MARCH 2003 HISTORY TODAY 1

XXxxxxxx XXxxxxxxxx examines the totally new

grid for main articles now in place.

HISTORY TODAY MARCH 200440

AAnnggeellaa MMccSShhaannee JJoonneess aasskkss wwhhaatt ddeeppiiccttiioonnss iinn bbrrooaaddssiiddeess ooff MMaarryy IIII wwiitthh hheerr bbrreeaassttss eexxppoosseedd,, tteellll uuss aabboouutt 1177tthh--cceennttuurryy ppooppuullaarr aattttiittuuddeess ttoo rrooyyaallttyy..

AAnnggeellaa MMccSShhaannee JJoonneess aasskkss wwhhaatt ddeeppiiccttiioonnss iinn bbrrooaaddssiiddeess ooff MMaarryy IIII,, wwiitthh hheerr bbrreeaassttss eexxppoosseedd,, tteellll uuss aabboouutt 1177tthh--cceennttuurryy ppooppuullaarr aattttiittuuddeess ttoo rrooyyaallttyy..

TEMP PIC

Picture expected fromNational MonumentsRecord by 30th of January(Col Print)

MARCH 2004 HISTORY TODAY

N 1689 THE DEVOUTLY ProtestantPrince William and PrincessMary of Orange, nephew and

daughter of the Catholic James II,usurped the throne of England. Ablack-letter broadside ballad, ThePrincess Welcome to England, the mostpopular print medium of the period,heralded Mary’s arrival in England atthis historic juncture. The words ofthe ballad described Mary as a ‘Vertu-ous Wife in all her ways’, emphasisedher modesty and compared herfavourably with Mary of Medina,James II’s Catholic and Italian wife, atthe same time drawing attention tothe illustrative woodcut:

We have had a Papist QueenBut another may be seenIn Attire far more meanYet none can discommend her For we find humilityIn a Royal Dignity.

At the end of the ballad our attentionis drawn once again to the picture:

And while our joys did thus aboundTrue subjects did commend herTho’ she was modest, mild and mean,Behold her in her Glorious SceeneShe’s now Great Britain’s Royal

Queen.

Did this picture really depict awoman mean and modest? Thewords of the ballad hardly seem tobe in harmony with the woodcut, inwhich Mary is dressed in an extremedécolleté gown, breasts fullyexposed, while her face is covered indecorative ‘patches’, known as ameans used by prostitutes of cover-ing up the marks of the pox.

Perhaps there was some subversiveintention in the choice of this ratherdubious woodcut to represent Mary,despite the loyal words of the ballad?Could such pictures convey politicalmeaning as the words of the songsdid, or were they meaningless andchosen by the printer at random tofill space in the broadside? At such amomentous political juncture, surelyany depiction of the monarchy was

of importance and should tell ussomething? Paradoxical ballads likethese, where text and image seem tobe a mismatch, may reveal a greatdeal about popular conceptions ofmonarchy.

In the seventeenth century, broad-side publishers who were out tomake a profit produced ballads for ahighly competitive popular printmarket. This meant that publicationcosts needed to be kept down, andthe message had to be right. Balladswith woodcuts were double the priceof those without, and had to beupdated constantly (something notrealised by most commentators onthis genre); they consequently repre-sented an important part of theprinter’s investment. What was thefunction of a woodcut? Was it to illus-trate, to titillate, to sell to a targetaudience – or to subvert by introduc-ing a joke?

Poverty-stricken ballad-printershoping to make a few shillings may

41

REVEALING MARY

have had access only to outdated,perhaps discarded, woodcuts. Evenin those produced by reputable pub-lishers, there are a number of caseswhere images do not fit the textsthey accompany. One example is aballad entitled The dying mans goodcounsel to his chidren [sic] and friends,printed in the 1670s, whose accom-panying woodcut apparently depictsa couple surprised in bed!

