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Civic Portraiture and Political Culture in English Provincial Towns, ca. 1560–1640

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 January 2014

Robert Tittler
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Extract

In recent years the investigation of urban political culture prior to the Civil War has benefited greatly from three historiographical initiatives, all of them suggesting in one way or another the importance of interdisciplinary approaches to the subject. Though it deals with a later period, the work of Peter Borsay and others on what he has labeled “The English Urban Renaissance” has fleshed out a wide variety of cultural forms, verbal and nonverbal, and documented their development in the urban milieu. These studies have implicitly raised the question of antecedents from the pre-Civil War period and have suggested some possible lines of development. Yet by viewing urban culture as largely developing out of the cultural and social demands of the landed classes, rather than from concerns which were indigenously urban, and by not specifically connecting culture with politics to begin with, this work remains limited in its influence on the investigation of the earlier period.

A second tradition has emphasized the importance of Protestant, and especially Puritan, ideology in urban political culture before the Civil War. Such scholars as Paul Seaver, Patrick Collinson, and David Underdown have illuminated the force of those religious and moral concerns on the governing process and have explored such cultural forms as the sermon and the lecture as part of this effort. Their approach has been more explicitly political, and—even if the objective is often to assess the role of Puritan ideology in English politics leading up to the Civil War—it has still told us a great deal about the politics and culture of towns themselves in this period.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of British Studies , Volume 37 , Issue 3: Controlling (Mis)Behavior: Medieval and Early Modern Perspectives , July 1998 , pp. 306 - 329
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 1998

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References

1 See esp. Borsay, Peter, The English Urban Renaissance: Culture and Society in the Provincial Town, 1660–1770 (Oxford, 1989)Google Scholar, and “‘All the Town's a Stage’: Urban Ritual and Ceremony,” in The Transformation of English Provincial Towns, 1600–1800, ed. Clark, P. (London, 1984), pp. 228–58Google Scholar. See also McInnis, Angus, “The Emergence of a Leisure Town, Shrewsbury, 1660–1760,” Past and Present, no. 120 (August 1988), pp. 53–87Google Scholar.

2 Jonathan Barry, on the other hand, has argued for pushing the formation of provincial urban culture back to ca. 1640 and has questioned the essential importance of appropriated cultural models from the countryside. See Barry, Jonathan, “Provincial Town Culture, 1640–1780: Urbane or Civic?” in Interpretation and Cultural History, ed. Pittock, J. and Wear, A. (New York, 1991), pp. 199–225Google Scholar.

3 See esp. Seaver, Paul, The Puritan Lectureships: The Politics of Religious Dissent, 1560–1662 (Stanford, Calif., 1970)Google Scholar; Collinson, Patrick, The Birthpangs of Protestant England (New York, 1988), esp. chap. 2Google Scholar, “The Protestant Town,” and The Religion of Protestants: The Church and English Society, 1559–1625 (New York, 1982), esp. chap. 4Google Scholar, “Magistracy and Ministry”; Collinson, Patrick and Craig, John, eds., The Reformation in English Towns (Baskingstoke, 1998)Google Scholar, in press; Underdown, David, Revel, Riot and Rebellion: Popular Politics and Culture in England, 1603–1660 (Oxford, 1985)Google Scholar, Fire from Heaven: Life in an English Town in the Seventeenth Century (New Haven, Conn., and London, 1992)Google Scholar.

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5 Phythian-Adams, Charles, “Ceremony and the Citizen: The Communal Year at Coventry, 1450–1550,” in Crisis and Order in English Towns, 1500–1700, ed. Clark, P. and Slack, P. (London, 1972), pp. 57–85Google Scholar. The theme of cultural destruction is of course well established, but its recent and further exposition by Eamon Duffy, in pt. 2 of The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400–1580 (New Haven, Conn., and London, 1992)Google Scholar, should not pass without notice here.

6 For example, Tittler, Robert, Architecture and Power: The Town Hall and the English Urban Community, 1500–1640 (Oxford, 1991)Google Scholar.

