about English gardening texts, and then go downstairs for “cocktail watering” at the end of the day.  Regardless of when I sit down to immerse myself in this topic, it is obvious that there was a lot to write about then, and so I have a lot to write about now: new plants, coming from the Continent or the New World, how to feed the rapidly growing city of London, how to harness the power of plants for a variety of medicinal purposes. There were kitchen gardens, physic gardens, market gardens, and “summer gardens” for pleasure and relaxation. No matter what the purpose of the garden, the general belief was that it should be adjacent to the house and laid out in beds segregated by paths and walkways: the influences of the French parterre and medieval precedents encouraged the creation of a “knotted” or knot garden, which seems to have become a Tudor symbol. The pioneer of English gardening texts, Thomas Hyll (or Hill) published his first book, The Profitable arte of gardening in 1558: it was reprinted frequently thereafter and published in an amplified edition called The Gardeners Labyrinth posthumously in 1577. The Labyrinth was also very popular, due to the combination of Hyll’s “plain” instructions on how to lay out, enclose, plant, fertilize, irrigate, protect, and harvest a garden as well as its wonderful illustrations, the most reprinted of which are his images of watering the garden, something we all need to think about right now in the August doldrums (at least in New England). And true to its title, the Labyrinth also includes illustrations—templates really, for knot gardens, mazes, and labyrinths. Somehow I am more appreciative of his watering advice right now, in these 90-degree days!

Gardeners Collage First

Gardeners Labyrinth 1594 (2)

Gardeners Labyrinth Ch. 20 (3)

Gardeners Labyrinth 1594 watering through troughs (2)

Gardeners Labyrinth Watering (3)Tending to and ordering your garden in the Elizabethan era: Thomas Hyll’s Gardeners Labyrinth.

I am a bit confused by these two alternative watering techniques: “the maner of watering with a pumpe by troughes in the garden” and “the maner of watering with a pumpe in a tubbe” as Hyll is quite clear in the text that “water rotteth and killeth above ground.” So do we water from above or below?  I generally do both: aiming for the roots when I start watering and then just lazily arching it from above when I get tired and lazy—especially if I am watering with wine-in-hand. So many tools we use now were used then—rakes, hoes, shovels, watering “pottes”: and he calls his tin watering devices “great Squirtes”! August was hot in those Elizabethan summers as well: and Hyll instructs his readers to get out there and water in whatever way they can.

20200810_185343

20200810_070845Bad cocktail watering (?) and the garden in the morning.

There are several knot garden examples in The Gardener’s Labyrinth as well as mazes: Hyll had to appeal to the literary public, which was essentially a monied and aspirational one, and so his gardens had to have ornamental qualities as well as utilitarian ones. The knot or maze is a perfect and very literal example of man bending nature to his will, a key Renaissance preoccupation: man is at the center of everything. The perfectly-ordered gardens that appear in the backgrounds of English portraits from this era reflect very well on their individual subjects, as well as the society at large.

Gardeners Knot (2)

Gardeners Maze (3)

Lord Edward Russell

Gardening Young Man

Garden Lettice Newdigate 1606Knot & Maze designs from the Gardeners Labyrinth, 1577; Lord Edward Russell by George Perfect Harding, watercolor copy of a 1573 portrait after unknown artist, National Portrait Gallery; Isaac Oliver, a Young Man seated under a Tree, 1590-95, Royal Collection Trust; Lettice Newdigate, c. 1606, Private Collection: Arbury Hall, Warwickshire.

12 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , , , , , , | posted in History, Nature

November 30, 2019

Elizabethan Exemplar

By daseger

It’s been a long time since I featured one of my Renaissance crushes, but today is Sir Philip Sidney’s birthday so time to indulge. Sidney of course was a wonderful poet, but for me he is much more than that: he is the perfect Elizabethan Renaissance Man, multi-faceted, adept at both words and action, on the spot in all the key settings. He is one of those people whose lives can represent an age, albeit a rarefied experience. And he died young, on the battlefield, so that just makes him more: more elusive, more martyr-like, more crush-worthy. His notable contemporaries who lived longer had more layered lives in which both their attributes and their flaws were manifested, but Sidney seems flawless. His biographers note his proficiency in all the subjects in the studia humanitatis, but he himself asserted that one should aim for “well-doing, and not of well-knowing only” in The Defence of Poesy (published posthumously in 1595).