Throughout the century balladswere issued by different publisherssimultaneously, with minor alter-ations to the text or title and withdifferent woodcuts. According toone of the great nineteenth-centuryballad collectors, the 9th Earl ofCrawford, the normal print run for aballad was small, perhaps about 500sheets at a time. This meant that if a

High art: a detail of James Thornhill’smagnificent ceiling of the Painted Hall(1707-14) at the Royal Naval Hospital,Greenwich. William and Mary (whocommissioned the hospital), enthroned,are surrounded by the Virtues.

Part of the broadside heralding Mary’sarrival on the throne of England, butconveying a mixed message aboutpopular perceptions of the new queen.

REVEALING MARY

HISTORY TODAY MARCH 2004

ballad proved popular it would haveto be re-printed, which mightaccount for changes in layout. Healso suggested that ballad printingmay have been used as a trainingexercise for apprentices, resulting infrequent printing mistakes, includ-ing, perhaps, the choice of inappro-priate woodcuts.

Woodcuts were also commissionedto illustrate particular ballads. Adetailed study of the 10,000-oddremaining seventeenth-centurybroadsides shows that publishers reg-ularly updated woodcuts to reflectcurrent fashions and celebrities. Thechanging décolleté fashions of theseventeenth century, for example,can be traced in several of these.Woodcuts were also specially com-missioned from more expensiveprints and engravings, for examplein celebration of the 1689 corona-tion.

As a key part of the publishinginvestment woodcuts were deliber-ately deployed in order to target buy-ers and to complement the contentof the ballad. Pictures of buxomwomen on ballads could be a sellingpoint for a male audience – and afemale one too if the pictures actual-ly described the latest fashions. (It isnoticeable that there are more bustyballads in the large collection madeby Samuel Pepys than any other col-lection. It is hard not to suspect thatthere may have been a certain pref-erence in his ballad buying.) Wood-cuts illustrating ballads about royalty,however, were chosen with particular

care and decorum. Mere carelessnessor coincidence will not explain theextreme décolleté version of Mary II.

Balladeers sang the praises andfollowed the progress of the Princeof Orange from the time of hisarrival in England in 1688 until hisdeath in 1702. Dismissed as ‘pot

42

Sir Peter Lely’s portrait, above, of Maryin a décolleté gown, is a dignifiedrepresentation as befitting a courtpainting of the then Princess of Orange.The three most frequently usedwoodcuts depicting Mary on popularballads (below) have in common anexaggerated display of cleavage.

MARCH 2004 HISTORY TODAY

poets’ by more elite writers, theselargely anonymous songsters reput-edly wrote under the influence ofalcohol in order to earn money formore drink. They would steal any-thing for song material, adaptingtheatre songs, satirical poems andperhaps witty remarks overheard inthe tavern or street. Originality wasnot an issue. They wrote to a clearpolitical formula – liking the worldto be orderly, monarchical andProtestant – and, if at all possible,heroic, young and fashionable. Bythe end of his reign James II hadoffended all the traditional balladproprieties of right, law and rabidanti-Catholicism. He was also old andhis military exploits were longbehind him. Though they were usu-ally fiercely monarchist, Protes-tantism came first with balladeerhacks of the time. They threw intheir quills with the ‘ProtestantPrince’ William III, producing hun-dreds of ballads in his support. Somuch so that it became a joke – oneballad The Welsh Fortune-Tellerquipped ‘Since Arrival, Proclaimingand Crowning is o’re,/And songupon song made,/What wou’d youhave more?’

William’s wife and more directclaimant to the throne, Mary, was torule with him jointly. This meant thatfor the first time in the century therewas a ruling queen to sing about.Apart from Katherine of Aragon,who appears in one or two RobinHood ballads, and Charles I’s queenHenrietta Maria in one Civil War bal-lad, queen consorts were rarely thesubject of traditional printed ballads.They appeared in woodcuts along-side their royal husbands, but theydid not have their own ballad per-sonalities. The role of the ballad increating an image of Mary II is there-fore an interesting one. There aremore ballads remaining about MaryII than any other ruling queen, andunlike any queen before or after her,she was actually a ballad heroine –she emerges as a character whospeaks (or rather sings) about thepolitical needs of the nation, as wellas simply being the recipient of bal-lad panegyric.