7 Dyer, Alan, “English Town Chronicles,” Local Historian 12, no. 6 (1977): 285–91Google Scholar; Clark, Peter, “Visions of the Urban Community, Antiquarians and the English City before 1800,” in The Pursuit of Urban History, ed. Fraser, D. and Sutcliffe, A. (London, 1983)Google Scholar; and Woolf, Daniel, “Genre into Artefact: The Decline of the English Chronicle in the Sixteenth Century,” Sixteenth Century Journal 19, no. 3 (Fall 1988): 321–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar, “‘The Common Voice’: History, Folklore and Oral Tradition in Early Modern England,” Past and Present, no. 120 (August 1988), pp. 26–52Google Scholar.

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9 See Foister, S., “Paintings and Other Works of Art in Sixteenth Century Inventories,” Burlington Magazine 126, no. 938 (May 1981), esp. app. i, pp. 280–81Google Scholar.

10 See Duffy, , The Stripping of the Altars, pp. 332–34Google Scholar.

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12 Stone, Lawrence, The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558–1641 (Oxford, 1965), p. 712Google Scholar.

13 Few of the civic portraits which have come to light in this study have been listed in the standard reference sources for English portraiture (including the otherwise invaluable files of the National Portrait Gallery). They were instead culled from visits to local museums and record offices, responses to requests for information from curators of local collections, from local historical and antiquarian publications, and from a very limited corpus of modern published scholarship.

14 It may be assumed that these are all oil portraits, mostly on panel. Engravings, conventionally reproduced from painted or drawn originals, have not been surveyed. They were chiefly intended for publication, and thus for a larger audience, and are not likely to have been devoted to the sort of subjects treated here in this era.

15 A good many more have been identified for which there remains some uncertainty regarding one or more of these criteria. These have been excluded from consideration.

16 The Percy portrait is not only exceptional because of its early date but also because of the sitter's identity. Percy was a priest and local rector, the only cleric to have been included in this list of civic portraits. The decision to include him derived not from his clerical status but because he was an important benefactor to the city. He was presumably painted to commemorate his bequests: his portrait hung in the Guildhall, not the Cathedral or a parish church. See Cozens-Hardy, B. and Kent, E. A., eds., The Mayors of Norwich, 1403–1835 (Norwich, 1938), p. 69Google Scholar; Moore, A. and Crawley, C., eds., Family and Friends: A Regional Survey of British Portraiture (London, 1992), p. 197 and plate 4Google Scholar.

17 Cozens-Hardy, and Kent, , eds., Mayors of Norwich, 1403–1835, pp. 42, 48–49Google Scholar; Tillyard, Virginia, “Civic Portraits Painted for or Donated to the Council Chamber of Norwich Guildhall before 1687 with Documentary Evidence Relating to the Artistic Background of the City, the Artists and the Sitters” (M.A. thesis, London University, Courtauld Institute, 1978), pp. 21, 42–43, 45, 46Google Scholar; Moore, and Crawley, , eds., Family and Friends, pp. 24, 26–28, 196–97Google Scholar. A biographical sketch of Steward appears in Bindoff, S. T., ed., The House of Commons, 1509–1558, 3 vols. (London, 1982), 3:383–85Google Scholar.

18 Statham, Margaret, Jankyn Smith and the Guildhall Feoffees (Bury St. Edmunds, 1981), p. 3Google Scholar. Smith (died 1481) is considered the founder of the Guildhall Trust, which provided the townsmen the few elements of self-rule permitted under abbatial lordship. The trust served as the only essentially indigenous ruling body until the incorporation of the borough in the reign of James I, and it continued to exist on into the present century.

19 Quick, Richard, ed., Catalogue of the Second Loan Collection of Pictures held in the Bristol Art Gallery, 1905 (Bristol, 1905), no. 202Google Scholar.

20 Tittler, , Architecture and Power, pp. 42–50Google Scholar.

21 Mrs.Poole, R. L. Rachel, ed., Catalogue of Portraits in the University, Colleges, City and County of Oxford, 3 vols., Oxford Historical Society, vols. 57, 81, 82 (Oxford, 1912, 1926, 1926), 1:244Google Scholar, 2:xii; Berkshire County Record Office, MS. D/EP 7/55.

22 Quick, , ed., Catalogue of the Pictures of Bristol, p. 61Google Scholar.

23 For example, by the observations of Giovanni Lomazzo, which were disseminated through a translation by the English artist and theorist Richard Haydocke around this time, as cited in Peacock, J., “The Politics of Portraiture,” in Culture and Politics in Early Stuart England, ed. Sharpe, K. and Lake, P. (Basingstoke, 1994), p. 210Google Scholar.

