Hans Eworth (c.1525-after 1578), Allegorical Portrait of Sir John Luttrell, c.1550, Oil on wood panel,109.3x 83.8 cm, The Courtauld Gallery, Somerset House, London
In the mid-sixteenth century, viewers were expected to actively interpret the meaning of an allegorical portrait. The educated audience of a court painter would decipher a personification, an emblem, or a tournament device much as they would a Latin motto, valuing a picture for its emotional and persuasive power rather than its literal accuracy. While Netherlandish and Italian courts embraced this practice earlier, England adopted it with such enthusiasm that, two generations later, it produced Elizabeth I’s Sieve and Rainbow portraits. This historical context explains why the panel depicting Sir John Luttrell is often miscategorised. Though frequently described as a commemoration of the 1550 peace, its provenance, inscriptions, and creation circumstances suggest a narrower, more combative purpose: an argument about a military defeat, presented in a Continental visual language, for a select group of men already familiar with the story’s outcome.
England and Scotland had been at war since 1543, a conflict sparked by Henry VIII’s desire to betroth his son Edward to the infant Mary, Queen of Scots. Henry (1491–1547) believed this marriage would bring Scotland under English control. When the Scots refused, he initiated a campaign of invasions, burnings, and punitive raids, later known as the Rough Wooing. France, Scotland’s long-standing ally, sided with Scotland, leading to England fighting on two fronts by the end of the decade: maintaining control of the captured French port of Boulogne and defending a series of newly constructed forts within Scotland. Following Henry’s death in 1547, the crown and the war passed to a regency council governing for the young King Edward VI (1537–1553). Initially led by Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset (c.1500–1552), the council achieved a seemingly decisive victory over a Scottish army at Pinkie in September, yet this did not resolve the conflict.
The inherent flaw in England’s strategy lay in these forts, and it is this vulnerability that the portrait’s storm alludes to. Deep within hostile territory, the forts relied solely on sea-based supplies. By the winter of 1549, the French fleet had rendered these convoys so unreliable that the entire system became indefensible (Merriman 2000). Among the most exposed was Broughty Castle, a tower on a promontory commanding the mouth of the Tay and the sea approach to Dundee. At midnight on 12 February 1550, its captain surrendered to a combined Scottish and French force. He subsequently became a captive of James Doig of Dunrobin, a Scottish laird, who held him for ransom, a common practice of the era where a captured knight was a valuable asset rather than a criminal, and his release a matter for inter-governmental negotiation. This captain was Sir John Luttrell (c.1518/19 – 10 July 1551), heir to Dunster Castle in Somerset and a soldier of considerable standing. The capitulation was reportedly witnessed by Mary of Guise (1515 – 1560), the French-born widow of the late Scottish king James V and mother of the child queen for whom Scotland was governed. As the conduit for French money and troops into Scotland, her presence transformed the surrender into a public spectacle, an event that would have deeply wounded a proud man. The war concluded six weeks later with the Treaty of Boulogne on 24 March 1550, under which England returned Boulogne to France for a cash payment and abandoned its Scottish positions. Luttrell remained a prisoner in Scotland until his ransom and outstanding debts were settled that September, after the peace was proclaimed in England.
The artistic programme demanded a painter whose training, rather than any London-acquired skills, equipped him for the task. Netherlandish artistic tradition had long embraced placing sitters within mythological or moralised scenes, and Eworth arrived with this expertise already honed, at a time when his English contemporaries were attempting little of the sort. The allegorical images of Elizabeth I that later defined the English mode emerged a generation later, with Eworth’s Elizabeth I and the Three Goddesses (1569) now widely accepted as one of the earliest examples (Cooper 2012). To label him a foreign craftsman who merely adapted to English taste, therefore, reverses the historical current. He contended with the absence of an English appetite for allegory, rather than pressure from it. The standard by which such a picture was judged was not that applied by a modern eye, as contemporary praise measured pictorial success by rhetorical force—the capacity to impress an argument upon a viewer—well before likeness. On these terms, the panel is not the awkward experiment it might appear; it effectively fulfils its purpose.
The viewer is confronted with a puzzle, held together by a connection that doesn’t quite cohere. A bearded man stands naked to mid-thigh in a turbulent sea, his right arm raised, fist clenched. Behind him, a warship, struck by lightning, founders, while men row clear; a drowned face floats in the water to his left. Above, within a dark-rimmed break in the clouds, a woman leans from the sky, holding an olive branch, the traditional classical symbol of peace, and places her hand on his lifted arm. Around her are smaller figures, identified in older literature as Venus, Minerva, and the Three Graces, alongside the sitter’s warhorse, his armour, and several bags of money. Two distinct pictures occupy a single field, and the difficulty concentrates on the solitary gesture that links them.