Images used to depict Mary werevaried. In 1689 alone there weretwelve woodcuts of quite differentwomen used to depict the newqueen. William appears on ten ofthese, and again each representation

is different. But the most strikingaspect of these images is the way inwhich the modest and virtuous Marywas continually represented as open-ly baring her breasts. From 1690until 1694 another five new cuts wereused but three images emerged asstandards – two are ‘respectable’décolleté courtly women but themost frequently used depicted anextreme décolleté style.

These images of Mary are ambigu-ous. Dressed in this way, she could beheld guilty of ungodly ‘self confi-dence’ by proudly displaying herbreasts, and of vanity by patching herface. In the later images she wouldhave been vulnerable to the chargeof excessive luxury by wearing a top-knot – the cause of some consider-able ballad debate over sartorialmorality in the 1690s. Throughouther reign it appears that though theballad texts were uniformly loyal andcomplimentary of Mary, the woodcutdepictions of her that accompanythem depict her as potentiallyimmoral.

Apart from the specially commis-sioned coronation pictures, none ofthe 1689 woodcuts were new. Theirprevious incarnations were varied,and some of them potentially detri-mental to Mary’s reputation. Forexample one image was also used toillustrate ballads entitled The WantonWife of Bath and The Invincible Pride ofWomen. After Charles II’s death in1685, two portraits had appeared onPortsmouth’s Lamentation and A Dia-logue betwixt Two Wanton Ladiesdepicting his now redundant mis-tress, the Duchess of Portsmouth,while another Mary woodcut hadbeen used to represent Nell Gwynneon one ballad and Charles II’sQueen Catherine de Braganza onanother. One of the couples used todepict William and Mary had alsobeen used to portray a highwayman,‘George of Oxford’ and his mistressLady Gray on another ballad.

Yet ballads also show continuity inroyal imagery. A woodcut used origi-nally to depict James I and Anne ofDenmark and later used in balladson both Charles II and James II isone example. Angels bearing thecrown were a common feature onwoodcuts indicating royalty fromCharles I’s time. After 1689 theysometimes bore laurels instead. Bal-lad woodcuts were adapted andrepeated to create a monarchical col-

lage, using crowns, monarchs oldand new, all of which made the sub-ject of the ballad and the royalty ofthe figures clear. Almost all theseimages, meanwhile, either had beenor were to be used elsewhere to illus-trate a whole range of other subjects.

While traditional ballads sought todemonstrate their loyalty to themonarchy by singing royal praises,and did so by using a whole range ofold and new pictures of monarchson the same ballad, they also wantedto re-use these valuable and expen-sive pictures as selling points onother ballads. Ballad writers, publish-ers, performers, and buyers thus pre-sented a fantasy of courtly fashion

and romance through images andtext, rather than an accurate or sta-ble representation of their rulers.This helps to explain why there wereso many different pictures of Mary,but it still does not explain herimmodest dress.

High fashion was monolithic andled by the court. Since the ascen-dance at court of Charles I’s queenHenrietta Maria from 1629, onlyFrench ladies determined the cor-rect style. It was the French-bornDuchess of Portsmouth who hadbeen responsible for introducing thehairstyle depicted in The Princess Wel-come to England. While all ‘sorts’ insociety may have aspired to courtlyfashions, there were tensionsinvolved. High court fashion reflect-

43

REVEALING MARY

A popular example of the 17th-centuryfashion for décolleté.

HISTORY TODAY MARCH 2004

ed the instability of religious andpolitical orientation. For Protestantsthere was always a doctrinal difficultywith styles that had come in fromCatholic states and were thereforetainted with corruption and sin.John Evelyn, in Tyranus or the Mode(1661), said of French fashion:

Though I love the French well … yetI would be glad to pay my respects forit in any thing rather then myCLOTHES … when a Nation is ableto impose, and give laws to the habitof another … it has (like that ofLanguage) prov’d a Fore-runer of thespreading of their conquests there.

