Van Dyck’s portrait of Archbishop Laud: the hijack of an image

The Van Dyck exhibition has now started at Tate Britain. I haven’t had a chance to go yet, but in the meantime I thought it might be interesting to post about how a particular portrait by Van Dyck was put to very different uses by different political and religious factions.

In 1636, the Archbishop of Canterbury William Laud sat for this portrait by Van Dyck. Laud stands in his convocational robes, gazing powerfully out at the viewer. This was Laud as the architect of a restored and revivified Church of England, projecting authority without the need for props like Bibles in the background.

The impact of the image wasn’t limited to Lambeth Palace. By 1640, Wenceslaus Hollar had produced this reversed etching of the Van Dyck portrait:

AN344014001, © The Trustees of the British Museum

Although such etchings would have been expensive at about 6d. each, the etching survives in a number of versions, which suggests it sold well. Nor is the only version of the portrait that was available:

AN406358001, © The Trustees of the British Museum

There was clearly an audience for popular reproductions of Laud’s portrait. In the 1640s, however, a different type of popular audience emerged in the wake of the controversy over the Laudian canons. Van Dyck’s portrait was very quickly put to a rather different use. For example, here is an engraving from 1641 of Laud with his nemesis Henry Burton:

AN48816001, © The Trustees of the British Museum

Laud is shown vomiting books as Burton holds him still, gripping his head in a manner which is meant to remind the viewer of execution. The captions confirm this. Burton proclaims that Laud will be ill “till Head from body part”, and the punning verse above their heads reads as follows:

Great was surnamed GREGORIE of Rome

Our LITTLE by GREGORIE comes short Home.

The pun here is that Gregory was not just the name of Pope Gregory the Great – a critique of Laud’s perceived return to Rome – but was also the name of London’s executioner, Gregory Brandon.

Woodcuts, the cheapest form of printed image, also had a field day with satirical images of Laud. Here is a woodcut that was commonly used to illustrate anti-Laudian pamphlets, in this case taken from Mercuries Message of 1641:

AN406357001, © The Trustees of the British Museum

In this case the satirical content was provided by the text that accompanied the woodcut. But depictions of Laud could be extremely sophisticated satires in their own right. Here is an image of Laud with fellow prelates, which draws on Van Dyck’s image (Laud is on the far left) but also plays with the associations of the word ‘canon’:

AN501635001, © The Trustees of the British Museum

These kinds of images would have been in wide circulation in bookshops, taverns and private homes in London in the early 1640s. They may have played an important role in shaping a popular political consciousness amongst Londoners, for instance amongst the hundreds who gathered to protest outside Lambeth Palace in May 1640. Laud himself was in no doubt of their impact, seeing a key cause of the reaction against him as:

base pictures of me; putting me into a Cage, and fastning me to a Post by a Chain at my Shoulder, and the like.

For more on anti-Laudian satire:

• Helen Pierce, ‘Anti-Episcopacy and Graphic Satire in England, 1640-1645′, The Historical Journal, 47:4 (2004), pp.809-48. This article is where I first came across all the images above. A revised version of the article forms chapter 4 of her excellent Unseemly Pictures: Graphic Satire and Politics in Early Modern England (Yale University Press, 2009).
• Andrew McRae, Literature, Satire, and the Early Stuart State (Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 188-207.
• David Cressy, England on Edge: Crisis and Revolution, 1640-1642 (Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 294-302.

A bit of a pasting

Spotted the poster above pasted onto a wall on the north side of the Millennium Bridge, on the approach to Tate Modern. The URL in the corner is www.neoexternalism.co.uk – but it takes you to a defunct website. A Whois check on the URL doesn’t reveal much, either.

Still, seeing it reminded me that pasting satirical messages onto London’s walls is nothing new, so I thought it would be a good excuse for a post. For comparison, here is one of the Voyeur Card’s famous early modern counterparts: a satirical broadsheet ballad that would probably also have been glued onto walls.

AN47532001

© The Trustees of the British Museum

The World Is Ruled & Governed By Opinion was published in 1641 by Thomas Banks (although subsequent editions did not feature his name).  The text is by Henry Peacham, a writer and illustrator who in the late 1630s and 1640s published a number of written works. There is some suggestion that he was down on his luck and attempting to make money by doing so. At this period Peacham collaborated with Wenceslaus Hollar, who is the artist behind the ballad’s illustration. This is one of a number of works they collaborated on at this period. The dedication is to Sir Francis Prujean, a noted physician.