Sidney 2012-03-09-images-sidney_ma409_4_engraving The Sensational Sidney brothers as boys: Sir Philip and Sir Robert, from a painting by Mark Garrard at the Sidney’s ancestral home Penshurst Palace, Kent.

Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586) was always connected: He was the eldest son of Sir Henry Sidney, the Lord Deputy of Ireland, the nephew of Queen Elizabeth’s favorite, Robert Dudley, and the godson of King Philip of Spain. I’m not sure he would have been happy about this latter affiliation given that he became a relatively strident Protestant later on, which was perhaps a flaw in Queen Elizabeth’s estimation as she preferred a more moderate public religious stance and must have been very annoyed when Sidney opposed her marriage to Francis, the Duke of Alençon and Anjou, in 1579 on religious grounds. His principled Protestantism is not a problem for me, however: it makes him look like less of a dilettante courtier. Sidney was educated at Oxford but left for a “Grand Tour” on the Continent before taking his degree: clearly he was ahead of his time as this custom did not become popular among the English aristocracy until a century later. He returned to England to the life of a courtier (when he pleased Elizabeth), patron and poet, but clearly longed for some kind of serious placement, which he eventually received in the form of various official diplomatic missions on the Continent. In between, he commenced writing his corpus of poetry, invested in overseas expeditions, and spent time at the estate of his beloved sister, Mary, the Countess of Pembroke, to whom he dedicated his most ambitious work, The Arcadia, and who established a reputation as both a literary patron and poet(ess) herself.

Sidney 1577 (3)_edited

pixlr_20191130100316782-1 Sir Philip Sidney, 1577-78, courtesy the Marquess of Bath, Longleat House; A trio of Sidney copied portraits from the sixteenth, eighteenth, and twentieth centuries: National Portrait Gallery, London; an 18th century copy, NPG, London, and a 20th century version attributed to Frederick Hawkesworth Sinclair, Pembroke College, Oxford University.

All of the Sidneys are so interwoven with Elizabeth, most conspicuously Philip and Mary’s mother Mary Dudley Sidney (also a writer!) who served and nursed the Queen during her smallpox seclusion, contracting the disease herself and marring her beauty permanently. There is a theme of sacrifice that connects mother to son: Philip accompanied his uncle the Earl of Leicester’s expedition to the Netherlands in 1586 to fight England’s now arch-enemy Spain, and reportedly urged Leicester to push harder, eventually falling on the battlefield himself at the Battle of Zutphen. He was shot in the thigh, but took 21 days to die—likely of gangrene. He then becomes larger than life, memorialized by an ostentatious public funeral (paid for by his father-in-law Francis Walsingham), elegies, biographies and posthumous portraits. He is forever young and bold in imagery, and ever eloquent in text.

Sidney 17th Knole_edited

screenshot_20191130-080116_chrome

screenshot_20191130-075953_chrome

screenshot_20191130-080224_chrome Sir Philip Sidney, early 17th century, National Trust @Knole; by John de Critz the Elder, c. 1620; by John de Critz the Elder, 17th century; by George Knapton, 1739.

4 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , , , , | posted in Art, Culture, History

August 28, 2019

The Pope said Nope

By daseger

Last night we went to see Six at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge; I bought the tickets, but my husband accompanied me willingly. I simply could not resist a musical about the six wives of Henry VIII and it did not disappoint in its fluffy, fun feminism. The performance was certainly not a deep (or long) dive, but it was interesting in its distillation of the essential character of each woman, whether based on fact or fiction. Each queen had her say (or song), but the entire performance was a collective concert; midstream my husband said it reminded him of Josie and the Pussycats! The musical’s writers, Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss, are younger than us so they were inspired by different pop princesses: Beyonce, Avril Lavigne, Adele, Rhianna, Ariana Grande, Alicia Keys.

20190827_191656

20190827_192420

WivesBeard Collection, Victoria and Albert Museum.

