Custom, Statutes, Episcopacy, Monarchy, Church lands and tithes,
Nobility and the House of Lords, and ‘gaine’, symbolised by a pile
of coin; it excretes ‘The Fruits of a Commonwealth’, identified as
‘Taxes’, ‘Excise’, ‘monthly Assesments’, ‘Liberties’, ‘Loan mony’,
‘Oaths of Covenants’, ‘Ingagements’ and ‘Abjuration’, while the
common people are bound within the chain that forms the
dragon’s tail, ironically exclaiming ‘O wonderfull Reformation’.
The book includes a second frontispiece, the reduced version of
the frontispiece to Quarles’s Shepherds Eclogues (1645), described
above.
the Ship of State safely through trials and tribulations, till it has
now come to rest in the sunny uplands of divine favour. Somewhat
more puzzling, even sinister, is the third scene, the Sacrifice of
Isaac, with Abraham’s sword poised about to de-capitate the boy;
surely this cannot allude to the king’s beheading?
The bottom of the sheet is filled with several emblematic
scenes of peace and prosperity (left) and machinations against
the state (right). A shepherd pipes to his sheep beneath another
punning olive tree, labelled ‘Oliva Pacis’ (‘the olive of peace’, but
also, ‘Oliver’s peace’), and the Isaian prophecy ‘They shall beat
their Speares into Pruneing-hooks And their Swords into Plowshears’ is literally enacted in two further miniature scenes.
Interesting is the last of these peaceful emblems, the war helmet
that has become used as a hive by bees; already 150 years old
by this date, it first appears in England in Whitney’s A Choice
of Emblemes (1586), but there derives from Alciati’s original
emblem book of 1531. Closer in date to Faithorne’s print of
Cromwell, it had also appeared in Wither’s Collection of Emblemes (1635), the plates for which (engraved by Crispijn de
Passe) had been first used to illustrate Rollenhagen’s Nucleus
Emblematum (Arnhem, 1611).
In the bottom right-hand corner of the sheet two bonneted
Jesuits are depicted, one carrying a dark lantern, a man with
bellows trying to set light to barrels of gunpowder, and a pair of
foxes yoked by the tails about to fire a cornfield (these last not in
Barlow’s preparatory drawing), some of which imagery recurs a
few years later in Pyrotechnica Loyolana, Ignatian fireworks
(1667), which is discussed in Chapter Five. A gallows with noose
is labelled ‘Proditorum finis funis’ (The rope is the end of traitors).
The gunpowder is placed within a cavern of the rock on which
the right-hand pillar featuring the representations of England,
Scotland and Ireland stands, and is also attacked by a number of
men (one with a ?fox’s head, punning perhaps on Fawkes)
wielding pickaxes – literal attempts to undermine the state,
presumably. The final scene, which remains mysterious to me, is
of three rustics, one with pitchfork, approaching a small copse at
the foot of the same rock.59 Ironically, in the fifth state of the plate
(1690), the head is changed to that of William of Orange, while
the head of Queen Mary tops the left-hand pillar.60
Oliver Cromwell
Just as contemporaries do not seem to have gone overboard in
producing dramatic and horrific images of the beheading of King
Charles i at the Restoration, neither do they seem to have gone in
for pictorial demonisation and vilification of the man who
supplanted him.57 Although the woodcut-illustrated sheet The
True Emblem of Antichrist (held uniquely in the British Museum’s
Department of Prints and Drawings) – the text of which seems to
imply that Cromwell is dead (d. 1658) – sounds alarming in its
portrayal of him as ‘the Chief Head of the Fanaticks and their
Vices Supported by Devils’, it is merely a schematic ‘genealogy’,
with a small portrait bust of Oliver at its head, literally supported
by two winged devils. He is styled ‘Anti-christ Pontiff of Hell’, and
his hand is joined in the marriage-clasp with ‘Pride Daughter of
Ignorance’, who, the inscriptions go on to say, ‘begot Hereticks
Blasphemers Atheists’ and a host of contemporary sects.
