Illuminating the global in Tudor and early Stuart portraits

There are many ways of ‘reading’ a portrait and looking for evidence of the portrait as an object, and not just an image, is one way to start. Most portraits from the 1500s in the National Portrait Gallery are painted on wooden panels. If you approach a Tudor portrait, chances are you’ll notice evidence of its life as a tree.

Artists often used oak from the Baltic region for Tudor paintings, as this was higher-quality wood than English oak and more suitable to cut down into regular-sized boards for painting.

Like portraiture, trade and exploration blossomed in the Tudor and Stuart era, and wood played an important part in making this possible. Wooden ships, and the objects and people they carried, connected the nation to other parts of the world.

For more information on what wood tells us about paintings:

Watch the Gallery’s dendrochronology film (at the bottom of the page).

Born in France, the Protestant Isaac Oliver moved to London to escape the French wars of religion. His paintings were influenced by the styles and techniques of Italian and Flemish artists.

Choose a range of Tudor and early Stuart portraits.

Find out more via the Runnymede Trust’s resource ‘Our Migration Stories’

Tudor women played an important part in bringing families and dynasties together – through marriage. They were often required to leave their homes and settle in new countries. Stories about the early life of Katherine of Aragon, Henry VIII’s first wife, are often overlooked in favour of the drama and intrigue of her later life – her divorce from Henry, his interest in Anne Boleyn, and England’s break from the Catholic Church in Rome. By following Katherine’s journey, we can discover how women connected the Tudor court to the world beyond.

Katherine was born near Madrid. Her parents were Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile – the royal couple who sponsored Christopher Columbus’s voyages to ‘India’, which eventually led him to the Americas in 1492. Growing up, Katherine travelled with her family through large parts of Spain at a time when the kingdoms of Castile and Aragon were at war against the Muslim rulers of Granada.

The portrait of Katherine is often purely considered to be a companion to Henry VIII’s portrait (see NPG L246 and NPG 4690). But her sumptuous clothing and steady gaze present Katherine as powerful in her own right: a woman who brought prestige and wealth to the Tudors through her connections to the Spanish Empire and its vast trade networks. Another surviving portrait of Katherine includes a monkey, a symbol of exoticism, and a means of showcasing Spanish access to global goods.

Behind the power and wealth, there were many unseen individuals, such as those who dyed fabrics, crafted clothes, and attended to and dressed the monarch. Katherine’s royal entourage would have included Spanish attendants and peoples who had been captured during the Spanish campaigns to reconquer parts of Muslim-ruled Spain. One such woman was Katherine’s attendant and bed-maker, Catalina of Motril. ‘Catalina’ was the name given to her after her conversion, so her real name is unknown. The councillor Thomas More also noted a group of ‘Ethiopians’ who were part of Katherine’s retinue. Suddenly, our understanding of the Tudor court becomes more complex – non-European peoples including ‘Moors’ (Muslim North Africans) and ‘blackamoors’ (Africans) were present in private chambers and public ceremonies, even if they are not visible in these portraits.

The Tudors increasingly established contact with Eastern empires, including the Ottoman Empire (modern-day Turkey), Persian Empire (Iran), and Mughal Empire (India). Until merchants, ambassadors and other travellers set up more direct exchanges, people accessed global goods via Venice, a bustling multicultural city that had long had (and benefitted from) contact with the Middle East and Asia.

After the Reformation, English monarchs rejected the pope’s ban on conducting trade and diplomatic relations with Islamic rulers. The fashion for the ‘Orient’ can be found in Tudor and Jacobean portraits, in the appearance of Ottoman and Persian-made carpets, and silk garments, the product of merchant access to eastern trade, and diplomatic gift-giving.

Elite society was fascinated by Persia and its empire. James I’s silkworm expert praised the Colony of Virginia in North America for being ‘in the same latitude that Persia is’. A similar climate would be beneficial to establishing a silk industry, just as ‘silks are the sinews of the Persian state’.