Henry and his six wives have been the focus of many popular culture expressions for decades, even centuries: none of them will ever die. What’s interesting to me about re-envisioning is how it reflects on the society which is doing the re-envisioning and what gets distilled down as the universal “truth” of whatever or whomever is being recalled. In the case of the former, the King is nowhere to be seen on the Six stage: obviously he is the elephant in the room but he’s not there in this #metoo moment, this “her-story” (I hate that word; I almost lost the job I now hold because I told the hiring committee I would not teach a course on the books titled “Herstory” as history was about people). It’s all about the women and even though they look and sound very contemporary their characterizations are pretty traditional: Catherine of Aragon is the steadfast queen who says “no way” to Henry, Jane Seymour is “the only one he really loved”, Anne of Cleves is the one who got away, with a very nice annulment settlement, Katherine Howard is the precocious teenager with very poor judgement owing to an abusive past, and Katherine Parr is the grown-up survivor. I’ve heard this all before many times, and there’s a nice spotlight on the court painter Hans Holbein, including the old yarn in which he is sent to Germany to paint the miniature portrait of Anne of Cleves before her betrothal to Henry, and falling in love with her, made her more beautiful than she really was and so raised the King’s expectations to an extent that she could not meet, as well as entire song, “Haus of Holbein,” right in the middle of the performance. The one Queen I did not recognize was Anne Boleyn: she’s a plucky party girl in Six, with many, many references to her unfortunate death, including her showcase song, “Don’t Lose Ur Head”. She does get one of the best lines of the night when narrating her long road to royal marriage, when “the Pope said nope” to the annulment of Henry’s first marriage. But there’s no conviction in Anne, or any of the wives really: it’s hard to inject religion into a pop concert. The conceit of the show was that these women would compete—through their stories–for the title of who suffered the most at Henry’s hands, but near the end they decided they were all in it together, so we didn’t get to clap for our favorite Queen. I was relieved, as I was torn: I know Henry’s first queen suffered the most, but my very favorite, forever, is his last.

SIX_NoWay_LizLauren-2000x1429

20190828_084803

Six Poster

Six Wives BookAll the wives, plucky Anne, personal Tudor history from the last century, and Hans Holbein re-envisioned by Alys Jones.

1 Comment   |  tags: , , , , , , | posted in Culture, History

June 16, 2019

Traces of Half-Timbering

By daseger

I was running along the ocean on Lynn Shore Drive when I became progressively 1) tired; and 2) bored so I stopped running and started walking, into the adjacent “Diamond District” of Lynn. Yes, I’m embarrassed to admit that, after a lifetime of living alongside it, I do take the ocean for granted, but I never, never grow tired of walking up and down streets lined with historic structures. I can never run on those streets, though, because there is too much to see, and the eclectic Victorian architecture of this neighborhood is particularly eye-catching. The Diamond District is large, encompassing nearly 700 buildings, so you need to break it up into sections or styles to be able to take in all in, and on this particular morning all I could see was ornamental half-timbering on the third stories of sprawling houses built in some composite “Victorian” style: are they Queen Anne, Stick, or some form of “English Revival”? I can never get all those late nineteenth-century categorizations straight! In my own mind I classify them as Tudor-Victorians, but that’s just because I like to assign the characteristics of “Tudor” to anything and everything.

20190614_144234

20190614_144610

20190614_144714

20190614_145757

20190614_145713-1

20190614_145850

20190614_150834

20190614_145954

20190614_150050This last house tricked me: I turned the corner and thought I was seeing TWO houses ahead of me, but there was only one!

Well whatever style this is, it definitely dates from the 1880s and 1890s. I looked through some architectural catalogs in the vast Building Technology Heritage Library at the Internet Archive and the earliest example of half-timbered embellishment I could find was from the early 1880s, though I didn’t really conduct an exhaustive search. These homes are described simply as “modern” in contemporary texts, though the addition of the half-timbering detail also seems to have called for the addition of the adjectives “cozy” and “comfortable”. They are all cottages, of course, whether consisting of four rooms—or forty.

Cottage on a SIde Hill

Lynn CollageHalf-timbered cottages from William T. Comstock’s Cottages (1884) and Lambert’s Suburban Architecture (1894).

14 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , , | posted in Architecture, Design, Houses

January 29, 2019

Edwardian Tudors

By daseger

I’m back teaching this semester after a productive sabbatical, although I’m a bit out of practice. Thankfully I’ve got my favorite Tudor-Stuart survey scheduled, a course that I’ve taught many, many times but always in a different way. This semester we are focusing on “disorder” in general and crime in particular and they are reading accounts of sensational crimes interspersed with the usual narrative of Reformation and Revolution. Before we get to any of that, however, I drag my students through a lot of historiographical and cultural context, because I find that they already have so many preconceived notions about this era, even those who have never really studied it, from films and television…..and Shakespeare, even though they don’t know that their “history” is Bard-derived. Yesterday we were examining how the Victorians perceived the Tudors, as you generally have to burst through Victorian interpretations to get close to anything resembling the historical truth, and we ended up with these wonderful Edwardian murals, installed in the East Corridor of the House of Commons in 1910. They are images of Tudor monarchs (for the most part), of course, but they are also Edwardian projections, chosen to represent the ideals of that time: a more popular-based sovereignty, empire, education, and the long-term consequences of the Reformation. What is so interesting is that several of the murals are not based on any documented historic event, but rather on Shakespeare’s depiction of an historical event: with their prominent situation in Parliament, they represent a multi-layered representation of the past.