At any rate, it is a very different image from Faithorne’s
engraving after Barlow’s drawing of Cromwell in Glory, against a
background of emblems, in a superb large sheet entitled The
Embleme of Englands Distractions As also of her attained, and
further expected Freedome, & Happiness Per H M 1658
(pl. 4.17).58 Oliver stands holding a sword piercing three crowns
upraised in one hand, an open book in the other, and tramples with
one foot between the bare breasts of the prostrate Whore of
Babylon, who pours the contents of her ‘cup of abominations’ over
a hydra-headed serpent labelled ‘Error’ and ‘Faction’, which his
other foot pins to the ground. Above his head are the dove bearing
the olive branch of peace (and punning on his name), and a glory,
indicating divine approval. He stands, himself a pillar of the state,
like a latter-day Hercules between two columns, on one of which
allegorical figures representing England, Ireland and Scotland offer
him laurel wreaths, while the other is composed of the fundamentals of English civil society, Magna Carta, the Rule of Law, etc.
Three Old Testament vignettes are placed above him. The first,
showing Noah’s ark safely arriving through wind and wave to the
top of Ararat, on which the sun beams down, is clearly another
example of the ship metaphor explored above: Oliver has steered
cromwell’s car
John Nalson’s A true copy of the journal of the High Court of
Justice, for the tryal of K. Charles I (1684) is prefaced by a
frontispiece engraving of Cromwell being driven in a triumphal
car by a devil, in a clear allusion to the proverb ‘Needs must when
the devil drives’. Another minor devil holds up the Arms of the
Commonwealth over the triumphing rider’s head. The three
female personifications of England, Ireland and Scotland that we
left, a generation earlier, constituting one of the pillars of
22
4.17
William Faithorne, Embleme of Englands Distractions, 1658, engraving, British Museum
Princeps Proditorum is the very earliest English publication to
illustrate the Gunpowder Plot, for, mysteriously – as if the nation
and its artists were still in shock – no surviving English print
concerning it can be dated before The Papists Powder Treason of
1612 (see below). Not only did the half-length portrait of Garnet,
holding a document labelled ‘The Popes Pardon’, appear on the
title page of Princeps Proditorum (pl. 3.8), but, to judge from
Trevilian’s copies, the remaining twelve conspirators also appeared
in pairs on the following pages of the pamphlet (pl. 3.9).
At the bottom of the present Powder Treason print, beneath the
plotters, who are disposed in an arc with Garnet at its apex, is a
hell mouth – portrayed in the medieval fashion as the mouth of a
gaping beast – in which a devil brandishes what is probably
intended for that same alleged advance papal pardon, rather in
the manner of a letter of introduction, before the resident fiends,
the plotters behind him being labelled ‘Ignations conclaue’, that
is, a conclave of Jesuits, or ‘Ignatians’, followers of Ignatius
Loyola (1491–1556), founder of the Order of Jesus (Donne’s
scurrilous anti-Jesuit polemic Ignatius His Conclave had appeared
in 1611). Suggestively, in a letter to Tobie Matthew of 1607/8,
Francis Bacon referred, in passing, to ‘this last Powder Treason,
fit to be tabled and pictured in the chambers of meditation, as
another hell above the ground’.16
Henry Garnet SJ
3.7
But I come back to the ‘Pope’s darling’, the Princeps Proditorum
himself, the plotters’ Jesuit confessor, Father Henry Garnet. On
21 March 1607 – just under a year after his execution – the
Stationers’ Register licensed to Roger Jackson and Christopher
Purset, ‘A booke called The popishe myracles or wonders
conteyninge the strawe, the grasse, and the Child with a
confutation of them and their Lyinge’. As published, this is Robert
Pricket’s The Iesuits miracles, or new popish wonders. Containing
the straw, the crowne, and the wondrous child, with the
confutation of them and their follies. It features an important
engraving, initialled by Jan Wierix, on its title page (pl. 3.10) that
was issued as a single sheet on the Continent, and doubtless
circulated amongst Catholics in England, and this, the earliest
English record of the image, seems all but unknown to historians
of the Jacobean era.17 As the Gunpowder Plotters’ confessor,
Garnet became notorious for ‘equivocating’ (see Macbeth ii. iii.
