During the 1570s, when Mary Queen of Scots’ custodian was George Talbot, 6th Earl of Shrewsbury, her creative collaboration with his wife, Bess of Hardwick, produced England’s largest surviving corpus of early modern needlework. It was not produced as disposable fashion or private household items, despite her later claim that: ‘the only apartments that I have for my own person consist […] of two little miserable rooms, so excessively cold, especially at night, that, but for the ramparts and entrenchments of curtains and tapestry which I have had made, it would not be possible for me to stay in them in the daytime’. Its primary intention was political. Mary used her needlework to powerfully articulate her French, Scottish Irish, English and Catholic royal identities, to maximize public support for her own and her son James’s ambitions to the English throne, and to support a public persona as a Catholic martyr.
Painfully aware of the danger of communicating her political and religious ambitions through the textual medium of words, Mary chose the visual medium of textiles. Mary’s artistic genius was to express what was too sensitive or subversive, from a political or religious viewpoint, for her to say or write, through textile mediums whose labour intensiveness, durability and high cultural value draw attention to their creations and provide them with the maximum protection against destruction. My talk will report on my ongoing researches into the choice and reworking of visual motifs of both captive and captor, from the perspective that, far from being uninformed or imitative, they were innovative, creative, and laced with a dark wit that sprung from humour, erudition and a clear sense of the precarious political situation of early modern powerful women in general, and Mary’s exile in particular.
Prison/Exile: Controlled Spaces in Early Modern Europe 