The traditional interpretation connects the allegory to the peace treaty. According to this view, the descending woman is Pax, the money in the cloud represents the French payment for Boulogne, delivered in two instalments, and the clenched fist signifies a soldier’s objection to a settlement that nullified seven years of his effort (Yates 1967; Hearn 1995). Some accounts shift the reference from the treaty to the ransom, thereby altering the entire mood of the image: the bag and gold box symbolise the two high-ranking Scots exchanged to secure Luttrell’s return, and the treaty becomes a subject to be avoided, given that his brother, Captain Hugh Luttrell, had deserted at Boulogne and was suspected of attempting to surrender the town to the French (Campbell, cited in Boyle 2002; Vegelin van Claerbergen 1999). Evidence supports the exchange: five Scottish hostages travelled north on 29 March 1550, and a ransom of £1,000 was arranged in May for the sons of George Douglas of Pittendreich and the Master of Semple, details and sums preserved in diplomatic records (Potter 1984). Against this, it has been argued that both capture and treaty inevitably lead a knowing eye back to Hugh’s disgrace, rendering any attempt to display one and suppress the other futile (Boyle 2002). This objection seems valid, pushing the picture entirely out of the category of commemoration. The panel does not need to definitively settle on either meaning to achieve its visible effect: to contain a defeat, a purchase, and a peace within one frame, while refraining from imposing a definitive judgment on any of them.
The written elements are often expected to bear more weight than their condition can genuinely support. The rock in the lower left features an English couplet about a constant heart unafraid of danger amid raging seas, along with the initials S.I.L., the date, and Eworth’s HE monogram. Two Latin mottoes are found on the sitter’s bracelets, recorded at Dunster as Nec Flexit Lucrum [Neither swayed by gain] and Nec Fregit Discrimen [Nor broken by danger]. Both draw on the vocabulary of Stoic endurance, the classical philosophy of steadfastness in the face of fortune, which was then closely studied in circles around the English council. This provided a defeated commander with a language in which constancy outweighed victory (Boyle 2002). The problem lies in the evidence. Only one motto survives on the Courtauld panel, both remain legible on the 1591 copy at Dunster Castle, and published transcriptions diverge enough to render the Latin nonsensical in places, suggesting scholars copied one another rather than the original object. The chronological precedence of the two versions was only reversed in the later twentieth century, as the Dunster picture had long been considered the original, and the study that established the received iconography relied mainly on that copy. An interpretation built on mottoes half-lost on the prototype and reconstructed from a replica thus rests partly on restoration (Burnstock 2007–8).
The picture’s journey after 1550 reveals more about its purpose than any interpretation of its figures. Both this panel and Eworth’s portrait of Luttrell’s uncle, Thomas Wyndham (c.1510–1553), a naval commander painted in the same year, can be identified with reasonable certainty in the 1590 inventory of John, Lord Lumley (c.1533–1609). This source is highly valued by historians because, unlike most English inventories of its time, it records painters as well as sitters. Lumley’s collection largely came from his father-in-law, Henry FitzAlan, twelfth Earl of Arundel (1512–1580), who had purchased Henry VIII’s Nonsuch Palace in Surrey in 1556. Lumley inherited the collection upon Arundel’s death in 1580. The most probable route for the two pictures to reach Arundel is through Sir John’s daughters, who lived at Nonsuch, rather than through any separate acquisition by Lumley (Boyle 2002). The bond between the families was long-standing and military. Luttrell had served alongside Arundel at the siege of Boulogne in 1544, was knighted after the burning of Edinburgh and Leith that May, and returned to Scotland with the army in 1547. Wyndham shared these campaigns and commanded the fleet in Scottish waters throughout his nephew’s imprisonment. A captain and his admiral, painted by the same artist in the same year and ultimately housed in a single aristocratic collection, appear to be the furnishings of a political connection rather than heirlooms destined for a hall in Somerset. Based on this evidence, the audience for whom the allegory was created likely numbered only a few dozen men, each of whom could recall from memory the context the picture omits, and for whom the ambiguity of the gesture represented tact, not obscurity.
The Luttrells commissioned their own version four decades later. The Dunster panel reproduces earlier inscriptions and adds a Latin quatrain from 1591, signed G.L., in which George Luttrell (1560–1629) states that love and obligation prompted him to renew the likeness, as his kinsman had named his brother as heir, ensuring he inherited the estates. The legal background is clear: Sir John’s three daughters were co-heiresses to a third of the property, with the remainder passing under two entails and his will to his next brother, Thomas. An entail legally bound land to a chosen male line, excluding daughters. The verse asserts title; a grandson’s copy of a picture about constancy under adversity thus becomes an assertion of ownership. By 1591, the allegory had become an argument about land in Somerset.
Luttrell had little time to enjoy his inheritance. He died on 10 July 1551 during an outbreak of sweating sickness, while preparing to sail for Morocco with Wyndham, approximately fifteen months after the surrender the panel appears to address. The disease typically killed victims within about a day, occurred in warmer months, and was reputed to strike healthy young men (Dyer 1997), a reputation solidified by physician John Caius (1510–1573) in his account of the outbreak the following year. The voyage it prematurely ended was common for gentlemen who had expended their capital on war and needed to recoup it, a description that accurately fits Luttrell in 1551.
References
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