9ff.; indeed, his ‘equivocation’ is crucial to the dating of
Shakespeare’s play), that is, for not breaking the seal of the
confessional, although he knew what the plotters were intending.
The English authorities were keen that there should be no relics
of the executed plotters, who might appear to the Catholic
populace to have been made martyrs. A drop of Garnet’s blood,
however, splashed onto an ear of corn amongst the straw that had
been placed to hand to line the baskets in which the traitors’ limbs
Anonymous, Princeps Proditorum, 1606/7, woodcut, British Museum
3.7). It was, however, copied out in full by Thomas Trevilian in
both his manuscripts of 1608 and 1616,15 though, extraordinarily,
appears not to be known to historians of the Gunpowder Plot.
Princeps Proditorum is undated but must have appeared before 3
May 1607, since it refers to the execution of Garnet as having
occurred ‘last third day of May’, and maybe as soon as a few days
after the event; a ballad entitled The shamefull downefall of the
Popes Kingdome Contayning the life and death of Steeuen [sic]
Garnet uses the same phrasing, yet was entered in the Stationers’
Register just two days after his execution on 3 May 1606.
8
3.8
Thomas Trevilian, Princeps Proditorum, The Great Book,
page 265, 1616, ink and colour wash, Sir Paul Mellon,
Walmsley
3.9 Thomas Trevilian, Robery Keyes Gent & Guydo Faux,
Gent, The Great Book, page 271, 1616, ink and colour wash,
Sir Paul Mellon, Walmsley
and heads were to be placed after execution. A Catholic layman
took the corn-ear away as a relic splashed with the Jesuit’s blood.
It was not until a few days later, that, on closer inspection, he
noticed that a double-headed apparition had revealed itself on the
ear. Instantly proclaimed miraculous, it became a popular image
amongst Continental Catholics. Indeed, on 12 May 1607 Sir Ralph
Winwood, English agent to the Dutch States General, wrote that
Furthermore, Sir Thomas Edmondes, English ambassador to the
States General, based in Brussels, complained about a reproduction
of the image being circulated in that city in 1607, a fact we know
thanks to a letter from Sir Henry Wotton, ambassador in Venice,
of December 1607: ‘For your picture of Garnet and his straw
received in your last . . . I do very much thank you.’19
A year or so later, on 19 or 20 September 1608, the intrepid
Thomas Coryate saw in Cologne:
Sir Charles Cornwallis, the Ambassador in Spain, being of late
received in audience by the King there, complained much of the
honour done to Garnet the Jesuit who was executed last May [i.e.,
May 1606], for they have procured a painter to make pictures of
Garnet, under it setting the words ‘Henry Garnet, an Englishman,
martyred in London’, signifying thereby that King James is a
tyrant, for none but the tyrants execute that kind of cruelty upon
the saints and witnesses of God. Moreover in Low Countries the
Jesuits have set out a book of the supposed miracle of Garnet’s
straw, but the Archduke [Albert] hath caused it to be suppressed.18
the picture of our famous English Jesuite Henry Garnet,
publikely exposed to sale in a place of the citie, with other
things. Whose head was represented in that miraculous figure
imprinted in a straw, as our English Papists have often reported.
A matter that I perceive is very highly honoured by divers
Papists beyond the seas. Though I thinke the truth of it is such,
that it may be well ranked amongst the merry tales of Poggius
the Florentine.20
9
is, ‘Printed Coloured & Sold by Iohn Garrett at the Royall
Excha[n]ge in Cornhill up ye stayres’. Thanks to the kindness of
the seller, I am able to reproduce it here (pl. 3.4).6
N. N.’s The blessed martyrs in flames; or, Queen Marys fury, rage
and cruelty, seasonably discovered in the bloody martyrdome of 277
eminent Protestants, some of whose dying expressions are sureably
[sic] applied to the present state of affairs in England (1683) may
serve as typical of later exploitation of the Protestant martyrs,
especially in the era of the Popish plots (see Chapter Five), who are
the subject of four of the ‘several copper-plates’ in this work.
