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Tudor time machines: Clocks and watches in English portraits c.1530–c.1630

2018; Wiley; Volume: 33; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/rest.12517

1477-4658

Christina J. Faraday,

Historical Art and Culture Studies

Hans Eworth’s magnificent portrait of Lady Mary Dacre in the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Fig. 1, shows the crusading noblewoman at her desk, pen poised above copybook, looking into the distance as though considering the phrasing of her next sentence. Beside the book is an ink well and a golden table clock. Against the tapestry behind her hangs a copy of Hans Holbein’s 1540 portrait of her husband, Thomas Fiennes, suspended in time at the age of twenty-four, before his execution in 1541 for his part in a brawl in which a gamekeeper died. This portrait has been interpreted as a depiction of marriage after the death of the ‘senior partner’, the clock an oblique reference to Eworth’s playful interweaving of different historical moments.1 Yet the clock arguably plays a more significant role. Eworth’s portrait is dated to c.1558, around the time of Elizabeth I’s accession, when the Dacre lands were restored to Fiennes’ surviving son and daughter. The portrait could have been painted just before, or just after, the long years of Lady Dacre’s campaigning on her children’s behalf came to a successful conclusion. As well as referring to her marriage, the clock arguably alludes to the widow’s patience in adversity, an extension of the ‘truth unveiled by time’ commonplace popular in early modern emblem books. Clocks and watches appear with surprising frequency in British portraits c.1530–c.1630. There are over twenty surviving examples, yet no studies have been devoted to their symbolism. Occasional references in footnotes and exhibition catalogues apply a blanket interpretation to all examples, without much reference to context or sitters’ biographies, and different writers disagree among themselves.2 This article sets out the many resonances that timepieces could have for men and women in Tudor and Jacobean England, many of which have not been previously discussed. More broadly, this article is a case study for a holistic approach to signification in early modern culture. It explores the clock’s ubiquitous presence in early modern intellectual, devotional and imaginative lives, and attempts to explain the popularity of the ‘clock portrait’ in the century preceding the foundation of the Worshipful Company of Clockmakers in London in 1631. As the portraits demonstrate, despite the lack of organised, indigenous clock-making in Tudor and early Stuart England, clocks and watches were familiar and important objects, particularly for members of what is popularly termed the ‘middling sort’.3 Early timepieces were not straightforwardly utilitarian objects. Before the pendulum clock was invented in the mid-seventeenth century, clocks were accurate to around fifteen minutes per day at best, and sundials remained the most popular time-telling device even after the clock’s accuracy improved.4 Despite its flaws, the mechanical clock became increasingly popular for symbolic as well as practical reasons, particularly as a statement of wealth. The range of metaphors deploying clockwork in contemporary literature further indicates its hold on the sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century imagination. The fact that so many men and women chose to be portrayed with timepieces indicates that patrons were aware of its symbolic dimensions, revealing a great deal about their statuses, beliefs and aspirations. The extent of actual clock ownership in the period is difficult to gauge. Monarchs from Henry VIII to Charles I owned a variety of timepieces, as did their well-off subjects,5 but these were probably imported or made by immigrant craftsmen. There is little evidence of domestic clock-making until the late sixteenth century, and then the craft developed slowly.6 This is generally attributed to the differences in techniques required for constructing tower versus chamber clocks. Unlike tower clocks, linked to blacksmithing and for which there is English evidence, smaller weight- and spring-driven clocks were associated with lock- and gold-smithing, professions less advanced in sixteenth-century England than on the continent.7 Yet the need to import clocks increased their desirability. Linda Levy Peck has shown that luxury consumption emerged in the Tudor and Jacobean periods; clocks are just one example of the goods imported for the developing consumer market.8 According to Peck, luxury was morally ambivalent in this period, with its associations of excess, effeminacy, Catholicism and the evils of social mobility.9 However, in contrast to other imported items, clocks had an enormous variety of additional associations, allowing them to be interpreted in terms other than decadent and trivial. It is these meanings – and their implications for sitters’ wealth and status – which explain