Emblems in Scotland (Scottish Cultural Review of Language and Literature) (Scottish Cultural Review of Language and Literature, 28) 9004364056, 9789004364059

Table of contents :
Emblems in Scotland: Motifs and Meanings
Copyright
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgements
List of Figures
1 A Jester at the Crucifixion? The Fool at Fowlis
2 A City of Famous Women: Esther Inglis, Georgette de Montenay, and Christine de Pisan
3 Protestant Emblems: Building the House
4 ‘Rare shewes and singular inventions’: Court Festivals and Royal Baptisms
5 Alexander Seton’s Suburban Villa: Neostoical Emblems and United Nations
6 Presbyterian Preaching: Hieroglyphical Paintings in Stirling
7 Quarles Comes North: Scottish Reception of the Emblemes
8 Mobilising the Gap: Ian Hamilton Finlay’s Inheritance
References
Photograph Credits
Index

Citation preview

Emblems in Scotland

Scottish Cultural Review of Language and Literature Series Editors Rhona Brown (University of Glasgow) John Corbett (University of Macau) Sarah Dunnigan (University of Edinburgh) Ronnie Young (University of Glasgow) Associate Editor James McGonigal (University of Glasgow)

volume 28

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/scrl

Emblems in Scotland Motifs and Meanings By

Michael Bath

leiden | boston

In association with The Stirling Maxwell Centre in The University of Glasgow. The support of the Strathmartine Trust towards this publication is gratefully acknowledged. Many thanks to The Marc Fitch Fund for their assistance and support. Cover illustration: gold £20 coin: the largest coin ever minted in Scotland. Printed with permission of Numismatic Group, Inc: http://www.cngcoins.com/ The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available online at http://catalog.loc.gov lc record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2018019414

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 1571-0734 isbn 978-90-04-36405-9 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-36406-6 (e-book) Copyright 2018 by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill nv incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi, Brill Sense and Hotei Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill nv provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, ma 01923, usa. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

Contents Preface vii Acknowledgements xviii List of Figures xix 1 A Jester at the Crucifixion? The Fool at Fowlis 1 2 A City of Famous Women: Esther Inglis, Georgette de Montenay, and Christine de Pisan 23 3 Protestant Emblems: Building the House 56 4 ‘Rare shewes and singular inventions’: Court Festivals and Royal Baptisms 79 5 Alexander Seton’s Suburban Villa: Neostoical Emblems and United Nations 115 6 Presbyterian Preaching: Hieroglyphical Paintings in Stirling 178 7 Quarles Comes North: Scottish Reception of the Emblemes 234 8 Mobilising the Gap: Ian Hamilton Finlay’s Inheritance 301 References 323 Photograph Credits 336 Index 341

Preface In 1531 the eminent Italian jurist, Andrea Alciato, produced his little book of illustrated Latin epigrams under the title Emblematum Liber (‘A Book of Emblems’).1 The word ‘emblem’ goes back via Latin to Greek roots, which refer to any kind of decorative application or inlaid work, but the title of Alciato’s book, and the way its woodcuts illustrate the moral, proverbial or political ideas which the verse epigrams discuss, changed the meaning of the word ‘emblem’ – not only in Latin but in nearly all modern European languages – to become virtually synonymous with the word ‘symbol’. Ancient emblemata are not necessarily symbols, whereas modern ‘emblems’ are by definition. Book titles seldom change the meaning of words, and Alciato’s title could not have achieved such a linguistic change had it not been a success in its own day, when – from the 1540s onwards – it inspired innumerable successors in both Latin and the vernacular languages. The new genre of illustrated books which we know as ‘emblem books’ modelled themselves upon Alciato, and although there was considerable variety in their format, subject matter and readership, they mostly favoured the Alciatian model, in which a Latin motto was printed above a symbolic picture, followed by a more-or-less explanatory moralising epigram. Modern emblem studies characterises this as the ‘tripartite emblem’, consisting as it does of motto, picture, and epigram. As with any genre, however, such a normative model may vary its formal as well as its functional conventions, and over the following two- to three-hundred years the tripartite emblem developed numerous subgenres and congeners. By the end of the seventeenth century, modern bibliographers have calculated, more than 6000 putative editions of emblem books were published – the exact number is unlikely ever to be agreed when such awkward questions of definition and also the issue of what constitutes a new work as opposed to a merely new edition – are unclear, as they often are with emblem books.2 In view of the extraordinary success of this new bimedial genre we should not be surprised that it should have exercised an important influence on ­various media of communication, persuasion, and representation in both literature and the visual arts. It was, however, only recently that ‘emblem studies’

1 A. Alciato, Emblematum Liber (Augsburg: H. Steyner, 1531). 2 For wider studies of the history and theory of the emblem see e.g. John Manning, The Emblem (London: Reaktion, 2002); Peter M. Daly, The Emblem in Early Modern Europe: Contributions to the Theory of the Emblem (London: Ashgate, 2014).

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began to develop as a specialised area of academic research.3 Though there had long been individual pioneers – lone scholars, collectors, or connoisseurs – in a variety of different disciplines and languages, it was only in the 1980s that a small group of scholars meeting annually at the Medieval Studies Congress in the University of Western Michigan (Kalamazoo) began to collaborate and extend their findings by identifying and attracting an increasing number of fellow scholars, who found themselves intrigued, puzzled or (often) frustrated by emblems and their applications in a variety of fields of study. Emblems are, typically, enigmas. The essays that follow in this volume are all, as we shall see, attempts to solve such enigmas. So much for ‘Emblems’, but why ‘Scotland’? If one looks at the growing number of bibliographies of emblem books, one will not find many of such books produced in Scotland or by Scottish writers and artists. My own engagement with emblems grew out of some research into animals-in-art, and specifically the iconography of stags with wings and wearing collars.4 I was not an art historian by training, but a lecturer in English literature looking for answers to questions about imagery in a number of texts, ranging from Petrarch to Thomas Hardy. However the particular motifs that I was pursuing cropped up also in emblem books and, living in Scotland as I do, I was fortunate to find that the largest known discrete collection of emblem books was in Glasgow University Library, whose Stirling Maxwell Collection, now consisting of more than 2000 emblem books, had been bequeathed to the library by Sir William Stirling-­Maxwell, Scotland’s nineteenth-century historian of Spanish painting, ­Member of Parliament, Trustee of the British Museum, and author of books: Annals of the Artists of Spain (1848), The Cloister Life of Emperor Charles v (1852), and Don John of Austria (1857); in 1876 he was elected Chancellor of the University of Glasgow. Best known, perhaps, for the paintings and furniture which fill the second of the great houses he inherited, Pollock House in Glasgow, his personal collections now share their space, in Pollock Park, with that other great bequest to Glasgow, the Burrell Collection. His collection of emblem books almost got dispersed, however, and it was only thanks to the astute librarian, R.O. MacKenna, who in 1958 happened to notice that the books were being advertised for auction by Christies in London and, knowing that a codicil to Sir William’s will bequeathed all the emblem books to Glasgow University in the event of such a sale, jumped on the overnight train to L­ ondon and plucked 3 David Graham, ‘“Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts”: Lessons from the History of Emblem Studies’, Emblematica, 22 (2016), 1–42. 4 M. Bath, The Image of the Stag: Iconographic Themes in Western Art (Baden-Baden: Koerner, 1992).

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1,700 emblem books out of the auction. Some universities are ­extremely lucky in their librarians! It was some time in the 1980s that another Glasgow University librarian, Keeper of Special Collections David Weston, asked me if I was aware that a seventeenth-century painted ceiling that survives in the historic mining town of Culross, in Fife, copied and adapted emblems from the first English emblem book, Geffrey Whitney’s A Choice of Emblemes, published in Leiden in 1586. Identifying sources for pictures is one of the things that gives art historians their best ‘eureka!’ moments, and I had not long been working on the emblems at Culross before I discovered that this was only one of a large number of painted ceilings in Scottish buildings of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that used emblems. Some of these had certainly been documented and recorded by previous scholars in such journals as the Scottish Antiquaries’ Proceedings, but few of these knew much about emblems or emblem books, and it became clear that the time was ripe for a book on Renaissance Decorative Painting in Scotland, which I completed in 2003.5 Several of the essays that follow in the present volume extend research I did for that book. Emblem studies can become obsessive – once spotted, emblems turn up everywhere – and even before I visited Culross I knew that Mary Queen of Scots had sewn embroideries that use emblems. Strangely enough no one had fully documented, described and interpreted these embroideries by Scotland’s most famous queen, whose historical celebrity has increasingly been claimed to overshadow other, possibly more important, aspects of Scottish history, and biographies of whom appear annually with little if anything new to say. When I came to look at these embroideries, however, it became clear that they not only use emblems which have sources and analogues in printed emblem books, but also borrow motifs which were in circulation more widely in the political and courtly iconography of France and elsewhere. Many of them express, once their symbolism has been interpreted, Mary’s own opinions and feelings about her situation as Queen successively of Scotland and France, and prospective Queen of England. These were findings I explored most fully in a book, Emblems for a Queen: The Needlework of Mary Queen of Scots.6 My earliest example in the present book is a motif in some late-medieval religious painting that predates by some decades the arrival, with Alciato’s 1531 Emblematum Liber, of the emblem. It anticipates my later examples, however, 5 Bath, Renaissance Decorative Painting in Scotland (Edinburgh: National Museum of Scotland Publications, 2003). 6 Bath, Emblems for a Queen: The Needlework of Mary Queen of Scots (London: Archetype, 2008).

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in some important respects, since one of the things that all my studies are concerned with is the transmission of received ideas and images. It was undoubtedly the use of woodcut and engraved illustrations in printed emblem books which brought them into line with that post-Gutenburg development which, for the first time in history, facilitated the circulation of multiple copies of the same image. That is undoubtedly how emblems, or at least their motifs, found their way into so many different applications in the decorative or ‘applied’ arts that are studied in these essays. However, we know how strongly conventional the visual arts were in their received iconography even before the invention of printing, and that is why the puzzling and enigmatic motif that I focus on in my opening essay in this volume finds its explanation not only in the biblical texts which sanction it but also in a number of precedents and parallels which appear to validate my interpretation. Emblems are enigmas, and motifs have meanings. All the essays in the present volume started with questions whose answers have a Scottish context, though they also tend to have wider European connections and implications. Questions of Scotland’s relations with England, and the succession to the English throne following the demise of its ‘Virgin Queen’, continued to preoccupy educated Scots following the execution of Marie Stuart, and it was ­Alexander Seton, first Earl of Dunfermline, who negotiated, following the 1603 Union of Crowns, the terms for that projected stronger union between the two nations that King James favoured but which did not come about until 1707. Seton’s decorated long gallery at Pinkie House, Musselburgh, was not only, as I argued in my Renaissance Decorative Painting book, the most sophisticated of all these ceilings in its use of emblems, but also a deliberate recreation of the stoa poikile (‘painted gallery’) in which the philosophy of Stoicism was thought to have originated in ancient Greece. However, as I now believe and argue in Chapter 5 of the present volume, the house was built on the site of the last battle ever fought between Scotland and England and its emblems and architecture were designed to celebrate a prospective union that promised to end centuries of Anglo-Scottish conflict. Written, as it happens, at the very time when we in Scotland were voting in a referendum on the issue of Scottish independence from that union, this essay is not the only one in this collection, I  suggest, that alerts us to the enduring relevance of political issues which found emblematic expression in the various motifs and meanings explored in the present book.7 7 Chapter 5 returns to and incorporates much material I have discussed previously in various places, most recently in ‘Philostratus Comes To Scotland: A New Source for the Pictures at Pinkie’, Journal of the Northern Renaisance, 5 (2013), [accessed 30/03/17]. 8 Georgette de Montenay, Emblemes, ou Devises Chrestiennes (Lyons: Jean Marcorelle, 1567). 9 See e.g. John Manning and M. van Vaeck, ed., The Jesuits and the Emblem Tradition (Turnhout: Brepols, 1999); P.M. Daly and D. Dimler, The Jesuit Emblem in the European Context (­Philadelphia: Saint Joseph’s University Press, 2016); P.M. Daly and D. Dimler, Corpus Librorum Emblematum: The Jesuit Series (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 5 vols., 1997–2007).

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Satyrs, who shook their tails at their English guests. In Chapter 4 I examine the history of the received idea that ‘All Englishmen have tails’, which turns out to be more historically embedded and relevant to the political circumstances on this occasion than it might seem. The successor to this royal baptism, in 1594, involved courtiers who turn out to have played an important role in subsequent literature, architecture and ceremonial in Scotland. These all had personal or patronage connections with Alexander Seton, and include architect William Schaw and poet William Fowler. Schaw’s role in rebuilding the Chapel Royal in Stirling for this baptism, modelled as we now know it to have been on the biblical Temple of Solomon, is clearly related to Schaw’s reform of the Scottish masonic statutes, in which modern Freemasonry is now known to have its origins. This raises questions about the role of the emerging masonic lodges in the interpretation and circulation of a number of the emblematic devices which we shall be studying. William Fowler’s role in writing the script for the 1594 baptism alerts us to his continuing responsibility for recording and circulating descriptions of the emblematic embroideries sewn by Mary Queen of Scots. The fact that his notes on these were inherited by his nephew (and fellow poet) William Drummond of Hawthornden, will be shown to account for the interest which these aroused amongst later writers and visitors to ­Scotland, including Ben Jonson, whose ‘walk to Scotland’ in 1618 retraced some of the steps of the royal visit the previous year, when Alexander Seton had been in charge of the arrangements. Scotland was not a Catholic country by the later sixteenth century, of course, though Seton had been educated by the Jesuits in Rome and was known as a crypto-Catholic long after he had attained eminence in 1604 as Chancellor of Scotland. In 1635 the English poet, Francis Quarles, produced one of the most influential of English emblem books, which copies, or adapts, emblems from two Jesuit emblem books from Antwerp: Typus Mundi produced by students of the Antwerp College, and Pia Desideria by Herman Hugo.10 Quarles was an ­Anglican Protestant and, despite their Jesuit origins, his emblems were reprinted and read for another two hundred years by English dissenters, alongside John Bunyan, as classics of evangelical literature. Three years later in 1638 Quarles published a successor, Hieroglyphickes of the Life of Man, whose title signals the close affinity that was widely recognised between emblems on the Alciatian model and the hieroglyphics of the ancient Egyptians, whose iconography and meaning was thought to have been recorded and preserved in a late Greek text, by a writer known as Horapollo, that was brought to Florence in 10

Francis Quarles, Emblemes (London: A.M. for Robert Allott, 1635); Typus Mundi (Antwerp: J. Cnobbaert, 1627); Herman Hugo, Pia Desideria (Antwerp: H. Aertsens, 1624).

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the early fifteenth century and printed in 1505. 1638 also saw the publication, in London, of two books that are virtually the only known emblem books written by a Scottish author, Robert Farley, who describes his nationality on the title pages of both as ‘Scoto-Britanio’ (Kalendarium Humanæ Vitæ) or ‘ScotoBritanno’ (Lychnocausia, sive Moralia Facum Emblemata).11 Both are bilingual, with parallel texts in Latin and English. Whether Farley was aware of Quarles, his contemporary, is unclear, but in 1622 a Scottish presbyterian minister, Archibald Simson, had published in Edinburgh his Hieroglyphica Animalium, which copies or adapts entries describing symbolic beasts from the great and hugely influential Hieroglyphica of Pierio Valeriano.12 All of these animals are interpreted by Simson not merely as ­religious emblems, but in many cases emblems that signify strictly Calvinist doctrines and raise issues for the Reformed Scottish kirk. Several of these emblems had been painted on the walls of Simson’s brother Patrick’s manse, next to Holy Rude kirk in Stirling, where they were described and explained in answer to his brother’s questions as Patrick lay on his death bed. The dying minister’s explanations of their significance give us a wholly new and unexpected insight into the way these hieroglyphs were drawn into the Scottish religious debates of the seventeenth century, since both Simsons were at the centre of conflicts within the reformed Church between strict Calvinist presbyterians and the episcopalians, who supported King James’s attempts to appoint bishops. The king hoped that the power to do so would afford him at least some control over the affairs of the national church, though on what Scots increasingly came to recognize as an English model which had been instituted south of the border, of course, by Henry viii. Those disagreements in Scotland were eventually to lead to the Covenanting tradition in the Scottish church and, with it, the outbreak of the so-called ‘Bishops’ Wars’, or Wars of Three Kingdoms, also known as the English Civil Wars. Given this context, it might well surprise us to find that Calvinist presbyterian Archibald Simson’s Hieroglyphica Animalium was published in 1622 to commemorate the demise, that same year, of Scotland’s Catholic Chancellor, Alexander Seton, whose ­neo-Stoic gallery of emblems at Pinkie House was designed, as we have noted, to celebrate the union of the two kingdoms. Chapter 6 explores this paradox and finds a plausible explanation.

11 12

R. Farley, Kalendarium Humanæ Vitæ (London: W. Hope, 1638); Lychnocausia, sive Moralia Facum Emblemata (London: T. Cotes, 1638). A. Simson, Hieroglyphica Animalium (Edinburgh: Thomas Finlason, 1622–4); Pierio Valeriano, Hieroglyphica sive de sacris Ægyptiorum literis (Basel, 1556).

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Chapter 7 continues this history by examining the extraordinary influence which Quarles’s emblems played in seventeenth-century applied arts in Scotland, and on carved gravestones in particular, beginning with one of the most impressive examples, which happens to be in the Stirling churchyard of the parish where, a few years earlier, Patrick Simson had been minister. The fact that this gravestone was executed by local stonemason, John Service, for his deceased father who was also a stonemason, raises the question of the role played by emerging masonic lodges in the circulation of emblems at this period. The fact that Quarles’s emblems were also used, however, in Catholic applications such as the Earl of Nithsdale’s carved windows to his castle at Caerlaverock, raises many of the questions concerning doctrinal divisions and religious conflicts at this period, when the Covenanting armies destroyed Nithsdale’s new lodgings only a few years after they were built. Similarly the verses copying Quarles which were found on some painted ceiling joists in Dundee some years later have been shown to go back to an emblem, Phosphore redde diem (‘Sweet Phosphor, bring back the day’) which Royalists used, following the regicide of Charles i, to express their hope of a restoration of the monarchy. Whether the early gravestones decorated with motifs that go back to Quarles reached the United States via Scottish companions of the Pilgrim Fathers is uncertain, though the fact that the earliest American gravestones are stylistically so similar and that they repeatedly use the same motifs, suggests that they have the same roots as the Scottish gravestones. These examples take us, both in Scotland and in the United States, into the eighteenth century. My concluding chapter brings us up to the present day. The use of emblems in the visual arts did not die out entirely during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, although emblems and emblem books certainly became less fashionable during the Enlightenment. A remarkable twentieth century revival can however be witnessed in the work of Ian Hamilton Finlay whose Heroic Emblems (1977) contains twenty-four emblems comprising line-drawings of modern weaponry and warfare with axiomatic and often enigmatic mottoes, accompanied with commentaries.13 Finlay’s book title also alludes to Paradin’s Devises heroïques, and the close relationship of these with the highly emblematic iconography and inscriptions to be found in Finlay’s extraordinary garden, Little Sparta in the Pentland Hills south of Edinburgh, is suggested by the 13

Ian Hamilton Finlay, with R. Costley and S. Bann, Heroic Emblems (Calais, vt: Z Press, 1977). Much of this chapter reworks material that has previously appeared in an article, ‘Mobilising the Gap: Hamilton Finley’s Inheritance’, in Anthony J. Harper, Ingrid Höpel and Susan Sirc, eds., Emblematic Tendencies in the Art and Literature of the Twentieth Century (Glasgow: Glasgow Emblem Studies, 2005), pp.113–28.

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e­ mblem of an aircraft-carrier surrounded by a swarm of helicopters and the biblical motto ‘Out of the strong came forth sweetness’, which characterises the helicopters as honey-bees (Heroic Emblems, p. 37). We may well compare this with the monumental bird-table that we see at Little Sparta which is also shaped like an aircraft-carrier – an avian landing-strip. That ‘heroic’ association of the militaristic with the pastoral is characteristic, one might almost say definitive, of Finlay, whose various innovative literary and artistic creations are often not only at the cutting edge of experimental Modernism but also combine word and image in ways that are strongly emblematic. His ­characteristic impulse to conflate images of modern militarism with classical epigraphy and allusions will be shown, in my concluding chapter, to raise issues of classical revival and cultural renewal in a context that is both highly Scottish and yet strongly international. Despite the historical gap, these will be found to reduplicate many of the communicative procedures that emblems have been shown to utilise in Scottish culture of an earlier period in my preceding chapters. Most of the chapters in the present book reprint or rework arguments that originally appeared in articles published in academic journals or essay collections that are listed in my bibliography. In editing them for this reprint I have updated and revised nearly all of them to accommodate new evidence and also to clarify the connecting threads that tie the majority of them together in recurrent references to major issues in early-modern Scottish history and culture. These are not by any means the only emblems to be found in Scotland, however, and many further examples have been documented and discussed elsewhere, in articles that remain relatively accessible. Chapter 3 reworks an article which I originally co-authored with Theo Van Heijnsbergen whose fingerprints remain on my writing, and whose findings at an earlier stage were fundamental to this research. Readers wanting more may therefore find the following references useful. The early reception of Alciato’s emblems in Scotland is suggested by the fact that the first French edition of his Emblemata in 1549 was dedicated to the Scots Earl of Arran; the reason for this dedication and its historical context in the ‘auld alliance’ are examined in my ‘Alciato and the Earl of Arran’.14 In the light of this auspicious early link between Scotland and the originator of emblem books we might well ask how many copies of Alciato, or of other emblem books, found their way into early Scottish libraries. Evidence of ownership ­depends largely on surviving inventories and booklists, though we may well assume that householders or their artists must at least have had access to the illustrated books they used as patterns for their decorative schemes. A catalogue 14

Bath, ‘Alciato and the Earl of Arran’, Emblematica, vol. 13 (2003), 39–52.

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of the library of King James vi, compiled by his tutor Peter Young between 1573 and 1583, records the young king’s ownership of half a dozen actual emblem books, including ‘Emblemata Alciati’,15 and also a copy of the French translation of Paolo Giovio’s Dialogo dell’Imprese Militari et Amorose.16 The list also includes copies of both the French edition of Claude Paradin’s Devises heroiques and its Latin translation, Symbola Heroica, which was first printed in 1562 by Plantin in Antwerp.17 Young’s catalogue also includes an emblem book, ‘La ­Morosophie de Guillaume de la Perriere’ (Lyon, 1553) which is less well-known, though its author is known for one of the most influential and widely-used emblem books in the decorative arts of this period, Le Theatre des bons engins.18 La Perrière’s Morosophie supplied the motto, as we shall see, for an inscription which the Earl of Gowrie placed above his fireplace in Castle Ruthven which I examine in Chapter 3. Many of the books in the young king James’s library that are listed by his tutor came from his mother, Mary Queen of Scots; however none of these emblem books had such a source – the copies of Alciato and Paradin, for instance, are both recorded by Peter Young as gifts to the king from James’s great-uncle Robert Stewart, Bishop of Caithness. Warner describes him as ‘The donor whose name most often meets us’ in this catalogue of the King’s books: ‘James was indebted to him for 25 books’. He also presented his royal nephew with ‘such aids to learning as “tua faire globes,” and a pen, inkhorn and portfolio of silver’ (Warner, p. xxiv). And although Young’s list includes several books which we know James’s mother used in her embroideries, such as Conrad Gessner’s Historia Animalium (Warner, p. xxxix) or André Thevet’s Singularités de la France antarctique (Warner, pp. xxv–xxvi), these are recorded as direct gifts to the king from identified donors and not among the books which she left in Edinburgh following her flight into English exile in 1568.19

15

16

17 18 19

George F Warner, ‘The Library of James vi. 1573–1583 from a Manuscript in the Hand of Peter Young, his Tutor’, Miscellany of the Scottish History Society, vol. 1 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1893), xi–lxxv, p. lxi. Warner, p. lxvi, ‘Devises de Jouio en francoys’, first published in Lyons by Rouille in 1561 as Dialogue des Devises d’Armes et d’Amours, this edition also included the Devises Heroiques et Morales of Gabriele Simeoni. Warner, p. xxxvii, and p. lx. Warner, p. lxii; Le Theatre des bons engins supplied patterns for two of the emblems on a painted ceiling at Earlshall, Fife, see Bath, Renaissance Decorative Painting, pp.149–50. For Mary Queen of Scots’ embroideries that use Gessner or Thevet, see Bath, Emblems for a Queen, pp. 69–112. See also Peter Mason, ‘André Thevet, Pierre Belon and Americana in the Embroideries of Mary Queen of Scots’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 78 (2015), 207–21.

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The embroideries of Mary Queen of Scots are undoubtedly the richest, most extensive, and also perhaps the most sophisticated historical artefacts to use emblems in a Scottish context, even if they were nearly all sewn whilst she was in terminal exile in England, but as noted above I have illustrated and interpreted these very fully in Emblems for a Queen.20 Many of the emblems which the embroideries use are also found, as noted in my book, in other artefacts – including coins, medals, and jewellery – that were circulating in Scotland at the time, and these are more fully identified and analysed in an article, ‘Symbols of Sovereignty: Political Emblems of Mary Queen of Scots’.21 Following the murder of Henry Darnley in 1567, which is among the most notorious events in the whole course of Scottish history, emblematic placards circulated in ­Edinburgh accusing the Earl of Bothwell and Mary herself of responsibility for the murder. The pictorial motifs of a seductive mermaid (Mary) and a timorous hare (Bothwell) featuring on these placards have now been shown to copy ­particular emblems from the Devises heroïques (1557) of Claude Paradin.22 I should acknowledge, finally, how many of the emblems that are studied in these pages are in artefacts which have since disappeared. However we should remember that what survives invariably depends on accidents of history, so that records of objects that have not survived can often tell us much that is worth knowing. I therefore make no apology for describing and discussing ­absent works of art. 20 21 22

Bath, n. 4 above. Bath, ‘Symbols of Sovereignty’, in Immagini e potere nel Rinascimento europeo, ed. Guiseppe Cascione and D. Mansueto (Milan: Ennere, 2009), pp. 53–67. Bath and M. Jones, ‘“Placardes and Billis and Ticquettis of Defamatioun”: Queen Mary, the Mermaid and the Hare’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 78 (2015), 223–46.

Acknowledgements My illustrations go back to many sources, which are acknowledged in the text and notes. I am deeply indebted to The Marc Fitch Fund and to the Strathmartine Trust for generous grants towards the reproduction and permissions charges for these, and although I have made the effort to identify all copyright holders, the source of some images has proved to be illusive and I shall be pleased to hear from any owners whom I may have failed to identify or contact. By far my greatest illustration debts are, however, to The Stirling Maxwell Centre in The University of Glasgow and to the Keeper of Special Collections, Julie Gardham, together with Nicola Russell, Public Services Manager in the library’s Department of Special Collections. Research for this book has benefited from the help of those friends and ­colleagues over many years who have shared their knowledge, initiated ideas, responded to queries or corrected mistakes. I am particularly indebted to ­Alison Adams, Ian Campbell, Helen Cargill Thomson, Jennifer Craig, Peter ­Davidson, Alastair Fowler, Malcolm Jones, John G Harrison, Theo van Heijnsbergen, P ­ edro Germano Leal, Donato Mansueto, Ksynia Marko, Heather Meakin, Catherine Oakes, Alessandra Petrina, Nuccio Ordine, Michael Pearce, ­Rebecca Quinton, Stephen Rawles, Anne and Stéphane Rolet, Alison Saunders, Allison Steenson, Jane Stevenson, David Weston, and the late Charles McKean, but especially to Jamie Reid Baxter, whose suggestion that I might stop bombarding him with offprints and collect some of this research between single covers is what led me to write this book. Jamie, this book is therefore yours; without that intellectual democracy of learning we should all be the poorer, and not only in Scotland.

List of Figures 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6

1.7 1.8

1.9

1.10 1.11 1.12 1.13 1.14 1.15

1.16 1.17 2.1 2.2

Fowlis Easter, Angus, church of St. Marnock 1 Fowlis Easter, rood screen Crucifixion, oil paint on oak boards 3 Fowlis Easter, Crucifixion, detail with speech scroll, ‘Vere filius Dei erat iste’ (‘Truly this was the son of God’) 5 Dortmund, Marienkirche, Berswordt-Altar centrepiece, Crucifixion, c. 1397 6 Fowlis Easter, Crucifixion detail, jester peers over the shoulder of crowned? King Herod 7 ‘Dixit insipiens’ manuscript incipit of Psalm 52, showing parti-coloured jester pronouncing his atheist message to King David. Thirteenth-century English psalter 9 Royal wisdom rejecting atheistical folly, Book of Hours, c. 1450–1460 10 ‘Dixit insipiens’ illustration from Henry viii’s personal psalter, c. 1540 showing Henry’s court jester, Will Somer, turning his back on Henry who is imitating David by playing a harp and not listening 11 French ‘Allegory of Folly’ showing the range of proverbial follies identified in the Bible, which supplies the text, top left, STVLTORVM INFINITVS EST NVMERVS (‘The number of fools is infinite’, Ecc.1:15) 12 ‘Allegory of Folly’ detail, NOVS SOMMES TROIS (‘We are three’), so where is the third? ‘Here’s looking at you …’ 14 ‘Wee Three Logerh[ea]ds’; the fool’s glance identifies the missing third. Stratford-upon-Avon, Shakespeare Birthplace Trust 15 Salzwedel church, Saxony, centre panel of carved altarpiece, c. 1510 18 Salzwedel church, Saxony, carved altarpiece, detail 20 Sankt Florian, Austria, abbey of St Florian, Christ carrying the Cross, attrib. Michael Wohlgemut, 1489 20 Sankt Florian, Austria, abbey of St Florian, Christ carrying the Cross, detail: triple-tonsured jester addresses the five Maries, finger in mouth, as he denies the divinity of Christ 21 Peter Breugel the Elder, Christ carrying the Cross, 1564, Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum 21 Peter Breugel the Elder, Christ carrying the Cross, detail 22 Esther Inglis in 1595, Edinburgh, National Gallery of Scotland, oil on panel, artist unknown 24 Georgette de Montenay, author portrait prefixed to Emblematum Christianorum Centuria (Zurich: Froschauer, 1584) sig.b4r, unsigned but dated in the plate 1567 and undoubtedly engraved by Pierre Woeiriot 28

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2.3 Esther Inglis, Emblemes Chrestiens (1624), calligraphic rendering in pen and ink of Georgette de Montenay’s author portrait 29 2.4 Esther Inglis, Emblemata Christiana (1624) 30 2.5 Esther Inglis, Les Proverbes de Salomon 31 2.6 Esther Inglis, Lamentations of Jeremiah (1602) 33 2.7 Esther Inglis, Emblemata Christiana (1624) 35 2.8 Georgette de Montenay, Emblemes ou Devises Chrestiennes (Frankfurt: Johann Karl Unckel, 1619), emblem 1, ‘Sapiens mulier ædificat domum’ (‘The wise woman builds the house’) 37 2.9 Esther Inglis, Insigni pietate heroinæ Mariæ Stewartæ … Emblema Christianum 39 2.10 Georgette de Montenay, Emblemes ou Devises Chrestiennes (Lyons: Jean Marcorelle, 1571), emblem 8 42 2.11 The queen and her ladies entering the Cite des Dames, in ‘La Cité des dames’ 46 2.12 Three Virtues, Reason, Rectitude and Justice, appear to Christine in a dream sitting in her study 49 2.13 Cité des Dames Workshop, c. 1410: Reason, Rectitude and Justice appear to Christine; Reason helps Christine build the city Livre de la Cité des dames, c. 1401–1500 50 3.1 Guillaume de la Perrière, Morosophie (Lyons: Macé Bonhomme, 1553), no. 48 57 3.2 Guillaume de la Perrière, Morosophie, no. 48, epigram 58 3.3 Enea Vico, Veritas, from series of 42 Imagines engravings by François Salviati of c. 1540 showing iconological figures 60 3.4 Geffrey Whitney, A Choice of Emblemes (1586), p. 4, ‘Veritas temporis filia’ 61 3.5 Guillaume de la Perrière, Morosophie (Lyons, 1553), no. 99 65 3.6 Guillaume de la Perrière, Morosophie (Lyons, 1553), no. 99, epigram 66 3.7 Largs, Ayrshire, Skelmorlie Aisle, southern end of painted ceiling erected by Sir Robert Montgomery to commemorate his late wife, Margaret Douglas, in 1636 69 3.8 Skelmorlie Aisle, detail showing one half of the bisected In utrumque paratus emblem, quoting two lines of Whitney’s epigram 70 3.9 Geffrey Whitney, A Choice of Emblemes (1586), p. 66, ‘In utrumque paratus’ 71 3.10 Théodore Beza, Icones (Antwerp, 1580), frontispiece 72 3.11 Gold £20 Scots coin, obverse, minted 1575–76 74 3.12 Gold £20 Scots coin, reverse, minted 1575–76 75 3.13 Rossend Castle, Burntisland, Fife, detail from painted ceiling now displayed in Edinburgh, National Museum of Scotland 77

List of Figures 4.1

xxi

Winged satyr, grotesque detail of late-sixteenth century painted ceiling, 43–45 High Street, Edinburgh 84 4.2 François i as a transgendered, composite deity combining the attributes of Minerva, Mars, Mercury and Diana, parchment pasted on panel, c. 1545 95 4.3 The Bayonne magnificences, 1565, opening tournament showing Charles ix tilting at the quintain whilst his brother Henri follows, dressed as an Amazon, Antoine Caron, attrib., drawing 96 4.4 Emblem showing the Reformed church shining with the full light of revealed religion, Theodore de Beze, Icones, id est verae imagines virorum doctrina simul et pietate illustrium […] quibus adiectae sunt nonnullae picturae quas Emblemata vocant (Geneva: Jean de Laon, 1580), no. 40 100 4.5 Emblem ‘In deprehensum’ (‘Caught!’) illustrating the adage Folio ficulno tenes anguillam (‘You hold an eel in a fig leaf’). Andrea Alciato, Emblemata (Padua: Tozzi, 1621), p. 120 101 4.6 Allegorical ship for the obsequies of Charles v in Brussells, 1558, engraving from J. and L. Duetecum, Magnifique et somptueuse Pompe funèbre faite aux obsequies et funerailles de tres victorieus emperor Charles v (Antwerp : Plantin, 1559) 104 4.7 Medal of Mary Queen of Scots with the three crowns device, Aliamque moratur (‘And awaits another’), Edinburgh, National Museums of Scotland 110 4.8 Triumphal arch for Henri ii’s entry into Paris, 1549, showing Henry as Typhis, pilot of the Argonauts flanked by his guiding stars Castor and Pollux, woodcut, C’est l’ordre qui a este tenu à la nouvelle et joyeuse entrée (Paris, 1549) 111 5.1 The Battle of Pinkie Cleugh, woodcut from William Patten, The Expedition into Scotland in 1547 (London: Richard Grafton, 1548) 116 5.2 Pinkie House, Musselburgh, viewed from the garden 118 5.3 Pinkie House, inscription originally placed above garden entrance 119 5.4 Stone altar dedicated to Apollo Grannus, found in 1549, and drawn by Thomas Segetus 1587 121 5.5 Pinkie House, Musselburgh, Long Gallery 123 5.6 Pinkie House, Long Gallery, octagonal cupola 125 5.7 Hans Vredeman de Vries, Perspectiva (Antwerp, 1604–5) p. 20, design for octagonal cupola showing mathematics for achieving an eccentric viewing angle 126 5.8 Otto Vaenius, Emblemata Horatiana (1607), Quo plus sunt potae, Plus sitiuntur aquae 130 5.9 Pinkie House, emblem Semper avarus eget, (‘The miser is always in want’) 131 5.10 Pinkie House, emblem ‘Nescio an Anticyram ratio illis destinet omnem’ 133 5.11 Vaenius, Avarus quaesitis frui non audet (‘The greedy man dare not enjoy what he has acquired’) 134

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List of Figures

5.12 Vaenius Nihil amplius opto (‘I choose nothing more’) 135 5.13 Pinkie. Nihil amplius opto (‘I choose nothing more’) 136 5.14 Marcus Gheraerts, Alexander Seton, First Earl of Dunfermline, oil on canvas, 1610 137 5.15 Adrian Vanson, portrait of George, 5th Lord Seton 139 5.16 Frans Pourbus, George, Lord Seton, with his family, 1572 140 5.17 Marin le Roi, Sieur de Gomberville, La Doctrine des Mœurs (1646), frontispiece showing Louis xiv being instructed in the Stoic painted gallery 142 5.18 Blaise de Vigenère, Images ou Tableaux de Platte Peinture des Deux Philostrates (Paris, 1614) title page 143 5.19 Pinkie House, Long Gallery, emblem Nympharumque leves cum satyris me secernunt populo 146 5.20 Blaise de Vigenère, Images ou Tableaux de Platte Peinture des Deux Philostrates (Paris, 1614), p. 378, ‘Pindare’ 147 5.21 Pinkie House, Long Gallery, emblem A teneris adsuesce labori 150 5.22 Denis Lebey de Batilly, Emblemata (1596), no. 38, ‘Accustom yourself to hard work from childhood’ 151 5.23 Pinkie House, Long Gallery, emblem Pax optima rerum 152 5.24 Denis Lebey de Batilly, Emblemata (1596), no. 28, ‘Better to study peace than war’ 153 5.25 Pinkie House, Long Gallery, emblem Nullum Numen abest si sit prudentia 154 5.26 Denis Lebey de Batilly, Emblemata (1596), No. 32, ‘Victory through Prudence’ 156 5.27 Pinkie House, Long Gallery, emblem. ‘Let Tiphys be Virtue’ 157 5.28 Girolamo Ruscelli, Imprese Illustri (1566), p. 517, ‘Utriusque auxilio’ 158 5.29 Andrea Palladio, I Quattro Libri dell’Arhitettura (Venice: Francesci, 1579), title page 160 5.30 Embroidery of Mary Queen of Scots, centrepiece of the Marian Hanging, showing a hand pruning a vine with the motto Virescit vulnere virtus (‘Virtue flourishes from its wounds’), with Mary’s monogram and the royal arms of Scotland 173 6.1 Stirling, the Manse with Holy Rude kirk, as illustrated in D. MacGibbon and T. Ross, The Castellated and Domestic Architecture of Scotland (Edinburgh, 1892), vol. 5, p. 21 179 6.2 Alexander’s aged horse Bucephalus borne off on a carriage drawn by younger horses, to illustrate the emblem ‘Les vieux soient supportez par les jeunes’ (‘The elderly should be cared for by the young’), Barthélemy Aneau, Picta Poesis (1552), p. 106 182 6.3 Jackel-headed Anubis attending a mummy 183

List of Figures

xxiii

6.4 Horapollo Nilus, Hieroglyphica (Paris: Kerver, 1551), p. 30, woodcut illustration of the cynocephalus hailing the moonrise 184 6.5 Figure of a cynocephalus, Ulisse Aldrovandi, Monstrorum historia (Bologna: Nicolai Tebaldini, 1642), p. 22 185 6.6 The male Cynocephalus lying in despair at the moon’s disappearance, Pierio Valeriano, Hieroglyphica (1556), p. 45 187 6.7 Female Cynocephalus leaping up to celebrate the moon’s reappearance, Pierio Valeriano, Hieroglyphica (1556), p. 46 187 6.8 The salamander extinguishing flames with its cold feet, Claude Paradin, Devises heroïques (Lyon: de Tournes, 1567) p. 16 189 6.9 Archibald Simson, Hieroglyphica Animalium (Edinburgh: Thomas Finlason, 1622), title page 192 6.10 Théodore de Bèze, Icones, id est Veræ Imagines Virorum Doctrina Simul et Pietate Illustrium (Geneva: Jean de Laon, 1580), title page 196 6.11 David Calderwood, Perth Assembly, published in Leiden by William Brewster, 1619 203 6.12 David Calderwood, ‘A Re-examination’ of the Five Articles, published in 1636 the Articles were repealed in 1638 203 6.13 Page 5 from John Gordon, Dean of Salisbury’s ENΩTIKON or a sermon of the Union of Great Brittannie (London: George Bishop, 1604), preached before the king at Whitehall in October 1604, in which he takes the etymology of Hebrew keywords as significant for Christian doctrine and church history 207 6.14 Dunfermline Abbey, tomb to William Schaw (1550–1602) with Alexander Seton’s and Queen Anne’s inscriptions recording Schaw’s achievements as Royal Master of Works 210 6.15 Culross (Fife), The Palace, second floor painted ceiling 213 6.16 Detail of Culross ceiling, ‘Tempus Omnia Terminat’ emblem 214 6.17 Geffrey Whitney, emblem ‘Time ends all things’ from A Choice of Emblemes (London, 1586) 215 6.18 Enea Vico, Tempus from Emblematic Subjects series 216 6.19 William Blake, Newton (1795–c. 1805) 219 6.20 Edouardo Paolozzi, statue of Newton (1995), London 219 6.21 Culross, The Palace, sketch by John Houston of mural showing ‘The Judgement of Solomon’ 220 6.22 Rubens, ‘Judgement of Solomon’, London, Banqueting House 221 6.23 Sir Robert Moray’s drawing of his mason mark, from the Kincardine papers in the National Library of Scotland, f. 67r 225 6.24 Robert Farley, Lychnocausia, sive Moralia Facum Emblemata, Lights Moral Emblems (1638), no. 21 229

xxiv

List of Figures

6.25 Robert Farley, Lychnocausia, sive Moralia Facum Emblemata, Lights Moral Emblems (1638), no. 32 230 6.26 Francis Quarles, Hieroglyphikes of the Life of Man (1638), title page 232 6.27 Francis Quarles, Hieroglyphikes of the Life of Man (1638), emblem no. 13, of declining age, which Quarles moralises, ‘Continuance is the Child of Eternity, not of Time’ 233 7.1 Stirling, Holy Rude kirkyard, gravestone of John Service 235 7.2 Stirling, Holy Rude kirkyard, gravestone of John Service, east face roundel 236 7.3 Francis Quarles, Emblemes (London, John Marriot, 1635), p. 304, Fidesque Coronat ad aras (‘And faith is crowned at the altar’) 237 7.4 Stirling, Holy Rude kirkyard, gravestone of John Service, west face roundel 238 7.5 Francis Quarles, Emblemes (London, 1635), p. 172, ‘Are not my days few?’ 240 7.6 Stirling, Holy Rude kirkyard, gravestone of John Service, west face, detail of emblem ‘Are not my days few?’ 241 7.7 Stirling, Holy Rude kirkyard, gravestone of John Service, west face, detail of emblem ‘Lord all my desire is before Thee, And my groaning is not hid from Thee’ 242 7.8 Francis Quarles, Emblemes (London, 1635), p. 124 243 7.9 Herman Hugo, Pia Desideria (Antwerp: H. Aertssen, 1628, 1st ed. 1624), frontispiece 244 7.10 Stirling, Holy Rude kirkyard, gravestone of John Service, supporting base of tombstone, with hollowed niche showing carved skull of the deceased 246 7.11 Dundee, the Howff, gravestone of i.c., wife of Thomas Victane †1645 248 7.12 Dundee, the Howff, Victane gravestone, emblem ‘It is good for me to draw near to God’ 249 7.13 Francis Quarles, Emblemes (London, 1635), p. 232 250 7.14 Dundee, the Howff, Victane gravestone, emblem, ‘My life is spent with grief, and my yeares with sighing’ 251 7.15 Francis Quarles, Emblemes (London, 1635), p. 180 252 7.16 Dundee, the Howff, Victane gravestone, emblem, ‘I will arise and go about the city’ 253 7.17 Francis Quarles, Emblemes (London, 1635), p. 224 253 7.18 Dundee, the Howff, Victane gravestone, emblem, ‘When shall I come and appear before the Lord?’ 254 7.19 Francis Quarles, Emblemes (London, 1635), p. 288 254 7.20 St Andrews Cathedral, Fife. gravestone of Judith Nairn, †1646 255 7.21 St Andrews Cathedral, gravestone of Judith Nairn, emblem, ‘I will arise and go about the citie and will seek him whom my soule loveth’ 257 7.22 St Andrews Cathedral, gravestone of Judith Nairn, emblem, ‘When shall I come and appeare before God’ 258

List of Figures

xxv

7.23 St Andrews Cathedral, gravestone of Judith Nairn, emblem, ‘Everything has an appointed time’ 258 7.24 St Andrews Cathedral, gravestone of Judith Nairn, emblem, ‘Draw me and I will run after thee’ 258 7.25 Francis Quarles, Emblemes (London, 1635), p. 180 259 7.26 Old Scone graveyard, Perthshire, gravestone of Gilbert Coupar †1647, emblem, ‘When shall I come and appear before the Lord?’ 261 7.27 Old Scone graveyard, Perthshire, gravestone of Gilbert Coupar †1647, emblem, ‘Wherefore hidest thou thy face, and holdest me for thy enemy?’ 261 7.28 Francis Quarles, Emblemes (London, 1635), p. 148 262 7.29 Caerlaverock Castle, Dumfriesshire 263 7.30 Caerlaverock Castle, new residential wing with carved lintels to doorway and windows, built for the Earl of Nithsdale in 1634 264 7.31 Quarles, Emblemes (London, 1635), fol. A4v, frontispiece to the poet’s opening Invocation to his heavenly muse 266 7.32 Caerlaverock Castle, carved second-floor lintel B1 to Nithsdale Lodging, ­‘MAIORA CARPE’ (‘Gather ye greater things’) 268 7.33 Frontispiece to Typus Mundi (Antwerp, 1627) showing St Ignatius uniting the two worlds 269 7.34 Caerlaverock Castle, carved second-floor lintel B3 to Nithsdale Lodging, NON AMAT ISTE SED HAMAT AMOR (‘Don’t think love just wishes, he fishes!’) 269 7.35 Quarles, Emblemes (London, 1635), p. 72 270 7.36 Caerlaverock Castle, carved second-floor lintel B2 to Nithsdale Lodging, QUIS LEVIOR? CUI PLUS PONDERIS ADDIT AMOR (‘Which is lighter? That to which love adds greater weight’). The cartouche strapwork is marked with Robert Nithsdale’s initials: rn 272 7.37 Quarles, Emblemes (London, 1635), p. 16 273 7.38 Caerlaverock Castle, carved lintel to Nithsdale Lodging, QUAM GRAVE SERVITIUM EST, QUID LEVIS ESCA PARIT (‘What a heavy responsibility it is, to prepare light meals’) 273 7.39 Quarles, Emblemes (London, 1635), p. 76 274 7.40 Caerlaverock Castle, carved third-floor lintel A1 to Nithsdale Lodging, Opulenti haereditas (‘The rich man’s legacy’) 275 7.41 A. Alciato, Emblemata (Padua, 1621), p. 673, ‘Opulenti Hæreditas’ (‘The rich man’s legacy’) 275 7.42 Caerlaverock Castle, carved second-floor lintel A2 to Nithsdale Lodging, Quae supra nos, nihil ad nos (‘What lies above us is none of our business’) 276 7.43 A. Alciato, Emblemata (Padua, 1621), p. 426, Quae supra nos, nihil ad nos (‘What lies above us is none of our business’) 276

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List of Figures

7.44 Gardyne’s House, Dundee shortly before its demolition in 1887 278 7.45 Facsimile transcript of verses painted on a beam from Gardyne’s House, as printed in Dundee Advertiser, 21 Feb 1887 279 7.46 Quarles, Emblemes (London, 1635), p. 4 280 7.47 Quarles, Emblemes (London, 1635), pp. 56–57 284 7.48 Girvan, Ayrshire, gravestone to Elizabeth McCrakes, †1714 286 7.49 Old Inch, Wigtonshire, gravestone to John Drymen, †1748 287 7.50 Soulseat Abbey, Wigtonshire, gravestone of Robert Campbell, †1701 288 7.51 Quarles in England, carved chimneypiece of unknown provenance, now in the great hall, Sutton Place, Surrey 289 7.52 Alloway Churchyard, Ayrshire, anonymous undated gravestone 290 7.53 Francis Quarles, Hieroglyphickes of the Life of Man (1638), p. 22 291 7.54 Alloway Churchyard, Ayrshire, gravestone of Agnes Meler, †1741 292 7.55 American gravestone, King’s Chapel cemetary, Boston ma, gravestone of Joseph Tapping, †1678 293 7.56 King’s Chapel cemetary, Boston ma, gravestone of Joseph Trapping, detail 294 7.57 King’s Chapel cemetary, Boston ma, gravestone of Rebecca Garish, †1743 294 7.58 Arbroath Abbey Museum, Angus, undated gravestone commemorating ‘pw’ and ‘ig’ 295 7.59 Quarles, Emblemes (London, 1635), p. 64 296 7.60 Church at Katharinenheerd, Schleswig, painted panel on organ gallery, 1635– 1650, copying a version of Herman Hugo’s emblem 13, Nunquid non paucitas dierum meorum finietur brevi (‘Our life is brief; it will be ended shortly’) quoting the text from the Office for the Dead 298 7.61 Church at Katharinenheerd, Schleswig, painted panel, copying Hugo’s Pia Desideria frontispiece 299 8.1 Ian Hamilton Finlay, Heroic Emblems (Calais, vt, 1977), p. 3 303 8.2 Peter Isselburg, Emblemata Politica (Nürnberg, 1640), no. 8 305 8.3 Ian Hamilton Finlay, Heroic Emblems (Calais, vt, 1977), p. 13 306 8.4 Ian Hamilton Finlay, Heroic Emblems (Calais, vt, 1977), p. 15 306 8.5 Ian Hamilton Finlay, Heroic Emblems (Calais, vt, 1977), p. 17 307 8.6 Ian Hamilton Finlay, Heroic Emblems (Calais, vt, 1977), p. 25 308 8.7 Ian Hamilton Finlay, Heroic Emblems (Calais, vt, 1977), p. 27 308 8.8 Ian Hamilton Finlay, Heroic Emblems (Calais, vt, 1977), p. 29 309 8.9 Ian Hamilton Finlay, Heroic Emblems (Calais, vt, 1977), p. 33 309 8.10 Ian Hamilton Finlay, Heroic Emblems (Calais, vt, 1977), p. 37 310 8.11 ‘Out of the Strong Came forth Sweetness’, trademark of British sugar refiner Tate & Lyle, as used on golden syrup tins since 1884 311

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8.12 ‘The Rewards of War’, from The Royal Politician represented in one hundred emblems (London, 1700), Sir James Astry’s translation of Diego de Saavedra Fajardo, Idea principis Christiano politici 313 8.13 Geffrey Whitney, A Choice of Emblemes (Leiden, 1586), p. 138 314 8.14 Ian Hamilton Finlay, Heroic Emblems (Calais, vt, 1977), p. 45 314 8.15 Ian Hamilton Finlay, Heroic Emblems (Calais, vt, 1977), p. 47 315 8.16 Little Sparta, plant trough, Ian Hamilton Finlay with John Andrew, 1977, ‘Semper festina lente’. By courtesy of the Estate of Ian Hamilton inlay 316 8.17 Little Sparta, emblem ‘Through a dark wood’, commemorating the Pacific Battle of Midway, 1942 317 8.18 Ian Hamilton Finlay, Heroic Emblems (Calais, vt, 1977), p. 43 317 8.19 Little Sparta, slate plaque commemorating the Battle of Midway, 1942, and reworking inscriptions from the two terminal Heroic Emblems 319 8.20 Little Sparta, ‘Grotto of Aeneas and Dido’ 320 8.21 Little Sparta, stone aircraft carrier Bird-Table, 1972 320 8.22 Little Sparta, ‘Nuclear Sail’, 1974 321

Chapter 1

A Jester at the Crucifixion? The Fool at Fowlis

The Church of St Marnock, Fowlis Easter

The 15th-century painting in the church at Fowlis Easter, Angus, a few miles west of Dundee, is one of only two or three surviving Scottish examples of latemedieval ecclesiastical painting to have escaped the Reformation’s destruction of images. (Fig. 1.1) It therefore offers vitally important, if not unique, evidence for our understanding of the relationship between such painting in Scotland and Christian art of the later Middle Ages elsewhere in Europe. The painting was probably executed when the church was rebuilt in 1453 for its patron, Sir Andrew Gray. This was a collegiate church, which meant that it had not just one priest but a staff of seven prebendaries and a provost who together formed a ‘college’. A collegiate church required priests who were literate and educated and whose job was to celebrate divine service and offer masses for benefactors. The Gray family’s continuing interest in painting is suggested by the fact that

Figure 1.1 Fowlis Easter, Angus, church of St. Marnock. Photo author © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���8 | doi 10.1163/9789004364066_002

2

Chapter 1

in 1497 Dean James Gray presented a panel painting to King James iv who had recently visited Fowlis Easter.1 The painting that survives in the church includes eleven panels of saints and apostles, and also part of a large altarpiece, once misidentified as a Trinity but which David McRoberts has shown to be a representation of Christ as Salvator, flanked by St. Catherine, John the Baptist and the Virgin and Child.2 Several further fragmentary paintings on boards show unidentified characters in costume, some mounted and armed: these resemble the figures we see in the large Crucifixion panel which was originally part of a rood screen. In 1612 the reformed church’s Synod of Fife ordered that ‘the paintrie quhilk is upon the pulpitt and ruid-laft, being monumentes of idolatrie, sal be obliterate be laying it over with grein colour’ – the term ‘grein’ is not specifying the colour but is a variant spelling of ‘grain’ in the sense ‘ineradicable, indelible’ (oed, sb 10b, hence ‘ingrained’). When the paintings at Fowlis were rediscovered in the eighteenth century we are told that they were covered in whitewash. Research by Apted and Robertson and by David McRoberts has succeeded in establishing exactly what went where before the decorative painting of this medieval church was torn down or overpainted on the Synod’s orders.3

The Rood Screen Crucifixion

The rood screen Crucifixion, which is our subject in this chapter, can be shown to be a fairly conventional, or faithful, example of the type which Gertrud Schiller, in her authoritative Iconography of Christian Art, calls ‘the late-­medieval narrative crucifixion image with many figures’.4 There are, certainly, many figures in it – this is a crowded Crucifixion. (Fig. 1.2) Nearly all of these, as one might expect, are sanctioned by holy writ or by the received iconography of 1 Duncan Macmillan, Scottish Art 1460–1990 (Edinburgh: Mainstream, 1990), p. 31, citing M. ­Apted and S. Hannabus, Painters in Scotland 1301–1700: A Biographical Dictionary (Edinburgh: Edina Press, 1978), p. 113. 2 D. McRoberts, ‘The Fifteenth-Century Altarpiece of Fowlis Easter Church’, in From the Stone Age to the ‘Forty-Five’, ed. Anne O’Connor and D.V. Clarke (Edinburgh: J. Donald, 1983), pp. 384–98. 3 M.R. Apted and W.N. Robertson, ‘Late 15th Century Church Paintings from Guthrie and Fowlis Easter’, Proceeding of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, 95 (1962), 262–79. Earlier studies of the church and its history were written by James Stuart, Historical Sketches of the Church and Parish of Fowlis Easter (Dundee, W & J Middleton, 1865) and A.B. Dalgetty, History of the Church at Fowlis Easter (Dundee, 1933). 4 Schiller, Gertrud. Ikonographie der christlichen Kunst, 8 vols. (Gütersloh: Gerd Mohn, 1969), ii, p. 164, ‘Das vielfigurige szenische Kreuzigungsbild des spâten Mittelalters’.

A Jester at the Crucifixion? The Fool at Fowlis

3

Figure 1.2 Fowlis Easter, rood screen Crucifixion, oil paint on oak boards, 3.962x1.600mm. © St Marnock’s Church, Fowlis Easter

Christian art; there is one figure, however, whom one does not find any mention of in the gospel narratives: behind the mounted soldiers on the left side of the painting (viewer’s right) we see the head of a jester, wearing his unmistakable fool’s cap, who peers out of the picture directly at the viewer. (Fig. 1.5) Solving the mystery of this unexpected motif and its meaning is our task in this chapter – a task which I believe not only yields a better understanding of this particular painting but also anticipates some of the problems and procedures we shall be encountering in later chapters of this book. However before we account for the presence of this jester, we perhaps need to identify the other figures. Immediately below the cross we see the group of four haloed women, including Mary, Mother of God, Mary the wife of Cleophas, and Mary Magdalene, as described in John 29:25, where they are accompanied, as in the painting, by the favourite disciple, John himself. The fourth woman is Salome. Further to the right (viewer’s left) we see the mounted soldier known as Longinus, holding what must be one of the longest spears in Christian art and pointing to his eye. His presence is sanctioned by St. John’s gospel, which describes a soldier who pierced Christ’s side with his spear, from which flowed blood and water, ‘And he that saw it bare record, and his record is true: and he knoweth that he saith true, that ye might believe’, as the Apostle puts it at this point (John 19:35). Indeed, this text is probably implied in the painting which, I suggest, is all about conversion and believing. The reason L­ onginus – unnamed in the gospels but thus christened in later legend – points to his eye is that these legends elaborated on the gospels by telling how he suffered from a disease of the eyes which was cured by Christ’s blood flowing down the lance. Moreover, the reason why another soldier, at Fowlis as in other paintings of this subject, supports the lance is that Longinus cannot do so because he is blind. Accordingly, he became (among the figures standing around the cross) a type of converted gentile, sometimes identified with that other centurion,

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not mentioned by St John but whom the other three gospels all describe as exclaiming at the moment of Christ’s death, ‘Vere filius Dei erat iste’ (‘Truly this was the son of God’). If we look at the mounted figure just beneath Christ’s left hand at Fowlis, we see that he holds a scroll which quotes this very text from Matthew 27:54. (Fig. 1.3) It is a speech scroll, giving this historical painting that dramatic, or perhaps one should say, using Gertrud Schiller’s term, ‘narrative’ status which is characteristic of the type she defines as ‘narrative crucifixion … with many figures’. The further characterisation of the painting at Fowlis as what we might call a ‘conversion narrative’ is suggested by two more details. The two thieves bound to their crosses on either side of Christ are shown expiring and breathing out their souls as small homunculi: that on the right (viewer’s left) is being received by an angel whereas on the left (viewer’s right) the expired soul is being seized by a devil. This way of representing the two thieves from the gospels was sanctioned by Luke’s statement that Christ turned to one of the thieves, who had acknowledged his crime and asked for forgiveness in the next world, telling him, ‘Today thou shalt be with me in paradise’ (Luke 23:43). It followed that Christian art distinguishes between the penitent and the impenitent thieves by showing the ‘good’ thief on Christ’s right hand and the ‘bad’ thief on his left: the soul of the former is borne away by angels whilst the latter is seized by demons. Once we notice this, we can see how many of the other details in the Fowlis Easter panel follow this space coding. For example, the richly dressed Caiaphas, priest of the temple, is to the left holding his death warrant and behind him is an ermined mounted figure with a sceptre who may be intended for Herod, though Herod is not normally shown witnessing the crucifixion. The pattern, righteous to the right, sinners and unrighteous to the left, is clear enough in the painting.

European Parallels

Further confirmation of this as a ‘conversion narrative’ comes when we look at the centre panel of the Berswordt Altar in Dortmund, painted in 1397. (Fig 1.4) Here we see so many of the details of the Fowlis rood screen Crucifixion reduplicated that we can hardly doubt that the Scottish painting belongs in precisely this tradition. We see the haloed three Maries, Longinus with his spear, and the centurion who acknowledges the divinity of Christ, pointing to the cross and holding just the same scroll that he has at Fowlis, quoting his ‘Truly this man was the son of God’ speech. Speech scrolls in paintings of this period anticipate the speech bubbles in modern strip cartoons, and there are three other witnesses in the Dortmund painting who have similar scrolls. There,

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Figure 1.3 Fowlis Easter, Crucifixion, detail with speech scroll, ‘Vere filius Dei erat iste’ (‘Truly this was the son of God’). © St Marnock’s Church, Fowlis Easter

­ ilate and an anonymous Jew sit beneath the cross with a scroll which says, P ‘I have written what I have written’, in answer to the Jew’s words, ‘Write not king’, on a separate scroll, dramatising the dialogue recorded in John 19:19–22, and as Schiller notes, ‘The scroll held by the knight on the other side of the centurion indicates that he is a mocker. His legend runs, “Save thyself, and come down from the cross” (Mark 15:30)’.5 These details are rarely represented in paintings 5 Schiller, ii, p. 170, ‘Der Ritter auf der anderen Seite des Hauptmanns ist durch das Wort in seinen Händen als Spötter gekennzeichnet. Hier ist zu lesen: “Hilf dir nun selber und steig herab vom Kreuzen” mk 15.30.’

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Figure 1.4 Dortmund, Marienkirche, Berswordt-Altar centrepiece, Crucifixion, c. 1397. © Dortmund, Marienkirche, Berswordt

of this subject, though the centurion’s ‘Truly this man was the son of God’ confession is quite commonly included just as we see it at Fowlis. The Dortmund altar painting also shows the two thieves exhaling their souls, as at Fowlis, into the hands of an angel on Christ’s right hand and a devil on his left. The soldiers at Dortmund who are dicing for Christ’s garments are not represented in the Fowlis painting, though they are common enough in paintings of this type and are sanctioned by the Gospels narrative (Matthew 27:35; John 19:23–24). We might conclude from this comparison that such Scottish religious painting of the fifteenth century was fully conversant with Christian art on the continent. Examples of this type of Crucifixion scene with many figures are widely found, particularly though by no means exclusively in Germany. Schiller reproduces examples from Cologne, Munich, Hamburg, Antwerp, Vienna, and Prague, together with further examples from Italy (Florence and Siena) by artists that include Giotto and Simone Martini. Individual paintings show occasional variations of detail and also vary considerably, as one might expect, in the skill of their execution. This scene demands at least some competence, however, in representing the human figure and it tends to delight in showing a range of rich and exotic clothing. Such painting is moving some way towards what we have been taught to see as ‘Renaissance’ realism, representing characters in fancy dress who, for all their medieval chivalric appearance, need to be

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Figure 1.5 Fowlis Easter, Crucifixion detail, jester peers over the shoulder of crowned King Herod. © St Marnock’s Church, Fowlis Easter

recognised as Roman soldiers and Jews. It thus has to be seen as ‘history’ painting in both the traditional and a more modern sense. The inclusion of speechscrolls also has to be seen, as in modern strip cartoons or bandes dessinées, as confirming this narrative or dramatic function.

The Jester Figure

But what are we to make of the seemingly anomalous figure of the fool? It is a detail which Duncan Macmillan calls attention to in his history of Scottish Art:

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A fool leers over the heads of the soldiers at the Crucifixion looking ­directly at the spectator. It is a sardonic touch of startling directness that is quite unexpected in the iconography of the Crucifixion.6 Although, as we have seen, the gospel narratives do not sanction the presence of a jester at the crucifixion, it would surely be unusual if there were no biblical texts that justified and explained it. There are indeed a number of biblical references to fools and their follies, but the key text has to be the opening verse of Psalm 52, ‘Dixit insipiens in corde suo: non est Deus’ (av, Ps. 53:1, ‘The fool hath said in his heart, there is no God’).7 The same verse opens Psalm 13 (av 15), but it is incipits to Psalm 52 in illuminated Psalters and Books of Hours of the Middle Ages that most frequently represent the figure of a jester. (Fig. 1.6) If we take the Fowlis Easter fool as an allusion to this psalm, I suggest, it makes perfect sense of most of the other details in the painting which – unlike the jester – are sanctioned by the New Testament accounts of the crucifixion. In its demand for a viewer who can interpret its symbolic and doctrinal message, the Fowlis painting shows its artist’s confidence in grasping and communicating that message. At the very moment of the crucifixion the figures of Longinus whose blindness was cured by Christ’s blood, the biblical centurion who recognised Christ’s divinity, and the two thieves, one of whom recognized the saving power of Christ, all establish its potential to be understood as a conversion narrative. The inclusion of a wholly uncanonical fool surely has to be interpreted in the same light: as an allusion to the Psalm text that describes the folly of those who deny the divinity of Christ. Moreover, the direction of his glance – straight towards the viewer – can only be read as a challenge to the congregation. It is a detail which, properly understood, in what Duncan Macmillan calls its ‘sardonic touch of startling directness’, confirms the confidence of this painting. Illuminated ‘Dixit’ initials from medieval manuscripts tend to show the Psalmist’s fool with defining attributes such as cap and bells, or his club (‘marotte’) and wafer, though from around the thirteenth century he tends to be shown confronting king David the psalmist, to whom he is delivering his foolish atheistical sermon (Fig. 1.7). If the painting of the rood-screen Crucifixion did indeed have any connection with King James’s reputed visit to Fowlis ­Easter,

6 D Macmillan, Scottish Art 1460–1990 (Edinburgh: Mainstream, 1990), p. 32. 7 For the iconography of the ‘Dixit insipiens’ fool, see D.J. Gifford, ‘Iconographical Notes towards a Definition of the Medieval Fool’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 37 (1974), 336–42.

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Figure 1.6 ‘Dixit insipiens’ manuscript incipit of Psalm 52, showing parti-coloured jester pronouncing his atheist message to King David. Thirteenth-century English psalter, Oxford, Bodleian Library, ms Laud.lat 114, f. 71. © Oxford, Bodleian Library (MS Laud.lat 114, f.71)

then it might well have been this iconography, exemplifying royal wisdom in response to atheistical folly, that suggested the inclusion of the jester figure. This setting and costume facilitated identification of the biblical fool with the court jester figure, which is what we find in a page from Henry viii ’s personal Psalter, c. 1540, where the ‘Dixit insipiens’ fool is represented by the king’s jester Will Somers.8 (Fig. 1.8) As Malcolm Jones explains: ‘Henry plays the harp while his fool – recognisable as Will Somers – turns his back on his King and his God, for here he is representing … the atheistic fool of Psalm 52 who “has 8 For this, see John Southworth, Fools and Jesters at the English Court, (Stroud: Sutton, 1998).

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Figure 1.7 Royal wisdom rejecting atheistical folly, Book of Hours, c. 1450–1460. © University of Glasgow Library, Department of Special Collections (MS Gen 288, f. 152v)

said in his heart, there is no God”.’9 It is, I suggest, the way the Psalm text identifies the fool with speaking – with the word ‘Dixit’ – that justifies the jester’s presence in a painting that is, in some sense, all about speaking and silence. That association was suggested not only by biblical but also by classical proverbs where, as Erasmus noted in the first chiliad of his Adagia (no. 1.1.98), the 9 This comment is quoted online from where Jones’s invaluable pinterest boards of medieval and early modern iconography include one of ‘­Images of the Fool’ containing more than 400 images on which I have drawn for this investigation. [accessed 26/04/2016]

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Figure 1.8 ‘Dixit insipiens’ illustration from Henry viii’s personal psalter c. 1540 showing Henry’s court jester, Will Somer, turning his back on Henry who is imitating David by playing a harp and not listening. © British Library Board (MS Royal 2.A.XVI, f.63v)

saying ‘Stultus stulta loquitur’ (‘A fool says foolish things’), which goes back to Euripedes’ Bacchæ, is the same as what we find the prophet Isaiah saying in the Bible. Erasmus does not cite chapter and verse but is almost certainly referring to Isaiah 32:6, ‘Stultus enim fatua loquetur’ (‘For a fool will say foolish things’).10

A Sixteenth-century ‘Allegory of Folly’

So, if we turn from documenting the received iconography of the crucifixion to the medieval iconography of the fool, we get some interesting results. Among the many images of the jester figure it is indeed remarkable how many of these 10

Erasmus associates this with further proverbs which affirm how our speech defines us; these have been shown to underpin emblems such as Alciato’s ‘In silentium’ on the virtues of silence in a world where one cannot tell whether someone is foolish of wise until he opens his mouth; see D. Russell, ‘Alciati’s Emblems in Renaissance France’, Renaissance Quarterly, 34 (1981), 534–54.

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Figure 1.9 French ‘Allegory of Folly’ showing the range of proverbial follies identified in the Bible, which supplies the text, top left, STVLTORVM INFINITVS EST NVMERVS (‘The number of fools is infinite’, Ecc.1:15). From the nineteenthcentury collection of P-A Mordret, now owned by The National Trust and displayed in Paycock’s House, Coggleshall, Essex. Photograph © Anna Forest

medieval fools point to their mouths, in gestures that often allude to proverbial sayings. This is the typical gesture that we find not so much in the high art of religious painting but in popular, secular and frequently scatological sources. We find the gesture, for instance, in a remarkable sixteenth-century French painting known as ‘Allegory of Folly’ that has been brought to our attention by Malcolm Jones.11 (Fig. 1.9) It was owned in the nineteenth century by a French 11

M. Jones, ‘Paycocke’s Rich Allegory of Folly: Unravelling the Message of the Inscriptions and Fool Imagery’, Arts, Buildings, Collections Bulletin of the National Trust, (Summer 2015),  8–9.  accessed 25/02/2017. For the wider attributes of the fool see Jones, The Secret Middle Ages (Stroud, Sutton, 2002), pp. 100–20.