Parliamentary prints first Plucking_the_Red_and_White_Roses,_by_Henry_Payne.jpgHenry Arthur Payne, The Origin of Parties. Plucking the White Rose in the Old Temple Gardens

Let’s take the first East Corridor mural as a case in point: Henry Arthur Payne’s The Origin of Parties. Plucking the White Rose in the Old Temple Gardens, which depicts a scene taken from Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part I in which the noble factions about to wage what would become known (much later) as the War of the Roses are choosing sides/roses. This is a pre-Raphaelite depiction of a pre-Tudor “scene”, and a bit of a stretch to consider the York and Lancaster factions as the “origin of parties”. Apparently even the artist questioned the first subtitle given to his work, but as the murals project was being overseen by the American artist Edwin Austen Abbey of the Royal Academy, who most definitely looked upon Shakespeare as his muse, the inclusion of this scene is understandable. Abbey was also responsible for the homogeneity of the East Corridor murals, as he specified the red, gold, and black color scheme which unites all six murals, as well as the uniform height and perspective of the characters portrayed.

cooper john-cabot-and-his-sons-receive-the-charter-from-henry-vii-to-sail-in-search-of-new-landsDenis William Eden, John Cabot and his Sons Receive the Charter from Henry VII to Sail in Search of New Lands 1496

henry_vii_at_greenwichFrank Cadogan Cowper, Erasmus and Thomas More Visit the Children of Henry VII at Greenwich, 1499

katherine and henryFrank O. Salisbury, Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon before the Papal Legates at Blackfriars, 1529.

(c) Palace of Westminster; Supplied by The Public Catalogue FoundationErnest Board, Latimer Preaching before Edward VI at St. Paul’s Cross, 1548.

mary enteringJohn Byam Liston Shaw, The Entrance of Mary I with Princess Elizabeth into London, 1553

And there you have them: representatives of Tudor history from an Edwardian perspective. The emphasis seems to be on: the story, empire, the “new learning”, and the relationship of the royal government to the people. We have an equal representation of both Protestantism and Catholicism, hinting at the secularism of the era. I’m happy to see that my favorite Tudor, Henry VII, has a larger role in this story than Henry VIII, but surprised to see such a supporting role for Elizabeth: perhaps she was too powerful an opponent of parliamentary power.

Images and more information about the murals here: https://www.parliament.uk/worksofart/collection-highlights/british-history/tudor-history.

and more context here: https://www.paul-mellon-centre.ac.uk/publications/browse/9780300163353.

edwardian sense

2 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , , | posted in Art, Culture, History

March 24, 2017

Death Cushions

By daseger

In the early morning of this day in 1603, the great Queen Elizabeth I died at Richmond Palace, in a great royal bed befitting her station in life and history. But this was not her chosen place of earthly departure: she was forced into it after days of lying upon a pallet of cushions laid out in her privy chamber by her ladies-in-waiting. The Queen’s death watch was very focused on these cushions, as recorded by the oft-cited account of Sir Robert Carey, and imprinted in historical memory by Paul Delaroche’s famous 1828 painting, The Death of Elizabeth I. According to Carey, on the Sunday before her death the Queen did not go to chapel; instead  she had cushions laid for her in the privy chamber hard by the closet door, and there she heard service. From that day forwards, she grew worse and worse. She remained upon her cushions four days and nights at the least. All about her could not persuade her, either to take any sustenance, or go to bed. The Queen grew worse and worse, because she would be so, none about her being able to persuade her to go to bed. My Lord Admiral was sent for, (who, by reason of my sister’s death, that was his wife, had absented himself some fortnight from court) what by fair means, what by force, he got her to bed. There was no hope of her recovery, because she refused all remedies.