their presence in portraits c.1530–c.1630. In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, patrons, not artists, were usually responsible for the mode, dress and iconography of portraits.10 The craftsman might have studio props from which the sitter could choose, but ultimately the picture’s contents were probably dictated by the person who paid. There are some instances of imitation and transference of the clock symbol between images: for example, the remarkably similar portraits of John Whitgift and his friend Thomas Nevile depict the same objects (table clock, ink horn and desk tidy) on the tables at the sitters’ elbows, suggesting Neville was imitating his patron Whitgift.11 However, other surviving clock portraits are not similar or numerous enough to suggest that the motif ever became standard or formulaic. As a result, where we know that the portrait was commissioned by a patron, we can infer that the clothing and objects depicted probably held some significance for them. This is why the profusion of clocks and watches in portraits c.1530–c.1630 is such an interesting topic for study. When sitters requested to be painted with a clock or a watch, they intended it to convey one, or several, meanings; this article explores the possible motives behind such requests. Although clocks have received little scholarly attention in the field of visual art, they have featured in analysis of the literary works of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Several authors have discussed the clock’s potential influence on Shakespeare’s own use of time and the development of early modern individuality more generally;12 Adam Max Cohen in particular has discussed Shakespeare’s use of human-clock metaphors, touching on issues of self-control, individualism and authoritarianism.13 While these topics chime with several aspects of the clock’s appearance in visual art, as is explored below, such analyses are largely limited to the special conditions of theatrical narrative. This article builds on such literary analyses by turning to period texts – not just the most famous, but also sermons, trade treatises and conduct manuals – for what they say about the importance and symbolism of the timepiece. The first part of this article presents the results of a systematic analysis of more than 2,200 English texts containing the words ‘clock’, ‘dial’, and/or ‘horologe’ from the Early English Books Online (EEBO) database. The aspects of the mechanical clock which interested writers when constructing metaphors are identified and examined. The EEBO database is not complete; vernacular texts were read alongside Latin and continental authors in England. Nevertheless the material is comprehensive enough to reveal general trends, allowing for the combination of detailed and systematic ‘microhistory’ with ‘macrohistorical’ analysis. Mining the texts of the period for references to clocks and dials puts these objects into the broadest possible context, as a preliminary to an exploration of the motif in the visual arts. The results supply a rich textual foundation on which to reconstruct the period’s ‘clockwork imaginary’14 shared by the ‘patron classes’ – those who bought, read and exchanged books and timepieces, and who also commissioned the portraits under examination here. The second section discusses the most common interpretation of clocks in portraiture to date – memento mori symbolism. While vanitas was undoubtedly one connotation of timepieces, the depiction of a clock rather than the more terminal hourglass suggests additional meanings. The third section explores the worldly associations of the timepiece in depictions of successful city men, and discusses clockwork metaphors as applied to commerce. In the final section I turn to the clock’s religious connotations, analysing its relationship to both Catholic and Protestant teaching, and its particular suitability for illustrating the Calvinist doctrine of Double Predestination, as well as more general concerns about temperance, patience and ‘knowing thyself’. In English vernacular literature c.1530–c.1630, ‘clock’, ‘dial’ and ‘horologe’ were separate but overlapping terms. The results of EEBO searches for these words indicate that ‘clock’ was the most popular word for mechanical timepieces, followed by ‘dial’ and then ‘horologe’ (‘orloge’ in late fifteenth-century texts).15 ‘Horologe’ is interchangeable with ‘clock’ and ‘dial’ and used infrequently. ‘Dial’ is the most problematic term, meaning: the visual time-telling part of the clock; the mechanical clock in its entirety, or, most frequently, sundials; context does not always clarify. The word has multiple possible origins, deriving from Middle French dyal, a wheel in a timepiece rotating once every twenty-four hours, or post-classical Latin diale, meaning the dial of a clock, from Latin dialis (‘daily’).16 ‘Dial’ was associated with the highly sophisticated mathematical craft of ‘dialling’, or sundial-making,17 but also had ancient resonances, for example referring to the Biblical ‘dial of Ahaz’ in 2 Kings 20, when the shadow on a sundial miraculously regressed to show that the Prophet Isaiah had added fifteen years to King Hezekiah’s life.18 The word is frequently mentioned in references to mortality and measuring time, and has the extended meaning of something which teaches the onlooker to spend time well. Nevertheless, in early modern texts the word ‘dial’ is not applied to the same rich range of metaphor as the word ‘clock’.19 In searching period literature for uses of the word ‘clock’, this section follows in the footsteps of Jonathan Sawday’s Engines of the Imagination, which explores the imaginative aspects of machinery and mechanisms in the European Renaissance, and Otto Mayr’s survey of clock metaphors in early modern European literature.20 Introducing Authority, Liberty and Automatic Machinery in Early Modern Europe, Mayr argues that the ‘feedback mechanism’ (a machine which adjusts its behaviour based on signals from its output) was first re-popularised, in modern times, in eighteenth-century Britain, where political liberality was gaining momentum. He posits a connection between the ‘democratic’ feedback mechanism and the early development of modern democracy, suggested by the many political metaphors based on the ‘feedback loop’, and contrasts this with the clock, a symbol of authoritarian, unidirectional power-structures.21 Looking at the clock’s appearance in earlier literature, Mayr concludes that the clock mechanism was highly praised in most of Europe but not in Britain, where, he argues, writers deploy the clock metaphor with unusual negativity. He suggests that conditions in Britain had always been favourable to the development of political liberty, and concludes that this explains the country’s suspicion of the authoritarian clock as far back as the sixteenth century.22 Mayr, assuming that Britons were predisposed towards an anti-authoritarian political system, looked for evidence of negativity towards clocks in English literature. Yet a systematic search shows Mayr’s conclusions are not supported by the texts, at least in the period c.1530–c.1630. Admittedly the English can be unenthusiastic about clocks: clocks are ‘cold’23 and ‘restlesse’,24 and besides time may count ‘miseries’25 or ‘care’.26 However, as even Mayr admits, the English are not always negative about clocks: clocks also count ‘praises’,27 and are used as exemplars of reliability28 and patience.29 They are favourably deployed as metaphors to illustrate the greatest of God’s creations: humanity, the heavens,30 and the well-ordered society.31 For as in a clocke or watch, all the wheeles shoulde goe, when the Maister wheele doth mooue, and if any stay, the same putteth all out of frame, and must bee mended: even soe in publike states and civill governementes, If the prince doe mooue as the cheefe commaunder and master wheele, the people shoulde followe, and if any stay and trouble the whole, the same is to bee mended, and forced to his due and timely order. (Hacket, A sermon needfull for theese [sic] times (1591), f.B7v.) This mouing world, may well resembled be, T’a Jacke,32 or Watch, or Clock, or to all three: For, as they moue, by weights, or springs, and wheeles, And euery mouer, others mouer feeles, So doe the states, of men of all degrees, Moue from the lowest to the highest sees. (Norden, The Labyrinth of Mans Life (1614), f.D2vff) Compared with smaller wheels, he says, the greater wheels ‘moue with farre more constancie’, and ‘if there mouings lowest wheeles neglect, / The greatest mouer doth them all correct’. If all levels of society were equal, anarchy would prevail: ‘For, if the wheeles, had equall force to moue, / The lowest would checke, the leading wheele aboue. / So, if there were, no difference in estates, / All would be lawlesse...’. However, he concedes that those in power must prove themselves worthy leaders, concluding that ‘a meane preserues the whole in peace’.33 The clock is associated with authoritarian, unidirectional command structures, but in the period c.1530–c.1630 when monarchy was, on the whole, still the only conceivable form of government, there is little to indicate the germination of attitudes which would lead to regicide and revolution later in the seventeenth century. Although Adam Max Cohen attributes the clock’s authoritarian reputation to its relentless measurement of time, in fact – as Mayr points out – it is the clockwork system’s causal chain (the weight or spring moves a wheel, which moves another wheel, etc) which forms the basis for these clock-based metaphors.34 This causal system is shared by clocks of all kinds, from watches to domestic and even tower clocks, and makes the clock metaphor applicable to a diverse range of subjects, including Norden and Hacket’s arguments above, which see noble rule as the driving force ordering the rest of society. The metaphor could be taken further, and deployed in support of older arguments for the existence of an ultimate ‘prime mover’, God, whose first action is the root cause