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collector, P.A. Modret of Angers, and bequeathed to the English National Trust by architect Marshall Sisson in 1978; it now hangs in a National Trust property, Paycocke’s House, Coggleshall, Essex. Its crowd of jesters are all illustrations of proverbial follies identified in the texts which are cited from the Vulgate Bible, of which thirteen come from the Old Testament and two from the New. Such a painting suggests just how likely it was, at this period, that a viewer of the Fowlis Easter Crucifixion would have associated its fool figure with biblical texts. It also shows just how much of the received iconography of folly is associated with speaking. The central figure holds a key labelled ‘The Key of Foolishness’ as he holds open the door behind him, through which the fools surrounding him are being invited to pass. However, the index finger holding the key also points directly to his mouth, and the biblical texts on either side of his face both refer to speaking, citing Isaiah 32:6, STVLTVS FATVA LOQVET[V]R (‘The fool will speak foolish things’) – which is the same text we saw Erasmus alluding to above – and Proverbs 17:28, STVLTVS SI TACVERIT SAPIENS REPVTABITVR (‘If the fool falls silent he will be thought wise’). The three different groups of fools who surround this keyholder all take their cues from biblical texts, such as the cage of fools, bottom right, with the text IN CVSTODIAM STVLTVS ­T RAHITVR (‘The fool is thrown into custody’); those crowding through the door on the left take their cue from Ecclesiastes 21: 27, STVLTITIA HOMINIS AVSCVLTATVR PER OSTIVM (‘It is folly for a man to listen at the door’), whilst the two on the right illustrate the preceding verse from Ecclesiastes 21:26, STVLTVS A FENESTRA RESPICIT IN DOMVM (‘The fool looks from the window into the house’). These two jesters are perhaps the most interesting for our purposes, since one of them not only points to his lips but, rather like the fool at Fowlis, he directs his gaze straight at the viewer. (Fig. 1.10) And the reason he does so is signalled by the inscription between him and his companion, for this is the only inscription that is not Latin but French: NOVS SOMMES TROIS (‘We are three’). This, and the fact that all the named books of the Bible that are cited in the painting use the French forms of their names, means that ‘there can be no doubt it is French’, as Jones points out (2015, p. 8). But NOVS SOMMES TROIS is also written in French because this is a vernacular proverb addressed directly to the viewer, a joke recorded in a number of languages, including English, where it is known as the proverb of ‘We Three’. Shakespeare refers to it in Twelfth Night as ‘the picture of we three’ and its ecphrastic basis depends on the foolish reader who, confronted with the picture of just two fools, asks ‘Where is the third?’ To which the answer, of course, is ‘You too!’ Widely represented in popular art of the later Middle Ages, one of its two fools is almost invariably depicted, as here, gazing directly at the viewer: to answer the

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Figure 1.10

‘Allegory of Folly’ detail, NOVS SOMMES TROIS (‘We are three’), so where is the third? ‘Here’s looking at you …’ Photograph © Anna Forest

inevitable question, and solve the riddle, we have only to follow the fool’s gaze. So for all their variety the biblical fools depicted in this remarkable painting share two senses, the eye and the ear, which supply their access to folly, and that is why in the French ‘Allegory of Folly’ (Fig. 1.9) the right-hand figure at the door points to his ear whilst the one furthest left through the window touches his lips. Furthermore the direction of the many pointing fingers in this remarkable deixis is only matched by the various directions of gaze. If we look at almost any of the other late-medieval examples of this bimedial topos of ‘We three’ we shall find that the direct gaze of one of these fools at the viewer was wholly conventional, if not inevitable: after all, the joke depends on it. (Fig. 1.11)

The Iconography of Folly

If we, therefore, conclude by asking ourselves what a fifteenth-century viewer might have made of the jester who peers out at us from the crowded Crucifixion on the Fowlis Easter rood screen, it seems more than likely that he or she might

A Jester at the Crucifixion? The Fool at Fowlis

Figure 1.11

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‘Wee Three Logerh[ea]ds’; the fool’s glance identifies the missing third, though the artist’s decision to include the conventional fools-headed marotte rather spoils the joke, even if the marotte is also regarding us. Reproduced courtesy of Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, Stratford-upon-Avon

have recognised an allusion to the ‘Dixit insipiens’ jester of Psalm 52, and that the direction of this jester’s gaze, directly at us, might well have also posed a challenge to the viewer of deciding which group he or she belongs to: Of those witnessing Christ’s Passion, there were some who recognised His divinity, but others who denied it. The fool hath said in his heart, “There is no God”. You too?

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We are, admittedly, looking at examples that are some fifty or more years later than the Fowlis Easter painting. By the sixteenth century the iconography of folly had been influenced, or perhaps one should say ‘summarised’, by two highly influential publications, neither of which was available to the Fowlis painter or to its priests and congregation. 1494 saw the publication of Sebastian Brant’s Narrenschiff (‘Ship of Fools’), which has been described as ‘one of the most widely-read and widely influential books of the Renaissance’.12 Quickly translated into all the major European languages, its reliance not only on popular traditions and, at the same time, on classical and biblical sources, ensured its wide appeal. The year 1509 saw two English translations, Henry Watson’s prose version and also Alexander Barclay’s better-known and much more influential bilingual Latin and English Ship of Fools, which is illustrated with woodcuts and heavily annotated with classical and biblical quotations. Scholars have stressed the influence of sermons on its creation, imagery and reception, whilst its heavy reliance on proverbs accounts for its inspiring another work of literature, Erasmus’s Moriæ Encomium (‘The Praise of Folly’) also in 1509, that helped to secure the central place which the idea of folly and the figure of the jester assumed in Renaissance culture. The appeal to proverbial wisdom was undoubtedly one of the things which strengthened the appeal of Brant’s work to the author of the Adagia, and the fundamental role which Biblical references played in this whole tradition is suggested when, as he reaches the concluding pages of his paradoxical encomium, Erasmus turns from classical to Biblical authorities. However, perhaps the authority of these writers is disregarded by Christians. We shall, therefore, illustrate our argument through the testimony of Sacred Scripture, as learned scholars frequently do to strengthen their points.13 And Erasmus proceeds to take us through those Biblical loci – Ecclesiastes and Psalms and also St Paul – which define the place of the fool and of folly in Christian doctrine. Of course neither Brant nor Erasmus could have influenced the painting at Fowlis, but they do accommodate and bring to a new fruition 12

13

Robert Evans, ‘Alexander Barclay’s Ship of Fools’, in Fools and Folly, ed. C. Davidson (Kalamazoo,: Medieval Institute, Publications, 1996), pp. 47–72 (p. 48). For the iconography of the fool see also Barbara Swain, Fools and Folly during the Middle Ages and Renaissance (New York, Columbia up, 1932). John P. Dolan, The Essential Erasmus, (New York, New American Library, 1964), p. 162.

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the accumulated proverbial and topical wisdom surrounding the figure of the fool in late-medieval culture. The relevance of these two Renaissance texts to the jester figure in the Fowlis Easter Crucifixion and to its theology is, indeed, clarified by the work of a distinguished modern scholar, leading authority on Erasmus and French renaissance literature, M.A. Screech, in a book whose title, Laughter at the Foot of the Cross, immediately suggests its importance for our investigations in this chapter.14 Screech reminds us of how not only the gospel narratives but also biblical commentaries, from the earliest Christian fathers to writers such as Erasmus and Montaigne, had stressed the mockery of Christ by those non-believers who witnessed his crucifixion. The biblical texts recording that mockery may be summed up in those passers by at Matthew 27: 39–42 who ‘reviled him, wagging their heads… He saved others; himself he cannot save. If he be the King of Israel, let him come down from the cross, and we will believe him’. It is the association which these texts recording the mockery of Christ make between such mockery and theological disbelief that begins to make sense of the inclusion of a jester figure at Fowlis Easter among those witnesses who, as we have seen, are divided, like the two thieves, into those who accept and those who deny the divinity of Christ. Although the presence of a jester figure at the crucifixion may not be sanctioned by holy writ, he nevertheless represents, as it were allegorically, the folly of those who, the Bible insists, mocked or ‘derided’ Christ and denied his divinity (Luke, 23: 35–36, cf. Screech, pp. 25–26). Moreover this mockery in the New Testament narratives is anticipated by those places in the Old Testament which traditional Typology led believers to interpret as prophetic anticipations of the New. The Renaissance Christian scholar or his predecessor across the centuries, having piously collected all the places in the New Testament where Christ is laughed at, would still have much to do. Certainty about the humiliation of Jesus was also to be sought from the Old Testament.15 Those places included the Psalms, most notably Psalm 22, whose opening verse is quoted, as Screech reminds us, in Christ’s cry of dereliction from the cross, ‘My God, my God, why has thou forsaken me?’ That cry is at the furthest 14 Screech, Laughter at the Foot of the Cross (London: Allen Lane. 1997). I am indebted to Alison Adams and Stephen Rawles for alerting me to this book, described by Frances Yates as ‘a landmark in Erasmus studies’. 15 Screech, p. 28.

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Figure 1.12

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Salzwedel church, Saxony, centre panel of carved altarpiece, c. 1510. © Salzwedel church, Saxony

remove from the laughter of the disbelievers, but it might nevertheless s­ uggest how well attuned the early viewers of the Fowlis Easter roodscreen might have been to recognise the Old Testament allusion which the inclusion of its jester figure was making to Psalm 52, ‘Dixit insipiens’ (‘The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God’), a text which clearly signals its status as speech. Like the speech scrolls in the painting recording actual witnesses to the crucifixion, the fool’s atheism is, we may say, voiced. As Screech points out, the mockery of the New Testament witnesses is further anticipated by Psalm 22: 7–8, ‘All they that see me laugh me to scorn: they shoot out their lip, they shake their head, saying: “He trusted on the Lord, that he would deliver him, seeing he delighted in him”’. As Screech insists, ‘That explicit “laughing to scorn” of the psalmist

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adds a new fact to the facts given in the Gospels. It is every bit as authoritative, as true, as the Gospel itself. The crowd who massed together at the foot of the Cross to enjoy the spectacle and who saw Jesus hanging there laughed him to scorn.’ Where there is such laughter, we should certainly not be surprised to find paintings that introduce the figure of a jester. And that ‘crowd massed together at the foot of the Cross’ will see us to the end of this chapter.

Further Fools in Paintings of the Passion

So is the fool at the crucifixion unique to Fowlis? Duncan Macmillan was surely justified in describing it as ‘unexpected’, however we know how unusual it is to find anything wholly original or unprecedented in medieval painting, and it is now possible to identify at least a few precedents or analogues. The carved altarpiece of c. 1510 from the parish church in Salzwedel in Saxony, for instance, is another crowded Crucifixion in which we can see nearly all the conventional figures – the four Maries; Longinus with his spear and pointing to his eye; his mounted companion who supports his lance; the two expiring thieves, etc. (Fig. 1.12) And at the foot of the cross, embracing it with finger pointing to his mouth, we see a gesticulating fool, identified as such by his fool’s cap. (Fig. 1.13) It is that cap with its three projections, which may have bells but two of which are normally asses ears, which identifies another example of what we should now identify as the pictorial motif of the Fool at Calvary in the painting showing Christ carrying the Cross attributed to Michael Wohlgemut, dated 1489 in Sankt Florian church, Austria. (Fig. 1.14) The fool who has here turned his back on us, gestures at the four women at the foot of the cross and is only recognizable once one notices the hood that, most untypically, lies on his shoulders. (Fig. 1.15) He has evidently removed it in order to reveal the triple tonsure on his head, for he is a misguided cleric who, finger in mouth, is addressing the grieving Mother of God to insist that there is no God, non est deus. It was the use of this fool’s cap as a watermark which gave us, in English, the name of paper of a particular size, the use of which name testifies to popular familiarity with this attribute of the fool and the likelihood that it was definitive. The idea that it defines the figure in the Sankt Florian painting is thus more plausible. There are undoubtedly further examples to be found, but for now it will suffice to illustrate one of the most crowded of such paintings, not in this case the actual Crucifixion but, like the Sankt Florian painting, another Christ Carrying the Cross, this time by Peter Breugel the Elder. (Fig. 1.16) Dating from 1564, this is the largest picture Breugel ever painted, and as we try to count or identify the hundreds of figures accompanying our Saviour on his path to Calvary we

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Figure 1.13

Salzwedel church, Saxony, carved altarpiece, detail. © Salzwedel church, Saxony

Figure 1.14

Sankt Florian, Austria, abbey of St Florian, Christ carrying the Cross, attrib. Michael Wohlgemut, 1489. © Church of Sankt Florian, Austria

A Jester at the Crucifixion? The Fool at Fowlis

Figure 1.15

Sankt Florian, Austria, abbey of St Florian, Christ carrying the Cross, detail: triple-tonsured jester addresses the five Maries, finger in mouth, as he denies the divinity of Christ. © Church of Sankt Florian, Austria

Figure 1.16

Peter Breugel the Elder, Christ carrying the Cross, 1564. Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum. © KHM-Musemsverband

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Figure 1.17

Peter Breugel the Elder, Christ carrying the Cross, detail. © KHM-Musemsverband (GG 1025)

can maybe understand why the actual crucifixion, in the paintings we have been looking at, was quite so busy. The task of identifying all the figures in Breugel’s painting, and explaining what they are doing, might defeat all but the most diligent of viewers, and the jester is certainly in danger of getting lost in the crowd. But if we narrow it down once again to the group immediately surrounding Christ carrying the cross, we can see that they include a figure wearing the jester’s cap. (Fig. 1.17) We might be hard pressed to say whether, as depicted here, he retains any of the moral or doctrinal significance that he holds when his biblical text is recalled, or whether with Breugel we have moved so much further in the direction of narrative realism as to lose any such doctrinal and homiletic points, but his mere presence in this very busy painting is clear enough evidence of an iconographic tradition in the art of this period which sanctioned the inclusion of a jester at the crucifixion.16 16

The credit for spotting this jester figure in Breugel’s painting is due to Dr Malcolm Jones, whose eagle-eye for identifying proverbial and emblematic details in late medieval and early modern visual arts, and the jester figure in particular, is unparalleled.

Chapter 2

A City of Famous Women: Esther Inglis, Georgette de Montenay, and Christine de Pisan

Emblemes Chrestiens (1624)

In 1624 Esther Inglis produced the last, and in many ways the most impressive, of the elegant manuscripts on which she spent her time as a professional calligrapher. Surviving in unique single copies, which were presented to influential patrons, each of the more than fifty known works which she created was intended primarily to earn some financial reward or recognition from its dedicatee. Often made into small booklets with embroidered bindings, we see her holding one such example in the 1595 portrait by an unknown artist in the National Gallery of Scotland. (Fig. 2.1) These manuscripts are artefacts which would be treasured above all for their skillful calligraphy; that does not mean, however, that the texts which Inglis copied from various sources (she was not, herself, author of any of them) were not carefully chosen, or that they did not address moral, religious or, possibly, political issues which were of some importance to the writer herself or her dedicatees. Surviving in single copies which might have been read, if at all, only by their dedicatee and his or her immediate friends and family, clearly such texts cannot have had much influence, if any, on wider public opinion. However once we look into both the form and content of the last and longest of these presentations it becomes apparent that they address issues which were of some moment to the writer herself and her dedicatees. The sequence of illustrated emblems, entitled Emblemes Chrestiens premierement inventez par la noble damoiselle Georgette de Montenay en France … ecrits, tirez et tracez par la main et plume de moi Esther Inglis, is dedicated to Charles, Prince of Wales, who became king of Great Britain only the following year, and this is how it came to be preserved amongst the royal manuscripts now in the British Library (ms Royal 17, D, xvi). Each of the individual emblems, however, has a separate dedication to different members of the royal family or British nobility.1 The work’s Scottish provenance is indicated in the 1 As Alison Saunders shows, the dedications are all ranked in hierarchical order descending from the king; see her ‘Montenay Comes to Edinburgh’ in The Emblem in Renaissance and Baroque Europe, ed. Alison Adams and A.J. Harper (Leiden: Brill, 1992), pp. 132–246 (pp. 135–37).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���8 | doi 10.1163/9789004364066_003

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Figure 2.1 Esther Inglis in 1595, Edinburgh, National Gallery of Scotland, oil on panel, 74.60 × 63.20 cm, artist unknown. © National Galleries of Scotland

closing words of its title: A Lislebourg en Ecosse (‘At Edinburgh in Scotland’) – ‘L’Islebourg’ was the accepted French name for Edinburgh in the sixteenth century, as found in the letters of Mary Queen of Scots, for instance, or those of the French ambassador Le Croc.2 This, then, has some claim to be considered the first Scottish emblem book. Created in Scotland, though written in French (and Latin), with dedications to leading members of English (or British) royalty and nobility, it should not be surprising to find that it reflects some of those issues which dominated Anglo-Scottish and European relations in the Since Inglis was working on her manuscript for several years, she sometimes had to adjust the order and rank as individuals were ennobled, debased or deceased. 2 See e.g. Robert Keith, History of the Affairs of Church and State in Scotland (Edinburgh: Spottiswood Society, 1845), p. viii.

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sixteenth and (as it turned out) throughout the seventeenth century. Some of them, indeed, are reappearing as we embark on our twenty-first century. The Emblemes ou Devises Chrestiennes by Georgette de Montenay had been first published in Lyons in 1567, although we are told that the text had been with its publisher since 1561 and two reprints and several reissues have the date 1571.3 Numerous reprintings testify to its subsequent popularity in cities such as Heidelberg, Frankfurt, Zurich and La Rochelle which had strong Protestant, and specifically Calvinist, readerships. Esther Inglis’s copies of fifty-one of these emblems might seem a rather negligible initiation of the meagre corpus of Scottish emblem books; however as we shall see its doctrinal or political arguments, and its iconography, raise issues which we shall find recurring throughout the following chapters of the present book.4 Perhaps the first thing to recognise is that Georgette de Montenay’s was the first religious emblem book ever to have been published, and that the emblems were specifically Protestant. Montenay was also, clearly, aware of the emblematic model which she was following, declaring in her dedication to Jeanne d’Albret that she wrote them after having seen Alciato’s Emblematum liber. Alciat feit des Emblémes exquis, Lesquels voyant de plusieurs requis, Desir me prit de commencer les miens, Lesquels je croy estre premier chrestiens. (Alciato made exquisite emblems which, having seen after many requests, a desire came to me to start my own, which I believe to be the first Christian ones.) ( fol. a4r) Born in 1540, Georgette had been brought up, following the death of both her parents from plague, by her noble relative, Jeanne d’Albret, Queen of Navarre (1529–1572). Leader and defender of the French Huguenots, following the Colloque de Poissy (1561), Jeanne d’Albret’s court was the centre of Protestantism in France, and although the extent of Montenay’s connections with the actual court is unclear it is still likely that she grew up in circles where the h ­ umanist

3 Alison Adams, ‘Georgette de Montenay’s Emblèmes ou devises chrestiennes, 1567: New Dating, New Context’, Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance, 63 (2001), 567–74. For the full bibliography of Montenay’s emblems see Alison Adams, S. Rawles and A. Saunders, Bibliography of French Emblem Books, 2 vols (Geneva: Droz, 2002), ii, pp. 177–91. 4 Two of the emblems, one the preliminary emblem addressed to Prince Charles and the other (no. 7) addressed to the Duke of Buckingham, copy Jean-Jacques Boissard’s 1588 Emblematum Liber, see Saunders, pp. 142–43.

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educators included such Protestant teachers as Théodore de Bèze, Calvin’s disciple and eventual successor at Geneva. Written at a time when French religious conflicts were leading, in 1572, to the St Bartholomew’s Day massacre and wars of religion, the doctrinal position of these spiritual emblems is strongly Calvinist.5 Esther Inglis was born in 1571 in Normandy, daughter of Nicholas Langlois, who fled with his wife Marie Presot to London following the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre and almost certainly as a result of persecution. Around 1575 the family settled in Edinburgh where Nicholas became master of the French School, with an annuity from King James for teaching written and spoken French. Esther was almost certainly taught the languages used in her writing by her father, whilst she owed her mastery of calligraphy to her mother, who was herself a skilled calligrapher. In 1596 Esther married Bartholomew Kello, son of a Presbyterian minister, who had himself recently been ordained in the Church of Scotland. This did not prevent him, following his marriage, from commencing his ministry in England, as Rector firstly of Willingale, Essex (in Epping Forest) and afterwards at Spexhall, Suffolk. During this time Kello also worked as a scrivener for the English court, producing official documents such as passports and letters of recommendation for which his wife’s skills as a calligrapher were often required. Since Kello was also responsible for delivering such documents to their recipients he would occasionally include the small hand-written gift books which Esther created, and which sometimes contained complimentary verses of his own composition. These duties account for the high status, whether royalty or nobility, of so many of the books’ dedicatees, and the beautifully executed calligraphic manuscripts were all presented in the expectation of a financial reward. Although Kello himself could not determine who those recipients of official correspondence would be, many of them shared the Calvinist or ‘Puritan’ theology of the Kellos themselves. This is especially the case with Esther’s religious emblems selected from the book published some sixty years earlier by her fellow Huguenot Frenchwoman, Georgette de Montenay. Esther Inglis’s exceptional skills as calligrapher were already recognised in her own day. In 1638, for instance, Scottish teacher of handwriting, David Browne, singles her out in his own book on the art of calligraphy thus: Surely the most rare and curious writs and workes of one woman, ­Esther English by name, which are extant both in his majesties librarie at St Jameses, and in the Universities of Oxford and in many other places 5 A. Adams, Webs of Allusion: French Protestant Emblem Books of the Sixteenth Century (Geneva: Droz, 2003), see pp. 9–118.

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e­ lsewhere, may be patternes and examples, as well for practice and teaching, both to all the men and women, professors and others that either are or have been in Europe these many yeeres….6 Browne goes on to acknowledge Esther Inglis’s generosity and readiness to ­assist him in acquiring and training his own pupils in the art, one of whom, he reports, had been presented to King James during the royal visit to ­Scotland in 1617, when the nine-year-old nobleman’s skills in writing had impressed the king. It was during the period spent in England that, in 1599, Esther changed her maiden name from Langlois to Anglois and, in 1601, she changed it to the Scottish form ‘Inglis’, which she retained for the rest of her life. It is the English c­ onvention that a wife assumes her husband’s surname which results in this Scottish calligrapher being sometimes identified as Esther Kello, but as Jamie Reid Baxter points out, ‘It is worth observing that Scotswomen of that time, and long thereafter, did not use their husband’s surnames, and the poet [­Elizabeth Melville, Lady Culross] should never, ever, be referred to as “Elizabeth Colville”’.7 We should insist equally forcefully that the correct name of our calligrapher is not ‘Kello’ but ‘Inglis’. The form of her birthname, as it happens, signals issues of national identity which, I am going to argue, are at the heart of her writings, and of her Emblemes Chrestiens in particular. Those issues were especially ­significant, as we shall see, for her identity as a woman.8

Author- and Self-portraits

In 1567 Montenay inserted Pierre Woeriot’s engraved portrait of herself before the title page to her emblem book. (Fig. 2.2) Such engraved author portraits are rare at this period, and we should note that this is in fact the first emblem book ever to use copperplate engravings rather than woodcuts for all its illustrations. Montenay is shown sitting, pen in hand, at a desk on which rests an inkwell 6 David Browne, The Introduction to the true Understanding of the Whole Arte of Expedition in Teaching to Write (London, 1638), sig. E2v, quoted by Nicolas Barker (ed.), Esther Inglis’s Les Proverbes de Salomon: A Facsimile with an Introduction (London: Roxburghe Club, 2012), p. 71. 7 Poems of Elizabeth Melville, Lady Culross, ed. J. Reid Baxter (Edinburgh: Solsequium, 2010), p. 115. 8 For this, see also Susan Frye, Pens and Needles: Women’s Textualities in Early Modern England. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010).

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Figure 2.2 Georgette de Montenay, author portrait prefixed to Emblematum ­Christianorum Centuria ­(Zurich: Froschauer, 1584) sig.b4r, ­unsigned but dated in the plate 1567 and undoubtedly engraved by Pierre Woeiriot. © University of Glasgow Library, Department of Special Collections

and an open booklet from which, presumably, she is transcribing onto a larger sheet of paper the text which reads, ‘O plume en la main non vaine’. This is also the opening line of the second quatrain of verses below the portrait, in which she celebrates the power of her pen to praise Christ, so we are witnessing the act of writing the book which we are actually reading. The preceding quatrain has paid tribute to the power of a consort of instruments and voices hymning the excellence of God, and the lute and musical score that lie on her desk in the engraving represent these more vocal expressions of praise. The final line of the inscription, ‘GAGE D’OR TOT NE TE MEINE’ (‘Golden wages do not guide you’) is an anagram of her name: Georgette de Montenai. As MarieClaude Tucker notes, the strong link between Montenay and Inglis is suggested by the two author portraits prefixed to the Scottish manuscript.9 (Figs. 2.3–2.4) It was surely this portrait of a woman holding a pen, as she transcribes words from a book onto a sheet of paper, that must have led Esther Inglis to 9 C-M Tucker, ‘Georgette de Montenay and Esther Inglis’, in Rhetoric, Royalty, and Reality: Essays on the Literary Culture of Medieval and Early Modern Scotland,. ed. Alasdair A. MacDonald and K. Dekker (Paris: Peters, 2005), pp. 165–95 (p. 169).

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Figure 2.3 Esther Inglis, Emblemes Chrestiens (1624), ­calligraphic rendering in pen and ink of Georgette de Montenay’s author portrait. British Library ms Royal 17.D.XVI, fol. 6r. © British Library Board

identify herself, and her own activity as calligrapher and copyist, with the creativity and spiritual witness of the woman whose work she was copying. We might recall that on her own title page Inglis describes the emblems as written, copied and traced (‘escrits, tirez, et tracez’) by her own hand and pen (‘par la main et plume de moi’). Esther Inglis copies Montenay’s portrait into her own manuscript, together with all its details, adding two sets of Latin verses by ­poets identified only by their initials, which (as Tucker notes, p. 172) originally appeared after the ‘advice to the reader’ in Montenay’s emblem book.

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Figure 2.4 Esther Inglis, Emblemata Christiana (1624), British Library, ms Royal 17.D.XVI, fol. 7r. © British Library Board

On the next leaf of her Emblemes Chrestiens (fol. 7) Inglis does something truly remarkable, as she repeats the author portrait she has just copied from her source, but now substitutes her own self-portrait in its place. She depicts herself in exactly the same attitude as Montenay, though wearing a wide brimmed hat, sitting at a writing desk on which rests the open booklet which she is transcribing. Sequencing these two portraits at the start of her manuscript suggests a certain equivalence between the emblem book’s original author and its present calligrapher. Inglis’s sense of the value or importance of her art is indeed suggested by her readiness in document after document which she copied to identify herself as its writer, and indeed the inclusion of laudatory testimonials

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and commendatory verses addressed to her, of the kind normally reserved for a book’s author, often supports this ambition. Montenay’s lute and musical score have been removed in the second of these preliminary portraits in Emblemes Chrestiens, and in place of the ‘O plume de ma main’ inscription which we saw on Montenay’s copy sheet we can read (if we stand on our heads) a verse ­couplet, ‘De l’Eternel le bien / De moi le mal ou rien’ (From God the good / From myself the evil or nothing). As Tucker notes, ‘Inglis wrote the latter motto in three earlier manuscripts, each time making explicit the Protestant notion that good gifts are of God’s doing, and that we are worthy only through the grace of God’ (Tucker, p. 174). Tucker fails to notice, however, that these previous manuscripts not only quote this motto, but also anticipate her Emblemes Chrestiens by some years in copying, or adapting, Montenay’s author portrait. Les Proverbes de Salomon in Oxford (ms Bodl. 990, pp. cix–xv) for instance has a title page inscribed ‘Esther Anglois Francoise’ showing our calligrapher (‘cuius effigiem hic vides’) standing behind her desk, holding her pen above the ink well, just as in Montenay’s author portrait. (Fig. 2.5) She is here more elaborately dressed, but the lute and musical score on the desk leave no doubt that Montenay’s portrait was its pattern. This manuscript is dated 1601, which means it could not have been copied

Figure 2.5 Esther Inglis, Les Proverbes de Salomon, Oxford, ms Bodl. 990, pp. xiv–xv. Oxford, Bodleian Library (MS Bodl. 990, pp. xiv–xv)

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from the 1619 Frankfurt polyglot edition identified by Tucker (p. 169) as Inglis’s source for her Emblemes Chretiens in 1624. The Zurich 1584 edition of Montenay, however, includes the engraved portrait, as do some copies of the first edition, including the unique 1567 copy, so clearly Inglis must have had access to one of these.10 The author portrait in this Bodleian Proverbes de Salomon manuscript is accompanied by some commendatory verses addressed to our calligrapher by Andrew Melville, who was the leading champion and defender of the Presbyterian wing of the Scottish kirk at this time. The status of the last and longest of all Esther Inglis’s surviving manuscripts as the summation of her life’s work is, indeed, suggested by the way she included this self-portrait in manuscript after manuscript over the previous years of her career. Of her fifty-five known or surviving manuscripts no fewer than twenty-two include a version of this self-portrait, modelled as we have seen on that which Georgette de Montenay prefixed to her Emblemes Chrestiens.11 The earliest of these is dated 1599, which means that Inglis must have been familiar with Montenay’s emblem book at least twenty-five years before embarking on her translation of the emblem book as a whole. Among the twenty-two surviving manuscripts with this self-portrait of the calligrapher is National Library of Scotland ms 20498, Lamentations of Jeremiah, showing her wearing the same elaborate costume and with the same objects on her desk as the Bodleian manuscript, and here she again identifies herself as ‘Esther Anglois Francoise’. (Fig. 2.6). The portrait also includes Andrew Melville’s subscribed commendatory verses, together this time with a second Latin commendation to ‘Estheram Anglam Gallam’ on the facing page. Her remarkable self-identification with the French, Protestant author is signalled by her appropriation of the iconography of Montenay’s image in these manuscripts of biblical texts whose proverbial wisdom would be particularly sympathetic to Puritan (Calvinist) readers. The French spelling of her name signals her determination to identify not only with the doctrines of her coreligionist, whose portrait she is copying, but also her nationality, although the 10

11

Adams, Alison, S. Rawles, and A. Saunders, A Bibliography of French Emblem Books of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, 2 vols. (Geneva: Droz, 2002), ii, F438, and see ‘Remarks’ to F437 on p. 180 of this exemplary bibliography. Scott-Elliot, A.H. and E. Yeo, ‘Calligraphic Manuscripts of Esther Inglis (1571–1624): a Catalogue’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 84 (1990), (11–86), the self-portrait, sometimes in colour, is found in nos. 7, 8, 9, 10, 12, 16, 17, 18, 19, 24, 25, 27, 37, 39, 41, 42, 45, 48, 50, 53. The updated and slightly amplified list in N. Barker (ed.), 2012 (n. 6 above), includes another manuscript which has the portrait (p.101, no. 29), as recorded in Catalogue of English Literary Manuscripts, no. *InE 18. https://celm2.dighum.kcl.ac.uk/authors/inglisesther.html [consulted 25/01/18].

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Figure 2.6 Esther Inglis, Lamentations of Jeremiah (1602) Edinburgh. © National Library of Scotland (MS 20498)

paradox of a Frenchwoman whose name in French means ‘English’ and who now lives in Britain/England but defines her nationality as ‘Francoise’ (‘Esther Anglois Francoise’) should not be overlooked. As we have seen, in 1624 she identifies herself specifically as ‘Inglis’, writing as we have seen ‘From Edinburgh in Scotland’ (‘A Lislebourg en Ecosse’). Clearly issues of national identity were of some importance to this immigrant writer, even down to the spelling of her name. As D.J.B. Trim remarks, ‘Rather than only being strangers in strange lands, Huguenots had multiple identities they could adopt, facilitating their adaptation and assimilation’.

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Chameleon-like, members of Huguenot communities, exploiting empathy (or at least relative lack of suspicion and hostility), could take on such personae and identities as best suited their ends. Yet this could engender difficulties among the Huguenot community by raising questions as to who its members really were. Huguenot identity was thus innately bound up with the Huguenots’ history, the transnational nature of their diaspora, and the memories they and others preserved of their experiences. Ultimately, however, the traumatic shared experience of persecution, forced emigration, and the contested process of integration, all helped to ensure that a memory of being Huguenot endured even when most signifiers of ethnic distinctiveness had been eroded.12 If these aspects of the experience of exile account for Esther Inglis’s strong identification in more than one manuscript with her fellow Huguenot, Montenay, they might also account for the problems of assimilation into the mixed and multi-national identities of the newly United Kingdom(s). We might, ­indeed, want to bear in mind that, as Trim notes, the Huguenots’ flight into countries sympathetic to them, which they termed ‘the Refuge’, is the origin of the modern term ‘refugee’.13

Building the House

The inclusion of author portraits which copy other portraits in manuscripts which copy the writing of other writers, by a calligrapher who shows herself holding a pen with which she is writing the text that we, the readers, are now reading raises all kinds of theoretical issues of self-reference, reflexivity, and recursive form which would be worth developing, but which are not my immediate concern. In the present chapter I merely wish to compare Inglis’s self-portrait on fol. 7 of her 1624 manuscript with one of the emblems in the same manuscript which also contains a portrait. This emblem, which in both Montenay’s and Inglis’s versions shows a woman building a wall, has the motto ­SAPIENS MVLIER ÆDIFICAT DOMVM (‘The wise woman builds the house’) (Fig. 2.7). The emblem is based on a biblical text, Prov. 14:1 which the motto is quoting: ‘Every wise woman buildeth her house: but the foolish plucketh it down’ as the King James translation has it. The figure is identified 12

13

D.J.B Trim, ‘The Huguenots and the Experience of Exile: History and Memory in Transnationalism’, in The Huguenots: History and Memory in Transnational Contexts. Essays in Honour and Memory of Walter C. Utt, ed. Trim (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 1–42 (p. 4). Trim, p. 2.

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Figure 2.7 Esther Inglis, Emblemata Christiana (1624). British ­L ibrary, ms Royal 17.D.xvi, fol. 10r.

in Montenay as a portrait of the Queen of Navarre, and as a ‘Christian Emblem’ it must therefore be referring to Jeanne d’Albret’s efforts to build the true (­reformed) church in France. This is the very first emblem in the book, and the importance of the woman’s identity is signalled, in some copies, by an inscription on the wall behind her, towards which the woman is turning as she builds, for although this wall is blank in most copies, a revised state of Woeriot’s engraving in a number of surviving copies of the Frankfurt 1619 edition (Adams.

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et al. 2002, item F.439) shows this wall with an inscription, ‘Vera effigies Regina Navarræ’ (‘A true likeness of the Queen of Navarre’). (Fig. 2.8). Clearly, then, as late as 1619 it was felt to be historically important to identify this spiritual builder as the Huguenot leader who had worked to secure the hegemony of the Protestant church some fifty years previously in France. Evidently the concern with naming and identifying the author of these emblems which we have witnessed in Esther Inglis’s handling of them was shared by other readers, and the fact that – in these variant copies at least – the Queen of Navarre is depicted gazing at her own name inscribed on the wall she has just built, mirrors that ­reflexivity that we have witnessed in the author portraits of Inglis’s manuscript, and its concern with naming. The first thing we might notice about Inglis’s reworking of this emblem in her 1624 Emblemes Chrestiens is its dedication, ‘To the most high and mighty Princess Elizabeth Queen of Bohemia etc’. Placed as it is, immediately above the picture of the ‘sapiens mulier’, it is difficult not to identify Princess Elizabeth as the prudent woman who builds this house, taking over the role which, as we have seen, was occupied in Montenay’s emblem specifically by the Queen of Navarre. We should recall that Esther Inglis dedicated the emblem book as a whole to Elizabeth’s brother Charles, heir apparent to the English throne, who had only recently, as it happens, returned home from that controversial visit to Spain where, with the Duke of Buckingham, he had been seeking a Catholic bride, the Spanish Infanta: Inglis’s whole manuscript of Emblemes Chrestiens was indeed produced specifically to congratulate Charles on his safe return.14 It seems more than likely therefore that the dedication of this emblem to Elizabeth, Queen of Bohemia, was equally motivated by current events, which are usefully summed up by Marie-Claude Tucker. Princess Elizabeth Stuart married Frederick v, the Elector Palatine, in 1613. Frederick was chosen King of Bohemia in 1619, but in Prague the Calvinism of the couple won few friends, and after a reign consisting of a single winter the pair were sent packing by the Catholic League. In greatly reduced circumstances, they found sanctuary first in Brandenburg and subsequently in the Protestant Low Countries. A martyr of her religion, the ‘Winter Queen’ was a focus of sympathy for Protestant England, and it is from that country that Esther Inglis pays her tribute to her. In this ­illustration the woman builds the house, and this can be either a house of God, or the house of a king or queen, meaning an empire. That a female

14

Saunders, 1992, pp. 132–246; see also Michael Bath, ‘Esther Inglis and Georgette de ­Montenay’, Society for Emblem Studies Newsletter, 34 (2004), 9–12.

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Figure 2.8 Georgette de Montenay, Emblemes ou Devises Chrestiennes (Frankfurt: Johann Karl Unckel, 1619), emblem 1, ‘Sapiens mulier ædificat domum’ (‘The wise woman builds the house’). © University of Glasgow Library, Department of Special Collections

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ruler may be intended is perhaps a discreet rejoinder to the well-known opinion of John Knox and Christopher Goodman, who notoriously regarded rule by women as ‘monstrous’ – exception only being made for Deborah, in Judges 4. (Tucker 2005, p. 182)

More Dedications: Marie Stuart or Mary Stewart?

Inglis’s habit of dating her work as she was doing it reveals that she worked on her Emblemes Crestiens over two or three years, since different sheets carry dates ranging from 1622 to 1624. A sign of the extent of her commitment to these emblems, and the opening Sapiens mulier emblem in particular, is the fact that at the very time she was working on these Emblemes Chrestiens she also created a single sheet, now in the Huntington Library (Ca) dated 1622, which similarly copies this opening emblem showing the wise woman of Proverbs 14:1 who builds her house.15 (Fig. 2.9) This also copies Montenay’s engraving closely, the only variation being a miniscule inscription on the truncated pillar that stands beside the wall she is building : ‘Drawn and written by me Esther Inglis January 1622’. This Huntington Library manuscript copies both the Latin and the French verse subscriptio which Montenay composed for this emblem, and these are paste-ins. Its picture is closer than the calligraphic Emblemata Christiana portrait to Montenay’s original in its rendering of the face, which in this case is turned towards the rear wall, unlike the wise builder of the ‘temple sainct’ whom we have met in Emblemes Chrestiens who stares out directly at the viewer. The pasted-in dedications are noted by Alison Saunders, who observes: ‘on more than one occasion Mrs Kello had to resort to scissors and glue in order to keep her dedications up to date at the last possible moment when the manuscript was due to be presented’ (p.137). She also notes how, in the Emblemata Christiana, In the original copper engraving which accompanied the Montenay text the likeness to Jeanne d’Albret is only too recognizable: in particular the long Valois nose which Jeanne d’Albret shared with her mother, Marguerite de Navarre. But, as well as updating the costume slightly, Mrs Kello also tactfully modifies the face to give it a likeness to its new recipient, Elizabeth of Bohemia. (Saunders, p. 144)

15

Thomas Lange, ‘A Rediscovered Esther Inglis Calligraphic Manuscript in the Huntington Library’, Papers of the Bibliographic Society of America, 89 (1995), 339–42.

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Figure 2.9 Esther Inglis, Insigni pietate ­heroinæ Mariæ Stewartæ … Emblema C ­ hristianum. © The Huntington Library, Ca (MS RB 283000 V:III)

Which brings us to the dedications, for the Huntington Library manuscript, unlike the opening Emblemes Chrestiens emblem, is not dedicated to the Protestant ‘Winter Queen’, Elizabeth of Bohemia, but to two different persons. The header dedicates the manuscript ‘To the most illustrious hero, John, Earl of Mar’. John Erskine, 2nd Earl of Mar (1558–1628) was at this date Lord High Treasurer of Scotland, so this dedication conforms with Inglis’s habit which we have noted in Emblemes Chrestiens of dedicating these emblems to leading members of the nobility. Mar had grown up as fellow student of the young king James under the tutelage of George Buchanan in Stirling; after Mary Queen of Scots’s abdication he acted as James’s guardian. This dedication is supported by eight lines of Latin commendatory verses in praise of the Earl,

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written and signed by Esther’s husband, Bartholomew Kello. However below this we see another dedicatory inscription, which has to be taken as referring to the emblematic pictura beneath it, showing the Sapiens mulier building the house of God. This inscription reads, INSIGNI PIETATE HEROINÆ MARIÆ STEWARTÆ PRÆDIC: ILLUSTRISS: COMIT: VXORI LECTISSIMÆ CASTISSIMÆQ. EMBLEMA CHRISTIANUM. (‘Christian emblem showing the remarkable piety of heroine Maria Stewart, choicest and chastest wife of the aforesaid most illustrious earl’). It is the prominence of the capitalised name MARIÆ STEWARTÆ that has led all commentators on this manuscript since the eighteenth century, including myself, to describe it as ‘An emblematical drawing of Mary, Queen of Scots’.16 If they had read the whole inscription however – though admittedly it lies in the fold of the page – it should have been clear that this Maria Stewart cannot possibly have been the late Mary Queen of Scots. As the inscription says, this Mary was wife of the current Earl of Mar, who married his second wife Mary in 1592; she was the daughter of James’s French cousin and favourite, Esmé Stuart, 1st Duke of Lennox. Esmé Stuart’s Roman Catholic religion had aroused the disaffection of the Scottish Protestant Earls, despite the King’s claim to have converted him to Calvinist doctrines, and when the nobles lured young King James to Ruthven Castle in 1582 in the episode known to Scottish history as ‘the Raid of Ruthven’, Mar was among the raiders who kidnapped the young king and held him prisoner for ten months. We shall be examining an emblem of that Raid in our next chapter. Following James’s escape, the Earl of Arran gained the ascendency at court, and Mar led the futile attempt to seize Stirling Castle in 1584, after which he fled to England, but returned to Scotland in 1585 and banished Arran, becoming one of the king’s most trusted ministers for the remaining fifty years of his life. That Calvinist Esther Inglis should have dedicated this most significant of the Emblemes Chrestiens, an emblem celebrating the power of women to build the Christian Church, to the Catholic Mary Queen of Scots seems so unlikely that we should welcome this clarification. The Earl of Mar’s role in the 16

This is its description in the sale of James West’s library at Christies on 8 April 1773. The mistake is perpetuated in the Huntington Library’s checklist of Esther Inglis manuscripts, and by the Library’s Curator of Early Books, Thomas Lange, in Lange, op.cit. 1995. The error is compounded by the description in The Catalogue of English Literary Manuscripts, http://www.celm-ms.org.uk/ no. *InE 7, and also by Nicolas Barker (2012), p.116, ms no.52. I am guilty of making the same mistake in Bath, ‘The City of Dames Tapestries: Building the House’, in Transmigrations: Essays in Honour of Alison Adams and Stephen Rawles, ed. Laurence Grove and A. Saunders, (Glasgow: Glasgow Emblem Studies, 2011), pp. 189–205 (pp. 199–202).

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courtly infighting which influenced policy surrounding the establishment of the reformed Church in Scotland for many years – both before and following the Union of Crowns in 1603 – must have been sufficient warrant for dedicating this emblem to him, but it was presumably Montenay’s (and the biblical proverb’s) female gendering of its builder which led her to dedicate the actual picture not to the Lord High Treasurer of Scotland himself, but to his wife, Elizabeth Stewart (and we should remember what has already said about the Scottish convention of women preserving their maiden names after marriage). There is one further detail in Montenay’s various pictures of the sapiens mulier, who is building the temple saint, that requires our attention before we move on, for beside the wall which the Queen of Navarre is building stands a truncated pillar. This has an emblematic significance which has been well explicated by Alison Adams and which clarifies its specifically Calvinist doctrine. Montenay’s ‘temple saint’ is the ‘holy temple’ of Ephesians 2:21, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, of which Christ is the cornerstone, and as Adams explains, ‘this is the “pillar of faith”, significantly of the same height as the temple, which is growing only as much as faith grows’.17 Moreover the pillar of faith is the motif of a whole emblem (no. 8) a few pages later in the volume, which can be shown to represent Calvinist doctrines of justification by faith. (Fig. 2.10) This shows the pillar resting on the rock of faith on which Christ has built his church: La foy en Christ est celle mesme pierre Sur laquelle est basti tout l’edifice Du temple sainct, comme dit Christ a Pierre. (Faith in Christ is that same stone on which is built the whole edifice of the holy church, as Christ said to Peter.) The engraving shows a pillar standing on the squared rock of Christ and surmounted by the flaming heart of the true believer. The pillar supports, or is intersected by, successive terms of the motto: MAXIMA/NON CONFVNDIT/JVSTIFICAT/CHRISTVS (‘The greatest does not confound, it justifies Christ’). As Adams shows, all these terms have specific Biblical echoes and allusions; ‘maxima’, for instance, alludes to the three theological virtues, the greatest of which is Charity (1 Corinthians, 13:13), but although ‘Christus’ is the column’s foundation stone, the central term of this segmented motto is the word ‘Justificat’ which has a number of biblical locations, all of which support the doctrine that true faith is founded on Christ. As Adams insists, ‘the overall 17 Adams, Webs of Allusion, p. 26.

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Figure 2.10

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Georgette de Montenay, Emblemes ou Devises ­ Chrestiennes (Lyons: Jean Marcorelle, 1571), emblem 8. © University of Glasgow Library, Department of Special Collections

theme of the emblem is the Protestant dogma of justification through faith in Christ’ (Adams, p.13). Although Esther Inglis does not include this emblem of Montenay’s in her manuscript, its reiteration of the Bible’s reference to the ‘temple saint’ of Ephesians 2:22 cannot have escaped her attention (this is the phrase used in the French Geneva Bible, as Adams points out, p.14), and both of these emblems that use the phrase and show the pillar are concerned with the building of the Reformed church in the kingdoms of England, Scotland and/or France. Montenay’s emblem of the wise woman of Proverbs 14:1 who builds her house, whilst the foolish pluck it down, is obviously referring to the role played by women, or by queens and female rulers, in that Reformation. Mary Queen

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of Scots cannot possibly be the Mary Stewart referred to in the Huntington Library’s version of this emblem; indeed the late Catholic queen and martyr was more likely to be seen by Inglis not as the wise woman who buildeth the house, but as ‘the foolish who plucketh it down with her hands’. Mary Queen of Scots had nevertheless at least some claim to have played her part in the reformation of the church in Scotland and, as we shall see, she had some connection with artefacts that use a version of this emblematic motif of a woman building a house. Those artefacts, and this motif, will occupy us for the r­ emainder of this chapter.

The City of Dames Tapestries: Building the House

Almost a hundred years before Esther Inglis presented her Christian emblems to Charles, Prince of Wales, Charles’s great-grandfather, James v of Scotland, was busy buying tapestries that would enrich the furnishings of his royal palaces. This was in preparation for his two French marriages – to Madeleine of France and, following her premature death in 1537, to Charles’s grandmother, Mary of Guise/Lorraine. By the end of his reign the Scottish royal collection was evidently quite rich, for the 1539 inventory of the royal wardrobe and furnishings lists the following sets of tapestry: History of Aeneas, History of R ­ eboam, History of Maliasor, Cietie of Dammys, Auld Testament, History of Percius, ­History of the Unicorne, History of Apes and other Beasts, History of Tobie, The Old History of Troy, another History of the Unicorne, Verdures, antique work of the histories of Venus, Pallas, Hercules, Mars, Bacchus, and the Moder of the Erd (i.e. Ceres). Further sets are described in the margin as ‘brocht hame be Wm. Schaw’, almost certainly those that the Treasurer’s Accounts record him bringing home the year before from Flanders: History of Saloman, Poesie, The History of Jason ‘that wan the goldin fleys’ together with ‘sundry histories to chalmers [chambers] of fyne stuff’.18 Since none of these survive it is difficult to visualise their appearance. One such subject that was bought for several 18

Accounts of the Lord High Treasurer of Scotland 1473–1566, ed. T. Dickson et al., 11 vols. (Edinburgh: General Register House, 1877–1916), vii (1538–1541), p. 17. See also Thomas Thomson, ed., A Collection of Inventories and Other Records (Edinburgh: General Register House, 1815), pp. 49–51. An inventory of tapestries in 1542 also lists the following subjects: Perceus, Hercules, Tobie [i.e. ot history of Tobias], Roboam [i.e. ot history of Rehoboam], Jason, ‘the tint barne’ [i.e. Judgement of Solomon], Old Testament, Romulus, The Story of Troy, see Thomson, pp. 103–04. For a study of the functioning and furnishings of the Scottish court, see Andrea Thomas, Princelie Majestie: The Court of James v of Scotland (East Linton: Tuckwell, 2004).

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other European courts around this time, however, is that which the 1539 inventory describes as Cietie of Dammys. Susan Groag Bell has established that the Cietie of Dammys tapestries identified in the 1539 Scottish inventory were, in fact, based on Christine de Pisan’s Book of the City of Ladies (1405), a tribute to the achievements of two hundred famous women – warriors, scientists, queens, philosophers, and builders of ­cities – of which twenty-five manuscripts survive.19 Bell has tracked down records of five further sets of tapestries based on this source, which show that all the early owners were royal and nearly all were women, including E ­ lizabeth Tudor (1533–1603), Margaret of Austria, Regent of the Netherlands, (1480–1530) and Anne of Brittany (1477–1514), Queen of France as wife successively to Charles viii and Louis xii. England had three different sets, one ‘delivered to the Lady Elizabeth towardes the furniture of her howse’ in 1547, a second set assigned to her brother Edward vi, and a third stored in the Tower of London ‘in the Keaping of Humphrey Orme’.20 None of these tapestries, in England or elsewhere, is now extant. Christine de Pisan (c. 1364–c. 1430) is widely recognised as an important champion of women’s rights and proto-feminist ideas in the later Middle Ages, and Bell pursues this lead in a study which traces ‘an emerging cultural network among the women of Renaissance royal families’ who owned tapestries of this subject. She raises the questions which have a bearing on James v’s motives for acquiring a set at the time of his marriage to the Princess Madeleine: Could brides from such families, who brought to their husband’s domain specific ideas and artistic styles in the form of books, also have brought them in the form of tapestries? What were the ideals and the realities of queenship in this period?21 In this context it is interesting to note that in 1533 a set of six tapestries listed as the Cité des Dames had been taken from Fontainebleau to Blois for the ­wedding 19 Bell, The Lost Tapestries of the City of Ladies: Christine de Pisan’s Renaissance Legacy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); see also Bell, ‘The Lost Tapestries of the “Cietie of Dammys” in Scotland’ in Contexts and Continuities: Proceedings of the IVth International Colloquium on Christine de Pisan, ed. A.J. Kennedy, R. Brown-Grant et al., 3 vols. (Glasgow: Glasgow University Press, 2002), i, pp. 51–64. For the purchase of ‘the story of the Tryumphand Dames’ see Treasurer’s Accounts, vol. vii, p. 28. 20 The three English manuscripts are listed in David Starkey, The Inventory of King Henry viii (London: Harvey Miller, 1998), p. 181 no. 9021, p. 381 no. 15272, p. 350 no. 14033. 21 Bell, Lost Tapestries, p. 4.

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celebrations of the future Henri ii to Catherine de Medicis.22 Of all James v’s tapestry purchases at the time of his own French marriage a few years later it is the Cietie of Dammys set which can be shown to be the most clearly motivated, illustrating as it does the role of women in the governance of the state – indeed James’s choice of this subject seems uncannily proleptic in view of the prominent role women were destined to play in ruling Scotland following his premature death, whether during the regency of Mary of Guise (1554–1560) or the ill-fated reign of their daughter Mary Queen of Scots (1542–1587). For both of these rulers the propriety of surrounding themselves with tapestries celebrating the power of women, unassisted by men, to build a dream city ruled over by the three virtues of Reason, Rectitude and Justice can only have seemed unpredictably appropriate, if not ironic. Moreover, as the Reformation of the church became a more and more pressing issue, the extent to which their efforts to govern Scotland became enmeshed in doctrinal questions can only have highlighted the religious connotations of this allegorical city. ‘Every single holy lady who has ever lived’, Christine writes in the book’s closing pages, ‘can … take their place in this City of Ladies, about which we can say, Gloriosa dicta sunt de te, civitas Dei’.23 The biblical text, Psalms 87:3, supplied the title of Saint Augustine’s City of God and in quoting it directly Christine is making the final and most telling analogy between her own city of famous women and the heavenly city which was the ultimate realisation of the Christian church on earth: this is – at least potentially – a feminist, or at least a feminine, City of God. Moreover the way some of the manuscript illuminations depict Christine welcoming the Queen of Heaven into her rising city in the closing pages of her book might well suggest a tapestry cartoon: manuscripts at this point tend to show a busy architectural setting with a number of elegant figures. (Fig. 2.11) Since none of the actual tapestries has survived we cannot know for sure quite what they represented, however the likelihood that they would have copied or adapted miniatures from contemporary manuscripts of the book they were based on seems likely. There are indeed some clues that this was the case in the very titles which early records assign to the Scottish set. Whilst the accounts of James v’s expenditure in France record the purchase in Paris of the ‘story of the Tryumphand Dames’ they also record ‘the story of dammis’ being lined and prepared for hanging by a French tapissier.24 22 Bell, Lost Tapestries, p. 134, citing ‘Inventaire des tapisseries emportées du Château de Blois en 1533’, in Nouvelles Archives de l’art français (Paris: Société de l’Histoire de l’Art Français, 1879), p. 334. 23 Christine de Pisan, The Book of the City of Ladies (London: Penguin Books, 1999), p. 237. 24 Treasurer’s Accounts, vol. 7, pp. 28 and 43.

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Figure 2.11

The queen and her ladies entering the Cite des Dames, in ‘La Cité des dames’. © Bayerische Staatsbibliothek (MS gall.8, fol. 90v. 2.11).

The 1539 inventory of James v’s wardrobe identifies them, as we have seen, under the title Cietie of Dammys, confirming that they were indeed based on Christine de Pisan’s Cité des Dames. They are not listed under this title in any later inventories, but the inventory compiled by John Wood in 1561 of the items ­remaining in the deceased Mary of Guise’s Wardrobe and delivered to Mary Queen of Scots’ valet de chambre, Servais de Condé, at the Palace of Holyrood includes a four piece tapestry depicting the ‘historie of Mathiolus’.25 As Bell 25

Joseph Robertson, ed., Inventaires de la Royne Descosse: Catalogues of the Jewels, Dresses, Furniture, Books and Paintings of Mary Queen of Scots 1556–1569 (Edinburgh: Register House, 1863), p. 210.

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notes, this must be a reference to the Cité des Dames since Christine de Pisan began writing her justification of women, she says, after reading the Lamentations of Matheolus. ‘Matheolus’ is Mathieu de Boulogne, author of a diatribe against women entitled Liber lamentationum (c. 1295) which had been translated into French c. 1371. It seems more than likely, Bell argues, that one or other of the four pieces that Mary Queen of Scots inherited from her mother must have shown ­Christine ­reading Matheolus’s book, with the label naming him inscribed somewhere on the tapestry, and possibly on the book itself. As she says: … if the first panel of the set of tapestries identified in the 1561 inventory as the ‘historie of Mathiolus’ illustrated the beginning of Christine’s book, it is possible that a banderole with the name Matheolus was visible in the weaving. Seeing the name Matheolus (or Mathiolus), the inventory taker, Johnne Wod, may have thought that such was the name of the entire set of tapestries.26 Bell’s recognition that the ‘Mathiolus’ tapestries identified in the 1561 inventory must belong to a City of Dames set helps us to fix their likely subject matter, if not their exact appearance, for Matheolus makes his one and only appearance at the start of the book and there can be little doubt that the tapestry identifying him must therefore have illustrated the frame narrative describing the vision that comes to Christine one day as she sits in her study reading his Lamentations. Outraged at the book’s attack on women, she falls into a reverie as she wonders whether anything in her own life, or in the lives of other women, would justify such a negative view of female nature and habits. Her appeal for divine guidance on the subject prompts a dream vision in which the three Virtues of Reason, Rectitude, and Justice command her to correct this negative view of marriage by writing a biographical catalogue of famous women, a book which they will inhabit like a city in order to protect virtuous ladies from anti-feminist attack. These three Virtues spend the rest of the book suggesting examples of past and present heroines who construct this allegorical city of ladies, supporting by their example its foundations, walls, towers, and ­defences. The book is thus itself the building, and the ensuing catalogue of f­emale ­heroines constitutes its building blocks: they are both its inhabitants and its substance. It follows, therefore, that the tapestry naming Matheolus must have illustrated this self-referential frame narrative describing Christine’s reading of

26 Bell, Lost Tapestries, p. 133.

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his Lamentations and that it is most likely to have included the three allegorical Virtues and a woman, or group of women, building a city. As Bell says: If the tapestry designer drew on specific stories, the panels could have illustrated mythological figures or events, or religious themes, or ­historical material, or allegorical love poetry. At the same time, the frame story – about the construction of a city of and for women – does not fall into any of the standard categories, nor would tapestries based on that narrative.27 Although such a subject is not represented in any surviving tapestries its probable appearance or style, I suggest, can nevertheless be realised by looking at contemporary illuminations of Christine’s manuscript, and these do indeed include illustrations of the frame narrative, not only in the closing pages where Christine welcomes the Virgin Mary into her city, but also at the beginning of her vision. Early manuscripts illustrate the incipit to the book, showing Christine in her study with several books in front of her, and the three crowned personifications of Reason, Rectitude and Justice instructing her, each holding an attribute as identified in the text: Reason holds a mirror to assist her in achieving self-knowledge (‘whoever looks in this mirror […] will see themselves as they really are’); Rectitude holds a rule (‘the yardstick of truth which separates right from wrong’); Justice carries a gold vessel (‘to share out to each person exactly what he nor she deserves’).28 (Fig. 2.12) The books on Christine’s shelf do not show any titles, though they represent the literary sources on which she will draw to construct her city of virtuous women.29 It is, however, quite possible that, as depicted in the Scottish tapestry, these books might also have included the volume whose unjust attack on women originally provoked Christine’s search for true knowledge, and that it was marked with its author’s name, ‘Matheolus’. At least four surviving manuscripts which include this incipit miniature also have a contiguous image which shows Christine not in her study but ­standing 27 Bell, Lost Tapestries, p. 61. For the image of Christine in her study, see Bell, ‘Christine de Pisan in her Study’, Cahiers de Recherches Médiévales et Humanistes. (accessed 21/03/2017). 28 Christine de Pisan, City of Ladies, p. 10, p. 13, p. 14. 29 The case for reading them in this way is well argued by Liana De Girolamo Cheney, ‘Christine de Pisan’s Collection of Art and Knowledge’ in Contexts and Continuities: Proc. of 4th Int. Colloquium on Christine de Pisan, ed. Angus Kennedy (Glasgow: Glasgow University Press), pp. 257–86.

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Figure 2.12

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Three Virtues, Reason, Rectitude and Justice, appear to ­Christine in a dream sitting in her study. © Brussels, Bibliothèque Royale (MS 9235, fol. 5)

building a wall with a trowel in her hand (Fig. 2.13). And here, of course, we have the motif of a woman building a wall which anticipates Georgette de Montenay’s wise woman who builds the temple saint. There are, admittedly, many differences: Christine is accompanied by the allegorical figure of Reason, and her house is part of a more ambitious city, a housing scheme which will become a feminist civitas dei or City of God. Reason stands within the rising enclosure, handing Christine the blocks of stone to lay the foundations of her City: in shape and size they look very like the books on the adjoining table. We cannot, of course, be sure that the set of Scottish tapestries included this particular scene, though it does seem likely that it copied the preceding miniature showing Christine in her study, since otherwise it would not have been likely to include the name of Matheolus. Christine, it is true, does not cite the biblical text about the wise woman who builds her house in Proverbs 14:1; her foundation stone is a different biblical text, Psalms 87:3, identifying the city of God, of which glorious things are spoken. Both buildings were interpreted, however, as

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Figure 2.13

Cité des Dames Workshop, ca. 1410: Reason, Rectitude and Justice appear to Christine; Reason helps Christine build the city, Livre de la Cité des dames, c. 1401–1500, Français 607, f. 2r, Bibliothèque nationale de France, ­Département des manuscrits. © Bibliothèque nationale de France (MS Français 607)

figures for the building of the true church, and once again we are witnessing emblematic motifs which, like the figure of the fool in our previous chapter, are sanctioned by specific biblical texts. Millard Meiss assigns all four manuscripts containing this miniature, which he dates 1405–1415, to the workshop of an artist he designates The Master of the Cité des Dames, who ‘formed one of the largest and most prolific associations of illuminators in Paris during the first two decades of the fifteenth century’.30 Influenced by Italian Trecento painting, this artist was apparently engaged by Christine herself to design not only the illustrations to her Cité des Dames but also others of her compositions, including the Epître d’Othéa and Livre des trois vertus. His workshop also specialised in illustration of the French translation of Boccaccio’s Cas des nobles hommes et femmes, a work which was one of Christine’s major sources or models for her Cité des Dames, and c. 1404 he also illustrated Augustine’s Cité de Dieu.31 It seems likely that the design of all of the sets of Cité des Dames tapestries that are recorded in the sixteenth century refer back to the cartoons used for the earliest set, presented to Margaret 30 31

Millard Meiss, The Limbourgs and their Contemporaries (London: Thames and Hudson, 1974), p. 377. Meiss, pp. 377–78.

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of Austria in the city of Tournai in 1513 when, as Regent of the Netherlands, she came to meet Henry viii of England and celebrate his victory over the French following the Battle of the Spurs. Tapestry merchants Jean and Antoine Grenier were ordered by the city fathers to present various tapestries to Margaret and a couple of years later their treasurer, Diego Floris, records ‘six pieces of tapestry called “The City of Ladies” made of silk and given to madame by the citizens of Tournai when she went there to meet the king of England’.32 Margaret already owned a manuscript of the Cité des Dames which she had purchased in 1511 from William of Croy, prince of Chimay, and which is now preserved in Brussels.33 It has several miniatures illustrating the frame narrative rather than the individual tales; one of these is our Fig. 2.12, showing the three Virtues appearing as Christine sits dreaming in her study, where the books from which she has been reading lie on a shelf. Further miniatures in the Brussels manuscript show one or more of the three Virtues helping Christine to build or welcoming the Queen of Heaven into the completed city. What seems remarkable is how consistently not only the early sets of tapestries but also the later adaptations of Georgette de Montenay’s sapiens mulier emblem were designed by, or for, or dedicated to women. Susan Groag Bell’s researches reveal just how familiar the female owners of the early Cité des Dames tapestries must have been with Christine de Pisan’s book on which they were based.34 As Bell insists, in looking at these hangings on their walls they would undoubtedly have recalled the motivation and meaning of these images in the book that was their source, moreover there is one further reference in early records which, although it is not noticed by Bell, confirms her overall thesis that these tapestries circulated within a network of royal women.

Mary Queen of Scots and Elizabeth i

The Calendar of State Papers (Scotland) lists an entry, dated 20 January 1569, for wardrobe stuff for Tutbury Castle in Staffordshire, where Mary Queen of Scots had just begun her period of imprisonment under the protection of the 32 Bell, The Lost Tapestries, pp. 72–73, citing Correspondance de l’empereur Maximilien Ier 1507–1519 (Paris: Jules Renouard, 1839), ii, p. 485. 33 Bibl. royale ms 9235. 34 See Bell, The Lost Tapestries, pp. 86–88 on copies owned by or available to Margaret of Austria, p. 135 on Diane de Poitiers’ copy of Le Livre des trois vertus; Bell also notes, pp. 136–37, that the famous ‘four Maries’ who served Mary Stuart were schooled in France at the same Dominican convent at Poissy in which Christine de Pisan had spent the last eleven years of her life.

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Earl of Shrewsbury and his wife Elizabeth, known to us as Bess of Hardwick.35 The new furnishings for the exiled Queen of Scots included beds ‘sent by Rauf Rowlandson, groom of the removing wardrobe’, and three sets of tapestry, all lined with canvas, sent from the Tower of London and identified as six pieces of the History of the Passion, seven pieces of the History of Hercules and six pieces which are described as the History of Ladies. Sent up from the Tower of London in 1569 to decorate the cheerless and uncongenial surroundings of the exiled Scottish queen, this must be one of the three City of Dames sets which were already recorded, as we have noted, in the posthumous inventory of Henry viii’s Wardrobe in 1547. One of these is the set which Edward vi ordered to be ‘delivered to the Lady Elizabeth … towardes the furniture of her howse after the decease of her said father’.36 However the set she later sent up to furnish Mary’s lodgings at Tutbury can be identified with some certainty as ‘vj peces of the Storie of ladies lyned with Canvas’ which are listed in 1547 as among tapestries housed in the Wardrobe at the Tower of London.37 Evidently, these had remained in storage for twenty years and were thus available for use in furnishing the lodgings in which Queen Elizabeth decided to house her unexpected and unwelcome royal visitor. The discovery that, only eight months after her arrival in England, Elizabeth Tudor sent Mary Stuart a set of tapestry hangings which celebrated the power of women, unassisted by men, to rule or to build the house of God must, however, be seen as a highly motivated, if not ironic, gesture. It seems highly likely that Elizabeth herself would have had some say in the choice of this set so similar to one that had been a personal possession and family gift from her younger years. Moreover, the degree of estate afforded to Mary Stuart was a sensitive issue for the English during her years of exile: in 1583 she was moved into the custody of the implacable Amyas Paulet, the last of Mary’s English jailers, who insisted that she no longer be allowed to sit under a cloth of estate since it signalled her controversial status in England and, at her trial in 1586, she again demanded the right to sit under a cloth of estate at the head of the Great Hall at Fotheringhay but was escorted to her own red chair placed alone in a corner.38 It is surely unlikely that Elizabeth would not have taken at least some interest in such formalities bearing, as they did, on the status in England of her cousin and rival queen. 35

Calendar of State Papers Relating to Scotland and Mary Queen of Scots 1547–1603, ed. J­ oseph Banks (Edinburgh: Registry Office, 1900), ii, entry for 20 January, 1569. 36 Starkey, Inventory of Henry vii, p. 380. 37 Starkey, no. 9021.29. See Susan Watkins, Mary Queen of Scots (London: Thames and Hudson, 2001), p. 193 and p. 197. 38 See Watkins, p. 193 and p. 197.

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It is, moreover, quite possible that Elizabeth would have been aware that Mary had, in her youth, delivered a Latin oration before the French court on the subject of women’s capacity for learning, a defence which makes her possibly one of the earliest women after Christine de Pisan to defend women’s education. Pierre de Brantôme, who heard this oration in the Louvre, gives the following account of it in his Mémoires … des femmes illustres, … estant en l’age de treize à quatorze ans, elle déclama devant le roi Henry, la reyne, et toute la cour, publiquement en la sale du Louvre, une oraison en Latin qu’elle avait faicte, soubtenant et deffendent, contre l’opinion commune, qu’il estoit bien séant aux femmes de sçavoir les lettres et arts libéraulx.39 (… when she was thirteen or fourteen years old, she read out publicly in front of King Henri, the queen, and all the court, a speech in Latin which she had composed, supporting and defending against the received opinion that it was seemly for women to know literature and the liberal arts.) Brantôme also tells us that, as a direct result of the eloquence of this speech from the fourteen-year-old girl, a French book on the art of rhetoric was published the following year with a dedicatory epistle in which Mary’s eloquence and wisdom in this same speech to the French court is acknowledged.40 The fact that it was composed in Latin suggests that it must have built upon the Latin theme compositions which Mary had composed as part of her education under an unidentified tutor in France, of which quite a large number are devoted to the defence of women’s education. For example in September 1554 she writes, Ut possis respondere bellis istis blateronibus qui heri dicebant esse foeminarum nihil sapere. Volo tibi dicere, soror, foeminam tui nominis adeò sapientem fuisse ut bene respondisset illis si adfuisset. Est Elizabeta abbatissa Germanica, quae scripsit plures orations ad sorores sui conventus, et opus de vijs quibus itur ad superos. Themistoclea oror Pythagorae

39 40

Quoted in A de Montaiglon, Latin Themes of Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots (London: Warton Club, 1855), p. xviii. See A. de Montaiglon, pp. xix–xx; the book referred to is Antoine Fouquelin, La Rhétorique francoise d’Antoine Foclin de Chauny en Vermandois, a tresillustre princesse madame Marie royne d’Ecosse (Paris: A. Wechel, 1555); the book was reprinted by Wechel in 1557. I am grateful to Geneviève Guilleminot at the Bibliothèque nationale de France for identifying this reference.

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ita docta erat, ut pluribus in locis usus sit illius opinionibus. Et ut habeas unde satisfacias ijs homunculis, te docebo magnum alliarum numerum.41 (So that you may answer these fine babblers yesterday who said women cannot know anything, I want to tell you sister that there was a woman with your name who was knowledgeable enough to have answered them if she had been there. That is Elizabeth, the Abbess in Germany, who wrote many lectures for the sisters of her convent, and a book on the paths by which we ascend to heaven. Themistoclea, the sister of Pythagoras, was so learned that in many places he cites her opinions. And so that you should have what it takes to satisfy these manikins, I will tell you about many others.) Addressed to her fellow pupil and future sister-in-law Elisabeth, daughter of Henri ii and Catherine de Medicis, who would eventually marry Philip of Spain, Mary’s argument and rhetorical technique in this Latin theme are exactly those of Christine de Pisan in her Cité des Dames, namely to identify ­examples of learned women. Although her Latin themes were based on French originals composed by her tutor, their argument is accepted, applied to her own learning, and offered to her nine-year-old fellow pupil and princess as justification of their joint studies.42 It is surely inconceivable, in this context, that the suite of embroideries that Mary later inherited from her mother in ­Scotland, and the similar suite that she was sent by her cousin Elizabeth in England would not have vividly recalled this episode and its arguments from her youth. Whether Elizabeth was also aware, in sending the tapestries to ­Tutbury, of these close personal associations that they held for her cousin cannot be known, but is at least possible. When he ordered six tapestries of the ‘triumphant dames’ to be bought in Paris, twenty years earlier, Mary’s father James v may not himself have fully understood the significance of their subject matter, and he could not possibly have anticipated these outcomes, but that he intended them to honour and 41 Montaiglon, Latin Themes of Mary Stuart, p. 33. 42 Jane Stevenson notes that almost all the names used in Mary’s ‘defence of learned women’ also appear in one of the letters of Angelo Poliziano, on the subject of learned women, that had been printed in his Epistolae in Paris in 1523. Stevenson is, however, mistaken in assuming that Mary’s Latin theme exercises are addressed to her cousin Elizabeth of England rather than to her fellow pupil, Elisabeth, daughter of Henri ii of France. Mary’s three royal sisters-in-law were all tutored by Jean Dorat. See Stevenson, Women Latin Poets: Language, Gender, and Authority, from Antiquity to the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 182.