24 Which is on the cover of Frith's, BrianTwelve Portraits of Gloucester Benefactors (Gloucester, 1972)Google Scholar.

25 Reproduced in Atkinson, Tom, Elizabethan Winchester (London, 1963), plate 4, opposite p. 33Google Scholar.

26 Information and photograph were provided by R. W. Edwards, head of Design Services, King's Lynn, to whom I am grateful.

27 Haskins, Charles, The Salisbury Corporation Pictures and Plate (Salisbury, 1910), pp. 9–12Google Scholar.

28 Peacock, , “Politics of Portraiture,” pp. 210–11Google Scholar, citing Lamazzo; and Strong, Roy, The English Icon: Elizabethan and Jacobean Portraiture (New Haven, Conn., and London, 1969), pp. 29–41Google Scholar.

29 Shaw, David Gary, The Creation of a Community: The City of Wells in the Middle Ages (Oxford, 1993), pp. 157, 198–99CrossRefGoogle Scholar. My thanks to Dr. Shaw for his elucidation of this point.

30 For an erudite summary of this theme, see Duffy, , The Stripping of the Altars, pp. 332–34Google Scholar.

31 Tillyard, , “Civic Portraits,” p. 3Google Scholar.

32 Strong, The English Icon, p. 29.

33 As demonstrated, for example, by Victor Morgan in his paper “Civic Fame in Renaissance Norwich,” read at the Institute of Historical Research, London University, London, 23 January 1995.

34 Victor Morgan, in both “Civic Fame” and “The Norwich Guildhall Portraits, Images in Context,” in Moore, and Crawley, , eds., Family and Fortune, pp. 21–30Google Scholar.

35 Gloucester Borough Archives, Gloucester County Record Office, Gloucester, MS. GBR B3/1, fol. 188v; Stanford, Maureen, ed., Ordinances of Bristol, 1506–1598, Bristol Record Society Publications, vol. 61 (Bristol, 1990), p. 97Google Scholar.

36 Strong, The English Icon, pp. 21–25.

37 Stone, , The Crisis of the Aristocracy, p. 712Google Scholar.

38 As is noted in Tillyard, , “Civic Portraits,” p. 8Google Scholar; Frith, , Twelve Portraits of Gloucester Benefactors, p. 5Google Scholar; Berkshire Record Office, MS. D/EP 7/55, about an early twentieth-century exhibit of the Alms House portraits in Abingdon. The propensity of Dutch civic portraits in particular to depict the ruling group as well as the individual may probably best be explained by the greater prominence of the committee system in the government of those larger and more complex provincial centers and by the greater fiscal ability of Dutch towns to commission large works.

39 As described especially by James, Mervyn, “The Concept of Order and the Northern Rising of 1569,” Past and Present, no. 60 (1973), pp. 49–83Google Scholar, and Family, Lineage and Civil Society: A Study of Society, Politics and Mentality in the Durham Region, 1500–1640 (Oxford, 1974)Google Scholar.

40 See the very suggestive essays in Hoak, Dale, ed., Tudor Political Culture (Cambridge, 1995)Google Scholar.

41 In this they resembled constables and other officers of the village community who have been studied more thoroughly. See, e.g., Wrightson, K., “Two Concepts of Order: Justices, Constables and Jurymen in Seventeenth Century England,” in An Ungovernable People? The English and Their Law in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, ed. Brewer, J. and Styles, J. (New Brunswick, N.J., 1980), pp. 21–46Google Scholar.

42 This is the subject of Tittler, Robert, The Reformation and the Towns in England: Politics and Political Culture, 1540–1640 (Oxford, 1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, but it may be inferred in its bare essentials from the listings of borough incorporation given in Weinbaum, M., British Borough Charters, 1307–1660 (Cambridge, 1943), pp. xxix–lvGoogle Scholar.