of everything that happens in the universe.35 Yet there is another aspect of the mechanical clock which attracts writers: the idea that what occurs inside the clock is made visible on the outside, through the movement of the hands and the sound of the bell. John Heywood writes about a lover’s countenance: ‘yet shall his semblaunce as a dyale declare / Howe the clocke goeth’.36 As will be explored below, this idea is used to suggest how the heart or mind of a man may be judged from outside appearances. It relates to Protestant, particularly Calvinist concerns to ‘know thyself’, and anxieties about how one may judge who is a member of the saved Elect.37 These two points of comparison – the causal chain, and the ability to represent the interior on its exterior – form the foundations of most clock metaphors in the period. To these can be added a third interest: in the clock’s ability to portray the passage of time. This is particularly popular in memento mori literature and constitutes an explicit motivation for the clock’s inclusion in painted portraits. The ability to measure the passing hours was not new with the clock, however: sundials had existed for centuries. They feature in some of the most iconic paintings of the age, such as Holbein’s The Ambassadors, and continued to dictate the setting of their less-reliable mechanical counterparts – sometimes with interesting consequences for the clock metaphor.38 Yet compared to the clock, the sundial was mechanically (though not mathematically) low-tech. Although the clock could not rival the sundial’s accuracy or affordability, its new technology (the ‘moving parts’) explains its use in a variety of exciting comparisons – to the body, the heavens, families, commerce, and government. The novelty of the clock mechanism, not its primary function of time-telling, attracted interest in the technology, and explains its popularity in literature and the visual arts. The variety of uses to which contemporary writers put these mechanical timepieces proves that there is more to clocks than just memento mori messages. The clock seeped into the early modern imagination, becoming a symbol through which the world could be organised and understood. In early modern literature, clocks are often associated with mortality. As the minutes pass, human life trickles away; clocks exposed the headlong rush towards death and, hopefully, everlasting life. For Olivia in Twelfth Night, ‘The clock upbraids me with the waste of time’.39 In Richard II the king’s moving soliloquy, shortly before his murder, links clocks, mortality and the overwhelming sense of time passing beyond his control: ‘I wasted time, and now doth time waste me; / For now hath time made me his numbering clock’.40 For Thomas Churchyard (1578): ‘the course of mortall life, is like a running Glasse / That neuer rests, but still holds on, his houres as clock and chime / Whose minets tele us pilgrimes all, we waste and weare with tyme’.41 Watches could be made in novelty shapes, including skulls,42 and even on plainer clocks memento mori imagery and inscriptions sometimes feature in engraved decoration.43 If real clocks could remind beholders of mortality, so could their painted equivalents. Memento mori symbolism is ubiquitous in the visual arts c.1530–c.1630, particularly in late sixteenth-century portraits. As Tarnya Cooper shows, likenesses themselves demonstrated the passage of time by fixing the sitter’s appearance at a particular moment.44 Such portraits were often further adorned with reminders that life is short: skulls, hourglasses, corpses, snuffed candles and inscriptions instruct the viewer that ‘all is vanity’, and clocks contribute to these themes. Like the hourglass, the clock makes the usually-imperceptible passage of time visible, counting the hours until death, when Christians would be expected to render to God an account of how they had spent the time He gave them. In portraits from the mid-sixteenth century onwards clocks often appear with skulls, evoking vanitas themes. Father and son Jacques (1574) and Jacob Wittewronghele (c.1590–1600), Figs. 2 and 3; John Isham (c.1567), Fig. 4, and William Ffytch (c.1550), Fig. 5, are shown resting their hands on skulls and standing near wall or table clocks. In Ffytch and Jacques Wittewronghele’s portraits, the hour hands approach twelve: the day is almost over, but the sitters engage the viewer differently. Wittewronghele’s direct stare challenges us to consider the passage of time (Ut Hora Sic Fugit Vita appears on his clock: ‘as the hour, thus life flies’)45 while William Ffytch is apparently lost in contemplation of the approaching hour, looking to one side in a pose typical of alleged artist John Bettes the Elder, and reminiscent of earlier portraits by Hans Holbein the Younger, for example of Nicholas Kratzer.46 This can be compared with the portraits of Joyce Frankland, née Trappes (1586) at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, and Brasenose and Lincoln Colleges, Oxford. Frankland, who outlived two husbands