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pay tribute to his royal bride can hardly be in doubt. The tapestries were based on one of the most compelling proto-feminist texts of the later Middle Ages, celebrating the power of women not only to govern themselves but also to play a leading role in affairs of church and state. James could not know just how short a time his own two marriages and indeed his own reign were destined to last when purchasing these tapestries or building the new palace apartments at Stirling, Falkland or Linlithgow that they were meant to furnish,43 but with hindsight we can only see it as uncannily proleptic of the role that his widow, Mary of Guise, and her daughter, Mary Stuart – both of whom inherited these tapestries – were destined to play in the future affairs of Scotland. When Georgette de Montenay invented the emblem of the mulier sapiens who builds the temple saint sometime in the 1560s, we should not conclude that her image of a royal woman building a wall is in any way indebted to the very similar image that illustrates early manuscripts of Christine de Pisan’s Cité des Dames showing a woman building a feminist City of God, for we do not know whether Montenay ever read the writings of Christine de Pisan. We may surely conclude, however, that the motif of a woman building a wall in both of the contexts identified in this chapter addressed issues of the role of women, and of specific royal women, in establishing or protecting the Christian church. The issues of gender which clearly motivated both of these different positions also evidently transcended the sectarian and doctrinal differences between Catholics and Protestants. As we shall see in the following chapters, those doctrinal divisions were overridden by shared iconographic traditions more often than one might expect in early modern Scotland. 43

There is no surviving evidence of where the City of Dames tapestries were hung, although Treasurer’s Accounts confirm that royal sets of tapestries were regularly moved around between the different Scottish palaces, and were not site-specific furnishings.

Chapter 3

Protestant Emblems: Building the House The castle known as Huntingtower, formerly Castle Ruthven, near Perth is a building which is known for the significant part it played in Scottish history as the place where, in 1582, the ‘Ruthven raiders’ led by William, fourth Lord ­Ruthven and first Earl of Gowrie, took the young King James hostage in a coup designed to secure the Presbyterian and Anglophile basis of the reformed church in Scotland. That explains, perhaps, why the only historical record of a piece of its emblematic decoration should be preserved in the mid-seventeenth century History of the Kirk in Scotland written by David Calderwood, who terminates his account of the ‘Ruthven Raid’ by describing a motto that could then be seen painted on a chimney piece, which read, Vera diu l­atitant , sed longo temporis usu /Emergunt tandem, quae latuere prius (‘The truth which was once hidden remains hidden for a long time, but after a long time emerges’).1 The fact that the Raid led to extensive and historically significant legal proceedings is what persuaded Robert Pitcairn to include Calderwood’s account of the Huntingtower inscription in his Criminal Trials in Scotland.2 The noted distich, which Calderwood, in his ms. Church History, states to have existed in his times, and which, he says, was painted above an ancient chimney-piece in the Castle of Ruthven, (now called Hunting Tower), may perhaps be considered as worthy of memory. VERA DIU LATITANT, SED, LONGO TEMPORIS USU, EMERGUNT TANDEM QUAE LATUERE DIU. What Pitcairn describes as Calderwood’s ‘noted distich’ had indeed already been noted a few years earlier in the nineteenth century by James Scott, in a biography of the Earl of Gowrie published in a limited edition of 150 copies by William Blackwood (Edinburgh, 1818). Scott includes the distich not only in his account of Calderwood’s History but also on his title page, with the ­following verse-translation: ‘Truths which were long conceal’d emerge to light; / And controverted facts are render’d bright’.

1 David Calderwood, The History of the Kirk in Scotland, 8 vols. (Edinburgh: Wodrow Society, 1842–1849), vi, p. 75. 2 Robert Pitcairn, Criminal Trials in Scotland, 7 vols. (Edinburgh: Bannatyne Club, 1833), i, p. xxxviii. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���8 | doi 10.1163/9789004364066_004

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This hitherto unsourced inscription, which is not proverbial, can now be shown to go back to Guillaume de la Perrière’s Morosophie, in which it comments on the emblem showing Time drawing Truth out of a well.3 (Figs. 3.1– 3.2) La Perrière’s epigram supplies the distich inscribed above Lord Gowrie’s fireplace,

Figure 3.1 Guillaume de la Perrière, Morosophie (Lyons: Macé Bonhomme, 1553), no. 48. © University of Glasgow Library, Department of Special Collections 3 Credit for identifying this source is due to Theo Van Heijnsbergen, who coauthored in the journal Emblematica the article on which the present chapter is based: Bath and Van Heijnsbergen, ‘Paradin Politicised: Some New Sources for Scottish Paintings’, Emblematica 22 (2016): 43–67. Much else in the present chapter is reliant on Dr Van Heijnsbergen’s unstinting collaboration and expertise.

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Figure 3.2 Guillaume de la Perrière, Morosophie, no. 48, epigram. Glasgow University Library

Hoc latuit puteo iam filia Temporis alma, Quam patri ridens indicat ille senex: Vera diu latitant, sed longo temporis usu Emergunt tandem, quae latuere priùs. (The kind daughter of Time has long lain hidden in this well; this old man, laughing, points her out to her father. The truth which was previously h ­ idden remains hidden for a long time, but after a long time emerges.) The woodcut shows Time being instructed to draw his daughter out of obscurity by the ‘laughing old man’ (‘ridens … senex’) whom we see standing above

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the pulley, and whose identity as Democritus is clarified by La Perrière’s French translation: Le Temps cherchoit sa fille Verité, Qui se cachoit pour n’avoir grandz appuys, Democritus homme d’authorité La luy montra cachée dans un puys. (Time was seeking his daughter Truth, who was hiding because she had no supporters. Democritus, a man of authority, showed her hiding down a well.) Democritus, the ‘laughing philosopher’ noted for his cheerful optimism, puts in his appearance at this point in La Perrière’s Morosophie to vindicate the book’s Erasmian title, since it was assumed that he laughed at the follies of men, and ‘morosophie’ means, of course, ‘The wisdom of folly’: this, then, is an emblematic Moriae Encomium that illustrates the book’s paradoxical title.4 As James Scott recognised in 1818, La Perrière’s emblem is also a version of that well-known topic Veritas filia temporis (‘Truth the Daughter of Time’), which normally shows Truth not down a well but hidden in a cave, within which she has been confined by Envy, Strife and Slander (or some combination of these); Father Time is normally shown dragging her out of that obscurity.

Veritas Filia Temporis: Religion Emblematically Restored

Calderwood makes no mention of any image accompanying this inscription on the Earl of Gowrie’s fireplace, though the fact that painted ceilings and fragments of mural painting can still be seen in what remains of the castle now known as Huntingtower suggests that the decoration may well have originally included the emblematic pictura. The conventional iconography of the ­Veritas filia temporis topos is illustrated in an influential engraving by Enea Vico of c. 1540 (Fig. 3.3) which had considerable posterity, having been copied as the device of printer Marcolini in Venice, who used it in Anton ­Francesco 4 In his prefatory letter to Antoine de Bourbon, La Perrière comments on his book’s title, ‘J’ay nommé mon dit oeuvre, MOROSOPHIE, par diction Grecque composée, signifiant en Grec comme fole sagesse en Françoys. Je suys asseuré que plusieurs me noteront de temerité, de ce que je vous ay fait present de ma folie, chose fort repugnante à votre sagesse’ (‘I have called my work Morosophie, made out of Greek words, meaning in Greek what we would call mad wisdom in French. I have been assured that many would accuse me of temerity in what I have brought to pass by my folly, something strongly repugnant to your wisdom’) (fol. A4v).

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Figure 3.3 Enea Vico, Veritas, from series of 42 Imagines engravings by François Salviati of ca. 1540 showing iconological figures, Bartsch: Vico, ‘Sujets emblématiques,’ no. 91. © University of Glasgow Library, Department of Special Collections

­Doni’s Filosophia morale (Venice, 1552), a collection of fables which Sir Thomas North translated in 1570 as The Morall Philosophie of Doni using close copies of ­Marcolini’s illustrations.5 Veritas filia temporis also found its way into ­Whitney’s Emblemes (1586, p. 4), and it is Whitney’s version that has been commonly used to document its wider circulation in northern Renaissance contexts in classic essays by Fritz Saxl, Donald Gordon, and Soji Iwasaki. (Fig. 3.4) These studies establish a context for its usage in England which surely clarifies G ­ owrie’s likely motives for including a version of it in the decoration of his house in late-­sixteenth century Scotland, for that context was precisely parallel to the contested arguments between Catholic and Protestant campaigners that 5 For these illustrations, and an illuminating discussion of the relation of these fables, which go back to oriental sources known as The fables of Bidpai, to emblems see North, The Morall Philosophie of Doni, ed. Donald Beecher et al. (Ottowa: Barnabe Riche Society Publications, 2003), pp. 75–98.

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Figure 3.4 Geffrey Whitney, A Choice of Emblemes (1586), p. 4, ‘Veritas temporis filia’. © University of Glasgow Library, Department of Special Collections

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o­ ccasioned the kidnapping of the young King James and his confinement in ­Ruthven Castle in 1582. It was Saxl who, as Gordon says, first ‘traced the various uses to which the motto “Veritas Filia Temporis” was put by English monarchs from Henry viii to Elizabeth, showing how it was made to serve the causes of Protestantism and Catholicism in turn’.6 Whitney’s version reuses a woodcut commissioned by Plantin for previous publication in Hadrianus Junius’s Emblemata (1565, p. 59) – though this has a different motto – and Whitney adapts the motto by which this politically active topic was known and circulated throughout the sixteenth century in the woodcuts by Vico or Marcolini. La Perrière made no use of mottoes either in Morosophie or in his much better known Thèatre de bons engins, which is why the Earl of Gowrie was obliged to deploy a couplet abstracted from the verse subscriptio to supply its motto. As Soji Iwasaki says, ‘the motto Veritas filia temporis was frequently used as a rallying cry of Protestantism at the time of the Reformation on the Continent and in England.’7 Mary Tudor had adopted it in 1553 as her personal device, to signify Truth rescued by Time after a period of Catholic sufferings: the motto appears on her crest, on her seal and on coins. Her sister Elizabeth, however, used it in the pageant preceding her own coronation in 1558, when Time ­rescuing her daughter Truth was shown with labels for each, and Truth held the English Bible which was later handed to the new queen, to give Mary’s ­motto a new Protestant significance. As Iwasaki suggests (251–252), ‘The ­emblem V ­ eritas filia temporis was thus frequently used by both Catholics and Protestants for almost every political change, especially when they could take advantage of the image of the redeemed daughter Truth as fitting with either Mary or Elizabeth, each in her turn newly vindicated by Time’.8 The Ruthven raiders’ kidnapping of the King of Scots in order, as they thought, to isolate him from the influence of his Catholic kinsman, Esmé Stuart, and secure the Protestant reformation in Scotland conforms so closely to this context that it is surely inconceivable that the Earl of Gowrie’s use of the inscription in his Perthshire Castle did not have the same significance.

6 Donald Gordon, ‘Veritas Filia Temporis’: Hadrianus Junius and Geoffrey Whitney’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 3 (1940), 228–40, p. 228, citing Fritz Saxl, ‘Veritas Filia Temporis’, in Philosophy and History: Essays Presented to Ernst Cassirer, ed. R. Klibansky and H.J. Paton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1936), pp. 197–222. 7 Soji Iwasaki, ‘Veritas Filia Temporis and Shakespeare’, English Literary Renaissance, 3 (1973), 249–63, p. 250. 8 This is also the context that is identified for its use in England by Donald Beecher et al. in their ‘Introduction’ to North, The Moral Philosophy of Doni, pp. 84–85.

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The documents do not, unfortunately, supply a precise date for this painting, but Calderwood’s description was made closely enough to the time of the actual Raid, in precisely this context, to support the assumption that it was painted for William Ruthven during his ownership of the building. Sixteenyear-old King James did not spend much of his ten months’ captivity in the Castle, although his movements and policies were effectively controlled by the conspirators. It is therefore not certain whether the fireplace was already painted before he arrived or whether, if that were so, he would have seen it. We do, however, have contemporary descriptions which testify to the Earl’s interest in painting, and we know that in 1579 he built the large extension to one of his other houses, the town house known as Gowrie House in Perth. It was in 1584, when Gowrie was arrested as he was about to sail into exile from Dundee, that David Hume of Godscroft described a visit which he made to Gowrie House, shortly before this arrest, when he found the Earl ‘… looking very pitifullie upon his gallery where we were walking at that time (which he had but newly built and decored with pictures) he brake out into these words, having first fetched a deep sigh, ‘Cousin (says he) is there no remedie? Et impius haec tam culta novalia miles habebit? Barbarus has segetes?’ (‘And is a godless soldier to hold these well-tilled lands? A barbarian these fields’).9 If we may trust this anecdote recalling the Earl of Gowrie’s melancholy ­citation of Virgil’s Ecl. i, 70–71, in which Meliboeus contemplates his impending exile to distant lands, ‘penitus toto divisos orbe Britannos’ (‘Britain cut off far from the whole world’) (i, 66), then it surely suggests something of the classical spirit in which he evidently viewed his paintings – a mentality which, with its easy resort to classical apophthegm, would be ideally attuned to emblems and ready to apply them to his contemporary situation. That the motto on his fireplace at nearby Castle Ruthven, together with any emblematic pictura that may have accompanied it, would have had the same political significance in Scotland at this critical time as it had long had for the fortunes of the national church in England can hardly be doubted.

The Wisdom of Folly: Scottish Readers’ Knowledge of Morosophie

Morosophie has not been identified as the pattern book used for any known example of Renaissance decorative painting in Scotland at this period, but that La Perrière’s emblem book was known to other Scottish readers is evident from a Latin citation in an undated funeral sermon preached by Andrew 9 David Hume of Godscroft, History of Scotland (London: Simon Millar, 1657), p. 377.

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Boyd (1566–1636) in which, as Bishop of Argyle, he objects to pompous and elaborate funeral ceremonies, insisting rather on what we might describe as a democracy of death in which all men are equal. It ill behooves us to turn a funeral into a theatrical performance, argues Boyd, … for if the play-maister send into the scene a king with his robe, and begger with his rags, a philosophe with his stole, and a foole with his hoode; since the begger cannot make himselfe the king, nor the foole make himselfe a philosophe, let thame onlie in thaire owne given habite do the thing requyred of thame; that is, whatever be thy persone, play the part weill; for so soone as they go behind the vaile, the habite is shakine off, the persone is changd and both becume alyke. Quos fors distinguit, mors facit esse pares.10 Jamie Reid Baxter has, astutely, identified La Perrière’s penultimate emblem (Morosophie no. 99) as the source of this Latin adage, Quos fors distinguit, mors facit esse pares, which we might translate, ‘Those whom chance divides, death makes equal’. La Perrière’s picture shows the skeletal figure of death holding scales in which a royal sceptre and crown are balanced with humble agricultural implements, ‘Pour demontrer,’ as the French quatrain puts it, ‘que quand la mort s’avance, / De mesme poix sont les Roys & vassaux’. (Figs. 3.5–3.6) The Scottish sermon moralises the emblem as follows, To make a short redditione of this similitude. Blissed is that man, wha, whatever place he be put into in this world, is first content thairwith, and then dischargis it in such a forme, as may please that great playmaister, the liveing God, and procure applause off the spectators who hes seene the actis of his lyfe, and thairby may be moved to follow his exemple.11 By describing this Latin phrase as a ‘similitude’ Boyd is identifying its rhetorical status as an Erasmian figure of the type that so many emblems utilised, and the shadow of La Perrière’s paradoxical encomium on the wisdom of folly can also be witnessed in Boyd’s reference to kings, fools and philosophers (‘the begger cannot make himselfe the king, nor the foole make himselfe a philosophe’). 10

11

Cited by J. Reid-Baxter, ‘Mr. Andrew Boyd (1567–1636): A Neo-Stoic Bishop of Argyll and his Writings’, in Sixteenth Century Scotland: Essays in Honour of Michael Lynch, ed. J. Goodare and A.A. MacDonald (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 395–425, p. 412, citing National ­Library of Scotland, Wodrow Quarto, Boyd MSS, Vol. xx, fols. 146v–147. Reid-Baxter, p. 412.

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Figure 3.5 Guillaume de la Perrière, Morosophie (Lyons, 1553), no. 99. © University of Glasgow Library, Department of Special Collections

Just as the Earl of Gowrie was obliged, lacking a motto, to abstract a sententious cutting from the emblem subscriptio for his purposes, so likewise Andrew Boyd has evidently inserted this cutting from his commonplace-book into his funeral sermon. Though these two quotations from Morosophie occur in quite different media – decorative painting on the one hand and a funeral oration on the other – both share that fundamental basis in rhetoric which characterises the emblem in all of its many applications at this period. The paradoxical encomium, showing the wisdom of folly, might indeed suggest a new context for that paradox of the jester at the Crucifixion which we explored in our opening chapter on the fool at Fowlis. The Ruthven estates were forfeited on Gowrie’s death in 1584, only to be restored the following year. The title passed to Gowrie’s second son, John,

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Figure 3.6 Guillaume de la Perrière, Morosophie (Lyons, 1553), no. 99, epigram. © University of Glasgow Library, Department of Special Collections

who inherited his father’s religious and humanist principles and tastes, travelling widely in Europe, studying at Padua, and visiting the French court of Henri iv before lodging for three months with Théodore de Bèze (‘Beza’) in Geneva – this was another traveling Scot who thus found his way to Geneva.12 On his return to Scotland he met his fate in the 1600 ‘Gowrie 12

J.D. Davies, Blood of Kings: The Stuarts, the Ruthvens and the Gowrie Conspiracy (Hersham, Surrey: Ian Allen Publishing, 2010), pp. 132–35.

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­ onspiracy’ when King James and his hunting party made that unexpected C visit to Perth in pursuit, the king alleged, of a rumoured pot of gold, only to be led up into the tower of Gowrie House, where another plot to imprison the king was foiled. John and his brother, Alexander Ruthven, were both killed and the name of Ruthven abolished, which is why Castle Ruthven acquired its present name of Huntingtower. The implications of the Veritas filia temporis emblem would have been as acceptable to John, 3rd Earl of Gowrie, as they were to his father, William, and its classical basis equally in sympathy with his humanist education and tastes. The strength of his religious convictions is attested to by Beza who said that, following Gowrie’s visit to Geneva, he could not think of this young man without tears in his eyes. And on his arrival back in Edinburgh in 1600 Gowrie was confronted with hostility from the royalist faction, and when asked if he ­intended to avenge his father’s death by attacking Captain William Stewart, who was the man who had arrested his father in 1584 and thus sealed his fate by execution, he is said to have replied, ‘Aquila non captat muscas’ (‘An eagle does not catch flies’).13 This classical proverb had also been turned into an emblem by La P ­ errière (Theatre des bons engins, 1540, no. 32), but none of the many editions of this emblem book uses Latin mottoes, and Gowrie is merely quoting a familiar Latin proverb.14 Gowrie’s readiness to resort to such classical and potentially emblematic topics underlines what might be called the emblematic mindset in this militant Protestant family, and although we cannot be absolutely sure that the Vera diu latitant inscription on the Castle Ruthven fireplace was carved by William, 1st Earl of Gowrie, at the time of the ‘Ruthven Raid’ in 1582–83, and not by his son, John, 3rd Earl, who attempted to murder the king in the ‘Gowrie Conspiracy’ of 1600, it seems likely that the inscription was already in place before the end of the sixteenth century and its specific relevance to this most notorious episode in Scottish history would have been apparent.

The Skelmorlie Aisle: ‘In Utrumque Paratus’

The Earl of Gowrie’s inscription in Perthshire has clear political implications for those doctrinal issues which increasingly divided the nation, following the Reformation, in its attempts to establish a national church. We have greater ­difficulty however in determining the doctrinal position of the emblems ­painted some fifty years later in a building that is more directly religious,

13 See Davies, p. 135, citing Pitcairn. 14 Erasmus, Adagia no. 3.2.65, 1703, p. 761.

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­although as we shall see this becomes clearer once we explore the wider distribution at this period in Scotland of one of its emblems in particular. The funerary aisle built onto the old parish church of Largs, Ayrshire, by Sir Robert Montgomery of Skelmorlie to house the tomb of his late wife, Margaret Douglas, in 1636 is notable for its painted ceiling, whose complex trompe-l’oeil false vaulting and rib-work divides it into 41 different panels filled with a variety of subjects, including emblems.15 Sources for a number of these details have been identified in continental prints, of which the non-emblematic examples include subjects based on engravings by Etienne Delaune, whose Adam and Eve and Esau and Jacob from his set of six Old Testament prints of c. 1570 were copied for two of the centre panels, whilst his Arts and Sciences series supplied the pattern for some purely decorative detail featuring a bearded figure with amorini and animals in an ensemble which the artist reproduces no fewer than six times at various places on the ceiling. Two of the Four Seasons panels adapt Adrian Collaert’s engravings after designs by Maarten de Vos of Autumnus (Autumn) and Hiems (Winter). The panel showing a woman watching a spirited, unbridled and galloping horse has been shown to copy an engraving by Hendrik Goltzius, published in 1578, of the ‘Wild and Untamed Horse’ (Equus liber et Incompositus) from the set of 40 prints illustrating the royal stable of Don John of Austria. This panel is exceptionally important since it is the only known example in Scottish decorative painting of this period that its artist has both signed and dated: ‘J Stalker fecit 1638’.16 The range of sources that have been identified for this painting in contemporary prints is quite remarkable, and would stand as paradigmatic of the heavy reliance of the decorative arts more generally on print sources at this period. The only details on the Skelmorlie ceiling that have been sourced to an ­actual emblem book, however, are two half-panels at the southern end of the aisle, adjoining what was originally – prior to its demolition in 1802 – the nave of this parish church. (Fig. 3.7) One of these shows a lion rampant with the ­subscriptio, ‘THAT TO DEFENDE OUR COUNTRIE DEAR FROM HARME,’ whilst its corresponding semi-oval shows a hand holding an upraised sword, ‘FOR WARRE OR WORKE WE THIS HANDE SHOULDE ARME’. (Fig. 3.8) The fact that the two inscriptions, read successively, make up a rhymed pentameter couplet suggests that these two half panels should be joined together to form a single emblem, and it was H.S. Adams, in an unpublished Glasgow University Master’s dissertation (Adams 1999, 47–48), who identified its source as ­Geffrey Whitney’s In utrumque paratus emblem (Whitney 1586, 66), 15 Bath, Renaissance Decorative Painting in Scotland (Edinburgh: National Museums of Scotland Publishing, 2003), pp. 128–45, 227–28. 16 Bath, Decorative Painting, p. 128.

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Figure 3.7 Largs, Ayrshire, Skelmorlie Aisle, southern end of painted ceiling erected by Sir Robert Montgomery to commemorate his late wife, Margaret Douglas, in 1636. © Donald Whannell

showing two hands, one upholding the raised sword whilst the other holds a ­builder’s trowel, and with a verse subscriptio that concludes with the couplet, ‘That to defende, our countrie deare from harme, / For warre, or worke, wee eyther hande should arme’. (Fig. 3.9) In adapting Whitney’s emblem to show a lion rampant where Whitney has a hand holding the trowel, the Scottish artist loses the neat antithesis between ‘warre’ and ‘worke’ which shapes its pictura and justifies its motto, substituting a different and equally bellicose image for Whitney’s peaceful trowel. The substitution might well have been motivated by Montgomery’s importation of this English emblem – which actually goes back to Paradin (Devises heroïques, p. 115) – to a northern context, where the lion rampant features most prominently in the royal arms of Scotland. The removal of the hand with a trowel, however, necessitated rewriting the English verses, so that Whitney’s ‘eyther hande’ becomes a single ‘this hande’. Once detached from its original setting, the grammar of this concluding couplet also fails to make sense since the relative pronoun (‘That’) lacks its antecedent: Whitney’s epigram concludes, ‘Which doth inferre, this lesson unto all / That to defende, our countrie … / … wee eyther hande should arme.’

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Figure 3.8 Skelmorlie Aisle, detail showing one half of the bisected In utrumque paratus emblem, quoting two lines of Whitney’s epigram. © Donald Whannell



In utrumque paratus: A Protestant Appropriation

Paradin and, following him, Whitney both give a biblical sanction for this emblem, claiming that it refers to Nehemiah’s rebuilding of the walls of Jerusalem and the defence of the city. Paradin’s interpretation (p. 115) gives the Old Testament story a typological interpretation, as anticipating the establishment of the Christian church (‘Histoire mistiquement representant les edificateurs de l’Eglise Chretienne’) and the defence of the faith against its enemies with the sword of holy scripture (‘touiours avec le trenchant de l’espee de la parole

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Figure 3.9 Geffrey Whitney, A Choice of Emblemes (1586), p. 66, ‘In utrumque paratus’. © University of Glasgow Library, Department of Special Collections

de Dieu’). This reading seems to have given the emblem its leading role in the ­sixteenth century, particularly in Scotland, as a reminder of the need for vigilance in building and defending the reformed church, which is undoubtedly why Théodore de Bèze (lat. Beza) attaches the same motto to his engraved portrait of King James in the Frontispiece to his Icones (1580); the royal portrait varies Paradin’s pictura to show the young king holding no trowel, but a sword in one hand and an olive branch in the other, hence ready for either war or

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Figure 3.10 Théodore Beza, Icones (Antwerp, 1580), frontispiece. © University of Glasgow Library, Department of Special Collections

peace: ‘IN UTRUNQUE (sic.) PARATUS’. (Fig. 3.10) Thus, like the Skelmorlie Aisle, Beza’s Frontispiece does not scruple to vary the alternative object being held in the figure’s left hand when illustrating this motto. We may well ask why this book of engravings identifying the principal persons from different countries who had supported the Protestant reformation should begin with a portrait of the King of Scots but, in his preface dedicating the whole book to King James, Beza pays tribute to Scotland’s European role in reforming the church, acknowledging the influence of John Knox and Andrew Melville, together with other learned Scots whose reputation was well-known overseas, among whom several had found their way to Geneva. These include George Keith, founder of Marischal College, Aberdeen, and Henry Scrimgeour, who studied with Budé and Ramus in Paris before converting and becoming Fugger’s librarian and Calvin’s friend in Geneva – in 1570 Scrimgeour was encouraged by regents Moray and Mar to return to Scotland and assist George Buchanan and Peter Young in the young king’s education, though Scrimgeour declined the offer.17 Buchanan and Young are themselves both named by Beza and credited, as James’s tutors, with instilling in the young king that knowledge 17

John Durkan, ‘Henry Scrimgeour, Renaissance Bookman’, Edinburgh Bibliographical Society Transactions 5 (1971–74), 1–31.

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of languages, learning and the liberal arts which had supported his determination to establish the true religion at home and abroad. It was the ­arrival of the king’s Catholic kinsman, Esmé Stuart, at the Scottish court in 1579 which excited Protestant paranoia that his mission was to convert James vi to Catholicism, and this alarm was nowhere greater than in Calvinist Geneva, where Beza’s dealings with Scotland had already involved correspondence with the Scottish chancellor, Lord Glamis, on the evils of episcopacy. The conversion to Presbyterianism of Andrew Melville during this leading Scottish theologian and religious reformer’s studies in Geneva, 1569–74, was also at Beza’s instigation when Melville was appointed to the chair of humanity in Geneva.18 In summer 1579 Beza sent the composer Jean Servin to Scotland with musical settings of 41 of George Buchanan’s Latin Psalm paraphrases, and (as Jamie Reid Baxter writes) Servin’s job was ‘at least in part to find out what exactly was going on in Scotland.’19 One of the peculiarities of this book by Calvin’s successor in Geneva is the way its 49 portraits of reformers are followed by 44 completely original Latin emblems. The relationship between these and the Icones has occasioned some discussion but has never been satisfactorily explained; it may well, however, help to explain why Scottish Protestants should so readily have associated the circulation of emblems with the promulgation of reformed doctrines.20 Although Beza’s book was published more than 50 years before Montgomery painted his ceiling, the In utrumque paratus emblem had already found its way by this time, as we shall see, into several other decorative schemes, and it seems likely that a primary influence on its circulation might have been its prominent position as the Frontispiece to Beza’s Icones, id est verae ­imagines virorum ­doctrina simul et pietate illustrium […] quibus adiectae sunt ­nonnullae picturae quas Emblemata vocant (‘Icons, that is to say portraits of men ­celebrated for both their teaching and their piety … to which are added a few of those pictures which they call Emblems’). The full title itself suggests the possible connection between the reformation of the church and the circulation of emblems. It was not Beza, however, who substituted the olive branch for Paradin’s builder’s trowel in this emblem, for in 1575/6 – five years earlier – new gold 18

19 20

James Porter, ‘“Beatus ille qui misertus pauperis”: the historical importance of Jean Servin’s settings of Buchanan’s Psalm Paraphrases’, in George Buchanan: Poet and Dramatist, ed. P. Ford and R.P.H. Green (Swansea: Classical Press of Wales, 2009), 113–35. Reid Baxter, personal communication. Alison Adams, Webs of Allusion: French Protestant Emblem Books of the Sixteenth Century (Geneva: Droz, 2003), 119–53; also Adams, ‘The Emblemata of Théodore de Bèze’, in Mundus Emblematicus: Studies in Neo-Latin Emblem Books, ed. K.A.E. Enenkel and A.S.Q. Visser (Turnhout: Brepols, 2003), 71–99.

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Figure 3.11

Gold £20 Scots coin, obverse, minted 1575–76. Photo courtesy of Classical Numismatic Group, Inc: http://www.cngcoins.com/

coinage had been issued which included £20 pieces which, Ian Stewart says, ‘weighed an ounce each and were the largest gold coins struck in the British Isles before the 17th century’. As he says, ‘their purpose seems to have been more medallic than monetary.’21 The moment we look at the obverse of this coin we recognise exactly where Beza found the model for his frontispiece, for here we see the young king in profile, holding a sword over his shoulder and an olive branch in his left hand. (Fig. 3.11) And if we look at the IN VTRVNQVE PARATVS exergue we notice that same variant spelling of the Latin (normally ‘utrumque’) which we have witnessed in Beza’s engraving; we can also identify the origin of Beza’s inscription naming the person represented, for this copies exactly the surrounding inscription: IACOBVS•6•DEI•GRA•REX• SCOTOR[VM]. When we turn to the reverse of this coin, moreover, we can almost certainly identify the source of Montogomery’s substitute for Whitney’s trowel, for this 21

Ian Stewart, ‘Coinage and Propaganda: An Interpretation of the Coin-Types of James vi’, in From the Stone Age to the ‘Forty-Five’, ed. A. O’Connor and D.V. Clarke (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1983), 450–62, p. 455.

Protestant Emblems: Building the House

Figure 3.12

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Gold £20 Scots coin, reverse, minted 1575–76. Photo courtesy of Classical Numismatic Group, Inc: http://www.cngcoins.com/

is the lion rampant of the royal arms of Scotland, and it is encircled by another inscription, PARCERE SVBIECTIS & DEBELLARE SVPERBOS (‘To spare the defeated, and overcome the proud’). (Fig. 3.12) Both of the moralising inscriptions on this coin are, in fact, quotations from Virgil: the one about sparing the defeated quotes Aeneid, vi, 853, where they are the closing words of Anchises to his son, Aeneas, as he forecasts his future destiny and duties as founder of the Roman Empire, whereas ‘In utrumque paratus’ is the phrase used in Book Two to describe the Greek captive Sinon, who tricks the Trojans into dragging the Trojan Horse into their city, with the disastrous consequences that we are all familiar with. It therefore seems likely that the curiously divided ‘In utrumque paratus’ emblem that we find on the Skelmorlie Aisle ceiling copied, in 1638, the wording of Whitney’s epigram that had appeared in his emblem book of 1586 showing disembodied hands holding a sword and a trowel, whilst returning that image to the iconography of an extremely valuable and impressive gold £20 Scottish coin, minted sixty years earlier to define the values of Scotland’s young king. By 1638 the royal resolve – either to build the nation with the peaceful masonic trowel or to defend it with the sword of justice – had undergone a dramatic change of circumstances, with the Union

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of Crowns in 1603, the death of James vi/i in 1635, and political disagreements and divisions leading up to the Bishops’ Wars of 1639–40, that would radically problematise the application of this emblem to contemporary circumstances. Those issues, as we shall see, were addressed in the emblems we shall be examining in our following chapters. We should recall that both Paradin and Whitney interpret the emblem as referring to the establishment of the Christian church and the defence of the faith against its enemies. Wider familiarity with this emblem and this motto is, indeed, suggested by the number of other places which made use of it. The ceiling from Rossend Castle, Burntisland (Fife), for example, which is now on display in the National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh, has grotesque motifs interspersed with twelve emblem motifs that go back to Paradin , one of which shows the two hands holding a sword and a trowel. (Fig. 3.13) There are no mottoes or accompanying inscriptions on this ceiling, and it is unclear whether, interspersed as they are with non-symbolic details, the devices copied from Paradin retain any emblematic function. Claude Paradin’s Devises heroïques (1551, et seq.) also supplied six of the emblems that were recorded by local historian Daniel Wilson in the Edinburgh tenement known as ‘Mary of Guise’s House’.22 These included what Wilson describes as ‘two hands out of a cloud, one holding a sword, and the other a trowel: In utrumque paratus.’ (194). None of these paintings has survived, although watercolor sketches of some of the other – religious – paintings that were made before they disappeared from this site in the nineteenth century are preserved in the Historic Environment Scotland collection in Edinburgh. The tenement containing these was built in 1591 for two merchant burgesses, Robert McNaught and James Rynd, who inscribed the date and their initials on the building, and the local belief that it was once occupied by Mary of Guise, or that this painting was for her use, lacks documentary evidence and can now almost certainly be discounted.23 In 1968 the National Trust for Scotland restored a house known as ‘The Bay Horse Inn’ near Dysart, Fife, dating from 1583. It was built for Henry ­Sinclair, whose family were hereditary lairds of this burgh on the Forth estuary where coal was mined and salt panned for export to the Netherlands: Dysart was known, accordingly, as ‘Salt Burgh’ and ‘Little Holland’. The restoration r­ evealed 22 23

Daniel Wilson, Memorials of Edinburgh in the Olden Time 2 vols (Edinburgh: A & C Black, 1891), i: 190–97. Bath, ‘Was there a Guise Palace in Edinburgh?’ in All Manner of Murals: The History, Techniques and Conservation of Secular Wall Paintings, ed. R. Gowing and R. Pender (London, Archetype Publications, 2007), 11–22.

Protestant Emblems: Building the House

Figure 3.13

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Rossend Castle, Burntisland, Fife, detail from painted ceiling now displayed in Edinburgh, National Museum of Scotland. Photo author

painted decoration under later plaster both on ceilings and on walls, i­ ncluding mural painting on boards in the west gable-end, where it was treated to some false-architecture, with Ionic pillars supporting a classical entablature in a landscape, above a detail which is described in the unpublished conservation report as follows: Within the archway of the classical motif a ribbon which encloses a virtually indecipherable crest contains the motto ‘IN VTRVMQVE PARA…’

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The ribbon itself is surmounted by detached arms, dexter bearing a sword and sinister a spade-like object, possibly a mason’s trowel.24 Although, unfortunately, no photographs of this detail appear to have been taken this is clearly another application of the same emblem that we have found used also at Rossend, Skelmorlie Aisle, and Mary of Guise’s House. Paradin’s Devises heroïques was published in the Netherlands from 1561 onwards, when Plantin produced the first edition to have appeared outside France, followed by many subsequent Antwerp editions.25 We may well ­wonder whether it was Scotland’s close trading links with The Netherlands which helped f­ amiliarise Scottish householders with continental emblems and emblem books such as Paradin’s. Coal mining down both shores of the Firth of Forth had been established before the Reformation by the local landowning religious houses, who used the coal to heat their salt pans for the production of the valuable salt that they exported to the Netherlands. At Culross, in Fife, Sir George Bruce extended his coal seams out under the sea, with artificial ventilation which became a curiosity that attracted sightseers. His dwelling house known as The Palace, built in 1597 and extended in 1611, is decorated with paintings. These include a ceiling covered in emblems adapted from Whitney, whose Choice of Emblemes (1586) was printed, as we have noted, by Plantin: the In utrumque paratus emblem, however, is not used on Bruce’s ceiling. In later chapters we shall return to Culross, following in the footsteps of early ­visitors, including King James and Ben Jonson, where we shall find, nevertheless, that the continuing issues surrounding the business of building the house and ­establishing the Protestant reformation in Scotland again come to the fore.

24 25

Historic Environment Scotland, file ref. FIR/12/1, p. 6. Alison Adams, S. Rawles, and A. Saunders, A Bibliography of French Emblem Books of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, 2 vols. (Geneva: Droz, 2002), ii, items F. 462–67.

Chapter 4

‘Rare shewes and singular inventions’: Court Festivals and Royal Baptisms

A Local Ballad: The De’il o’ Buchlyvie

The local history of a village in Stirlingshire records a ballad which, we are told, was originally sung by a folksinger called Watty McOwat about the acting performance of his father ‘daft Davie’ who had played the part of a satyr in a great banquet held in Stirling castle. A local tradition tells how the ballad was sung at a neighbouring ceilidh when the singer was questioned about his background and profession as a minstrel or balladeer, in response to which he recalled his father’s dancing in a ‘devil’s dress’ or ‘Satyr’s dress’ made up by a tailor called Spittal in Stirling. The ballad records how, when he returned home to his village, the guiser’s costume made him look like a devil, Nae doubt ye’ll hae heard how daft Davie McOwat Cam hame like a deil, wi’ an auld horn bouat; devil lantern His feet they were cloven, horns stuck through his bonnet That fleyed a’ the neibours whenever they looked on it.frightened The ballad is largely intent on deriding the village’s inhabitants, who are characterised as devils for their drinking, swearing, and lying. But none of its other devils rival daft ‘Davie, the guizer’. But deils wi’ Court favour we never look blue at,devils Then let’s drink to our new deil, daft Davie McOwat, And lang may he wag baith his tail and his bairdie beard Without skaith or scorning frae lord or frae lairdie! harm Let him get but the Queen at our fauts to connive aye – He’ll be the best deil for the toon o’ Buchlyvie.1

1 W. Chrystal, The Kingdom of Kippen: Its History and Traditions (Stirling: Munro and Jamieson, 1903) p. 97. To ‘look blue at’ means to be anxious, oed’s earliest citation dates from 1550. Buchlyvie’s bad reputation also informed Walter Scott’s depiction of it in Rob Roy (1818), Chapter 28, where the chapter heading quotes a ‘popular rhyme’ excoriating ‘The Baron o’ Buchlyvie/

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���8 | doi 10.1163/9789004364066_005

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This local tradition appears to be a remarkably long-lived reminiscence of a court festival in neighbouring Stirling (about fifteen miles from Buchlyvie) in which masquers appeared in the guise of horned, tailed and clovenhoofed ­satyrs. And we happen to know of the actual court festival which, in the s­ixteenth century, became notorious for staging a cast of such characters: it was a royal ceremony held in 1566 to celebrate the baptism of James vi/i, f­uture king of Scots and, eventually, of the united kingdoms of Scotland and England. It is somewhat ironic, therefore, that the classical goat-headed, drunken followers of Bacchus who performed in this pageant are now remembered, if at all, solely for their misbehaviour, when they turned to insult their English guests. As Antonia Fraser tells us in her well-known biography of Mary Queen of Scots, ‘The English party took offence at one masque in which some French-born satyrs deliberately turned in their direction and put their hands behind them to their tails which they wagged with their hands’.2

The Stirling 1566 Baptism: Splendid Ceremony or Comic Capers?

This bit of horseplay explains why the Stirling baptism of 1566 is largely ­remembered, if at all, as a symptom of the natural, or perhaps one should say national, incivility of the Scots. However we should perhaps also note the judgement of Michael Lynch – virtually the only historian to have examined the Stirling baptism in any detail – when he concludes that ‘for historians of the art of power, Stirling in 1566 deserves to be restored to its proper place as the venue of what was by most yardsticks the first truly Renaissance festival which Great Britain had ever witnessed’.3 The Stirling entertainment, he shows us, was closely modelled on the Valois magnificences organised by Catherine de Medici in France, in which Mary’s mother-in-law had sought to reconcile the religious differences that were tearing her own country apart. Indeed these French ceremonies were the very same court festivals which inspired the famous set of Valois tapestries whose study in 1959 attracted the ­attention of Frances Yates.4 The masque of rural deities in Stirling – satyrs, May the foul fiend drive ye/ And a’ to pieces rive ye /For biggin sic a toon,/ Whaur ther’s neither horse meat, /Nor man’s meat, nor a chair to sit doon’. 2 Fraser, Mary Queen of Scots (London: Methuen, 1989), p. 338. 3 Michael Lynch, ‘Queen Mary’s Triumph: the Baptismal Celebrations at Stirling in D ­ ecember 1566’, Scottish Historical Review, 69 (1990), 1–21 (p. 21). The Baptism had previously been ­studied by Anna J. Mill, Medieval Plays in Scotland (Edinburgh 1927, repr. London: Blom, 1969), pp. 333–43. 4 Frances Yates, The Valois Tapestries (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1959).

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nereids, naiads, fauns and ‘Orcadians’ – who offered this insult to their English guests was, moreover, written by that most eminent of European neo-Latin poets, Scotland’s George Buchanan.5 How, then, could this Scottish imitation of such elaborate and sophisticated French court festivals have descended into insult and farce? The fact that there was no printed account of the 1566 Baptism means that most of our evidence for what actually happened has to be gleaned from ­random sources, including contemporary witnesses or from state papers, such as the Treasurer’s Accounts, where we find payments recorded for masquing costumes, stage properties, and fireworks. The ‘play claythis’ included goat skins for the ‘hieland wyld mens cleithings’ and various costumes for Moors, mercenaries and for ‘counterfeit devils’.6 This makes it difficult to know ­whether the tail-wagging was part of the pre-planned scenario, or whether it was an unauthorised and impromptu improvisation. It is also unclear from surviving descriptions whether it was the Scots or the French participants in the ­baptism who initiated this piece of horseplay, although Sir James Melville suggests that  it was Queen Mary’s French servant, Bastien Pagez, who was responsible. And at the principal banquet there fell out a great grudge and cause of ill-feeling among the Englishmen: for a Frenchman called Bastian devised a number of men formed like satyrs, with long tails and whips in their hands, running before the meat, which was brought through the great hall upon a trim engine, marching as appeared alone, with musicians clothed like maids, singing and playing upon all sorts of instruments. But the satyrs were not content only to make a way, but put their hands behind them to their tails, which they wagged with their hands in such sort as the Englishmen supposed it had been devised and done in derision of them.7 5 ‘Pompae deorum rusticorum dona ferentium Jacobo vi. & Mariae matri eius Scotorum Regibus, in coena quae Regis baptisma est consecuta’, in Buchanan, Poemata; frequently reprinted, the edition I have used is Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1676, pp. 375–76, edition no. 205 in John Durkan, Bibliography of George Buchanan (Glasgow: Glasgow University Library Studies, 1994). For the best modern introduction to Buchanan as a poet see Robert Crawford, ed., Apollos of the North: Selected Poems of George Buchanan and Arthur Johnston (Edinburgh: Polygon, 2006), which offers Crawford’s vigorous parallel-text verse translations, although these do not include Pompae deorum. 6 Lynch 1990, pp. 6–7. The fireworks have been studied by Philip Butterworth, ‘The Baptisme of hir hienes derrest sone in Striveling’, Medieval English Theatre, 10 (1988), 26–55. 7 The Memoirs of Sir James Melville of Hallhill, ed. G. Donaldson (London: Folio Society, 1969), p. 60.

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Melville was well placed to recognize the diplomatic embarrassment of such a performance, since it was he who had been sent to London to invite ­Elizabeth to be represented at the baptism of the child who was Scotland’s, if not ­England’s, heir apparent, and Melville himself had escorted the Duke of Bedford after the English party reached Berwick on the last leg of their journey to Stirling. The banquet at which the misbehaving satyrs wagged their tails was the culmination of three days of ‘feasts, banquets, pageants, fireworks, and what else belonged to triumph and joy’.8 The dinner was served, as Melville describes it, on an ingeniously contrived moving table that entered the hall pulled by twelve satyrs, with the viands displayed, and musicians dressed ‘lyk ­maidins’ playing different kinds of musical instruments in a mixed consort. Both ­maidens and satyrs then served the first two courses, following which a child recited verses whilst descending from the ceiling like an angel. At some point in this entertainment George Buchanan’s Pompae Deorum Rusticorum was performed: woodland satyrs offer the infant king the pleasures of hunting and country pursuits; nereids tell the queen-mother that the strength of her virtue is what has drawn them like a loadstone from the Indian coast to the northern mountains; naiads tell the infant king that he should not value their trifling gifts nearly as much as the spirit in which they are given; fauns account for the appropriateness of these various gifts brought to the infant king by his rustic gods, and finally the Orcadians return to the pleasures of hunting which the satyrs had previously offered to the king, who would perhaps grow up, they surmise, to prefer rough woodland pastimes to the pleasures of proud cities – a piece of advice which shows notable foresight when offered to this future king who became such a passionate devotee of hunting. What seems important to remark about this masque is the way it includes native Orcadians (i.e. inhabitants of the Orkney islands to the north of S­ cotland) among its classical cast of ‘rustic gods’, as if to domesticate its ­Arcadian personae. Scotland’s reputation as a region of remote, wild ­highlanders had already influenced the iconography of court festivals in France, where s­ even-year-old Mary had almost certainly attended the 1550 Rouen entry during Mary of Guise’s visit to France (the last time Mary would ever see her mother). Three hundred Brazilians, including imported natives, on that occasion had been part of the pageant celebrating not only French colonial ambitions and achievements but also the alliance with Scotland.9 Whether or not it was the pageant’s inclusion 8 Claude Nau, History of Mary Stewart, ed. J. Stevenson (Edinburgh: W. Paterson, 1883), p. cxlvi, cited Lynch, p. 10. 9 The standard study of the Rouen entry remains Margaret M. McGowan, ed., L’Entrée de Henri ii à Rouen 1550 (Theatrum Orbis Terrarvm, Amsterdam, [1973]), facsimile with an Introduction. I have discussed the influence of this entry on Mary Stuart’s courtly ­iconography in

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of wild Brazilians that set the precedent for the inclusion of wild highlanders in subsequent festivals in France with a Scottish theme, we know that Mary herself, in her teenage years, took a delight in ‘dressing up as a savage’ (as Pierre de Brantome tells us).10 A more immediate precedent for the inclusion of wild highlanders in the Stirling triumph, however, was – as Michael Lynch shows – the festival which Catherine de Medici and Charles ix had staged over fourteen days in June 1565 at Bayonne as the culmination of their great tour of France. This included a ‘Tournament of Diverse Nations’ in which the duc de Guise led a troop of men-at-arms dressed ‘à l’Escoçoise sauvage’.11 The Orcadians who recited Buchanan’s Latin verses in Stirling (highly Latinate highlanders these!) were not the only wild highlanders to perform in the Stirling triumph: more prominent were the ‘heiland wyld men’ who took part in the mock-siege of a fort that had been constructed on the esplanade, where it was attacked by ‘Moors’, ‘counterfeit devils’ and wild highlanders brandishing fireworks – their costumes, made out of goat skins, are recorded in the Treasurer’s Accounts.12 Hence, although the bad behaviour of Stirling’s tail-wagging satyrs might look like no more than another example of the proverbial incivility and barbarism of the Scots, it occurred in a context that had developed in the sophisticated court festivals of France as the conventional way of representing Scotland. Satyrs – with their bristly hair, pointed ears, and goats’ horns, hooves, and tails – were always associated with the grosser, Dionysian aspects of nature: sensual, inebriated, and fearsome. Associating ‘wild highlanders’ with these classical demigods has to be seen, however, as one way of assimilating them to a more civilised, neoclassical, European tradition. This uneasy combination of civility and savagery, of courtly sophistication and rustic wildness, might thus be seen to control the decorum of the Stirling pageantry in its representation of Scotland. Many years before, if we can believe an early witness, Scotland had adopted with some enthusiasm a style of Italian all’antica decoration that, similarly, combined classicism with grotesquery, and well before the end of the century Scots would be used to seeing uncouth satyrs depicted on their painted ceilings.13 (Fig. 4.1)

Bath, ‘Symbols of Sovereignty: Political Emblems of Mary Queen of Scots’, in Immagini e p­ otere nel Rinascimento europeo, ed. G. Cascione and D. Mansueto (Milan: Ennerre, 2009), pp. 53–67. 10 Brantome, Recueil des Dames (Paris: Gallimard, 1991), iii, p. 74. 11 Lynch, p. 9. 12 Lynch, pp. 6–7. 13 See Bath, Renaissance Decorative Painting in Scotland (Edinburgh: National Museums of Scotland Publications, 2003), p. 107; also Bath, ‘Andrew Bairhum, Giovanni Ferrerio and the “Lighter Style of Painting”’, Journal of the Northern Renaissance, 2 (2010), 1–13. [accessed 30/03/2017]

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Figure 4.1 Winged satyr, grotesque detail of late-sixteenth century painted ceiling, 43–45 High Street, Edinburgh, known as ‘John Knox’s House’ although never occupied by Scotland’s great reformer. Photo author

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Anglici Caudati: All Englishmen have Tails

Historians have not always recognised, however, that this piece of horseplay rests on a well-known proverbial saying which affirmed that all Englishmen have tails, and I want to suggest that we are unlikely to understand what may have been going on in Stirling unless we contextualise this piece of medieval folklore. The legend goes back to the English twelfth century chroniclers, where William of Malmesbury’s Gesta Pontificum Anglorum (1125), Wace in his Anglo-Norman Roman de Brut (c. 1155) and Layamon in his expanded Brut (c. 1190–1215) all tell how when Saint Augustine of Canterbury landed in England the local inhabitants near Rochester in Kent ridiculed him by hanging fishes’ tails on his clothing. In return for this insult, according to Wace and Layamon, God almighty avenged the saint by causing all their descendents to be born with tails. This mark of their shame was rapidly extended by the French to ­apply not just to the men of Kent but to all Englishmen, and already by the end of the century the phrase Anglici caudati had become a term of abuse. By the later Middle Ages the idea becomes commonplace, with the proverbial phrase Anglois coué being used by French writers such as Eustache Deschamps, Alain Chartier, Jean Molinet, and Guillaume Crétin whenever they wished to slander the English. An anonymous thirteenth-century satire insists that the ungrateful and treacherous nature of the men of Rochester is common to all Englishmen, though the Welsh and Scots, it notes, are different: after all they live a long way from Kent.14 In 1551 John Bale lamented ‘That an Englyshman now cannot travayle in another land by way of marchandyse or any other honest occupyinge, but it is most contumeliously thrown in his tethe that all Englyshmen have tails’.15 Bale was a vigorous apologist for the English Reformation, which is precisely the context for his reference here to the legend which contemporary foreigners delighted to cite as evidence of Englishmen’s historical resistance to religious conversion and their rejection of Catholic doctrine. His testimony suggests just how likely it would have been that witnesses attending the 1566 baptism would have understood the significance of the Stirling tail-wagging. Scotland’s role in both the early transmission and the more recent study of this legend is notable though seldom remarked upon. Indeed the best account of it remains the paper entitled ‘Anglicus Caudatus: A Mediaeval ­Slander’ which was delivered by George Neilson to a meeting of the Glasgow Archaeological 14 15

P. Rickard, ‘Anglois coué and L’anglois qui couve’, French Studies, vol. 8 (1953), 48–55 (p. 50). See also Sandra Billington, ‘Routs and Reyes’, Folklore, 89 (1978), 184–200. S. Baring Gould, Curious Myths of the Middle Ages (London: Rivingtons, 1884), Ch.7, ‘Tailed Men’, p. 148, citing Bale, The Actes of Englysh Votaries (London: John Bale, 1551).

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Society as long ago as 1895. Although reprinted from the S­ ociety’s ­Proceedings only the following year in Edinburgh this limited edition of 100 copies has ­remained somewhat inaccessible until recently, when it has at last become available online.16 Neilson identifies not only the 1566 Stirling baptism, but also the role which Scottish writers appear to have played in its transmission, beginning with Walter Bowers’ fifteenth-century Scotochronicon, whose account of Saint Augustine’s mockery evidently derives from the earlier English chroniclers.17 Later Scots chroniclers such as John Major, or John ­Bellenden (in his expanded 1536 translation of Hector Boece’s Historia Gentis Scotorum), both retell the story, and passing allusions to it include poet W ­ illiam Dunbar’s ‘Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedy’.18 However, the most telling Scottish precedent for the slander occurred some forty or fifty years before the Stirling baptism, when English poet John Skelton wrote a flyting reply to a Scot named Dundas, who had apparently written a Latin poem (which Skelton quotes) accusing the English of having tails: This Dundas, This Scottishe as, He rymes and railes That Englishmen have tailes. To which Skelton’s reply is characteristically pungent, By Jesu Christ, Fals Scot thou lyest: But behynd in our hose We bere there a rose For thy Scottyshe nose… This vilissimus Scotus Dundas was George Dundas, Knight of Rhodes and Preceptor of Torphican (West Lothian), headquarters of the Knights Hospitallar in Scotland. The position carried considerable status, and was contested ­between

16

17 18

George Neilson, Caudatus Anglicus: A mediaeval slander (Edinburgh: George P. Johnston, 1896) [accessed 06/06/2010]. Neilson, pp. 11–15. Neilson, pp. 20–21; Dunbar, The Poems of William Dunbar, ed. Bawcutt, 2 vols. (Glasgow: Association for Scottish Literary Studies, 1998), i: 204, 211, ii: 434, 441.

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1513 and 1515 by another Scot, Patrick Paniter.19 Only months before the ­Battle of Flodden, king James iv had written to the Master of Rhodes contesting the ­English Prior’s right to control the Order’s Scottish preceptories; having heard of the pretensions of the English in a suit brought by Paniter against Dundas, and also ‘on account of the war impending with England’ king James claims that he has no alternative but to question Dundas’s entitlement to the ­Torphican preceptory.20 The dispute rumbled on for some years, with Henry viii in England writing to Pope Leo x on behalf of Paniter in 1515, requesting his Holiness not to confirm the decree obtained by Dundas appointing him to the preceptory, and as late as 1517 James v of Scotland also wrote to Pope Leo on behalf of James’s own brother, Alexander Stewart, who was himself in dispute with Dundas concerning the same preceptory. Dundas, who was styling himself brother of the Order of St John of Jerusalem, had obtained bulls from Rhodes against Paniter.21 This was, clearly, a high profile dispute over issues of politics and preferment which had European ramifications and was felt to reflect deeper disagreements between Scotland and England at the time.22 Those ­disagreements must be what motivated Dundas to write his satire against the English, and its high profile will explain why it – and Dundas’s verses – should have a­ ttracted the attention of John Skelton, England’s professed ‘Laureate against the Scots’.23 We might well wonder why international disputes concerning issues of leadership within the ancient order of the Knights Templar should have required quite such high-level intervention, but this dispute goes back to the thirteenth century when, in 1279, the Templars in London appealed to king Edward i for financial support toward the rebuilding of their chapel dedicated to English saint and martyr, St Thomas à Becket. This assimilated the ancient Order of Knights of St Thomas into the Knights Templar, affirming their j­urisdiction 19

20 21 22

23

Dundas is identified in John Scattergood’s notes to his edition of John Skelton: the Complete English Poems (London: Penguin Books, 1983), pp. 429–30. Scattergood, p. 430, identifies all the relevant references to Dundas in Letters and Papers Foreign and Domestic of the Reign of Henry viii Preserved in the Public Record Office (London : Longman, Green, 1864–1932). Letters and Papers Foreign and Domestic of the Reign of Henry viii, i, 1720. Ibid. ii, 90, 2800. For the disputes between Henry viii and his sister, James’s widow, Margaret of Scotland, concerning Paniter and Dundas and control of the Hospital at Torphichan, see Marsha Keith Schuchard, Restoring the Temple of Vision: Cabalistic Freemasonry and Stuart Culture (Leiden: Brill, 2002), pp. 131–32. For Skelton’s anti-Scottish persona see also his ‘A Ballade of the Scottisshe King’, and ‘Agaynst the Scottes’ in Complete English Poems, ed. Scattergood (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press), pp. 113–16.

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over preceptories in Scotland and abroad. A few years later, in 1291, the Pope appealed to king Edward to join a crusade to save the last Christian citadel of Acre in Palestine, which was beseiged by the Mamelukes, but in 1296 E ­ dward invaded Scotland, where he demanded the fealty not only of the Scottish barons, but also of the Master of the Scottish Templars, and in 1298 ­William ­Wallace occupied the Hospitallers Priory at Torphican before killing the English Master of the Templars in the Battle of Falkirk, allegedly by his own hands. As Marsha Schuchard says, ‘These events provide background to the determination of later Scottish monarchs to maintain national control over the Templar-Hospitaller orders in the kingdom’.24 It was in this context that Edward seized the Stone of Scone and took it to London as part of his attempt to destroy records and monuments of S­ cottish history, for that stone had its legendary origins in the Stone of Destiny upon which the Greek commander Gathelus allegedly administered justice for the Egyptians in Mosaic times. Gathelus married Pharaoh’s daughter Scota, who gave her name to their offspring when, following an outbreak of plague in Egypt, they migrated firstly to Galicia in Spain and eventually to Scotland. This origin myth, which rivalled the English Arthurian legends tracing British descent from Brut, established an Egyptian origin and identity for the Scots which would have an enduring importance for the Scottish Templars and their successors, the Freemasons. While Scottish bards lamented the theft of the ‘Stone of Destiny’, which had been brought by Gathelus and Scota from Egypt, Wallace roused an angry populace into armed revolt against the English. Edward responded by devastating Scotland, and both sides sent appeals to the Pope in which they argued the justice of their cause.25 Before the battle of Bannockburn in 1314 Robert the Bruce was anxious to keep the Scottish Templars onside, rather than see them serving in Edward’s army and obeying the English Prior, as they had done earlier, and in the year of the battle his ally Sir Ralph Lindsay occupied their Preceptory at Torphican. As Schuchard says, this ‘asserted the independence of the Scottish branch of the order’ (pp. 92–93). That also explains why, in the Declaration of Arbroath in 1320, the Scottish nobles were intent on affirming Scotland’s Egyptian origins, since ‘above 1,200 years of the Israelites coming out of Egypt’ they ‘did by many victories and much toil obtain these parts in the West which they still 24 25

Schuchard, p. 87. Schuchard. p. 87.

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­ ossess … This kingdom hath been governed by an uninterrupted succession p of 113 kings of our own native and royal stock, without the intervening of any stranger.’ It was in this context that they issued their most famous declaration of independence, For so long as there shall be but one hundred of us remain alive we will never consent to subject ourselves to the dominion of the English. For it is not glory, it is not riches, neither is it honours, but it is liberty alone that we fight and contend for, which no honest man will lose but with his life.26 None of this explains why, in 1566, the performers should have turned their backsides to the audience and wagged their tails, but it does help to explain why the most notable Scottish individual to have cited the libel that all Englishmen have tails should have been a Knight of Rhodes and Preceptor of ­Torphican, headquarters of the Knights Hospitallar in Scotland. Thomas ­Dempster tells us in his (Catholic) history of the church in Scotland (Bologna, 1627) that Dundas was learned in Latin and Greek and had been a Professor at Aberdeen before joining the Knights of Rhodes.27 The traditions of the Knights Templar had strong connections with later developments in Scottish Freemasonry, and as we shall see these are the context for at least one later reference to the received idea that Englishmen have tails. Although it seems unlikely that anyone attending the 1566 baptism of James vi would still have been familiar either with George Dundas’s poem or John Skelton’s reply, the Skeltonic exchange nevertheless shows just how easily the topos of Anglici caudati could be invoked in the sixteenth century on occasions when national identities and rivalries between England, France and Scotland were at issue. As late as 1667 we find the topic invoked by Andrew Marvell in his poem The Loyal Scot. This was the year when the Dutch fleet sailed up the river Medway in the Second Anglo-Dutch War, setting fire to the English ships in their home port. Among those consumed in the flames was a Scots sailor, Archibald ­Douglas, who is the ‘loyal Scot’ of Marvell’s title. Marvell excoriates the wretched failures of English policy and government that had led to such a scandalous defeat, whilst celebrating the heroic sacrifice of the Scot, and it is Douglas’s nationality which leads the poet to reflect on Anglo-Scottish relations, arguing

26 27

In Gordon Donaldson, Scottish Historical Documents (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1970), pp. 55–58. Dempster’s description of Dundas is noted by Alexander Dyce in his edition of The Works of John Skelton (London: Thomas Rodd, 1843), ii, p. 224.

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that what divides the two nations is not just the River Tweed but differences of religion. Nothing but clergy could us two seclude. No Scotch was ever like a bishop’s feud. All litanies in this have wanted faith, There’s no Deliver us from the bishop’s wrath. Never shall Calvin pardoned be for Sales, For Becket’s sake Kent always shall have tails.28 It is the assassination of Thomas à Becket in Canterbury Cathedral that justifies Marvell’s associating it with the punishment handed down by St A ­ ugustine on the men of Kent, Canterbury remaining, as it still is, the seat of the Archbishop who presides over the Anglican church. St François de Sales attempted to convert the reformed Calvinists around Geneva, so the satire here – and in the following 100 lines of his poem – is directed against the English clergy and its bishops, whose scandalous and corrupt mismanagement of the E ­ nglish church, in Marvell’s opinion, is what divided them from the upright and ­Presbyterian Scots. Though kingdoms join, yet church will kirk oppose, The mitre still divides, the crown does close. We shall see in Chapter 5 how it was precisely this internal division between Presbyterianism and Episcopalianism that led, earlier in the seventeenth century, to the Civil Wars (or ‘Wars of Three Kingdoms’) in which Marvell played his part. And in Scotland it was, as we shall see, precisely this conflict which, following the Union of the Crowns, produced some of the most interesting cycles of Scottish emblems. Marvell’s use of the ‘tailed Englishmen’ topos in the context of religious differences between England and Scotland is what most notably links it with the issues which, as we have seen, were at play one ­hundred years earlier in the Stirling baptism of king James iv/i. Moreover Marvell’s familiarity with Rosicrucian, alchemical, and Masonic ideas has been well documented in recent studies, and in The Loyal Scot he goes on to argue ‘If Wealth or vice can tempt your appetites,/ These Templar Lords Exceed the Templar Knights’.29 So it would seem that the proverbial insult that Englishmen 28 29

Andrew Marvell, The Complete Poems (London: Penguin Books, 1972), pp. 185–86. See Schuchard, 688–93; also Lyndy Abraham, Marvell and Alchemy (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1990).

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had tails had an enduring association with the ancient order of Knights Templar.

The Stirling Baptism of Prince Henry

The 1594 baptism of James’s son and heir apparent has the advantage over its 1566 predecessor in that we have a fairly full and official description of its ceremonial, whereas everything that we know about the 1566 baptism has to be built up, as we have seen, from contemporary eye-witness accounts or from fragmentary entries in state papers. Historians have noted both connections and contrasts between the two baptisms. Michael Lynch, for instance, shows how Mary Queen of Scots’ celebrations were closely modelled on the Valois magnificences in which Mary’s mother-in-law had sought to reconcile the ­religious differences that were tearing her country apart.30 Writing of the 1594 baptism however, Lynch suggests that it was more influenced by E ­ nglish rather than by French models. The opening tournament, he writes, ‘was a straightforward copy of what by the 1580s had become a regular spectacle in England, the Accession Day tilts, where a Protestant ethic was grafted on to a revived tradition of Burgundian chivalry’.31 This reading of the 1594 Baptism, in which French (Catholic) ceremonial models were overtaken by English (Protestant) ones, has been further developed by Lynch himself in 2003 and it has also been pursued by Rick Bowers, who argues that William Fowler’s 1594 True Reportarie of the 1594 ceremonies in Stirling, ‘represents a new form of ­political ­announcement, a reformed Protestant communiqué that breaks with a ­Catholic past, balances Scottish nationalism with British union, and asserts the cultural complexities of James’s future power’.32 In this chapter, however, whilst welcoming and insisting on the internationalism of the models and precedents for both celebrations, I want to question that contrast between French and English influences. The continuities between the Scottish 1566 baptism of James vi and the 1594 baptism of his son and heir-apparent are 30 31

32

Michael Lynch, ‘Queen Mary’s Triumph: the Baptismal Celebrations at Stirling in ­December 1566’, Scottish Historical Review, 69 (1990), 1–21. Lynch. ‘Court ceremony and ritual during the personal reign of James vi’, in Julian Goodare and Lynch, ed. The Reign of James vi (East Linton: Tuckwell, 2000), 71–92 (p. 89). See also Lynch, ‘The Reassertion of Princely Power in Scotland: The reigns of Mary Queen of Scots and King James vi’ in Princes and Princely Culture 1450–1650, ed Gosman, M ­ acDonald and Vanderjagd (Leiden: Brill, 2003), pp. 199–238. Rick Bowers, ‘James vi, Prince Henry, and A True Reportarie of the Baptism at Stirling’, Renaissance and Reformation / Renaissance et Réforme, 29, no. 4, (2005), 3–22, (p. 4).

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stronger, I suggest, than Lynch’s distinction between French and English models might suggest. There remain many elements of the 1594 Baptism that go back directly to French roots, and the use of emblems in the later ceremonies is – I shall suggest – an important part of that internationalism, albeit something that it undoubtedly shares with the English Accession Day tilts.

Fowler’s True Reportarie

The printing of William Fowler’s True Reportarie of the Baptism of the Prince of Scotland might itself be a sign of such French influence.33 The publication of more-or-less official accounts of such ceremonies began in France in the 1550s as a way of capitalising on their huge costs by publicising more widely the magnificence of the occasion and its message. Subsequent French court festivals and royal entries had been commemorated in albums written by such authors as Maurice Scève (who is often viewed as an emblematist), Jean ­Martin, Charles Chappuys, Joachim du Bellay, and emblematist Barthelemy Aneau: in following suit in Edinburgh in 1594 Fowler was therefore following some notable predecessors. It is however important to remember that two versions of the True Reportarie were published, one in Edinburgh and the other in London so that as Clare McManus says, ‘Despite its rushed and improvised air, Fowler’s festival was designed to signal the magnificence of the Scottish court and to advance James vi’s succession to the English throne; significantly, both Scots and anglicised contemporary variants of the text exist’.34 It was e­ vidently ­important to King James that his future English subjects noticed what had been performed in Stirling. Nevertheless, as Roy Strong says, the Valois court festivals, and particularly the magnificences that took place in Fontainebleau in 1564, formed a pattern for those to follow both in France and elsewhere.35 Lasting over two or three days, they included two different types of spectacle, outdoors and indoors, the 33

34

35

William Fowler, A True Reportarie of the Most Triumphant, and Royal Accomplishment of the Baptisme of the Most Excellent. Right High, and Mightie Prince, Frederick Henry; By the Grace of God. Prince of Scotland. Solemnized the 30 Day of August, 1594 (Edinburgh: Robert Waldegrave, 1594), (stc 11214.6), and (London: Peter Short, 1594), stc 11214.7. Clare McManus, ‘Marriage and the Performance of the Romance Quest: Anne of ­Denmark and the Stirling Baptismal Celebrations for Prince Henry’, in A Palace in the Wild: Essays of Vernacular Culture and Humanism in Late-Medieval and Renaissance Scotland, ed. L.A.J.R. Houwen, A.A. MacDonald, and S.L. Mapstone (Leuven: Peeters, 2000): 175–98, p. 185. Roy Strong, Art and Power: Renaissance Festivals 1450–1650 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1984), p. 105.

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first being predominantly chivalrous, with tournaments such as barriers and running at the ring, or the storming of a fortress. The indoor entertainments included pageant cars, feasting, singing and dancing, and a number of theatrical forms which outlasted these occasions – the Stuart court masque, the French ballet de cour, and the opera. This scenario might tempt us to distinguish the outdoor tournaments from the more theatrical indoor entertainments, but this would be a mistake since the outdoor martial arts were no less theatrical than the indoor festivities, with the combatants dressed up in costume and often assuming fictitious roles and identities: these are tournaments in fancy dress. Scottish indebtedness to this format is clear when Fowler explains at the start of his description that the Stirling Baptism festivities were ‘devided both in Feeld pastimes, with Martiall and heroicall exploites, and in household, with rare shewes and singular inventions’.36 The 1594 Baptism of Prince Henry opened with Running at the Ring ‘in the valley near the castle’ by three Christian Knights of Malta, three Turks ‘verie gorgiouslie attired’, and three Amazons ‘in women’s attire, very sumptuously clad’. All nine of these costumed participants were, of course, courtiers: the three Christian knights were King James himself plus the Earl of Mar and Thomas Erskine; the three Turks were the Duke of Lennox, Lord Home, and Sir Robert Kerr; the three Amazons ‘in women’s attire’ were the Abbot of Holyroodhouse, Lord Buccleuch and Lord Lindores. There were precedents for this: in November 1561, for instance, Mary Queen of Scots had witnessed an equestrian masque which Sir Thomas Randolf described to Cecil: ‘the Lord Robert, the Lord John, and others ran at the ring, six against six, disguised and ­apparelled, the one half like women, the other like strangers, in strange masking garments. The Marquis that day did very well; but the women, whose part the lord Robert did sustain, won the ring. The Queen herself beheld it …’37 The ‘Marquis’ referred to here was Mary’s uncle, Marquis of Elbeuf, who had accompanied Mary on her return to Scotland from France earlier in the year and, as Joseph Robertson notes, citing Brantôme, Not many months before, during Mary’s brief reign in France, her ­uncle, the Grand Prior, and the Duke of Nemours ran at the ring before the court at Amboise, both in women’s apparel; the Prior in the guise of an 36 37

William Fowler, The Works of William Fowler, ed. Henry W. Meikle, 3 vols, (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1914–1940), ii (1936), p. 172. Joseph Robertson, Inventaires de la Royne Descosse Douairaire de France: Catalogues of the Jewels, Dresses, Furniture, Books, and Paintings of Mary Queen of Scots 1556–1569 ­(Edinburgh: H.M. Register House, 1863), p. lxxvii.