In the illustration you can see Opinion (the blindfolded woman), crowned with the Tower of Babel. She has a globe on her lap, a chameleon on her left arm and a staff in her right hand. In the tree are various pamphlets and broadside ballads. On the left is a jester-like man watering the tree. On the right is the aristocratic cavalier labelled “Viator” or traveller, who is the person Opinion is debating with in the ballad’s text.

The ballad and its illustration are a good example of of views held in the 1640s about the dangers of print, news and opinion – Opinion is an inversion of Justice, watered by a fool, producing nothing but confusion and a world turned upside down. This is ironic, given that the pamphlet’s publisher, Thomas Banks, was a key producer of cheap ballads, pamphlets and newsbooks during the 1640s. Paradoxically, the ballad’s very medium cuts across its message.

Where it gets really interesting are the titles it’s possible to make out of the books hanging from the tree. These are:

• “[John] Taylor’s Reply”
• “The Ironmonger’s Answer”
• “Mercuries Message”
• “News from Elyzium”
• “Hellish Parliament”
• “A Swarme of Sectaries”
• “Canterburies Tooles” (not Troubles as the British Museum website has it)
• “Brownists Conventicle”
• “Taylors Physicke”
• “Lambeth Faire”

Of these, Taylor’s Reply, A Swarme of Sectaries, Taylors Physicke, and The Ironmonger’s Answer all relate to the pamphlet war between John Taylor and Henry Walker.

Mercuries Message was a ballad critical of Laud. Newes from Elizium was a satirical piece using the same woodcut of Laud as Mercuries Message. The Hellish Parliament was another satirical pamphlet by Taylor. Canterburies Tooles is a pamphlet purporting to be by Prynne which reused the same woodcut. Brownists Conventicle was yet another Taylor satire. Lambeth Faire was another satirical ballad hostile to Laud.

I have a hunch – and it is no more than that at this stage – that the listed works may all have been published by Thomas Banks. Certainly Taylor had close professional connections with Banks, who printed a number of his satires. And much of Banks’s output at this time consisted of cheap satirical pamphlets and ballads. To add another layer of paradox, it may be that as well as a critical commentary on the burgeoning public sphere in 1641, The World Is Ruled & Governed By Opinion is also an advert for the very cheap print the ballad criticises.

What is also potentially fascinating for me is that works from both sides of the pamphlet war between John Taylor and Henry Walker are mentioned – not just Taylor’s but also Walker’s. Having blogged about this previously, and hypothesised that the two may have been closer than is supposed, and linked by their mutual associations with Banks and other printers, it is intriguing to wonder whether Banks actually printed all the pamphlets in the dispute. At any rate it’s something I’ll be following up.

Incidentally the ballad also inspired the title of Dagmar Freist’s excellent study of politics and communication in mid-seventeenth century London, which is now available in limited preview on Google Books, and which I would recommend if you want to find out more about print and other forms of communication in 1630s and 1640s London.

The pamphlet war between John Taylor and Henry Walker

The series of posts that follow are a slightly amended and lengthier version of a paper I gave on 12 July at the Birkbeck Early Modern Society.

The pamphlet above is one of a number of salvoes fired in an infamous pamphlet war that started in June 1641, between two writers called John Taylor and Henry Walker.

Taylor was a waterman who had lived in London since his apprenticeship in the early 1590s. Despite only a brief spell at grammar school, contact with actors and writers he ferried to the Bankside triggered a new interest in literature for him. From 1612, Taylor started publishing verses and experimented with other forms of print. For example, in 1614 he produced a miniature “thumb-bible” as a novelty for courtiers. He also experimented with a subscription model for selling books. By the 1630s, Taylor’s predominant output was satirical pamphlets.

Less is known about Henry Walker’s background. In 1638 he was admitted as a pensioner at Queens’ College, Cambridge. However, before this he was apprenticed to an ironmonger in Newgate market. By 1641 he was writing and selling anti-episcopal books. At the same time, he was also becoming well-known as an Independent “tub preacher” – in other words, a preacher without a living.

The first salvo in their pamphlet war was fired by Taylor in a pamphlet called A Swarme of Sectaries. In it Taylor satirised a range of “mechanic” or non-beneficed preachers. Walker responded with An Answer to a Foolish Pamphlet entituled A Swarme of Sectaries, in which he attacked Taylor’s literary and religious credentials. Taylor quickly came back with another pamphlet, A Reply as true as Steele, criticising Walker and throwing in a woodcut of a she-devil giving birth to Walker. Walker then wrote a further response, Taylors Physicke has purged the divel, with a woodcut showing Taylor in his ferry-boat drinking something unmentionable from the rear end of another she-devil: this is the pamphlet you can see above. A third author, George Richardson, then entered the fray on Taylor’s side.