Paul_Delaroche_-_The_Death_of_Elizabeth_I,_Queen_of_England_-_WGA6262

elizadutch Paul Delaroche, The Death of Elizabeth I, Queen of England (1828), Musée du Louvre, Paris;Queen Elizabeth I of England receiving Dutch Ambassadors (1570-75), Artist Unknown. Neue Galerie, Kassel, Germany.

Both the story and the image make me sad, not just because it’s a death scene, but also because they remind me of my favorite image of the Queen in her prime, the charming painting Elizabeth receiving the Dutch Ambassadors (above), painted in the 1570s by an anonymous artist. I just love everything about this painting: its accessibility and informality, the interior details (floorcovering, wallpaper, windows!), Thomas Walsingham’s skinny legs, the ladies-in-waiting lounging on the cushions–perhaps in the very place that Elizabeth herself reclined for the penultimate time. It’s very intimate, and so is the image of a very vulnerable Elizabeth at the end of her life. She is so tired, she’s done: why can’t she choose her own place of death? But no, her final dutiful act was to consent (???) to be carried into that big bed to die.

Eliz Final Hours Elizabeth in her Last Hours. Illustration for the History of Queen Elizabeth by Jacob Abbott (Harper, 1854).

The public reactions to Elizabeth’s death (as far as we can tell from printed sources) seem to fall into two camps: relief that a secure succession was enacted (the Queen is dead; long live the King) and devout mourning. I think there must have been some relief in the latter camp too, because there was considerable anxiety about Elizabeth’s inevitable death and succession over the previous decade, if not longer. But this was the end 0f a long reign, likely the longest in historical memory for Englishmen and women, and when her long, choreographed funeral procession made its way through the streets of London a little over a month later (drawings of which you can see here) I have little doubt that those on the sidelines knew they were witnessing  the ritualistic end of an era.

Elizabeth collage

Eliza Petowe_Henry-Elizabetha_quasi_viuens-STC-198035-1390_11-p1

5 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , , | posted in History

March 10, 2017

A Tudor House in Salem

By daseger

How did I miss it? Here I am, a sixteenth-century English historian living in Salem, and I never knew about a reproduction sixteenth-century house built right here in 1927 by a mason named James H. Boulger. I’ve posted on “English” houses in Salem before, and often lamented the lack of Tudors in town, all the while blind to the existence of this interesting little house in South Salem. While I was researching the “Electrical Home” in this same neighborhood (with streets named for U.S. Presidents), I came across a story entitled “Salem Home and Garage Built in 16th Century English Style” in the November 21, 1927 edition of the Boston Globe. Yesterday I walked down from my office at Salem State to see this very house, hoping that it was still standing and bore some semblance of its sixteenth-century self and had not been turned into a ranch, or even worse, a “Colonial”. But as I walked down Cleveland Road and saw its pitched roof approaching, I got more excited, and there it was: an adorable, obviously well-maintained and well-loved, Tudor cottage.

Tudor second.jpg

Tudor third

Tudor fourth

Tudor Sixth

My only basis of comparison is the grainy newspaper photograph, but it looks like the major alteration to Boulger’s original house is the integration of the originally-freestanding garage. I’m not sure my photographs capture the scale of the house and the interesting pitch of its roof: to me, (and again, for the thousandth time, I’m just an architecture buff) the house looks more Tudor than Tudor Revival. According to the article, all plans were by Mr. Boulger, who is a native of Manchester Eng, and a mason by trade. In designing the building, he was aided by a picture printed in a magazine showing a farmhouse in England during the 16th century. Like many English architects of centuries back, the designer has secured the typical English charm that marked the early, simple, unpretentious homes in England. 

Tudor in Salem

I made a limited search for the precise photograph that might have been Mr. Boulger’s inspiration, but contemporary periodicals in America are full of Tudor Revivals and those in Britain tend to feature either “great” Tudor structures or townhouses, like the famous Seven Stars pub in Mr. Boulger’s native Manchester, now sadly long gone. He seems to have invested as much effort into the interior as the exterior, as the Globe article goes into considerable detail about the “outstanding features” of the new/old house: an ‘English box seat’ window, a combination dining room and parlor, natural finished woods, low, wide arches leading to the various rooms, low situated windows and the ‘cold box’, so-called, where vegetables and wines were kept by the English farmer….. Mr. Boulger plans to install old-fashioned furniture in keeping with the exterior of the building. And no doubt he did.