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­ gyptian, with a she-ape, swaddled like a baby, on his arm; the Duke in E the guise of a burgher’s wife, with a huge pouch and a bunch of more than a hundred keys at his girdle.38 These grotesque disguisings, which seem so odd to us, thus appear to go back to French Valois precedents. The fashion for cross dressing can indeed be witnessed in the portrait of Francois Ier as a composite trans-gendered deity ­combining the features of Mars/Mercury/Minerva/Diana. (Fig. 4.2) This may not illustrate any actual masquing costume, though it surely reflects such disguising. In 1576 Henri iii certainly gave a masqued ball in Paris at which he appeared as a woman, with his hair dressed and powdered, his gown cut low décolleté, and wearing brocade, lace and ten ropes of pearls. The most notable appearance of a costumed Amazon in the tiltyard, however, was in the 1565 Bayonne magnificence when Charles ix appeared in the first day’s tournament dressed as a Trojan, whilst his brother Henri – future Henri iii – was dressed as an Amazon, wearing a skirt.39 If we want to know just what such a cross-­dressing Amazon might have looked like, we have only to look at Antoine Caron’s drawing of the Bayonne tournament. (Fig. 4.3) This was not the last time that Amazons appeared in Valois court tournaments, for in 1573 Charles with his brothers and the Duc de Guise appeared as Amazons in the magnificence staged in Paris to celebrate the marriage of Henri de Navarre to Marguerite de Valois; and in a notable prefiguration of the Stirling Baptism, their opponents in this running at the ring were dressed as Turks.40 The taste for Turkish disguising seems to have begun in France at the 1533 celebrations of the wedding of Prince Henry ii to Catherine de Medicis in M ­ arseilles, when Catherine’s cousin, Ippolito, recently returned from ­Hungary, arrived with an escort of Magyars and pages dressed as Turks, wearing turbans and wielding scimitars. French attitudes towards the Islamic empire remained more open-minded than most of its European neighbours, indeed under H ­ enry iii the Sultan became France’s ally in opposition to the territorial ambitions of the Empire: the opposition of Turks and Christians in these continental ­antecedents to the Stirling Baptism does not necessarily therefore imply any foregone preference or advantage for the latter. This was not the first time that Scotland had used such disguising since in 1561 we learn that the French a­ mbassador, de Foys, with his followers, ran at the ring 38 39 40

Robertson, p. lxvii, citing Brantôme, Oeuvres complètes, 10- vols (Paris: Renouard, ­1864–82), iii, pp. 154–55. Strong, p. 108. Ibid. p. 113.

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Figure 4.2 François i as a transgendered, composite deity combining the attributes of Minerva, Mars, Mercury and Diana, parchment pasted on panel, c. 1545, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Département des Estampes et de la Photographie, Na 255 Rés. © Bibliothèque nationale de France (Na 255 Rés)

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Figure 4.3 The Bayonne magnificences, 1565, opening tournament showing Charles ix tilting at the quintain whilst his brother Henri follows, dressed as an Amazon, Antoine Caron, attrib., drawing, Courtauld Institute, University of London. © Courtauld Institute of Art, London

‘dysguised and ­apparelled thone half lyke women, and thither lyke strayngers, in strange maskynge garments’.41 For Clare McManus ‘The close approximation of the feminine and the foreign’ in these disguisings needs to be read ‘as symbolic markers of difference’ which underline the gendered rhetoric of ‘a festival which defines Queen Anne as the passive prize of King James’s romance quest’. As she says, The performance of blackness is not unknown in Scottish entertainments. The first recorded presence of black performers in Scotland dates from 1505 and the court of James iv; however, its perhaps most significant appearance is found in the same king’s tournament of the Black Lady (1507 and 1508) in which a black woman, celebrated in Dunbar’s ‘parodic blazon’ ‘Ane Blak Moir’ as the ‘ladye with the meckle lippis’, performed. (McManus, p. 189) There are later Scottish examples, and in 1596 – two years after the Stirling ­baptism – Moorish and Turkish disguises were adopted in the Danish 41

Calendar of State Papers, ed. Bain, i, p. 467.

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­tournament for the coronation of Christian iv.42 And in England these precedents undoubtedly foreshadow the Stuart court masques of Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones, notably The Masque of Blackness of 1605 in which Queen Anne actually participated. We should perhaps not be surprised to find French antecedents for these Turks and Amazons in Stirling, but it might be more surprising to discover that the wild highlandmen who attacked the burning fortress in the 1566 mock-siege at Stirling had already put in an appearance the year before in France, where the Bayonne magnificences included a pageant of Knights of seven different Nations, at which a group of six knights accompanied the Duc de Guise, all dressed as wild Scotsmen ‘à l’Escossaise sauvage’.43 These French Highlanders were admittedly more richly dressed than their Scottish successors: rather than goat skins they wore shirts of white satin, made with embroidery and clothof-gold, and coats of yellow velvet whose base was pleated ‘selon la coustume des sauvages’ (i.e. like kilts). It was almost certainly the Guise connection with Mary Queen of Scots through her mother that motivated this choice of costume.44

Emblems and Imprese

The internationalism of William Fowler’s designs for the Stirling baptism certainly extends to its prominent use of emblems. Fowler himself had a wider interest in these, for his papers (which were preserved by his sonin-law, poet William Drummond, amongst the Hawthornden Papers now in the National Library of Scotland) include details of the devices embroidered by Mary Queen of Scots for her bed of state, together with extracts from Italian writers on the art of the impresa, and a note suggesting that he himself had written such a treatise. Fowler tells us that the combatants in the first day’s Running at the Ring in Stirling rode on horses bearing their master’s impresa, ‘So al the persons being present and at their entrye making their reverence to the queen, embassadours, and ladyes, having their pages ryding upon their led horses and on their left armes bering their maisters Imprese or devyse’.45 42

McManus, p. 191, citing Lausund, Olav, ‘Splendour at the Danish Court: The Coronation of Christian iv’, in Italian Renaissance Festivals and their European Influence, ed. J.R. Mulryne and Margaret Shewring (Lampeter: Edwin Mellen, 1992), pp. 289–310. 43 Recueil des choses notables qui ont esté faites à Bayonne… (Paris: Michel de Vascosan, 1566), sig.Civ; Lynch 1990 (n. 23 above), p. 9; see also Victor E. Graham and W. McAllister Johnson, The Royal Tour of France by Charles ix and Catherine de’ Medici: Festivals and Entries, 1564–6 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979), p. 337. 44 Bath, ‘Symbols of Sovereignty’, p. 58. 45 Fowler, Reportarie, in Works, vol. 2 (1936), p. 175.

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This certainly supports Michael Lynch’s contention that the 1594 Scottish Baptism was influenced by the English Accession Day tilts, where imprese were similarly used, indeed Alan Young has shown that the pasteboard shields that were presented as the combatants entered the tiltyard in England were subsequently put on display in an impresa gallery in Whitehall Palace.46 Fowler would have had the opportunity to witness the Accession Day tilts during his time in England, 1581–1583, since tilts took place in both these years. The precedents for such presentations had been established, however, not in England but in France where, in the Bayonne Magnificence of 1565 for instance, the Arthurian knights of Britain and Ireland presented gold medallions bearing the devices displayed on their shields to the ladies observing their tournament in the tilt gallery. As Roy Strong notes, ‘The official Recueil of these events contains engravings of them’.47 As we begin to unpack the iconography and meaning of these Scottish tiltyard imprese, it becomes clear that – like most emblems – they go back to ­diverse sources, combining conventional motifs and commonplace mottoes in new ways or, more often than not, inventing new emblems in a bricolage of ­received ideas. King James, for instance, led the group of three Christian Knights bearing the device of a lion’s head with open eyes ‘which signifieth ­after a mystique & Hieroglyphique sense Fortitude and Vigilance’. Fowler might seem to be overplaying the ‘mystique and Hieroglyphic’ sense of what seems a pretty straightforward heraldic device here, but the King’s motto certainly gives it a more abstruse and pointed application. The motto ‘Timeat et primus et ultimus orbis’ (‘May he fear worlds both near and far’) comes from Ovid (Fasti, i: 717–18), ‘Horreat Aeneadas et primus et ultimus orbis: Si qua parum Romam terra timebit, amet’ (‘May the world near and far dread the sons of Aeneas, and if there be any land that feared not Rome, may it love Rome ­instead’). The contrast between local and distant worlds has a long history, g­ oing back to Virgil’s description of Britain as an island almost totally cut off from the known world, ‘penitus toto divisos orbe Britannos’ (Ecl. 1, 67), but the ­distinction had been drawn into imperial iconography most notably in the ‘Plus oultre’ badge of emperor Charles v, with its two columns signifying the pillars of Hercules that separated the Old World from the new ­Americas.48 James’s voyage to ­Denmark to bring back his bride Anna may look to us somewhat less than transatlantic, but there can be no doubt that the Stirling festival was designed, as McManus demonstrates, to characterise his voyage as a 46 47 48

Alan Young, Tudor and Jacobean Tournaments (London: George Philip, 1987); the devices are fully listed in Young, The English Tournament Imprese (New York: AMS Press, 1988). Strong, p. 107; cf Graham and McAllister Johnson, p. 49, and figs. 27–44. Bath ‘Symbols of Sovereignty’, pp. 58–59.

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romance quest, r­ e-enacting Jason’s voyage to secure his bride Medea and the golden fleece. It was an outlandish adventure. The Earl of Mar in the Stirling tournament displayed a dog-collar ‘all beset with iron pikes’ and the motto ‘Offendit et defendit’ (‘He attacks and protects’). The emblem has no exact antecedents, though the prickly iconography surely recalls the famous porcupine device of Louis xii, whose motto ‘Cominus et eminus’ (‘Hand-to-hand and at a distance’) signals the same two alternatives of proximity and distance. The porcupine, however, has the emblematic advantage over Fowler’s spiked dog-collar since it was reported to be able to shoot out its quills. The third of the Christian knights, Thomas Erskine, displayed ‘a windmill with her spokes unmoving and windes unblowing on every side’ and the motto ‘Ni sperat immota’ (‘He expects nothing unmoved’). Again the message seems to allude to the royal journey, though quite how a windmill could be depicted with the sails not turning, or the winds not blowing, is unclear: the emblem depends on its motto to make the point. Far from being becalmed, James’s Danish voyage in 1589 had been beset by storms, which is surely what this emblem refers to. Of the three Turks, the Earl of Lennox displayed a love emblem showing a heart with one side on fire, the other frozen with ‘on one side Cupid’s torch, on the other Cupid’s thunder’. This, and the motto, ‘Hinc amor, inde metus’ (‘Here love, there fear’), declares a conventional Petrarchan conceit which would not have been out of place in Fowler’s sequence of love-sonnets, Tarantula of Love, and which reflects James vi’s stance in these ceremonies as ‘a questing romance hero’ which is well analysed by McManus.49 Lord Home’s impresa showed ‘a zodiac with a moon opposite the sun, motto: Quo remotior, lucidior. That is to say, the further the fairer’. The device has no exact equivalent in emblem books, but something of its iconography can perhaps be illustrated by an untitled emblem from the 1580 Icones of Theodore de Bèze. (Fig. 4.4) Its emphasis on proximity and distance has to be read, once again, as alluding to the royal voyage. Of the three Amazons, all ‘in women’s attire’, the Lord of Buccleuch displayed an impresa showing a crown, an eye, and a portcullis ‘the crowne ­betokening the power of God, the Eye his providence, and the Portcullis his Protection’ with the motto ‘Clausus tutus ero’, ‘which were composed in anagram of ­Walterus Scotus, the Laird of Buccleuch’s name’ (Fowler 1936: 174). Fowler’s taste for anagrams is amply documented in the National Library’s Hawthornden p ­ apers, and we should not doubt that he played a major role 49

McManus, pp. 190–91; for Tarantula of Love see Sebastiaan Verweij, ‘The Manuscripts of William Fowler: A Revaluation of The Tarantula of Love, A Sonnet Sequence, and Of Death’, Scottish Studies Review 8 (2007), 9–23.

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Figure 4.4 Emblem showing the Reformed church shining with the full light of revealed religion, Theodore de Beze, Icones, id est verae imagines virorum doctrina simul et pietate illustrium […] quibus adiectae sunt nonnullae picturae quas Emblemata vocant (Geneva: Jean de Laon, 1580), no. 40. © University of Glasgow Library, Department of Special Collections

in devising these imprese for the noble participants in the joust. The second of the Amazons was his co-author of the 1594 Baptism, Sir Patrick Leslie, Lord of Lindores, whose device was based on a familiar proverb that had already been turned into emblems and is described as ‘an hand, holding an eel by the

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tail, ­alluding to the uncertainty of times, with these words: “Ut frustra, sic patienter”’ (‘As in vain, so patiently’). Sir Patrick had been appointed Master of Ceremonies for the baptism, in which role he stands shoulder to shoulder with William Fowler as its inventor – a Scottish Inigo Jones beside Scotland’s Ben Jonson. The classical proverbs ‘Cauda tenes anguillam’ (‘You hold an eel by the tail’) or ‘Folio ficulno tenes anguillam’ (‘You hold an eel in a fig leaf’) are recorded in Erasmus’s Adagia (1.4.95–96) and had been turned into an emblem by Alciato on capturing a slippery customer; the emblem had been imitated by Thomas Palmer and Geffrey Whitney among others at this date.50 (Fig. 4.5) Leslie’s device certainly goes back to one or other of these sources.

Figure 4.5 Emblem ‘In deprehensum’ (‘Caught!’) illustrating the adage Folio ficulno tenes anguillam (‘You hold an eel in a fig leaf’). Andrea Alciato, Emblemata (Padua: Tozzi, 1621), p. 120. © University of Glasgow Library, Department of Special Collections 50

See Bath Speaking Pictures: English Emblem Books and Renaissance Culture (London: Longman, 1994), pp. 63–64.

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The Occasion: Architecture and Ritual

The actual baptism took place on the third day in the newly-built Chapel Royal which had been rebuilt especially for this baptism and at considerable cost. As Ian Campbell and Aonghus MacKechnie say, ‘It can claim to be the earliest Renaissance church in Britain, with its main entrance framed by a triumphal arch, flanked by Italianate windows. However, even more significant is the evidence that the chapel was deliberately modelled on the Temple of Solomon’.51 The chapel is as they say, ‘the most concrete demonstration of James’s own vision of himself as “Great Britain’s Solomon”’, and its design must be attributed to James’s architect, William Schaw, inventor of modern Freemasonry.52 In 1589 Schaw had, like Fowler, accompanied the king on his journey to Denmark to fetch home his bride, a voyage which the great model ship that became the most memorable feature of these indoor entertainments was designed to commemorate.53 The proceedings then moved into the Great Hall for a ceremonial feast. After a sumptuous first course, a table carrying all sorts of delicacies was drawn into the hall on a large chariot. Six ladies, dressed in satin and tinsel and with loose hair dressed ‘Antica forma’, stood round the table, presenting what Fowler calls ‘a silent comedy’. Each of these represented an allegorical figure, holding her defining attributes and with a Latin motto on her skirt. The overall theme is one of fertility, fruition and fecundity; thus Ceres appeared holding a sickle and sheaf of corn, with the motto ‘Fundent uberes omnia campi’, ‘which is to say the plenteous fields shall afford all things’. Similarly Fecundity appeared with some bushes of poppies ‘which under an hieroglyphic sense, representeth broodiness’ with the motto ‘Felix prole divum’, and on the other side of her dress ‘Crescant in mille’ ‘The first importing that this countrie is blessed by the child of the goddess, and the second alluding to the King and Queen’s majesties, that their generation may grow into thousands’.54 This chariot should have been drawn by the king’s tame lion, but because it was feared that this might frighten the company, or itself be frightened by the lights and torches, it was replaced by a blackamoor, who appeared to move it single-handed, though it 51

Ian Campbell and A. MacKechnie, ‘The “Great Temple of Solomon” at Stirling Castle’, A ­ rchitectural History, 54 (2011), 91–118, p. 91. 52 David Stevenson, The Origins of Freemasonry: Scotland’s Century 1590–1710 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). 53 David Stevenson, Scotland’s Last Royal Wedding: The Marriage of James vi and Anne of Denmark (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1997). 54 Fowler Works, vol. 2 (1936), p. 188.

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was in fact moved ‘by secret convoy’ to the Prince’s table where Ceres, Fecundity, Faith, Concord and Perseverence delivered the whole dessert to the court servers. It is only with the third course of this feast that we encounter the most elaborate and memorable of the ‘rare shows and singular inventions’ that characterised these festivities. After the chariot was removed there entered ‘a most sumptuous, artificial and well-proportioned ship’, 24 feet long, with a 40-foot mast and ‘the sea under her was lively counterfeit with all colours’.55 The ship was festooned with emblematic devices and was, we are told, his majesty’s ‘owne invention’ recalling and moralising the king’s voyage to Norway to fetch home his queen. This was by no means the first time that a large model ship had been used in such courtly pageants. Precedents include the Bayonne magnificences, which had featured actual pageant ships sailing on the river Ardour, and the Navarre-Valois wedding in 1572 featured marine chariots encrusted with coral and sea creatures, where Charles ix played the part of Neptune. In 1558 the allegorical ship that had been drawn through the streets of Brussels as part of the obsequies for the death of Emperor Charles v featured his twin pillars with the motto ‘plus oultre’ and was specifically identified as the vessel of Jason and the Argonauts, who had brought back the golden fleece. (Fig. 4.6) Its relevance to James vi’s great ship in Stirling is signalled by Fowler’s own explanation, as he says: But because this devise carried some morall meaning with it, it shall not be impertinent to this purpose, to discover what is meant thereby. The Kings Maiestie, having undertaken in such a desperate time, to sayle to Norway, and like a new Jason, to bring his Queene our gracious Lady to this Kingdome … thought it very meet, to followe foorth this his owne invention, that as Neptunus (speaking poetically, and by such fictions, as the like Interludes and actions are accustomed to be decored withal) ioyned the King to the Queene.56 If we are inclined to doubt whether Scotland could possibly have produced any model to compare with such predecessors, we might bear in mind the comment of a later visitor to Stirling who, in 1687, countered any doubt as to the ‘Wit, Learning and Delicacy of the Scottish court at so great a distance of time’ by appealing to ‘several pieces of workmanship used upon that signal occasion, And particularly the Ship yet extant, which I have lately seen in the ­apartment 55 Fowler, ii (1936), p. 190. 56 Fowler, ii (1936), p. 193.

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Figure 4.6 Allegorical ship for the obsequies of Charles v in Brussells, 1558, engraving from J. and L. Duetecum, Magnifique et somptueuse Pompe funèbre faite aux obsequies et funerailles de tres victorieus emperor Charles v (Antwerp : Plantin, 1559). Antwerp, Plantin-Moretus Museum, Inv.R.44.8

next to the Great Hall in the Castle of Stirling where that triumphant and royal entertainment was kept’.57 Although the great ship that sailed into the Great Hall at Stirling in 1594 ­recalled the actual voyage which had brought King James’s bride from D ­ enmark to Scotland in 1589, it also had Scottish antecedents that were purely ceremonial. In 1579/80 there are records in the Treasurer’s Accounts of a masque that took place at court during the Epiphany festivities of the young king, for which ‘mask claithis’ were ordered along with fencing swords and daggers.58 The only parts of the actual masque to have survived, however, are a verse prologue and a ‘Cartel’ written by Alexander Montgomerie (c. 1550–1598), who was later to become leader of the ‘Castalian band’ of court poets surrounding king James, of which William Fowler was also a member. ‘The Navigation’ and ‘A Cartel of the Three Ventrous Knichts’ are possibly Montgomerie’s earliest surviving ­poems, 57 58

Cited in Fowler, iii (1940), p. 70. Accounts of the Lord High Treasurer of Scotland, ed. T. Dickson and J. Balfour Paul ­(Edinburgh: H.M. Stationery Office, 1877–1916), vol 13, p. 301.

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and ‘cartel’ was the French term for a courtly challenge, delivered in verse, to a tiltyard tournament, of which a large number in France were composed by Ronsard.59 Ronsard’s ‘Aultre Cartel pour le Roy Henri iii’, for ­instance, announces the challenge issued by ‘Trois guerriers incognuz de nation estrange’ who had traveled from their distant land to challenge the ‘Chevalliers Franćois’ in combat, winning honour and showing themselves worthy to gain the love of their ‘belles Maistresses’.60 The three foreign travellers who issued such a challenge before the thirteen year old King of Scots in 1580 were dressed as a Turk, a Moor, and an Egyptian, and Montgomerie’s prologue to the masque is entitled ‘The Navigation’, as it narrates the progress of their adventurous voyage from Constantinople to Scotland in order to join James’s Epiphany celebrations and issue their ‘Cartel’ to his court. It should be clear how this challenge by three costumed strangers to the open-air courtly tournaments anticipates the tournaments by Christians, Turks and Amazons that we have witnessed opening the Stirling baptism of Prince Henry. Not only that, but the very title of Montgomerie’s ‘Navigatioun’ signals that its 278 lines narrate one of the most remarkable verse descriptions of a seavoyage – from the Black Sea westwards across the Mediterranean, through the Pillars of Hercules and round the Bay of Biscay, past the Needles and the Isle of Wight, up to the Bass Rock in Scotland and the Port of Leith. The ‘Navigatioun’ is full not only of geographical detail but also of nautical terms, which should not surprise us since Montgmerie had already traveled on the continent, and in this same year, 1580, he was one of three Scots who jointly bought a barque from a Southampton merchant for £300.61 Hence, although the Epiphany celebrations in 1580 did not feature any model ship, they included a highly graphic description of a voyage to Scotland by three exotic strangers in just such a ship. As Sarah Carpenter has pointed out, Montgomerie’s two speeches ‘can be compared with other scattered evidence from E ­ ngland, Scotland and France for the courtly performance of the exotic visitation both before and throughout the sixteenth century’.62 What she describes as ‘the entry of spectacular foreign visitors journeying from exotic lands’ became something of a conventional ­topos in courtly festivities at this period. 59 60 61 62

Alexander Montgomerie, Poems, ed. David J. Parkinson, 2 vols (Edinburgh: Scottish Text Society, 2000), i, pp. 90–98. Ronsard’s poem is cited by Parkinson in Montgomery, Poems, ii, p. 79. Noted by Parkinson in Montgomerie, ii, p. 77. I am indebted to Sarah Carpenter for this concept, which she examined in a paper, ­‘Alexander Montgomerie: Courtly performance of the exotic visitation’, read to the 15th International Conference on Medieval and Renaissance Scottish Language and Literature, held in the University of Glasgow, 25–28 July, 2017.

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The 1580 masque for the Scottish court’s Epiphany celebrations not only anticipates the sea voyage of the 1594 royal baptism in Stirling, it also anticipates some of its political themes and issues. The epiphanic occasion inevitably prompts identification of the oriental visitors with the three Magi. As they sail through the English Channel, our three travellers note the Dover cliffs, In at the Nedles our Pilot tuke vs right, Furth at Sanct Ilands and entrit in pace Spithead Then to the Douns vhair that we raid a space.  South Downs Fra they persaiv’d the hils high of calk chalk One to another they begouth to talk. ‘Thir ar the Hils, surely we suppone, Quharthrou this land is callit Albion’. They daskand farther, ‘Vhat if the Quene wer deid? remark Qua suld be nixt or to the Croun succeid?’ They follouit forth this Argument so far, Syndrie wes sibbe bot ay your grace wes nar. related nearer ‘Quha wat’, quod they, ‘bot his grace may pretend? The thing is yit far of that God may send. Becaus heirin we na thing vnderstand We will not hazard for to go a land Leist they perchance micht find some falt in vs As Inglishmen ar very captious’. (ll.224–38) The remarkable politics of this passage, anticipating as it does the Union of Crowns more than twenty years later, is underpinned by its religious ­allusions for, as Montgomerie’s editor David Parkinson remarks, this hesitation of the three travellers over the question of stopping in England alludes to what he calls ‘the epiphanic alternative route, Matt. 2.12’.63 This is the moment on the flight into Egypt when the Magi are warned by God not to return via ­Jerusalem, but to go another way, ‘And being warned of God in a dream that they should not return to Herod, they departed into their own country another way’. The historical context for Montgomerie’s epiphanic advice at this moment to the thirteen-year-old King James on the rights of succession may require some clarification, for Montgomerie was a Catholic, and 1580 saw the arrival from France of Esmé Stuart, an exotic visitor who would be created Earl of Lennox in March of that year, provoking Presbyterian fears of a Catholic revival. Those fears, as we saw in our preceding Chapter, would lead up to the 63 Montgomery, Poems, ii, p. 77.

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­ uthven Raid in 1582, and when Esmé Stuart died in France, in 1583, it was R ­William Schaw who brought his heart back to the king in Scotland. We should not doubt, therefore, that in planning the baptism of Prince Henry fourteen years later Schaw, Fowler and their associates would have known these issues that had influenced the Christmas festivities of 1580. By 1580 the Reformation of the church was firmly established in England; in Scotland however it was still somewhat insecure, fully justifying the three exotic visitors’ anxiety ‘Leist they perchance micht find some falt in vs / As Inglishmen ar very captious’. Their reminder to the young king of the strength of his rights of succession should Queen Elizabeth die prematurely (‘vhat if the Quene wer deid?’) is hardly reassuring, since although James was her nearest and dearest, she had sundry other relatives (‘Syndrie wes sibbe’). Montgomerie’s word play on ­‘Albion’ is telling, since although its etymology justifies its association with the white cliffs of Dover (Lat. albus, ‘white’) it is, of course, specifically the name for Scotland, Alba in Gaelic, even though ancient Greek (Ἀλβιών) had already legitimised its usage in classical sources for the whole island of Great Britain. That these issues were of some moment for the Scottish court, and that they could already be articulated and dramatised in court festivals by some of the leading writers and intellectuals surrounding the young King James as early as 1580 would therefore seem to be not in doubt.

Marine Deities and French Models: Satyrs and Sirens in Stirling

The model ship that entered the Great Hall of Stirling Palace in 1594 was piloted by an actor playing Neptune, with other actors impersonating classical marine deities Thetis and Triton and, as with the preceding emblems of fertility, these were evidently treated as allegorical figures, each marked with a Latin motto to signal – at least for those who could read it – his or her ‘moral meaning’. Thus Neptune carried the inscription ‘Iunxi atque reduxi’ (‘I have joined them and brought them back’) to signal that it was the sea that united Scotland’s king and queen before bringing them back to their kingdom. The foresail of the ship bore the legend ‘Quascunque per undas’, ‘Which is to say, through quhatsoever seas, or waves, the King’s Majestie intendeth his course … N ­ eptune as God of the sea, shal be favourable to his proceedings’. The marine pageantry at Stirling has clear French precedents; Fowler tells us, for instance, how the sea gods were surrounded by ‘Marine people, as Syrens (above the middle as women, and under as fishes)’.64 The 1563 ‘magnificences’ at C ­ henonceaux 64 Fowler, Works, ii (1936), p. 193.

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featured ­singing sirens and wood nymphs who were abducted by a group of lecherous Satyrs before being rescued by knights. As Roy Strong says, ‘These singing sirens were to be a standard ingredient of the mythology of every set of “magnificences” for the next twenty years’.65 If such French precedents remained quite important in the 1594 Stirling baptism we need to ask how they might have reached Scotland. The cultural commerce between Scotland and France in the sixteenth century was, of course, very strong and direct. The Latin ‘Pompae deorum’ court masque for the 1566 Stirling baptism was written, as we have seen, by George Buchanan, who had worked in Paris and Portugal before returning to Scotland with a ­European reputation. Another Scottish courtier who is much less well known but who had also been active in both the Scottish and French courts and, ­indeed, played his part in designing at least one of the French court festivals was John Gordon, son of the last Catholic Bishop of Galloway. He had been recommended by Mary Queen of Scots to serve as Gentleman of the bedchamber to French kings Charles ix, Henri iii and Henri iv, and in 1581 Henri iii held a festival to celebrate the marriage of duc Anne de Joyeuse to Marguerite de Vaudémont. This consisted of five hours of entertainments dominated by the Balet comique de la Royne. Designed by Balthasar de Beaujoyeulx, born Italian Baltazarini Belgioioso, who came to France c.1550 as a virtuoso violinist, he was patronised by Henri ii, for whom he became ‘valet de chambre’, a position he retained in the service successively of Catherine de Medicis and Marie Stuart (cf David Rizzio), followed by Charles ix and Henri iii. Gordon was friendly with Brantôme, Ronsard, and d’Aubigné, and moved in the circle of courtiers surrounding the duc d’Alençon. In 1582 he wrote the festival album explaining the meaning and allegorical symbolism of the Balet comique de la Royne, which became the prototype of what we now call opera. The importance of this work, with its mixture of mythology, music, poetry and painting, emblematics and iconography, to the history of European musicology and theatre has been widely recognised; as Nuccio Ordine says, its innovations were quickly noted by foreign residents and ambassadors in Paris, whose descriptions ‘ne laissent aucun doute sur la curiosité que tels événements ont é­ veillée chez les souverains des royaumes voisins’.66 It certainly established a precedent for the E ­ dinburgh baptism in its marine iconography, for in Paris King Henri arrived in a ship and in the Ballet he is presented as ‘rex nauta’ who has steered the ship of state through troubled waters of religious sectarianism. The king is ­characterised as 65 66

Strong, p. 103. Nuccio Ordine, Trois couronnes pour un roi; la devise d’Henri iii et ses mystères (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2011), p. 21.

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a new Ulysses who has triumphed over the poisonous enchantments of Circe, whom the hero encounters on his voyage home at the end of the ­Trojan War. The closing pages of the printed description of the Balet comique de la Royne contain an appendix of no fewer than four different explanations, by various authors, of the meaning of the Circe mythography, of which the last was ­written by John Gordon. Entitled Autre allegorie de la Circé, it tells us that it was written by ‘sieur Gordon, escocois, Gentilhomme de la Chambre du Roy’. It is unknown whether John Gordon had any connection with the Stirling baptism, though he later became a firm favourite of James vi who recalled him to ­England in 1603 and made him Dean of Salisbury Cathedral, where he preached a sermon comparing the union of the crowns of Scotland and ­England to the biblical kingdoms united by David and Solomon. The sermon was printed in London under the title Enotikon or a sermon on the union of Great Britainie, in antiquitie of language, name, religion and kingdome (London, 1604). Gordon’s role as an intermediary for the transmission of ideas and images between the different courts is suggested by the fact that Adrian d’Amboise, in his Devises royales (1621), tells us that it was Gordon who had recommended the device of three crowns with the motto ‘Manet ultima caelo’ (‘The last remains in heaven’) to Henri iii of France. The device went back to a medal minted for Mary Queen of Scots in 1560.67 (Fig. 4.7) The continuities between French, Scots and ­English court festivals are, indeed, established by the fact that Beaujoyeulx’s Balet comique, based on the legend of Circe, was adapted by Aurelian Townsend for the court masque Tempe Restored designed by Inigo Jones and performed at Whitehall Palace on Shrove Tuesday 1632. Royal marriages are inevitably ­inter-dynastic, which is why their iconography for the resultant weddings and baptisms crosses national frontiers so readily. It is worth recalling that the Balet comique celebrated the king as ‘rex nauta’, or second Jason, sailing the ship of the Argonauts safely out of the storms of religious and political conflict guided by the twin stars Castor and Pollux and their pilot Typhis. As Clare McManus says, ‘The Ovidian [Argonauts] myth operates as a narrative archetype for many Renaissance court entertainments and their documentation … the test of Jason’s power against the forces of a distant enchanted land underlies James vi’s representation as the romantic questing hero’.68 The same symbolism had been used, for instance, on a triumphal arch erected for Henri ii’s entry into Paris in 1549, portraying Henry ii as Typhis, along with Castor and Pollux. (Fig. 4.8) Scottish familiarity with this iconography is evidenced by one of the emblems which Chancellor 67 68

Bath ‘Symbols of Sovereignty’, pp. 60–63; Ordine, pp. 184–91. McManus, p. 194.

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Figure 4.7 Medal of Mary Queen of Scots with the three crowns device, Aliamque moratur (‘And awaits another’), Edinburgh. © National Museums of Scotland

­ lexander Seton painted in his remarkable neo-Stoic gallery at Pinkie House A in 1613, which shows the pilot Typhis guiding the ship of state propelled by the Goddess Fortuna. We shall examine this emblem and its meaning more fully in our following chapter, however the connections between Seton’s ceiling and William Fowler’s ‘singular inventions’ are suggested by the fact that it was Fowler who preserved the fullest records of Mary Stuart’s embroideries on her Bed of State, which was covered in emblems including the ‘Manet ultima caelo’ device showing three-crowns.69 Moreover it was Fowler who left these records to his nephew, William Drummond, who eventually passed them on to Ben Jonson after Jonson, in 1618, had walked to Scotland to find out more about Scottish culture. It was Jonson who devised the majority of the Stuart court masques, with Inigo Jones, in England – masques which make notable use of emblems. Jonson had, in fact, asked Fowler on his return to London to send him a description, not of the emblems on the embroideries but of these very inscriptions at Pinkie.70 Alexander Seton, First Earl of Dunfermline, who built this gallery in 1613, was patron of William Schaw, indeed it was Seton who wrote the Latin epitaph for Schaw, following his death in 1602, praising his learning and skills in the art of architecture, which one can still read on his monument in Dunfermline Abbey. Finally it is Schaw who is now recognised as the inventor of modern freemasonry, issuing in December 1598 the First Statutes, which reformed the medieval stonemasons guilds into the modern lodges where initiation rituals use symbolism in which the architecture of the biblical temple of Solomon plays a major role. 69

70

See Bath, ‘Ben Jonson, William Fowler and the Pinkie Ceiling’, Architectural Heritage, 18 (2007), 73–86; Bath, Emblems for a Queen: The Needlework of Mary Queen of Scots (London: Archetype, 2008), pp. 42–47. Michael Bath and Jennifer Craig ‘What Happened to Mary Stuart’s Bed of State?’ Emblematica, 18 (2010), 279–88.

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Figure 4.8 Triumphal arch for Henri ii’s entry into Paris, 1549, showing Henry as Typhis, pilot of the Argonauts flanked by his guiding stars Castor and Pollux, woodcut, C’est l’ordre qui a este tenu à la nouvelle et joyeuse entrée (Paris, 1549). Librairie Camille Sourget, Paris

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In 1988 David Stevenson published his thoroughly revisionist history of The Origins of Freemasonry, showing how modern Freemasonry developed not, as previously supposed, in England with the foundation of the London Grand Lodge in 1717, but on 28 December 1598 with the issue by William Schaw of ‘The statutis and ordinanceis to be obseruit be all the maister maissounis within this realme of Scotland’.71 These are what initiated the new lodges with their distinct grades of master, apprentices, and ‘fellow crafts’, using secret initiation rituals and the ‘masonic word’. Stevenson’s evidence has since been consolidated and much extended by Marsha K. Schuchard.72 The importance of the 1594 royal baptism for this development is established by Ian Campbell and Aonghus MacKechnie, whose article ‘The “Great Temple of Solomon” at Stirling Castle’ (2011) identifies those features of King James’s new chapel royal which seem to confirm its status as an attempted reconstruction of the biblical Temple. These include its internal dimensions, which correspond to those authorised in the bible, i Kings 6:16–17, where Solomon’s temple measures 60 cubits by 20, whilst the Stirling entrance portico has twinned columns supporting a Roman arch that almost certainly adapts models illustrated in various books, including Sebastiano Serlio’s Terzo libro d’architettura (1540) and Franceso ­Colonna’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (1499). As Campbell and MacKechnie say (p. 110), ‘For our purposes, however, a clinching piece of evidence is a letter dated 17 July 1594 which refers to the new chapel as “the great Temple of Solomon”’. The writer of this letter was Scottish courtier, John Colville, who was reporting on Scottish affairs to the English government, informing them that the building work on the chapel in Stirling was behind schedule. As Campbell and MacKechnie say (p. 109), ‘It was not unusual for a church to be modelled on Solomon’s Temple’. However the coincidence of a royal baptism solemnised in a chapel which claimed to be a reconstruction of the Temple of Solomon, and the institution of modern Freemasonry by the architect William Schaw just four years later, is surely too great to be wholly fortuitous. Although Schaw is not identified by name as the architect of the new Chapel Royal in Stirling, the fact that he had been appointed Master of the King’s Works in December 1583 makes it almost certain that he was responsible. It also opens the possibility that Freemasonry might have played a wider role in the use of emblems in Scottish culture which we shall be examining in the remaining chapters of this book. The Second Schaw Statutes, issued at Holyroodhouse on 28 December 1599, a year to the day later than the First Statutes, lay down a new requirement that 71 72

Stevenson, p. 34. Schuchard 2002, cited n. 22 above.

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initiates should be tested in ‘the art of memorie and science thairof’, and it is this stipulation that has been shown to have opened Freemasonry to a wide body of influences and practices that favoured the use of emblems. The ‘art of memory’ is, of course, the subject of a classic study by Frances Yates, and its association with architecture was particularly close because of its technique of associating the ideas and keywords that had to be remembered with architectural spaces: buildings are used as memory theatres whose features and spaces function as loci for words and ideas. Moreover these ideas historically include many of the hermetic and occult beliefs and practices which also preoccupied Frances Yates. For Freemasons the building which embodied the fundamental beliefs and statutes of the order is the Temple of Solomon as described in i Kings 6–7, with its two pillars named Jachin and Boaz, its windows in three rows, and its ‘porch of judgement’ (i Kings, 7: 7). It is unclear exactly how much of this symbolism, which became definitive for later Freemasonry, was already understood by the earliest lodges that were regulated by Schaw in his role as Warden of the masons, however it is certain that long before they took over the symbolism of Solomon’s Temple, much of this lore had been appropriated and developed by the crusading order of Knights of St John of Jerusalem, also known as the Templars, or Knights Hospitaller, who in 1338 had begun to ­acquire the Templar holdings in Scotland.73 As Baigent and Leigh demonstrate (p. 109), ‘For more than two centuries in Scotland – from the beginning of the fourteenth to the middle of the sixteenth – the Templars, it appears, were ­actually merged with the Hospitallers’. Thus during the period in question, there are frequent references to a single joint Order – the Order of the Knights of St John and the Temple’. As we shall see in the chapters which follow a major role in the Scottish emblem tradition of the seventeenth century was played by Alexander Seton, and as Marsha Schuchard reveals his Seton ancestors had played a major role in the history of the Templars in Scotland. By 1345 the guardian of ‘the house of St John of Jerusalem at Torphican’ was Alexander Seton, whose family was connected ‘by ties of family and patriotism with the cause of Bruce.’ Despite the dearth of documents from the period, two charters survive that reveal the continuing existence of ‘Temple Courts’ witnessed by Seton. According to later Scottish chronicles, Seton’s ancestors had participated in Templar crusades and at least one descendent made a peaceful pilgrimage for the Hospitallers to Jerusalem. In the eighteenth century Jacobite Freemasons would claim that the Setons served as hereditary guardians of the secret Order of the 73

Michael Baigent and R. Leigh, The Temple and the Lodge (London: Corgi, 1993), p. 108.

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Temple in Scotland, which continued a clandestine existence with the connivance of the Scottish kings.74 If this is the case, we might conclude that the apparently gratuitous and provocative tail-wagging of the Stirling Satyrs in 1566 was no passing aberration from the overall politics and purpose of the royal baptism, and that its historical significance would have been recognised by the participants. The fact that the most recent precedent for this Scottish insult to the English had come from the Preceptor, George Dundas, of the Knights Templar at their Scottish headquarters at Torphican perhaps helps to confirm its significance. As we shall see many of the individuals who played their parts in the sixteenth-century royal baptisms in Stirling have an enduring role in the continuing use of emblems in the following century in Scotland, when relations between the two nations, following the Union of the Crowns in 1603, and related issues surrounding the establishment of a national church became pressing problems.

74

Schuchard. pp. 98–99, citing Baigent and Leigh, 97, 226–34.

Chapter 5

Alexander Seton’s Suburban Villa: Neostoical Emblems and United Nations

The Battle of Pinkie Cleugh

In 1547 the last ever battle between England and Scotland was fought at a place known as Pinkie Cleugh1 on the banks of the river Esk, near Musselburgh east of Edinburgh. (Fig. 5.1) The causus belli was Scots repudiation of the Treaty of Greenwich, which proposed a marriage between infant Mary, Queen of Scots, and Henry viii’s son and heir, the future Edward vi of England. That marriage would have secured a union of the two crowns, frustrating the Scots’ intended alliance with France whilst also imposing an Anglican Reformation on the Catholic church in Scotland. The war that followed to teach the Scots a lesson in keeping their marital promises is known to Scottish history as the ‘Rough Wooing’, and following Henry’s death in January of that year Edward Seymour, who became Lord Protector and Duke of Somerset, invaded Scotland with a large army supported by a fleet of ships. Advancing up the east coast from Berwick-on-Tweed, they reached the river Esk where it flows into the Firth of Forth, and where Scotland’s Regent, the Earl of Arran, had marshalled an army with supporting artillery on the west bank of the river to resist them. Arran’s misreading of English deployments on the opposite bank led him to take his troops across the river, where they could no longer count on the support of their artillery, and they were driven back, retreating in disarray across the Esk where they were either drowned in the river or slaughtered as they struggled across the surrounding marshland. Although the Battle of Pinkie was a resounding defeat for the Scots, the English failed to follow up and secure its ends, as Regent Arran and dowager Mary of Guise remained in power and the infant Queen of Scots was smuggled out of the country to France, where she was betrothed to the dauphin François. It took another fifty years or so, as we know, for that union of the two crowns to take place which was the object of Henry viii’s ‘rough wooing’, and then it was a result of the fertility of those successive Scottish marriages, of Mary Stuart (to her second husband Henry Darnley) and of her son James (to Anne of Denmark), whose baptismal ceremonies have been described in our preceding 1 Scots ‘cleugh’ means gorge or side of a ravine.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���8 | doi 10.1163/9789004364066_006

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Figure 5.1 The Battle of Pinkie Cleugh, woodcut from William Patten, The Expedition into Scotland in 1547 (London: Richard Grafton, 1548). Public domain

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chapter. For all his six marriages, and his belligerence, Henry viii was not able to foresee that the succession to the English throne would come to depend on a daughter, Elizabeth, who would remain an avowed virgin. When, as a result, James vi of Scotland acceded to the English throne, in 1603, he immediately took steps to secure a closer union of the two nations which, in the event, only came to pass a hundred years later, in 1707. The man whom James appointed to negotiate that union in the early years of the seventeenth century was Alexander Seton (1555–1622), successively Lord Urquhart and Lord Fyvie, who was appointed Chancellor of Scotland in 1604, whilst in 1605 he was also created Earl of Dunfermline at Queen Anne’s request. Anne of Denmark, who had been made mistress of the town of Dunfermline following her marriage to King James, had made Seton in 1596 ‘bailie and justiciary of the regality of Dunfermline’ which extended over both sides of the River Forth.2 After James left for England, Seton became guardian of the infant Prince Charles in Dunfermline Palace, and elevation to the Earldom gave him the enhanced status as lawyer to negotiate King James’s unsuccessful policy for uniting what eventually, in 1707, became and still remains known as the United Kingdom, or Great Britain.

Pinkie House: The Earl of Dunfermline’s Classical Villa

In 1613 Seton built a new country house at Pinkie, on lands which had belonged to Dunfermline Abbey. It stands, as its name suggests, on the site of the battle which had failed to unite the two kingdoms some sixty years earlier and, as Charles McKean notes, ‘the disastrous Battle of Pinkie, which the Scots lost so needlessly and so badly to the English, took place within sight of the house’s windows.’3 Speaking of windows, there are – as we can see – many of them, indeed the architectural sophistication of this building has been increasingly recognised in modern studies, but the idea that the meaning and motivation of its innovative architecture were deliberate responses to the historical significance of its site goes largely unrecognised, and it is this that remains to be ­explored in the present chapter. Perhaps the most significant sign of this innovation is, indeed, the three-storied, nine-bay east range with all its twenty-­seven windows which, as McKean notes, are ‘defined by the parallel ashlar string-courses which would have stood out against the harling, acting as the plinth for seven tall chimney-stacks’ of which he says, ‘once harled they 2 George Seton, Memoir of Alexander Seton, (Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1882), p. 102. 3 Charles McKean, The Scottish Chateau: The Country House of Renaissance Scotland (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 2001), p. 187.

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Figure 5.2 Pinkie House, Musselburgh, viewed from the garden. Public domain

alternated with dormer windows rising above the roofline to convey suitably understated power’ (p. 187). (Fig. 5.2) Looking at this distinctive and rather remarkable row of chimneys we may well wonder just how they connect to any flues or fireplaces, or whether their presence was not as much stylistic as functional: they stand sentry over the garden like a row of pacifist battlements, domestic not defensive. Moreover this extraordinary way of reading them, and the argument I shall be pursuing in this chapter, are supported by an inscription which Seton himself placed above the gateway to his garden, for it insists that this building is no fortified, defensive castle, but a classical suburban villa dedicated to the humane arts. (Fig. 5.3) To the best and greatest God. For his own benefit, for the benefit of his descendents, and that of all men of cultivation and urbanity, Alexander Seton, most loving of culture and the humanities, has founded, erected and decorated a villa, gardens and these suburban buildings. There is nothing here to do with warfare, not a ditch or rampart to repel enemies, but a fountain of pure water, lawns, pools and aviaries to welcome guests with kindness. He has benevolently brought together all kinds of amenities that can afford decent pleasures of heart and mind. Therefore whoever shall destroy this by theft, sword or fire, or behaves in any kind of hostile manner, will show himself to be a man devoid of all charity and urbanity,

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indeed an enemy of all culture and the human race. The sacred stones will speak and proclaim it.4 It is, of course, this inscription’s unusual rejection of militarism that supports the suggestion that Seton’s motivation for building the house on this site had much to do with its historical situation. His acquisition of the site, and his position as Chancellor of Scotland and first Earl of Dunfermline, confirmed that motivation since they involved keeping King James informed in London about

Figure 5.3 Pinkie House, inscription originally placed above garden entrance. Photo author 4 D[EO] O[PTIMO] M[AGNO] SIBI POSTERIS BONIS OMNIBVS HVMANIS VRBANISQUE HOMINIBVS VRBANITATIS OMNIS HVMANITATISQVE AMANTISSIMVS ­A LEXANDER ­S ETONIVS VILLAM HORTOS ET HAEC SVBVRBANA AEDIFICIA FVNDAVIT EXTRVXIT ORNAVIT NIHIL HIC HOSTILE NE ARCENDIS QVIDEM HOSTIBVS NON FOSSA NON VALLVM VERVM AD HOSPITES BENIGNE EXCIPIENDOS BENEVOLE TRACTANDOS FONS ACQVAE VIRGINIS VIRIDIARA PISCINAE AVIARIA PER AMOENITATEM OMNIA AD CORPVS ANIMVMQVE HONESTE OBLECTANDVM COMPOSVIT QVISQVIS IGITVR IN HAEC FVRTO FERRO FLAMMA SVE QVOMODOLIBET HOSTILITER SE GESSERIT IS SE OMNIS CARITATIS VRBANITATISQVE ­O MNIS HVMANIQVE GENERIS HOSTEM PROFITEATVR LAPIDES SANCTI LOQVENTVR ET PROMVLGABVNT. The inscribed panel can now be seen on the garden wall; it was originally above the gate, with the letters inscribed in gold. For an excellent account of the gardens see Marilyn Brown, Scotland’s Lost Gardens (Edinburgh: Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monument of Scotland, 2012), pp. 151–56.

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continuing affairs in Scotland, whilst negotiating terms for that closer union of the two nations which the king favoured. Those negotiations had, it is true, been frustrated by English recalcitrance some time before Seton finished his building, but the inscription is one of several at Pinkie which are intent on defining its values and functions.5 The inscriptions, as we shall see, are supported by the remarkable programme of neostoical emblems in the long gallery which overlooks this garden through its range of windows. This, then, is a building which seems to have a strong impulse through its motifs and its meanings to tell us what it stands for.6 In describing his building as a suburban villa Seton is alluding to a famous letter in which Pliny the Younger celebrates his house out-of-town (suburbanum), to which he escapes from the city and which is designed to carry down to posterity his own tastes and values.7 Pliny’s letter occupies a significant place among the classical sources that influenced the development of the country house in early modern Britain, and the pretensions of the building at Pinkie to be viewed as some kind of renovatio of the buildings of classical antiquity extend to its remarkable neo-Stoic long gallery. This, as I have argued elsewhere, asks to be regarded in its trompe-l’oeil fictive arcading and its emblematic picturae as a recreation of the ancient painted gallery or stoa poikile in Athens from which Stoicism took its name.8 There is, moreover, one further local historical connection which may have influenced this piece of neoclassical renovatio, for in 1549 it was near Musselburgh, just across the River Esk, that one of the earliest Roman inscribed altar stones to be found in Scotland was reported. Its inscription recorded that the stone had been dedicated to Apollo Grannus, known as the ‘long-haired Apollo’, by an Imperial Procurator called Quintus Lucius Sabinianus: ­A POLLINI GRANNO Q. LVSIVS SABINIAVS PROC. AVG. V. S. L. V.M. (‘To Apollo Grannus, Quintus Lucius Sabinianus, Imperial Procurator, fulfils his vow freely, gladly and deservedly’ – the concluding abbreviation is short for ‘votum susceptum solvit lubens merito’). (Fig. 5.4) That the Roman empire had reached 5 The politics and history of negotiations surrounding the union have been widely studied, but the essays in Scots and Britons: Scottish Political Thought and the Union of 1603, ed. Roger A. Mason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) provide an excellent and balanced account. 6 For more on this see Bath, ‘Books and Buildings: Recursive Emblems in the Applied Arts’, Emblematica, 22 (2016), 167–94. 7 Pliny, Epistulae i.3, also ii.16, see Bath, Renaissance Decorative Painting in Scotland (Edinburgh: National Museums of Scotland 2003), p. 100. 8 Bath, Decorative Painting, pp. 96–99.

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Figure 5.4 Stone altar dedicated to Apollo Grannus, found in 1549, and drawn by Thomas Segetus 1587 (Antwerp, Museum Plantin-Moratus); the altar has now disappeared. © Antwerp, Plantin-Moretus Museum (M 21.f.13)

Scotland in classical times had long been evident to readers of Tacitus, but the discovery of actual Roman antiquities north of Hadrian’s wall must have brought home to educated Scots the continuities between the ancient world and the land they lived in. The Musselburgh discovery aroused extraordinary interest at the time, much of it from people known to Seton personally. In 1565, for example, the English ambassador to Scotland, Thomas Randolph, wrote about it to William Cecil, ‘The cave found bysyde Muskelbourge semeth to be some monument of the Romaynes, by a stone that was found, with these words greven upon hym APOLLINI GRANNO Q. L. SABINIANVS PROC. AVG.’ The cave, he writes, was made out of ‘Dyvers short pillars sette upright

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in the ground, covered with tyle stones large and thycke’.9 In the same year Mary Queen of Scots ordered that a messenger be sent from Edinburgh to ­‘direct the Baillis of Mussilburgh, charging thame to tak diligent heid and attendance, that the monument of grit antiquitie new funden be nocht demolish nor brokin down’.10 In the Scottish part of his Britannia (in Philemon Holland’s English translation of 1610), William Camden mentions the altar stone immediately following his account of the Battle of Pinkie, citing John Napier, who also mentions the stone in his commentary on the Apocalypse; Camden prints an accurate copy of the inscription which, he tells us, was made for him by ‘the eminent sir Peter Young, tutor to king James vi’.11 Camden’s book would almost certainly have been known to Alexander Seton, as would Napier’s. In building his strongly neoclassical villa suburbana close to the site of a monument which testified to the fact that Scotland had once been part of the Roman imperium Seton must have recognised the importance of signalling its status as a classical revival. Another inscription – now no longer visible – on the front of the house at Pinkie confirms the date when he built it: ‘Dominus Alexander Setonius hanc domum aedificavit, non ad animi, sed fortunatum et agelli modum, 1613’ (‘Alexander, Lord Seton, built this house in 1613 not as he wished, but as circumstances and finances permitted’).12 Charles McKean comments on this ‘faux modeste apology’ and suggests that the building work Seton ‘intendit and begune’ at Pinkie, according to his last Will and Testament, was never ­completed.13 The link between these two influences, which the building reflected from the local history of its situation, is clear enough, for the union of the two nations of Scotland and England could best be signalled by designing a building which declared in its architecture and its monumental inscriptions the return of classical values to the newly united kingdoms. That motivation accounts most notably for the internal decoration of its gallery of Renaissance emblems.

9

10

11 12 13

Adam de Cardonald, ‘Description of Certain Roman Ruins Discovered at Inveresk,’ ­ rchaeologia Scotica: Transactions of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, 2 vols. (1809), A ii, 159–67, 287–88, (p. 287). George Chalmers, ‘Miscellaneous Communications: Randolph’s Letters Concerning Roman Antiquities Discovered near Musselburgh’, Archaeologia Scotica: Transactions of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland iii (1818), 294–95 (p. 294). William Camden, Britannia, trans. Philemon Holland (London: G. Bishop and J. Norton, 1610), ‘Lothien’, para. 3. The inscription recording the date of the building is noted in George Seton, Memoir of Alexander Seton (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1882), p. 17. McKean, pp. 186–87, citing Seton, Memoir, pp. 157–58.

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A Neostoic Long Gallery: True Philosophy and False Architecture

The first thing we notice about the painting of this Long Gallery is how strongly architectural its trompe l’oeil decoration is, transforming the twenty-six meter length of its coved wooden-boarded ceiling into arcaded vaulting, rising up from trompe l’oeil column capitals, and with cupolae and oculi offering the illusion of a glimpse of the sky. (Fig. 5.5) Elaborate mouldings and strapwork enrich the decoration, whilst the emblems that hang in these vaulted compartments are presented as framed panel paintings, each hanging on a ring and a nail: this illusion is perhaps the least successful aspect of this false architecture since, for all the fictive vaulting, the pictures are not hanging at all vertically; as we look up at them on the ceiling they appear to be suspended horizontally from their pretend hooks. Although we might be tempted to dismiss this as the naive work of an unskilled northern artist, I am going to suggest that it is, nevertheless, the result of a quite ambitious and sophisticated design purpose. The pictures had to be shown as if they were hanging in an arcaded loggia or portico, I suggest, because this was thought to be the way the emblems were

Figure 5.5 Pinkie House, Musselburgh, Long Gallery. © Historic Environment Scotland

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displayed in the Greek gallery known as ‘the painted gallery’ where philosopher Zeno did his teaching in ancient Athens; that gallery, the stoa poikile, gave its name to the philosophy which we still know as Stoicism and, as we shall see, these emblems draw on some of the key texts in which the philosophy of neostoicism made its appeal to Renaissance humanists and officers of state such as Seton. Before we turn to look at those emblems, however, it is worth noting one other feature that suggests the architectural ambition of this decoration. When we stand beneath the extraordinary octagonal cupola at the centre of the gallery, filled with its host of winged putti who peer down at us, playing musical intruments or with toys and feathers (one of them is naughtily playing at Cupid and taking aim at us with his bow-and-arrow), we notice that this ­octagon is not at all symmetrical. (Fig. 5.6) Are we to assume that Alexander Seton could not find a local artist able to paint a regular octagon? He would have seen similar architectural lanterns and cupolae in Italy, where the fashion for populating them with such playful amorini was well established but, as M ­ artin Kemp has observed, these ‘architectural forms are portrayed at odd angles from such close viewpoints that the effects are those of anamorphic images which assume undistorted appearance only when viewed from a particular position’.14 Kemp makes this comment with reference to a book by Dutch artist and writer on architecture, Hans Vredeman de Vries, whose ­Perspective was published in 1604.15 The illustrations to Vredeman’s various publications satisfied a taste for ‘imaginary architecture’ influencing, as Olaf ­Recktenwald says, the ‘­architecture, crafts and gardens of late-Renaissance Northern Europe’,16 and in Renaissance Decorative Painting in Scotland I was able to show that ­Seton’s elliptical cupola copies Vredeman’s design showing the mathematics for achieving an eccentric viewing angle on just such an octagonal cupola. (Fig. 5.7) As I was led to remark, It is probably a sign of the mathematical challenges of these images that Seton should have chosen as his pattern not one of the more fully realised and realistic engravings of architectural forms that fill Vredeman’s book, but a design that is reduced to little more than a mathematical diagram. A patron who wanted to supply his artist with a labour-saving 14 15 16

Martin Kemp, The Science of Art: Optical Themes in Western Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), p. 110. Hans Vredeman de Vries, Perspective id est celeberrima ars inspicientis (The Hague: ­Hendrick Hondius, 1604). Olaf Recktenwald, ‘Vredeman de Vries: Geometry and Freedom’, North Street Review: Arts and Visual Culture, 17 (Jul. 2014), pp. 75–84. [accessed: 28/01/2017].

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Figure 5.6 Pinkie House, Long Gallery, octagonal cupola. Photo author

pattern for purely decorative purposes could easily have found a more useful model than this. Mathematics, however, was seen as fundamental to architectural proportion from Vitruvius onwards, and was particularly manifested in the polyhedral sundials that proliferated in this period in Scottish gardens, whose calculations depended on Napier’s invention of logarithms.17 17 Bath, Decorative Painting, p. 102.

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Figure 5.7 Hans Vredeman de Vries, Perspectiva (Antwerp, 1604-5) p.20, design for octagonal cupola showing mathematics for achieving an eccentric viewing angle. © University of Glasgow Library, Department of Special Collections

Napier’s book on logarithms was in fact dedicated to Seton, who was described by his seventeenth-century biographer as ‘well versed in mathematics’.18 There can be no doubt that Seton’s cupola adapts Vredeman’s illustration since, ­although it adds the decorative Italianate amorini, it has the same three tiers rising on trompe l’oeil pillars. It makes just one, crucial, alteration to its model, however, which has hitherto gone unnoticed. As Martin Kemp says, such eccentric images ‘assume undistorted appearance only when viewed from a ­particular position’19 There is just one detail in the Pinkie painting which suggests where the viewer should be standing in this gallery to view the cupola, namely the heraldic arms of Seton that are placed right at the apex of its rising pillars. The reader of Vredeman’s book necessarily views its illustration from the bottom of the page; however when standing in the gallery we only see the coat of arms properly displayed when standing beneath the winged musicians, from the opposite side, where there is no foreshortening – we shall then be directly on target for the mischievous putto who is about to shoot his arrow at us, and the assumed viewing angle has, in fact, been reversed. It is, moreover, 18 19

Richard Maitland, History of the House of Seytoun. (Glasgow: Maitland Club, 1829), p. 63. Kemp, p. 110. For Napier’s dedication of his book to Seton, see George Seton, Memoir, pp. 122–23.

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unclear why the ceiling at Pinkie should want to assume any such fixed viewing point since, unlike a baroque church, a Long Gallery was a peripatetic space in which one walked about to view its decorations or admire the prospect from its many windows. In 1625 Alexander Seton’s son-in-law David, Lord Lindsay of Balcarres, who had married one of Seton’s many daughters, compiled an ‘Inventair of som of the Earill of Dunfermeline his buiks in Pinkie’. There is no mention of Vredeman’s Perspective in this, but it does include a book which is identified as ‘Leçons de perspective positive folio’.20 This is identifiable as a copy of a different book on perspective written by the French architect and illustrator, Jacques Androuet du Cerceau, who is best known for his Les plus excellents bastiments de France (1576), a book which Seton also owned.21 In 1576 Du C ­ erceau also produced his Leçons de perspective positive, and this is clearly the book owned by Alexander Seton.22 Though earlier than Vredeman, Du Cerceau was by no means the first artist to study the art of perspective, indeed his distinguished predecessors include Dürer and Alberti. Du Cerceau’s book includes no illustration of an octagonal cupola, however, and it is therefore clear that Seton must have owned or had access to both of these books on the theory and practice of perspective. The Leçons de perspective sits alongside a remarkable number of other books in the 1625 Inventory, including works by Palladio and Serlio,23 that testify to his interest in architecture, and we should bear in mind that this is an inventory of only ‘som of … his buiks’: it is therefore not exhaustive.

Horatian Emblems

Among such books which Seton must have owned but which is not listed in the 1625 Inventory is the emblem book on which he drew for eight of the seventeen 20

21 22 23

Inventory no. 53. The inventory is discussed and the books identified by Peter Davidson, ‘Alexander Seton, First Earl of Dunfermline: His Library, his House, his World’, British Catholic History, 32 (2016), 315–42. See also Ian Campbell, ‘An “Inventair of som of the Earill of Dunfermline his buiks in Pinkie June 1625”: a fragment of the library of Alexander Seton (1555–1622)’, Innes Review, 67 (2016), 31–54; Campbell amplifies Davidson’s listing and corrects or suggests alternatives for some of the identifications; I follow Campbell’s numbering of the entries. Inventory no. 55. Leçons de perspective positive par Jacques Androuet Du Cerceau, architecte (Paris: 1577), Inventory no. 53. Inventory nos. 50, Andrea Palladio, Quattro libri dell’Architettura (Venice, 1570), and 52, probably S. Serlio, De Architectura libri quinque (Venice, 1569).

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emblems on his ceiling, the Emblemata Horatiana of Otto van Veen (‘Vaenius’). As its title suggests, this turns moralising excerpts from the poetry of Horace into Renaissance emblems by supplying them with illustrative engravings, actualising visually what remains the most famous of the poet’s dicta on the art of poetry (‘ut pictura poesis’) by offering elaborate copperplate illustrations of the types of human behaviour on which the poet passes judgement in his satires. Vaenius could draw the pictura for this poesis because he was a distinguished artist in his own right, in whose Antwerp studio the youthful Rubens had studied. As Simon McKeown remarks, Vaenius’s ‘Horatian Emblems’ differ from the work of his predecessors since, unlike the relatively simple woodcuts illustrating the emblems of Alciato and his immediate followers, ‘Vaenius designed elaborate engraved copperplates both substantially larger than had been the norm for woodblock illustrations in emblem books of the sixteenth century, and of a very much higher artistic order.’ Earlier emblem books (and some later) tend to represent the emblematic moral by symbolic objects or iconic figures but ‘Such principles fall flat before the picturae of the Emblemata Horatiana: here, far from single iconic figures, we meet scenes teeming with life, crammed to the margins with characters, action and incident. Turbulent battle-scenes join with triumphs and crowded public gatherings’.24 Outdoor events are displayed in widespread landscape settings; indoor activities in fully furnished apartments. It is a sign of Alexander Seton’s ambitions for his gallery that he should have chosen emblems requiring such complexity and vraisemblance: these pictures do not simpy visualise moral abstractions, they show historical events and the realia of classical life. Thus, rather like the house itself, they bring the ancient world to life in contemporary Scotland. Vaenius’s emblems also depart from their Alciatian models in their treatment of the emblematic scriptura. Alciato’s examples had established a normative model for the emblem, in which a symbolic picture illustrates a moralising motto or inscriptio which is then explained or discussed in the epigrammatic verse epigram that follows. Vaenius, however, offers us an elaborate engraving on the recto of each page-opening; it has no motto or header but on the facing page we find a succession of Latin quotations, nearly all of which are assigned to their classical authors. Of these, only the first will be printed in capital l­etters at the head of the page, where it may serve as the motto. We thus have emblems which are in advance of Vaenius’s predecessors in both the Renaissance realism of their pictures and in the display of humanist learning in their letterpress, which consists of an assemblage of passages from classical 24

Simon McKeown, ed., Otto Vaenius and his Emblem Books (Glasgow: Glasgow Emblem Studies), p. xviii.

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authors of whom Horace stands at the head. Such collections of moral commonplaces were what schoolboys were taught to copy from their reading into their commonplace books, which were then used in rhetoric, as Erasmus demonstrated in De Copia, to develop a facility for copious expression.25 These emblems are thus at the cutting edge of developments for the representation of the ancient world in Netherlandish history painting, and at the same time they are in touch with the art of rhetoric in achieving fluency of expression through a mastery of the models of eloquence found in classical authors. The way Seton copies or adapts his models from this source on his ceiling tells us much about his architectural motives and meanings. Perhaps the first thing we notice is how closely most of these emblems on the ceiling copy their source engravings, once recognised, in the book which was their inspiration. We can see this, for instance, with the emblem showing a man sitting in front of a blazing hearth, where he is drinking from a flask; his bandaged gouty leg is propped up in front of the fire whilst a physician standing beside him examines his urine; the domestic interior is represented in some detail to show the sickbed with a drawn-back curtain. (Fig. 5.8) ­Vaenius’s engraving lacks a motto, though it is seemingly intent on dramatising the event still further by including a speech-scroll in which the physician’s reflections, or perhaps his diagnosis, are being voiced. The Pinkie painting (Fig. 5.9) certainly has such an inscribed scroll, though it is not a speech-scroll but now ­functioning as the emblem’s motto: SEMPER AVARVS EGET (‘The miser is always in want’). This is not Vaenius’s header for the seven classical quotations on his facing page, but quotes the sixth of Vaenius’s list of commonplaces, from Horace’s Epistulæ, 1.2, 56, ‘Semper avarus eget, certum voto pete finem’ (‘The miser is always in want, let your desires seek a fixed limit’). The Pinkie emblem not only selects this inscription as its scrolled motto, but finds a second Latin text which is inscribed beneath the framed picture in a bit of monumental arcading to serve as its subscriptio, and although this gives the emblems at Pinkie something closer to the tripartite structure of an Alciatian emblem, this lower inscription is not a summative verse epigram but is much closer to functioning as a supplementary motto. Here it copies the fifth of Vaenius’s commonplaces, from the closing lines of Horace’s Odes, 3, l24: ‘scilicet improbæ/ Crescunt divitiæ, tamen/ Curtæ nescio quid semper abest rei’ (‘It happens that unearned wealth grows without limit, but there is always something unknown which is lacking’). What we have is an emblem of Stoic moderation, reminding us that

25

For this see Bath, Speaking Pictures: English Emblem Books and Renaissance Culture (­London: Longman, 1994), pp. 31–51.

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Figure 5.8 Otto Vaenius, Emblemata Horatiana (1607), Quo plus sunt potae, Plus sitiuntur aquae. © University of Glasgow Library, Department of Special Collections

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Figure 5.9 Pinkie House, emblem Semper avarus eget, (‘The miser is always in want’). PHOTO AUTHOR

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excessive consumption is addictive, and that stupid billionaires cannot easily curb their acquisitive instincts. Seton’s adaptations and alterations to his source are further illustrated by the way he reuses the text which Vaenius wrote in the Physician’s speech-scroll for this emblem, ‘Danda est hellebori multo pars maxima avaris / Nescio an Anticyram ratio illis destinet omnem’ (‘By far the greatest portion of hellebore is to be admitted to the covetous / I don’t know whether reason should not consign all Anticyra to their use’). This quotes Horace, Sat. 2.3, and expects its reader to know that the city of Anticyra was famous for growing the herb hellebore, a sovereign remedy for madness; so the moral is: ‘There’s nothing so mad as a miser’. Seton makes no use of this axiom in the Semper avarus eget emblem, but he must have noted it there in Vaenius’s speech scroll since he borrowed it for use as his motto to another emblem, also from Vaenius, showing a miser who sits in his cellar dressed in rags but surrounded by barrels and chests holding his hoarded wealth and provender; despite this hoard our ragged miser with his unkempt hair is dining on a raw turnip. (Fig. 5.10) The picture copies Vaenius’s emblem some pages later, quoting extended passages from two of Horace’s Satires (2.3 and 1.3) under a header AVARVS Q ­ VÆSITIS FRVI NON AVDET (‘A greedy man dares not enjoy what he has earned’). (Fig. 5.11) This is one of four emblems beneath the cupola on the ceiling, which are not on trompe l’oeil panels but in oval strapwork cartouches, each with a single motto on a scroll. These emblems are typical of many that praise moderation and satirise greed among the Emblemata Horatiana, this being one of the basic tenets of Stoicism. Another can be found on the page immediately following the ‘­Semper avarus eget’ emblem. This shows a dipsomaniac drinker who is seeking to satisfy his enormous thirst by swallowing a whole river, whilst his more prudent companion draws a modest cupful from a fountain. (Fig. 5.12) The picture ­illustrates the opening Satire of Horace’s First Book, in which the poet wonders why everyone, but especially the greedy rich, think that they are really paupers. While you leave us to take as much out of a moderate store, why should you extol your granaries, more than our corn-baskets? As if you had occasion for no more than a pitcher or glass of water, and should say, ‘I had rather draw so much from a great river, than the very same quantity from this little fountain.’ Hence it comes to pass, that the rapid Aufidus carries away, together with the bank, such men as are delighted by an abundance more copious than what is needed. But he who desires only so much as is sufficient neither drinks water fouled with the mud nor loses his life in the waves.