A Thankful Remembrance of God’s Mercie by G. C., dated 1625
and ‘sold by Thomas Jenner at the Royall Exchang [sic]’; it was
engraved by Cornelis Danckertsz. in Amsterdam, in part after the
title page of George Carleton’s A Thankful Remembrance of Gods
Mercie, engraved by Willem de Passe and first published in 1624.11
In 1627 a second edition of Carleton’s book was issued with
illustrative plates differently composed, but accompanied by the
same labels, engraved by Frederik van Hulsen, a Frankfurt
engraver of Dutch origin.
Jan Barra engraved a not unrelated print (compare the title), To
the Glory of God in thankefull remembrance of our three great
Deliverances (1627), in which, to the Armada and the Gunpowder
Plot, he added ‘the heavy time of Gods Visitation, 1625’, that is,
a visitation of the plague in that year. A note below the engraving
reads: ‘Gentle Reader, if thou be desirous to see more of this, I
referre thee to a little Booke called The Crummes of Comfort’
(1627, by Michael Sparke), a book in which a trimmed impression
of Barra’s engraving appears, together with two extra subjects
engraved by van Hulsen, entitled The night of Popish Superstition
(the burning of the Protestant martyrs) and The Return of the
Gospels light (Elizabeth receiving the Bible from Anglican priests,
etc.), which latter also appear in Sparke’s Thankfull Remembrances
of Gods Wonderfull Deliverances of this Land (1628).
Over fifty years after Danckertsz.’s original ‘Copper picture of
the Thanckefull remembrance’ was entered in the Stationers’
Register on 30 November 1624, the print-seller John Garret was
still advertising ‘A Thankful Remembrance of Gods Mercies for
his Deliverances from Popish Plots, and Treasons, from the
beginning of the Reign of Queen Elizabeth’, and it is this state of
1678, at the time of the Popish Plot, that brings this imagery back
into play.12 Apart from all the miniature scenes, which naturally
include the Armada and the Gunpowder Plot, the title of the sheet
is borne by an allegorical figure Danckertsz. copied from Willem
de Passe’s title page to Carleton’s book. Labelled ‘Ecclesia Vera’,
in the book she sits in front of banners bearing images of the
Armada and the Gunpowder Plot (omitted on the present
broadside), wears a church on her head and tramples a devil, a
monk, a cardinal and a pope under her feet; they are labelled
‘Ecclesia Malignantium’. This 1678 reprint includes, incidentally,
an interesting advertisement for Garret’s wares: ‘. . . where you
may have choice of all Sorts of Large and Small Maps: Drawing
Books, Coppy Books, and Pictures for Gentlewomens works; and
also very good originals of French and Dutch prints’.