Although the dispute went quiet later in the summer of 1641, Taylor resurrected it in 1642 with two further pamphlets. One, a satire of a sermon preached by Walker, became well-known as “Tobie’s dog” after the mock-sermon’s subject, the book of Tobias. Another was a spoof of a debate held between Walker and a Jesuit.

This dispute has traditionally been seen as one of the literary set-pieces of the 1640s. In the civil war both Taylor and Walker would go on to be propagandists for king and Parliament respectively. As a result, their dispute is often presented as a paper conflict prefiguring the actual conflict that would break out between Charles I and Parliament in 1642. This interpretation has been combined with a tendency to see the dispute as being crude and of low literary merit. More recently, historians have been concerned not to marginalise popular print and instead to see it as an expressive form in its own right. Taylor and Walker’s pamphlet war has also been re-evaluated as part of this trend, and some historians have sought to restore Walker and Taylor’s literary credentials.

However, all of these re-interpretations have continued to stress the oppositional nature of Walker and Taylor’s exchange. Importantly, too, even the most recent interpretations have only considered one aspect of the dispute – the two authors.

But actually it takes more than authors to bring a book to print. As Robert Darnton has argued in work on the print culture of eighteenth-century France, there is a “communication circuit” involved in every book. You also need printers, booksellers and readers. And a text itself doesn’t exist in a vacuum either – it relates to the social and political context of its time. The diagram below shows Darnton’s version of this communication circuit.

What I will do in subsequent posts is analyse some of the missing characters in the communication circuit behind Walker and Taylor’s dispute:

• the texts, and how they relate to seventeenth-century print culture in general
• the readers
• the publishers

A full contextual analysis of all the parties involved, and the creative tensions between them, reveals that the exchange could be at once a pitched battle and a friendly spat, and could simultaneously be both crude and erudite.

The Noble Revolt

So, my first post. I haven’t actually started the Masters yet – that has to wait until October – but I thought I’d get into the habit of forcing myself to write, and to collect my thoughts. I’m going to start with a review of John Adamson’s recent book on the politics of the build-up to the English Civil War between 1640 and 1642, The Noble Revolt , which I have just finished re-reading.

I mention the fact that I have re-read it because this is not a small book, and it takes quite some time to absorb in full. The footnotes alone take up 191 pages, which should alert you to the fact that it gives an incredibly detailed coverage of the two years on which it focuses. The book is in many ways a prequel to Adamson’s PhD thesis on the role of the English peerage in politics between 1645 and 1649 (when the House of Lords was abolished). In his thesis, Adamson argued that the nobility’s role in civil war politics had previously been neglected, both by Whiggish historians concerned with seeing the conflict as the high road to nineteenth century democracy, and by Marxists presenting the period as one of class struggle. In particular, Adamson focused on the emergence of two groups amongst the peerage, each of which cooperated with their comrades in the Commons – a moderate, later Presbyterian group that was keen by the late 1640s to reinstall the king with only mild limits on his authority, and a more extreme group (the Independents). This split between Presbyterians and Independents had been established before Adamson’s thesis, notably by David Underdown in Pride’s Purge , but the centrality of the peerage had not been suitably brought out.

Adamson’s wider thesis was criticised in the early 1990s in a debate with Mark Kishlansky over whether Viscount Saye and Sele had had a hand in drafting the Heads of Proposals, rather than just Cromwell and Ireton as had been previously believed. The general consensus seems to be that Adamson’s evidence doesn’t prove this, but Adamson’s blistering response to Kishlansky’s original critique in the Historical Journal is still worth reading. The unfortunate thing about the debate was that it tended to damn the rest of Adamson’s much wider thesis; unfairly, in my view.

