Threads of Life

by Clare Hunter

  On panel forty-four of the tapestry is Mary, Queen of Scots, the Queen of Scotland from 1542 to 1567, surrounded by miniature sewn motifs of her needlework. She holds an embroidery frame in her hand, and from it a single sewing thread connects her to the stitched legend of her life, which is played out within the frame of her body. She lived at a time when embroidery was one of the most potent forms of Renaissance communication, when it was valued as a transmitter of intellect and emotion, when it was a conversation between people and their God, the church and its congregation, ruler and subjects. Back then, needlework had power and its embroiderers had value. Back then, sewing mattered.

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  Power

  It was Mary, Queen of Scots who marked the beginning of my attention to history. At my convent school, she was a rare heroine among the textbook tales of battling kings and male inventors. Unlike the devout missionaries or caring nurses we were exhorted to admire, Mary held sensual and sexual allure. Her portraits and the melodramatic paintings of her life captured her material world: the luxury of velvet glinting with silk thread, the richness of tapestries caught in the flicker of candlelight. Even in captivity she was depicted in stubborn splendour, capped in a coif that shimmered with pearls and clothed in a dress of lustrous black silk, behind which a gossamer veil floated like a waterfall.

  Her story has been unpicked time and time again in novels, films, plays, operas, documentaries, biographies and countless academic tracts, her life forensically examined to excavate new morsels of evidence and shed more light on her character and her choices. Queen of Scotland at only six days old, she was already a political pawn. From her birth in 1542, King Henry VIII of England pursued his ambition of a marriage contract between Mary and his own son, Edward. When Scotland refused, Henry began his so-called Rough Wooing, a seven-year war on Scotland. At the Battle of Pinkie Cleugh in 1547 the Scots were defeated and thousands were slain. Afraid that the five-year-old queen would be forcibly abducted, Mary was smuggled out of the country by her Scottish nobles and taken to France as the prospective wife of François, its young Dauphin. There she grew up in what was said to be the most brilliant of the Renaissance courts. She was feted and indulged and when she was seventeen, she married her Dauphin in a head-swimming show of pageantry. But just eighteen months later her glory days were over. The Dauphin had died.

  Left without a husband or a role in France, Mary went home to take up her Scottish throne. Her seven-year reign in Scotland was catastrophic, blighted by intrigue, religious distrust, disastrous marriages, miscarriage and murder. She lost the loyalty of her nobles. She lost the love of her people. She lost her throne, her only son and her liberty. And she lost her head when she was executed in 1587 on the command of her cousin, Queen Elizabeth I of England.

  It is strange, however, that among the tangled threads of her life, so avidly tugged free by biographers and historians, one remains scantly mentioned. For Mary was an embroiderer and not a highday or holiday stitcher, for her embroidery had a purpose. It was her agent. It was to become her emotional and political representative.

  In France, Mary would have been tutored in plain sewing such as hemming, seaming, darning; the basic skills required of every girl, even queens. In the sixteenth century, power was precarious, particularly for women. Queens had to be prepared for a sudden fall from grace: the failure to provide an heir or the elevation of a mistress could see their influence wane and their position alter. They needed to be armed with the tools of survival.

  During her thirteen years in France, Mary learned horsemanship and falconry. She was taught to play the lute and sing virginals, how to write poetry and compose arguments in prose, and was tutored in French, Italian, Spanish, Greek and Latin. But another essential part of her education was the artful language of embroidery, learned under the influence, but probably not the tutelage, of her prospective mother-in-law, Catherine de Medici. An entry in the French court’s ledger when Mary was nine years old records the purchase of two pounds of woollen yarns for her to ‘learn to make works.’ Embroidery was the visual language of the French elite. It was a culture of sophisticated visual communication, of symbols and personal ciphers. Textiles were the most versatile form of visual messaging: displayable, wearable, portable, recyclable, they could carry information from place to place, from person to person. Colour choices declared allegiances and intimate relationships. Stitched political and personal statements were declared within the folds of a skirt or on the drapes pulled around a state bed. It was a rich material world. Its presence and practice signalled wealth, power and lineage.

  In palaces all over Europe, embroidered cloths dressed the nobility, cushioned benches, were smoothed over tables, hung on walls and used to screen off commodes. They fluttered in tournaments and processions in autographed billows of banners and pennants and created spectacle at masques and pageants. But they were not there as mere decoration. They were vital proclamations of power, disseminating reminders of longevity, virtue, sovereign strength and divine entitlement through family crests, classical and biblical allusions and in the symbolic potency of specific motifs. Their display was not only intended to impress their immediate audience, but also to have impact vicariously and internationally through the letters and reports in which they were described and the painted portraits for which the sitters wore their costliest garments and sat against backdrops of their most luxuriant textiles. Such portraits advertised prestige and prosperity, communicated by the delicate brushstrokes that depicted hand-crafted lace and the oil-painted shimmer of silk. In Renaissance art, different painters commonly worked on the same portrait, each contributing their own specialist skill. The artists who painted fabric were paid more than the portrait painter himself and were allowed access to the most expensive grades of paint. The portrait miniaturist Nicholas Hilliard (1547–1619) saved the highest and most expensive grade of white pigment for capturing the gleam of white satin. For a painter who could capture a monarch’s finery there were rich rewards indeed.

  This was an exclusive materiality. Sumptuary laws ensured that only the nobility had access to luxurious imported fabrics like silks, cut velvets and brocades. Only they could afford the smooth, slender needles that slipped through cloth like butter. Others had to make do with home-spun fabrics and rough, hand-hammered needles, still so precious that they were kept in special cases chained to a woman’s waist.

  An extraordinary example of the time and money invested in material sovereign power was the meeting between the two young royal colts, Henry VIII of England and Francis I of France, in 1520. They met in a field near Calais, ostensibly to sign a treaty of peace. The rendezvous was an excuse for a competitive show of rival kingship. It was christened the Field of the Cloth of Gold because of the amount of gold fabric, thread and trimmings on display. The royal parties were transported in embroidered litters to their brocaded tent cities, which were weighted down with 200 pounds of silk fringing. Thousands of tents were partitioned by richly embellished fabrics to create reception rooms, private apartments, chapels and connecting galleries. One tree was hung with 2,000 satin cherries, another bedecked in gold and damask leaves. And the kings themselves were dressed in the finest tissue of gold spun from the beards of mussels.

  The Catholic Church had led the way to such indulgence. It communicated the wonders of faith through its material appeal and invested heavily in its textured power, procuring an excess of seductive textiles to transmit the word of God. For a time, medieval England was the source of the best embroidery that could be had. Its embroiderers had developed techniques to bring a three-dimensional quality to the flat plane of cloth and thread. Silk thread was laboriously split, stitch by stitch, to achieve a subtlety of detail more precise than any fine brushwork could attempt. Gold thread was overlaid at intervals with the lustre of silk by means of a method called or nue (shaded gold). The dimpling of the gold cast shadows and caught light, producing a three-dimensional evocation of the suffering of saints, the ecstasy of angels,
the mystery of faith itself. The embroiderers amplified the splendour of cloth and thread with precious jewels – rubies, diamonds, pearls, emeralds – and attached sequins so loosely that they would tremble and glitter in cathedral candlelight. Their embroidery, named Opus Anglicanum (English work) was coveted for its brilliance, prized even above manuscript illumination as the most persuasive depiction of the life of Christ and the tenets of Catholicism. This was faith kindled by a mastery of embroidery to emanate spiritual light and illuminate the very darkest shadows of sin. They conjured visual hallelujahs. They were inordinately expensive. The Vatican owned over a hundred pieces.

  It wasn’t just the professional embroiderers, men and women, who were amply rewarded for their service to the church and their God in lucrative payments, noblewomen could achieve social and spiritual prestige through their ecclesiastical needlework, as could nuns who received a welcome contribution to their religious coffers as well as an increased investment in spiritual grace which they could store up for the hereafter. Their donations of stitched devotion could secure salvation for their souls as well as a public reputation for virtue. St Margaret of Scotland (c.1045–1093) was described as having a workshop ‘of celestial art’ where ‘there were always copes for the cantor, chasubles, stoles, altar-cloths and other priestly vestments and decorations for the church.’

  St Edith of Wilton (c.963–c.956) embroidered vestments ‘interwoven with gold union pearls . . . set like stars in gold . . . Her whole thought was Christ and the worship of Christ’. Sewing sacred embroidery entitled these needlewomen to have their names inscribed in the church’s inventory of the good, the Liber Vitae, as being worthy of special prayers. If their embroideries were interred with a saint, their reputation was increased by association and some were honoured by a sainthood of their own, such as St Margaret, St Edith, St Clare (1194–1253, the patron saint of embroidery) and St Ethelred (c.636–679), who were sainted in part for their stitching in God’s name.

  But in sixteenth-century Britain, the Reformation stripped churches of their textile wealth. This ended women’s access to public status in honour of the church. Women had already been largely excluded from the London Guild of Broderers, the trades guild of embroiderers which had existed since the thirteenth century and officially chartered in 1561, when it faced a reduction in commissions following the Black Death, the plague that decimated Europe and Asia between 1347 and 1351. Now the Reformation put an end to ecclesiastical embroidery work. Monasteries and nunneries were shut down. Many priests and nuns fled to Europe, and some nuns took their sewn masterpieces with them. Nuns from the Bridgettine convent in Syon in Middlesex escaped abroad with a cope on which sentinel angels and seraphs bordered the life stories of the Virgin and Christ. Worked in silver and gold threads on an embroidered ground of red and green, it was an exceptionally fine example of Opus Anglicanum. The cope survived and was brought back to England when the Order was re-established at the start of the nineteenth century. It remains a rare remnant of the golden age of embroidery. But many ecclesiastical embroideries were less fortunate. The most precious were burned to extract their costly gold thread and jewels, their silk thread unpicked. The choicest were recycled for secular use. Most were destroyed.

  As the Reformation took hold, secular embroidery gained ground, serving the dynasties now endangered by the threat and cost of war, unstable alliances and religious unrest. The rivalry between monarchs intensified, with an unprecedented number of European female sovereigns competing for a small pool of eligible suitors. In France, Mary, already the established Queen of Scotland, was a prized commodity. Her legitimate claim on the English throne made her politically and economically precious to the ambitions of the French, who were keen to expand their territory. Her value was displayed through the investment made in her clothes, even as a child: dresses in violet velvet, gold damask, Venetian crimson silk, cloth of silver, one in white satin adorned with over a hundred rubies and diamonds. But the death of her young husband and the accession of Elizabeth as England’s queen made her less profitable to the French. All that was left to her was Scotland.

  Mary returned to Scotland’s shores an untested monarch. Having left as a child, she had been nurtured in French culture and its Catholic religion. To many of her Scottish nobles and people, she seemed a foreigner. Moreover, she was a woman. Only three years earlier John Knox, the leader of the Scottish Reformation, had circulated his First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women, a seditious tract denouncing the right of women to rule. Mary had to counteract not just his misogyny but also the mistrust of her people with a forceful assertion of her right to rule as their legitimate queen, daughter of their king, James V. She needed every device at her disposal to exercise her sovereignty and demonstrate capacity.

  For her voyage to Scotland Mary had packed ten cloths of estate (the ceremonial cloths which hung above monarchs’ thrones emblazoned with their coat of arms), forty-five bed sets, thirty-six Turkish carpets, twenty-three suits of tapestry, eighty-one cushions, twenty-four tablecloths and a variety of embroidered wall hangings. There was her own wardrobe of fifty-eight dresses, thirty-five farthingales (hooped or padded underskirts), several cloaks and shifts, petticoats, stomachers, drawers and coifs. They encompassed thousands of metres of luxurious fabric: embroidered, appliquéd, braided, beribboned, fringed, tessellated and studded with jewels.

