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The 'Tapestry Hangings of the House of Lords'
The Tapestry Hangings of the House of Lords: representing the several engagements between the English and Spanish fleets in the ever memorable year 1588 (PBE3597)John Pine (1690-1756) was an engraver and a friend of William Hogarth, a fellow governor of the Foundling Hospital, and was depicted by him as the fat friar in his engraving The Gate of Calais in 1749.
In 1739 he published The Tapestry Hangings of the House of Lords. The hangings themselves were designed by Hendrick Vroom (1563-1640) and hung in the House on their completion in 1650. They depict the English victory over the Spanish Armada, the fleet sent by Philip II in an attempt to re-establish Catholic supremacy in England. The victory was seen as a matter of great patriotic pride and as an indicator of the English supremacy at sea, as well as an affirmation of their righteousness in religious matters. The engravings have a preface which gives details of the battle and lists the ships and captains involved in the action. The ships of the Armada are described as “of an uncommon size, strength, and thickness, more like floating castles than any thing else…” This has the effect of making the English victory seem more marvellous due to their courage and superior tactics. The illustrations of the battle further emphasise this, with the Spanish ships appearing larger and darker in colour, and thus more imposing when contrasted with the smaller, lighter, more insubstantial looking English warships.
The images of the battle are very stylised. The fullness of the sails as they billow in the wind has been used in an attempt to represent movement but has the additional effect of complementing the curves of the Spanish ships’ battle formation. Plate V here also imaginatively shows a number of whales frolicking in the sea, while in the foreground of the engraving, a Spanish ship has had its mast blown apart by a cannon. The development of engraving as an illustrative technique allowed a far greater level of detail than older methods such as woodcuts, and these engravings display this to great effect, with individual sailors and oars clearly visible. There has also been some attempt made to colour the images, through printing a blue/green finely textured wash over areas of the sea, in a process called mezzotint. This is an early English example of this particular technique.
Aside from the pictorial images of the battle, there are a number of charts showing the positioning of the ships at different stages of the battle, alongside the English and French coasts. The image shown here depicts a skirmish off the coast of Portland, in Dorset. While cherubs are shown here gently blowing compass roses across the sea, wind was in fact to become arguably the major reason the Armada was defeated – the fleet was blown off course and severe weather partially destroyed it, reputedly prompting Philip of Spain to declare ‘I sent my ships to fight against the English, not against the elements’.
An engraving of the Thames is also included in the book. This was not one of the tapestries, but was engraved after an illustration from an earlier work on the Armada. Although no battles took place in the estuary, there was a fear of invasion, and as a result Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, led a force of 4,000 soldiers at Tilbury Fort in Essex. It was here on 9 August 1588 that Elizabeth I delivered her famous speech: ‘I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and a king of England too…’ The engraving shows the famous dockyards such as Chatham and Deptford, which would have been at risk if such an invasion had taken place, and the various fortifications which had been set up along the river.
Pine obviously considered this work to be among his most significant, as he argued for and successfully won the right under the 1735 Engraving Copyright Act to the exclusive rights on copying the engravings it contained. In fact, this book was to become even more important after 1834. It is somewhat poignant that at the opening of the preface, the author explains that ‘because time, or accident, or moths may deface these valuable shadows, which, by being multiplied and dispersed in various hands, may meet with that security from the closets of the curious, which the originals must scarce always hope for, even from the sanctity of the place they are kept in.’ In 1834 the Houses of Parliament were largely destroyed by fire, taking Vroom’s original tapestries with them, and Pine’s engravings are now, as he foresaw, the surviving pictorial record of the images they portrayed.
The Caird Library owns four copies of The Tapestry Hangings of the House of Lords, and all differ in some respect, with missing or additional engravings, and a differing level of colour used on some of the images. The other item numbers are PBE3595, PBD7659 and PBE3596.
