All hands on deck at Westminster

Wednesday, 13th May 2009

Dan Jones on how the Armada tapestries, destroyed by fire, are being recreated

Anthony Oakshett points to a palette and shows me a colour called ‘sea-monster grey’. The tall and genial artist is guiding me around his cool, airy temporary studio in an outhouse at Wrest Park, the Bedfordshire country house. Around us stand six vast canvases depicting scenes from the failed attack of the Spanish Armada in 1588. There are indeed a number of sea monsters in various stages of completion, their terrible mouths yawning and their tails thrashing as English and Spanish ships give battle around them.

Oakshett is the artist leading a two-year project to recreate the Armada tapestries, a largely forgotten glory of the pre-Victorian House of Lords. The original tapestries — of which there were ten — were commissioned in 1592 by Lord Howard of Effingham, Elizabeth I’s apparently rather dishy cousin. As we all know, Howard led the Brits against the swarthy Spanish dastards in 1588, and the beautiful, gold-trimmed tapestries were his way of celebrating his victory. They were enormous: perhaps 27ft by 15ft each, and if they survived today would probably be the finest works of tapestry in the country, if not in Europe.

All art, George Orwell wrote, is propaganda; a typically sweeping claim, but one that is certainly true for the stuff that got the Elizabethans going. After being purchased by James I, the tapestries were paraded around various royal residences, before finding a home in the Palace of Westminster. They hung in the Lords chamber from around the 1650s, gathering soot and filth, but reminding everyone who saw them of the moment that British maritime dominance came of age. Paintings made of the chamber during the years in which they hung there depicted the tapestries fully covering the walls from floor to ceiling. A satirical print dating from the late-18th century imagined the horrible scenes that might occur if the French invaded England: Gallic greasers in horrible frock coats leap about the chamber like monkeys, slashing at the precious tapestries with their cutlasses.

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