The Noble Revolt is a rehabilitation of that thesis, stretching Adamson’s arguments back into the early 1640s. He argues that Pym’s centrality in the move towards war has been overstated, and that instead we should look to a network of godly Puritan nobles, centred around Bedford and Warwick, excluded from power during the 1630s and anxious at the direction in religious and political policies were heading. Adamson is at pains to emphasise that it was a case of bicameral cooperation, rather than the Lords commanding the Commons; but he does make the point that it was the great houses of the English nobility who possessed the political and, importantly, military clout to take things to war. What follows is a case of gambles alternately paying off then failing and pushing factions further away from their opponents. In particular, Adamson draws out the role of the Scots, not as an invading army but as mercenaries invited to invade by the Warwick-Bedford faction. If the invasion failed or the plot was discovered, this was treason; and so the stakes in negotiations with the king could not have been higher. Adamson presents his evidence through painstaking analysis of letters, newssheets and other contemporary sources. His reconstruction of the Warwick-Bedford axis, and the factions within it, is highly convincing. Kishlansky has argued in the past that kinship connections do not necessarily make for political connections. However, the weight of familial, spiritual, political and financial connections – handily combined in involvement in the Providence Island Company for many within the group – are such that it is hard to refute Adamson’s reconstruction.

And there are some standout moments in that reconstruction. There is a shrewd look at the authorship of a pamphlet which leads him to conclude that it was authored by Oliver St John. There is the set of annotations on a document hand-written by Charles I and handed to Will Morray that Adamson discovered in a barn belonging to a distant descendant. The analysis of the factional politics over Strafford’s execution, as different parts of the group blew alternately hot and cold depending on relationships with the Scots, is outstanding – as is the atmospheric account of the trial itself (where one suspects Adamson sympathises with Strafford, lucid and calm again the bumbling and tongue-tied Pym).

However, there are some moments where Adamson over-reaches himself. His account of the previous historiography of the origins of the war focuses really only on Conrad Russell. There is no coverage of other historians from a wide range of theoretical or argumentative backgrounds. This extends through the book’s epilogue, where Adamson is keen to debunk Whigs and revisionists alike by finding a third way on explaining the origins of the war – but can coverage of only 1640-1642 cover enough of the origins of the war to adequately explain them? I don’t believe it can. What it can do is explain the move in Westminster and Edinburgh politics towards war; but it doesn’t explain the longer-term preconditions that allowed such a move to happen, nor does it cover the background to development of party and ideology in the aftermath of war breaking out. And Adamson’s argument that it was not a war of religion, but a war based on cold-blooded political concerns may be right, but doesn’t sit well with his other point that (rightly) religion cannot be separated from politics during this period. There is also the odd assertion where his evidence doesn’t quite do what he wants it to. Charles I’s complaint that he would be turned into a doge of Venice, and the existence of quotes from republican authors in Bedford’s commonplace book, doesn’t quite add up to a determined intellectual programme of "Venetianisation" of the English state. If anything I think that Adamson’s arguments of contingency and short-term political calculation apply here too, and that there was less of a coherent programme of political thought behind the Warwick-Bedford axis than he perhaps argues.

What takes the book beyond its arguments is the quality of the writing. Chapters start and end with some fantastic set-pieces – for example, Charles fleeing Whitehall in January 1642:

"From the cabin at the stern of the barge, Charles caught a glimpse of the gilded weather-vanes of Whitehall Palace before the boat turned westwards, past the Abbey, and under the great east window of St Stephen’s Chapel – the Commons’ chamber, and the scene of his most recent political debacle. It would be seven years before Charles saw his palace again".

We all know – but Adamson leaves unsaid – the reason why Charles would return. And this extract also gives a glimpse into Adamson’s excellent sense of London’s geography, both physical and political. The geographical networks of godly aristocrats, going from one great house to another or holed up in the chamber, are brought out superbly. London comes alive in the book as we realise how small and yet how divided it could be between the rival factions. There are superb passages on the indefensability of Whitehall, on the physical layout of Strafford’s trial, and on the scenes in Whitehall yards as crowds of apprentices jostled with each other.

The critical response to the book so far has been pretty good, although some reviews have been of higher quality than others. The Times was very positive without particularly engaging in the book’s arguments. Diane Purkiss’s review in the Financial Times probably owes more to Adamson’s own review of Purkiss’s recent book . The Spectator and the Telegraph were more considered. By far the best was Blair Worden’s lengthy meditation on the book in the London Review of Books – subscribers only, unfortunately, but it contained a fascinating insight into Worden’s work on Hugh Trevor-Roper’s papers and a book on the English Civil War that he never finished, but which covered similar ground to Adamson. It was also the only review so far to engage with the book’s arguments in a genuinely critical way.

As a final word, if you are interested in a summary by Adamson himself of his arguments, there is a recording of a reading he gave at the Hay festival available on the Guardian’s site . It costs a pound to buy but it is worth downloading.