Seven Stars Manchester

Tudor 1

I’m sure that the Seven Stars, widely heralded as one of England’s oldest pubs in its day, was not Mr. Boulger’s inspiration, but wanted to inject a bit of old Manchester here!

5 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , , | posted in Architecture, Houses, Salem

January 1, 2017

The Golden Age of Gift-Giving

By daseger

Before the Victorians and the twentieth century transformed Christmas into the extravaganza that it is today, New Year’s Day–in the midst of an extended Christmastide– was the occasion for offering and receiving gifts. We know a lot about the meaning and materiality of gifts in Tudor England because of some extraordinary records, and several recent works which have transcribed and interpreted them for all of us, most notably Jane Lawson’s momentous transcription of 24 surviving Gift Rolls from Elizabeth’s reign, The Elizabethan New Year’s Gift Exchanges (2013) and Felicity Heal’s The Power of Gifts: Gift-Exchange in Early Modern England (2015). These two complementary volumes are really interesting and useful (though expensive–fortunately I received one as a gift!). I’m sure you can imagine how valuable and variable these sources are–as Elizabeth received a lot of stuff from her courtiers: pounds of gold coins in little bags made of luxurious fabrics and embroidered, beaded and embellished, books, jewels, articles of clothing, as well as more unique items. Let’s just look at one year’s haul, recorded in the roll from 1578-79 entitled New Yer’s Guiftes giuen to the QUENE’S MAIESTIE at her Highnes Manor of Richmond, by these Persons whose Names hereafter do ensue, the First of January, the Yere abouesaid, which has been digitized by the Folger Shakespeare Library.

gift-collage

elizabethan-gift-roll-folger

gift-roll-in-situ

Our sources: the gift rolls are quite literally ROLLS.

It’s a long roll, organized by the titles of the gift-bearers, from Earls to Gentlemen, and the value of their gifts, a perfect illustration of currying favor. Elizabeth’s long-time favorite, the Earl of Leicester, offered up a very fair jewel of gold, being a clock fully furnished with small diamonds pointed, and a pendant of gold, diamonds, and rubies, very small; and upon each a lozenge diamond, and an apple of green and russet enamel. From the Earl of Ormond, a very fair jewel of gold, wherein are three large emeralds set in which and red roses, one bigger than the other two, all the rest of the same jewel garnished with enameled roses and flowers, furnished with very small diamonds and rubies; about the edge very small pearls; and in the bottom is part of a flower-de-luce garnished with small diamonds, rubies, and one sapphire, with three mean pendant pearls, two of them small; the backside a green-enameled flower-de-luce. More jewels, lots of gold coin, and embellished apparel, including girdles and kirtles, mantles, “forepartes”,”scarfs”, petticoats, caps, mufflers, gloves and handkerchiefs  in cloth of gold, satin and velvet. Very detailed descriptions: you can easily see why these rolls are so valuable to historians of clothing and accessories, as well as to those attempting to piece together the intricate and dynamic relationships that formed the Elizabethan Court.

elizabeth-in-gloves

elizabethan-blackwork

swete-bag

A crop of Elizabeth and the Three Goddesses by Hans Eworth (1569), ©Royal Collection Trust: a rare image of the Elizabeth wearing gloves, a common New Year’s Day gift. A fragment of Elizabethan blackwork, often referred to in the Gift Rolls, ©National Trust; Elizabeth received at least one “swete bag” to fill with sweet-smelling herbs to guard her from the plague in 1579–this embroidered example is from the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. 

Rather than additions to Elizabeth’s vast and well-studied wardrobe, I tend to look for more unusual items in these records, especially household furnishings.The Earl of Hertford gifted the queen with a small pair of writing tables enameled with a grasshopper, all of gold, enameled green on the backside, and a pin of gold having a small pearl at the end thereof.  From Lady Thockmorton, a large bag to put a pillow in or moire satin, allover embroidered with gold, silver, and silk of sundry colors, with 4 tassels of green silk and gold; and a cushion cloth of network, flourished over with flowers of gold, silver and silk of sundry colors, lined with white satin. Elizabeth also received  contemporary examples of things we might receive today (on Christmas Day): books, stationery, sweets, flora and fauna, including eighteen larks in a cage from one Morris Watkins, on New Year’s Day of 1579.

elizabethan-cushion-cover

Elizabethan Cushion Cover, Metropolitan Museum of Art.

5 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , , , , , | posted in History

%d bloggers like this: