Panel, The Oxburgh Hangings

Public Access Description:

This embroidered panel was one of 13 objects investigated in 2019 as part of ‘Gendering Interpretations’: a collaborative project between the V&A, University of Plymouth, Vasa Museum (Stockholm), Lund University, Leiden University and the University of Western Australia.

While early modern professional embroiderers were usually male, amateur embroidery was encouraged as an activity for women. Despite its association with a gender ideology that fixed women in domestic roles, embroidery offered opportunities for self-expression and engagement with the political and intellectual world. Women were able to exercise creativity, autonomy and preference in selecting subjects for embroidery, and to express their identity by signing their work, as Mary Queen of Scots and Bess of Hardwick did with personal ciphers. They and often chose images that engaged with current affairs or themes of female resistance, such as classical or Biblical stories in which women overcome male violence. This specific panel is an original emblem designed by Mary, expressing resilience and hope as well as reaffirming Mary’s royal status.

Male trivialisation of women’s embroidery also liberated it from close scrutiny. Working on embroidery together allowed women to withdraw behind closed doors, creating meaningful, intimate relationships with each other and offering opportunities for both friendship and sexual contact. Dismissive attitudes towards women’s ‘work’ (as it was known) paradoxically facilitated their freedom of expression. George Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury’s description of Mary’s conversations while embroidering – ‘her talk [is] altogether of indifferent and trifling matters’ – is a case in point.

In fact, many of Mary’s embroideries were politically subversive. Her gift of a cushion cover to Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk, featuring a hand descending from heaven to cut down a vine with the motto “Virescit Vulnere Virtus” (“virtue grows strong by wounding”), was used as evidence against him in court and contributed to his execution.

Curatorial comment:

This embroidered panel was one of 13 objects investigated in 2019 as part of ‘Gendering Interpretations’: a collaborative project between the V&A, University of Plymouth, Vasa Museum (Stockholm), Lund University, Leiden University and the University of Western Australia. This project aimed to recover the complex gender dynamics that made objects meaningful to early modern people, and to increase the visibility of women and LGBTQ people in museum collections. Research on the V&A objects was carried out by Dr Kit Heyam.

In addition to the findings noted in the Public Access Description, research on this object revealed the following:

The panels now known as the Oxburgh Hangings do not appear to have been originally envisaged as parts of larger hangings; instead, they were mounted in the seventeenth century by Alathea Talbot, Bess’s granddaughter. They feature pictures taken from printed sources, mainly emblem books and natural history books. As Nicole LaBouff’s research has demonstrated, some of their embroidered images are based on research, rather than simply copied: the ‘shofler’ (spoonbill) panel, for example, combines the pose of the bird from the image in Conrad Gessner’s Historia Animalium (1551-8) with the shallow water and small fish discussed in Gessner’s text; it also corrects the bird’s name from Gessner, who calls it a pelican. Similarly, Bess of Hardwick used the panels she embroidered with Mary Queen of Scots to collate her knowledge of medicinal plants and as a memory aid for learning Latin. This demonstrates that embroidery was not merely a process of reproduction, but a process of creativity and intellectual work.

Mary also used embroidery to communicate with other women. In the early 1570s she sent Ann Dacre (stepdaughter of the recently executed Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk) an embroidered panel with an emblem of hope in love to console her after she had experienced rejection from her husband. In 1574, she sent Elizabeth I an embroidered skirt, probably hoping to soften relations between them. Elizabeth later expressed regret that politics and royal status had prevented her from developing a friendship with Mary: she told her parliament in 1586, as they advocated for Mary’s execution, that she wished that she and Mary ‘were but as two milk-maids, with pails upon our arms’.

It is important to acknowledge that Mary and Bess’s freedom in embroidery resulted partly from their social and economic status. The linen cloth on which they embroidered was created from flax spun by poor women, who could not earn a living from flax-spinning alone. This perspective can be applied to every early modern embroidered object.

In the late 1580s and early 1590s, having separated from her husband, Bess of Hardwick carried out two building projects that advertised her wealth, status and virtue: the refurbishment of Chatsworth House in Derbyshire, including a series of tapestries showing ‘Noble Women of the Ancient World’; and the building of nearby Hardwick New Hall, adorned with her initials E.S. Coupled with the ciphers found in Bess and Mary’s embroidery, this demonstrates a commitment to visibility and statements of identity on the part of both women. Indeed, needlework represented an opportunity for women more broadly to make themselves visible and to pass down objects marked with their names within their family, challenging a genealogical system that habitually erased them.

(Dr Kit Heyam, August 2019)

References:

Key references

• Michael Bath, Emblems for a Queen: The Needlework of Mary Queen of Scots (London: Archetype Publications, 2008), esp. pp. 30-31
• Susan Frye, Pens and Needles: Women's Textualities in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010)
• J. Goodare, Mary [Mary Stewart] (1542–1587), queen of Scots (2007), http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-18248
• Margaret Swain, The Needlework of Mary Queen of Scots (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1973)

Further reading

• Susan Frye, ‘Sewing Connections: Elizabeth Tudor, Mary Stuart, Elizabeth Talbot, and C17th Anonymous Needleworkers’, pp. 165-82, in Susan Frye and Karen Robertson (eds.), Maids and Mistresses, Cousins and Queens: Women's Alliances in Early Modern England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999)
• Theodora A. Jankowski, ‘… in the Lesbian Void: Woman–Woman Eroticism in Shakespeare's Plays’, in A Feminist Companion to Shakespeare (Malden; Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2001), pp. 318-338
• Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000)
• Nicole LaBouff, ‘Embroidery and Information Management: The Needlework of Mary Queen of Scots and Bess of Hardwick Reconsidered’, Huntington Library Quarterly, Volume 81, Number 3, Autumn 2018, pp. 315-358
• Elizabeth Mazzola (2003) Who's She When She's at Home?: “Manifest Housekeepers”, Jealous Queens, and the Artistry of Mary Stuart, Exemplaria, 15:2, 385-417