The Defeat of the Armada and the Gunpowder Plot
DOUBLE DELIVERANCE
3.4
Anonymous, Faiths Victorie in Romes Crveltie (2nd state – original state, 1630), published by John Garrett, engraving, Mr Charles Goodfriend, New York
The Stationers’ Register also records ‘A Picture and a Table
intituled “ffaithes” “Romes” or The picture of the Marters’,
entered to ‘Master Birde’ on 6 March 1630, and the same sheet –
now listed as ‘Faithes roomes, or the picture of the martyrs’ – was
assigned to John Wright Jr on 13 June 1642. The editors of A
Short-Title Catalogue of Books understandably missed this
somewhat eccentric entry in the Register, and yet the two words
of the title, as quoted there, do fall directly beneath each other in
the centre of the print, while the rest of the entry is clearly a goodenough description of the subject of the sheet, which is actually
entitled, FAITHS VICTORIE in ROMES CRVELTIE, and is an
anonymous engraving depicting the Protestant martyrs of 1555–
6. The unique surviving impression of this first state (in the British
Museum) bears the imprint ‘Sould by Tho: Ien[n]er city Excha.’,
and duly appears in Jenner’s advertisement of 1662 as ‘The
Martyrs that suffered in Queene Maries days’. The English
Protestant Martyrs described by Hind as issued by John Garrett,
and said to survive uniquely in the Bute Granger,5 is a later
impression of this same print, which Hind seems not to have
realised, but, as we have noticed above, Garrett acquired most of
Jenner’s stock at the time of the latter’s death circa 1673. In 2007
a second impression of FAITHS VICTORIE in ROMES
CRVELTIE came onto the market, bearing exactly the same
imprint line as quoted by Hind for the Bute Granger issue, that
4
The Double Deliverance 1588. 1605 is a particularly important
and unusually well-documented sheet, ‘Imprinted at Amsterdam
Anno 1621’.7 It pairs the Armada on the left (labelled ‘88’ and
‘Ventorum Ludibrium’ [the winds’ laughing-stock]), with Guy
‘Faux’ about to enter the powder-filled cellar of Parliament on the
right, two scenes that flank a central table around which, plotting
England’s destruction, are seated the pope, the devil, a cardinal, a
Jesuit, a Spaniard and two monks. A protest from the Spanish
ambassador landed its designer, ‘Samuel Ward preacher of
Ipswich’, in prison. The print itself was advertised at the end of
the second edition of Ward’s The Life of Faith (1621) as ‘a most
remarkable monument . . . necessary to be had in the house of
every good Christian, to shew God’s loving and wonderfull
providence over this Kingdome, when the Papists twise sought
their utter ruine and subvertion’ – important evidence that such
prints were expected to adorn loyal Protestant houses.
By 1654 the plate had passed into the hands of Peter Stent, who
re-titled it The Papists Powder Treason; it was still being reprinted
by his successor in the 1670s, and copied in a bilingual German/English etching issued in 1689, the year of the ‘Glorious
Revolution’ when anti-Catholic sentiment was again rife. Copies
were also made in other media: two needlework versions survive,
one made by an unknown needlewoman, now preserved in the
Lady Lever Gallery in Port Sunlight,8 and the other by Dame
Dorothy Selby of Ightham near Ipswich, who also had it copied on
her tombstone.9 The same ‘double deliverance’ is found in painting,
too, in a pair of panels bequeathed to his parish church in Gaywood, Norfolk, by the former rector, Thomas Hares (d. 1634).10
The Trampling Motif
A THANKFUL REMEMBRANCE
The trampling motif continues the medieval depictions of Christ
and the Virtues trampling Vices, etc., but, more immediately, in a
Protestant iconographic context recalls the iconic woodcut
illustration entitled The pope suppressed by King Henry the
A rather more comprehensive print featuring no fewer than fifteen
numbered miniature scenes and a further sixteen unnumbered
ones was first issued four years later than the Double Deliverance:
5
6.23
Anonymous, Converte Angliam, circa 1685, etching and engraving, British Museum
6.24
Anonymous, [Preaching Fox], late 17th century, etching, British Museum
••). Several figures in A Mappe of the Man of Sinne are depicted
with one or more churches on their shoulders, but this particular
motif – the pluralist who holds two or more benefices at the same
time – was a recurring and, in fact, quite non-denominational
complaint (see below, pp. ••–••).
Monk-Calf and Pope-Ass
The monk-calf and the pope-ass were two of the staples of antiCatholic iconography ever since they had been codified in the early
German Reformation in a book issued in 1523 by Melanchthon
commenting on the two ‘monsters’ as cut by the Cranach
workshop. Half a century later, the book was translated into
English by John Brooke and published in 1579 as Of two
woonderful popish monsters, to wyt, of a popish asse . . . and of
a monkish calfe . . . Which are the very foreshewings and tokens
of Gods wrath, against blinde, obstinate, and monstrous Papistes,
with bold woodcut portraits of both monsters (pl. 6.10). It
appears that the monk-calf in the woodcut of two monks fleeing
in terror at the sight of the monster, cowled like them, which is
found in Usury. The ruinate fall of the pope Vsury, deriued from
the pope Idolatrie (circa 1580), is copied from this same translated
Lutheran pamphlet. The monk-calf was still going strong at the
end of the following century, where it reappears in Aristotle’s
Master-piece (1684, etc.). The pope-ass had already appeared in
England a few years before the date of Brooke’s treatise in
Boaistuau’s Certaine secrete wonders of nature (1569), and this
cut was reused in Batman’s translation of Lycosthenes, The doome
warning all men to the judgemente (1581).