There was much moralising aboutfashion, consequently, directed atthe court and those who aped them.Sermons, pamphlets, broadsides andballads, written against women show-ing their breasts and patching, wereproduced continuously. For exam-ple, A Just and Seasonable Reprehensionof Naked Breasts and Shoulders, (trans-lated from the French original), pub-lished in 1670 with a preface by thegreat divine Richard Baxter, and Eng-land’s Vanity (1683) both declaimedvociferously against such abomina-tions as bare breasts and the use offace patches. Ballads too, such as TheInvincible Pride of Women, discouragedfashionable practices that Evelyn, in1653, had pointed out were ‘former-ly… used only by prostitutes’. Ofcourse, this was simply a moral inver-sion: prostitutes aped court fashionnot the other way round. Balladsdeclaiming against these fashionswere published by the same menwho publicised them through theirwoodcuts; an indication of just howkeen ballad publishers were to sell toevery market.

Morally, the display of the breastcould be both good – the breast ofthe mother nourishing for example(one ballad exhorts Mary to ‘nourishreligion and laws’) – and bad – lead-ing to lascivious temptation. A balladwoodcut of the renowned beautyElizabeth of Bohemia (Mary’s aunt)depicts her wearing a gown thatreveals her breasts fully, but she isalso with her children – thus theseare good, yet fashionable, breasts onshow. Less exalted women were alsodepicted in the company of children,fashionably and legitimately, showing

their breasts. Low-cut fashion had been popular

in courtly circles in Western Europesince the fourteenth century and inEngland since the late sixteenth cen-tury. It may have had its beginningwith the less than respectable AgnesSorel, mistress to Charles VII ofFrance, but by 1600 possibly the vir-ginal Elizabeth I and definitely JamesI’s unimpeachably virtuous queenAnne of Denmark were devotees ofextreme décolleté. By this time,high-class female fashion hadbecome subject to Renaissancerhetoric. Noble breasts needed tocomply with the classical ideal ofeternal youth, beauty and virtue.They should be ‘unused’ and ‘apple-like’ as those of Venus and Helen.

Décolleté styles enabled a displayof the potential fecundity and youthof a maiden, emphasising or encap-sulating her beauty and vulnerability,though, as with all aspects of nobility,such a display was acceptable only ifit were joined with virtue and self-control. There was great encourage-ment to look and admire, but therewas no invitation to touch.

Royal breasts were not usuallydepicted in art, however, thoughthey may well have been shown. Amasque costume design by InigoJones for Henrietta Maria wouldhave fully revealed the Queen’sbreasts if, indeed, she ever wore it.

Elite costume had to balance a senseof fashion with suitability and safetyof reputation. In portraits, the expo-sure of both breasts tended to berestricted to court ladies who wereknown to be mistresses. The expo-sure of one breast was a differentmatter – depictions of court ladies(but not queens) as St Catherine, forexample, could involve the exposureof a single breast. In medieval depic-tions both saintly breasts are shown,a reference to the removal ofCatherine’s breasts as part of hermartyrdom. However, even in therelaxed déshabillé of Lely’s portraits,the full exposure of the breasts, as inhis portraits of Nell Gwynne, onlyoccurred if the woman concernedwas known to be lacking in maritalvirtue.

Did these same ‘rules’ apply todécolleté fashion in low class ballads?Breasts on ballad sheets were a fairlycommon sight but the context of thebared breast varied enormously. Forexample, one woodcut of a younglady marks the point at which largerbreasts had ‘come into fashion’,around about the mid-century. Thisimage was used on ballads entitledThe Virtuous Maid’s Resolution, TheDescription of a Town Miss, and Jockey’slamentation turn’d into joy or JennyYields at last. Thus, this one woodcutwas used to represent respectivelythe moral, the potentially immoraland the seduced female. It was notthe image alone, but the contextual-ising of the image within a song orstory that gave an image its meaning.

For the ordinary woman the barebreast may have been licitly dis-played by the unmarried, as anexpression of their unused state,and suitability as lover, wife andmother. Certainly, some ballad pic-tures and songs suggest this, thoughafter 1660 there is a strong sugges-tion that this was a fashion preferredby the ‘town misses’ of London.