Have you noticed the high heels that men wear in portraits of the late 1590s and early 1600s? Persian military men wore heels for practical reasons, and the popularity of heels at European courts may have been the result of a Persian diplomatic mission to Europe in 1598. In the early 1600s, the adventurer Sir Robert Shirley (pictured) befriended Shah Abbas and claimed to have helped train the Persian Safavid army. When he returned to England, Shirley continued to wear a turban and silk coat (qaba).

What does the fashion for heels, earrings, feathers, bracelets and certain colours tell us about how men and women styled themselves in this period? Think about the body parts we choose to emphasize through our clothing. Men’s legs took centre stage at the court of James I, while Elizabeth I was particularly pleased with her pale, slender hands. This striking image of Elizabeth depicts her in a rather masculine, military-style doublet.

In the 1500s and 1600s, colours had different associations than they do today. Pink was considered a variant of red, suitable for both women and men (though some of the pink colours in Tudor portraits may be faded reds). Elizabeth favoured the combination of white and black. 

In today’s society, studies have revealed a marketing trick known as the ‘pink tax' whereby women pay more than men for the same product if it is pink. Pink razors, for example, are more expensive than similar razors for men, in grey or blue. Yet as portraits show us, associations between colours and genders are not fixed over time.

Silk threads and imported textiles show how Tudor and early Stuart self-presentation was influenced by global connections. Chances are, the clothes you are wearing were not made locally. Look at the tags on your clothes or bags.

When he ascended the throne, James I sought to end the many decades of armed conflict between England and Spain. This portrait shows leading councillors from Spain and the Spanish Netherlands (left) and England (right) debating the terms of peace at Somerset House in 1604.

James’s Secretary of State, Robert Cecil (bottom right), was an influential courtier who fought to ensure that the terms of peace granted England greater freedom to pursue their Atlantic ambitions.

Whereas English monarchs styled themselves as rulers of ‘England, Scotland, Ireland and France’, Philip III styled himself king of a vast range of territories, including Castile, Sicily, Jerusalem, Portugal, Guinea, the East and West Indies, and ‘the islands and terra firma of the Ocean Sea’.

Jamestown, Virginia, was the first successful English colony in America, founded in 1607. The colonisation of Bermuda, New England, Newfoundland and parts of the Caribbean followed.

Understanding the importance of fashion in Tudor and Stuart portraiture gives us an indication of ideas of power and status in the early colonies. Archaeologists at Jamestown in Virginia have found five ‘goffering irons’ – the tools that Jacobeans used to stiffen and arrange their ruffs.

Prince Henry died while still a teenager, but supporters hailed him as Europe’s ‘military prince’. Henry was very invested in colonisation. He funded voyages to seek a ‘Northwest Passage’ and instructed captains in Virginia to write to him with news.

John Smith was a soldier rather than a member of the nobility. What do you think is the significance of his portrait appearing so prominently on this early map of the North American coastline?

Pearls are so pervasive in Tudor and Stuart portraits that they can become almost invisible. These were highly prized as luminous gems with potent mythological associations with the sea. They were deeply implicated in the maritime empire and brought to England both legally and in illicit ways – in pockets and boxes, sewn into clothes or turned into earrings.

Pearls had long been sourced in Asia. By the 1500s, the Tudors also relied on enslaved African and Native American divers in the Atlantic, where the Spanish had established large fisheries. The valuable skills of pearl divers were used in other contexts too. When the English warship the Mary Rose sank in 1545, Henry VIII employed an expert West African diver, Jacques Francis, to recover sunken goods.

Observe the range of different-sized pearls and the ways that they were worn, on clothing by men and women alike.

Elizabethan explorers including John Hawkins and Francis Drake profited from trafficking enslaved people in Africa and transporting them to Spanish plantations in America. Records also indicate that there were hundreds of Africans living in England in the Tudor and Stuart eras. Some were performers and household attendants, while others were sailors or interpreters. For example, a London parish record from 1611 notes a:

‘Dederj Iaquoah about the age of 20 years, the sonne [son] of Caddi-bian King of the river of Cetras … in the Country of Guinea, who was sent out of his country by his father in an English ship.’