43 See, e.g., Clark, and Slack, , eds., Crisis and Order in English Towns, pp. 20–24Google Scholar.

44 See Tittler, Robert, “‘Seats of Honour, Seats of Power’: The Symbolism of Public Seating in the English Urban Community, c. 1560–1620,” Albion 24, no. 2 (Summer 1992): 205–24CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

45 These points are treated at length in Robert Tittler, Architecture and Power, passim, and “Political Culture and the Built Environment in the English Country Town, c. 1540–1620,” in Hoak, , ed., Tudor Political Culture, pp. 133–56Google Scholar.

46 Thomas, Keith, “The Perception of the Past in Early Modern England,” Creighton Lecture (London University, London, 1983), p. 2Google Scholar.

47 This is summarized in Duffy, , The Stripping of the Altars, pp. 327–36, 480, 494–96Google Scholar.

48 I have explored the re-creation of a politically legitimizing collective memory in the decades following the Reformation in a paper entitled “Reformation, Civic Memory and Political Culture in English Provincial Towns,” delivered at the Pre-Modern Towns Group Conference in London, January 1997, and published in Urban History 24, no. 3 (1997): 283–300CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

49 This is treated briefly in Tittler, , Architecture and Power, pp. 150–54Google Scholar, and at greater length in Tittler, The Reformation and the Towns in England, chap. 13.

50 See, e.g., the concerns of Henry Gee, sheriff and thrice mayor of mid-Tudor Chester; Mills, , “Chester Ceremonial,” pp. 5–6Google Scholar. The tendency is widely apparent throughout the towns of the realm, as summarized in Tittler, Robert, “The End of the Middle Ages in the English Country Town,” Sixteenth Century Journal 18, no. 4 (Winter 1987): 485–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

51 The burgesses of Elizabethan Wallingford, e.g., with the help of a member of the Middle Temple, compiled such a history because, as they said in its introduction, “We the inhabitants could saye nothinge thereunto.” It is cataloged as MS. W/AC 1/1 in the Berkshire Record Office. Analogous efforts came forth in Exeter, Great Yarmouth, Grantham, Ipswich and Canterbury. See Martin, G. H., “The Publication of Borough Records,” Archives 8, no. 36 (1966): 199–206Google Scholar.

52 Clopper, L. M., ed., Records of Early English Drama, Chester (Toronto, 1979), pp. xxxvi–xliiiGoogle Scholar. See also the work of William Whiteway and Denis Bond in Dorchester and both Robert Owen and the familiar “Anon.” in Shrewsbury: Underdown, , Fire from Heaven, pp. 51–52Google Scholar; “An Elizabethan Chronicle of the History of Shrewsbury, 1372–1603,” and Robert Owen, “Escutcheons of the Bailiffs and Mayors of Shrewsbury,” both undated and unpublished manuscripts in the Shrewsbury School Library. (My thanks to Mr. James Lawson, librarian of Shrewsbury School, for steering me through the last two items with characteristic thoroughness and care.)

53 See Haskins, , Salisbury Corporation Pictures and Plate, pp. 9–12Google Scholar.

54 For information on White, see the Dictionary of National Biography.

55 The inscription reads: “Haeredes isti quoties succeditis aulae fraternis mentibus adsit amor” (My successors, as often as you succeed to this hall, let brotherly love be present in your minds).

56 The inscription for John and Joan Cooke's portrait reads: “Though death hath rested these life mates / Their memory survives / Esteemed myrrors may they be / For Majestrates and Wives / The School of Crist ye Bartholomews / The Cawsway in ye West / May witness wch ye pious minde / This Worthy man possest. / This vertuous dame perform'd ye taske / Her husband did intend / And after him in single life / Lived famous to her end. / Their bountye & benificence / On earth remaines allways / Let present past a future time / Still Celebrate yr praise.” Thomas Bell's portrait inscription reads: “He did wel for the poore Provide / his righteousnes shal still remaine / and his estate with praise abide / surpassinge gold & worldly gayne.” The inscription for Thomas Poulton's portrait is an entirely prosaic “He gave vnto the same Citie of Glosester, 60, powndes forever.” The inscription of John Thome's portrait is a laconic list of bequests, including a basin and ewer, presumably of silver and worth £30, to be part of the city's plate forever, an annual payment for alms and a sermon to the parish church of St. Nicholas, and land to support the latter (all inscriptions are from Frith, , Gloucester Benefactors, pp. 9, 11, 19Google Scholar, and 19, respectively).