Courtly Magnificence and Stuffed Pelicans

There can’t have been many art exhibitions (other than those dealing with the work of Damien Hirst…) in which a stuffed pelican was a key exhibit.  The V&A’s recent show on Tudors, Stuarts and the Russian Tsars, however, had one on prominent display.   The bird in question, now some 350 years old, was one of a pair brought to England by Prince Pozorovsky, ambassador from Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich Romanov to the newly restored Charles II Stuart as a diplomatic present.  It’s pleasing to think that its descendants can still be found taking food from tourists in St James’ Park….

The V&A show shone the spotlight on one of the more unlikely diplomatic linkages in early modern Europe- that between the Russian Tsars and the monarchs of England, then Britain, in the years between the 1550’s and 1690’s -after which Peter the Great’s assertion of his power and his “westernising” domestic policies put his country’s external relations on a new footing..   It was a relationship which began almost by accident.   In 1553 the English mariner Richard Chancellor, looking for a short cut to China across the top of Asia (the “north east passage”) was forced ashore by ice somewhere near the modern city of Archangelsk.  The locals were mightily impressed by the size of his ships and (probably under some duress) sent him off inland to the court of their ruler, Ivan IV (better known as Ivan the Terrible).   Chancellor made a favourable impression there and, to simplify a rather complex tale, the Chartered Company on whose account Chancellor was sailing ended up with a monopoly on Western trade with Russia- as a result of which it took the name of the Muscovy Company.   Ivan was at war with his western neighbours (primarily Poland and Sweden) and was only too happy to establish trading links with a far away but putatively friendly power which could supply him with modern arms and gunpowder.   Chancellor was responsible for shipping the first Russian embassy to England in 1557 (though they ended up shipwrecked on the Scottish coast they eventually made it to London).

This set the scene for relations between the countries for the next century and a half.   Apart from a sticky period under Ivan’s son Fyodor, these were mostly friendly.  This was helped by the fact that they were basically commercial in nature.  Even if the Muscovy Company soon lost its absolute monopoly over Russia’s western trade links it remained a privileged interlocutor of successive Russian regimes for many years.  Russian and British foreign policy concerns rarely overlapped in the 16^th and 17^th centuries so causes for conflict on that score were minimal.   There were other commonalities.  Both countries sat on the edge of Europe and had complex, often conflicted, relations with their neighbours.   After the very earliest contacts established under Mary Tudor’s Catholic regime, both sat outside the European religious mainstream- England’s idiosyncratic brand of Protestantism with its strong royal role in church affairs was a surprisingly good match for Russia’s status as the only independent Orthodox power of any importance.

In practice most Anglo-Russian diplomacy in this period was funded by the Muscovy Company and responsive to its interests.  This eventually rather irked Ivan who complained to his “sister” Queen Elizabeth about the low social status of the men who were acting as her emissaries to his court.   This was unlikely to cut much ice with the parsimonious Elizabeth, only too happy to run diplomacy with somewhere marginal to her primary concerns on the cheap.   Although the social status of ambassadors on the English side crept up a bit under the Stuarts, relations with Russia remained quasi-privatised.    Individual ambassadors might occasionally play a wider political role. One was instrumental in making peace between Russian and Sweden in 1617 and the Muscovy Company exercised a de facto protectorate over parts of northern Russia during the Time of Troubles between the death of Boris Godunov and the accession of Mikhail Romanov (1605-12).   On the whole, however, the formal relationship between the countries was amiable but distant for the first ninety years.  On a human level exchanges were vastly lop sided; there was no Russian counterpart to the small but well-established permanent English colony in Moscow (some of whose leading lights appear to have very much “gone native”) and Russian visitors to England were rare indeed.

Things changed a bit with the Civil Wars in Britain.  The majority of the Muscovy Company’s directors backed Parliament against King Charles.  A Russian Embassy which turned up in 1645 was warmly welcomed in London but not allowed to cross the lines to visit the King.   Tsar Alexei was not amused.   When news of the execution of King Charles reached Moscow he reacted with horror.  Unlike other European states, Russia shunned all contact with the English Republic and the Cromwellian Protectorate even after the initial shock had passed and became a refuge for the most intransigent Royalist exiles.   The most notorious of these was perhaps General Sir Thomas Dalyell (ancestor of the modern day Labour politician) who vowed never to shave or cut his hair after the kind’s execution.  Presumably he looked a bit less out of place commanding irregular Cossack cavalry in Russia than he did back in Scotland after 1660, where he gained a reputation for extreme brutality in suppressing the illegal open air church services of the religious and political dissidents remembered (somewhat incorrectly) in Scotland as the Covenanters.   

