I’ve been looking at the Tudor/Elizabethan relationship with other countries lately (like Iceland, last time) and this week we’re looking at China. Specifically a dinner party hosted by Robert Cecil, a letter, and a portrait.
All of these connections were originally made by Matthew Dimmock, in his book: Elizabethan Globalism: England, China and the Rainbow Portrait (Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art). Buy it on Amazon here.
Or, read a review of the book here: https://eduglobal.news/en/elizabethan-globalism-england-china-and-the-rainbow-portrait-by-matthew-dimmock
First, the piece of China that Robert Cecil owned, which is now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art:
And the 1602 letter Elizabeth wrote to Emperor Wanli of China, which only made it as far as Baffin Island.
And of course, the famous Rainbow Portrait, which may have been commissioned for the housewarming party.
Rough Transcript of Episode 160: Elizabeth and China
[advertisement insert here: if you like this show, and you want to support me and my work, the best thing you can do (and it’s free!) is to leave a rating or review on iTunes. It really helps others discover the podcast. Second best is to buy Tudor-themed gifts for all your loved ones at my shop, at TudorFair.com, like leggings with the Anne Boleyn portrait pattern on them, or boots with Elizabeth I portraits. Finally, you can also become a patron of this show for as little as $1/episode at Patreon.com/englandcast … And thank you!]
Hello and welcome to the Renaissance English History Podcast, a part of the Agora Podcast Network. I’m your host, Heather Teysko, and I’m a storyteller who makes history accessible because I believe it’s a pathway to understanding who we are, our place in the universe, and being more deeply in touch with our own humanity.
This is episode 160, and it’s all about Elizabeth and China, in the spirit of strong women rulers. As I’m recording this it’s January 15, and it’s Elizabeth’s Coronation Day – or, if you have a small daughter or are close to any little girls, you hear Anna saying, “it’s cornoration day!” in your head when I say that.
But this episode is going to be a bit different, as I’m going to be playing Connect the Dots with a few very famous Elizabethan motifs, and it’s going to lead us to China. I will say that all of this comes from the book, Elizabethan Globalism – England, China and the Rainbow Portrait by Matthew Dimmock, and I discovered the connections while wanting to do an episode on Elizabeth’s foreign policy beyond Europe.
On Monday, December 6, Robert Cecil threw a housewarming party for his new home on the Strand. In his Survey of London, John Stow wrote, “‘Sir Robert Cecil, Principal Secretary to her Majesty, hath lately raised a large and stately house of brick and timber, as also levelled and paved the highway near adjoining, to the great beautifying
of that street and commodity of passengers’.”
The party was was postponed three times, waiting for the Queen’s schedule to open up. Chamberlain to Carleton, postscript, December 6: ‘The Queen dined this day at
Mr Secretary’s, where they say there is great variety of entertainment prepared
for her, and many rich jewels and presents’.
One of those entertainments was a play by the playwright John Davies. It included this prose dialogue between a Gentleman Usher and a Postman:
“A Post bringing letters from the Emperor of China to the Secretary is urged by
the Usher to deliver them directly to the Queen, who ‘speaks and understands
all the languages in the world which are worthy to be spoken or understood…
Sawest thou ever more majesty, or more perfection, met together in one body?…
Besides all her perfections all the earth hath not such a Prince for affability:
for all is one, come Gentleman, come Serving-man, come Ploughman, come Beggar,
the hour is yet to come that ever she refused petition…Draw near her, kneel
down before her, kiss thy letters and deliver them, and use no prattling while
she is reading; and if ever thou have worse words than “God have mercy, fellow!”
and “Give him a reward!”, never trust me while thou livest’.”
So you’ll note that in the play there were letters coming from China. Elizabeth had tried to build a relationship with the Chinese emperor Wanli for ten years, with no success. By the 1580’s, she had received gifts of porcelain from China, courtesy of the Portuguese traders, and she was very interested in building up a relationship with China directly.
Her first foray was a shop that left in 1596 with a letter, but nothing had been heard of its captain since.
The audience at Cecil’s house that night, made up of lords, ladies, and other courtiers who witnessed this performance would known all the messages behind it. The previous summer, George Weymouth, an experienced navigator from Devon, had proposed to the East India Company a voyage in search of the North-West passage to Asia. Although the Company was taking a big gamble in accepting Weymouth’s proposal, because after all, this wasn’t the first time someone had tried to find the northwest passage, it agreed to fund the voyage as long as Weymouth and his crew “bestowed one yeare att the least from the time of their dep[ar]ture in going forward seeking sounding and attemptynge the p[er]form[an]ce of this intended voyage”.
Weymouth agreed, and on May 2, 1602, he left London with the Discovery (70 tons) and the Godspeed (60 tons), carrying with him an exquisitely ornamented letter from Elizabeth to the emperor of China. Weymouth made good progress along the eastern coast of Baffin Island until the night of July 19–20, when his men mutinied in protest at the extreme frost they encountered in the Davis Strait. Soon afterwards, both ships were hit by another ferocious storm, and Weymouth and his weary crew had no choice but to return home to face the furious enquiries of the Privy Council and the East India Company.
The Portuguese had established a trading port, Macau, in Southern China and the Dutch were making inroads Indonesia and the Philippines, and effectively blocked the passage of the small English fleet by the obvious route via India and the Malacca Strait (between Malay Peninsula and Sumatra). It seems likely that Elizabeth wanted to get around the Portuguese and the Dutch by arriving from a completely unexpected direction, without having to confront either nation.