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Figure 5.10

Pinkie House, emblem ‘Nescio an Anticyram ratio illis destinet omnem’. Photo author

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Figure 5.11 Vaenius, Avarus quaesitis frui non audet (‘The greedy man dare not enjoy what he has acquired’). © UNIVERSITY OF GLASGOW LIBRARY, DEPARTMENT OF SPECIAL COLLECTIONS

Vaenius quotes the whole passage on his facing page, under a header or motto taken from the Epistles, 1.2, ‘Quod satis est cui contigit, nihil amplius optet’ (‘He who owns enough, let him wish for nothing more’). This supplies Seton with his motto, whilst the third of Vaenius’s quotations, from Odes, 3.16, supplies his subscriptio, ‘BENE EST CVI DEVS OBTVLIT PARCA QVOD SATIS EST

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Figure 5.12 Vaenius Nihil amplius opto (‘I choose nothing more’). © University of Glasgow Library, Department of Special Collections

MANV’ (‘It is well for him on whom God has conferred, with sparing hand, what is just enough’). (Fig. 5.13) There is however one change that the picture at Pinkie makes to Vaenius’s original in the Emblemata Horatiana, and it is one of the most significant changes which any picture in the applied arts of this period makes to its source, for in place of the rugged hirsute bearded figure who fills his modest flask at the fountain in Vaenius’s engraving, the painting

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at Pinkie shows us an aquiline nose and trimmed beard which are those of Seton himself. We have only to look at the portrait of Seton painted by Marcus Gheeraerts in 1610 to recognise his identity. (Fig. 5.14) As I noted when writing up this discovery in Renaissance Decorative Painting in Scotland, This adaptation of the source to present a portrait of the patron is unparalleled by any decorative scheme of this period in Britain. It would appear that Seton wished to identify imself with the qualities of temperance and moderation this emblem exemplifies.26 This adaptation is reinforced by a change that Seton makes to Vaenius’s motto: Vaenius’s optet is third person subjunctive ‘may he choose nothing more’, whereas the Pinkie motto is first person indicative, opto: ‘I choose nothing

Figure 5.13 Pinkie. Nihil amplius opto (‘I choose nothing more’). Photo author 26 Bath, Decorative Painting, p. 82. See also Bath, ‘Books and Buildings: Recursive Emblems’, p. 87.

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Figure 5.14

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Marcus Gheraerts, Alexander Seton, First Earl of Dunfermline, oil on ­canvas, 1610. Edinburgh, Scottish National Portrait Gallery. © National Galleries of Scotland

more’, and the positioning of the scroll round the figure’s head identifies the sentiment with the character it portrays: this then is another speech scroll. It is worth noting that the Setons went in for portraits, and are among the most ­frequently represented families in the surviving portraiture of this period in

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Scotland. In the 1570s, for instance, Alexander’s father George, 5th Lord Seton, was painted by Adrian Vanson in the magnificent clothes he wore at the wedding of Mary Queen of Scots to French Dauphin François in 1558. (Fig. 5.15) And sometime between 1570 and 1572, whilst Seton’s father was in the Netherlands as ambassador to the Duke of Alva following the murder David Rizzio, Frans Pourbus painted a remarkable group portrait of the whole family. (Fig. 5.16) The picture shows George surrounded by his five children, of whom young ­Alexander, the future Earl of Dunfermline, stands on the right beneath his sister Margaret. We note from all these portraits the characteristic height and long aquiline nose of the Setons. The Earl of Dunfermline’s introduction of his own image into one of his emblems at Pinkie was therefore likely to be recognised. The neostoic tenor of Vaenius’s Emblemata Horatiana is advertised in his opening address, Lectori seu Spectatori (‘To the Reader or Spectator’), which explains that the book brings word and image together to offer the reader ‘­adages, commonly known as emblems’ (‘Sententias, quas Emblemata vulgo vocant’), faithfully represented in the very spirit of Horace’s own dictum, ut pictura poesis.27 Vaenius ends his address by insisting that this is not the place to say anything further about Stoic philosophy and morals, since Lipsius has written his Manuductionem (‘Introduction’) to the whole subject. Justus Lipsius (1547–1606) was the great humanist scholar in the University of Leiden, who had died the previous year and ‘whose formulation of Stoicism made him one of the foremost thinkers of the early modern period’.28 Plantin had published his De Constantia in 1584 and his Manuductionis ad Stoicam Philosophiam, which Vaenius is referring to here, appeared in 1604. The two knew each other personally, for Lipsius contributed an entry to Vaenius’s album amicorum, and one of his ablest students was Philip Rubens, elder brother to the painter who had trained in Vaenius’s studio.29 These Emblemata Horatiana, then, are ­presented to the reader as specifically neostoical emblems. Seton’s own interest in Lipsius is indicated by the 1625 Inventory of his books, which records an entry for ‘Opera omnia Lypsii’.30 The Earl of 27

‘Damus hic vobis, lector seu spectator benevole, sententias quas emblemata vulgo vocant, ex Q. Horatio Flacco, Lyricorum princeps, desumptas, tabulisque in æs inciis illustratus. Mutuas namque sibi operas poesis et pictura fidelissime præstant, sic enim noster ille Horatius: Ut pictura poesis erit.’ (Emblemata Horatiana, 1607, p. 6). 28 McKeown, Vaenius, pp. xv–xvi. 29 See Mckeown, p. xiv. 30 Inventory no. 67.

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Figure 5.15

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Adrian Vanson, portrait of George, 5th Lord Seton, Edinburgh. © National Galleries of Scotland

Dunfermline, therefore, owned a copy of the complete works of the modern founder of this fashionable and highly influential philosophy.

Philosophical Galleries and Pictorial Teaching Aids

The case for seeing Seton’s Long Gallery as an imitation or recreation of the stoa poikile in which Stoicism had its orgins, however, depends on what Lipsius

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Figure 5.16

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Frans Pourbus, George, Lord Seton, with his family, 1572. Edinburgh, Scottish National Portrait Gallery. © National Galleries of Scotland

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and his followers knew about the way paintings were displayed as visual aids in the gallery attached to the Agora in Athens, in which the philosopher Zeno reportedly did his teaching. The gallery had been described by Pliny (Hist Nat 35.59), by Pausanias (1.15) and by Diogenes Laertius (7.5), it was however the letters of Synesius that seem to have prompted the idea that the paintings in the gallery were panel paintings and not frescoes, as Synesius – writing in the fourth century ad – at one point complains that there is nothing left in Athens for tourists to admire since the panels which decorated the Painted Gallery had been removed; so this may be why the emblems at Pinkie are shown in trompe l’oeil frames hanging on hooks and nails. Synesius’s letters had been printed by the Aldine press in 1499, and reprinted in Paris in 1553 and 1605. For a modern representation of what such a neostoic gallery should look like we have only to look at the frontispiece to a later reworking of Vaenius’s Horatian emblem book. In 1646 Frenchman Marin le Roy, Sieur de Gomberville, published without acknowledgement his plagiarised edition of Vaenius, with reverse copies of all the engravings and new commentaries on each emblem. The book was dedicated to the young prince, future Louis xiv of France, and it has a new frontispiece, engraved by Pierre Daret, in which we see Louis being instructed in front of a colonnaded gallery by the allegorical figures of Wisdom and ­Virtue. (Fig. 5.17) On the walls of this gallery we see framed panel paintings representing emblems from the book which follows. This, then, is the young French monarch being educated using the visual aids that neostoic teaching afforded: Vaenius’s Emblemata Horatiana has been turned into a speculum principis. We find a very similar arcaded gallery on the title page of another book printed in France at the very time when Alexander Seton was decorating his own gallery, and this moreover is a book which we know that Seton owned. (Fig. 5.18) The 1625 Pinkie library Inventory includes a book described as ‘Les tableaux de plate peinture de Philostrate par viginere folio’ (‘The pictures of paintings of Philostratus by Viginère, folio’).31 This can be identified as Blaise de Vigenère’s French translation of Philostratus, the Greek philosophical ­writer whose Imagines is a description of sixty-four pictures which he saw in a gallery in Naples in the late Roman empire, with a second part, or continuation, ­describing further paintings written by his son (‘Philostratus the Younger’). These were long thought to be descriptions of actual works of art, and outstanding as examples of ekphrasis. Since so few examples of ancient mural painting were known to have survived, at least before the rediscovery of Pompeii in 1599, Philostratus’s vivid descriptions remained key documents for any art-historical understand31

Inventory no. 31.

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Figure 5.17

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Marin le Roi, Sieur de Gomberville, La Doctrine des Mœurs (1646), frontispiece showing Louis xiv being instructed in the Stoic painted gallery. © University of Glasgow Library, Department of Special Collections

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Figure 5.18

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Blaise de Vigenère, Images ou Tableaux de Platte Peinture des Deux ­Philostrates (Paris, 1614) title page. © University of Glasgow Library, Department of Special Collections

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ing or attempted modern revival of classical painting. It was only the fifteenthcentury rediscovery of Nero’s Golden House in Rome that had revealed the first examples of authentic antique painting ever to have come to light, but these are all grottesco, a purely decorative style of painting which, although it became highly fashionable in Renaissance buildings, cannot realise many of the high ideals of illusionism, commemoration or idealisation which classical writers found in the great painters.32 This is, however, what they found in Philostratus. Seton possessed a copy of the complete works, listed as ‘Philostrati opera’ in the 1625 Inventory.33

Ekphrastic Models

The Imagines, however, had been translated into French in 1578 by Blaise de Vigenère, with reprints in 1602 and 1611, and the reason why Seton also bought a copy of Vigenère’s 1614 French translation, Images ou Tableaux de Platte Peinture des Deux Philostrates, was almost certainly because this had fine ­engravings by a Parisian engraver called Jaspar Isaac. This was, indeed, the first edition of Philostratus ever to be illustrated, and the date of its appearance, a year after that which Alexander Seton recorded as the date of the house’s building, suggests the assiduity with which he was purchasing books published on the continent. As Peter Davidson says, ‘Seton would appear to have greater funds to lay out on recent editions, many of them expensive illustrated folios, and he seems also to have access to continental books far beyond that afforded by the comparatively modest book trade of Scotland in his time’.34 This is not, moreover, the only work by Blaise de Viginère that Seton owned, for the 1625 list also includes his book on secret cyphers (‘Traites de ciphres de viginere 4°’, Inventory no. 68), his commentaries on Caesar’s Gallic Wars (‘Commentaires de Caesar par vignere 4o’, no. 73), and Vigenère’s translation of Onosander’s 32

33

34

The standard work on the rediscovery of the Domus Aurea remains Nicole Dacos, La découverte de la Domus Aurea et la formation des grotesques à la renaissance (London: Warburg Institute, 1969); for the use of grottesco ornament in Scotland see Bath ‘Andrew Bairhum, Giovanni Ferrerio and the “Lighter Style of Painting”’, Journal of the Northern Renaissance, 2 (2010). [accessed 30/03/2017]. Inventory, no. 33, identified by Campbell as likely to be Philostrati … opera quæ exstant Philostrati iunioris Imagines et Callistrati Ecphrases. Item Eusebii Cæsariensis episcopi liber contra Hieroclem … (Paris, 1608). Davidson, ‘Alexander Seton’, p. 8.

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Greek treatise on military strategy (‘Onosander par viginere 4°’, no. 69). Seton evidently had a strong interest in the writings of this French humanist and diplomat and we may well wonder whether the two men had ever met: Seton had pursued legal studies in France in the 1570s following his early education in Rome; also in 1583 and again the following year he had accompanied his father, George Seton, on a royal embassy to Paris to persuade Henri iii to renew the ‘auld alliance’.35 Having obtained his copy of the illustrated Imagines so soon after completing his building, we should not be surprised to find that Seton used one of its illustrations to decorate his Long Gallery. An emblem with the motto Nympharumque leves cum satyris me secernunt populo (‘The light-footed nymphs with satyrs distinguish me from other people’), again quotes Horace, Od. 1.1.32. (Fig. 5.19) The picture for this emblem shows a group of nymphs, with a satyr, dancing round a circular building resembling a classical temple along with other figures and spectators, and on the steps in front of the doorway lies a sleeping baby in a cradle of branches. The motto below the picture also quotes Horace, Od. 4.8, 28, and refers to the immortal memory which poets confer on praiseworthy people, DIGNVM LAVDE VIRVM MVSA VETATA MORI (‘The muse will not allow the praiseworthy man to die’). It is not at all easy to make sense of this picture, particularly the small detail of the baby in its cradle, in relation to the two mottoes. The picture, however, copies de Vigenère’s illustration, and what the Nympharumque leves … emblem at Pinkie actually shows is a classical painting which Philostratus entitles ‘Pindar’, depicting what ancient writers tell us about the birth of the poet who was predicted by the gods to become the greatest of lyric poets. (Fig. 5.20) His father, they tell us, placed the future poet in his doorway on a cradle of laurel and myrtle branches, where the bees came from their hives and laid honey on his lips. At the same time, Philostratus tells us, Pan and a group of nymphs danced round him, overlooked by the mother of the Gods, earth goddess Rhea, whose marble statue stands in the doorway. Although the engravings that illustrate de Vigenère’s Images ou Tableaux are nearly all signed by Isaac, some of the others were designed by Antoine Caron, court painter to Catherine de Medici and Henry ii of France. Caron was responsible for organizing the French court pageants and his drawings of festivities at the court of Charles ix are well known as likely sources for

35

Bruce Gordon Seton, The House of Seton: A Study in Lost Causes (Edinburgh: Lindsay and Macleod, 1939), p. 296.

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Figure 5.19

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Pinkie House, Long Gallery, emblem Nympharumque leves cum satyris me secernunt populo. Photo author

Alexander Seton’s Suburban Villa

Figure 5.20

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Blaise de Vigenère, Images ou Tableaux de Platte Peinture des Deux ­Philostrates (Paris, 1614), p. 378, ‘Pindare’. © University of Glasgow Library, Department of Special Collections

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the Valois Tapestries.36 When we look at Isaac’s picture of the Birth of Pindar we might easily imagine that what it represents is the type of allegorical pageantry represented by the French ballet de cour in court festivals of the later sixteenth century: we see nymphs dancing to the music of onstage performers who are part of the scene; those French pageants had influenced the Scottish royal baptisms, as we saw in our preceding chapter, and we should note that the dancing figures also include a cloven-footed, horned and tailed satyr. De Vigenère’s commentary on the Pindar painting makes no mention of Horace’s Odes, and Seton must presumably himself have chosen these to supply the missing mottoes, making this panel conform with the other emblems from different ­emblem books that he chose for his painted ceiling. Both of these mottoes confirm Philostratus’s moral by celebrating the status and immortality of poetry, and Horace’s reference to ‘Nymphs and satyrs’ in Odes 1.1.32 must have seemed particularly appropriate to this picture of Pan and his Nymphs cavorting round the nascent poet. Horace’s ut pictura poesis dictum which Vaenius quotes, as we have seen, in his Preface as a key to the Emblema Horatiana, was widely read as a justification of ekphrastic writing, and ekphrasis is therefore the common ground which Vaenius shares with Philostratus. Ekphrasis was primarily a rhetorical rather than an artistic or aesthetic principle however, held up for critical admiration wherever it was encountered in the writing of classical authors, whose examples of rhetorical enargeia were imitated or emulated as a regular classroom exercise in the schoolroom – indeed in his proem to the Imagines Philostratus explains that it was only when he was challenged to talk about the paintings in a house he was visiting by a group of local youths that he agreed to produce his ekphraseis: these were showpiece exercises in epideictic rhetoric. If we are right to define ekphrasis as ‘a rhetorical description of a work of art’37 then the attempts of modern artists to create, or recreate, the pictures which were suggested by such descriptions are what, I suggest, might better be called ‘realised ekphrasis’ since ekphrasis is, strictly, the verbal description of a painting whereas ‘realised ekphrasis’ is the visual realisation of such verbal descriptions. Such realisations are likely to be characteristic of Renaissance artists if only because they stand as attempts to recreate the art of the ancient world. Since Alexander Seton’s house at Pinkie has so many other features that ask to be read as a deliberate renewal of the arts of antiquity, his inclusion of one of Philostratus’s Imagines in his Long Gallery therefore has to be seen as a

36 37

Frances Yates, The Valois Tapestries (London: Warburg Institute, 1959). Jean H. Hagstrum, The Sister Arts: The Tradition of Literary Pictorialism and English Poetry from Dryden to Gray (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1958), p. 18.

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deliberate attempt to recreate an authentic reproduction of ancient painting in early-modern Scotland.38

The Emblemata of Denis Lebey de Batilly

There is one further book on which Seton drew for the emblems at Pinkie House, and this is a true emblem book. The Emblemata of Denis Lebey de Batilly, with engravings by Theodor de Bry after designs by Jean Jacques Boissard, was printed in Frankfurt in 1596, containing sixty-three tripartite emblems, on the Alciatian model consisting of motto, picture and Latin verse epigram, but also with a prose commentary on the facing page. The book is described by Mario Praz as ‘scarce’ and it was never reprinted.39 No record of Seton’s ownership is recorded in the 1625 Inventory; three of the emblems, however, use close copies of Boissard’s pictures, albeit with some changes to the mottoes. One of the four emblems in oval cartouches beneath the cupola, for example, shows a young man emerging from a barn carrying a calf on his shoulders, whilst an older man carries a full-grown bull. (Fig. 5.21) The motto A TENERIS ADSVESCE LABORI means ‘Accustom yourself to hard work from your childhood’. Lebey de Batilly identifies its subject as the legendary Olympic athlete Milo, who carried a calf in his youth so that he would be strong enough to carry a bull when he grew up: his motto is ADEO IN TENERIS ASSVESCIRE MVLTVM EST (‘Doing enough training in childhood is great’). (Fig. 5.22) The legend was evidently quite well known: Shakespeare refers to ‘bull-bearing Milo’ in Act 2, Sc. 3 of Troilus and Cressida. The commentary to the emblem applies this piece of weight-training to the importance of accustoming young people to hard work only gradually, whatever their ambitions – whether military or scholarly – might be. The emblem PAX OPTIMA RERVM (‘Peace is the best of all things’) (­Fig. 5.23) copies its picture from Lebey de Batilly’s PACI STVDERE P ­ RÆSTAT QVAM BELLO (‘Better to study peace than war’), and de Batilly’s epigram and commentary explain the group of figures as those who attended on king Cecrops, the founder of Athens, when he was obliged to choose between Poseidon, shown as a naked man standing with his trident beside a white horse, and Athena, standing beside her olive tree, who has thrown down her shield and spear. (Fig. 5.24) The gods promised Attica to whichever of the two 38 39

For some further examples of ekphrastic painting of this period in Scotland, see Bath, Decorative Painting, pp. 210–14, also Bath, ‘Philostratus Comes to Scotland’. Mario Praz, Studies in Seventeenth-Century Imagery (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1975), p. 279.

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Figure 5.21

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Pinkie House, Long Gallery, emblem A teneris adsuesce labori. Photo author

Alexander Seton’s Suburban Villa

Figure 5.22

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Denis Lebey de Batilly, Emblemata (1596), no. 38, ‘Accustom yourself to hard work from childhood’. © UNIVESITY OF GLASGOW, DEPARTMENT OF SPECIAL COLLECTIONS

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Figure 5.23

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Pinkie House, Long Gallery, emblem Pax optima rerum. PHOTO AUTHOR

Alexander Seton’s Suburban Villa

Figure 5.24

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Denis Lebey de Batilly, Emblemata (1596), no. 28, ‘Better to study peace than war’. © University of Glasgow Library, Department of Special Collections

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gods could give the most useful gifts to mankind, and when Poseidon struck the ground with his spear a war horse sprang up, whereas Athena produced the peaceful olive tree, so better to establish a city based on the peaceful arts than to count on the cavalry: Athens before Sparta, one might think. Pinkie’s version of this emblem has its subscriptio, PAX VNA TRIVMPHIS INNVMERIS POTIOR (‘One peace is worth a thousand victories’) and its two mottoes are copied from de Batilly’s commentary, which cites both from Silius Italicus’s poem on the Punic war. This emblem relates more directly perhaps than any other in the gallery to the motives that led Alexander Seton to build his house on the historic battlefield at Pinkie. A third emblem that copies Lebey de Batilly’s Emblemata has the motto N ­ VLLVM NVMEN ABEST SI SIT PRVDENTIA (‘If prudence is shown then no divine power is lacking’) and below the picture we read SÆPE ACRI ­P OTIOR PRVDENCIA DEXTRA (‘Prudence is often better than a strong right arm’). (Fig. 5.25) Both mottoes are adapted from the opening lines of de ­Batilly’s

Figure 5.25

Pinkie House, Long Gallery, emblem Nullum Numen abest si sit prudentia. Photo author

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e­ pigram: ‘Sæpe animis etiam in bello Prudentia. Sæpe / Acri etiam dextra est, viribus et potior’ (‘Often, indeed, in war prudence is skilful and often better than courage and strength’). The picture shows Fabius Maximus ­being offered the fruits of wisdom, peace and plenty at the altar of Bacchus; the Roman general was known as ‘the delayer’ as he preferred to weaken Hannibal by delaying tactics. (Fig. 5.26) The moral, once again, applies to Pinkie’s situation on the site of a historic battlefield.

‘Let Tiphys be Virtue’

The emblems we have examined so far at Pinkie all copy examples from published emblem books, whose illustrations provided the unknown Scottish decorative painters with patterns to be followed, on the whole with few alterations. Mottoes could always be changed, however, or replaced with alternatives by Seton himself in a recycling of rhetorical commonplaces that was second nature to educated readers and writers at this period.40 Iconographic motifs in the visual arts enjoyed a rather similar capacity for creative recycling, with repetition and variation often making identification of the immediate source of an image difficult, if not impossible. That is the case with several further examples in the Long Gallery, for which various analogues can often be identified which may clarify the meaning, but no exact sources.41 This is the case, for example, with the emblem SIT VIRTVS TIPHYS (‘Let Tiphys be Virtue’), showing a ship sailing in rough waters; in place of its mast it has the naked figure of Fortuna (also known as Occasio), holding her usual billowing sail and with the lock of hair streaming from her forehead (you have, proverbially, to catch occasion by the forelock). (Fig. 5.27) In the stern of the ship sits the helmsman, evidently a military man, wearing a helmet and grasping a sword in one hand and the tiller in the other: Fortuna sails, he steers. If we seek his identity, the motto supplies it, for Tiphys is the name of the famous pilot who steered Jason and the Argonauts on their voyage to recover the golden fleece. 40

41

Students compiled their own commonplace books, but numerous printed collections of classical commonplaces were in circulation, chief among which are Erasmus’s Adagia. Seton himself owned at least one such collection, Johannes Stobaeus, Sententiae: ex thesauris Graecorum (Antwerp. 1609, Inventory no. 18). As Campbell notes, p. 40, ‘his works were originally published as two works, the Eclogues and the Sententiae, and the 1609 edition is the first to collect them together’. For these see the more exhaustive listing of the Pinkie emblems, which I am not attempting here, in Bath, Decorative Painting, pp. 231–36.

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Figure 5.26

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Denis Lebey de Batilly, Emblemata (1596), No. 32, ‘Victory through Prudence’. © University of Glasgow Library, Department of Special Collections

Alexander Seton’s Suburban Villa

Figure 5.27

Pinkie House, Long Gallery, emblem. ‘Let Tiphys be Virtue’. Photo author

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The picture at Pinkie goes back to an impresa which is illustrated in ­ irolamo Ruscelli’s collection of Imprese Illustri (Venice, 1566, and frequentG ly reprinted). (Fig. 5.28) However although the ship has the same shape, and Ruscelli’s Fortuna stands in much the same posture on deck, the helmsman in this case is not the warrior Tiphys, but another nude female whom Ruscelli identifies in his commentary as the figure of Virtus, an ethical keyword in classical philosophy which means both moral virtue, and also courage or strength. Ruscelli’s motto is VTRIVSQUE AVXILIO (‘In support of each other’), and his commentary explains that Virtue cannot achieve its worthy ends unless the winds of fortune are favourable. The emblem was inspired by a number of Latin proverbs which suggest the control a virtuous man has over his destiny, such as Cicero’s adage Virtute duce comite fortuna (‘Under the guidance of valour, accompanied by good fortune’, Epist. ad Fam 10.3) which Ruscelli cites, or Ovid’s Rara quidem virtus quam non fortuna gubernat (‘Rare indeed is the

Figure 5.28

Girolamo Ruscelli, Imprese Illustri (1566), p. 517, ‘Utriusque auxilio’. © University of Glasgow Library, Department of Special Collections

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virtue that fortune does not steer’ (Eleg. 14.30).42 Alciato had used a version of this adage for his emblem under the motto Virtute fortuna comes (‘Fortune accompanies Virtue’) although with a different picture, showing Mercury’s caduceus entwined with two cornucopiae. Ruscelli’s version of the impresa was appropriated as a printer’s mark by the Francesci printers in Venice during the 1570s, with a motto Ducibus his prospera quaeque (‘With these leaders all good fortune follows’) and the label ‘REGINA VIRTUS’ or ‘VIRTVS ET FORTVNA’ inscribed along the gunwale of the ship. Among the books which they printed was one of the most influentual works in the history of European architecture, Palladio’s Quattro libri dell’Architettura (Venice, 1570), a book which we now know that Seton owned, and it may well have been this copy which supplied the picture on which he modelled his emblem.43 (Fig. 5.29) What we do not find, however, in any of these sources or versions of the Virtus and Fortuna emblem is any mention of the famous pilot of the Argonauts, but his embarkation on board deserves some investigation, and perhaps the first thing to recognise is that the new motto ‘Let Tiphys be Virtue’, refers to this very substitution. The new motto is notably self-reflexive; indeed it would only be intelligible to a reader who had prior knowledge of the source on which it is based. This substitution of the named pilot of the Argonauts for the abstract personification of Virtus was almost certainly prompted by something which Seton would have read in Virgil, for in his famous Fourth Eclogue Virgil addresses a divine child who will restore the golden age; this, however, will only come about once he has read about the glorious deeds of his forefathers: ‘et quae sit poteris cognoscere virtus’ (‘and you will be able to know what virtue is’, 4.27). Only then will the new Golden Age arrive, ‘Alter erit tum Tiphys, et altera quae vehat Argo / Delectas heroas’ (‘A second Tiphys shall then arise, and a second Argo to carry chosen heroes’). There can surely be little doubt that it was this reference to Tiphys, pilot of the Argonauts, as the leading exemplar of ‘Virtus’ in Virgil’s most famous Eclogue that suggested his substitution for her in the motto that heads the Virtus et Fortuna emblem at Pinkie. Seton’s interest in the legend of Jason and the Argonauts is, in fact, suggested by his ownership of an edition of the Argonautica of Apollonius of Rhodes.44 It is, moreover, the location of this in Virgil’s celebrated Fourth Eclogue that supports the case 42

43 44

Among the many applications of this emblematic topos is the Nuremberg programme studied by Sabine Mödersheim, ‘Duce virtute, comite fortuna. Das emblematische Programm des Goldenen Saals im Nürnberger Rathaus’, in Die Domänen des Emblems, ed. G. Strasser and M. Wade (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2004), pp. 29–54. Inventory no. 50. Inventory no. 76; Campbell identifies the likely edition, Apollonii Rhodii Argonauticon libri iiii. Scholia vetusta … [Graece]. Cum annotationibus Henrici Stephani ([Paris] 1574).

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Figure 5.29

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Andrea Palladio, I Quattro Libri dell’Arhitettura (Venice: Francesci, 1579), title page. © UNIVERSITY OF GLASGOW LIBRARY, DEPARTMENT OF SPECIAL COLLECTIONS

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I am advancing in this chapter for Seton’s neostoic gallery as a celebration of the newly united kingdom of Great Britain, for Virgil’s panegyric on the birth of an imperial child who would bring back the Golden Age had long been read not only as a prophecy of imperial renewal, but as forecasting the birth of Christ in a unique moment of Christian revelation vouchsafed to the pagan poet. The return of a golden age also became strongly associated in imperial iconography with the myth of Astraea, the Virgin goddess of justice, who was thought to have been exiled to the heavens following the Fall, or the end of the Golden Age in pagan mythology, but whose return would follow the r­ estoration of ­legitimate rule: ‘iam redit et Virgo, redeunt Saturnia regna’ (‘Now the Virgin returns, the reign of Saturn returns’).45 From Spenser to Dryden in English literature this was the panegyrical touchstone for praise of any new regime, imperial revival, or cultural revolution. As we saw in Chapter 4, the triumphal arch erected for Henri ii’s entry into Paris in 1549 showed the king as Typhis being guided by the twin stars Castor and Pollux.46 When King James made his ceremonial entry in London in March 1604, the triumphal arches designed by Ben Jonson and Thomas Dekker included a ‘New World Arch’ supporting the figure of Astraea, and below her the two figures of Virtue and Fortuna, and the final arch at Temple Bar had the Virgilian motto, as Jonson writes, ‘REDEANT SATURNIA REGNA. Out of Virgil, to shew that now those golden times were returned again, wherein Peace was with us so far advanced’.47 This would have helped to make the association between the Union of Crowns and the return of the golden age familiar, at least to clued-up readers who could follow the highly figurative and complex iconography of the 1504 entry. Jonson returned to the myth of Astraea in 1615 when the Twelfth Night masque at court declared its subject in its title, The Golden Age Restor’d. 45

46

47

Ecl. iv.6. The historical significance of this topic is surely too familiar to require documentation here, although Frances Yates, Astraea : The Imperial Theme in the Sixteenth Century (London: Routledge, 1975) defines exactly the context for its use at this period in England. For more on the idea of an ‘Empire of Great Britain’, see Jenny Wormald, ‘The Union of 1603’, in Roger A. Mason, ed., Scots and Britons: Scottish Political Thought and the Union of 1603 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 17–40. For the iconography of this, see Nuccio Ordine, Trois couronnes pour un roi: La devise d’Henri iii et ses mystères (Paris: Les Belles Letteres, 2011), pp. 32–35. Ronsard composed the sonnet for the similar triumphal arch in the 1571 Paris entry of Charles ix, in which the Argonauts’ pilot is identified by name (‘Thyphis’) even though on this occasion the arch showed the Argo and not its pilot, see Ordine, p. 33, and fig. 45. Graham Parry, The Golden Age Restor’d: The Culture of the Stuart Court. 1603–42 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1981), pp. 15–18.

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These implications need not be fully spelled out in the substitute Pinkie motto, though they almost certainly account for it, and it must have been Seton’s role in negotiating a constitution for the newly United Kingdom that prompted such an emblem on his ceiling. Moreover the longstanding Christian interpretation of Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue as a revelation to the pagan imperial poet of the imminent birth of Christ had repeatedly led to its association in Renaissance panegyric with modern struggles to either conserve or reestablish the true church.48 Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue has recently been shown to have ­exercised a pervasive influence in neo-Latin panegyric in Scotland in precisely this context. As L.B.T. Houghton says, It cannot be denied that by the time the seeds of Renaissance culture took root in Scotland, the exploitation of material from Virgil’s fourth Eclogue to celebrate rulers both spiritual and temporal was already an established convention of princely panegyric…. Scottish Latin poets were not only part of an international literary community, but were also fully engaged with the events, the experiences and the concerns of their own times and their own country. For these authors, the composition of Latin verse was not a retreat into an esoteric world of arcane learning remote from the squabbles and skirmishes of contemporary life: in early modern Scotland, Latin literature mattered.49 As we shall see in the following chapters, despite his Catholicism Seton had played his part in King James’s attempts to establish a unified national church in the newly united kingdom.

United Nations?

Seton’s own views on the proposed union of the two nations are expressed in the letter he wrote to Robert Cecil on 14th March 1604, writing from Dunfermline. This Union is the most at this time of all men’s hearts and speeches. I find none of any account here but glad in heart to embrace the same 48 49

See Yates, Astraea: The Imperial Theme in the Sixteenth Century (London: Routledge, 1975). L.B.T. Houghton, ‘The Scottish Fourth Eclogue’, in Neo-Latin Literature and Literary ­Culture in Early Modern Scotland, ed. Steven J. Reid and D. McOmish (Leiden: Brill, 2017), pp. 74–99 (p. 98).

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in general: some suspect the particular conditions may engender greater ­difficulties. I hope the wisdom of the Prince who is both the ground and the cornerstone of this happy Union, with your and other wise men’s assistance shall set by all such difficulties: as also I think there can be no particular condition desired for the weal of one of the nations, but it must be profitable to the other, nor nothing prejudicial to one, but must be hurtful to the other, albeit only by the distracting of their due concord which wise men will think of greater consequence, nor any particular may be subtly cozened in. This is all I can write even of our thoughts ­here-away: I doubt not there are divers apprehensions there also.50 Later that year he was in London staying in the Palace of Whitehall, where Cecil’s son William, Viscount Cranborne, arranged for him to read various state papers that clarify case law on issues of national unification. These included relations between Spain and Portugal before the war of the Portuguese succession (1580–83), when Portugal passed under the rule of the Spanish monarchy. As Jenny Wormald writes, ‘The tracts written about union, its nature and its problems naturally turned to other unions of the period for analysis and example. There were plenty to draw on’.51 He also arranged for Seton to read the Treaty of Greenwich: ‘I render you with most hearty thanks the treaty of marriage betwixt Prince Edward and Queen Mary of Scotland, with other treaties joined thereto,’ Seton writes.52 It was, as we have seen, the failure of that treaty which led to the battle of Pinkie Cleugh on the site where Seton was shortly to start building his new house. In returning these papers to Viscount Cranborne, Seton ends his letter by anticipating their next business meeting to discuss terms for the proposed treaty of Union between Scotland and England: ‘When your leisure may serve, I will be glad of some conference with you anent the propositions to be conferred on at our next meeting in the treaty of Union. – Quhythall, [i.e. Whitehall] 3 Nov. 1604.’ This was, of course, the treaty that these historical papers were of particular relevance to. On the English side it was Sir Francis Bacon who was the leading advocate of such a union, serving on the same Commission and writing his Preparation Toward the Union of the Laws of England and Scotland to show the king how 50 51 52

Calendar of the Cecil Papers in Hatfield House, 1604, vol.16 (1933),14th March. [accessed 02/02/2017]. Wormald, p. 30. G. Seton, Memoir of Alexander Seton, (Blackwood, Edinburgh 1882), pp. 64–65: Calendar of the Cecil Papers, vol. 16, (1933), see 3 Nov. 1604.

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practical it would be to adapt English law to Scots jurisprudence, or vice-versa.53 Bacon was knighted in 1603 and became Solicitor General in 1607. Moreover, he had grown up with his elder brother Anthony in his father’s house at Gorhambury near St Albans, Hertfordshire, taking possession of it in 1601 upon his brother’s death. In the following years, he restored and improved the decayed building and created an elaborate water garden on the estate: his associated essay ‘Of Gardens’ remains one of the key documents for our ­understanding of garden history at this period.54 The Long Gallery at Gorhambury – which Sir Nicholas built to impress Queen Elizabeth on her visit in 1577 – also happens to be the only other such gallery that has so far been claimed to imitate or recreate the ancient Athenian painted gallery in which Stoicism originated and from which it took its name.55 John Aubrey tells us that Gorhambury had inscriptions not only on the building, but also in its garden: ‘The garden is large, which was (no doubt) rarely [i.e., excellently] planted and kept in his Lordship’s [i.e., Sir Francis’s] time. Here is a handsome Dore, which opens into Oake-wood; over this dore in golden letters on blew are six verses’.56 This appears remarkably similar to the inscription which, as we have seen, Seton placed over his garden gateway at Pinkie. Furthermore Aubrey also describes ‘a noble Portico’ that Sir Francis added to his father’s house after he had inherited it from his brother Anthony in 1601: The Lord Chancellor [i.e., Sir Francis] made an addition of a noble Portico, which fronts the Garden to the South; opposite to every arch of this Portico, and as big as the arch, are drawn by an excellent hand (but the mischief of it is, in water-colours) curious pictures, all Emblematicall, with Motto’s under each. For example, one I remember is a ship tossed in a storm, the Motto, Alter erit tum Tiphys (‘There will then be another Tiphys’).57 The coincidence of two buildings not only containing neo-Stoic long galleries but also emblems featuring the figure of Tiphys suggests that there were not only close similarities between these two buildings but that one of them might 53 54 55 56 57

See Bacon, The Works of Sir Francis Bacon (London, 1753), pp. 137–45. Paula Henderson, ‘Sir Francis Bacon’s Water Gardens at Gorhambury’, Garden History, 20 (1992), 116–31. Elizabeth McCutcheon, Sir Nicholas Bacon’s Great House Sententiae (Honolulu: University of Hawaii, 1977). For Aubrey’s interest in architectural conservation, Bacon’s house, and its association with his interest in Freemasonry, see Schuchard, p. 747. John Aubrey, Aubrey’s Brief Lives, ed. Oliver Dick (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962), p. 123.

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even have influenced the other. Moreover Bacon’s motto for his emblem confirms the allusion to the Fourth Eclogue which I have been arguing for, since it is a direct quotation of Virgil, ‘Alter erit tum Tiphys, et altera quae vehat Argo / Delectos heroas’ (‘There will then be another Tiphys, and another Argo to carry the chosen heroes’ (Ecl. 4.34). Bacon’s interest in this classical maxim anticipating the arrival of empire is confirmed by another reference to the pilot of the Argonauts which, in 1625, opens his essay ‘Of Prophecies’.58 He begins by quoting the lines (Aeneid, iii. 97–98) in which Virgil adapts two lines from Homer in which the Greek poet appears to be forecasting the foundation of the Roman empire: ‘At domus Aeneae cunctis dominabitur oris,/ Et nati natorum, et qui nascentur ab illis’ (‘But the family of Aeneas shall rule over all the lands, even his children’s children, and those that shall be born of them’). These lines, writes Bacon, are ‘a prophecy, as it seems , of the Roman empire’. He then goes on immediately to quote a passage from Seneca’s Medea (lines 375–9), Venient annis Saecula seris, quibus Oceanus Vincula rerum laxet, et ingens Pateat tellus, Tiphisque novos Detegat orbes, nec sit terris Ultima Thule. (In far-off years, there shall come a time when the Ocean shall loosen nature’s bands, and a vast continent shall lie revealed, and Tiphys shall disclose new worlds, and Thule shall no longer be the end of the earth.) This, writes Bacon, is ‘a prophecy of the discovery of America’ – a comment which wonderfully confirms those associations between the Tiphys emblem and those more familiar emblems of imperial expansion beyond the Pillars of Hercules (‘Ne plus ultra’), or Britain (and/or Scotland) as a nation at the edge of the known world – ‘penitus toto divisos orbe Britannos’ as Virgil puts it in his First Eclogue (l.66). Seton cannot have read Bacon’s essay before painting his Tiphys emblem at Pinkie, which did not appear in the earlier editions of the Essays published in 1597 or 1612; ‘Of Prophecies’ first appeared in 1625 whereas Seton died in 1622. The two Chancellors (Bacon was appointed Lord Chancellor of England in 1618) would have known each other well, however, 58

The essay did not appear in earlier editions of the Essays published in 1597 or 1612, so ­ lexander Seton could not have read it before painting his Tiphys emblem at Pinkie; A he died in 1622.

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and it should not surprise us to find them sharing emblematic topics such as this, bearing as it does on the establishment of a new empire of Great Britain for which both men had worked. The coincidence nevertheless raises issues concerning the wider connections between Seton’s emblems at Pinkie and the architecture and decorative arts of England at this period. What if anything, we may ask, was known in England of Seton’s buildings in Scotland?

Contemporary Witnesses: Ben Jonson’s Trip to Scotland

There was, as it happens, at least one English visitor to Scotland at this time who not only met Alexander Seton but also knew about his painted ceiling at Pinkie. In July 1618 Ben Jonson walked all the way to Scotland, with an unidentified companion whose record of the journey sheds new light on what he saw and whom he met whilst there.59 Even before the manuscript of his ­companion’s record of ‘My Gossip Jonson his Foot Voyage and Mine into Scotland’ came to light in 2009, it had been well known that Jonson had visited Scotland, where his Informations by Ben Jonson to William Drummond had been recorded by Drummond; those Informations, also known as Conversations with William Drummond, record the opinions Jonson expressed to his fellow poet upon contemporary English writers including Shakespeare, Spenser, Daniel, Donne and a host of others; they have therefore earned their place for students of English literature as an unparalleled set of contemporary judgements on Elizabethan and Jacobean writers. Jonson’s visit to Scotland is important for our knowledge of the emblems at Pinkie, however, because on his return to London Jonson wrote a letter to Drummond, dated 10 May 1619, in which he tells Drummond how King James had been interested to hear of his experiences in Scotland, ‘He professed (I thank God) some Joy to see me, and is pleased to hear the purpose of my Book: To which I most earnestly solicit you for your Promise of the ­Inscriptions at Pinky.’ This is the earliest known historical record of the painted ceiling at Pinkie. Jonson’s letter goes on to request some further information and material about Scotland for his projected book. We shall return to investigate just what that book was about in due course, but for now some more immediate questions require answers. Did Jonson actually visit Pinkie House whilst he was 59

James Loxley, A. Groundwater and J. Sanders, Ben Jonson’s Walk to Scotland (Cambridge: Cambridge Univrsity Press, 2015). The identity of Jonson’s companion remains unclear, though Ian Donaldson suggests that Jonson’s journey may have had a competitive ­element, possibly to fulfill a wager, which required an independent witness and record, Donaldson, Ben Jonson: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 40.

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in Scotland? Had he seen the emblems in the Long Gallery? Did he meet the Earl of Dunfermline? Did Jonson even know that the ‘inscriptions’ he is asking for were mottoes for emblems? And did Drummond send Jonson what he had promised? Jonson would certainly have been interested in these emblems, based as many of them were on his favourite classical poet, Horace, whose satires supplied models and were indeed the guiding spirit for much of his own poetry. Jonson’s commonplace book Timber, or Discoveries abstracts the sententiae from his reading of classical authors which provided the building materials for many of his own poems; he would therefore have had little trouble recognising the sources for most of these emblems, and the way they deployed, adapted and displayed their classical commonplaces and quotations on the Pinkie ceiling: emblems are allusive. Jonson certainly knew the fashion for inventing emblems, as he uses many of them in the court masques which he devised and wrote in collaboration with Inigo Jones.60 The fact that what he asks Drummond for are not the ‘emblems’ at Pinkie, however, but the ‘inscriptions’ need not suggest that he had not actually seen them – after all, besides emblems, the ceiling also displays a large number of further inscriptions which have no pictures. Asking Drummond for ‘the Inscriptions’ at least meant that he might get the whole lot, whereas asking for just ‘emblems’ would risk omitting some of the material he might want. There is, however, no conclusive evidence that Jonson actually visited ­Pinkie or saw its Long Gallery during his time in Scotland. The Foot Voyage, it is true, identifies most of the places they stayed at, or visited, but its anonymous ­author left Scotland on 5th November 1618; he therefore makes no mention of Jonson’s visit to William Drummond at Hawthornden, and Jonson only returned to London in January the following year, leaving Edinburgh for the long walk home. As Loxley et al. note, however, the Gallery at Pinkie was replete with references that Jonson would have recognised, and ‘it seems likely that Jonson visited the Earl of Dunfermline at Pinkie when the Earl returned to his duties in Edinburgh that October’.61 The only recorded meeting between Jonson and Seton, however, was earlier in September, shortly after his arrival in Edinburgh, when the two English visitors crossed the Forth and rode to Sir George Bruce’s house at Culross, Fife, where they saw Bruce’s famous coalmine that extended under the sea and was mechanically ventilated by a horse-powered treadmill, ‘The most strange and remarkable thing that ever I saw or read of’, as Jonson’s 60

Jennifer Craig, Inventing Living Emblems: Emblem Tradition in the Masques of Ben Jonson 1605–1618. PhD. thesis, University of Glasgow, 2009; M.T. Jones-Davies, ‘Figures emblématiques dans les Masques jonsoniens’, in Emblèmes et devises au temps de la renaissance, ed. Jones-Davies (Paris: J Touzot, 1981), pp. 33–46. 61 Loxley et al., p. 194.

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companion describes it.62 Their visit to Culross followed in the footsteps of a more celebrated visitor the previous year, when King James himself had taken fright whilst underground and had to be evacuated by boat from the undersea pit-shaft.63 We do not know whether Jonson saw the decorative painting that survives in Sir George’s house, known as the ‘Palace’ following this royal visit (and still known by that name), but this contains a ceiling painted with emblems copying, and adapting, examples from the first emblem book ever to be printed in England, Geffrey Whitney’s, A Choice of Emblemes (London, 1586).64 These would certainly have interested Jonson, who spent the whole week-end in Culross as Sir George Bruce’s guest, attending church on Sunday before being taken to visit the coal mine and salt-pans on Monday, after which Sir George took them to Dunfermline, which is where they met Alexander Seton. Sir George Bruce brought us to Dunfermlin, the Queen’s town, where my gossip [Jonson] was with all grace received by my Lord Chancellor [­Seton] and my lady with her brother. We found my lady shooting at butts. Here we drank hard, with some six more, and were made burgesses.65 So, although we now know that Jonson actually met Alexander Seton, this meeting was not in Pinkie House but across the river Forth in Dunfermline, where he occupied a house close to the abbey and was expected to provide entertainment for important visitors. Jonson found the Earl and his Lady in Dunfermline ‘shooting at butts’, that is to say practising archery, in the grounds of the Palace which was Queen Anne’s Scottish residence, built on the site of the ancient Abbey. Seton’s third wife was Margaret Hay, whose initials are prominently displayed together with her husband’s in the decoration at Pinkie. Jonson and his fellow traveller were ‘made burgesses’ of Dunfermline as the customary honour which Scottish towns bestowed on distinguished visitors at this period, which normally meant inviting them to a lavish dinner with local townspeople and officials; this might well involve some sociable drinking (hence ‘Here we drank hard’). The day before the trip across the Forth (which would have been via Queensferry on a boat) Jonson had been greeted in Edinburgh by throngs of women who ‘ran to see us etc., some bringing sack and sugar, others aquavitae [i.e. whisky] and sugar [i.e. marzipan sweetbreads] etc.’, following which they were escorted to the High Cross, where they ‘on their knees drank the king’s health’ 62 Loxley et al., p. 91. 63 For this, and the emblems at Culross, see Bath, Decorative Painting, pp. 56–77. 64 Bath, Decorative Painting, pp. 56–77. 65 Loxley et al., p. 92.

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together with bailiff, aldermen and crowds of people, ‘they being so thick in the street that we could scarce pass by them, they ran in such throngs to have a sight of my gossip [i.e. Jonson]’.66 This enthusiastic reception testifies to the fact that, as Ian Donaldson says, he was already a literary celebrity even as far north as Scotland, better-known than Shakespeare.67 On their return to Edinburgh, Jonson was again ‘with all ceremony made burgess’ (p. 96); this Scottish practice corresponds to what we now call granting someone ‘the freedom of the city’.

Jonson and the Union

The warmth of Jonson’s reception owed much to the fact that it followed the king’s own visit to Scotland the previous year. His trip north seems to have enjoyed royal approval in furthering good relations between inhabitants of James’s two kingdoms, which is doubtless why the sovereign welcomed Jonson back to London so warmly on his return in a meeting which, as we have seen, prompted questions about Jonson’s book. This was the book for which he required information concerning the ‘Inscriptions at Pinky’; meeting Seton would have been particularly interesting to Jonson in this context, as it was Seton who had been in charge of arrangements for the royal visit in 1617.68 Moreover, as Ian Donaldson points out, Since the accession of James vi of Scotland to the throne of England in 1603, Jonson had been attracted by his monarch’s vision of a single kingdom uniting under the ancient name – Britain, or Britannia – that Camden’s historical scholarship had conveniently helped to popularize. It was Camden, as Jonson proudly wrote, ‘to whom my country owes / The great renown and name wherewith she goes’ (Epigrams 14.3–4).69 Camden was Jonson’s teacher at Westminster School, to whom he owed his love of classical literature, and whose chorographical description of the whole of Great Britain, written in Latin, had been published in 1586 and, proving very popular, had reappeared in five subsequent editions before, in 1610, Philemon Holland’s translation appeared. Britannia took its title from the Roman name 66 Loxley et al., pp. 89–90. 67 Ian Donaldson, p. 41. 68 Maurice Lee, ‘Seton, Alexander, first Earl of Dunfermline (1556–1622)’ odnb. [accessed 25/01/2017]. 69 Donaldson, p. 28.

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for the British Isles, of which Camden assembled the first comprehensive account, familiarising the British public with the name that came to be used, after 1603, for the newly united kingdoms. Jonson’s interest in this unification also owed something to the fact that he believed his own immediate ancestors were Scots, and that his grandfather came from Carlisle or the region of the Borders known as Annandale, on the Solway Firth, where the Johnstones were a historically powerful clan. Hence, as Donaldson says, ‘Jonson was of course – as Drummond well knew – not strictly a Sassenach but a homecoming Scot … One powerful motive for Jonson’s journey to Scotland must have been the wish to revisit his family’s homeland …’(p. 52). So what exactly was the book Jonson was writing about Scotland which required Drummond to send him information about ‘the inscriptions at Pinky’, and also, as his letter of 10th May puts it, ‘some things concerning the Loch of Lomound, touching the Government of Edinburgh; and what else you can procure me with all speed’?70 We know that he planned to write ‘a fisher or pastoral play’ based on Loch Lomond, but at the very beginning of Drummond’s Informations we are told ‘That he hath an intention to perfect an epic poem, entitled Heroologia of the worthies of [t]his country roused by fame, and was to dedicate it to his country’. I have square-bracketed the ‘t’ of ‘this’ because, as Loxley and his co-authors note, the additional letter is sanctioned by the Sibbald transcript of Drummond’s notes, ‘Modern editors,’ they write, ‘amend “this” to “his”’, following a later printed text of the ‘Conversations’.71 But ‘his’ country refers to England, whereas ‘this’ country, in the words of William Drummond writing at Hawthornden, is Scotland. The difference is crucial. Such a move erases what would have been a challenging non-­Anglocentric, indeed distinctively British, gesture – a verse history of Scotland told through the lives and deeds of its most celebrated figures, addressed to an English audience that was not always interested in, or receptive to, the national claims of those peoples with whom it was required to share the archipelago.72 If this is what Jonson aimed to write on his return from Scotland, then we have to say that the interpretation I am advancing in this chapter for the emblems 70

Ben Jonson, Works, ed. C.H. Herford and P. Simpson, 11 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925–1952), i (1925), p. 207. 71 For details of Sir Robert Sibbald and the survival of variant copies Drummond’s Informations see Donaldosn, pp. 46–47. 72 Loxley et al., p. 159.

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at Pinkie would have been wholly intelligible and sympathetic to him, and Jonson would have good reason to request his ‘most true Friend and Lover’ (as he signs himself) Drummond to send him copies of ‘the Inscriptions at Pinky’. Furthermore, as Loxley et al. note, … among the books that passed in some way between Drummond and Jonson was a copy of John Johnston’s Inscriptiones Historicae Regum Scotorum, his sequence of Latin epigrams on all the Scottish kings from Fergus i, which was published at Edinburgh in 1602. Johnston was widely admired, a friend of Justus Lipsius and, as we have seen, a collaborator with William Camden, and had contributed other topographical poems besides his encomium to Edinburgh to the 1607 edition of Britannia. His Inscriptiones was an accomplished celebration of the Stewart dynasty … John Johnstone’s Inscriptiones was followed a year later by his Heroes ex omni Historia Scotica (‘Heroes from the whole of Scottish History’) in which Jonson’s Scottish namesake celebrates a pantheon of Scottish noblemen to complement his previous celebration of its heroic monarchs; the two books were often bound together, which is how they are found in a copy signed on its title page by Jonson, and on its final leaf by Drummond.73 It is surely this volume that would have offered Jonson his model for any ‘Heroologia (“praise of heroes”) of the worthies of this country’, and its title might well explain why, if he was planning to write a similar work, Jonson’s request to Drummond should have asked specifically for the ‘inscriptions’ at Pinkie. Jonson never published this work, however, and it seems likely that, along with the pastoral play on Loch Lomond, it went up in flames in the fire which in 1623 consumed his library. We might recall, however, how well a book celebrating the historical kings and heroes of Scotland would have fulfilled the moral of the emblem painted on Seton’s ceiling, based on Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue on the restoration of a golden age, which will only come about, the poet says, once we have read about the glorious deeds of our forefathers, since only then shall we know what true virtue is, ‘Alter erit tum Tiphys, et altera quae vehat Argo / Delectas heroas’ (‘A second Tiphys shall then arise, and a second Argo to carry chosen heroes’). Jonson never published his ‘Praise of (Scottish?) Heroes’, but in 1620 Henry Holland produced a book titled Heroologia Anglica (‘Praise of English Heroes’) consisting of sixty-six plates engraved by Crispijn de Passe showing portraits of famous (Protestant) Englishmen, with Latin texts by Holland, and dedicated to King James; the book was produced in the Netherlands at de Passe’s expense 73 Loxley et al., pp. 160–61.

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and printed in Arnhem.74 Jonson’s proposed book thus had its title overtaken by a book which had no Scottish heroes, and declared by its very title its commitment to a uniquely Anglocentric Heroologia.

The ‘Inscriptions at Pinky’ and ‘Emblems on a State Bed’

So did Drummond ever send Jonson the requested ‘Inscriptions at Pinky’? We have the answer to that question in the reply which Drummond wrote to Jonson on 1st July 1619 in which, after apologising for delay arising from ‘The uncertainty of your abode’, Drummond writes that although he has already sent the description of Loch Lomond, with a map, together with details of the form of government of Edinburgh and the teaching method of the Scottish universities, which Jonson had asked for as we have seen in his letter of 10th May, he is now sending Jonson a different set of ‘inscriptions’, which are identified specifically as ‘impresas and emblems’: ‘For all the inscriptions I have been curious to find out for you, the impresas and emblems on a Bed of State, wrought and embroidered all with gold and silk by the late Queen Mary, mother to our sacred sovereign, which will embellish greatly some pages of your book.’75 So, in place of the inscriptions at Pinkie, which Jonson had asked for, what he received was a description of emblems sewn by Mary Queen of Scots on her State Bed. The letter then proceeds to list thirty of these emblems, detailing their mottoes and their motifs, and concluding, ‘The workmanship is curiously done, and above all value, and truly it may be of this piece said Materiam superabat opus’ (‘The workmanship excelled the subject matter’) – the phrase from Ovid was proverbial. Until quite recently this was all that was known of the embroidered Bed of State which Mary Queen of Scots had worked on during her final years of exile in England, and which is, in fact, listed among Mary’s goods immediately following her execution at Fotheringhay in 1587, when ‘Furniture for a bedd wrought with needle woorke of silke, silver and golde with divers devices and armes, not throughly finished’ was ordered to be delivered ‘to the Kinge of Scottes’.76 The bed remained in Scotland, and the fact that Drummond thought that its emblems would serve Ben Jonson’s purposes for his proposed 74

Antony Griffiths, The Print in Stuart Britain 1603–1689 (London: British Museum Press, 1998), pp. 52–53. 75 William Drummond, Works (Edinburgh: James Watson, 1711), p. 137, repr. Jonson, Works, ed. Herford and Simpson, i, pp. 208–10. 76 Bath, Emblems for a Queen: The Needlework of Mary Queen of Scots (London: Archetype, 2008), p. 20.

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Embroidery of Mary Queen of Scots, centrepiece of the Marian Hanging, showing a hand pruning a vine with the motto Virescit vulnere virtus (‘Virtue flourishes from its wounds’), with Mary’s monogram and the royal arms of Scotland. Oxburgh Hall, Norfolk © Victorian and Albert Museum

book about Scottish heroes suggests that the relationship between these two important suites of emblems in the decorative arts of Scotland requires further study. Many actual embroideries sewn by Mary Queen of Scots have indeed survived, nearly all of which can now be seen at Oxburgh Hall, in Norfolk, and

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the fact that many of these use emblems means that they ought to occupy a prominent position in any survey of ‘emblems in Scotland’. (Fig. 5.30) However I have already published a comprehensive study of these, in which the embroidered hangings for Mary’s State Bed are also discussed, and in this chapter all that remains to be done is to review what the connection might be between the emblems that are recorded on Mary’s Bed of State and those painted on Alexander Seton’s ceiling at Pinkie. Would Seton have known of Queen Mary’s embroideries when designing his Long Gallery? Did those emblems anticipate or reflect any of the meanings or morals that we have identified on his ceiling? Perhaps the first thing to report about what we know concerning the emblematic bed hangings is the fact that in 1617, only the year before Jonson walked to Scotland, these furnishings for the Queen of Scots’ great Bed of State had been brought out of storage and sent down to London for conservation in preparation for King James’s visit, when they were undoubtedly to be used as part of the State furnishings for the royal apartments in the Palace of Holyrood. Alexander Seton had, in 1598, been made burgess and Provost of Edinburgh and retained overall responsibility for arrangements for the royal visit, so he would therefore surely have known of this bed embroidered by Mary Queen of Scots (she was, indeed, his godmother); it would most probably have been his decision to put it on display. The official who was ordered, in 1616, to take this and three further beds to London was John Auchmouty, who was Master of the King’s Wardrobe in Scotland.77 Auchmouty was related to Seton by marriage, having wed the daughter of Seton’s brother William, so Seton was his uncle. Jonson not only met Auchmouty during his visit, but also several members of his family, having been greeted on his journey into Scotland at North Berwick by John’s brothers, Alexander and James, both of whom were also members of the royal household.78 The Auchmouty family lived at Auldhame, near Tantallon, where Jonson visited them, and it was doubtless the fact that John, the eldest brother of the three, had already performed in one of Jonson’s masques in London – The Irish Masque in 1613 – which meant that he was already on terms of some familiarity with Jonson. Following the foot voyage into Scotland, Jonson gave John Auchmouty further roles in his court masques, indeed in the antimasque entitled For the Honour of Wales performed to celebrate Charles’s assumption of his title as Prince of Wales, the roles were played by various members of the court whose names are comically interpreted as giving them Welsh identities. Thus Sir Robert Kerr is claimed to have a Welsh name that he shares with Welsh place-names such as Caernarvon or Cardiff, and Auchmouty 77

On Auchmouty and the subsequent history of the State Bed see Michael Bath and J. Craig, ‘What Happened to Mary Stuart’s Bed of State’, Emblematica. 18 (20-10), 279–88. 78 Loxley et al., p. 87.

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is claimed to be a Welsh name ‘Ap-mouth-wye of Llanmouthwye’.79 These antimasque misnomers are expressions of the English court’s satirical take on unpronounceable (to English ears) names and national identities of their Welsh and Scottish neighbours. Performed immediately following the royal visit to Scotland, the Welshmen assign Welsh identities to Scottish names in order to persuade James and his court to visit the new Principality of Wales. Such questions of national identity and linguistics had, of course, been accentuated by the presence of large numbers of Scots at court in England following the Union of the Crowns, and James’s return to his native Scotland in 1617 had as one of its primary purposes to win support for that closer union of the two nations which Chancellor Seton had been tasked with negociating. Whether Jonson had ever discussed with John Auchmouty the embroidered Bed of State that he had brought to London in 1616 we cannot tell, but when Jonson received Drummond’s letter describing all the emblems that were sewn onto its hangings, he may well have remembered something Auchmouty had mentioned about such a bed. The two men were, after all, on terms of some familiarity. We may well assume that, in order to write his letter describing all these emblems, William Drummond must have seen the actual bed. However he may not have had that pleasure, since we now know that his letter to Jonson was not the only time these bed hangings, and their emblems, had been described; moreover two of the previous descriptions are preserved in documents which Drummond himself owned. Both of these he had inherited from William Fowler, who was his maternal uncle, the same William Fowler, poet and courtier to James vi, who had devised the ceremonies for the baptism of Prince Henry at Stirling that we examined in our previous chapter. In 1583 his sister, Susannah married John Drummond, son of Robert Drummond of Carnock; William Drummond of Hawthornden was their son. As noted in Chapter 4, Fowler had travelled with the king in 1590 to bring Anne of Denmark back to Scotland and had subsequently been appointed Secretary to the queen. Following his death in 1612 Drummond inherited his papers, among which were the two documents listing the devices on Queen Mary’s Bed of State. The first of these is written and signed by Fowler himself, and its header reads, ‘5 April 1603 after the King’s departure I did observe these devyses upon the queen’s his mother’s bed’. A second list is in a different hand, unsigned and undated. Drummond’s letter to Jonson can easily be shown to have copied entries from these lists, including Fowler’s occasional comments on the political significance of some of the devices. Thus, after describing an emblem depicting an eclipse of the sun with the motto Ipsa sibi lumen quod invidet aufert (‘She takes from herself the light which she envies’), Fowler comments ‘Glancing, as I think, at Queene 79

Bath and Craig, p. 282.

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Elizabeth’. In his letter to Jonson, Drummond repeats this comment: ‘Glancing, as may appear, at Queene Elizabeth’. Fowler was alert to the political significance of some of these emblems because in the 1580s he had been recruited to act as a spy by Sir Francis Walsingham, providing him with intelligence of the Scottish queen’s activities and intentions and using documents which sometimes included what, in Emblems for a Queen, I refer to as ‘Incriminating Emblems’ observed in her personal possessions or furnishings.80 There are, however, just four emblems described on the State Bed which are not found in either of these lists.81 For these Drummond must have either found some other source of information, or seen them on the actual bed. We know that these bed hangings remained in Scotland since, a dozen years later in 1633, preparations were necessary for the next royal visit to Scotland by King Charles, and the same four beds that had been sent for refurbishment to England in 1616 were reused. It was ordered ‘For the third uncompletit bed sewed by his majesties moder that fine courtainis and coveringis be preparit sutable to the pand, and that the freyes be sewed to the pand.’ The 1633 notice identifies each of these beds as those that had been listed, as it says, ‘in the inventory producit be John Auchmouty’.82

Union of Nations and Unity of the Church

The Earl of Dunfermline’s relations with James in the years between the king’s departure to London in 1603 and his one and only return visit in 1617 had not always run smoothly, however. His falling out of favour had to do with questions of religion, and the establishment of a national church. In 1588 Seton had overcome opposition to his appointment to Scotland’s supreme civil court, the Court of Session, by taking holy communion and subscribing outwardly to the doctrines of the reformed church. Following the Union of the Crowns King James was intent on restoring bishops, on the Anglican model, a policy which Seton resisted because of his distrust and dislike of the king’s principal advisor on church matters, John Spottiswoode, Archbishop of St. Andrews, who in 1605 became a member of the Scottish Privy Council. In that year the king cancelled the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, but Seton allowed them to meet, thereby endorsing the ministers’ belief that the king had no legal right to 80 Bath, Emblems for a Queen, pp. 49–67. 81 Bath, Emblems for a Queen, nos. 7, 49, 51, 57. 82 Bath and Craig, pp. 280–81.

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prohibit the Assembly. Spottiswood urged James to dismiss Seton as Chancellor, but although this did not happen, Seton was forced to cooperate in effecting the king’s policies for Scotland. In 1610 the General Assembly was forced to accept the imposition of bishops, and in 1611 Seton had regained the king’s trust and became keeper for life of the palace and park of Holyroodhouse, which is what gave him major responsibility for planning and overseeing the royal visit of 1617. As Maurice Lee points out, on this royal visit, James’s principal public purpose was to arrange for changes in the Scottish church to bring its practices closer to those of the Church of England. The upshot was the five articles of Perth, which, to James’s surprise and irritation, met with considerable resistance as being ‘popish’ in nature. They failed to secure adoption in a general assembly held after his departure, and were pushed through only with difficulty at the assembly held in Perth in 1618.83 These issues, as we shall see, are of central importance for the emblematic programs to be studied in our next chapter. 83

Maurice Lee jun. ‘Alexander Seton: first Earl of Dunfermline’, odnb. [accessed 02/03/1917].

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Presbyterian Preaching: Hieroglyphical Paintings in Stirling

The Deathbed Descriptions of Patrick Simson

In March 1618 Patrick Simson, who was Church of Scotland minister in Stirling, lay on his deathbed. His brother Archibald, who was also a minister – of Dalkeith in Midlothian – was at his brother’s bedside when, finding that Patrick ‘had convalesced a little, to trye his memorie’ Archibald asked his brother what he could recall about some paintings that decorated his walls. In this remarkable anticipation of a modern therapeutic memory test, the dying minister of Stirling responded by not only naming seven of the animals that were painted on his walls but also expounding their emblematic meanings. These emblems we are told, in the ‘Life and Death of Master Patrick Simson’ which Archibald later wrote to commemorate his deceased brother, were copied from the Hieroglyphica of Pierio Valeriano: On Friday, the 13 of March, he began to seem somewhat to convalesce, to the great gladness and contentment of the persons who continually came to visit him. He said the grace before and after the little meat whilk he took, and his brother began to try his memory and judgement by some questions anent something whilk he read in Pierius, noted by him, and painted on his wall; and first he asked anent the Armenian whyte mouse he has painted?1 Before we find out what Patrick Simson thought about Armenian white mice, I want to express my surprise at this discovery. I think anyone who has worked on emblems in the applied arts knows how rare it is to find any contemporary description and interpretation of their emblematic meanings by early owners or witnesses, and to find an account such as this that tells us not only what the emblems meant but also where they came from is truly extraordinary. ­Simson’s statement that the paintings were based on ‘something whilk he read 1 W.K. Tweedie, ed., Select Biographies. Edited for the Wodrow Society, Chiefly from Manuscripts in the Library of the Faculty of Advocates. Vol. i (Edinburgh: Wodrow Society, 1845), pp. 6­ 3–113, ‘A True Record of the Life and Death of Master Patrick Simsone. Written by his Brother, ­Archibald Simsone, Minister at Dalkeith’ (p. 102). © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���8 | doi 10.1163/9789004364066_007

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in Pierius’ tells us that they copied material from a work entitled Hieroglyphica, sive, De sacris Aegyptiorvm literis commentarii by Pierio Valeriano (1477–1560), first published in 1556 in Basel. Unfortunately neither the seventeenth-­century manse (Fig. 6.1) nor the actual paintings have survived and for that reason they were not included in my attempt at an exhaustive listing in Renaissance Decorative Painting in Scotland.2 The historical record of these Stirling ­paintings is

Figure 6.1

Stirling, the Manse with Holy Rude kirk, as illustrated in D. MacGibbon and T. Ross, The Castellated and Domestic Architecture of Scotland (Edinburgh, 1892), vol. 5, p. 21. AUTHOR

2 Bath, Renaissance Decorative Painting in Scotland (Edinburgh: National Museums of ­Scotland Publications, 2003).

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noteworthy, however, not just because it adds one more example to the documented corpus of Scottish decorative art, but also because of what it tells us about the wider use of emblems in the religious and political culture of ­Scotland at this period.

A Hieroglyphical Bestiary

Firstly one might recall what is known about the Hieroglyphica of Pierio ­ aleriano.3 Perhaps the greatest contribution which Valeriano made in the latV er sixteenth century to the Hieroglyphica of Horapollo Nilus was to expand the narrow Egyptian lexicon of Horapollo so as to incorporate the major ­Christian iconologies. That is why in the seventeenth century it became, in Europe, the model for such Catholic successors as the Theologia Symbolica (Mainz, 1636) of Maximilianus Sandaeus, or the De Aegyptiorum Sapientia (Cologne, 1618) of Nicolas Caussin.4 In 1635 Francis Quarles put it plainly ‘To the Reader’ that ‘Before the knowledge of letters, God was known by Hieroglyphics’.5 Valeriano set the pattern for such successors by identifying the Biblical authority for many of his hieroglyphs and expounding their significance for Christian doctrine. This is undoubtedly why Valeriano’s work appealed not only to the postTridentine iconologies of the seventeenth-century Catholic Church in Europe but also, as we shall see, to the severely iconoclastic teaching and preaching of Scottish Calvinist Presbyterians such as the Simsons. Their accommodation of Egyptian ‘hieroglyphic’ wisdom to Christian doctrine also has many points of contact with what Frances Yates taught us to recognise as ‘the occult philosophy’, and the possible connections of this in Scotland with such things as ­Rosicrucianism and the Christian Cabala therefore need to be considered.6 In 1564 John Dee published his ‘Cabalistic grammar’ under the title Monas hieroglyphica and ‘hieroglyphics’ at this period suggested a connection with hermeticism and the occult more often than not.7 We should also recall that 3 First printed in 1556, translated into French in 1576 and again 1615, into Italian in 1602, it reached a total of seven Latin editions before the end of the seventeenth century. 4 See Bath, Speaking Pictures: English Emblem Books and Renaissance Culture, (London: Longman, 1994), p. 235. 5 Quarles, Emblemes (London: A.M. for Robert Allott, 1635), sig. A3v. 6 For a wider study these in Scotland see Marsha K. Schuchard, Restoring the Temple of Vision: Cabalistic Freemasonry and Stuart Culture (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2002). 7 Frances Yates, The Occult Philosophy in the Eizabethan Age (London: Routledge, 1979), pp. 83–84.