and her only son, seems hardly to hold her watch at all, as if to suggest the impossibility of grasping time. Here there is no skull, but the hour hand again points at twelve. Clocks could evoke themes of mortality in more unusual ways. Another example of the clock-skull combination is found in the Triptych Portrait of Henry and Dorothy Holme (1628), V&A, London.47 The couple and their two children are shown on the inner panels with the traditional skull, but a clock appears when the triptych is closed, part of a visual pun (or ‘rebus’) on the right exterior panel: following the inscription ‘We Must’, the dial supplies the macabre punch-line, visually representing the words ‘die all’. As Cooper suggests, clocks and other memento mori symbols could denote virtue, and defend against possible charges of vanity in having their portrait painted at all.48 With or without skulls, in literature and the visual arts clocks could remind the viewer of their approaching death and the importance of having a healthy soul. Of course, the religious dimensions of death and the afterlife are intimately connected with memento mori themes, and the religious aspects of the clock symbol will be explored below. A key point, however, is that these vanitas associations do not exclude other meanings, and many sitters’ biographies and professions demand a more complex approach to a machine that could stand equally for human life, as well as death. So is exchange ioyned to monyes, and monyes to commodities, by their proper qualities and effects. And euer as in a Clocke, where there be many wheeles, the first wheele being stirred, driueth the next, and that the third, and so foorth, till the last that moueth the instrument that strikes the clocke: euen so is it in the course of Traffique: for since money was inuented [it] became the first wheele which stirreth the wheele of Commodities and inforceth the Action. (Gerard Malynes, The maintenance of free trade (London, 1622), 5–6)49 The metaphor extends to businessmen themselves, whose dealings – if trustworthy – should be as regular as clockwork.50 Several sitters portrayed with clocks were successful early capitalists and merchant adventurers – John Isham, Fig. 4, Jacques and Jacob Wittewronghele, Figs. 2 and 3, and William Chester, Fig. 6 – and it is tempting to speculate that in these portraits a business-related comparison is being drawn between the orderliness of a clock and the entrepreneur himself. This is particularly so in the case of John Isham, a substantial man, both financially and physically. In the small area of the portrait not filled by his impressive form, a clock is mounted above two still-extant and clearly recognisable account books, implying regularity in his business dealings.51 It is difficult to know whether sitters owned the clocks in their portraits if their inventories have not survived. The religious allegory of William Chester’s clock, Fig. 6, or its floating otherworldly counterpart over Jacques Wittewronghele’s shoulder, Fig. 2, suggest symbolic rather than literal meanings, although these are not mutually exclusive. It is also possible that the clocks were selected from a range of props belonging to the artist, or invented without a physical prototype. Yet, real or not, timepieces in portraits enhance the sitter’s status by alluding to wealth: a meaning as ubiquitous as memento mori themes, if less obvious in today’s world of mass-production. For members of recently-gentrified families, such as the Joneses (see the portrait called Anne Fettiplace, the first Mrs Henry Jones (1614), Fig. 7), a watch or clock advertised the sitter’s worldly status. This is especially true of watches, which were more expensive and less accurate than larger clocks. See for example the Unknown Woman aged 41 (1629), at Erdigg, Wrexham (National Trust), whose watch hangs from her waist, or the elaborate octagonal watch in the portrait of a girl of the Morgan family (1620), Fig. 8. The latter is comparable to the exactly contemporary octagonal gilt-brass and silver cased verge watch made by Edmund Bull of Fleet Street, now in the British Museum, Fig. 9. Although clearly indicative of its owner’s wealth, it also refers to religious themes, as it is engraved on both sides with scenes of Christ washing Peter’s Feet and the Last Supper, and has panels depicting the Evangelists and personifications of the virtues. Such imagery could advertise the owner’s piety, and encourage moral behaviour by portraying exemplary figures both historical and allegorical.52 Watches in particular overlapped with jewellery as miniaturised, often elaborately decorated objects which could be worn on the person, sometimes encompassing functions normally reserved for other jewels, for example pomanders; the Nuremberg watchmaker Andreas Henlein is credited with the invention of timepieces set in musk-balls.53 An extraordinary pocket watch set inside a large hexagonal emerald was found in the Cheapside Hoard, suggesting that such objects would have been regularly stocked by London