While it is therefore possible that Davies wrote his dialogue before news of Weymouth’s early return on August 5, 1602, the fact that this performance was staged at all reflects the enduring optimism of Elizabeth’s subjects that a letter from the Emperor of China might yet be forthcoming. Moreover, the fact that it was Elizabeth who was dramatized as the recipient of the emperor’s letter, and not the other way around, further emphasized her incomparable “majestie” and power. The letter Weymouth carried with him (and eventually brought back undelivered) was the third Elizabeth had addressed to the Emperor of China: the first was sent out in 1583, the second in 1596, and the last in 1602. Each letter was carried by a different crew of English merchantadventurers determined to tap into the lucrative trade in silks, spices, and porcelain that flowed from the fabled land of Cathay. None of them were successful.
Copies and translations of Elizabeth’s first two letters were published by the geographer Richard Hakluyt in his Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and discoveries of the English Nation (1599–1600) to encourage further public investment in overseas trade and exploration. The third letter, dated 1602, survives in the Lancashire Record Office (UK).
I’m going to read it to you now, because it is such a beautiful letter, and Elizabeth’s propaganda kicks in, in full force.
“Elizabeth, by the grace of God, Queen of England, France and Ireland, Defender of the Faith to the great, mighty and invincible Emperor of Cathay, greetings.
We have received divers and sundry reports both by our own subjects and others, who have visited some parts of Your Majesty’s empire. They have told us of your greatness and your kind usage of strangers, who come to your kingdom with merchandise to trade.
This has encouraged us to find a shorter route by sea from us to your country than the usual course that involves encompassing the greatest part of the world.
This nearer passage may provide opportunity for trade between the subjects of both our countries and also amity may grow between us, due to the navigation of a closer route. With this in mind, we have many times in the past encouraged some of our pioneering subjects to find this nearer passage through the north. Some of their ships didn’t return again and nothing was ever heard of them, presumably because of frozen seas and intolerable cold.
However, we wish to try again and have prepared and set forth two small ships under the direction of our subject, George Waymouth, employed as principal pilot for his knowledge and experience in navigation.
We hope your Majesty will look kindly on them and give them encouragement to make this new discovered passage, which hitherto has not been frequented or known as a usual trade route.
By this means our countries can exchange commodities for our mutual benefit and as a result, friendship may grow.
We decided for this first passage not to burden your Majesty with great quantities of commodities as the ships were venturing on a previously unknown route and would need such necessities as required for their discovery.
It may please your Majesty to observe, on the ships, samples available from our country of many diverse materials which we can supply most amply and may it please your Majesty to enquire of the said George Waymouth what may be supplied by the next fleet.
In the meantime, we commend Your Majesty to the protection of the Eternal God, who providence guides and follows all kings and kingdoms. From our Royal Palace of Greenwich, the fourth of May anno Domini 1602 and of our reign 44.
Elizabeth R”
The letter was finally delivered to China in 1984, a delay that makes the current mail delays look like nothing at all!
So in his book on Elizabethan Globalism, Professor Dimmock makes the case that the famous Rainbow Portrait was commissioned as part of the Cecil housewarming party, and that in the Davies play, a gift of a cloak presented to Elizabeth is actually the cloak that she’s wearing in the painting. We know that Cecil had a large collection of porcelain from China, which would have been on display in all its glory at that housewarming party, more evidence that England wanted to have ties to China, and have a strong trading relationship.
By the time of the party, Elizabethans had some good idea about China – where it was, what you could buy there, etc. There were accounts of the experiences of Marco Polo, which were available in English in 1579 [Translated into English by John Frampton (1579): The most noble and famous travels of Marco Polo.]
Then there was the English merchant Ralph Fitch who travelled to Malacca, which was easily within China’s trading zone at the time, and who returned to England in 1591. [Fitch’s journey is referred to indirectly by William Shakespeare in Act 1, Scene 3 of Macbeth, where the first witch cackles about a sailor’s wife: “Her husband’s to Aleppo gone, master of the Tyger.”].
Fitch became one of the most celebrated Elizabethan adventurers and his experience was greatly valued by the founders of the East India Company, who consulted him on Indian affairs.
‘So that’s it for this week. I don’t have one specific book to recommend this week, but there are a ton of papers, blog articles, and sources I used which are all in the show notes at englandcast.com/iceland. Special shoutout to the paper Mark Gariner and Natascha Mehler wrote, ‘Trading and Fishing Sites in Medieval Iceland’, and the aforementioned Gissurarson, Hannes H., ‘Proposals to Sell, Annex or Evacuate Iceland, 1518-1868’. Plus, my dear friend Mike, an American I met while living in London who now lives in Iceland, and helped me with pronunciation. I owe him a beer next time I’m there! Let me know what you thought about this episode -You can get in touch with me through the listener support line at 801 6TEYSKO or join the new Tudor Learning Circle, which is a free social network just for TUdor history nerds. Thanks so much for listening, and I hope you’re having a joyful advent season!
[final advert insert: if you like this show, and you want to support me and my work, the best thing you can do (and it’s free!) is to leave a rating or review on iTunes. It really helps others discover the podcast. Second best is to buy Tudor-themed gifts for all your loved ones at my shop, at TudorFair.com, like leggings with the Anne Boleyn portrait pattern on them, or boots with Elizabeth I portraits. Finally, you can also become a patron of this show for as little as $1/episode at Patreon.com/englandcast … And thank you!]