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the first Book of Valeriano’s Hieroglyphica is devoted entirely to animals, and that is why seven of the eight hieroglyphs which Patrick Simson describes as painted on his wall are zoological. So what on earth is, or was, an ‘Armenian white mouse’? And what kind of fish is the ‘purpura that lives in Mare Euxino’ (the Black Sea)? And what, for God’s sake, was the ‘cynocephalus’? Even Patrick got this one wrong, we are told, in this anticipation of a modern panel game: March 16, betuixt nyne and ten, in the verie tyme of the change of the moone, being asked, ‘What a beast wes Cynocephalus?’ Ansuered, ‘The horse quhilk wold suffer no man to ryde upon him but Alexander;’ for he thoght his brother had said Bucephalus: But hearing it wes Cynocephalus, ansuered, ‘It is a beast that, at the change of the moone, takes the falling evill, and lyes on the backe of it, stirring as if it wer at the verie paine of death; being thus commoved at the defect of a naturall light, though not the greatest. Yet are not we surpryzed and commoved at the defect of a supernaturall light in this land, quhen the glorious worke of Reformation is ecclipsed, and apostasie farre advanced!’8 In view of the rarity of such historical accounts of the way early readers interpreted emblems in the decorative arts we should, I suggest, highlight the interest of this account of an early householder who not only interprets the emblems painted on his walls, but also sometimes makes mistakes. Valeriano certainly includes Bucephalus, the famous warhorse of Alexander the Great, in his Hieroglyphica (1556, p. 29), which is doubtless where Simson must have found it, even if it was not ‘painted on his wall’.9 We might speculate that, l­ying on his sickbed, Patrick simply misheard what his brother had said: ‘I said ­“Cynocephalus”, not “Bucephalus” – where is your hearing-aid?’ (Fig. 6.2). 8 This is the text as it appears in John Row, Historie of the Kirk in Scotland, ed. B. Botfield ­(Edinburgh: Maitland Club, 1842), pp. 322–3 (hereinafter Historie). In Select Biographies, ed. Tweedie (hereinafter Biographies), we are told only that the cynocephalus lies down ‘as though it were in the pangs of death; it is moved at the defect of a natural light,’ which Patrick moralises simply by saying, ‘We are not moved at the defect of a supernatural light in this land’. 9 Alexander’s horse Bucephalus had already been used in an emblem by Barthélemy Aneau, Picta Poesis (1552), p. 106. (Fig. 2) Aneau’s emblem goes back to an adage in Erasmus, ­however, and owes nothing to Valeriano, who does not illustrate it; see Bath, Speaking Pictures, p. 63.

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Figure 6.2

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Alexander’s aged horse Bucephalus borne off on a carriage drawn by younger horses, to illustrate the emblem ‘Les vieux soient supportez par les jeunes’ (The elderly should be cared for by the young’), Barthélemy Aneau, Picta Poesis (1552), p. 106. © University of Glasgow Library, Department of Special Collections

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The Cynocephalus

As always when modern readers encounter such fabulous beasts the first thing to find out is what the ancient natural histories tell us about them. ­Cynocephalus means ‘dog’s head’, and owes its name to ancient Greek sources who supplied this name to the Egyptian jackel-headed god of the dead, Anubis. (Fig. 6.3) Horapollo identifies cynocephalus as the hieroglyph used by the ancient Egyptians to signify the rising of a new moon, which we find illustrated with a woodcut in some French editions of the Hieroglyphica that show it, as described, standing with arms raised to the moon and wearing a regal crown (Fig. 6.4).10 Its hybrid shape is not clearly indicated in this, although that was evidently what earned the cynocephalus its place in Ulysse Aldrovandi’s ­Monstrorum Historia (Bologna, 1642). (Fig. 6.5) Its hieroglyphical significance is more fully elaborated on in Conrad Gessner’s Historia Animalium (1554–1560),

Figure 6.3

10

Jackel-headed Anubis attending a mummy. Public Domain, https://commons .wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2745051. Public domain

For details of these illustrated French editions published by Jacques Kerver see Alison Adams, S. Rawles and A. Saunders, A Bibliography of French Emblem Books, 2 vols (Geneva: Droz, 1999): i. pp. 619–25, items F.328-F.330.

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Figure 6.4

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Horapollo Nilus, Hieroglyphica (Paris: Kerver, 1551), p. 30, woodcut illustration of the cynocephalus hailing the moonrise. © University of Glasgow Library, Department of Special Collections

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Figure of a cynocephalus, Ulisse Aldrovandi, Monstrorum historia (Bologna: Nicolai Tebaldini, 1642), p. 22. © University of Glasgow Library, Department of Special Collections

where we are told that no animal was more sacred to the Egyptians, and this was because the cynocephalus alerted them to the rising or rebirth of the moon when, as Patrick Simson remembered, the male cynocephalus lies on its back on the ground, lamenting the loss of the moonlight. The female cynocephalus,

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however, comes into season, and celebrates the birth of the new moon by raising her forearms to the heavens and, with a crown on her head, congratulates the new moon on its rebirth, whereupon the moon begins to grow brighter, as if that gesticulation was pleasing to God.11 We should note how it was Valeriano’s emphasis on the sacredness of this hieroglyph, with its celebration of heavenly light emerging out of darkness, that sanctions his particular interpretation of it. As painted on Simson’s wall in Scotland this animal, we are told, was an emblem of true believers’ dismay at the loss of the light of revelation in the kingdom of Scotland, which the reformation of the church had vouchsafed, or as he puts it: ‘the defect of a supernaturall light in this land, quhen the glorious worke of Reformation is ecclipsed, and apostasie farre advanced!’ As we shall see, this is not the only one of these emblems to celebrate the light of revealed (i.e. reformed) religion. And if we want to know what this dog-headed baboon looked like on the wall of Patrick Simson’s manse in Stirling, we might look at the woodcuts which illustrate both a male and a female cynocephalus on pp. 45–46 of Valeriano’s 1556 Hieroglyphica, where we see the male lying on its back in ­despair at the moon’s disappearance (Fig. 6.6), and the female leaping up to celebrate its r­eappearance. (Fig. 6.7) Simson’s interpretation of this hieroglyph gives it both a sectarian and a national application which reflects his (and his brother’s) view of the contemporary state of the reformed church in ­Scotland: it is not only doctrinal but also political. Finally we might note that the actual timing of this question, on March 16th 1618, was ‘in the verie tyme of the change of the moone’ – clearly the Egyptians were not alone in believing that their hieroglyphical emblems had divine sanction and cosmological force.

11

Edward Topsell’s description in his History of Four-footed Beasts (1607, repr. 1658) translates Gessner, whose account follows Valeriano’s closely: ‘The reason why the Egyptians do nourish them among their hallowed things is, that by them they may know the conjunction betwixt the Sun and Moon; because the nature of this beast is, to have a kind of feeling of that conjunction, for after that these two signs meet, the male Baboun will neither look up nor eat, but cast his eyes to the ground, as it were lamenting the ravishment of the Moon with disdainful passion: In like manner the female, who moreover, at that time sendeth blood out of her womb of conception: w ­ hereupon the Egyptians signifie by a Baboun the Moon, the rising of the Moon, by his standing upright holding his hands up toward heaven, and wearing a crown on his head, because with such gestures doth that beast congratulate her first appearance. (Topsell 1658, p. 9)’

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Figure 6.6 The male Cynocephalus lying in despair at the moon’s disappearance, Pierio Valeriano, Hieroglyphica (1556), p. 45. © University of Glasgow Library, Department of Special Collections

Figure 6.7 Female Cynocephalus leaping up to celebrate the moon’s reappearance, Pierio Valeriano, Hieroglyphica (1556), p. 46. © University of Glasgow Library, Department of Special Collections



The Armenian Mouse and Other Animals

As for the ‘Armenian whyte mouse’ which was the first of Archibald Simson’s therapy questions to his dying brother, we learn that to the question ‘What is its meaning?’ Patrick answered, ‘The hunters can find no means to take it; but when it is seeking its meat they fill the hole of her entry by dirt and filth; and she will rather expone (“expose”) herself to the hunters’ hound than defile her selfe with filthines. Such a mouse wes Daniel, the three children, and Eliezer.’ For the application of this moral we are told, ‘He remembered it ilk (“every”) night, and in the morning applyed it to his brother, Archibald, and said they made the Armenian mouse of him’ (Biographies, p. 102). Valeriano (1556, p. 100) identifies a species of white mouse native to Armenia as an ­emblem of intaminata munditia (‘unstained cleanliness’) precisely because of its habit of enduring p ­ ersecution rather than defilement. Its biblical exemplars – ­Daniel, the three children (Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego), and Eliezer – are Patrick S­ imson’s suggestions, not Valeriano’s, and he moralises the emblem by applying it to to his brother’s own situation, an allusion which makes no immediate sense but which will become clearer as we learn more about both brothers’ attitude towards what they saw as the pollution of the

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nascent ­Presbyterian church of Scotland by King James’s imposition of bishops.12 Valeriano’s A ­ rmenian white mouse is unillustrated, though we do find in the illustrated Kerver editions of Horapollo some of the creatures that are unillustrated by Valeriano; whether Simson used any of these for his murals is impossible to say, though it seems not unlikely. As for the marine shellfish known as ‘The Purpura, that lives in the Mare Euxino’ we are told that ‘if the fischers strike it on the head, it renders out all its blood, and it is excellent litt (“dye”); if it be stricken in any other part, it is all confused, dieth, and does no good. There is a wisdome in dealing with sinners to bring them to conversion, but by indiscreit dealing with them they are lost, God dishonored, and our travell is spent in vaine.’ (Historie, p. 233) The moral is, again, a matter of religious conversion, which has immediate relevance to Simson’s vocation. Other beasts whose hieroglyphical meanings were figured in these murals are more familiar. They include the Salamander, which Archibald in his ‘Life and Death of Master Patrick Simson’ recalls his brother being reminded of ‘When he put on his cloathes’. Patrick remarked on how ‘The feet of it [i.e. the salamander] are as cold as ice, and they would quench coals of fire whereupon they trode,’ and it was evidently this characteristic which came to mind each morning as he searched for his stockings in Stirling. Most familiar in the ­sixteenth century as the device of François i, this amphibian that was thought to extinguish fire by its coolness is here interpreted as a reminder that ‘our affections sould [sic.] be cold towards lusts, and so they sould be quenched’ (Historie, p. 233). Illustrated editions of Horapollo show the cold-footed firebreathing salamander standing amidst the flames. (Fig. 6.8) And ‘Speaking of the crane, whilk keeps watch by keeping a stone in her one foot to hold her watching, he said, “Should we not watch and pray that we enter not into temptation?”’ (Biographies, p. 104, cf. History, p. 233). The emblem of the vigilant crane that guards its sleeping companions by holding up a stone in one claw, which will awaken it with a clatter if it falls, is commonplace. Equally familiar from medieval bestiaries, from Valeriano, and from emblem books is the serpent-eating stag: ‘The Hart by his breath suckes the serpent out of his hole:

12

John Row in his Historie offers a somewhat different account of this opening question, “What meant the Armenian Whyte Mouse?’ Ansuered, ‘The hunters can find no meanes to take it; but quhen it is seeking its meate, fyles the hole of her entrie by dirt and filth; knowing that she will rather expose her selfe to the hunters’ hand than defyle her selfe with filthines! Such a mouse wes Daniel, the Thrie Children, and Eleazar; such a mouse sould everie Christian be, quho sould choose affliction rather nor sin.’ (p. 322).

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Figure 6.8

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The salamander extinguishing flames with its cold feet, Claude Paradin, Devises heroïques (Lyon: de Tournes, 1567) p. 16. © University of Glasgow Library, Department of Special Collections

So, sin by the Spirit is brought out of us’ (Historie, p. 233).13 Compared to such obscure creatures as the cynocephalus, or the Armenian white mouse, these familiar emblems might have earned him no bonus marks, though we are told, ‘being asked how he remembered all these things, he answered, He never spent his thoughts upon any other thing but his calling’ (Biographies, p. 105). That application to his parochial vocation was evidently the orientation of all these emblems painted on the walls of this seventeenth-century manse.

Latin Learning: The Candle that Burns at Both Ends

More impressive, perhaps, were those questions to which the Stirling minister gave his answers in Latin (or once, in answer to a question about church 13

For the serpent-eating stag see Bath, The Image of the Stag (Baden Baden: Koerner, 1992), pp. 237–74.

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­festivals, in Greek). Thus when asked ‘anent the hawk, he answered, “Solus inter aves accipiter fertur recto cursu sursum.”’ He spoke this in Latine. ‘The hawk only, among all fowles, flies by a right and straight course upward. The Lord make us not to imitate her fierceness, bot her straight course to heaven, and not walk in circular and oblique courses.’ The emblem, and its moral, are based on Valeriano’s hieroglyph under the heading Sublimitas (‘Loftiness’) which is the hawk, Latin accipiter. Any surprise we might have at Simson’s launch into Latin as he lay on his deathbed might be tempered by what we recall Archibald telling us about this whole exercise in iconology being based on ‘questions anent something whilk he read in Pierius’, and that this was as much a test of verbal as of visual memory is suggested by one of the most engaging moments in this domestic narrative, when immediately following Patrick’s lapse into Latin on the significance of the hawk, we read, ‘Thirdly, asked anent a torch painted on the window, his wife answered in Latine, “Aliam viam nescio,” at whilk he smyled, and was blyth she had so much Latine.’ We certainly need to recognise the strongly Latinate, humanist basis of the Calvinist theology which underpins this domestic episode in seventeenthcentury Scotland, even if Mrs Simson’s Latin was limited to the few phrases her husband might have muttered as she was cleaning the windows.14 We should also note that this emblem, which is not zoological, is the only one whose location in the building is specified. The candle that burns upwards whichever end is lit is interpreted as a sign that ‘Christians’ hearts sould be heaven-ward; both in prosperitie and adversitie, love and zeal sould kyth.’ ­(Historie, p. 233) Its placement in the window of this minister who ‘never spent his thoughts upon any other thing but his calling’ is surely significant, for it is the true light of the gospel which must shine out of his manse upon the surrounding parish of Stirling, whose parishioners, we are told, hastened to visit 14

The use of Latin by Scottish Presbyterians may surprise us in a period when the Catholic church had so strongly resisted vernacular translations of the Bible and Latin remained the language of the Mass, so that as Françoise Waquet says, ‘As the language of the Catholic Church, Latin came to be identified with Catholicism itself.’ However, as she reminds us, Latin also played a major role in the training of ministers, and Calvin composed his Instututio religionis christianae (1536) and conducted most of his correspondence in L­ atin; it remained the language of international communication and learning well into the ­eighteenth century for most Christian denominations. See Waquet, Le Latin ou l’empire du signe (Paris, 1998), trans. John Howe, Latin or the Empire of a Sign (London: Verso, 2001), pp. 41–79.

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him on his deathbed and hear him expound the biblical truths which were presumably committed to memory as preaching aids upon his walls.15 The art of holy dying was widely professed by Protestants at this time, which is certainly why this narrative of Patrick Simson’s demise as recorded by his brother found its way into histories of the Reformed church in Scotland that were ­already ­being written. The idea that this emblem of the candle lit at both ends might indeed stand as a summation of Patrick Simson’s vocation is strongly suggested by the use which Archibald made of it in the funeral eulogy which he wrote following his brother’s death: we can find that sermon preserved as an appendix or supplement to the ‘Life and Death’ of his brother among the Wodrow papers in the National Library of Scotland, which were reprinted in the nineteenth century by the Wodrow Society.16 Patrick died on 31 March, 1618, and Archibald’s sermon records that it was ‘Preached in private, on occasion of the death of Master Patrick Simson, because the author was prohibited by the bishops from publicly exercising his ministry.’ The sermon takes as its text John, 5:35: ‘He was a burning and shining candle, and his light ye would have rejoyced for a season.’ Its subject is Patrick’s witness to the light of revealed religion: ‘Ministers are called candles; for as candles serve when neither sun nor moon shynes, so ministers must carry light to such as never admitted the truth of God.’ (Biographies, p. 118) The sermon might be characterised as a virtuoso rhetorical exploration of the doctrinal significance of its biblical emblem, one variant of which, as we have seen, was painted in the window of his late brother’s dwelling house.

Archibald Simpson’s Hieroglyphica Animalium (1622–1624)

His brother’s funeral was not the last time, however, that we find Archibald returning to the emblems that were painted on his brother ‘s walls. In 1622, four years after Patrick’s death, the first volume of Archibald Simson’s H ­ ieroglyphica Animalium was published in Edinburgh by Thomas Finlason. (Fig. 6.9) Describing itself on its title page as hieroglyphs of the animals, birds, reptiles, 15

16

On the layout and architecture of the Stirling manse, see John G. Harrison, ‘Houses in Early Modern Stirling: Some Documentary Evidence’, Review of Scottish Culture 25 (2013), 42–59 (p. 43). The Society, named after Robert Wodrow (1679–1734) who was Professor of Divinity at Glasgow University, was devoted to research into the history of the Church of Scotland, on the subject of which Wodrow had collected a large number of historical documents, including these.

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Figure 6.9

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Archibald Simson, Hieroglyphica Animalium (Edinburgh: Thomas Finlason, 1622), title page. © University of Glasgow Library, Department of Special Collections

insects, plants, metals and precious stones which are to be found in holy scriptures, the book is divided into four parts, published in successive years up to 1624, each with a new title page, a new preface and dedications. Written in

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Latin, it includes all of the animals, except the Salamander, that were painted in the Stirling manse. Book i is devoted to mammals and includes entries for the cynocephalus, the white mouse of Armenia and the serpent-eating stag. It also includes an entry for Bucephalus, in the chapter on the horse, where ­Archibald moralises Alexander’s steed that would carry no rider except the emperor as an emblem of the Christian, Equus Regius Christianus, who will allow no-one to rule his conscience other than Christ. Patrick Simson’s supposition that this was what his brother was referring to when he questioned him about the dogshead cynocephalus is good evidence that one of his wall paintings in S­ tirling did indeed show the faithful imperial horse, and if so it probably had the same significance. It was, after all, that fundamental doctrine concerning the individual conscience of the believer that motivated the ­Simsons’ implacable ­opposition to bishops. Book ii of Hieroglyphica Animalium, published 1623, has hieroglyphs of birds, including the hawk that alone among birds flies straight rather than indirectly up to heaven. Here too we find the crane, whose vigilance finds biblical sanction in the text from Matthew 26: 41, ‘Vigilate et orate ait Dominus’. (‘Watch and pray, that ye enter not into temptation: the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak’ as the Authorised Version has it.) For the purpura shellfish that only yields its dye colour when struck in the right place the reader has to await Book iii in 1623, which is dedicated to Hieroglyphica Nautalium (‘Marine Hieroglyphs’), and the moral is that ministers of religion who impose excessive punishment on sinners inflict a mortal wound and may thus have wasted their time, whereas if they mix it with milder atonement they may save the sinner’s soul. The moral is emphasised in a sidenote: ‘Discretio Pastoris in admonitionibus’ (‘Discretion of Pastors in reproofs’). Simson’s Hieroglyphica Animalium is not a book that has attracted much attention since the seventeenth century: it has never been reprinted or translated, and has not attracted the attention of modern students of emblems and emblem books. Walter Scott, it is true, knew of it since in Waverley we are told that Baron Bradwardine’s device is the bear. The Baron observed, he could not deny that ‘the Bear, though allowed by heralds as a most honorable ordinary, had, nevertheless, somewhat fierce, churlish, and morose in his disposition, (as might be read in ­Archibald Simson, pastor of Dalkeith’s Hieroglyphica Animalium)… By the early nineteenth century it was a book likely to be known, if at all, only to Scottish antiquarians. The discovery that these paintings of hieroglyphs in his brother’s house were nearly all replicated in Archibald Simson’s book,

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however, prompts us to ask just what role each brother might have played in their invention and application: clearly the two brothers had a shared i­ nterest in the Hieroglyphica, which almost certainly goes back to their education as the sons of Andrew Simson, a graduate of St Andrews University who between 1550 and 1560 was master of the school in Perth where, we are told, … he taught Latin with applause. He had sometimes upwards of three hundred boys in his charge, among whom were included the sons of some of the principal nobility and gentry of Scotland, and from his school there proceeded many of those who subsequently became distinguished in the Reformation of the Church in Scotland. (Life, p. 65) In 1564 he became minister, and master of the grammar school, in Dunbar, writing a Latin grammar book, Rudimenta Grammatices, which remained a standard textbook in Scotland. This is undoubtedly why so many of Andrew Simson’s offspring not only became ministers of the Church but also wrote works in prose and verse that make a notable contribution to the vigorous tradition of Scottish neo-Latin writing. Another of his sons, William, who ­became minister of Dunbarton, published a book De Accentibus Hebraicis which has been described as ‘the first work on Hebrew literature which appeared in ­Scotland’ (Life, p. 66). Although we might assume that a knowledge of Hebrew would be primarily required of Protestant ministers as a means of supporting their insistence on the primacy of the scriptures in Christian doctrine, we should perhaps bear in mind that the rapid growth of Hebrew learning in Christian cultures of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries often owed more to Cabalism than it did to what we might think of as biblical philology or the Higher Criticism. The Christian Cabalist tradition in the early-modern period involved elaborate manipulations of the Hebrew alphabet to arrive at hidden mysteries veiled in the name of God and the ranks of Old Testament angels. Archibald, in addition to his Hieroglyphica Animalium which we have already looked at, wrote various other works whose titles – Seven Penitentiall Psalmes, Christ’s Seven Words on the Crosse, A Sacred Septenarie, and Of the Creation – suggest an obsession with the number seven; that preoccupation with mathematics and number symbolism is also characteristic of the occult philosophy. His history of the Scottish Church, Annales Ecclesiasticæ Scotorum, a tempore Reformationis ad obitum Jacobi Regis vi (‘Annals of the Church of Scotland, from the time of the Reformation up to the death of King James vi’) survives in manuscript, and we might well wonder why a church that had existed for so few years should have taken pains to preserve so many records of its history.

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Presbyterian Church History

The reason why the Reformed church in Scotland was obsessed with its own history, however, is primarily because of its claim to have restored the true faith after centuries of Roman usurpation. The story of its founders, saints and ­martyrs was therefore seen as critical – indeed no other historical event had more importance than the survival of God’s church on earth, which is why the story of Patrick Simson’s exemplary death is preserved, as we have seen, in two types of document, one historical the other biographical, neither of which is the kind of document in which we would normally expect to find evidence of art history. The impulse to establish a quasi-canonical pantheon of the ­Reformed church’s pioneers was, indeed, supported by Théodore de Bèze, whose Icones, id est Veræ Imagines Virorum Doctrina Simul et Pietate I­ llustrium in 1580 p ­ resented a portrait gallery of the leading Reformers, many of them Scots. (Fig. 6.10) As we noted in Chapter 3, it was dedicated to James vi of ­Scotland, whose portrait stands at their head to signal the leading role ­Scotland had played in that Reformation. In the early seventeenth century, however, confidence in the achievements of the reformed church in Scotland had become open to question as a result of the growing division between its Presbyterian and Episcopalian wings. The Simsons had played a significant role in disagreements about whether the doctrines of reformed church required the oversight of bishops or whether, ­accepting Calvin’s teaching about the priesthood of all believers, questions of doctrine and belief were a matter of individual conscience, under the guidance only of parish ministers subject to the authority of the church’s General Assembly. King James’s attempt to maintain some control over the national church by appointing bishops began in the 1580s, though it won little support from the powerful Presbyterian wing of the church, and indeed in 1596, as Maurice Lee notes, the Presbyterian historian David Calderwood expressed his satisfaction that, ‘The Kirk of Scotland was now come to her perfection’.17 However, in 1600 James appointed his first bishops, and his policy of instituting diocesan episcopacy on the Anglican model in Scotland gained new ground following the Union of Crowns in 1603. It was at the Hampton Court Conference in 1604 that James famously declared ‘No bishop, no king’, and with the later liturgical innovations associated with Archbishop Laud and, in 1637, the imposition of 17

Maurice Lee, ‘James vi and the Revival of Episcopacy in Scotland. 1596–1600’, in Lee, The ‘Inevitable’ Union (East Linton: Tuckwell, 2003), p. 81, citing D. Calderwood, The History of the Kirk of Scotland, ed. T. Thomson, 8 vols (Edinburgh: Wodrow Society, 1842–49), v, 387.

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Théodore de Bèze, Icones, id est Veræ Imagines Virorum Doctrina Simul et Pietate Illustrium (Geneva: Jean de Laon, 1580), title page. © University of Glasgow Library, Department of Special Collections

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the Anglican prayer book on Scottish congregations, this eventually led to the signing of the National Covenant and the outbreak of the so-called ‘Bishops Wars’ which initiated the wars of the Three Kingdoms, also known south of the border as the English Civil Wars. The issues raised in Simson’s deathbed lessons in art history are therefore among the most significant issues to have played their part in the modern history of the British Isles. These momentous developments might not have been foreseen at the time Patrick Simson painted his murals, but they are already foreshadowed in what we know about Simson’s ecclesiastical principles and motives for painting them. On graduating from St Andrews he had spent time in England improving his knowledge of Greek and of ancient history. We learn that, Being inquyred why he stayed so much on those things, and read so many pagan writers? Answered ‘I purpose to dedicat to the building of the Lord’s tabernacle all the jewells and gold whilk I shall borrow from the Egyptians: we do not lightlie [sic.] pearls though gathered out of a dung-hill. (Historie, p. 422) The justification is noteworthy in the present context not simply because of its reference to the Egyptians, but also because its allusion is to Exodus 12:35, ‘And the children of Israel did according to the word of Moses; and they borrowed of the Egyptians jewels of silver, and jewels of gold, and raiment.’ This became the standard apology for using the Hieroglyphica of Horapollo for religious purposes; we find it used thus, for instance, by Jesuit Henry Hawkins in his ‘Preface’ to Partheneia Sacra in 1633.18 Hawkins explains that his emblem book adapts the prophane instruments of ‘Devises, consisting of Impreses, and Mottoes, Characters, Essays, Emblems and Poesies … once so sacred to the prophane deities’ to the higher praise of the Virgin Mary and the heavenly saints, imitating in this the Israelites who, when they left Egypt, consecrated the vessels of gold and silver ‘to a better use’ (Hawkins 1633, sig. A3). St. Augustine had ­argued in De Doctrina Christiana that the use to which the Israelites put the valuables which they carried out of Egypt was an appropriate metaphor for the use which Christians should make of pagan learning: such an apology was always likely to appeal to humanists, whether of a Catholic or a Protestant persuasion. It is precisely the Egyptian provenance of the hieroglyphics of ­Horapollo that made them prima facie a leading example of such pagan learning that might be put to a better use. 18

See Bath, Speaking Pictures, p. 236.

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Although the Simsons’ father was a strong Presbyterian, their mother, née Violet Adamson, was in fact sister to the Archbishop of St Andrews, Patrick ­Adamson, and in 1584 King James decreed that all ministers should ­acknowledge the authority of their Archbishop or else lose their stipends. Patrick ­Simson not only refused, but later himself turned down the offer of a bishopric and even rejected a yearly pension which the court had offered, we are told, ‘to induce him to be silent at least, seeing he had many children and ill-provided’ (Historie, p. 423). Simson used his scholarly researches in the classical languages to write a history of the church during its first thousand years, under the title The History of the First Ten Persecutions (Edinburgh, 1613–1616). In 1606 his ‘Protestation’ against the Parliament held in Perth in the summer of that year expresses most strongly the Presbyterian objections to the appointment of bishops in the Scottish kirk. Addressed to King James directly, Patrick reminds him that God has set the king to … maintaine and advance by your autoritie that Kirk which the Lord hath fashioned by the uncounterfitted work of his owne new creation … not that ye should presume to fashion and shape a new portraiteur of a kirk, and a new forme of divyne service, which God in his word hath not ­allowed; because that were to extend your authoritie farther than the calling ye have of God doeth permit. (Historie, p. 425) In the light of this opposition we might well be surprised to find that his brother Archibald’s Hieroglyphica Animalum is dedicated to King James’s influential Chancellor, Alexander Seton, Earl of Dunfermline, for Seton was not only ­responsible on the Scottish side for negotiating the proposed union of the two nations, as noted in our previous chapter, but was widely known to be a Roman Catholic.

Simpson’s Catholic Dedicatee

Archibald Simson’s book of zoological hieroglyphs was nevertheless dedicated to the immortal memory of Alexander Seton, who died in June 1622, its date of publication, and the preliminaries of the book insist that the death of ­‘Scotland’s most noble and erudite Chancellor’ was the book’s occasion. ­Simson tells us in his Preface to the Reader (‘Studioso Lectori’) that he happened to create these learned writings ‘with the most noble Chancellor, who is now in heaven, and to whom the hieroglyphics of Pierius were wonderfully

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pleasing, and extracted from the priestly writing of the Egyptians’, adding that he did so because they would be useful not only to himself but to the future of the whole Church.19 The book begins with a verse ‘Musarum Lachrimæ de Obitu Cancellarii’ (‘Tears of the Muses for the Death of the Chancellor’) in which each of the nine muses laments the death of Seton as a Scottish Mæcenas and patron of all the arts, ending with Rhetoric which, Polyhymnia says, nature fashioned and art paints, with added dialogue and wit as can be seen at Seton’s Tusculan house at Pinkie. It is striking that this obituary celebration should identify this particular building amongst all his other achievements, and moreover that the Muse should characterise it as not so much as an achievement in ­architecture as a triumph of rhetoric: ‘Rhetora quem finxit mater Natura, ita pinxit/ Ars, addens voces, ingeniumque sagax. / In Tusculano PINKÆI ­vivere visum, / Non mirum est igitur cum CICERONE loqui’ (‘That orator which Mother Nature fashioned, / art thus painted, and a wise temperament, adding voices./ He seems to live in Tusculan Pinkie/ It is no wonder therefore to speak with Cicero.’). This is only the second historical reference to the painted gallery at Pinkie, following Ben Jonson’s request to William Drummond that we witnessed in our preceding chapter, and we might remember that Seton himself characterised his building as a Plinian ‘villa suburbana’. The terms used by Polyhymnia to characterise the building will repay equally careful attention, for her characterisation of it as ‘Tusculan’ holds analogous connotations for the classically educated reader, alluding to the Tusculan Disputations written by Cicero in which the Roman orator and lawyer aimed to popularise Stoic philosophy. They were so called as they were reportedly written at his villa in Tusculum, following the death of his daughter, Tullia, in childbirth – her loss afflicted Cicero to such a degree that he abandoned all public business and, leaving the city, retired to his country house near Antium where he devoted himself to philosophical studies. The Tusculan Disputations debate five topics, all of which declare their adherence to Stoical philosophy in successive Books: ‘On The Contempt of Death’; ‘On Bearing Pain’; ‘On Grief of Mind’; ‘On other Perturbations of the Mind’; ‘Whether Virtue Alone be Sufficient for a Happy Life’. The Disputations begin thus: 19

‘Mihi contingit cum Cancellario dignissimo et eruditissimo Domino Alexandro Setonio, qui nunc in cœlis est, de scientiis verba facere; cui Pierii hieroglyphica de scientiis verba facere; cui hæc ex Sacerdotum Ægyptiorum sacri extraxit, Ego vero huiusmodi negotio non invitus animum applicabam; cum non mihi soli, sed toti Ecclesiæ utile futurum internoscerem.’ (fol. 5v).

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At a time when I had entirely, or to a great degree, released myself from my labours as an advocate, and from my duties as a senator, I had ­recourse again, Brutus, principally by your advice, to those studies which never had been out of my mind, although neglected at times, and which after a long interval I resumed: and now since the principles and rules of all arts which relate to living well depend on the study of wisdom, which is called philosophy, I have thought it an employment worthy of me to illustrate them in the Latin tongue … In Section 4 Cicero continues, ‘… I have so diligently applied myself to this pursuit that I have already ventured to have a school like the Greeks. And lately when you left us, having many of my friends about me, I attempted at my ­Tusculan villa what I could do in that way …. and so I have compiled the scholæ, as the Greeks call them, of five days, in as many books.’ Hence the association of Tusculum with the name of Cicero, the idea of Stoic withdrawal and the application of philosophy to the difficulties of life in a country setting, all of which meshes with what we have already learned of Seton and his concerns.20 Polyhymnia’s contemporary characterisation of the house therefore supports the strongly Neostoic interpretation of its emblems which I offered in the preceding chapter, whilst her insistence that it is a rhetorical space which nature fashions and art paints, with added dialogue and wit, strongly suggests that she is referring to the bimedial, emblematic painting of the Long Gallery itself. We can hardly doubt from this densely allusive description that, for a contemporary witness such as Archibald Simson, the house at Pinkie was characterised by and identified with its Long Gallery and its emblems.21 So how, we may ask, did this committed Calvinist come to publish his book commemorating Scotland’s Catholic Chancellor in the very year of Seton’s death? And why might such a strong Calvinist have assured his readers that this worshipper of the Roman whore of Babylon (as Protestants habitually characterised the Catholic church) was now in heaven (‘Alexandro Setonio, qui nunc in cœlo est’, sig. 5v)? The answer, as noted in our preceding chapter, is that, following the Union of Crowns, when the King moved to London, Seton became one of King James’s leading informants on affairs in Scotland and it was Seton’s situation as a known Catholic, as historian Maurice Lee 20 21

I am indebted to Jane Stevenson for explaining the Tusculan allusion, and for help with these translations. On the close relationship between decorative painting and the art of rhetoric at this ­period in Scotland see Bath, Renaissance Decorative Painting, pp. 169–83.

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has shown most c­ onvincingly, which distanced him from the growing differences which were dividing the reformed church.22 The Scottish Chancellor was keenly aware of the effect that the appointment of bishops was having on Scottish opinion, which now tended to see it not merely as a matter of church doctrine but rather as a political issue involving the imposition of the English system of church governance on Scotland. The General Assembly of the Church of ­Scotland was, and still is, the place where issues of doctrine and governance of the reformed church are decided, and it was in 1605 that the anti-episcopalians received the strongest indication that Seton was on their side. By law the Assembly should have met annually, although it was the king who determined the exact time and place of its meeting, and this allowed the bishops to persuade him, in 1604, to postpone it. The radical synod of Fife nevertheless declared that the assembly should meet without royal assent, and in June 1605 Seton appeared to support their decision, advising the king not to prosecute them for assembling in Aberdeen. However they disobeyed the privy council’s instructions by setting the date for another meeting, which angered the king and gave Archbishop Spottiswoode the chance he was looking for ‘to procure the Chancellor his disgrace, as suspected to be an enemy to the estate of the bishops’, as John Forbes writes in his account of the affair.23 Seton’s support for the Presbyterians thus brought him into royal disfavour but won him their respect and, as Maurice Lee puts it, ‘the somewhat paradoxical effect of his troubles was to make him much less unpopular with the Presbyterian elements in S­ cottish society, both inside the church and out, because they perceived him as the enemy of their enemy, the bishops’ (p. 154). This may explain why Presbyterian Archibald S­ imson should have felt it appropriate to dedicate his Hieroglyphica Animalium to the late Catholic Scottish Chancellor. A major objective of the royal visit to Scotland in 1617 had to do with these same issues, since James hoped whilst there to pass an act of parliament assigning ultimate authority over the kirk to himself. The bill proposed that the king should decide on church matters with the advice of the archbishops, ­bishops, and a competent number of the ministry. William Laud accompanied the king on his Scottish visit. Simson had exposed himself to royal displeasure by acting as secretary to an Edinburgh meeting of clergy who resolved to present the king with their objections to this bill, but although all fifty-five ministers who attended the meeting signed their ‘Protestation’, the king was presented 22

Maurice Lee Jr., The ‘Inevitable’ Union (East Linton: Tuckwell, 2003), see esp. Chap. 9 ‘James vi’s Government of Scotland after 1603’, and Chap. 10, ‘King James’s Popish Chancellor’. 23 Lee, The ‘Inevitable’ Union, p. 153, citing John Forbes, Certaine Records touching the Estate of the Church of Scotland, ed. D. Laing (Edinburgh: Wodrow Society, 1846), p. 406.

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with a copy bearing only Simson’s signature as secretary, and royal displeasure was heaped upon his shoulders even though the parliamentary bill was withdrawn. He was summoned to appear before the Court of High Commission and deprived of his parish. In their ‘Protestation’ the ministers referred back to the proclamation of 1605, ‘when rumours of ane intendit conformitie with the Kirk of England was spread abrode: wherein your majestie sufficientlie avoydit all such suspicion; and the hearts of all honest men settled themselves in a confidence, that noe such thing sould be attempted’.24 Simson eventually admitted his guilt, and was fined before reinstatement in his parish of Dalkeith. In 1618 the king asserted his presumed authority over the church by introducing the Five Articles of Perth, which imposed what were thought to be the major articles of faith that separated Presbyterians from the Episcopalians. They were: kneeling to receive the sacraments; observing holy days; confirmation by bishops; private baptism; and private communion. Presbyterian o­ pposition to the articles was expressed in pamphlets, but Parliament accepted them in 1621 and they became the law of the land.25 Ministers who refused to accept them were stripped of their parishes or imprisoned, among whom was David Calderwood, who had been examined before the king in St Andrews in 1617 for refusing to identify the signatories to another Presbyterian ‘Remonstrance’. In 1619 Calderwood sailed to Holland, where his attack on the Five ­Articles of Perth was published in Leiden by William Brewster. (Fig. 6.11) Brewster was an English Puritan emigrant to Leiden, where he had set up as printer of religious pamphlets and, in 1619, his publication of Calderwood’s attack on the Five Articles aroused King James’s anger and a warrant for Brewster’s arrest. However in 1620 Brewster sailed on the Mayflower to Plymouth, Mass., where he became spiritual leader to the Pilgrim Fathers in the New World. In S­ cotland controversy over the Five Articles was high among the issues which led to the Covenanting movement and the outbreak of the Bishops’ Wars. In 1638, following Calderwood’s ‘Re-examination’ of them in a pamphlet (Fig. 6.12), the Five Articles were repealed by the Glasgow Assembly and in his closing years Calderwood devoted himelf to writing what becamer the standard Historie of the Kirk in Scotland, first published in an abridged form in 1646. 24 Calderwood, Historie of the Kirk of Scotland, 8 vols (Edinburgh: Wodrow Society, 1842), vii, p. 255. 25 For the Five Articles of Perth in Scottish neo-Latin literature, see Robert Cumming, ‘Andrew Melville, the “Anti-Tami-Cami-Categoria”, and the English Church’, in Steven J. Reid and D. McOmish, ed., Neo-Latin Literature and Literary Culture in Early Modern Scotland (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 163–81.

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Figure 6.11 David Calderwood, Perth Assembly, published in Leiden by William Brewster, 1619. Photo courtesy of Helen Cargill Thomson

Figure 6.12 David Calderwood, ‘A Reexamination’ of the Five Articles, published in 1636 the Articles were repealed in 1638. Photo courtesy of Helen Cargill Thomson

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Presbyterian Hieroplyphics

We might still, however, be puzzled to explain why Scottish Presbyterians such as the Simsons should have invested so much time and effort into translating Christian doctrine, as they understood it, into hieroglyphics. The belief that Egyptian wisdom had inflected or informed the learning of the ancient I­ sraelites certainly had biblical sanction, the key text being Acts 7:22, ‘And M ­ oses was learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians, and was mighty in words and in deeds’. As Arthur Williamson says, ‘The Renaissance typically r­egarded such ancient wisdom – and especially Egyptian wisdom – as embodying pristine, original and uncorrupted knowledge’.26 Moreover Scotland had long claimed a direct descent from the Pharaohs, beginning in the fourteenth century with the Scotochronicon written by Aberdeen cleric John of Fordoun, who countered the English chroniclers’ claims, going back to ­Geoffrey of Monmouth, for a British descent from the eponymous Trojan Brutus. The distinctive progenitors of the Scottish dynasty, however, were alleged to be a Greek prince named Gathelus and his wife, who was Pharoah’s daughter, named Scota. As is the way with such chronicles Scotochronicon’s origin myth got copied into the later Scottish histories, and in 1527 Hector Boece – friend of Erasmus and founder of the University of Aberdeen – was able to claim in his Scotorum Historia that Scotland had long possessed the wisdom of ancient Egypt which was encoded in the hieroglyphs. Thay usit the ritis and matteris of the Egyptianis, fra quhome thay tuk thair first beginning. In all thair secret besines, thay usit not to write with commoun letteris usit amang othir pepil, bot with sifars and figuris of beistis maid in manner of letteris; sic as thair epithatis, and superscriptioun abone thair seputuris, schawis: nochtheles, this crafty maner of writing, be quat sleuth I can not say, is perist; and yet thay have certaine letteris propir amang thaimself, quhilis was sum time vulgare and commoun.27

26

27

A.H. Williamson, ‘Number and National Consciousness: the Edinburgh Mathematicians and Scottish Political Culture at the Union of the Crowns’, in, Scots and Britons: Scottish Political Thought and the Union of 1603, ed. Roger Mason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 187–212 (p. 190). Williamson, p. 188, citing Hector Boece, History and Chronicles of Scotland, trans. J. ­Bellenden (Edinburgh: ?1540), sig, D2r, repr. Edinburgh: W. and C. Tait, 1821, pp. lviii–lix.

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As Williamson says, ‘Boece had established the “Egyptian learning” as a feature of Scottish identity, and it would certainly have a long history’ (p. 190). His description of the hieroglyphics as a ‘crafty maner of writing’ with ‘sifars and figuris of beistis maid in manner of letteris’ may suggest the associations which the ‘Egyptian learning’ assumed between hieroglyphics and what ­Frances Yates calls ‘the Cabalistic grammar’ of the Hebrew aphabet.28 In 1617, on the visit of James vi to Perth during his tour of Scotland, the town’s Provost, John Adamson, was able to greet the king by proclaiming that ‘the ancient nation of the Scots’ had descended from ‘victorious Greeks and learned E ­ gyptians’.29 Adamson was a graduate of St Andrews who had been a professor in the University of Edinburgh of which, after some years spent as a humble minister of the parish of Liberton, he later became Principal. His brother Patrick was the Archbishop of St Andrews who had been appointed in 1578 to oust the Presbyterians, and their leader was Andrew Melville. Unlike his brother, John Adamson was a close friend of Melville, whose Latin poems he collected for publication in 1620. Adamson’s Muses Welcome (1617) assembled the speeches and panegyrical poems by himself and others, including William Drummond, which had greeted the king on his visit to Scotland, a visit whose primary political objective was, as we have seen, to win the Scots round to the king’s ­Episcopalian policies for the church.30 The programme and formalities of the 1617 royal return to Scotland were, as we have noted, the responsibility of Chancellor Alexander Seton, and Adamson’s reminder to the king of the Egyptian descent of the Scottish nation, therefore, may well have been motivated by the same Presbyterian principles that lay behind the Simsons’ interest in the Hieroglyphica Animalium. The strength of this connection between a Scottish national identity and Hebraic learning is further suggested by a sermon preached at Whitehall in 1604 by John Gordon, Dean of Salisbury, ‘in presence of the Kings Maiestie’ and published the same year under the title ENΩTIKON or a sermon of the Union of Great Brittannie, in antiquitie of language, name, religion, and Kingdome ­(London: George Bishop, 1604). It is a most peculiar sermon, in which ­Gordon seeks to expound what he calls ‘the mystical significance’ of the keywords ­relating to the Union, such as ‘kingdom’, ‘city’, ‘house’ and ‘king’; but 28 Yates, Occult Philosophy, p. 83. 29 Williamson, p. 187, citing J. Adamson, The Muses Welcome (Edinburgh, 1618), p. 137. 30 For The Muses’ Welcome’ see Roger P.H. Green, ‘The King Returns: The Muses Welcome (1618)’, in Neo-Latin Literary Culture in Early Modern Scotland, ed. Reid and McOmish (Leiden: Brill), pp. 126–162; see also J. Stevenson, ‘Adulation and admonition in The Muses’ Welcome’, in D.J. Parkinson, ed., James vi and i, Literature and Scotland: Tides of Change 1567–1625 (Leuven: Peeters, 2013), 267–81.

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the peculiarity lies in the fact that all these terms are quoted in Hebrew and frequently fragmented into the hebraic letters which make them up, each of which is claimed to have an individual significance which contributes to their meaning. (Fig. 6.13) This way of proceeding is pure Christian Cabalism, and we should surely remark on the fact that the Scottish courtier whom King James himself had invited back from France to become a Dean of Salisbury in 1603 should preach a sermon in justification of the Union of the Crowns that is so clearly informed by those principles which Frances Yates taught us to characterise as ‘the occult philosophy’. James’s appointment of this leading Scottish intellectual, who had spent much of his life abroad serving successive kings of France, to an Anglican deanery has to be seen as an assertion of royal authority over the English church: precisely the kind of thing which the Simsons opposed. This is the same John Gordon whom we identified in Chapter 3 as author of the 1582 commentary on the Balet comique de la Royne and who recommended Mary Queen of Scots’ device of three crowns with the motto Manet ultima caelo (‘The last remains in heaven’) to Henri iii of France.31 In 1574 Gordon’s ­Hebrew learning had been displayed in a public disputation with the chief r­ abbi in Avignon, and in 1603 he anticipated his Whitehall sermon congratulating James on the Union of Crowns with a ‘Panegyrique’ written in both a French and an English version, the French edition published in La Rochelle and the English in London.32 There can be little doubt that the Hebrew erudition displayed in his Whitehall sermon was intended above all to impress the king, and in the ‘pulpit-occurrents’ of 28 April 1605, it is reported that ‘Deane Gordon, preaching before the kinge, is come so farre about in matter of ceremonies, out of Ezechiell and other places of the prophets, and by certain hebrue characters, and other cabalisticall collections, he hath founde out and approved the vse of the crosse cap surplis etc.’33 In 1601 King James had written to John Gordon about a monument commemorating the Gowrie Conspiracy, thanking him ‘for your virtuous and learnit discourse and advyse, sa kyindlie set doune anent the rememberance of sa vyle a conspiracie, qhuairin as we allow 31

32

33

For Gordon and Mary Queen of Scots see Bath, Emblems for a Queen, pp. 42–44, and Bath, ‘Symbols of Sovereignty: Political Emblems of Mary Queen of Scots’, in Immagini e potere nel Rinascimento europeo, ed. Guiseppe Cascioni and D. Mansueto (Milan: Ennerre, 2009): 53–68, pp. 60–63. Panegyrique de Congratulation... par Jean de Gordon Escossois, sieur de Longorme, Gentilhomme ordinaire de la chambre du Roy Tres-Chrestien, La Rochelle, 1603; also in English, by E.G. (Grimston), ‘A Panegyrique’, London, 1603; and with new title-page ‘The Union of Great Britaine’, 1604. Cited in the useful Wikipedia entry for Gordon, where it remains unsourced. (https:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gordon_(bishop), accessed 05/04/2017.).

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Figure 6.13

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Page 5 from John Gordon, Dean of Salisbury’s ENΩTIKON or a sermon of the Union of Great Brittannie (London: George Bishop, 1604), preached before the king at Whitehall in October 1604, in which he takes the etymology of Hebrew keywords as significant for Christian doctrine and church history. © The Huntington Library, Ca

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your lerning, conioyned with ane intire affection, sa we have deliberat to cause the memorie of it be consecrat to the posterity be a monument answerable to your invention’. Moreover, the person whom Gordon was commanded to liaise with concerning the design of this monument was the king’s Master of Works, William Schaw, ‘quhome we haue directed expresslie to provide sic thingis as sould be necessar for the same, we have willed him to conferre with yow thairanent that ye may agrie vpon the forme, devyse and superscriptionis.’34 The intended location for this monument is not indicated, but it was never built, for Schaw died in April the following year. David Stevenson notes that Schaw’s appointment as Master of Works in 1583 followed his signing of the ‘Negative Confession’ which, following the Ruthven Raid, the reformed church required those courtiers to sign who were suspected of exerting Catholic influence on the king. ‘The timing of his appointment as master in December 1583 suggests that it was linked with political developments. James vi had just escaped from an extreme protestant faction, the Ruthven Raiders, which had kidnapped him the previous year, and the reaction against this episode brought more conservative men to power.’35 The Ruthven Raid was our subject in Chapter 3. John Gordon had close connections with Schaw, with Alexander Seton and with the circle that were active in the architecture and court ceremonial examined in Chapter 5. William Fowler was certainly familiar with Gordon’s writings, since he copied Gordon’s poem In effigiem Mariae Reginae, Jacob. Magni. Reg. matris into his papers, and the Hawthornden papers also include several places where Gordon’s name is transformed into anagrams.36 As Allison Steenson writes, ‘The state of “In effigiem” in Hawthornden ms 2064 points to a network of manuscript transmission involving Gordon’s writings,’ suggesting ‘that Fowler was either copying from, or preparing, a manuscript gathering of Marian material containing Gordon’s output.’37 Recent scholarship has clarified just how extensively ‘Egyptian learning’ influenced Presbyterian thinking in Scotland at this period, when it covered not only such issues of dynastic history and national identity, but also areas of mathematics and number-symbolism, prophecy, esoterica, architecture, 34 William Fraser, The Sutherland Book, 3 vols (Edinburgh: n.p., 1892), ii, pp. 11–12. 35 Stevenson, Origins of Freemasonry, p. 28. 36 Printed as a broadside, London: Iohann[e]s Norton, [1603?], estc: S3027, Fowler’s handwritten copy of Gordon’s ‘In effigiam’ can be found in the Hawthornden Papers, nls 2064, f. 22r. I am indebted to Allison L. Steenson for this information which she presented in her paper ‘Nusquam Audita’ Literary Footprints of Mary Queen of Scots in the Hawthornden Manuscripts’ to the conference ‘Saints and Sinners: Literary Footprints of Margaret and Mary, Queens of Scots’, organized at the University of Edinburgh in October 2016. 37 Personal communication, quoting her 2016 Edinburgh conference paper.

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­Freemasonry and the memory arts. Identifying Scottish interest and involvement in just a few of these will, I believe, clarify just what it was about the Egyptian hieroglyphics that led the Simson brothers to use them, and why ­Alexander Seton should have been exactly the right person to be commemorated in ­Archibald’s Hieroglyphica Animalium. Seton’s interest in architecture offers us a key to most of these apparently discrete, but historically interconnected, areas of knowledge, for when the Israelites left Egypt it was widely believed that they took with them the knowledge of mathematics and proportion which led to the building of Solomon’s Temple. As we saw in our previous chapter, the new Chapel Royal that was erected for the baptism of Prince Henry in 1594 was deliberately modelled on the Temple of Solomon, since its internal dimensions match those which the Bible records.38 The chapel was almost certainly built under the direction of William Schaw, King James’s principal Master of Works: Schaw had been amongst the courtiers who accompanied the king on that voyage to Denmark to fetch Queen Anne which the Stirling baptism celebrated. William Fowler’s emblematic scenography and the great model ship confirmed the significance of the baptism, as we have seen, whilst Schaw’s close ­connections with Seton went back a long way; in 1583 he accompanied Seton and his father on their diplomatic trip to France and by 1593 Schaw was appointed Chamberlain to the Lordship of Dunfermline, which was an office of the household of Queen Anne associated directly with Seton and William Fowler. Schaw was, like Seton, a Catholic, and when he died in 1601 it was ­Seton who wrote the eloquent Latin inscription on his tomb, praising his skills in architecture and his ‘integrity of life’: Seton, with Queen Anne, paid for the tomb. (Fig. 6.14) As David Stevenson writes, ‘Details of Schaw’s life are sparse, and much of what is known is derived from the Latin epitaph placed over his tomb  in Dunfermline Abbey’.39 A translation of the several inscriptions on this reads, To his most intimate loving friend, William Schaw. Live with the Gods, thou worthy, live for ever; From this laborious life, death now doth thee deliver. Alexander Seton, D.F.

38 39

Ian Campbell and Aonghus MacKechnie, ‘The “great Temple of Solomon” at Stirling Castle’, Architectural History, 54 (2011), 91–118. David Stevenson, The Origins of Freemasonry: Scotland’s century 1590–1710 (Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 26–27.

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Figure 6.14 Dunfermline Abbey, tomb to William Schaw (1550–1602) with Alexander Seton’s and Queen Anne’s inscriptions recording Schaw’s achievements as Royal Master of Works. Photo author

This small structure of stones covers a man of excellent skill, notable probity, singular integrity of life, a man adorned with the greatest virtues, William Schaw, Master of the King’s Works, Sacrist, and the Queen’s Chamberlain. He died 18th April, 1602. Among the living he dwelt 52 years; he had traveled to France and many other kingdoms for the improvement of his mind; he wanted no liberal art or science; he was most skillful in architecture; he was early recommended to great persons for the singular gifts of his mind; he was not only unwearied in labours and business, and indefatigable, but daily ­active and vigorous; he was most dear to every good man who knew him; he was born to do good offices, and thereby to gain the hearts of men; now he lives eternally with God. Queen Anne caused this monument to be erected to the memory of this most excellent and most upright man, lest his virtues, which deserve eternal commendation, should fail or decay by the death or corruption of his body.

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We should surely note the remarkable status of this little-known and rather neglected monument. Is there any other such monument in Britain that ­carries such a tribute to the deceased from the wife of the reigning monarch? Thanks to Stevenson’s work, we also know that it was Schaw who, as Master of Works, reorganised the stonemasons into semi-secret lodges and reformed their statutes to establish the Scottish foundations of modern Freemasonry. As Arthur Williamson writes, ‘The masons saw themselves as the successors to the ancient Egyptians among whom architecture and its mystical mathematical meanings were first perceived and developed’.40 Mathematics had developed at this period less as a practical science than as a way of calculating, among other things, the sequences of secular and sacred history and the periods of biblical prophecy. Above all for Presbyterians mathematics was also studied as a key to calculating the proximity of the Apocalypse, and that is why the discovery of logarithms and the slide-rule known as ‘Napier’s bones’ was the work of a writer who had previously written A Plaine Discovery of the Whole Revelation of St. John. First published in 1593 it was dedicated to King James, whom Napier urges to ensure ‘that justice be done against the enemies of God’s church’ at this critical stage in its history. Napier’s work on logarithms first published in 1614, however, was dedicated to Seton. ­Napier was by no means the only Scottish Calvinist to pursue mathematical and biblical studies for, as Arthur Williamson writes, ‘a highly significant group of E ­ dinburgh intellectuals – all of them intensely Protestant, all of them interested in mathematics, in biblical exegesis and, in most cases, in prophecy and in the occult as well – appear to have legitimized the pursuit of such esoteric knowledge’. Chief among these was Robert Pont, ‘A founding father of the ­Scottish Reformation and junior colleague to John Knox, he was one of the most eminent of Scottish clergy’. Pont shared the widespread Protestant belief that the world was living in its ‘latter days’, and that numbers held the key to biblical history and prophecy, whilst he also ‘strongly subscribed to the “manifold mysteries of the number seven”’.41 As we have seen, he shared that preoccupation with Archibald Simson, whose titles for his other works apart from Hieroglyphica animalium suggest, as noted above, an obsession with that number. It was for all these Protestant intellectuals the Union of the Crowns 40 41

Williamson, pp. 206–07. Williamson, pp. 192–94). For Presbyterian apocalyptics see Crawford Gribben, The Puritan Millennium: Literature and Theology 1550–1680 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2000), who discusses Napier on pp. 40–2.

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which signalled the urgency of determining God’s purposes for his church in this latter age. Such seemingly abstruse considerations did not wholly prevent these mathematical theorists from addressing some of the more practical implications of their research however. ‘Napier’s bones’ remained in use as a calculating tool well into the eighteenth century, and Sir John Skene valued Napier’s work for its utility in finding methods for land measurement. Napier also invented a rotating hydraulic screw for draining water from coal seams, which must recall what we know about Sir George Bruce’s undersea pit shafts at Culross.42 Our modern idea that technological advances have always been achieved by pursuing purely utilitarian goals is challenged by these findings. When he visited Culross in 1618, Ben Jonson, as we have noted, followed King James’s agenda the previous year by visiting Sir George’s ‘Palace’ with its painted emblems on the ceiling, before going down the coal mine next day to wonder at its industrial innovation: the two activities were not necessarily informed by different interests or objectives. They might, indeed, be summarised by something it is now possible to say about one of the emblems on that painted ceiling for, as Williamson says, ‘The building of Solomon’s temple (and presumably the building of the pyramids and other Egyptian structures) duplicated on a smaller scale what God Himself had performed in Genesis. In this tradition S­ olomon “taught” architecture, and God appeared, dividers in hand as the master builder of the cosmic temple’ (p. 207). We find just such an image in one of the actual emblems on Sir George Bruce’s ceiling at Culross (Fig. 6.15), where immediately above the door which admits us to the room there is an emblem, now badly decayed but which adapts the very last emblem from the book that supplied the models for all s­ ixteen of the emblems on this ceiling. (Fig. 6.16) Tempus omnia terminat (‘Time ends all things’) borrows Whitney’s motto and it is appropriately terminal, or we might even say ‘apocalyptic’. Whitney’s pictura however (Fig. 6.17) merely shows three trees (or is it a single tree?) in different stages of growth and decay, and the Culross emblem also shows these. However the figure seated beside them at Culross cannot be found in Whitney’s emblem; he is the winged figure of Time, seated with the terrestrial globe between his knees, which he is m ­ easuring with a large pair of dividers. This detail goes back to an engraving by Enea Vico of ‘Tempus’, who traces the continents with his pen as he measures the globe with

42

Williamson, p. 168.

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Figure 6.15

Culross (Fife), The Palace, second floor painted ceiling. © National Trust for Scotland Photo Library, by kind permission

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Figure 6.16

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Detail of Culross ceiling, ‘Tempus Omnia Terminat’ emblem. © National Trust for Scotland Photo Library, by kind permission

his dividers.43 (Fig. 6.18) For all its dissimilarity with ­Whitney’s picture, Bruce’s handling of this detail reveals not only his understanding of the iconographic and chronological ideas that we have seen developed in the mathematical works by Pont and Napier, but also his understanding of what was going on in Whitney’s emblem. We might notice that Vico’s emblem also has the three trees, in different stages of decay or decline, that feature in ­Whitney’s woodcut. Whitney moralises these in his verse ­epigram in a somewhat curious way, for he associates them with a topic, which I have studied extensively elsewhere, known as The Oldest Animals.44 This was an ancient proverbial saying which was widely used to compute the age of the universe, and it involves not just trees, but different animals. As Whitney’s epigram has it, 43

Further engravings from this series by Enea Vico were copied into an armorial manuscript known as Workman’s Manuscript in the Lyon Court, Edinburgh, probably in the early seventeenth century; see M. Bath, ‘Emblems from Enea Vico in a Scottish Armorial Manuscript’, Review of Scottish Culture, 21 (2009), 132–41. 44 Bath, Image of the Stag, pp. 131–73. The most notable use of the Oldest Animals topos in the visual arts is on the thirteenth-century Cosmati-work pavement before the High Altar in Westminster Abbey, on which see Richard Foster, Patterns of Thought: The Hidden  Meaning of the Great Pavement of Westminster Abbey (London: Jonathan Cape, 1991).

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Figure 6.17

Geffrey Whitney, emblem ‘Time ends all things’ from A Choice of Emblemes (London, 1586). © University of Glasgow Library, Department of Special Collections

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Figure 6.18

Enea Vico, Tempus from Emblematic Subjects series. Bartsch, Le Peintre Graveur, no. 66. Glasgow University Library

The longest day, in time resignes to nighte. The greatest oke, in time to duste doth turne. The Raven dies, the Egle failes of flight. The Phœnix rare, in time herselfe doth burne, The princelie stagge at lengthe his race doth ronne. And all must ende, that ever was begunne. When we look at Whitney’s woodcut, in the light of his epigram, it should be clear that these are not three trees in different stages of decay, but a single

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oak tree that ‘in time to duste doth turne’, and this image would stand as good example of that chronological sequencing of images in narrative art that has been so well analysed by Alastair Fowler in his study of Renaissance Realism.45 The addition of an allegorical figure to the pictures found in Whitney is common to all sixteen of the emblems on this ceiling in Culross, but all its other ­figures are female, resembling the type we find, for instance, in Ripa’s ­Iconologia. The bearded figure in the Tempus omnia terminat emblem, however, is unique as the only male figure on this painted ceiling. Sir George, or his designer, must have recognised Vico as Whitney’s source, so the rehandling of these motifs at Culross almost certainly shows, despite its poor state of conservation, Sir George Bruce’s familiarity not only with the two sources which he has combined in the terminal emblem of his gallery, but also with the way the ­English emblematist, Geffrey Whitney, had reworked an image he also ­evidently found in the Italian engraving by Vico. Whitney’s picture almost certainly owes its three trees of varying ages to the background detail in Vico, to which the Culross artist has simply restored the figure of Time measuring the globe with his dividers, which is lacking in Whitney. The fact that what he is measuring, by his name and nature, is not space nor the continents marked on his globe, but Time, indicates his essential conformity with those c­ omputations of biblical chronology and the periodic sequences of sacred time that we have witnessed in the writings of Napier and Pont. We find a telling analogue for Vico’s and Sir George Bruce’s motif of Time’s compasses in Milton’s description of God’s act of creation in Paradise Lost, Book vii (the number seven is, again, significant). … and in his hand He took the golden compasses, prepared In God’s eternal store, to circumscribe This universe, and all created things: One foot he centred, and the other turned Round through the vast profundity obscure, And said, Thus far extend, thus far thy bounds, This be thy just circumference, O world. (vii, 224–31)

45

Alastair Fowler, Renaissance Realism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), Ch. 2, ‘Events in Time’, pp. 20–33.

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As Alastair Fowler notes, the motif goes back to Proverbs 8:27, ‘I was there when he set a compass upon the face of the depth’, for which commentators, poets and artists had supplied the builder’s measuring tool. As Fowler says, ‘from Anglo-Saxon illumination to Renaissance emblems and printers’ d­ evices like Christopher Plantin’s … They imply a divine architect planning the universe by number and proportion’.46 To which we might add Ben Jonson’s device of the broken compass. As Drummond recorded in his Conversations, ‘His impresa was a compass with one foot in the centre, the other broken; the word, deest quod duceret orbem’ (‘That is lacking which might complete the circle’). J­ onson’s motto adapts Ovid, Met. viii, 249, on the fall of Icarus, and as ­Stevenson says, ‘the idea of God the geometer/artisan/architect was never more meaningful than in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The concepts of the Vitruvian architect as master of all the arts and crafts and of artisans in general as important participants in the search for knowledge were at their height’.47 The emblem enjoyed an enduring afterlife in later centuries, largely in the hands of Freemasons such as William Blake whose Newton (1804–5) recalls the impact of these occult Renaissance beliefs on the growth of enlightenment with the foundation of the Royal Society. (Fig. 6.19) Edward Paolozzi’s bronze Newton (1995) at the entrance to the new British Library in London copies Blake’s and brings what Donne called ‘the new philosophy’ into line with the artistic modernism of the twentieth century.48 (Fig. 6.20) The wider mathematical and architectural significance of this long-lived emblem at Culross might be sanctioned and supported by another wall-­ painting which Sir George Bruce painted in his ‘Palace’ in anticipation of the royal visit, for this showed ‘The Judgement of Solomon’, with Solomon seated on a tiered dais of seven steps (the number seven is, again, significant) rising from a chequered paved floor beneath a pillared canopy. (Fig. 6.21) The local belief that this painting was executed specifically for the royal visit of 1617 is highly plausible if only because it complies with James’s compelling ambition to be regarded as Great Britain’s Solomon.49 That ambition reached its summation, as Schuchard writes, when in 1635, ‘Rubens’s great canvases 46 Milton, Paradise Lost, ed A. Fowler (London: Routledge, 2007), ii, p. 198. For images of the Divine Architect with dividers, see Baigent, Michael and Richard Leigh, The Temple and the Lodge (1989, London: Corgi, 1993), Fig. 23, a mid-thirteenth century Bible moralisée, and Fig. 24, early fourteenth-centuiry Holkham Bible. 47 Stevenson, Origins of Freemasonry, p. 109. 48 For these, see Bath, ‘Emblems from Vico’, figs. 13, 14. 49 Maurice Lee, Great Britain’s Solomon: James vi and i in his Three Kingdoms (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1990).

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Figure 6.19

William Blake, Newton (1795–c. 1805) 460 × 600 mm. © Tate London 2017

Figure 6.20

Edouardo Paolozzi, statue of Newton (1995) London. © British Library Board (CC BY-SA 2.0)

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Figure 6.21

Culross, The Palace, sketch by John Houston of mural showing ‘the judgement of Solomon’. © National Trust for Scotland Photo Library, by kind permission

glorifying the Solomonic wisdom of James i were installed on the ceiling of the ­Banqueting House …. In “the Judgement of Solomon,” James was enthroned in a niche flanked by the twisted columns of the Temple of Solomon, identified as Jachin and Boaz by the masons’. (Fig. 6.22) Schuchard quotes Roy Strong’s highly ­apposite comment. … in the First Book of Kings two women contend for a child. Solomon, in his wisdom, decreed that the infant should be divided between them, split in halves. In the ceiling panel the two contending women are ­England and Scotland, and the judgement of the new Solomon, James i, excells that of his Old Testament predecessor. He reconciles the contestants by commanding the Union of the Crowns.50 The image also supports the highly plausible assumption that not only Sir George Bruce himself but also the series of distinguished visitors and tourists who came to see his architectural and technological achievements at Culross were Freemasons.51 50 51

Schuchard, pp. 432–33, citing Strong, Britannia Triumphans: Inigo Jones, Rubens, and Whitehall Palace (London: Thames and Hudson, 1980), p. 19. Michael Baigent, ‘The Painting of the “Judgement of Solomon” at Culross “Palace”’, Ars Quatuor Coronatum, vol. 106 (1993), 154–71; Schuchard, pp. 318–19.

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Figure 6.22

Rubens, ‘Judgement of Solomon’, London, Banqueting House. © Historic Royal Palaces (Images)

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Sir Robert Moray: Freemasonry and Friendship

King James’s Solomonic pretensions led, as we know, to no such closer union of the two kingdoms, for as the seventeenth century progressed under the rule of his son, Charles i, it broke down into the English Civil Wars, in which many of the same issues concerning the role of bishops in the government of the church and the relationship between the nation’s constituent parts, which we have seen debated in these emblems, were contested. It was only, in England at least, the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660 that brought about a return of those ideals of classical humanism and scientific enlightenment that freemasonry aspired to. Its establishment south of the border, moreover, owed a great deal to an immigrant Scot, Robert Moray (1609–1673), who enjoyed an enduring friendship with Alexander Bruce, grandson of Sir Robert Bruce of Culross. This went back to their teenage years when, in 1623, the fourteen year old R ­ obert actually came to Culross where, as Marsha K. Schuchard notes, he ‘visited the great underwater coal mine … which featured extensive stoneworks built by local masons, and he may have visited ‘The Palace”’.52 During their years of exile in Germany and Holland during the Civil Wars the two friends exchanged letters recording their difficulties in pursuing their studies in Hermetic chemistry, Paracelsian medicine, Egyptian hieroglyphics and Jewish lore, urging his friend ‘not to divulge to prophane such a transcendent Science, unless it were in hieroglyphicks’.53 Moray served as a soldier of the Garde Ecossaise in France and in 1638 he was sent to support the Covenanters, commanding the ­Scottish army which in 1640 invaded England in the Second Bishop’s War and took Newcastle. He was knighted for these services by Charles at Oxford in 1643. Moray was initiated into the Freemasons Lodge of Edinburgh in 1641, whilst in command at Newcastle, and although this was a Scottish lodge the initiation therefore took place in England, becoming the first known initiation into the Craft of Freemasonry to have taken place on English soil. Details of Moray’s historic initiation are preserved among the records of the Edinburgh Lodge: At Neucastell the 20 day off May, 1641. The quilk day ane serten nomber off Mester and others being lafule conveined, doeth admit Mr the Right Honerabell Mr Robert Moray, General quarter Mr to the Armie of Scotlan,

52 53

Shuchard, p. 552. Quoted in Schuchard, p. 552, citing nls Kincardine MS.5049.f.88 (20 January 1658).

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and the same bing aproven be the hell Mester off the Mesone of the Log off Edenroth, quherto they heaue set to ther handes or markes. A. Hamilton, R. Moray, Johne Mylln, James Hamilton.54 (At Newcastle the 20th day of May, 1641. Which day a certain number of Masters and others being lawfully convened, did admit as Master the Right Honourable Mr. Robert Moray, general Quartermaster to the army of Scotland, and the same being approved by the whole Master Masons of the Lodge of Edinburgh, whereto they have set their hands or marks. A. Hamilton, R. Moray, John Mylne, James Hamilton.) It is notable that the witnesses identified here include John Mylne, who was appointed Master Mason to the crown of Scotland in 1636 and, in 1640, joined the Scottish army which invaded England, which explains how he came to witness Moray’s initiation in Newcastle; in 1646 he became Captain of ­Pioneers, and Master Gunner of Scotland. In Edinburgh Mylne was admitted to the lodge of masons in 1633, and he worked on the Tron Kirk, St Giles and Heriot’s ­Hospital; in Stirling he assisted James Rynd with the design of Cowane’s H ­ ospital, becoming the last of Scotland’s major Renaissance architects. His monument, erected by his nephew Robert, stands in Greyfriars kirkyard, ­Edinburgh, showing two Masonic pillars, whilst another memorial, erected by his fellow F­ reemasons at their meeting place St Mary’s Chapel, disappeared when the chapel was demolished to make way for the South Bridge. After the Restoration of the monarchy in England, Moray was one of the twelve scholars (including Bruce) who attended Christopher Wren’s opening lecture on astronomy in 1660 at Gresham’s College, London, after which they resolved to found the Royal Society. Moray became a Privy Councillor, Secretary of State for Scotland, and was influential in getting the Society its royal charter before becoming its first President. Moray’s circle of friends included John Evelyn, Samuel Pepys, Andrew Marvell, Thomas Vaughan, Elias Ashmole, John Aubrey, and Gilbert Burnet, many of whom also became Freemasons. They also, of course, included Christopher Wren, which explains why one of the most notable British buildings to have been designed as a reconstruction of Solomon’s temple is St Paul’s Cathedral, indeed the Scottish input to that building may well extend further than any debts it owes to Scottish ­speculative Freemasonry, for when the Royal Society issued a ‘Directory for Inquiries’ on

54 Recorded at: http://Freemasonry.bcy.ca/texts/moray_r.html, accessed 04/04/2017; no source is cited.

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the technology required for quarrying, cutting and hardening stone in 1673 it referred directly ‘to the expert stone work involved in the Culross undersea mine’ belonging to ‘the Earl of Kincardine’s forefathers’.55 Alexander Bruce had become Second Earl of Kincardine in 1662, and in 1664 he inherited his grandfather’s ‘Palace’ at Culross, repairing the damage it had sustained during the Cromwellian occupation. His quarries of high quality stone and marble in Scotland led to it being used directly at Greenwich and in the rebuilding of St Paul’s, although Wren’s choice of Portland stone, which had been imported into London since the later middle ages and had been used by Inigo Jones for the Banqueting House, ensured that it was Portland, and not Culross, that earned its enduring reputation as the premier stone for iconic buildings in Britain. The Royal Society issued its Directive in 1673, which was the year of Moray’s death, because English masons needed to update their skills before working on the new St Paul’s Cathedral. Wren’s building however required, the Royal Society’s ‘Directory’ suggests, retrieval of ‘such commendable practices as were familiar to the Ancients … with new additions and inventions, which in this knowing and inquisitive age is like to be driven on as far as humane industry can go’. In this simultaneous appeal to ancient wisdom and industrial innovation, the directive sums up not only the combination of antiquarian curiosity and innovative technology that we have witnessed at Culross, but also the twin poles of ancient esotericism and enlightened invention that, at this date in England, went simultaneously into the foundation of the Royal Society on the one hand and of enlightened Freemasonry on the other. We have no independent evidence that, when he built his Palace in Culross seventy-six years earlier, Sir George Bruce was an accepted Freemason. However the iconography of his paintings of the Judgement of Solomon and of Time as cosmic architect surely make it likely. As David Stevenson notes, ‘Before the end of the century Bruce’s son, the third Earl of Kincardine, was a member of the Lodge of Dunfermline, and it is possible that his father had been 55

Schuchard, p. 668, citing Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, viii, no. 93, pp. 6010–15. The determination to rebuild or restore St Paul’s on the model of the Temple of Solomon antedates its destruction in the 1666 Great Fire of London, for as early as 1608 King James appointed a commission to repair the cathedral, and in 1620 contributions were sought towards its funding as a vote of confidence in James’s rule and in anticipation of Prince Charles’s intended marriage to the Spanish Infanta; rebuilding only began, however, using Inigo Jones’s designs, in 1633. For the Solomonic basis of these, see G ­ raham Parry, The Golden Age restor’d: The culture of the Stuart Court, 1603–42 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1981), pp. 247–49.