jewellers in the early seventeenth century.54 As David Thompson writes: ‘clocks [and watches] from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries reflect an age when they were as much items of status and demonstrations of wealth as they were machines used to measure time and regulate everyday life’.55 However, such objects could provoke jealousy, even animosity from others. Robert Dallington’s travel account describes a Frenchman (‘an endles & needles prater, a fastidious & irkesome companion’) who made great show of producing his watch, ‘not so much to shew how the time passeth, (whereof he takes little care) as the curiousnesse of the worke, and the beautie of the case, whereof hee is not a little brag & enamoured’.56 Clocks in portraits, intending to show the sitter’s awareness of vanitas, could perhaps also provoke accusations of vanity from unkind onlookers. Although the clock is associated with the ‘countdown’ to death, early modern writers show little interest in its more mundane function of dividing time into measured spans. The part of the clock responsible for regulation was called the ‘escapement’; its increasing sophistication was, technologically-speaking, one reason why clocks became more widespread. Scholars such as Gerhard Dohrn-Van Rossum and David Landes have explored the effects of the adoption of equal hours and accurate timekeeping on commerce and society.57 Yet the clock’s measuring function is not a major focus in texts of the period. This may have been due to its relative inaccuracy: minute hands (accurate or otherwise) were mostly absent until at least the 1580s, and sundials and hourglasses continued in use throughout the sixteenth century.58 Nevertheless, the clock’s ability to self-regulate did form the basis for some clock metaphors in the period. According to Adam Max Cohen Shakespeare uses the clock as a symbol of ‘temperance, moderation and self-control’.59 In All’s Well that Ends Well, for example, the King of France describes Bertram’s father’s character – neither ‘contempt nor bitterness / Were in his pride or sharpness; if they were / His equal had awaked them, and his honour – / Clock to itself – knew the true minute when / Exception bid him speak’ (i.2.41-46),60 ‘clock’ here used synecdochically to refer to the escapement, or regulating part of the mechanism, rather than the clock as a whole. He who is mindful of the clock Is punctual in all his acts. He who bridles his tongue Says naught that touches scandal. He who puts glasses to his eyes Sees better what’s around him. Spurs show that fear Make [sic] the young man mature. The mill which sustains our bodies Never is immoderate. (BNF MS fr.9186;62 translation from White ‘The Iconography of Temperantia’, 214). Here the clock represents regularity and punctuality as aspects of self-control. According to White, by the sixteenth century the allegorical figure of Temperance was rarely portrayed with all these attributes, but generally retains the clock until mid-century. White extends this to sixteenth-century portraits, arguing that clocks symbolise the sitter’s temperate nature, citing Holbein’s portrait of Thomas More and his family (1527): ‘a clock is placed almost directly over Sir Thomas’s head, as though Temperantia were wearing her horological hat’.63 In late-sixteenth century England Temperance is often shown with her traditional vessels – for example, on the column in the portrait of Elizabeth I with the Cardinal and Theological Virtues (1596), Dover Museum, and on Robert Cecil’s memorial tomb in the chapel at Hatfield House, by Maximilian Colt (c.1612) – yet there are instances of Temperance’s horological iconography even in the later sixteenth century. The figure of Temperance carries a clock in Richard Day’s extremely popular A Booke of Christian Prayers (1578, republished several times in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries), in which she tramples a vomiting man representing intemperance. As Tara Hamling has shown, this woodcut inspired a (sanitised) plasterwork overmantel at Postlip Hall in Gloucestershire, demonstrating the survival of this iconography in other media.64 That Temperance’s attributes lingered longer in image-memory than texts is also suggested by the later portrait of Dame Pigot (c.1621–1640) at Mompesson House (National Trust) where the clock sits on the table alongside another of Temperance’s old attributes – a pair of spectacles. White links Temperance’s technologically up-to-date iconography with the emergence of what he sees as ‘bourgeois’ virtues, especially self-regulation, and indicates that this pre-dates the arrival of Calvinism, which has been seen as the originator of similar capitalist values. The latter view was popularised by Max Weber’s The Protestant Work Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism; although much-debated, his conception of punctuality and self-discipline as peculiarly Calvinist virtues lives on in analyses of early modern religious and social life. Max Engammare’s study of Calvin’s