A stray reference in a biographical account of Richard Barnes,
Bishop of Durham from 1577 to 1587, records that in his
residence at Stockton-on-Tees he had himself painted a picture of
the pope as an old sow emerging from the labouring mountains,
‘whilst a train of persons all begrimed with farmyard filth hauled
it along by its tail’.25
6.9
6.10
vuolfe, printed in Emden circa 1555, that is, during the Catholic
reign of Mary Tudor (1553–8), though it is self-sufficient, and
probably circulated independently as well. The engraving exists in
two states, the earlier Latin-text version (pl. 6.11) and the later
English-text version (pl. 6.12). The central figure, satirised as a
wolf-headed bishop celebrating Mass by literally biting into the
lamb suspended over the Catholic altar, is identified as Stephen
Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester. Six slaughtered sheep with legs
bound are labelled with the names of six of the Marian Protestant
martyrs: Cranmer, Bradford, Ridley, Latimer, Hooper and Rogers.
Seven almost shaven-headed laymen are literally ‘led by the nose’,
the rings through their noses tied to Gardiner’s waist.
It is worth noting the one intriguing, albeit minor, difference
between the original state and the later state with inscriptions
translated into the vernacular. In the earlier Latin-text version, the
object on the right of the altar can be seen to be an empty
bookstand – a book is plainly visible to the bottom left of the altar.
Anonymous, A Mappe of the Man of Sin, 1622, published by John Bellamie, woodcut, Princeton University Library
THE WOLFISH BISHOP
shown ‘The Chair orturnd’, doubtless intended to be the papal
throne.24 To the left, labelled s, is heaven’s gate, which is guarded
by the symbols of the Four Evangelists and from which ‘proceede
lightening and thunder’; despite the number of churches the bishop
(whose crosier falls apart) has brought with him, he and his fellows
are shown being repulsed. The palatial Heavenly City, labelled t,
is surmounted by another blazing sun bearing the Tetragrammaton.
Curiously, placed outside the confines of the City, the ‘Redeemed’
(labelled v), ‘Palmes in their hands’, harp and sing in honour of
the Deity. a, d, e and the ‘Manne’ all wear soft squarish caps that
are doubtless intended to resemble the type worn by Jesuits (see pl.
his church, laments ‘Alas Alas Babilo[n] that great Cit[y]’ (Revelation 14: 8); there is thus no doubt that we are to identify her as
the apocalyptic Whore of Babylon. Despite their differing vowel
quality in modern English, ‘Babel’ and ‘Babylon’ are the same word
(from Hebrew babel) and, as the Oxford English Dictionary notes,
the name of the city was also used for ‘the mystical Babylon of the
Apocalypse; whence, in modern times, [it was] applied polemically
to Rome or the papal power’. As the text makes clear, the ruin of
Babel/Babylon is also the ruin of ‘her Rich louers’, including the
‘Emperours, kings and Preests’, here labelled r, whose crosiers and
sceptres are indeed depicted ‘slent’ (broken). The engraver has also
10
Anonymous, Of two woonderful popish monsters, to wyt… of a monkish
calfe…, 1579, published by Thomas East, woodcut, British Library
Ostensibly Protestant bishops who were thought to be
oppressively powerful, even rapacious, became targets for graphic
satire no less than their Catholic counterparts. The influential
Stephen Gardiner (Bishop of Winchester, 1531–51, 1553–5) – like
Archbishop Laud a century later (see Chapter Four) – was
suspected of pro-Catholic sympathies, and the treatment of both
bishops by Protestant engravers well illustrates the way in which
satirical imagery could be directed at individuals as well as types.