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Figure 6.23

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Sir Robert Moray’s drawing of his mason mark, from the Kincardine papers in the National Library of Scotland, f. 67r. © National Library of Scotland (Kincardine Papers, © The Earl of Elgin)

before him.’ Moreover Bruce’s extensive correspondence with Moray sheds much light on the intellectual, philosophical, scientific and esoteric interests which, as Freemasons, they shared. These include, as Schuchard says, ‘Jewish lore, Hermetic chemistry, Paracelsan medicine, Egyptian hieroglyphics and Masonic symbolism’.56 The two friends certainly spilled much ink in interpreting the significance of Moray’s mason mark, the pentangle or star with a motto Esse quam videri (‘To be rather than to seem’). Much of their correspondence on this and other matters, which is preserved in the National Library of Scotland’s Kincardine papers, is described or quoted by David Stevenson in his exemplary chapter on Sir Robert Moray, including Moray’s analysis for Bruce of the ‘hieroglyphical’ significance of his famous mason mark. (Fig. 6.23) This character or Hyeroglyphic, which I call a starre, is famous amongst the Egyptians and Grecians. For the Egyptian part of it I remitt you to 56

Schuchard, p. 552.

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Kircherus bookes that I named in my last. The Greekes accounted it the symbol of health and tranquillity of body and mind, as being composed of capitall letters that make up the word Hygeia, and I have applied five other letters to it that are the initials of 5 words that make up the summe of Christian Religion, as well as Stoick philosophy, all of which are to be found without much distortion or constraint, to make up the sweet word Agapa, which you know signifies love thou, or hee loves, which is the reciprocal love of God and man, and that same word is one of the 5 signified by the 5 letters. The rest are Gnothi, Pisteuei, Anecho, Apecho. There’s enough at once. (Stevenson, Origins, p. 173) We recognise in this much the same lexical fragmentation of words into individual Hebrew letters that we have witnessed in Gordon’s 1604 Whitehall sermon (and Stevenson alerts us to the fact that the Greek words italicised in his transcript use Greek characters in the original). However perhaps the most suggestive comment in this analysis of his Mason’s mark, if we still want to understand why Archibald Simson dedicated his Hieroglyphica animalium to the late Chancellor Alexander Seton, is Moray’s reference to ‘Kircherus bookes that I named in my last’, for ‘Kircherus’ is German Jesuit Athanasius Kircher, who claimed to have found the key to the Egyptian hieroglyphics, arguing in 1633, contra Valeriano, that the Coptic tongue preserved the characters of lateEgyptian hieroglyphics, and was key to their significance. He subscribed to the received idea that ancient Egyptian was the language spoken by Adam and Eve, containing occult and mystical symbols, to which modern European languages have lost the key. Clearly as late as 1633 the Simsons could not have read Kircher, but to ­understand why a book explicating the significance of animal symbols for ­Christian doctrine should characterise its emblems as Hieroglyphica Animalium and why such a book should have been dedicated to the memory of Alexander Seton, we surely now have some of the answers, for the hieroglyphica had long been associated with a range of Hermetic ideas which came down from antiquity, appealing to those on both sides of the religious and political divide who were looking for ways of surmounting their differences. It was Frances Yates who showed how Giordano Bruno influenced this debate in England ‘taking full magical Egyptian Hermeticism as his basis, preaching a kind of Egyptian Counter-Reformation … in which the religious difficulties will disappear in some new solution’. Characterised by ‘religious toleration, emotional linkage with the medieval past, emphasis on good works for others, and imaginative attachment to the religion and symbolism of the Egyptians’ the

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answer to this hope, in the seventeenth century, was Freemasonry.57 We should remember that the leading Scottish exponent of the Art of Memory, Alexander Dickson, had become Bruno’s protegé whilst the latter was staying in England in 1583–5. Bruno’s Lo spaccio de la bestia trionfante was written during his stay in England, dedicated to Sir Philip Sidney, and it identifies Henri iii as hero of his Politique campaign for the expulsion of religious persecution from the European heavens, bestowing on him as its signal the third, heavenly crown of Mary Queen of Scots’ Manet ultima caelo device of the three crowns, a device which had already featured on her medals. And the person who recommended that device to Henri iii of France, we are told, was the same Scotsman, John ­Gordon, who in 1604 preached his Cabalistical sermon at Whitehall on the Union of Great Brittannie. William Fowler, who also lists an ‘art of memorye’ treatise among his works, recalls in a manuscript note to King James that ‘Whilst I was teaching your majestie the art of memorye yow instructed me in poesie and imprese for so was yours’. Fowler had also been working in London at the time of Bruno’s visit, when both he and Dickson were acting as agents for Elizabeth’s spymaster, Sir Francis Walsingham.58 Such activities may seem to us to conflict with any more enlightened commitment to religious freedom and toleration, but the arts of secret writing had longstanding, practical connections with political intelligence and espionage, which is doubtless why the 1625 inventory of Alexander Seton’s ‘Books at Pinkie’ includes not only the copy of De Viginère’s wonderfully illustrated translation of Philostratus but also his Traicté des chiffres, ou secrètes maniéres d’escrire, which had been published in Paris in 1586. It also records a book ‘Nouhousius de fratribus roseæ crucis. 8o’ (Mason, no.96) which surely testifies to the Scottish Chancellor’s interest in Rosicrucianism, for Heinrichus Neuhusius’s, Pia et utilissima admonitio de fratribus Rosæ-­Crucis, published 1618 in Danzig, attempts to explain how the Rosicrucians left for the East because of European instability at the outbreak of the Thirty Years War. The connections between Rosicrucianism and Freemasonry were particularly close, both movements sharing a belief in the primacy of Egyptian learning and language that is signalled by the title chosen by its principal English exponent, John Dee, for his best known work, the 1564 treatise on symbolic language entitled Monas Hieroglyphica.

57 58

Stevenson, pp. 84–4, quoting Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (London: Routledge, 1974), p. 273. For this see Bath, Emblems for a Queen, pp. 44–47; also Nuccio Ordine, Giordano Bruno, Ronsard et la Religion (Paris: Albin Michel, 2004).

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Scottish Emblem Books of the 1630s

Although the relationship between hieroglyphs and emblems was recognised as close, it is doubtful whether we should classify Simson ‘s Hieroglyphica A ­ nimalium strictly as an emblem book, lacking illustrations as it does. Simson makes no use of the word ‘emblem’, and although at one point, in his entry ‘De Castore’ for the beaver (i, p. 72), he quotes the whole of Alciato’s epigram to the emblem ‘Aere quandoque salutem redimendam’, on the beaver that distracts its hunters by biting off its testicles, Simson is merely copying Gessner for this reference, who regularly quotes Alciato’s emblems whenever they are relevant.59 In 1638 two authentic emblem books by a Scottish author, Robert Farley, were certainly published in London; both are bilingual, with Latin epigrams and English verse translations from this author who describes himself as ‘Scoto-Britanno’ on his title page. Kalendarium Humanæ Vitæ, as its title suggests, takes us through the twelve different stages that Farley identifies for human life from birth to death and resurrection. Published in the same year, Lychnocausia, sive Moralia Facum Emblemata, Lights Moral Emblems not only identifies itself on its title page as an emblem book, but has particular relevance to one of Patrick Simson’s murals since it consists of fifty-eight emblems all of which are candles. No.21 indeed supplies a woodcut illustration that might well resemble the candle that was painted in Patrick Simson’s w ­ indow, described in John Row’s Historie (p. 431) as ‘burning at both ends’ (Fig. 6.24). Farley moralises this in terms of the familiar proverb about ‘burning the candle at both ends’ – a thriftless husband and a vain wife will quickly consume their means. Simson, we recall, interprets it differently, symbolising the soul that always aspires heavenwards whichever end is alight. This moral is closer to Farley’s no. 32, Extinguar quin ascendam, ‘I will die but I shall ascend’, showing a candle that is held pointing downwards, but will revive even after its flame has been extinguished, symbolising resurrection (Fig. 6.25). Robert Farley can now be identified as the ‘Robert Farlie’ who is recorded as a schoolmaster at ­Edinburgh High School until 1627, and from 1629 to 1632 schoolmaster for the parish of Musselburgh.60 Musselburgh is, of course, the location of Pinkie

59 60

For Gessner’s use of Alciato see Bath, ‘Some Early English Translations of Alciato: Edward Topsell’s Beastes and Serpents’, Emblematica, 11 (2001), 393–402. John Durkan, Scottish Schools and Schoolmasters, 1560–1633, ed. Jamie Reid Baxter ­(Aberdeen: Scottish History Society, 2013), p. 282, and p. 346.

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Figure 6.24

Robert Farley, Lychnocausia, sive Moralia Facum Emblemata, Lights Moral Emblems (1638), no. 21. © University of Glasgow Library, Department of Special Collections

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Figure 6.25

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Robert Farley, Lychnocausia, sive Moralia Facum Emblemata, Lights Moral Emblems (1638), no. 32. © University of Glasgow Library, Department of Special Collections

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House, though these emblems owe nothing to Alexander Seton’s painted long gallery, and Seton had died, as we have noted, in 1622. Farley’s Lychnocausia was not the only emblem book published in ­England at this time that is entirely devoted to candles, for Francis Quarles’s H ­ ieroglyphikes of the Life of Man was not only published in London in the very same year, 1638, as Farley’s, but its fifteen emblems parallel both of Farley’s books by featuring a candle, whose varied and progressive states symbolise the successive ages of man and the progress of the soul.61 (Fig. 6.26) It therefore includes both of the familiar topoi, the Ages of Man and the Candle of Faith, that Farley’s two books illustrate separately. (Fig. 6.27) We do not know whether Quarles or Farley knew of each other’s work, though Quarles’s Hieroglyphikes had received its imprimatur from the Bishop of London as early as ­January, 1637, which suggests that it preceded Farley’s work – whose imprimatur is ­dated February 1638 – by more than a year. These are all religious emblem books, for which Quarles’s title Hieroglyphikes signals the close affinity between spiritual emblems and the quasi-Egyptian hieroglyphs drawn, like Patrick Simson’s ­Stirling murals, ‘after Pierius’. Scotland was evidently ready to avail itself of the new fashion for religious emblem books that Quarles unleashed in ­England, since only the year before, in 1637, a stonemason, John Service, used no fewer than three of Quarles’s emblems in the carvings of a remarkable tombstone in Stirling, marking the grave of his father, also a stonemason and also called John, in the churchyard of Holy Rude, the same church of which Patrick S­ imson had been minister eighteen years earlier. The emblems on the gravestone are drawn from Quarles’s Emblemes that was published two years earlier, in 1635, in London, and which became the most popular, influential and often reprinted emblem book ever to be published in Britain. A further ten or more carved Scottish seventeenth-century gravestones have been identified as using emblems that go back to Quarles, and these will be our subject in the following chapter. We must surely see the murals which Patrick Simson painted in his manse some time before 1618 as anticipating, if not inspiring, the use of these religious emblems in Scotland.

61

Karl Joseph Höltgen, ‘Francis Quarles’s Second Emblem Book Hieroglyphikes of the Life of Man’, in Word and Visual Imagination, ed. Höltgen, P.M. Daly and W. Lottes (Erlangen: Univ.-Bibliothek Erlangen-Nürnberg, 1988), 183–207.

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Figure 6.26

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Francis Quarles, Hieroglyphikes of the Life of Man (1638), title page. © University of Glasgow Library, Department of Special Collections

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Figure 6.27

Francis Quarles, Hieroglyphikes of the Life of Man (1638), emblem no. 13, of declining age, which Quarles moralises, ‘Continuance is the Child of Eternity, not of Time’. © University of Glasgow Library, Department of Special Collections

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Quarles Comes North: Scottish Reception of the Emblemes

The Service Gravestone: Celestial Salvation

A visitor to Stirling who walks up the hill to the castle will pass by the Holy Rude kirk, which we pictured in our opening illustration to Chapter 6 (Fig. 6.1 above). The church’s proximity to the ancient royal palace accounts for its wider role in the nation’s history, hosting noble and royal baptisms and ceremonies including, in 1567, the crowning of the infant king James vi. Although nothing now remains of Patrick Simson’s adjoining manse with its painted hieroglyphs, further uphill towards the castle is the ancient graveyard in which, among the older tombstones, is the grave of stonemason John Service, which is not featured in any guidebook and does not attract much attention from tourists who flock to visit the castle and its recently refurbished palace; it is nevertheless a remarkable tombstone for reasons that we shall explore in this chapter. Standing on a rectangular base, its flat headstone and capstone are carved on both sides, the east side more richly than the west, though both feature roundels filled with carvings that turn out to be emblems. (Fig. 7.1) It was only Betty Willsher’s discovery that these copy three different details from the engravings by William Marshall and William Simpson for Francis Quarles’s 1635 Emblemes that enabled us to work out just what was going on in these carvings and what they mean.1 The roundel on the east face of the stone appears to show a figure reading a book, with hand on chin; scrolls behind curve up to two indistinct figures who hold some kind of object between them, and this is all contained within elaborate strapwork (Fig. 7.2). It is only when we look at the concluding illustration at the end of Quarles’s Emblemes, p. 304, that we can verify that the 1 See M. Bath and B. Willshire, ‘Emblems from Quarles on Scottish Gravestones’, in Emblems and Art History. ed. A. Adams and L. Groves, (Glasgow: Glasgow Emblem Studies, 1996), pp. 169– 201; also Bath, ‘Quarles Goes North’, in Polyvalenz und Multifunkzionalität der E­ mblematik, ed.W. Harms and D. Peil, 2 vols (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 2002), ii, pp. 987–1004. For Scottish gravestones more generally, see Willshire, Understanding Scottish Graveyards (Edinburgh: Chambers, 1985, 2nd edn. revised 1995, 3rd edn. revised 2005). On Quarles see K.J. Höltgen, Francis Quarles 1592–1644, Meditativer Dichter, Emblematiker, Royalist (Tübingen: Niemayer, 1978); also Höltgen, ‘The Devotional Quality of Quarles’s Emblemes’, in ibid., Aspects of the Emblem (Kassel: Reichenberger, 1986), pp. 31–65; Bath, Speaking Pictures: English Emblem Books and Renaissance Culture (London: 1994), pp. 199–232. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���8 | doi 10.1163/9789004364066_008

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Figure 7.1

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Stirling, Holy Rude kirkyard, gravestone of John Service. Photo author

central figure is indeed reading a book, chin on hand, and that the two figures above are angels holding a crown between them. (Fig. 7.3) Their other hands hold two speech scrolls, with Latin inscriptions: ‘Sis fidelis usque ad mortem’ (‘Be ye faithful unto death’) ‘et dabo tibi Coronam vitæ’ (‘and I will give thee a

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Figure 7.2

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Stirling, Holy Rude kirkyard, gravestone of John Service, east face roundel. Photo author

crown of life’), quoting Revelation 2:10. Quarles’s seated figure is the soul, Anima, and this emblem heads the book’s closing ‘Farewell’ epigram, voiced by the departing soul as it meditates its biblical promise of salvation. Marshall’s engraving shows the heavenly spirits holding above Anima’s head the crown

Quarles Comes North

Figure 7.3

Francis Quarles, Emblemes (London, John Marriot, 1635), p. 304, ‘Fidesque Coronat ad aras’ (‘And faith is crowned at the altar’). © University of Glasgow Library, Department of Special Collections

237

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Figure 7.4

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Stirling, Holy Rude kirkyard, gravestone of John Service, west face roundel. Photo author

which is the reward of religious faith. Its status is indicated by the clouds and rays above, which open the heavenly kingdom in what art history calls a ‘glory’, whilst the desk on which she rests her book is shown as an altar: indeed the inscription beneath it at the bottom of the page reads ‘Fidesque Coronat ad aras’ (‘And faith is crowned at the altar’). We might surmise that what attracted John Service’s attention to this emblem was not merely its reference to faith and heavenly salvation, but also its terminal position, with its ‘Farewell’ verses conclusively closing the volume, as they do on p. 307, with ‘THE END’. This supernumerary emblem in Quarles’s book is appropriately terminal.2 If we then walk round to the west face of the gravestone we see a roundel whose carved figures are equally difficult to make sense of until we have identified the emblems on which they are based. (Fig. 7.4) Two figures appear to be struggling to pick up something from a table, and behind them something else 2 Although the unnumbered concluding ‘Farewell’ does not conform exactly to the pattern of the preceding five Books of numbered emblems in Quarles’s work, lacking the final ‘Epigram’ that concludes each of the preceding emblems, it nevertheless works emblematically. The book as a whole traces the progress of the soul to this outcome, see Bath, Speaking Pictures, pp. 213–217.

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seems to be happening to a female figure whose hands clasp her breasts as her head tilts up towards another heavenly glory. We might also notice that each of these three figures has what appears to be a speech bubble issuing from his or her mouth. Speech bubbles? On a Protestant gravestone? Is this some kind of seventeenth-century comic-strip?3 If so, what on earth are they saying? The answer comes once we identify their originals in Quarles’s emblems, for this inventive carving brings together two different emblems from Quarles which, between them, dramatise that same transition from life to death, earthly distractions to heavenly rewards, which we have already witnessed in the ‘crown of life’ emblem. The two characters who appear to be struggling to grab something from a table turn out to copy Simpson’s illustration for Quarles’s Book iii, emblem no.13 (1635, p. 172), based on the Bible’s text from Job, 10:20: ‘Are not my days few? Cease then, and let me alone, that I may bewaile myselfe a little’. (Fig. 7.5) And this, indeed, is the text that can just about still be deciphered in the l­eft-hand speech bubble. (Fig. 7.6) The two figures are those of Anima (the human soul) whom we have already met, and Cupid (divine love), who populate Quarles’s emblems and whose dialogic debates and disputes over the meaning of life articulate their doctrine.4 The object to which they are pointing is not, in fact, a table but, in Simpson’s engraving, a sundial, and what is happening is a struggle in which Love is wrestling with the Soul to let go of the sundial and loosen its attachment to the short timespan of life on earth. The alternative to this is figured in the adjacent emblem, on the viewer’s right, where the figure who is tearing open her breast (Fig. 7.7) copies Quarles’s illustration on p. 124. (Fig. 7.8) This is not one of the sequence of numbered emblems but part of the preliminary frontispiece or ‘Entertainment’ to Book iii of Emblemes, and the figure is, once again, that of Anima, the Soul. Her hands are pulling open her robe in order to release the arrows of lamentation which rise up from her exposed breast towards another heavenly radiance, or ‘glory’, in which we see, rather reassuringly, the eye and ears of God. Each of the arrows has a label to indicate that it carries the groans of the penitent Soul: ‘Ah Lord’, ‘Oh that’ and ‘Alas’ – the trailing speech ribbons still remain on the Stirling carving, whilst the speech bubble behind Anima records the biblical text upon which this whole emblem is based, ‘Lord all my desire is before Thee, And my groaning is not hid from 3 On which see Laurence Grove, ‘Emblems with Speech Bubbles’, in Visual Words and Verbal Pictures: Essays in Honour of Michael Bath, ed. Alison Saunders and P. Davidson (Glasgow: Glasgow Emblem Studies, 2005), pp. 89–103. 4 On Quarles’s dialogic emblems see Bath, Speaking Pictures, pp. 199–232; also Sarah Howe, ‘“Silent Parables”: Making Pictures Speak in Quarles’s Emblemes’, Emblematica, 17 (2009), 299–318.

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Figure 7.5

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Francis Quarles, Emblemes (London, 1635), p. 172, ‘Are not my days few?’. © University of Glasgow Library, Department of Special Collections

Quarles Comes North

Figure 7.6

241

Stirling, Holy Rude kirkyard, gravestone of John Service, west face, detail of emblem ‘Are not my days few?’. Photo author

Thee’ (Ps. 38:9). It is the Psalm text, and not any strange early convention for representing the human voice in art, that accounts for the arrows, as the Psalm opens with the Psalmist hoping to escape divine anger, ‘For thine arrows stick fast in me … for mine iniquities are gone over mine head’ (Ps. 38: 2–4).

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Figure 7.7

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Stirling, Holy Rude kirkyard, gravestone of John Service, west face, detail of emblem ‘Lord all my desire is before Thee, And my groaning is not hid from Thee’. Photo author

Quarles Comes North

Figure 7.8

Francis Quarles, Emblemes (London, 1635), p. 124. © University of Glasgow Library, Department of Special Collections

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Figure 7.9

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Herman Hugo, Pia Desideria (Antwerp: H. Aertssen, 1628, 1st ed. 1624), frontispiece. Glasgow University Library

The reason why sighs play such a role in these emblems is because of the role they play in Quarles’s continental source, Herman Hugo, whose Pia ­Desideria is divided into three successive Books in which the pious desires of the soul are characterised as ‘Groans’, ‘Vows’ and ‘Sighs’: each of the three books into which

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Pia Desideria is divided appears under successive running titles: GEMITUS, VOTA and SUSPIRIA, with the frontispiece engraving to Book 1, by Boethius à Bolswert, which Quarles copies, showing arrows with similar labels: ‘Ah!’, ‘utinam’ and ‘Heu!’. (Fig. 7.9) Hugo’s Book i becomes Quarles’s Book iii because Quarles’s first two books copy a different source, Typus mundi (1627), composed by students of the Jesuit college in Antwerp. The arrows we see shooting up to heaven on this Stirling gravestone are thus the sighs of the penitent soul that were signalled as the very substance of these emblems a dozen years earlier in the title of the book composed by their inventor, Herman Hugo S.J., in 1624.5 In that book, the arrows are identified with the emblems, which are themselves the ‘Pious desires’ of the penitent soul: the emblems are self-referring. Unlike the strapwork that frames the roundel on the east face, this emblem on the gravestone (Fig. 7.4 above) is encircled by a snake biting its tail – the classical motif of eternity known as the ourobouros. It does not feature in any of the engravings copied from Quarles, and must therefore have been added by the designer of the carving, who was undoubtedly John Service jnr. It is a highly intelligent addition, signalling to the viewer that the drama of the human soul’s journey from earth to heaven is contained within the compass of eternity. What we are thus witnessing is the intelligence of its artist in selecting and adapting material from Quarles in the design of this tombstone, and also his technical skill in copying these highly challenging pictures, with their allegorical figures of Cupid and Anima depicted in all kinds of dramatic action and debate, that need to be represented and recognised if the emblem is to be understood. That meaning, as we can now see, is the drama of death and resurrection which it realises emblematically in tribute to its occupant, whose inscription on the east face reads: ‘JOHN SERVICE OBIIT ANNO DOM. 1637 aet. 54’. Designed and executed, as it undoubtedly was, by the son to commemorate his late father, also a stonemason, it should not surprise us to find that he devoted his very best professional skills to its creation. There is, moreover, at least one further aspect of this unique tombstone which, though easily overlooked, confirms this interpretation. Whilst the upper parts of this headstone dramatise, as we have seen, the heavenly progress of the departed soul, the rectangular base upon which it rests is not merely structural, for in each of the four sides we see a hollowed niche, and if we stoop down to examine these we see further carvings: at one end these show the top of an upturned skull (Fig. 7.10), whilst at the other end are the upturned feet of the buried corpse, whose skeletal hands emerge from similar hollows on each side. Gruesome though this might seem to our squeamish 5 For Hugo, see Gabriele D. Rödter, Via piae animae: Grundlagenuntersuchung zur emblematischen Veknüpfung von Bild und Wort in den ‘Pia desideria’ (1624) des Herman Hugo S.J., (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1992).

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Figure 7.10

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Stirling, Holy Rude kirkyard, gravestone of John Service, supporting base of tombstone, with hollowed niche showing carved skull of the deceased. Photo author

modern tastes, we should recognise that the drama of death and resurrection that we have witnessed on the headstone carvings above is being played out over the decaying corpse of the deceased. Hence that drama of the mutable body and immortal soul becomes the single key to the apparently diverse and otherwise confusing iconography of this remarkable tombstone. Once we understand what its emblems are doing and what they mean we surely have to admire the intelligence of its design and skill of its execution. John Service was one of three generations of stonemasons, all with the forename John, active in Stirling following the arrival of James Service, a mason from Kilmacolm, Renfrewshire, in 1603. In 1604 John Service the elder was admitted as a burgess, and thirty years later in 1634 his son and successor also became a burgess: two years later he was given the Kirk Session’s permission to erect a stone marking the grave of his deceased father. Our gravestone carver was married to Margaret Smith who, following his death in 1645, married another mason.6 Their son, the third John, succeeded his father in the trade: 6 The inscription, and the biographical details, are clarified by John G. Harrison, ‘Some Early Gravestones in the Holy Rude Kirkyard, Stirling’, Forth Naturalist and Historian, 13 (1993), 79–96.

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indeed such Masonic intermarriages might well have facilitated the spread of decorative styles and motifs across Scotland, and although the dozen or more gravestones that use emblems from Quarles in the next fifty years or so do not all use the same emblems, the Service stone may well have set the trend. In 1640 the Kirk Session ordered that all the unlicensed stones in Stirling should be removed, but the large Service stone was untouched, with the result that it is virtually the only headstone to have survived from these early years in the Holy Rude kirkyard.7 In the light of what we have seen in our previous chapter concerning the growth of Freemasonry in Scotland, we should certainly look for any evidence of the Service family’s membership of the Lodge of Stirling. However although Stirling was awarded the status of third lodge of Scotland in Schaw’s Second Statutes of 1599 its history is, as David Stevenson remarks, obscure. It is uncertain whether the lodge referred to in Schaw’s Statutes was separate from the ­incorporation of practising masons who, unlike Freemasons, were under the authority of the local burgh council. Stevenson notes that it is only in 1708 that we have any record of the names of some members of the Stirling Lodge; however ‘The fact that this lodge posesses a copy of the Old Charges dating from the mid or late seventeenth century suggests that it existed in some form in that period.’8 Although the east face is decorated with carvings of masons’ tools (fig. 7.1 above), we look in vain on these gravestones for evidence of those hermetic interests and influences that we witnessed in the Simsons’ ­hieroglyphics. Patrick Simson’s wall paintings would doubtless still have been visible in the manse a few hundred meters down the hill. The choice of Quarles as inventor of the emblems carved on these gravestones nevertheless might well have ­reflected a reputation he gained as a trafficker in ‘hieroglyphica’.

Dundee, the Howff: Cupid and Anima

Such emblematic carvings require a viewer who can figure out the drama being enacted in different emblems by the two symbolic figures of Cupid and Anima, and in view of the complexity and obscurity of Quarles’s pictures deploying these figures it is surprising to discover the number of Scottish gravestones that followed John Service in using Quarles as their pattern book. The fashion appears to be peculiar to Scotland, and it began only a few years after 7 Visitors should note that the Service gravestone is not now in its original position in the graveyard, since both earlier and more recent tidy-minded conservation work by the local council has involved the removal and realignment of monuments. 8 Stevenson, Origins of Freemasonry, p. 194.

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Figure 7.11

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Dundee, the Howff, gravestone of i.c., wife of Thomas Victane †1645. Photo author

the Service stone was erected, with several gravestones during the 1640s at different places that also use Quarles. All these are of a distinctive type known as coped stones, which differ from the upright Service headstone, being recumbent flat stones (Scots ‘thrugh stanes’) with a narrow raised centre panel which has sloping sides, offering the mason five flat surfaces to fill with carvings or inscriptions; the stones were originally supported on pedestals. Though there is one example in Stirling’s Holy Rude kirkyard, such stones are found mainly in Fife and just across the river Tay. In Dundee, for instance, The Howff burial ground, which was formerly part of the grounds of the medieval abbey close to the city centre, has several coped stones with carvings of the Cardinal Virtues.9 One of these, the gravestone of ‘i.c. SPOVS TO THOMAS VICTANE’, makes use of four different emblems from Quarles. Victane was a merchant burgess of the city, and the stone gives the date of his wife’s death as 22 August, 1645 (Fig. 7.11). The emblem details all take the form of figures – Cupid, Anima and Father Time – supporting the strapwork cartouches that hold the monumental inscriptions. Each figure has a ribbon-scroll, usually carved with 9 Scots ‘howff’ means ‘a meeting place’: the cemetery was used as meeting ground for the Dundee Incorporated Trades.

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Figure 7.12 Dundee, the Howff, Victane gravestone, emblem ‘It is good for me to draw near to God’. Photo author

the biblical text which, in Quarles, supplies the emblem’s motto. To the left of the cartouche recording the grave’s occupant and date of death, we see the two childlike figures from Quarles whom we can now identify as the winged Cupid carrying Anima riding piggy-back on her shoulders, and also carrying an anchor. (Fig. 7.12) This copies the reversed image of Emblem IV:13 from Quarles (1635, p. 232) in which the speaker rejects vain worldly hopes in favour of the unfailing love of God. (Fig. 7.13) Simpson’s engraving for Quarles’s picture shows Anima being rescued from a stormy sea, where a foundering ship and drowning swimmers dramatise the frustration of human hopes, and she carries the ancora spei as a sign of her confidence in her Saviour. The Dundee carving does not show this seascape, but the two figures retain their allegorical significance, which derives from the biblical text (Ps. 72:28) on which the emblem is based: ‘It is good for me to draw near to God; I have put my trust in the Lord God,’ and this is the barely legible text that is inscribed on the Dundee tombstone’s ribbon scroll. At the opposite end of this cartouche with its memorial inscription we see a more familiar figure of winged Father Time, running forward with his scythe in his right hand and holding an hour glass above his head with the other hand (Fig. 7.14) – Time’s scythe goes back to classical representations of Saturn.10 The personification of Time is commonplace on gravestone carvings, with twenty or more early Scottish examples – such an image belongs to the conventional iconography of vanitas topics which normally require no sourcing. However, though he will normally be winged, Father Time is not usually shown running, and the Dundee carving copies this detail from Quarles’s emblem, III:15, illustrating a verse from Psalms 30:10, ‘My life is spent with grief, and my yeares with sighing’. (Fig. 7.15) Marshall’s engraving shows Anima bewailing 10

James Hall, Dictionary of Subjects and Symbols in Art (London: John Murray, 1974), pp. 119–120.

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Figure 7.13

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Francis Quarles, Emblemes (London, 1635), p. 232. © University of Glasgow Library, Department of Special Collections

man’s sorrowful time on earth as her ‘sighing’ rises up to the heavens in another speech bubble (‘Ah mee’). These heavens are divided between a radiant sun-filled day and a dark night sky with moon and stars, and the winged figure of Father Time is running between them. The fleeing figure behind her is

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Figure 7.14 Dundee, the Howff, Victane gravestone, emblem, ‘My life is spent with grief, and my yeares with sighing’. Photo author

not Cupid in this case, but the departing soul escaping hopefully heavenwards, where her ghostly shadow is cast in a starry constellation beneath the moon behind her: the way the heavens are divided between light and darkness is significant. None of this is copied on the Victane gravestone, but the attitude of Father Time running across the sky in Quarles’s engraving is so close to what we see on the gravestone as to leave no doubt that this was its carver’s pattern. The inscription on his ribbon scroll is now illegible, though likely to have been the Psalm verse. On the other side panel of the Victane gravestone the rectangular cartouche is flanked at both ends by figures emerging from behind curtains. They go back to two different emblems in Quarles, both of which use this image, and it is a sign of the designer’s familiarity with the book that he was able to make the connection and bring together these two widely separated emblems. The first, to the left of the cartouche, shows bed curtains (Fig. 7.16) and copies Quarles, IV:11 (p. 224) illustrating Canticles, 3:2, ‘I will rise, and go about the City, and I will seeke him that my soule loveth: I sought him, but I found him not’. (Fig. 7.17) The picture shows Anima leaping out of bed in pursuit of a retreating figure who holds a flaming torch – only parts of an arm and a leg are visible as she runs out of sight. This is a Canticles love chase, which Quarles’s verse interprets as the pious soul’s frustrated pursuit of Divine Love, who is shown in Simpson’s engraving ironically peering unseen over the curtains at the departing Anima: she need not run around town in order to find God since His love is already with her. The emblem at the other end of the cartouche (Fig. 7.18) copies Quarles V:12 (p. 289), illustrating Ps. 42:2, ‘When shall I come and appear before the Lord?’ (Fig. 7.19) Marshall’s engraving shows a curtain suspended from a rail, behind which stands the radiant Cupid holding the curtain that separates him from

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Figure 7.15

Francis Quarles, Emblemes (London, 1635), p. 180. © University of Glasgow Library, Department of Special Collections

Anima, who is appealing for it to be opened. The meaning is best summed up in Quarles’s Epigram: How art thou shaded in this vale of night, Behind thy curtain flesh? Thou feelst no light,

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Figure 7.16 Dundee, the Howff, Victane gravestone, emblem, ‘I will arise and go about the city’. Photo author

Figure 7.17 Francis Quarles, ­Emblemes (London, 1635), p. 224. © University of Glasgow Library, Department of Special Collections

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Figure 7.18 Dundee, the Howff, Victane gravestone, emblem, ‘When shall I come and appear before the Lord?’ Photo author

Figure 7.19 Francis Quarles, Emblemes (London, 1635), p. 288. Glasgow University Library

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But what thy Pride does challenge as her owne; Thy Flesh is high: Soul take this Curtaine downe. (p. 291) The scroll is no longer legible in the carving, though it may well have contained the Psalm verse. Both emblems dramatise our spiritual veiling during this earthly life, which no longer separates the souls of the departed from the love of God.

St Andrews: Judith Nairn’s Tombstone

The Victane gravestone in Dundee commemorates a deceased wife. Little more than a year later, in 1646, some thirty miles away in St Andrews a coped thrughstane was carved for another woman, Judith Nairn, whose inscription identifies her as ‘dearly beloved wife of John Wemys, merchant’. (Fig. 7.20) The most remarkable thing about this gravestone is that it uses three of the same emblems from Quarles as the Victane stone in Dundee, and must surely have been designed and carved by the same stonemason. This cannot be John ­Service, who carved the Stirling gravestone, since as we have noted he died in 1645, though it might possibly have been his son, also John, who followed his ­father’s trade and presumably would have inherited his father’s copy of Quarles. J­udith Nairn’s gravestone is now preserved in St Andrews Cathedral Museum, together with a rich collection of other local tombstones, including

Figure 7.20

St Andrews Cathedral, Fife. gravestone of Judith Nairn, †1646. © St Andrews Cathedral Museum

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some other thrughstanes. We cannot be sure who commissioned this impressive stone, of which the museum’s curator writes, ‘This handsome coped stone is the most elaborate of the collection,’ but it was not her late husband, merchant John Wemys, who commissioned it, since he had died intestate as long ago as 1614.11 Clearly, therefore, he could have played no part in its design or the choice of its emblems and inscriptions; thanks to their conservation these are clearer and better preserved than almost any other gravestone of this date and that alone gives this stone an exceptional importance. The longitudinal centre and side panels are filled with Latin inscriptions, the memorial inscription being on one of the side panels: ÆXIGVO HOC ­T VMVLO CLAVDITVR FÆMINA LECTISS IVDITHA NAIRN IOANNIS VEMII MERCAT SPONSA DILETISS OBIIT ANNO DOM 1646 ÆTATIS SUÆ 80 (‘In this narrow tomb is buried the most excellent woman, Judith Nairn, dearly beloved wife of John Wemys, merchant. She died in the year of Our Lord 1646, on the 11th December in her eightieth year’). The narrow centre panel has a lower case Latin inscription: [Æter]na vt rervm primordia cuncta resurgunt sic rursum in terram mortua cuncta cadunt, which is continued below it on the other side panel: Cana fides probitas themis constantia virtus et pietas gelida hac contumulantur humo. These are Latin verse hexameters, for which I am happy to offer the following eighteenth-century verse translation, Eternal seeds of all things rise again; All dead things fall to earth, and there remain: Candour, faith, goodness, virtue, justice true And constant piety here are engrossed now.12 11

12

David Hay Fleming, St Andrews Cathedral Museum (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1931), pp. 126–128. See also Alan Reid, ‘The Churchyard Memorials of St Andrews’, Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, xlv (1911), 488–550 (pp. 545–48). From Robert Monteith, An [sic] Theater of Mortality; or, A Further Collection of Funeral ­Inscriptions over Scotland (Edinburgh: Heirs of Andrew Anderson, 1713), here reprinted from Collection of Epitaphs and Monumental Inscriptions Chiefly in Scotland (Glasgow: Printed for D. MacVean, 1834), p. 165.

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We should point out to English readers that the closing rhyme is perfectly good in Scots pronunciation. It is the concluding couplet here that is flanked by the two emblems we have already witnessed on the Victane gravestone in Dundee, in which Cupid and Anima play with the curtains (Figs. 7.17 and 7.19 above), and now we can read the mottos inscribed on the ribbon scrolls that were illegible on the Dundee scrolls. For the emblem showing Anima emerging from her canopied bed whilst Divine Love (alias Cupid) peers over the top, the carving is slightly cruder than on the Victane grave, with no sign of the fleeing figure holding his torch whom Anima is pursuing on her mistaken quest. (Fig. 7.21) The banderole inscription, however, reads, ‘I will rise and go about the city and will seek him whom my soul loveth’ quoting Quarles’s motto from Canticles, 3:2. The moral is that Divine Love, who peers over the canopy at the departing Soul, cannot be found in the world but only in the human heart itself. As the supporting text, which Quarles quotes from St Jerome, puts it, ‘Let foolish virgins ramble abroad; seeke thou thy Love at home’ (1635, p. 227). Judith Nairn’s gravestone wisely leaves it unquoted – aged 79 she was evidently no ‘foolish virgin’. At the other end of this panel we find the same image of Anima pulling at the closed curtain behind which Cupid plays hide-and-seek. (Fig. 7.22) The carving is very similar to that in Dundee, and the motto on the scroll reads: ‘When shall I come and appeare before God’, quoting Quarles’s motto from Ps. 42:2. If we turn to the other long side panel holding the memorial inscription we find it supported at one end by the figure of winged Father Time shown just as we have seen him on the Dundee Victane gravestone (Fig. 7.14 above), running with his scythe extended in one hand and an hourglass held over his head in the other. (Fig. 7.23) The inscription on his scroll reads, ‘Everything has an appointed Time,’ which is based on Ecclesiastes 3:1: this is the text that continues: ‘A time to be born, and a time to die.’ It is not cited by Quarles and must

Figure 7.21 St Andrews Cathedral, gravestone of Judith Nairn, emblem, ‘I will arise and go about the citie and will seek him whom my soule loveth’. © St Andrews Cathedral Museum

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Figure 7.22 St Andrews Cathedral, gravestone of Judith Nairn, emblem, ‘When shall I come and appeare before God’. © St Andrews Cathedral Museum

Figure 7.23 St Andrews Cathedral, gravestone of Judith Nairn, emblem, ‘Everything has an appointed time’. © St Andrews Cathedral Museum

Figure 7.24 St Andrews Cathedral, gravestone of Judith Nairn, emblem, ‘Draw me and I will run after thee’. © St Andrews Cathedral Museum

have been supplied by the gravestone’s designer. The figure shown running at the other end of this panel is one we have not seen before; he holds an object over his shoulder and is joined by a cord to the prostrate figure lying on the ground behind him. (Fig. 7.24) This copies Quarles, IV:8, based on Canticles, 1:3–4, and is another love chase. (Fig. 7.25) Quarles’s motto reads ‘Draw me; we

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Figure 7.25

Francis Quarles, Emblemes (London, 1635), p. 180. Glasgow University Library

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will run a­ fter thee because of the savour of thy good oyntments,’ quoting from verses 3–4 of the Song of Solomon, which the gravestone simplifies to read ‘Draw me and I will run after thee’ on its ribbon scroll. Quarles needed to use two of the Bible verses because his fleeing figure is holding a burning censer, which represents the Bible’s ‘savour of ointments’ and the moral is that it is only through the power of Divine Love, and not through any strength of its own, that the soul can be drawn to run a virtuous race. How difficult it might have been for early viewers to make sense of these carvings without reference to the emblems in which they have their source is not easy to say, but it can at least now be seen how the linkage of different emblems is not arbitrary, for just as both emblems on one side use an image of curtains, so on this side both emblems feature figures who are running: from a purely design point of view this has a certain coherence – the confronting emblems supporting each panel are balanced.

Old Scone Graveyard: Gilbert Couper

The last of the seventeenth-century Scottish thrughstanes known to use Quarles’s emblems dates from the following year, 1647, and is found near Perth in the Old Scone graveyard in the grounds of the Palace of Scone. This too has a number of coped stones, all dating from the 1640s and most of them carved with allegorical personifications of Justice, Charity, Hope and Youth, along with Death as a skeleton holding a dart. All of them now lie flat on the ground as grave slabs, and do not rest on pedestals, with the result that they are moss-covered and some are damaged. The grave of Gilbert Couper, however, has the same emblem of Anima riding piggy back with the anchor of hope and a banderole inscribed with Quarles’s biblical text, and it has the figure of Father Time with scythe and hourglass copying Quarles III:15; it also has the scene showing Anima attempting to draw back the curtain behind which ­Cupid lurks. (Fig. 7.26) Its fourth emblem, however, is one we have not seen elsewhere. It shows Amor Divinus trying to cover his face with his hands, whilst Anima reaches out to pull his hands away. (Fig. 7.27) The text is from Job 13:24: ‘Wherefore hidest thou thy face, and holdest me for thy enemy?’ and both text and image copy Emblemes III:7. (Fig. 7.28) The biblical speaker is Job, and in Quarles it is Anima: the Scottish carver’s inclusion of speech scrolls shows a recognition of just how much of the scriptura to Quarles’s emblems is voiced.13 It also testifies to a determination that the meaning of these emblems should be understood. 13

On Quarles’s voiced emblems see n. 4 above.

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Figure 7.26

Old Scone graveyard, Perthshire, gravestone of Gilbert Coupar †1647, emblem, ‘When shall I come and appear before the Lord? Photo author

Figure 7.27

Old Scone graveyard, Perthshire, gravestone of Gilbert Coupar †1647, emblem, ‘Wherefore hidest thou thy face, and holdest me for thy enemy?’ Photo author



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Caerlaverock’s Catholic Carved Windows

These are the only seventeenth-century Scottish gravestones using Quarles’s emblems that can be positively dated, and as we have seen they were all carved in the late-1630s or 1640s, within fifteen years of the book’s date of publication;

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Figure 7.28

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Francis Quarles, Emblemes (London, 1635), p. 148. Photo GUL. © University of Glasgow Library, Department of Special Collections

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Figure 7.29

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Caerlaverock Castle, Dumfriesshire. Public domain

they are thus early. The other datable Scottish gravestones using Quarles are all of the eighteenth century, and we shall return to those in due course. However before doing that we need to look at some remarkable Scottish sculptures that use emblems from Quarles which are not gravestones, for these are even earlier than the gravestones. In the 1630s the newly ennobled Robert Maxwell, Earl of Nithsdale, added a neo-classical east range to his ancestral moated castle at Caerlaverock, Dumfriessshire. (Fig. 7.29) This has carved stone lintels which use emblems from Alciato on windows to the second floor, with emblems from Quarles below them on the first floor.14 (Fig. 7.30) One of the lintels on the ground floor, however, has a crowned cartouche with the date 1634, which makes this the earliest decorative art of any kind to have used Quarles, since as we have noted his Emblemes was not published until a year later, in 1635. So how could the Earl of Nithsdale have copied not only the engravings but also the mottoes for emblems from a book that had not yet been published? The biographer of Quarles, Karl Joseph Höltgen, notes that Emblemes was entered in the Stationers’ Register on 2 May, 1634, and he also points out that the commendatory poem, Benlowe’s Quarlëis which is printed as an appendix 14

On Robert Maxwell and for a fuller account of the windows, see John Hunwicke, ‘Robert Maxwell of Caerlaverock and his Fashionable Windows’, Transactions of Dumfriesshire Natural History and Antiquarian Society, 68 (1993), 107–121.

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Figure 7.30

Caerlaverock Castle, new residential wing with carved lintels to doorway and ­windows, built for the Earl of Nithsdale in 1634. Public domain

to the volume, is also dated 1634. The Caerlaverock date, Höltgen concludes, supports ‘what I have always suspected, that the first edition of Emblemes was actually published in 1634 … and that the titlepage merely anticipates the next year’.15 A printer may well not have known exactly how long it would take to set type, and is likely to have played safe, especially when, as with Quarles’s book, the title page was to be engraved, not printed. Whatever the explanation, we ought to recognise just how rapid and favourable was the reception of Quarles’s emblems in Scotland. These Scottish windows were evidently designed and carved within months of the book’s publication in London, where at that time tbe Earl of Nithsdale was himself still residing. However Scottish culture – and its material culture in particular– was obviously ready and waiting for the ­arrival of these religious emblems. That must have had something to do with the religious climate in Scotland at this time, and all the monumental carvings we have examined so far have been Protestant, indeed Presbyterian. It is therefore important to note that Robert Maxwell was a Catholic who, with his Countess, had been excommunicated 15

K.J. Höltgen, ‘Quarles and the Emblematic Window Decorations at Caerlaverock Castle: A Postscript’, Society for Emblem Studies Newsletter, 18 (1996), 6–7.

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from the Church of Scotland. Countess Elizabeth was a cousin of the Duke of Buckingham, King James’s favourite, and Maxwell built his new range in 1634 to reflect both his status as newly created Earl of Nithsdale and his appointment to the Privy Council of Scotland. Six years later, in 1640, the Protestant Covenanter army besieged Caerlaverock and forced its surrender, after which it was partly demolished and allowed to fall into decay. The new Nithsdale Lodging, with its finely carved windows has been described as ‘the most ambitious early classical domestic architecture in Scotland’; it was nevertheless only occupied for five or six years before the Covenanters pulled it down.16 We might remember that for all their appeal to Puritan tastes, both then and later, Quarles himself was appropriating and adapting emblems devised by students in Jesuit colleges of the Netherlands together with others, published in 1624, by Jesuit Herman Hugo. Although the Catholic earl may well have known this, his window carvings show no sign of any wider familiarity with Quarles’s sources. In Scotland, as Höltgen reminds us, ‘there is ample evidence that Emblemes was popular with Catholics and Protestants alike’.17 Quarles himself was a conforming member of the established Church of England. The Service gravestone in Stirling, as we have seen, uses for one of its emblems the very last ‘Farewell’ emblem from Quarles’s book, in which the departing soul is awarded the crown of life. It might therefore seem curiously appropriate that one of the earliest artefacts to use his emblems, here in Dumfriessshire, should make use of an emblem which is equally liminary, but this time not at the end but at the very beginning of Quarles’s book. (Fig. 7.31) Facing Quarles’s ‘Invocation’ to his muse, on page 1 of the book, to give him sublime inspiration (‘Rowze thee, my soul’ it begins), Marshall’s illustration shows Anima reaching up from earth to a heavenly glory. ‘Majora Canamus’ (‘Let us sing of greater things’) is her cry, inscribed this time not in a speech balloon but on rays of light descending from the heavens. Behind Anima is a large lute, of the type known in its day as a ‘theorbo’, which symbolises the emblems that fill the following book as spiritual songs.18 Beside Anima, however, is an overflowing sack of treasure and a prostrate Cupid, symbolising the vanities of this world which the Soul despises as she reaches up to the world above. These o­ pposing images of terrestrial vanity and celestial glory are what 16

John Gifford, Dumfries and Galloway, ‘The Buildings of Scotland’ ser. (New Haven,: Yale University Press, 1996), p. 140. 17 Höltgen, Aspects of the Emblem, p. 7. 18 The significance of this motif is well discussed as a key to the whole volume by Jantina Ellens, ‘“Skrue up the Heightened Pegs of thy Theorboe”: Tuning the Senses in Quarles’s Emblemes (1635)’, Emblematica: Essays in Word and Image, i (2017): 111–39.

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Figure 7.31 Quarles, Emblemes (London, 1635), fol. A4v, frontispiece to the poet’s opening Invocation to his heavenly muse. © University of Glasgow Library, Department of Special Collections

Quarles’s motto refers to: ‘Dum Cœlum aspicio, Solum despicio’ (‘In looking up to heaven, I despise the Earth’). Robert Maxwell’s motives for choosing this preliminary emblem from Quarles’s book may well have been influenced by one of its more curious details, for the terrestrial globe on which Anima reclines as she reaches up to heaven is marked with two rather puzzling English place names, ‘Roxwell’ and ‘Finchingfield’. Both of these are in Essex, and they are the places where Quarles himself and his friend Edward Benlowes lived. The first Earl of Nithsdale can be shown

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to have adapted this emblem to express the values of the place where he, too, now lives, which as we have noted was a conspicuously modern and i­ nnovative addition to the historic dwelling place of his ancestors. His motives are revealed in the changes he makes to the engraving he is copying: Quarles shows Anima reclining between two trees, one flourishing and the other bare and fading, alluding to Ezechiel 17:24: ‘I the Lord have … dried up the green tree, and have made the dry tree to flourish’. Hanging on the withered tree is the poet’s crown of bay leaves, and a heraldic shield, with the motto ‘Vix ea nostra’ that quotes Ovid, Metamorphoses, xiii, 140, where it means ‘I hardly regard these things as my own’, these things being ancestry and the achievements of one’s forebears. In Ovid’s poem Ulysses and Ajax are arguing over which of them has won the right to inherit the arms of dead Achilles, and Ulysses refutes Ajax’s argument that noble ancestry gives him precedence: ‘Nam genus et proavos et quæ non fecimus ipsi / Vix ea nostra voco’ (‘As for the things done by our ancestors and other people than ourselves, I say that we can hardly call these things our own’). The Earl of Nithsdale adapts this iconography by hanging his own coat of arms (the Maxwell saltire) on the left-hand tree together with his monogram rn (Robert Nithsdale), and a shield bearing a single fleurde-lis from the right hand tree, with the monogram en of his wife, Elizabeth Countess of Nithsdale.19 (Fig. 7.32) He also adapts Anima’s vocalised prayer, ‘Majora Canamus’ (‘Let us sing of greater things’) to form a motto for this emblem, where the scrolled inscriptio is recorded as ‘MAIORA CARPE’ (‘Gather ye greater things’).20 This change was evidently motivated by the new application: the emblem is no longer functioning as an invocation to the heavenly muse, but rather as a call to overgo the achievements of one’s ancestors by plucking even greater glories from the heavens. It has thus become a political as much as a religious emblem, declaring the building’s claim to represent the Earl’s recent ennoblement. Evidently the two Essex place names and coat of arms in the picture that was his source must have suggested the appropriateness of this preliminary invocation on a building where his own heraldic achievements are otherwise prominently displayed. The emblem’s references to Quarles’s personal circumstances may well have suggested its availability for adaptation to the Scottish earl’s own situation. It is just possible, furthermore, that the Catholic

19 20

This is noted by Hunwick, p. 115. Not now legible on the carving, the motto is thus recorded in some undated sketches in the Historic Environment Scotland, National Monuments Record, and reproduced in Bath, ‘Quarles Goes North’ (n.1 above), p. 992.

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Figure 7.32

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Caerlaverock Castle, carved second-floor lintel B1 to Nithsdale Lodging, ‘MAIORA CARPE’ (‘Gather ye greater things’). © Historic Environment Scotland

Earl might have known that the design of this title page and its iconography had their origins in one of the two sources used by Quarles for the majority of his emblems. Typus Mundi, produced by the College of Rhetoric of the Society of Jesus in Antwerp in 1627, is dedicated to St Ignatius and its emblematic title page shows him standing with one foot on Spain and the other on America as he looks upwards towards the heavenly sphere. (Fig. 7.33) The motto ‘Quam fœdet mihi terra, dum cælum adspicio!’ (‘How the earth disgusts me as I look up to the heavens’) clearly inspired Quarles’s ‘Dum Cælum aspicio, Solum despicio’ (‘As I look up to heaven, I despise the earth’). Typus Mundi’s St Ignatius also stands between the two tree-like shrubs. We might well wonder whether it was the Antwerp title page’s mid-Atlantic placement of St Ignatius with one foot in the Old World and the other in the New which prompted Quarles’s Vix ea nostra Ovidian allusion to the distinction between inherited wealth or achievement, and current aspiration and obligations. An adjoining lintel on the second floor of the new lodgings (Fig. 7.34) shows three figures with a boat, and a motto copying Quarles, II:3, ‘Non amat iste; sed hamat amor’ (‘Don’t think Love just wishes: he fishes!’) – the motto uses a bit of word-play on the late-Latin verb hamo (‘I hook), and Marshall’s engraving shows the winged Anima standing in the boat, pulling in her net which has caught a figure wearing a fool’s cap; on the shore stands winged Cupid pointing towards the boat. Quarles’s motto to the poem that follows cites Job, 18:8, ‘He is cast into a net by his owne feet, and walketh upon a snare,’ and the poem castigates the false wordly lures which tempt the souls of those seeking true

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Figure 7.33 Frontispiece to Typus Mundi (Antwerp, 1627) showing St Ignatius uniting the two worlds. Photo GUL. © University of Glasgow Library, Department of Special Collections

Figure 7.34

Caerlaverock Castle, carved second-floor lintel B3 to Nithsdale Lodging, NON AMAT ISTE SED HAMAT AMOR (‘Don’t think love just wishes, he fishes!’). © Historic Environment Scotland

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Figure 7.35 Quarles, Emblemes (London, 1635), p. 72. © University of Glasgow Library, Department of Special Collections

religion into specious affiliations. (Fig. 7.35) The fool’s cap worn by Marshall’s catch was evidently prompted by the last lines of Quarles’s poem, which concludes that no bribe is big enough to free those who have been seduced into the wrong faith,

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… will no plump Fee Bribe thy false fists, to make a glad Decree, T’unfoole whom thou hast fool’d, and set thy prisners free? Although there is no explicit reference to contemporary sectarian politics in  the poem, it is difficult not to think that they are strongly implied when Quarles exclaims in the preceding lines, Thou grand Imposter, how hast thou obtain’d The wardship of the world? Are all men turn’d Ideots, and Lunaticks? Are all retain’d Beneath thy servile bands? Is none return’d To his forgotten selfe? Has none regain’d His senses? Although visitors viewing Nithsdale’s windows are unlikely have read these verses, it is difficult not to believe that this interpretation of the emblem, as a vitriolic attack on the madness that has deceived credulous believers into abandoning the old faith, is what attracted the Catholic earl. Quarles was not a Catholic, of course, but a middle-of-the-road Anglican, and the precise identity of the sectarians whom he is attacking, whether Puritan or Roman Catholic, remains unclear. However the poet’s insistence that it is not just a few believers, but the whole world that has gone mad, is one that any Catholic living in London in the years leading up to the Civil Wars would have found persuasive, whatever his own worldly success or honours. Moreover, that global application is reflected in a small detail in the illustration that is hardly visible in the carving, for the net that the deceived fool grasps as he is being caught has floats that are marked as terrestrial globes, a detail which almost certainly represents the concluding lines of Quarles’s ‘Epigram’: Nay, Cupid, pitch thy Trammill where thou please, Thou canst not faile to take such fish as these; Thy thriving sport will nev’r be spent; no need To feare, when ev’ry Cork’s a world; Thou’lt speed. We can now understand why, in Marshall’s engraving, the corks on the net are indeed shown as worlds. Whether any viewers could see them on the window carving, or make sense of them if they did, remains doubtful, but that the emblem carved on his window retained much of the significance for the Scottish earl that it has in the English emblem book that it copies seems likely.

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Figure 7.36

Caerlaverock Castle, carved second-floor lintel B2 to Nithsdale Lodging, QUIS LEVIOR? CUI PLUS PONDERIS ADDIT AMOR (‘Which is lighter? That to which love adds greater weight’). The cartouche strapwork is marked with Robert Nithsdale’s initials: rn. © Historic Environment Scotland

Other emblems on these carved lintels copy Quarles, I:4, with the Latin motto ‘Quis levior? Cui plus ponderis addit amor’ (‘Which is lighter? That to which love adds greater weight’) which is copied in the ribbon scroll beneath the carving. (Fig. 7.36) Based on Ps. 62:9 ‘To be laid in the ballance, it is ­altogether lighter than vanitie’, the engraving shows Divine Love holding the scales into which a winged Cupid is putting weights, whilst another putto is blowing bubbles into the other pan. (Fig. 7.37) Quarles’s verses elaborate on the number of worldly vanities, Which, weigh’d in equall Scales, is found so light, So poorely over-balanced with a Bubble. The moral is general enough to have no particular sectarian or political point, and the same is true of the carving, now detached from the building, (Fig. 7.38) that copies Quarles II:4, ‘Quam grave servitium est, quid levis esca parit’ (‘What a heavy responsibility it is, to prepare light meals’), in which earthly goals and  pleasures are dismissed, quoting Hosiah, 13:3, as ‘… chaffe that is driven with a whirlewind out of the floor, and as the smoke out of the chimney.’ The ­picture shows Anima chained to the world on which she is sitting, puffing a pipe: ‘A slave to pleasure is a slave to smoke’ as Quarles’s verse has it. (Fig. 7.39)

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Figure 7.37 Quarles, Emblemes (­London, 1635), p. 16. © University of Glasgow Library, Department of Special Collections

Figure 7.38

Caerlaverock Castle, carved lintel to Nithsdale Lodging, QUAM GRAVE SERVITIUM EST, QUID LEVIS ESCA PARIT (‘What a heavy responsibility it is, to prepare light meals’). © Historic Environment Scotland

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Figure 7.39 Quarles, Emblemes (London, 1635), p. 76. © University of Glasgow Library, Department of Special Collections

Two emblems from Alciato on the upper third-floor windows copy illustrations from the Padua, 1621, edition of Emblemata. ‘Opulenti haereditas’ (‘The rich man’s legacy’) shows vultures preying on the body of Patroclus, whose remains were claimed by Hector as spoils of war. (Figs. 7.40–7.41) ‘Quæ supra nos, nihil ad nos’ (‘What is above us is of no concern to us’) shows Prometheus chained to the rock where an eagle eternally pecks his liver, as punishment for stealing fire from the gods. (Figs. 7.42–7.43) What seems most remarkable about these two emblems is that they both draw on classical myths featuring birds feasting on human cadavers. Robert Maxwell’s motives for using these need not concern us, though the fact that he had a choice of emblem books available, and in 1634 placed examples from the most recent emblem book to be published in England alongside emblems from the founding pater et princeps of the whole emblem tradition, testifies to his knowledge of that tradition.

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Figure 7.40

Caerlaverock Castle, carved third-floor lintel A1 to Nithsdale Lodging, Opulenti haereditas (‘The rich man’s legacy’). © Historic Environment Scotland

Figure 7.41

A. Alciato, Emblemata (Padua, 1621), p. 673, ‘Opulenti Hæreditas’ (‘The rich man’s legacy’). © University of Glasgow Library, Department of Special Collections

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Figure 7.42

Caerlaverock Castle, carved second-floor lintel A2 to Nithsdale Lodging, Quae supra nos, nihil ad nos (‘What lies above us is none of our business’). © Historic Environment Scotland

Figure 7.43 A. Alciato, Emblemata (Padua, 1621), p. 426, Quae supra nos, nihil ad nos (‘What lies above us is none of our business’). © University of Glasgow Library, Department of Special Collections



Gardyne’s House, Dundee: ‘Sweet Phospher bring the day’

In 1640 the Covenanting army besieged Caerlaverock and razed parts of it. Ten years later, in 1651, Dundee was besieged by the Cromwellian army of General Monck, after the Committee of Estates had moved to Dundee to carry out its business of ruling on behalf of the young King Charles ii, following his coronation as King of Scotland in a futile attempt to restore monarchical power.

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On the approach of Monck’s army the Committee fled, leaving him to sack the city where hundreds of defenders and citizens were killed in the mayhem and looting which followed. Monck’s invasion of Scotland had already left its mark on the emblems in Stirling, where the gravestone of John Service still shows marks of the bullets which hit it from musket shots fired at the castle from the spire of Holy Rude kirk by troops besieging Stirling Castle. (Fig. 7.1 above) And in Dundee they appear to have left their mark on some further emblems that copy Quarles. These are to be found in painting which was discovered in 1887 on some beams from the ceiling of Gardyne’s House, in Gray’s Close, off the High Street. (Fig. 7.44) The way this example of Scottish decorative painting uses Quarles is highly unusual insofar as it borrows nothing from Quarles’s engraved pictures but copies lines of verse from his moralising text. There are plenty of examples where decorative painting of this period copied the pictures from emblem books without any texts, but it is very unusual to find them using the text without the pictures.21 Emblems are bimedial: their emblematic meaning and function are always likely to be compromised if one uses one without the other, so the question of what motivated a seventeenth-century householder to inscribe lines abstracted from Quarles’s verse, and these lines in particular, on his ceiling is a leading one. We owe the only plausible explanation so far to Peter Davidson, who associates these verses with the political circumstances of the time following Monck’s sacking of the city.22 The inscriptions came to light when Gardyne’s House was being demolished to make way for lodgings to house workers in Keiller’s nearby jam factory (‘Jute. jam, and journalism’ being proverbially the nineteenth-century sources of the city’s wealth). An article in the Dundee Advertiser (Mon., 21 Feb, 1887) described the joists that had been exposed and then removed for safe-keeping as ‘painted along the sides with panels in black lines … shaded with purple’; the undersides were decorated with interlaced foliage, and the boards between them richly painted with foliage, fruit and flowers. Three joists were painted with extracts which the writer – local historian Alexander Hutcheson – r­ ecognised as coming from Quarles’s Emblemes. He records all of these, and a woodcut

21

22

Painted ceilings which copy pictures from emblem books without texts include Rossend, Fife, now in the National Museum of Scotland, and Nunraw, E. Lothian, see Bath, Renaissance Decorative Painting in Scotland (Edinburgh, 2003), pp. 42–46, 229–30, 258–260; for Gardyne’s House see pp. 52–55. Peter Davidson, ‘Mute Emblems and a Lost Room: Gardyne’s House, Dundee’, in Visual Words and Verbal Pictures, ed. A. Saunders and P. Davidson (Glasgow: Glasgow Emblem Studies, 2005), pp. 51–67.

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Figure 7.44

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Gardyne’s House, Dundee shortly before its demolition in 1887. Photo courtesy of Charles McKean

­illustration shows one of the inscriptions as it appeared on the beam. (Fig. 7.45) Local antiquarian, A.C. Lamb, also took photographs which survive in the Wilson Collection of Dundee Public Library (cat. nos. 184–187), hence we have a fairly good record of what was painted on these beams, even though the actual beams have now disappeared.

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Figure 7.45

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Facsimile transcript of verses painted on a beam from Gardyne’s House, as ­printed in Dundee Advertiser, 21 Feb 1887. Public domain

The beams were painted with a total of seven inscriptions, each consisting of four or five lines of verse. On four panels these quote the concluding four-line Epigram with which Quarles sums up the moral to the emblem; the other three inscriptions extract four or five lines from the much longer verses that follow each of the engravings. These verse inscriptions certainly resemble the type of general moral or proverbial counselling which was familiar on Scottish painted ceilings of this period, such as Crathes, Delgaty, Traquair, or Sailor’s Walk, Kirkcaldy, where we find such ‘grave sentences’ inscribed along the beams.23 However what distinguishes these inscriptions from such generalised moralising is the fact that it is virtually impossible to know who is speaking in these verses, or what the context is for what they are saying: these verses are voiced. And this problem is not eased by the artist’s inclusion of speech markers, as in the passage from Emblems, I:1, which reenacts the Temptation from Genesis, where the speakers are Eve and the Serpent. (Fig. 7.46) As our seventeenthcentury viewer looked up at the following inscription, the first thing s/he had to do was to recognise that the speaker is Eve: ‘Tis but an apple, and it is as good To do as to desire. Fruit’s made for food; I’le pull and taste and tempt my Adam too To know the secrets of this dainty. Serp. Doe. It is one thing to look at a wall or a ceiling and read a biblical text or proverb, such as those we find at Crathes: 23

For these see Bath, Renaissance Decorative Painting, chapter 8, ‘Grave Sentences’, pp. 169–83.

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Figure 7.46 Quarles, Emblemes (London, 1635), p. 4. © University of Glasgow Library, Department of Special Collections

A maidin but modestie A clarke but courtesie A howsewife langinge fairleis to see Wants all there seimliest propertie.24

24

See Bath, Renaissance Decorative Painting, p. 175.

[‘without] [‘wonders’]

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It is quite another thing to look up and find what looks like a playscript, in which the change of speaker is marked (‘Serp[ent]’) even though he has only one word to say: assigning speakers is not what we normally have to do with moralising inscriptions on ceilings.

The Fall of Mankind or of the Monarch?

It is precisely because these beam inscriptions from Gardynes’ House make such little sense as conventional moral counselling that the political reading suggested by Peter Davidson begins to make better sense. The lines just quoted are not the only ones that draw on Quarles’s opening emblems at the beginning of his book, all of which are concerned with temptation and the Fall of mankind. As Davidson says, parallels between the Fall of man and the downfall of monarchical rule, or the ruin of Eden and the fall of the Three Kingdoms, became commonplace in political, or at least in royalist, rhetoric at this period: indeed the extent to which seventeenth-century readings of Genesis became politicised during the Civil Wars is apparent from modern interpretations of Milton’s Paradise Lost.25 A political application of the eschatological references seems more than likely in the inscription that reads: Lament, lament; look, look, what thou hast done! Lament the world’s, lament thy own estate. Look, look, by doing how thou art undone; Lament thy fall, lament the change of State; Thy faith is broken and thy freedom gone. These are the opening lines of Quarles’s second emblem, in which the ‘change of State’ might be equally moral or political. The possibility of these lines being read by a Catholic householder (on which see below) would surely make a political reading of the closing line irresistible. An equally telling reference is to be found on the other side of this beam, where what we find turns out to be the concluding ‘Epigram’ to Quarles’s opening emblem, the same emblem whose earlier verse dialogue dramatises the conversation between Eve and the Serpent. Epigram. Unlucky Parliament, wherein at last Both houses are agreed, and firmly past 25

See, for instance, Christopher Hill, Milton and the English Revolution (London: Faber and Faber, 1977).

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An act of death confirm’d by higher powers O had it had but such success as Ours. Just as the preceding dialogue’s use of speech-markers seems misplaced – they certainly ask to be read silently since they wreck the iambic metre – so the inclusion of Quarles’s ‘Epig.’ subtitle, signalling the status and form of the verse that follows to signal closure of his emblematic structure, seems curiously out of place on this ceiling. But it is the word ‘Parliament’ which most strikingly serves to signal a political reading in its new situation. That is not to say, of course, that the word was not open to much more innocent, apolitical usage at this period, when its primary meaning of conversation or talking was still current. Indeed that sense accords with the remarkable self-referentiality of this writing, describing as it does the dialogue, or ‘parlement’ between Eve and Serpent which has preceded it in Quarles’s emblem. But taken with ‘houses’ (of ‘Parliament’?) in the following line, and the ‘act of death’ which this leads to, it becomes difficult to resist the suggestion that this inscription was a Royalist allusion to that ‘change of State’ which had led to the capital punishment of Charles i, and the assumption of power by that ‘Unlucky Parliament’ which, under Cromwell’s Protectorate, had sent General Monk to Scotland to recover Dundee from monarchical rule. That possibility might be influenced by anything we knew about the ownership of Gardyne’s House at this time, and it is therefore of some interest to discover that one of the two seventeenth owners who might have commissioned this painting is thought to have been a Catholic. As Davidson notes, ‘In these years there are two possible candidates for the ownership of the house’. In the early 1650s it was owned by a certain Patrick Kid, but in 1657 the tenement came into the possession of Alexander Bower, for whose ­Catholicism there is ­apparently some evidence in the Scottish Catholic Archive (­Davidson, p. 55, n.5).