European ideas about Blackness were constructed over time, through a variety of influences that included cross-cultural contact as well as a range of conflicting ideas and prejudices transmitted through print, travel narratives and plays. English uncertainties about how to categorise Africans began to escalate in the mid-1600s. There was a growing need to justify the human labour required to produce the vast quantities of tobacco and sugar that sustained English plantations in Virginia and the Caribbean. This marked the beginning of institutional slavery in British society and fuelled racism against Black people.

Activity

Sub-Saharan Africans in Tudor and Stuart England were often termed ‘blackamoors’, while region-specific words like ‘Ethiope’ were also sometimes used.

Read this short essay on ‘blackamoors’ in England:

Historian Onyeka Nubia has suggested that Africans may have chosen to use or reclaim certain terms to convey ‘a Black sense of self’. This invites us to contemplate how Black Elizabethans may have viewed themselves, rather than how others categorised them.

It is unfortunately very difficult to obtain the direct voices of Black people in early modern England. Their words were always mediated by those who wrote these accounts down. These records, however, hint at the variety of African lives in Tudor and early Stuart England. 

• Richard Hakluyt, Principal Navigations, 1599
  ‘We also among us in England have blacke Moors, Ethiopians, out of all parts of the Torrid Zones.’ 

• Draft proclamation of Elizabeth I, 1601
  ‘Whereas the Queen’s majesty…is highly discontented to understand the great number of…blackamoors which (as she is informed) are carried into this realm since the troubles between her highness and the King of Spain; who are fostered and relieved here.’

This proclamation calls for the deportation of ‘blackamoors’ in England. It is only a draft, meaning it was never actually legislated. However, it suggests that there was a significant number of people of African descent in Elizabeth London, and that some English people did not welcome their presence.

• Westminster, London, 1602
  Burial of Fortunatus, black servant in the household of Robert Cecil (for a portrait of Cecil, see NPG 107 and NPG 665).

• London, 1610s
  A South African man, ‘Coree the Saldanian’ of the Khoekhoe people, lived in the household of Sir Thomas Smith after being captured when boarding an East India Company ship. Coree used his growing knowledge of the English language to express his desire to return home. He did return to Africa, where he died in 1627.

Explore resources about migrants from diverse backgrounds:

These portraits are highly unusual in that they depict an African girl and boy not in the act of serving or attending to another person but as individuals in their own right.

Women did not lead journeys of exploration in the same way that Drake or Ralegh did, and their travels were more restricted than those of men. Yet they did express an interest in colonisation. ‘Virginia’ was so called because Elizabeth I styled herself as the ‘virgin queen’. Ralegh wrote several letters to James I’s wife, Anne of Denmark, about Virginia and Guiana, and Anne met with Pocahontas in London. From the 1610s and 1620s, larger numbers of women began travelling to fledgling English colonies in the Americas, including Virginia, New England and Bermuda.

Prestige and wealth in portraits were increasingly demonstrated through the proliferation of global commodities – ivory, pearls, emeralds and silk. For example, hundreds of pearls can be seen in Elizabeth’s necklace, hair jewels, and dress in this portrait.

Women contributed funds towards provisioning ships and setting up schools abroad. A few invested in the Virginia Company. They grew and smoked tobacco, cooked with spices and sugar obtained from other countries, and wrote letters to merchants and agents, asking for ’India gowns’, rare plants, shells, and feathers.

Hints of these global interests begin to become more visible in portraits of the 1600s. Parrots and monkeys appear as ‘exotic’ companions. Pineapples and tulips feature in still life paintings and were engraved on cases in which miniatures were kept. Increasingly, the demand for plantation goods led to the mass importation of enslaved peoples to English colonies.

For short essays on Englishness and global encounters to use in teaching, see Keywords of Identity, Race, and Human Mobility in Early Modern England, available for free:

This resource was written by Dr Lauren Working, Lecturer in Early Modern Literature at the University of York. This research began during her time as researcher on the TIDE project at the University of Oxford.