An extraordinarily violent engraving, long believed to be an
independent single sheet, has recently been shown to belong to
complete copies of William Turner’s The huntyng of the romyshe
11
11.15
William Faithorne after Giovanni Battista de Cavalieri, The Trve Portritvre of a Prodigiovs Monster . . .
Zardana, 1655, published by William Faithorne, etching, British Library
headed dragon of Revelation 13, and claiming that the pope and
Catholic clergy were terrified by the news of its appearance. In the
verse the monster prophesies his kingdom’s downfall to the King
of Spain at the hands of the ‘English souldiers bold and brave’,
and the downfall of papal power.
Equally fabulous and equally popular across Europe was the
‘monstrous Tartar taken in Hungary by the valour of the noble
Count Serini. February, 1664’, whose allegedly ‘exact effigies’
were issued in London in the form of several single sheets in the
same year,50 probably following his appearance in Cologne on a
sheet engraved by the little-known Johann Hoffmann.51 A
relatively crude Catalonian woodcut print entitled Il Tartaro
Mostrvoso was evidently based on an Italian prototype,52 but, to
judge from the number of different surviving exemplars, his fame
would seem to have been nowhere greater than in England. By my
reckoning there are four monolingual English prints, two
broadside ballads bearing his image, and one quadrilingual print
where one of the captions is in English.
The true Effigies claiming to be ‘taken from the picture
presented to his Sacred Ma:tie’53 is attributed to William Faithorne
(c.1620–1691) by the British Museum. It is a close copy, unless it
is the original, of that signed by Johann Hoffmann and issued in
Cologne in 1664. The others, though very similar, seem to be
based on a slightly different prototype with the Tartar’s bow facing
outwards and the arrow upwards. That erroneously attributed to
Hollar,54 which also bears a somewhat suspiciously spelt licence –
‘With Allowance Roger Liestrange May 23 1664’ – bears the
address ‘Are to be sould at ye: Globe in the Ould Bailye’, which
we know from his trade card engraved by Gaywood that same
year (see pl. intro.2) to have been that of Arthur Tooker. It must
also have been advertised in an issue of The Newes of 26 May of
that year, which noted that ‘The effigies of a Monstrous Tartar
taken in Hungary by Count Serini, cut from a Description, and
Figure sent from beyond the Seas, is to be sold at the Globe in the
Old-Bayly’.55 It was copied in reverse with exactly the same title
and caption and ‘Sould by W: Faithorne’.56 A copy in the same
direction but with no arrow and the addition of ‘a tarter’ and ‘a
female tarter’ on a much smaller scale and set in a riverine
landscape survives in the National Portrait Gallery, London.57
The quadrilingual version58 – wherever it was published –
includes as background a representation of the battle in which the
monster was taken, as does, though rather more prominently, the
engraving that heads the Bodleian Library’s broadside, which
bears the imprint ‘London, Printed for W. Gilbertson at the [Bible
in Giltspur Street], and H. Marsh at the Princes Armes in
Chancery Lane, 1664’, which also includes Count Serini, sword
raised, about to capture the monster.59 A relatively crude woodcut
version of the subject adorns the (fragmentary) broadside ballad
entitled The Prodigious Monster: Or, The monstrous Tartar. Being
a true Relation of an un-heard of Monster, which was taken in
11.16
Anonymous, The Prodigious Monster: Or, The monstrous Tartar, 1664,
woodcut, British Museum
Hungary, by the Invincible Valour, and Matchless Man-hood of
the Noble Count Serini General of the German Forces against the
Turk (pl. 11.16).60
As Wittkower showed back in 1942,61 and as Roger Paas has
recently confirmed and amplified,62 with beak and weapon
omitted, Hoffmann’s Monstrous Tartar published in Cologne in
1664 is based immediately on a sheet issued four years earlier
in that city, featuring a monster said to have been taken in
Madagascar, and ‘gedruckt nach der Parisser Copeij’, but, as
Holländer showed, it belongs ultimately to the tribe of crane-men
who first appear in depictions of the Monstrous Races, such as
17