‘Phosphore redde diem’

The most persuasive evidence for a political reading of these inscriptions comes, however, from what we know about the missing pictura to Emblem I:14. The hint is in the closing lines of its epigram, quoted on the back of the first beam on this ceiling. Epigram. My soule if Ignorance puffe out this light Sheell doe a favour that intends a spight

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T’seems dark abroad but take this light away Thy windows will discover break of day. If we were to read this politically, we might suppose that it was holding out some prospect of Britain’s (or Scotland’s) recovery from that ‘change of State’ which the ‘unlucky Parliament’ had inflicted on the city and the nation. The likelihood of that reading becomes more probable, however, as a result of ­Davidson’s discovery of the classical sources to which the whole of this e­ mblem alludes. Emblem I:14 in Quarles has a picture showing Anima sitting before a lighted candle in front of a darkened world (Fig. 7.47): it is this candle that the Epigram refers to in the phrase ‘take this light away’. The motto is, ‘Phosphore redde diem’ (‘Sweet Phospher bring the day’ as Quarles renders it – ‘Phospher’ is the morning star). Davidson’s crucial discovery is that the motto quotes an epigram of Martial (VIII:21), in which the Roman poet interprets the dawning daylight as symbolic of the Emperor’s return to Rome: Phosphore, redde diem: quid gaudia nostra moraris? Caesere venturo, Phosphere, redde diem. (Phosphor, bring light; why dost our joys delay? Caesar’s to come; Phosphor, bring on the day.) Moreover in 1617 Martial’s epigram had been revised and rewritten to celebrate, not Caesar’s return to Rome but King James’s one and only return to his native Scotland after the union of the crowns. Published in Edinburgh by printer Andreas Hart, ΝΟΣΤΩΔΙΑ in serenissimi, potentissimi et invictissimi monarchus Jacobi Magnae Britanniae, Franciae et Hiberniae regis … in Scotiam reditum was composed and printed to express the congratulations of Edinburgh University on the royal visit, and its close imitation of Martial was designed to express the academic ideals of the university, whilst also appealing to the humanist tastes of the king. Its overriding laudatory thrust is, as Davidson says, ‘on James’s activities as a peacemaker in a British context’ (p. 65). Phosphore redde diem, ni gaudia nostra moreris, Noster adest Caeser, Phosphore redde diem… Pacificus vixti dum Scotia sceptra tenebas. Anglica gens nullo sanguine parta fuit. Pacificus Patriam (Domino aspirante) revisis … Cruda gerant gentes inter se bella prophane: Fraternam pacem terra Britanna colat.

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Figure 7.47 Quarles, Emblemes (London, 1635), pp. 56–57. © University of Glasgow Library, Department of Special Collections

(Prosper bring the day, do not delay our joys, our Caesar comes; Phosphor bring the day […] You lived a peacemaker while you held the ­Scottish sceptre, the English people were annexed with no bloodletting. You ­return as peacemaker to your native land, sighing for its lord, [… ] let prophane peoples wage savage wars amongst themselves: fraternal peace is cultivated in the British lands.]

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We cannot know whether the designer of the ceiling forty years later in Dundee was familiar with this particular poem, though it is certainly possible, considering that, as Davidson says, ‘there is plentiful evidence that Scottish neo-Latin poetry enjoyed long circulation.’ It is likely that an educated seventeenth-century reader of Quarles would at least have recognised the emblem motto’s own allusion to Martial.26 It is notable how memorable is its repetition, as the reiteration of the opening apostrophe to the dawn – ‘Phosphore redde diem’ – enacts in both poems the very return it is advocating: the Scottish poem’s reiteration of this reiteration is itself an allusion, and an act of hommage. Emblem mottoes not infrequently use classical adagia, whose sources would be recognised by competent readers as allusions; indeed as we saw at Pinkie House the habit of collecting and recycling classical commonplaces remained fundamental to Latin learning. The designer, or owner, of the Gardyne’s House ceiling might well therefore have recognised Quarles’s ‘Phosphore redde diem’ motto as alluding to a classical epigram which had anticipated the return of Caesar as the dawn of a new day, even though prudential reasons would have led him not to quote it directly in his inscriptions. Direct allusion to a classical source anticipating the return of a legitimate ruler would surely have been too risky in the immediate aftermath of the siege of Dundee, although the recognition of significant catchphrases, allusions, and emblems would become increasingly common in Jacobite circles as these politics moved, after the revolution of 1688, into the eighteenth century. The case for reading the excerpts from Quarles on this Dundee ceiling as essentially political rests, finally, on the difficulty of reading them any other way.

More Gravestones

Elaborately carved gravestones using emblems that go back to Quarles are not confined to the east-central region – Stirlingshire, Fife, Perthshire and Angus – that we have surveyed so far. The fashion for carving them also outlasted the mid-seventeenth century. It is however, remarkable how many of the remaining examples use some of the same emblems which we have already seen on gravestones in Dundee, Perth or Stirling. This suggests, as one might expect, that masons were familiar with each others’ work and copied it, or maybe shared the same design sketches and patterns. In 1714, for instance, a headstone 26

For the wider seventeenth-century recognition of this see Dale B. Randall, ‘Phosphore redde diem: Ancient Starlight in Quarles’s Emblemes, I.14’, John Donne Journal, 6 (1987), 91–103.

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Figure 7.48 Girvan, Ayrshire, gravestone to Elizabeth McCrakes, †1714. Photo courtesy of Betty Willshire

was carved for the late Elizabeth McCrakes in Girvan, Ayrshire. (Fig. 7.48) No one looking at this in isolation would think that this design, showing a skirted figure emerging from what might be a doorway or a cave, was an emblem; it certainly lacks any moralising text. However we can now recognise that this is another carving, like those we have seen on the Victane stone in Dundee or the Judith Nairn stone in St Andrews, that copies Emblemes, IV:11, in which Anima is emerging from a canopied bed in her futile love-chase (Fig. 7.17 above). The Girvan carving is much simplified, with no sign of the retreating leg and arm of Earthly Love holding his torch, which we see in Quarles’s picture (nor do any of these carvings include Anima’s wee lap dog, which looks up in surprise to know where its mistress is going, and why she has risen so early). Perhaps the most interesting thing to notice about these Scottish gravestones that use this emblem is that all three are dedicated to women. It was surely the fact that this emblematic love-chase is based on the text from the Song of Solomon, Canticles, 3:2, that would have supported a gendered reading, making it suitable for memorials to deceased wives. Even later in the eighteenth century, we find a stone dated 1748 that shows the two figures of Cupid and Anima, as we have seen them already one hundred years earlier on the 1647 coped stone to Gilbert Couper at Old Scone graveyard, in which Amor Divinus tries to cover his face as Anima reaches out to pull his hands away, copying Quarles, III:7 based on Job, 13:24, ‘Wherefore

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Figure 7.49

287

Old Inch, Wigtonshire, gravestone to John Drymen, †1748. Photo courtesy of Betty Willshire

hidest thou thy face, and holdest me for thine enemy?’ The Couper gravestone includes that text in its scroll, whereas the 1748 gravestone to John Drymen at Old Inch, Wigtonshire, in the far south west of Scotland, shows only the two figures. It has the same large borders with foliated scrollwork as the Girvan tombstone, but no inscription. (Fig. 7.49) Another motif that we find repeated on several stones is the emblem ­showing Cupid and Anima weighing worldly treasures in a pair of scales, and finding them overbalanced by a bubble. This is the emblem we have already identified as source for the ‘Quis levior?’ carving at Caerlaverock. (Fig. 145 above) Using Emblemes, I:4, based on Ps. 62:11, ‘To be laid in the ballance, it is altogether lighter than vanitie’, this might easily be mistaken for an emblem of Justice, because of the scales. Quarles’s picture, however, shows three figures, one holding the scales whilst the two further putti fill the pans. Hence we see the winged and aureoled Divine Love holding the scales and gesturing to point the moral, whilst a winged Cupid with his quiver fills the higher pan with weighty objects (one can just make out a terrestrial globe) and a wingless Anima blows the bubble with a bubble-pipe in the other pan: it tips the scales. We find this emblem on the tombstone of Robert Campbell, who died in 1701, in Soulseat Abbey graveyard (now a private garden), Wigtonshire. (Fig. 7.50) Flanked by skulls and crossbones, the three figures weigh their treasures in a mass of ­surrounding decorative scrollwork. We find it also, somewhat coincidentally, on one of the only pieces of historical sculpture to have been shown to use Quarles in England for, as Tara Hamling discovered, a carved stone

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Figure 7.50 Soulseat Abbey, Wigtonshire, gravestone of Robert Campbell, †1701. Photo courtesy of Betty Willshire

chimneypiece that originated in an unknown house in York copies Quarles’s ‘To be weighed in the balance …’ emblem.27 The carved overmantel is now installed in Sutton Place, Surrey, in one of those removals of commodified art objects from their historical settings that so often problematise historical research, particularly when records of provenance are not kept. The three childlike figures do their weighing enclosed by an oval cartouche in a landscape, with buildings in the background: a secular dwelling house to the left and a spired church above the winged Cupid to the right. (Fig. 7.51) The distinction between the buildings – secular and spiritual – appears to reflect the distinction between the goods being weighed in the opposed scales, which means that the designer must have wished, in making these changes, to preserve the moral point of the emblem even if, as Tara Hamling says, ‘It is not clear to what extent a contemporary audience could have understood this message from the image alone’ (p. 283). 27

Tara Hamling, Decorating the ‘Godly’ Household: Religious Art in Post-Reformation Britain (New-Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), pp. 282–283.

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Figure 7.51

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Quarles in England, carved chimneypiece of unknown provenance, now in the great hall, Sutton Place, Surrey. © Country Life

We find this same emblem used on an anonymous, undated gravestone in ­Alloway churchyard, Ayrshire, with the similarly richly foliated borders that are typical of these south-westerly gravestones in Scotland. (Fig. 7.52) Situated on the banks of the river Doon, south of Ayr, in the birthplace of Scotland’s national poet, the Old Kirk’s graveyard contains several of these vigorously carved stones that resemble in so many respects those we have also seen in central Scotland. MacGibbon and Ross note something that may account for this resemblance: ‘when James vi refounded and enlarged the Chapel Royal in Stirling,’ they write, ‘he annexed it to the Church of Alloway in Kyle [this district of Ayrshire], to form the prebend of one of the canons of that collegiate chapel.’28 That might suggest how these two regions of Scotland come to share such similar styles of gravestone, for operative stonemasons from Stirling may well have traveled to Ayrshire to carve the gravestones in the annexed ­Alloway churchyard. The town of Alloway had its own lodge of Freemasons, of which the poet Burns would later become a member, and he would certainly have been familiar with these gravestones since his father is buried in the same graveyard. Amongst the busy decorative detail on this gravestone one sees, beneath the three Cupids weighing their scales, the figure of winged F­ ather Time 28

David MacGibbon and Thomas Ross, The Ecclesiastical Architecture of Scotland, 3 vols (Edinburgh: James Thin, 1897), vol. i, p. 393.

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Figure 7.52 Alloway Churchyard, Ayrshire, anonymous undated gravestone. Photo author

confronting a skeleton. This detail introduces two motifs which one might ­easily dismiss as merely generic, however placed together in this format they turn out to be using a design that is also found more widely in tombstones of the eighteenth century and which goes back to a source in Quarles that we have not noticed so far. This image of Father Time standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the skeleton Death derives not from Quarles’s 1635 book of Emblemes but from his second emblem book, Hieroglyphickes of the Life of Man, which we have already noticed in Chapter 5. Its fifteen numbered emblems symbolise successive ages in the Life of Man figured as a lighted candle. In emblem no. 6 Time dialogues with Death under a text from Ecclesiastes, 3:1, ‘To everything there is an appointed time’ and on the facing page we see winged Father Time standing in front of a pillared sundial holding his hourglass as he encourages the skeletal figure of Death to snuff out the candle. (Fig. 7.53) The picture has its subscribed motto, ‘Tempus erit’ (‘The time will come’) – the motto may gain some iconological confirmation in Marshall’s engraving from Time’s forelock, which is, of course,

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Figure 7.53

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Francis Quarles, Hieroglyphickes of the Life of Man (1638), p. 22. © University of Glasgow Library, Department of Special Collections

what proverbially we must catch Time by; it is, emblematically, the attribute of Occasio. We find the same two figures on another deeply carved stone in the Alloway graveyard, for the monument to Agnes Meler, dated 1741, copies the same emblem from Quarles’s Hieroglyphickes and looks stylistically like work of the same carver. (Fig. 7.54) It is surprising how widespread this particular image we have found on both these Alloway gravesones became in eighteenth-century graveyards. Even

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Figure 7.54 Alloway Churchyard, Ayrshire, gravestone of Agnes Meler, †1741. Photo author

before the end of the seventeenth century they had evidently made their way across the Atlantic to North America. Quarles’s ‘Tempus Erit’ emblem is used on four different stones in King’s Chapel, Boston, Mass., with dates ranging from 1678 to 1750; gravestones dating from the later seventeenth century are also found elsewhere in Massachusetts, at Salem and in Dorchester, that use the same emblem.29 Whether these owe anything to the Scottish tradition is unclear, though all are thought to mark the graves of early Puritan settlers exiled during the persecution of English nonconformists following the Laudian reforms of Anglican church discipline. They therefore mark a late-seventeenth century shift in the reception of Quarles’s emblems, when these came to be regarded as pillars of dissenting doctrine and Puritan preaching, standing shoulder to shoulder with Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress in accommodating allegory and emblem to Nonconformist doctrine. Bunyan also wrote an emblem book, whose title A Book for Boys and Girls reflects that marginalisation which led to emblem books being regarded largely as children’s literature; the childlike figures of Cupid and Anima both in Quarles’s emblems and in those which Gabriel Harvey translated in 1647 as The School of the Heart, encouraged this development; numerous translations of the emblematic works by Jeremias 29

For details of these see Bath and Willsher, p. 196, n.13; on the wider influence of this emblem see K.J. Höltgen, ‘Francis Quarles’s Second Emblem Book, Heiroglyphics of the Life of Man’, in Word and Visual Imagination, ed. Höltgen, Daly and Lottes (Erlangen: Universitätsbund Erlangen-Nürnberg, 1988), pp. 183–207.

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Figure 7.55 American gravestone, King’s Chapel cemetary, Boston ma, gravestone of Joseph Tapping, †1678. Public domain

Drexel also influenced it, despite him being a Jesuit.30 The gravestone of Joseph Tapping in the Boston King’s Chapel graveyard (Fig. 7.55) uses the same style of extravagant scrollwork that we have witnessed on Scottish gravestones, here enclosing a conventional winged skull and hourglass; the rectangular panel beneath it, however, adapts Quarles’s emblem of Time and Death snuffing life’s candle from his Hieroglyphics of the Life of Man. Father Time now has his conventional scythe, replacing Quarles’s sundial, and the motto quotes Persius (Sat. V:151), ‘Vive memor lete fugit hora’ (‘Live mindful of Lethe, time flies). (Fig. 7.56) Founded in 1630, the King’s Chapel graveyard is the oldest cemetery in Boston and Joseph Trapping’s is its most famous headstone. Stones commemorating Samuel Adams (†1728), Rebecca Garish (†1743), Rebecca Sanders (†1745/6), and Samuel Greenleaf (c. 1750) also adapt Quarles’s Time and Death emblem with considerable variation in the designs, but which tend to place each figure on either side of the candle to form a more balanced composition. (Fig. 7.57) Returning to Scotland, it remains to mention one further stone which uses an emblem we have not encountered elsewhere. An undated gravestone from

30

For the endurance of Quarles through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in English dissenting traditions and children’s literature, see Bath, Speaking Pictures, pp. 264–81.

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Figure 7.56

King’s Chapel cemetary, Boston ma, gravestone of Joseph Trapping, detail. Public domain

Figure 7.57

King’s Chapel cemetary, Boston ma, gravestone of Rebecca Garish, †1743. Public domain

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Figure 7.58 Arbroath Abbey Museum, Angus, undated gravestone commemorating ‘pw’ and ‘ig’. Photo author

the grounds of Arbroath Abbey and currently on display in the Abbey Museum shows the two figures we can now identify as Cupid and Anima standing on either side of a terrestrial globe; winged Cupid is snuffing a candle that stands on the globe, whilst Anima is blowing the flames of the sun with a pair of ­bellows. (Fig. 7.58) The gravestone is undated but is inscribed with the initials ‘pw’ and ‘ig’ on either side of a solar glory; no text is now legible on the ribbon scroll that enfolds it. In the light of what we have seen elsewhere, we might suppose it not too difficult for early viewers to make sense of this imagery: the feeble flame of earthly light is extinguished in death, whilst the greater glory of the heavens above burns brighter with the breath of the expiring soul, perhaps. We are ­reminded of the sighs of the repentant soul that rise up like arrows on the Service gravestone in Stirling, or the candle whose light Death also extinguishes with his snuffer on the stones we have just looked at. The candle which P ­ atrick Simson painted in the window of his manse at Stirling as emblematic of the light shed by his preaching is also not irrelevant. This Arbroath ­gravestone, however, copies the illustration for the opening emblem of Quarles’s ‘Second Booke’ of Emblemes with the motto ‘Sic lumine lumen ademptum’ (‘Thus by light light is taken away’). (Fig. 7.59) Anima with the bellows wears a fool’s cap, whilst ­Cupid’s bow lies on the ground as he snuffs out the candle that stands in its global candlestick. The fool’s cap is accounted for in Quarles’s  satirical verses, which reproach earthly desires for their attachment to vanities,

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Figure 7.59 Quarles, Emblemes (London, 1635), p. 64. © University of Glasgow Library, Department of Special Collections

Doe silly Cupid snuffe, and trimme Thy false, thy feeble light, And make her selfe-consuming flames more bright; Mee thinke [sic.], shee burnes too dimme. Or as the Epigram puts it,

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Thou blowst heaven’s fire, the whilst thou goest about, Rebellious foole in vaine, to blow it out: Thy Folly adds confusion to thy death; Heav’ns fire confounds, when fann’d with Follies breath. Typically for Quarles, the closing line’s aspirated alliteration blows with the breath of Folly’s bellows. We should still, however, wonder at the baroque extravagance of a tombstone on which the foolish human soul is shown blowing up the sun with a homely bellows; this is not the stale generic iconography of conventional later tombstones or of Victorian piety. Timeworn and damaged though it is (the Arbroath tablestone had been lying for many decades on the ground, and was broken), such carving was always meant to surprise or puzzle a viewer, to raise eyebrows. Identifying its sources in Quarles’s emblems certainly helps clarify its meaning and intention, but if it does not initially challenge and surprise us it has almost certainly failed in its purpose. The ease with which Quarles’s emblems crossed confessional boundaries in Scotland is something we have witnessed in this chapter, as these emblems by a middle-of-the-road Anglican that rework Latin originals composed by continental Jesuits inspire both Catholic and Protestant monuments. Scotland was not alone in this, since we find decorative painting overseas in which Protestant congregations use these same emblems to decorate their churches. For instance in the town of Katharinenheerd on the Eiderstedt peninsula of Schleswig-Hollstein the church has an organ gallery decorated with fourteen panels copying emblems that go back to the Pia desideria of Herman Hugo, including not only the one in which Amor divinus is dragging Anima away from the sundial, which we saw on the Service gravestone, (Fig. 7.60) but also the emblem which the Stirling carving unites it with, in which Anima tears open her breast to release the sighs of the departing Soul as arrows to reach the heavenly face of God above.31 (Fig. 7.61) Painted sometime between 1635 and 1650, the Katharinenheerd emblems decorate a Lutheran church, and as Ingrid Höpel writes, ‘Furnishing a gallery of a Lutheran church with emblems after a widely circulating Jesuit devotional book is only surprising at first glance. Numerous examples are known which testify to the interconfessional exchange and mutual use of emblems by different confessions.’32 Although the 31

32

The Katherinenheerd emblem cycle can now be found well photographed online in the Arkyves website: http://www.arkyves.org/browse/?&q=katharinenheerd [accessed 10/11.2017]. Ingrid Hopel and U. Kuder, Mundus Symbolicus I: Emblembücher aus der Sammlung Wolfgang J. Müller in der Universitätsbibliothek Kiel (Kiel: Ludwig, 2004), p. 63, ‘Die Ausstattung der Empore einer lutherischen Kirche mit Emblemen nach dem verbreiteten

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Church at Katharinenheerd, Schleswig, painted panel on organ gallery, 1635–1650, copying a version of Herman Hugo’s emblem13, Nunquid non paucitas dierum meorum finietur brevi (‘Our life is brief; it will be ended shortly’) quoting the text from the Office for the Dead. Photo © Ursula Lins

Quarles Comes North

Figure 7.61

Church at Katharinenheerd, Schleswig, painted panel, copying Hugo’s Pia Desideria frontispiece. Photo © Ursula Lins

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Katharinenheerd church was Lutheran, Anabaptist immigrants had inspired their distinctive Mennonite branch in North Friesland which enjoyed a lively trade with the Netherlands. Under Duke Friedrich iii of Schleswig-HollsteinGottorf (1597–1659) the region enjoyed considerable freedom of worship. We need not look for any direct connections with Scotland, or any influence of one decorative tradition on the other, but the interconfessional adaptability of the emblems which Francis Quarles took over from his Catholic sources was not confined to Scotland. In Britain, its Puritan reputation and inheritance long outlasted the seventeenth century.33 jesuitischen Andachtsbuch erscheint nur auf den ersten Blick überraschend. Es sind zahlreiche Beispiele bekannt, die den interkonfessionellen Austausch und den wechselseitigen Gebrauch von Emblemen durch verschiedenen Konfessionen belegen.’ See also I.  ­Höpel, ‘Antwerpen auf Eiderstedt: ein Eblemzyklus nach Hermann Hugos Pia D ­ esideria in St.  Katharina, Katharinenheerd auf Eiderststedt, zwischen 1635 und 1650’, De zeventiende eeuw. Cultuur in de Nederlanden in interdisciplinair perspectief, 20:2 (2004), pp. 322–42. 33 Bath, Speaking Pictures, pp. 199–201, 271–77.

Chapter 8

Mobilising the Gap: Ian Hamilton Finlay’s Inheritance

Historical Revivals and Heroic Emblems

The emblem tradition did not die out entirely after its Renaissance flowering though it certainly faded. The emblems of Quarles were reprinted well into the nineteenth century in England, when they were marketed alongside Bunyan as classics of dissenting literature, with at least eight editions of Emblemes in the eighteenth century and thirty or more in the nineteenth. Quarles’s epigrams were sometimes recast in rhyming couplets and his plates were necessarily recut or revised in these editions, but although there was also something of a brief nineteenth-century revival of interest in the emblem amongst the English Tractarians, by the early twentieth century and with the advent of Modernism we may safely conclude that the English emblem tradition was essentially dead.1 In Scotland, however, Modernism saw what ought to be regarded as perhaps its finest flowering (and the horticultural metaphor is now highly appropriate, as we shall see) in the work of Ian Hamilton Finlay (1925– 2006), whose achievements both as a writer and a visual artist have been recognised as strongly indebted to the Renaissance emblem tradition.2 Finlay was justifiably described at the time of his death (in 2006) as ‘Our greatest living artist’ and his work was commemorated as ‘a wonder of its time’.3 We have seen in preceding chapters how strongly Renaissance emblems were associated with monumental epigraphy, with classical allusions and with neoclassical revivals. We find those associations everywhere in the work of Finlay, whose experimental and innovative combinations of word and image often appear in strongly emblematic formats. These can be found most patently in a printed emblem book, Heroic Emblems,4 but they are also present in his 1 For a discussion of ‘English Emblem Books Post-1700’ see the final chapter of Bath, Speaking Pictures (London: Longman, 1994), pp. 255–81. 2 Yves Abrioux, Ian Hamilton Finlay: A Visual Primer (London: Reaktion Books, 1985; revised and expanded 1992); for the emblematic affinities of Finlay’s work see esp. pp. 213–40. 3 I quote from the Exhibition guidenote to ‘Ian Hamilton Finlay: Twilight Remembers’ at the Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh, August – October, 2012. 4 Ian Hamilton Finlay and Ron Costley, Heroic Emblems (Calais, vt: Z Press, 1977).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���8 | doi 10.1163/9789004364066_009

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other writings and in his visual artwork, notably his remarkable garden known as ‘Little Sparta’ in the Pentland Hills, south of Edinburgh, whose name itself suggests some kind of neoclassical revival. We have also seen how often traditional emblem books, as mixed media artefacts combining word and i­mage, were multi-authored, incorporating the various skills of the nominal author, but also those of its artist, printer/publisher and sometimes incorporating learned commentaries on successive emblems by a different writer. Heroic E­ mblems follows this pattern, with Finlay’s name on the title page alongside that of his artist, Ron Costley, and the Introduction, and commentaries that follow each emblem, are acknowledged as the work of Stephen Bann. Alciato’s editors had already set the pattern for this in the sixteenth century, when later editions of the Emblematum liber were published with learned commentaries by such readers as Barthélemy Aneau, Sebastien Stockhamer, Claude Mignault, and Laurenzo Pignoria. Finlay was an instinctive, one might almost say compulsive, collaborator who, long before the arrival of the internet, networked with fellow authors and artists in pioneering innovative developments in the twentieth-century modernist movement.5 Finlay’s title for the volume, Heroic Emblems, is itself an echo of one of the most influential of the sixteenth-century collections of imprese, Claude Paradin’s Devises heroïques, and although this is not cited in Stephen Bann’s ‘Introduction’, Bann himself (p. ix) refers Finlay’s concept of modern heroism back to a much less well-known seventeenth-century English translation of Henri Estienne’s L’art de faire les devises (1645), which added to this French guidebook on the art of the emblem a ‘catalogue of Coronet-Devises both on the King’s and Parliament side, in the late Warres’.6 The moment we open Heroic Emblems we are struck by the images of modern militarism: tanks, battleships, aircraft carriers and fighter planes, all with enigmatic mottoes or inscriptions in various languages which at once invite and yet challenge interpretation. The emblem showing a mine-sweeper tank with its flail-chains and the motto ‘Semper festina lente Hasten slowly’ (Fig. 8.1) might be seen as paradigmatic. This image of modern warfare is linked to one of the most famous 5 For more on this see Daniel Russell, ‘Icarus in the City: Emblems and Postmodernism’, E­ mblematica, 13 (2003), pp. 333–58. Finlay’s correspondence with Stephen Bann has been published in Midway: Letters from Ian Hamilton Finlay to Stephen Bann 1964–69, ed. Stephen Bann (London: Bitter Lemon Press, 2014). 6 On Thomas Blount’s translation of Estienne see Bath, Speaking Pictures, pp. 148–155. The flag devices described by Blount are illustrated and discussed in Alan R. Young, Emblematic FlagDevices of the English Civil Wars 1642–1650 (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1995).

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Figure 8.1 Ian Hamilton Finlay, Heroic Emblems (Calais, vt, 1977), p. 3. This and the following Heroic Emblems reproduced by courtesy of the Estate of Ian Hamilton Finlay.

of Renaissance mottoes, which owes its celebrity, as Bann points out, to Aldus Manutius’ printer’s device, in which it was illustrated by an image of the dolphin and anchor. It is the unexpectedness of this conjunction between motif and motto which produces that ‘shock of the new’ which is one of the signals of modernist aesthetics. And yet in challenging us to work out the highly elliptical relationship of text to image, Finlay’s emblems also replicate the kind of hermeneutic challenge which, typically, confronts readers of Renaissance emblems, so we might think that the experience of interpreting any of these modernist creations was essentially continuous with the experience we have when reading traditional emblems. That sense of continuity, and yet simultaneous disjuncture, is characterised by Steven Bann as ‘mobilising the gap’. For Finlay does not simply take as a neutral ‘medium’ the emblem or impresa – a unified combination of image and text (or motto), such as might have appeared in emblem books of the seventeenth century. He mobilises the gap between the modern period and that of the Renaissance, just as the emblematists themselves signified the gap between their own period and the Graeco-Roman world through the choice of classical tags and quotations. He sets before us a cultural tissue in which these various levels – the Classical, the Renaissance and the Modern – are indissolubly linked.7 Bann’s argument is demonstrably moving in two opposed directions here, ­arguing on the one hand that Finlay ‘mobilises the gap’ between the modern period and the Renaissance, and then closing the gap which has just been 7 Heroic Emblems, p. ix.

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opened by affirming ‘a cultural tissue in which these levels … are indissolubly linked’. Is it sameness or difference that Bann is arguing for? If Finlay’s twentieth-century replication of Thomas Blount’s use of the emblems of seventeenth-century warfare signals his continuity with the tradition in which he is working, how can it also stand, as Bann goes on immediately to claim, citing Harold Bloom, as an index of modern ‘belatedness’? That tension, or contradiction, is the subject of this chapter. In his Map of Misreading, Harold Bloom recalls Ernst Robert Curtius’ studies on the classical tradition and underlines his view that this tradition ‘could be apprehended clearly “only” for the twenty-five centuries from Homer to Goethe… ‘ In the centuries which follow Goethe, the Romantic and Modern epochs, we are maintained (so Bloom suggests) in our sense of that Homeric prototype through our awareness of our own ‘belatedness’. (Heroic Emblems, p. ix) If its familiarity narrows the gap between Finlay’s ‘Semper festina lente’ motto and its Renaissance predecessors, that gap is widened into a chasm by the unexpectedness of the accompanying image of a Sherman tank. The emblem demands a reader familiar with the traditional topos, who recognises the allusion and is thus able to measure the gap between Finlay’s shocking image and Aldus’s ancient dolphin-and-anchor device. It is only when we recognise the allusion, of course, that we can measure the difference – cultural belatedness can hardly be felt by those who have no culture. However this example also shows rather well the principle of variation which was already well established in traditional emblematic composition for, as Bann notes, the association of this familiar motto was with the image of a crab and a butterfly, rather than with Aldus’s dolphin and anchor. Moreover in 1617 the Emblemata Politica of Peter Isselburg (Nuremberg: Hans Walch, no.8) illustrated the Festina lente motto with a ship’s sail raised on the back of a tortoise (Fig. 8.2). As Harms, Hess and Peil note, Isselburg’s image is recycling a picture which had already appeared, with a different motto, in Camillo Camilli’s Imprese illustri.8 That recycling of received materials in a bricolage of new combinations is fundamental to the

8 Wolfgang Harms, G. Hess and D. Peil, SinnBilder Welten: Emblematische Medien in der Frühen Neuzeit, exhib. cat. Bayerische Staatsbibliothek (Munich: Inst. für Neuere Deutsche Literatur der Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, 1999), p. 105.

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Figure 8.2 Peter Isselburg, Emblemata Politica (Nürnberg, 1640), no. 8. © Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel (Uk40)

emblem, as Daniel Russell has argued most persuasively,9 but we might think that with Isselburg’s radically different, political image we were already well on the way towards Finlay’s modernist mine-sweeper.

Oxymorons and Allusions

A taste for similarly oxymoronic, and equally traditional, mottoes can be witnessed in the three emblems, nos. 7–9, in which Finlay rings the changes on the Cominus et Eminus motto (‘Near and Far’), historically the porcupine device of Louis ii of France (the porcupine was thought to shoot out its quills). The first of these emblems (Fig. 8.3) pictures a self-propelled gun armed with both longrange cannon and small-arms for close-up protection; the second (Fig. 8.4) is the battleship Graf Spee scuppered off Montevideo, far from the two ­northern

9 Daniel Russell, Emblematic Structures in Renaissance French Culture (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1995).

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Figure 8.3 Ian Hamilton Finlay, Heroic Emblems (Calais, vt, 1977), p. 13. By courtesy of the Estate of Ian Hamilton Finlay

Figure 8.4 Ian Hamilton Finlay, Heroic Emblems (Calais, vt, 1977), p. 15. By courtesy of the Estate of Ian Hamilton Finlay

pine trees symbolising its northern home-port; the third (Fig.  8.5) shows a fighter-plane ditched in the sea, too far to return to its carrier (this emblem uniquely has a six-line verse epigram and no commentary). Such variation of figures for the same motto surely signals Finlay’s own awareness of the traditional modus operandi of emblematic composition, based on the inventive recycling and recombination of received materials – Renaissance rhetoric called it copia. Finlay’s own modus operandi is thoroughly traditional both in its copious invention of new conceits and in its copying of models, and we should not be too surprised if such techniques of modernism replicate Renaissance theories of composition: copious expression is, after all, a close enough anticipation of what twentieth-century Theory came to call ‘intertextuality’ and intertextuality is the very meat and drink of emblem studies.

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Figure 8.5 Ian Hamilton Finlay, Heroic Emblems (Calais, vt, 1977), p. 17. By courtesy of the Estate of Ian Hamilton Finlay

Paradox is built into those emblems replicating the combination of military (‘heroic’) and pastoral references which we shall see exploited in the garden at Little Sparta. Clearly Finlay’s habitual resort to pastoral as vehicle or ­metaphor for the military has huge ironic and deconstructive potential. In emblem no. 3 it is, again, the gap between motto and picture that is surprising: the motto – unsourced and, for once, in English – is ‘Woodland is pleasing to the muses’ but the picture shows a tank camouflaged or hiding in the sylvan foliage. Bann’s commentary reads this as an emblem not of military deception, as one might suppose, but rather of poetic isolation, placing its stress on the motto’s reference to the Muses. Creativity and the position of the artist in the modern world were never far from Finlay’s, or indeed modernism’s, concerns. The emblems immediately following this extend the pastoral theme, forming one of those sub-groups of related topics which help to structure not only Heroic Emblems but also, if Alastair Fowler is right, the traditional emblem books.10 It is suggestive, in this context, that such structural arrangements were characteristic of that genre known as silvae – Jonson’s Forest and Underwoods or Ronsard’s Bocage – these are pastoral groupings. Emblem 7 puts its Panzer into a wood to illustrate one of the most famously enigmatic of mottoes, Et in Arcadia Ego, (‘I too in Arcadia’), famously familiarised by Poussin and Panofsky. Enigmatic it remains in Bann’s commentary. No less paradoxical are the emblems which figure their martial arts in the iconography of love or religion. Venus has at least a walk-on part in Finlay’s ‘heroic’ emblems, but then we might recall that Renaissance imprese which were not heroiche were more than likely to be amorose. Such are a discrete group, emblem nos. 13–15, of which the first, ‘A niun’ altra’ (Fig. 8.6), justifies its Spanish motto (‘To none other’) in Bann’s citation of Contile’s view that mottoes 10

Alastair Fowler, ‘Emblem as a Literary Genre’, in Deviceful Settings: The English Renaissance Emblem and its Contexts, eds. M. Bath and D. Russell (New York: ams Press, 1999), pp. 1–31, see pp. 14–18.

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Figure 8.6 Ian Hamilton Finlay, Heroic Emblems (Calais, vt, 1977), p. 25. By courtesy of the Estate of Ian Hamilton Finlay

Figure 8.7 Ian Hamilton Finlay, Heroic Emblems (Calais, vt, 1977), p. 27. By courtesy of the Estate of Ian Hamilton Finlay

should be taken from the ‘Spanish tongue above all others for love matters’. The picture however shows two fighter planes, one trailing smoke since its pursuer has hit his elective target (and Bann suggests a modern allusion to Goethe’s Elective Affinities, not the sort of allusion we might pick up without his prompting). ‘The Divided Meadows of Aphrodite’ (Fig. 8.7) shows an aircraft-carrier dividing the ocean with its bow-waves. Aphrodite was born out of the sea, and the unease or tension of this love/war emblem centres on the word ‘divided’ itself, which Bann suggests may call to mind both the cleft meadows of the female mons veneris (a distorted modern echo of some ­Renaissance erotic ­blason?), or the strife of warring fleets. What counts in such modernist similitudes is less their congruence than their sheer incongruity: ‘similitudes far fet hinder to be understood’ might be the humanist voice we hear over our shoulder. The love-goddess lingers in the following emblem, headed ‘Aphrodite fitting these together with the Rivets of Love’, ‘these’ being an aircraft- carrier and its aircraft, representing sea and air. (Fig. 8.8)

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Figure 8.8 Ian Hamilton Finlay, Heroic Emblems (Calais, vt, 1977), p. 29. By courtesy of the Estate of Ian Hamilton Finlay

Figure 8.9 Ian Hamilton Finlay, Heroic Emblems (Calais, vt, 1977), p. 33. By courtesy of the Estate of Ian Hamilton Finlay

If such discrepancies mobilise the gap between tenor and vehicle, the occasional puns serve to narrow it. Thus the emblem with the evidently divided motto, ‘The Last Cruise of the Emden/ Kleiner Kreuzer Sonata’ (Fig. 8.9), is a play on words since, we are told, ‘Kreuzer’ in German can mean ‘cruiser’. Emden was the name of a ship that made lightning strikes on commercial shipping in the Indian Ocean at the outset of World War i, virtuoso attacks which remind Bann (and presumably Finlay) of a celebrated violin sonata by Beethoven. Here it is the surprising identification of militaristic and aesthetic values that produces the modernist shock, and the forced musico-military analogies are extended in the next emblem showing a submerged submarine firing its nuclear missile, with the motto ‘L’unique cordeau des trompettes marines’ drawn from the poet Guillaume Apollinaire. A fifteen-page post Symboliste commentary on Apollinaire’s one-line poem by French critic André Rouveyre prompts Bann’s self-reflexive comments on the proneness of all such commentary to excess, arbitrary association and redundancy, and his conclusion will stand as suggestive comment on the whole issue of intertextuality in these emblems: ‘if the emblem itself is seen, in its divided and united body and soul, as a m ­ eeting

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Figure 8.10 Ian Hamilton Finlay, Heroic Emblems (Calais, vt, 1977), p. 37. By courtesy of the Estate of Ian Hamilton Finlay

place of texts, a tissue of traditions, then the commentary itself is simply a further stage in the spinning of this tissue. There is no economy of the essential and the inessential which could govern this process’ (pp. 35–36). That status of the emblem as ‘a meeting place of texts, a tissue of traditions’ is well illustrated by the following emblem, possibly the best known of Finlay’s Heroic Emblems. ‘Out of the Strong Came forth Sweetness’ shows us an aircraft carrier encircled by its swarm of bee-like helicopters (Fig. 8.10). Once again the wide discrepancy between tenor and vehicle is narrowed by the paronomasia, since this ship, we are told, is ‘one of the largest British warships’ which happens to have been called hms Lion. If we start unpacking some of the manifold precedents and allusions surrounding this emblem we shall uncover a network (‘tissue’ would be Bann’s word) which I believe illustrates rather well the gaps and continuities which mobilise Finlay’s modernist emblems. We might start by noting that the motto, once again, articulates a paradox, indeed Bann’s analysis of this oxymoron presses it for all it is worth, arguing that the terms are ‘slightly displaced’ (‘the direct antitheses would be strong/weak, sour/ sweetl). There is also, he urges, a ‘metonymic substitution’ of ‘sweetness’ for ‘bees’, moreover the figure is also a synecdoche, ‘“sweetness” being conceived as “part” of the whole which is “strength”’. If we seem to hear something of a parody of the voice of a Renaissance rhetorician in this, it may be less an ironic distance that is being set up than a sign of his awareness of the essential continuities between Finlay’s metaphorics and the ancient rhetoric which governed the composition of emblems.

Textual Treacle

Finley’s motto is Biblical, from Judges 14:14, where it is Samson’s riddle, after the carcase of the lion that he has killed with his bare hands becomes the hive for a swarm of bees; Samson uses the riddle to test the fidelity of his Philistine

Mobilising the Gap

Figure 8.11

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‘Out of the Strong Came forth Sweetness’, trademark of British sugar refiner Tate & Lyle, as used on golden syrup tins since 1884. © Tate and Lyle Ltd

wife. It is likely to be more familiar to modern British consumers, however, as the trademark of sugar-refiners Tate & Lyle, featuring on their treacle tins since 1884, making it almost certainly the oldest brand logo in the world with the biblical motto and the image of the dead lion. (Fig. 8.11) Abram Lyle, who was a Scot – born in Greenock in 1820 – set up his Thames-side sugar factory in London in 1881, and his choice of a biblical subject reflects his Victorian piety. As Bann says, ‘An argument about the persistence of the emblem in everyday usage might well take as its example the trademark of Tate & Lyle’; it has accordingly been cited more recently by scholars such as Peter Daly who have begun to explore the manifold ways in which emblematic motifs or word/image combinations have been preserved in modern advertising.11 Lyle’s Golden 11

Peter Daly, ‘The Nachleben of the Emblem: Emblematic Structures in Modern Advertising and Propaganda’, in Polyvalenz und Mutifunktionalität der Emblematik, eds. Wolfgang

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Syrup logo is, however, easily the earliest. It is the quality of this emblem as ‘a meeting place of texts’ and ‘a tissue of traditions’ that seems most striking and suggestive for my own argument. The biblical topic was already turned into an emblem in the seventeenth century when Diego De Saavedra Fajardo illustrated the dead lion surrounded by bees under the motto ‘Merces belli’ (The rewards of war) in his Idea de un Principe politico Christiano (Munich, 1640). In 1700 Sir James Astry translated this into English under the title The Royal Politician. (Fig. 8.12). There are nevertheless many traditional emblems that ring the changes on the bittersweet paradoxes of the honey bee, for instance the emblem which Geffrey Whitney adapted from Alciato under the motto ‘Ex Bello, pax’. (Fig. 8.13) The pictura does not show Samson’s lion, but rather a swarm of bees that has made its hive in a helmet; although there is no biblical reference it is nevertheless difficult not to think that Samson’s lion is the emblem’s antetype. Equally paradoxical, though not at all biblical, would be Alciato’s muchimitated emblem of Cupid as honey-thief, who gets his finger stung and complains to Venus about the bittersweet experience of love. In 1941 James Hutton wrote an article on this topos which identifies innumerable versions in Renaissance writing, to which it is possible to add dozens more in emblem books and the visual arts.12 Commonplace rhetoric by definition places a heavy investment on the recycling of commonplaces, and that recycling in a ‘tissue of traditions’ is found in the historical circulation of this topos. The biblical impresa in which this modernist adaptation has its basis is thus not in any sense an isolated or self-contained topic; like all such emblematic topoi it has perennially been subject to displacement, interference or infection from similar or related topics in a continually evolving generative matrix. Finlay himself returns to the honey-bee topos in ‘The Battle of Midway/ Fourth June 1942’ (Fig. 8.14), where the picture shows named Japanese ships as beehives in flames, from which honey overflows, with American attack planes as swarming bees. Its successor emblem, the last in the book, is a pendant with the same motto or title, its picture unframed and followed by a long quasimonumental inscription. The picture continues the honey-bee conceit of

12

Harms, and D. Peil, 2 vols (Frankfuhrt-am-M.: Peter Lang, 2002), i: 47–69, and Daly, ‘The European impresa: from Fifteenth-century Aristocratic Device to Twenty-first Century Logo’, Emblematica, 13 (2003), pp. 303–32. James Hutton, ‘Cupid and the Bee’, pmla, 56 (1941), pp. 1036–58; cf. Bath, ‘Honey and Gall or Cupid and the Bees: a Case of Iconographic Slippage’, in Andrea Alciato and the Emblem Tradition, ed. Peter Daly (New York: ams Press, 1989), pp. 59–94.

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Figure 8.12

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‘The Rewards of War, from The Royal Politician represented in one hundred emblems (London, 1700), Sir James Astry’s translation of Diego de Saavedra Fajardo, Idea principis Christiano politici. © University of Glasgow Library, Department of Special Collections

the previous emblem with a flaming ship going down on the horizon whilst a ­floating, yet flaming, beehive shows signs of doing the same in the foreground; a few helpless bees flutter above the waves (Fig. 8.15). The subscriptio in Latin, with Japanese names, translates as: ‘Here perished Akagi, Kaga, Soyu, Hiryu, Yorktown the sea-hives, consumed with their most choice swarms by their own flame-bearing honey’. We might recall the early impresa theorists’ injunction

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Figure 8.13

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Geffrey Whitney, A Choice of Emblemes (Leiden, 1586), p. 138. © University of Glasgow Library, Department of Special Collections

Figure 8.14 Ian Hamilton Finlay, Heroic Emblems (Calais, vt, 1977), p. 45. By courtesy of the Estate of Ian Hamilton Finlay

that the motto should not normally be in the vernacular – a foreign language is always preferred if Latin is not used: in a modern(ist) context the use of ­Japanese might be read as signalling the simultaneous conformity and yet disjunction of Finlay’s mottoes in relation to this convention.

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Figure 8.15 Ian Hamilton Finlay, Heroic Emblems (Calais, vt, 1977), p. 47. By courtesy of the Estate of Ian Hamilton Finlay



Monumental Inscriptions

However, it is also clear that we should hesitate to read this inscription as an impresa motto; in this emblem the epigraphy dominates the pictura. As Bann points out, the emblem has ‘a distant but crucial kinship’ with the monumental inscription (p. 48). Bann was writing before the more recent researches of Pierre Laurens and Florence Vuilleumier had revealed just how many of Alciato’s emblems, and hence the whole genre, had originated in his early r­ ecording of monumental inscriptions,13 but Bann’s concluding comment signals the continuities between this printed emblem book and Finlay’s work as sculptor in the garden at Little Sparta: ‘Perhaps it is also appropriate that this collection should end with a memorial inscription. The register of evocations comes to a close in the laconic classical form, and in the permanence of stone’. In that permanence we might find an epigraph for the multiple (dis)continuities that 13

Pierre Laurens and F. Vuilleumier, ‘De l’archaeologie de l’emblême: La genèse du Liber Alciat’, Revue de l’art, no. 1031 (1993), pp. 86–95.

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‘mobilise the gap’ between Finlay’s modernist emblems and traditional emblematic forms. The close association of emblems with lapidary inscriptions is something we have witnessed often enough in the earlier chapters of this book, where the Earl of Gowrie’s inscription over his fireplace about Time revealing Truth, for instance, or Alexander Seton’s trompe l’oeil inscriptions in his emblematic long gallery at Pinkie House, as well as those on the building itself, testify to this association. In Ian Hamilton Finlay’s work it is most evident in the s­ culptures seen  at Little Sparta, a garden which is full of inscriptions, some of which ­reproduce the actual emblems printed in Heroic Emblems. For instance the carving on a plant trough of the Semper festina lente emblem, with its ­minesweeper tank, reproduces the Heroic Emblems example exactly. (Fig. 8.16) Another of the Heroic Emblems that we find reproduced as monumental sculpture is the circular plaque, serving we might think as a w ­ aymarker through the woods and bearing the inscription ‘THROUGH A DARK WOOD/MIDWAY’. (Fig. 8.17) This reproduces the first of the group of three ‘Midway’ emblems that close Heroic Emblems (Fig. 8.18) and, as Bann explains, the motto quotes the opening lines to Dante’s Divine Comedy, ‘Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita mi ritrovai per una selva oscura’ (‘Midway through the journey of our life, I found myself in a dark wood’). It is Dante’s phrase mezzo del cammin that, translated as ‘midway’, supplies the keyword for all three of the concluding Heroic Emblems, punning on the name of the tiny island which, Bann explains, was ‘the westernmost outpost of the Hawaiian chain’ whose

Figure 8.16

Little Sparta, plant trough, Ian Hamilton Finlay with John Andrew, 1977, ‘Semper festina lente’. By courtesy of the Estate of Ian Hamilton Finlay (Photo © Andrew Lawson)

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Figure 8.17

Little Sparta, emblem ‘Through a dark wood’, commemorating the Pacific Battle of Midway, 1942. By courtesy of the Estate of Ian Hamilton Finlay (Photo © Andrew Lawson)

Figure 8.18 Ian Hamilton Finlay, Heroic Emblems (Calais, vt, 1977), p. 43. By courtesy of the Estate of Ian Hamilton Finlay

defence ‘marked the turning point both of the War in the Pacific and, arguably, the entire World War’.14 The picture shows a Japanese battleship beneath what in the monumental carving look like clouds, but which Bann’s commentary identifies as ‘bursts of anti-aircraft fire, which can be seen covering the sky in surviving photographs of the battle. Just as Dante has embodied the ­complexity of middle age in his image of the “dark wood”, so the emblem suggests a predicament of choice.’ Hence the verbal conceit joining word and image rests on a pun, and his emblem book reaches its conclusion with a group of 14

Heroic Emblems, p. 43.

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interlinked ‘Midway’ emblems whose emblematic point stands as a kind of crowning rhetorical paranomasia. Such word-play is typical of Finlay’s poetics in much of his experimental writing, whether it is concrete poetry or his one-word poems; here it appears as a style of invention which one can only describe as modernist baroque.15 A circular plaque on a plinth elsewhere in the garden has no picture, but is carved verbatim with the same inscription which terminates the final emblem in Finlay’s emblem book. (Fig. 8.19) In that emblem the subscriptio is engraved in a font that resembles a carved inscription and, as Jessie Sheeler points out, the perfect circle of the dark slate is bisected at its diameter by the motto/title to the emblem, identifying its subject as ‘BATTLE OF MIDWAY FOURTH JUNE 1942’.16 Above this motto we find verbatim the Latin ‘HIC PERIERUNT …’ inscription that, in Heroic Emblems, follows the image of sinking battleships, which are depicted as flaming beehives, and it identifies the battleships by name. The inscription below it is the English translation that appears over the page and describes them as ‘SEA-HIVES … CONSUMED … BY THEIR OWN FLAME-BEARING HONEY’. As Sheeler notes the surprising comparison of the sinking Japanese battleships to flaming hives and honey holds a­ nother, less obvious, allusion, ‘which adds a Virgilian gloss to the elegy, recalling his description in the last book of the Aeneid where a shepherd smokes out a bees’ nest and their loud humming rises with the billowing smoke of their destruction’ (p. 85).17 Allusions to Virgil are plentiful in Little Sparta, most memorably in the reconstruction of the grotto of Aeneas and Dido, in which Vigil’s hero Aeneas takes shelter as a storm breaks out whilst they are hunting and where their love is consummated; its entrance is marked with their initials A and D divided by a thunderbolt.18 (Fig. 8.20) Inside an inscription quotes Dryden’s translation of Virgil, ‘A cave the grateful shelter shall afford /To the fair princess and the Trojan Lord’. The thunderbolt is depicted in the shape of the Nazi ss 15

16

17

18

It is notable that when in 2014 Stephen Bann chose to publish the letters he had received during a long friendship with Finlay, he gave it the title Midway: Letters from Ian Hamilton Finlay to Stephen Bann (n.5 above). Jessie Sheeler, Little Sparta: The Garden of Ian Hamilton Finlay (London: Frances Lincoln Ltd, 2003), pp. 84–85; see also John Dixon Hunt, Nature Over Again: The Garden Art of Ian Hamilton Finlay (London: Reaktion Books, 2008). Aeneid, xii, 583–92, describing the response of the Latins as Aeneas invades their city: ‘And now panic and dissension arose among the citizens … as when a shepherd has tracked the bees to their home in some volcanic rock containing many a hiding place, and fills it with acrid smoke; the bees inside, in desperation, hurry everywhere about the waxen fortress, hissing loudly as they whet their anger, while the reeking smoke rolls black about their home’ (The Aeneid, Penguin Books, 1956, trans. W.F. Jackson Knight, p. 327). This is discussed further in Michael Bath, ‘A Fruitful Collaboration: Ian Hamilton Finlay and Margot Sandeman’, Emblematica, vol. 19 (2012), pp. 29–49, see pp. 44–46.

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319

Figure 8.19 Little Sparta, slate plaque commemorating the Battle of Midway, 1942, and reworking inscriptions from the two terminal Heroic Emblems. By courtesy of the Estate of Ian Hamilton Finlay (photo © Andrew Lawson)

insignia, a motif on which Finlay rang the typographic changes in a number of his later works with highly ironic, if controversial, implications.19 Finlay’s habitual, if not definitive, practice of associating militaristic with pastoral imagery finds one of its most memorable results in the monumental aircraft-carrier, carved out of stone, at Little Sparta which is functioning as a bird-table. (Fig. 8.21) It is a sculpture that, as Yves Abrioux argues, belongs with those other works in the garden which bring marine iconography into this inland garden. The interplay between proximity and distance has animated Finlay’s work on his garden at Stonypath from the start. This is clear from the way in which the sea and sea-going vessels are omnipresent in the poet’s domain – for what is more distant from the enclosed spaces of an inland 19

See eg Abrioux, Visual Primer (1992), p. 283.

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Figure 8.20

Little Sparta, ‘Grotto of Aeneas and Dido’. By courtesy of the Estate of Ian Hamilton Finlay (photo © ­A ndrew Lawson)

Figure 8.21

Little Sparta, stone aircraft carrier Bird-Table, 1972. By courtesy of the Estate of Ian Hamilton Finlay (photo © Andrew Lawson)

Mobilising the Gap

Figure 8.22

321

Little Sparta, ‘Nuclear Sail’, 1974. By courtesy of the Estate of Ian Hamilton Finlay (photo © Andrew Lawson)

garden than the far-flung world of the oceans? Yet Finlay immediately brought the sea into the Southern Uplands of Scotland, in works involving minimal linguistic elements and based on metaphorical play.20 As we steer a path through the rolling Lanarkshire hills that surround us in the wild garden at Little Sparta, we see one of the simplest, yet most surprising and inspirational of all its lapidary monuments, in the shape of a highly polished black slate monolith. (Fig. 8.22) It might look like an ancient memorial or an 20

Abrioux, p. 167.

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unweathered obelisk; it rises however above the border of a small lake, and our startling realisation that land can become water, or sea might be land, is registered the moment we read the inscription at its base, ‘Nuclear Sail’. This is no neolithic relic, it is the conning tower of a nuclear submarine! A sculpture of the greatest possible simplicity, it has the power to transform the surrounding landscape. ‘Nuclear Sail’ was raised in 1974, shortly after Britain’s nuclear submarine base had been opened, in 1971, at Faslane on the eastern shore of Gare Loch, twenty-five miles west of Glasgow. As Sheeler comments, ‘sail’ is a word with peaceful, sea-going associations (there are sails everywhere in Finlay’s art work), whereas the conning tower of a nuclear submarine is a symbol of the imminent and ultimate destruction of human civilisation. You cannot get more ‘belated’ than that.

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Index Adams, Alison 41–42 Adams, H.S. 68 Adams, Samuel 293 Adamson, John 205 Adamson, Patrick 198, 205 Adamson, Violet 198 Albion 107 Alciato 25, 101, 128, 228, 263, 302, 312 Aldrovandi, Ulysse 183 Aldus Manutius 303, 304 Allegory of Folly 11–14 Alloway, Ayrshire 289–292 Androuet du Cerceau, Jacques 127 Aneau, Barthelemy 92, 302 Anne of Denmark 98, 115, 209 Apollinaire, Guillaume 309 Arbroath Abbey 295 Arbroath, Declaration of 88 Argonauts 103, 109, 155, 159, 171 Armenian mouse 187–188 Arran, Earl of 40, 115 Ashmole, Elias 223 Astraea 161 Astrey, James 312 Aubrey, John 164, 223 Auchmuthy, John 174–176 Augustine, Saint 50, 197 Augustine of Canterbury 85, 86, 90 Bacon, Francis 163–166 Bacon, Nicholas 164 Baigent, Michael 113 Bale, John 85 Balet comique de la royne 108, 109 Bann, Stephen 302, 303, 307, 308, 310, 315, 317 Bannockburn, Battle of 88 Barclay, Alexander 16 Battle of the Spurs 51 Baxter, J.R. 27, 64, 73 Bay Horse Inn, Dysart 76 Bayonne 97, 98 Belgioioso, Baltazarini 108 Bell, Susan Groag 44, 47–48 Bellay, Joachim du 92

Bellenden, John 86 Benlowes,Edward 266 Berswordt Altar 4–5 Bess of Hardwick 52 Bèze, Théodore de 26, 66, 71–74, 99–100, 195, 196 Bishops’ Wars 75 Bloom, Harold 304 Blount, Thomas 304 Boccaccio 50 Boece, Hector 86, 204 Boissard, Jacques 149 Boston 292 Bower, Alexander 282 Bowers, Rick 91 Bowers, Walter 86 Boyd, Andrew 63–64 Brandt, Sebastian 16 Brantôme, Pierre de 52, 93, 108 Breugel, Peter 21–22 Brewster, William 202 Browne, David 25 Bruce, Alexander 222, 224 Bruce, George 78, 167–168, 212, 217, 224 Bruce, Robert 222 Bruce, Robert the 88, 113 Bruno, Giordano 226–227 Buccleuch, Walter, Earl of 93, 99 Bucephalus 181–182, 193 Buchanan, George 72, 73, 81, 82, 108 Buchlyvie 79–80 Buckingham, Duke of 265 Bunyan, John 292 Burnet, Gilbert 223 Burns, Robert 289 Caerlaverock Castle 261–276, 287 Caiaphas 4 Calderwood, David 56, 59, 63, 195, 202 Calvin 195 Camden, William 122, 169 Campbell, Ian 102, 112 Campbell, Robert 287 Candle 190–191 Caron, Antoine 94, 95, 96, 145

342 Castor and Pollux 161 Catherine de Medicis 45, 54, 80, 94, 108, 145 Caussin, Nicolas 180 Cecil, William, Lord Burghley 93, 162 Cecil, William, Lord Cranborne 163 Cecrops, king of Athens 149 Chappuys, Charles 92 Charles I 23, 117, 222, 282 Charles II 277 Charles V, Emperor 103 Charles IX 94, 103 Cicero 158, 199–200 Cleophas 3 Collaert, Adrien 68 Colonna, Francesco 112 Colville, John 112 Condé, Servais de 46 Costley, Ron 302 Couper, Gilbert 286 Crathes 280 Crétin, Guillaume 85 Culross 27, 78, 167–168, 212, 224 Cynocephalus 181, 183–187, 193 D’Alençon 108 Dalkeith 178 D’Amboise, Adrien 109 Dante 316–317 Daret, Pierre 141 Darnley, Henry 115 D’Aubigné 108 David, King 8 Davidson, Peter 281–285 De Bry, Theodore 149 Dee, John 180, 227 Dekker, Thomas 161 Delaune, Etienne 68 Democritus 59 Dempster, Thomas 89 Deschamps, Eustache 85 Dickson, Alexander 227 Diogenes Laertius 141 Dixit insipiens 7–11, 18 Donaldson, Ian 169–170 Doni, A.F. 60 Dortmund, Marienkirche 6 Douglas, Margaret 68 Drexel, Jeremias 293

Index Drummond, William 97, 110, 166–167, 170–172, 205 Dryden, John 161 Drymen, John 287 Dunbar, William 86, 96 Dundas, George 86–87, 89, 114 Dundee 247–255, 276–285 Dunfermline 110, 117, 168, 224 Edward I 87, 88 Edward VI 52, 115 Ekphrasis 148–149 Elbeuf, Marquis of 93 Elizabeth I 52, 62, 117, 162 Erasmus, Desiderius 11, 16, 17, 59, 64, 101, 129 Erskine, John, Earl af Mar 39–41, 93, 99 Erskine, Thomas 93, 99 Estienne, Henri 302 Euripedes 11 Evelyn, John 223 Falkirk, Battle of 88 Farley, Robert 228–231 Finlason, Thomas 191, 192 Finlay, Ian Hamilton 301–322 Five Articles of Perth 177, 202–203 Forbes, John 201 Fordoun, John of 204 Fortuna 155 Fowler, Alastair 217, 307 Fowler, William 91, 92–101, 110, 175, 208, 209, 227 Fowlis Easter 1–22, 65 François I 94–95 François II 138 François de Sales 90 Fraser, Antonia 80 Freemasonry 89, 90, 102, 110, 112–113, 222–223, 224–227, 247, 289 Friedrich III of Schleswig-Hollstein 368 Gardyne’s House, Dundee 276–285 Garish, Rebecca 293 Gathelus 88, 204 Geoffrey of Monmouth 204 Gessner, Conrad 183–186 Gheeraerts, Marcus 136–137 Giotto 6

343

Index Girvan 286 Goethe 304 Golzius, Hendrik 68 Gomberville, Marin 141 Gordon, Donald 60, 62 Gordon, John 108, 109, 205–208, 227 Gowrie, William, Earl of 56–67, 206, 316 Graf Spee 305 Gray, Andrew 1 Gray, James 2 Greenleaf, Samuel 293 Guise, duc de 97 Hamilton, James 223 Hamling, Tara 287 Harms, Wolfgang 304 Hart, Andreas 283 Harvey, Gabriel Hawkins, Henry 197 Heiroglyphics 180–181, 191–195, 204–205, 225–227, 228, 231–233, 292 Henri II 45, 54, 145, 161 Henri III 94, 108, 109 Henri IV 108 Henry VIII 52, 62, 87, 115, 117 Henri de Navarre 94 Henry, Prince of Wales 91 Höltgen, K.J. 263, 265 Homer 305 Horace 128, 129, 132, 145, 148 Horapollo 180, 183, 197 Houghton, L.B.T. 162 Hugo, Herman 244–245, 297 Hume, Lord 93 Hume of Godscroft, David 62 Huntingtower 56, 59 See Ruthven Hutchison, Alexander 277 Inglis, Esther 23–43 Isselburg, Peter 304 Iwasaki, Soji 60, 62 James IV 2, 8, 87 James V 43, 45, 46, 54–55 James VI/I 26, 27, 62–67, 72–75, 76, 78, 80, 91, 92, 98, 102, 119, 122, 161, 168, 169, 176–177, 195, 205, 222

Jeanne d’Albret 25 Johnstone, John 171 Jones, Inigo 97, 101, 109, 110 Jones, Malcolm 9–10, 12, 13 Jonson, Ben 78, 97, 101, 110, 161, 166–176, 212, 307 Junius, Hadrianus 62 Katherinenheerd 297 Keith, George 72 Kello, Bartholomew 26 Kemp, Martin 124 Kerr, Robert 93, 174 Kid, Patrick 282 King’s Chapel, Boston MA 292 Kircher, Athanasius 226 Knights Templar 87, 88, 89, 90–91, 113 Knox, John 72, 84 Lamb, A.C. 278 Laud, William 195, 201 Layamon 85 Lebey de Batilly 149–155 Le Croc 24 Lee, Maurice 177, 195, 200 Lennox, Duke of 93, 99 Leo X, Pope 87 Leslie, Patrick, Lord of Lindores 93, 100 Lindsay, David, Lord of Balcarres 127 Lindsay, Ralph 88 Little Sparta 307, 315–321 Longinus 3, 4, 8 Louis II 305 Louis XII 99 Louis XIV 141 Loxley, James 167, 170–171 Loyola, St Ignatius 268 Lyle, Abram 311 Lynch, Michael 80, 83, 91, 98 MacGibbon and Ross 289 MacKechnie, Aonghus 102, 112 Macmillan, Duncan 7–8, 19 Major, John 86 Mar, Earl of See Erskine Margaret of Austria 50–51 Marguerite de Valois 94 Marshall, William 265, 270

344 Martial 283 Martin, Jean 92 Martini, Simone 6 Marvell, Andrew 89–90, 223 Mary I, Queen 62 Mary Magdalene 3, 19 Mary of Guise 43, 45, 46, 55, 76, 82, 115 Mary Queen of Scots 24, 40–43, 45–47, 51–55, 91, 93, 108, 109, 122, 138, 171–174, 206, 227 Mathieu de Boulogne 47, 49 Mathiolus See Mathieu de Boulogne Maxwell, Robert, Earl of Nithsdale 263, 254 Maxwell, Elizabeth, Countess of ­Nithsdale 264–265, 267 McCrakes, Elizabeth 286 McKean, Charles 117, 122 McKeown, Simon 128 McManus, Clare 92, 96, 98, 99, 109 McNought, Robert 78 McOwat, Davie 79 McRoberts, David 2 Meiss, Millard 50 Meler, Agnes 291 Melville, Andrew 32, 72, 73, 205 Melville, Elizabeth, Lady Culross 27 Melville, James 81–82 Midway 312–319 Mignault, Claude 302 Milo 149 Milton, John 217, 281 Modret, P.A. 13 Molinet, Jean 85 Monck, George 277, 282 Montaigne, Michel de 17 Montgomerie, Alexander 104–107 Montgomery of Skelmorlie, Robert 68, 69, 73 Montenay, Georgette de 25–32, 35–37, 49, 51, 55 Moray, Robert 222–226 Musselburgh 120–122 Mylne, John 223 Nairn, Judith 255–260, 286 Napier, John 122, 125–126, 211–212 National Covenant 197 Neilson, George 85–86

Index Neuhusius, Heinrichus 227 North, Thomas 60 Occasio 291 Oldest Animals 214 Old Inch, Wigtonshire 287 Ordine, Nuccio 108 Ovid 98, 158, 267 Pagez, Bastien 81 Palladio 127, 159 Palmer, Thomas 101 Paniter, Patrick 87 Paradin, Claude 69, 76–67, 78 Parkinson, David 106 Passe, Crispijn de 171 Paulet, Amyas 52 Pausanias 141 Paycock’s House 13 Peil, Dietmar 304 Pepys, Samuel 223 Perrière, Guillaume de la 57–59, 62, 63–65, 67 Persius 293 Philip of Spain 54 Philostratus 141–149, 227 Pignoria, Laurenzo 302 Pindar 145–149 Pinkie Cleugh, Battle of 115–117, 163 Pinkie House 117–177, 199–200, 230–231 Pisan, Christine de 43–55 Pitcairn, Robert 56 Plantin 62, 78 Pliny 120, 141 Pont, Robert 211 Pourbus, Frans 138, 140 Praz, Mario 149 Psalm 52  7–11, 18 Quarles, Francis 180, 231–233, 234–297, 301 Randolf, Thomas 93 Robertson, Joseph 93 Ronsard 105, 108, 307 Rossend Castle 76–77 Rouveyre, André 309 Rowlandson, Rauf 52 Royal Society 223–224 Ruschelli, Girolamo 158–159

345

Index Russell, Daniel 305 Ruthven, Raid of 40, 56–67, 107, 208 Rynd, James 76, 223 Saavaedra Fajardo, Diego de 311, 313 Salamander 188, 189 Salome 3 Salzwedel 18–19, 20 Sandaeus, Maximilianus 180 Sankt Florian 19–21 Saxl, Fritz 60, 62 Scève, Maurice 92 Schaw, William 43, 102, 110, 112–113, 208, 209, 210, 247 Schiller, Gertrud 2, 4, 5, 6 Schuchard, Marsha 88, 112, 113, 220, 222 Scone 260–261 Scota 88, 204 Scott, James 59 Scott, Walter 193 Screech, M.A. 17, 18 Scrimgeour, Henry 72 Seneca 165 Serlio, Sebastiano 112, 127 Service, John 234–247, 265, 277, 295, 297 Servin, Jean 73 Seton, Alexander 110, 113, 117–177, 198–201, 205, 209, 226, 316 Seton, George 138, 145 Seymour, Edward 115 Shakespeare 13, 149, 169 Sheeler, Jessie 318, 322 Shrewsbury, Earl of 52 Sidney, Philip 227 Sisson, Marshall 13 Simson, Andrew 194 Simson, Archibald 178–202, 211 Simson, Patrick 178–191, 228, 234, 295 Simson, William 194 Sinclair, Henry 76 Skelmorlie Aisle 67–70 Skelton, John 86–87, 89 Skene, John 212 Solomon, King 102, 110, 113, 209, 212, 224 Somers, Will 9 Soulseat Abbey 287 Speech scrolls 4–5, 7, 18, 239 Spenser, Edmund 161

Spottiswoode, John 176–177, 201 Stalker 68 St Andrews 255–260 Steenson, Allison 208 Stevenson, David 112, 208, 211, 224, 247 Stewart, Alexander 87 Stewart, Ian 74 Stewart, Mary, Countess of Mar 40 Stirling, Chapel Royal 102 Stirling, Holy Rude church 178–180, 234–247, 277 Stockhamer, Sebastien 302 Stoicism 123–124, 132, 200, 226 Stone of Scone 88 St Paul’s Cathedral 223–224 Strong, Roy 92, 98, 108, 220 Stuart, Esmé 40, 62, 73, 106 Sutton Place, Surrey 289 Synod of Fife 2 Tate and Lyle 311 Templars See Knights Templar Thomas à Becket 87, 90 Tiphys 155–162, 171 Treaty of Greenwich 115, 163 Trim, D.J.B. 33–34 Torphican Preceptory 87, 88, 114 Townsend, Aurelian 109 Trapping, Joseph 293 Tucker, M-C 28, 29, 36–38 Typhis 109, 164–5 Typus Mundi 268 Union of the Crowns 76, 90, 91, 106, 109, 114, 116–118, 122, 161–166, 169–172, 176–177, 195, 198, 200, 204, 205–208, 211, 220, 222, 227, 283 Valeriano, Pierio 178–188, 199, 226 Vanson, Adrian 138, 139 Vaughan, Thomas 223 Vaenius See Veen Veen, Otto van 127–136 Veritas filia temporis 59–63 Vico, Enea 59, 212–217 Victane, Thomas 248–255, 2896 Viginère, Blaise de 144–145, 227 Virgil 63, 75, 98, 159–160, 161, 162, 165, 171, 318

346 Virtus 158–161 Vos, Martin de 68 Vredeman de Vries, Hans 124–127 Wace 85 Walsingham, Francis 176, 227 Watson, Henry 16 Wemys, John 256 We Three, proverb of 13–15 Whitney, Geffrey 60–61, 62, 68–70, 75, 78, 101, 168, 212–217, 312, 314 William of Croy 51 William of Malmesbury 85

Index Williamson, Arthur 204, 205, 211, 212 Wilson, Daniel 76 Woeriot, Pierre 27, 28 Wohlgemut, Michael 19 Wood, John 46 Wormald, Jenny 163 Wren, Christopher 223–224 Yates, Frances 80, 113, 180, 226 Young, Alan 98 Young, Peter 72, 122 Zeno 124, 141