Obviously relations between Britain and Russia resumed after the Restoration (hence the pelicans) but on a rather more “official” basis.  The Muscovy Company’s role was never quite the same either.   Links between the countries remained loose but were conducted on a rather more formal basis.  One has a faint (and quite anachronistic) sense of things marking time until Peter seized control of the Russian state from his sister and encouraging the establishment of permanent embassies on the modern model  (though the St Petersburg Embassy was for many years a place which would-be diplomats tried to avoid being sent to- in modern diplomatic parlance it was a “hardship post” because of the substantial costs which the Ambassador had to meet from his own pocket on order to keep his country’s end up in a very expensive city, as well as the health hazards connected with the prodigious consumption of alcohol in fashion at the Russian court).   It’s an intriguing sidebar to history.   The exhibition, full of beautiful things as it was, didn’t quite map on to it.  

One problem was a basic disparity in material.  The core of the show was a massive (in every sense of the word) collection of English silverware dating from the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.  The majority of the pieces on show came from the Moscow Kremlin museum.  Not all were gifts from king (or queen) to tsar; Russian ambassadors did shopping in London behalf of their monarchs while English ambassadors and the Muscovy Company might make parallel gifts to the tsar or key members of his court.  The cumulative effect however was pretty overwhelming- and must have been equally if not more staggering when the items were ranked up as a collective assertion of royal power and wealth on grand occasions in the Kremlin (most of them were far too grand ever to have been used for anything as vulgar as serving food or drink).  Perhaps surprisingly given Russia’s own turbulent history, English silverware of this period survives rather better in Russia than in England, where much was melted down for the intrinsic value of the metal during the Civil Wars.   Only present at the V&A in virtual form, but presumably one of the centrepieces of the show when it goes to Moscow, the lavishly decorated processional coach presented to Boris Godunov by an English embassy in 1600 also survives as a remarkable example of early coach building.  

The problem is that (stuffed pelicans apart) there appear to be no equivalent surviving items from the presents which the Russians brought to London to balance things out.  This is perhaps understandable as the evidence suggests that the most valued gifts from Russia were consumable items like furs, gems or hunting birds.  Furs were especially prized, especially rare items like Astrakhan lamb which in the 16^th century was thought to come from a plant called the “vegetable lamb”.  One of Elizabeth’s ambassadors had to go to extreme lengths to conceal items which he had been given as a personal gift from the Tsar from the queen’s claim to pre-emptive rights over such gifts.   This absence of identifiable surviving gifts is compounded by other cultural disparities between the partners.  Secular painting in any form only began to appear in Russia in the second half of the 17^th century so, apart from a couple of small, icon-like, portraits of Tsars Mikhail and Alexei Romanov, there is nothing to compare with the gallery of royal portraits on the English side.   The wonderful portrait of Elizabeth at the very beginning of her reign (see top)- or something derived from it- might just possibly have found its way to Russia if she had shown any interest in taking up Ivan on the proposal of marriage which he sent her in one of his letters (and what a wonderfully improbable match that would have been….) but she turned him down tactfully.   

This disparity of artistic practice also means that, one small depiction currently kept in Hungary apart, there are no images of western embassies being received in Russia.  More surprisingly given that one might have expected a degree of interest in the no doubt exotic emissaries from Russia on the part of London based artists there appear to be no paintings illustrating the ceremonial surrounding the reception of Russian ambassadors there.   The exhibition tried to fill this gap with reference to a series of paintings depicting the pomp and circumstance surrounding the formal reception of a Spanish embassy to Charles II- all very interesting in its own right but somewhat removed from the Russian subject matter of the show (especially as Spanish court dress and etiquette was far closer to that observed in England than Russian practice).   The splendid portrait of Prince Potemkin (a distant relative of the “villages” man) in full Russian finery by Sir Peter Lely below is a rare late example of a Russian ambassador being painted by a London artist and perhaps a sign of future developments with the closer integration of Russian diplomats into the wider work of European diplomacy.

The shortage of “Russian” material led to a slightly blurred focus in the exhibition, which at times seemed unclear whether it was primarily about the Anglo-Russian links or covering a wider “courtly magnificence” agenda.   On the one hand, the choice of portrait paintings (monarchs apart) was very much focused on people with more or less close links to the Muscovy Company, most of whom were London merchants or at most very minor gentry- as a result they were often a bit second division in terms of quality.   Other areas- jewellery and tapestries, for instance- were represented by high quality items with at best tenuous links to the Russian agenda.   This was particularly notable for the early sections.  The Dacre Beasts (below) are fabulous and I really love them (especially the dolphin) but they were made decades before Chancellor set sail for the north.

The same could be said of Henry VIII’s full suit of armour dating from the 1540’s.   It’s a great example of high quality Renaissance armour and a physically imposing presence in the exhibition (even if the Henry’s 54 inch waistline is an ominous indication of how far he had gone to seed physically- in the 1520s’s the figure was more like 32 inches) but again predates links with Russia by a decade and half.

The armour pattern books from the Royal Armouries in Greenwich give a wonderful sense of what the well dressed military aristocrat was wearing when preparing to repel the Spanish Armada but there didn’t seem to be any evidence that Greenwich armour was ever exported to Russia as a diplomatic gift.   These were beautiful things to see but all at one remove from the core subject of the show. 

 

Perhaps it will work better in Russia as a show primarily about English princely display. I wonder if the stuffed pelican will find his way home for a visit….