  But the real worth of Mary’s textiles did not lie in their quantity or quality. What Mary brought with her to Scotland was much more precious than these: the presence of her power. Her vast trove of embroideries bore witness. These were autographed proof of her birth right, testimony to an unbroken line of accession, an impressive accumulation of sewn royal ciphers, monograms, coats of arms and emblems. They fixed her dynastic power and divine right on cloth.

  As a queen, Mary embodied her nation. She was the personification of Scotland; her visual projection mattered. At nearly six feet tall, her height was an asset but, even then, she amplified her physical presence by an expansive volume of skirts and cloaks and the outward flow of veils. These ensured she inhabited a separate physical space. She exhibited sovereignty as a physical act and a visual show. The weight of her clothes, thick with embroidery, studded with jewels, slowed her to a stately progress on ceremonial occasions. She chose to wear colours that marked her out from those around her. While her courtiers were dressed in coloured finery she would don the dramatic contrast of black and white, a trick she had learned from Diane de Poitiers, the mistress of her French father-in-law. She understood the impact of the flicker of candlelight falling on silk and the glint of gold embroidery in sunlight and used it to good effect. This was not an indulgence in conspicuous wealth; it was a strategic, theatrical performance of the magnificence of her monarchy, a public display of the power and sophistication of her nation.

  Female monarchs had greater need of the advocacy of textiles than their male counterparts. The public display of their hand-crafted emblems and symbols meant that for women, even when physically absent from court through childbirth, banishment or imprisonment, the textiles they had commissioned or sewn remained on display as their representatives, still messaging their lineage, still acting as a presence of sorts.

  Mary brought her armoury of textiles with her as a defence. She also brought her skill of sewing. But while Mary clearly learned embroidery in France, there is little evidence of her use of it there. Even the book with an embroidered cover she gave to the Dauphin as a love token was wrought by professional craftsmen. She seemed to prefer other pursuits: the riding, falconry, hunting in which she excelled; writing poetry, playing the lute, chess. Back in Scotland, however, sewing became a pursuit she zealously embraced.

  In Privy Council meetings, Elizabeth’s envoy Thomas Randolph reported in 1561 that Mary ‘ordinarily sitteth the most part of the time, sowing at some work or another’. Maybe it allowed her to concentrate on deciphering the unfamiliar accents. It certainly offered a pleasing show of
female docility. What is indisputable is that with her interiors shabby and the public purse depleted, Mary, with the skills of her professional embroiderers, set about restoring the royal textiles. They were propaganda, and politically expedient. If Scotland was to survive independently of its European vultures, it had to maintain the fiction of wealth, visible evidence of its continuing power. Her sewing represented metaphorically (intentionally or not) her protection and care of her country. As its newly returned queen, it signalled her mission to regenerate her realm so that it could stand on equal ground with other European nations.

  At the start of her active reign in Scotland in 1561, Mary wrote to King Philip in Spain lamenting her fate as ‘the most afflicted woman under heaven, God having bereft me of all that I loved and held dear on earth and left me no consolation whatsoever.’ She became more and more depressed, given to fits of weeping. She is reported to have confessed that she needed ‘the fortification of a man’: a husband, an heir. Suitors were suggested, considered, rejected, but any choice was dangerous: to choose a Catholic would certainly alienate Protestant England; to choose a Protestant might risk the loss of the support of Catholic France, Italy and Spain. Against the wishes of her council and her cousin she chose Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, her step-cousin. He was a direct descendant of the Stuart line, English but Catholic, young but dissolute, handsome but vain, bisexual and alcoholic. To Elizabeth I’s alarm and the disquiet of Mary’s nobles, the Scottish queen became smitten. She pursued Darnley with unquenchable zeal. Feverish textile activity was noted in the margins of her palace inventories. Bed furnishings were taken out of storage: the cloth of gold embroidered with the works of Hercules (a hero with an auspicious connection to childbirth), the gold and silver cloth embellished with ciphers and another embroidered with flowers. She reclaimed a green velvet bed set fringed in green silk and another in crimson, their silver braid redeployed on green and gold curtains, their damask recycled as a bed cover. Three damask curtains were remade as a bed pavilion. Against all advice, she and Darnley married in 1565.