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Prince Henry Revived: Image and Exemplarity in Early Modern England

2010; Oxford University Press; Volume: CXXV; Issue: 513 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/ehr/ceq014

1477-4534

Pauline Croft,

Scottish History and National Identity

This handsomely illustrated volume emerged from the 2005 annual conference of the Renaissance Society of America, and brings together the work of historians of Jacobean culture and the arts, along with literary scholars. Three chapters, by, respectively, Aysha Pollnitz, Michael Ullyot and Michelle O'Callaghan, discuss Prince Henry's education; O'Callaghan's treatment of Coryat's Crudites of 1611, ‘a pivotal travel book’ in élite circles, is particularly illuminating. John Buchtell analyses the 110 printed books dedicated to Henry, noting that the loudest voices were those of militant Protestants, while Gilles Bertheau sees Chapman's translations of Homer as incorporating a heroic vision of the prince. Alexander Marr examines the 1611 folio publication of La perspective avec la raison des ombres et miroirs, the pioneering study of perspective by the architect-engineer Saloman de Caus. Crucial to its impact were the perspectival diagrams and other illustrations, almost certainly the work of the Flemish emigrant artist and engraver Cornelis Boel, who, like Caus, worked for Henry at Richmond Palace. Marr depicts Richmond as the centre of ‘a dynamic, if short-lived, artistic community’ congregating around the prince. Gail Capitol Weigl and Timothy Wilkes evaluate the superb Parham Park portrait of Henry in armour on horseback, with Father Time walking alongside, known since its cleaning in 1985 to have been the work of Robert Peake the Elder. Often taken as an image of martiality, the picture in fact presents Henry as prepared for the tiltyard not the battlefield. Using the earl of Northampton's death inventory, Wilks suggests convincingly that Peake's painting belonged to the earl and was displayed at his house in Greenwich Park. Northampton hoped thereby to ingratiate himself with the prince, who in reality disliked and distrusted the crypto-Catholic privy councillor known to many Jacobeans from a popular libel as ‘His Majestie's earwig’. Wilks also contributes a chapter on the more militant engraving of Henry in profile, practising with a foot-soldier's pike, which formed the striking frontispiece of Michael Drayton's 1612 Poly-olbion. Gregory McNamara uses the Wardrobe accounts to situate Henry's funeral in the context of London's cloth and clothing culture, contrasting the prince's court in his lifetime as a centre of fashion with the vast display of mourning black in the procession to Westminster Abbey. Elizabeth Goldring writes perceptively of the funeral itself and the remarkable visual artefacts generated by it, noting similarities with the funerals of two earlier Protestant heroes, Henri IV of France in 1610 and Sir Philip Sidney in 1587.