Preachers moralising about fash-ion despaired over the breakingdown of distinctions in dress, (Tudorsumptuary legislation which restrict-ed the consumption of goods andparticularly the purchasing of richfabrics and dress to certain classes,had been bought to an end in 1604),which led to the lower sorts aspiringto inappropriate fashions they nei-ther needed nor could afford. Adam

44

This extreme caricature was used toillustrate a variety of ballad themes, notsimply the obviously lewd one above.

MARCH 2004 HISTORY TODAY

Martindale, yeoman diarist, wrote inthe 1640s that before the Civil War

Freeholders’ daughters … durst nothave offered to weare an hood, or ascarfe, (while now every beggar’s bratthat can get them thinks not aboveher,) noe, nor so much as a gowne tillher wedding day. And if any of themhad transgressed these bounds, shewould have beene accounted anambitious foole.

For the ordinary woman, aftermarriage there was to be a cover up,unless breast-feeding was going on. Ifnot, then her morality might be sus-pect. For the fashionable upper class-es there was no feeding. The breastremained the plaything of the loverand a permanent expression ofyouth and beauty. In two balladsabout Mary II rescuing children(both of which show her with breastsexposed) she sends for a wet nurseto attend the children, releasingtheir mother from her drudgery.

The evidence suggests that whiledisplaying the breasts was supposed

to be an upper-class affair, it hadbeen vulgarised and imitated bylower-class women, aspiring to court-ly fashion. To achieve the proper‘apple-like’ and unused breast, how-ever, it was necessary to use expen-sive stays and a stomacher, whichcould push the breast up, sometimesbeyond the breastbone, at the sametime creating a stiff, genteel deport-ment. Ballad woodcuts are quiteaccurate in showing the unnaturallift of the bosom. This way ofenhancing the breasts was beyondthe means of most, however. In TermsUsed for Taylors (London, 1688) it waspointed out that these stylesrequired ‘a Maid or Woman to dressthe wearer’. The lower orders moreoften obtained the look by loosening

a tightly laced bodice at the top. Yeton ballads, many décolleté ladies,described as merchant’s daughters,milkmaids, cook maids and shep-herdesses, appear in the guise ofroyal queens and mistresses, dressedin expensive stays, gowns and stom-achers.

Where does this leave Mary II andthe puzzle of dissonant text andimage in The Princess Welcome to Eng-land? It may be that the young queenarrived with a reputation for a rathertoo strong interest in fashion.William was reported to haverebuked her in 1689 for dining withher dressmaker, Mrs Graden, awoman of ill repute, by saying ‘heheard she dined at a bawdy house,and desired the next time she wenthe might go too’. Some printed criti-cism was directly aimed at Mary. Forexample To Queen Mary, The HumbleSalutation and Faithful greeting of theWidow Whitrowe with a Warning to the

45

REVEALING MARY

Lely’s portrait of Nell Gwynne reflectsher immoral role as a mistress, revealingmore of her breast than would be seenfit for a virtuous wife.

The baring of female flesh provoked irefrom religious quarters as in this treatisewith a preface by the churchmanRichard Baxter (1615-91).

Late Pics Photocopy

REVEALING MARY

HISTORY TODAY MARCH 2004

Rulers of the Earth (1690), pointed outMary’s lack of decorum at court. ‘Forbe it known to the Queen’ the widowrails:

... when I heard of the vain Pastimes,and sinful Pleasures with the Excessof Finery, in Richness of Apparel thatwas at the Court on the KingsBirthday … and that the Queen wentto Plays, Oh how was my soul boweddown … O Queen! … Is this toAnswer the end of her Creation, andthe King’s safe return from Ireland?

In the first depictions of Mary onballads she was not dressed in thehighest fashion. In The Princess Wel-come to England of 1689, the cut ofher gown dates from about 1680(décolleté fashion was not extremebetween 1660 and 1690 except per-haps in about 1680) and her hair isin the style of the late 1670s. (A 1677portrait by Lely depicts her like this.)It was only after her proclamation asqueen that Mary was given a moreup-to-date image. As the year 1690dawned she was invariably portrayedas a highly fashionable, top-knottedroyal. The image from The PrincessWelcome to England was never used todepict her again.

The context and language of thisand later ballads make it clear thatMary’s displayed breasts were to beseen as an expression of her youth,beauty and, hopefully, her fecundity.In 1689 and 1690 ballads such as TheBoast of Great Britain praised hervirtue (‘Neither light, nor vain, norproud’), her beauty (‘Fair to admira-tion’) and ‘her breasts [that] are likeParnassus’. Others prayed for her to‘ever be fruitful and ever be young’,

described her as ‘the star of thecourt’ and hoped ‘a mother e’erlong she may prove’. One was ratherexcessive in its demands: ‘when royalsons they have good store/so manythat they’d ask no more/may heav-en’s kindness ne’er give o’er/butbless them with a daughter.’

Representations of Mary andother monarchical figures that wereused interchangeably on love,advice, pastoral and political balladswere the vehicles by which broad-sides could offer audiences a fantasy.Through ballads, buyers could accessthe glamour, romance and seductionof the courtly world. The ultimatefantasy was portrayed in Cupid’sRevenge where a king married a beg-gar woman whose ‘behaviour alwaysgave her/Title to her dignity’.

Woodcuts of the Stuarts, male orfemale, tend not to appear on bal-lads that relate ‘real’ stories of actionin ordinary homes or lives. They doappear over and over on courtshipballads as lovers, fortunate andunfortunate, seducers, and dis-pensers of advice to other lovers. Insome ballads the figures seem to behovering in the sense of guardiansrather than as protagonists withinthe ballad. Occasionally official royalmotifs – such as the rose and fleur delys of Charles I and Henrietta Maria– were also used as illustrations on

love ballads.Mary II was

increasingly por-trayed favourably inballads as a lovingand obedient wifeand popular queen.Her relationshipwith William wasdepicted as a loveaffair, involvingmany partings andreturns from war. Inevery respect Maryfitted perfectly intopopular ballad

forms, making her seem accessible tothe ordinary citizen. Where she didnot fit – as in her childlessness – shewas portrayed as saving mothers andtheir children from poverty and dis-grace. Love, as a political and socialforce, was a matter for governmentas well as individual members of thecommunity. The Mournful Shepherdpointed out that unrequited lovecould lead to a ‘civil war’ of the sens-es. The ballad message seemed to bethat it was only on the basis of suc-cessful, fruitful, mutually loving rela-tionships that the country could everhope to face the future. The monar-chical couple represented political aswell as romantic aspirations. Ontheir survival and continuation thewhole stability of the kingdomdepended.

It was an unwise monarch, likeJames II, who allowed himself todraw so far away from popularunderstanding and discourses thathe could no longer command loyaltyfrom his people. As Selden sofamously said, ‘More solid things donot shew the Complexion of theTimes so well as Ballads and Libells’. FOR FURTHER READINGJ. Arnold, Patterns of Fashion: Englishwomen’s

Dresses and their Construction c. 1660 – 1860

(London, 1964); H. Dillon, Costume in England: A

History of Dress to the End of the Eighteenth

Century (London, 1885); J. Entwhistle and E.

Wilson, (eds.), Body Dressing (Oxford, 2001); A.

Ribeiro, Dress and Morality (London, 1986); D.

Roche, The Culture of Clothing: Dress and Fashion

of the Ancien Regime (Cambridge, 1989); S.

Suleiman, The Female Body in Western Culture

(London, 1986); M. Yalom, The History of the

Breast (New York, 1997); Ballads at Pepys Library,

Magdalene College, Cambridge

Angela McShane Jones is Lecturer in EarlyModern History at the University of Warwick.

46

Elizabeth of Bohemia (Mary’s aunt)appears here, breasts exposed butrespectable, with her children.

Images of bare-breasted women withbabies were free of immoral connotation.