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Renaissance Studies Vol. 0 No. 0 DOI: 10.1111/rest.12517
Tudor time machines: Clocks and watches in
English portraits c.1530–c.1630
C J F
INTRODUCTION
Hans Eworth’s magnificent portrait of Lady Mary Dacre in the National
Gallery of Canada, Ottowa, Fig. 1, shows the crusading noblewoman at her
desk, pen poised above copybook, looking into the distance as though consid-
ering the phrasing of her next sentence. Beside the book is an ink well and a
golden table clock. Against the tapestry behind her hangs a copy of Hans
Holbein’s 1540 portrait of her husband, Thomas Fiennes, suspended in time
at the age of twenty-four, before his execution in 1541 for his part in a brawl
in which a gamekeeper died. This portrait has been interpreted as a depiction
of marriage after the death of the ‘senior partner’, the clock an oblique refer-
ence to Eworth’s playful interweaving of different historical moments.1 Yet the
clock arguably plays a more significant role. Eworth’s portrait is dated to
c.1558, around the time of Elizabeth I’s accession, when the Dacre lands were
restored to Fiennes’ surviving son and daughter. The portrait could have been
painted just before, or just after, the long years of Lady Dacre’s campaigning
on her children’s behalf came to a successful conclusion. As well as referring
to her marriage, the clock arguably alludes to the widow’s patience in adver-
sity, an extension of the ‘truth unveiled by time’ commonplace popular in
early modern emblem books.
Clocks and watches appear with surprising frequency in British portraits
c.1530–c.1630. There are over twenty surviving examples, yet no studies have
been devoted to their symbolism. Occasional references in footnotes and
exhibition catalogues apply a blanket interpretation to all examples, without
much reference to context or sitters’ biographies, and different writers
This article is based on my MPhil dissertation submitted to the University of Cambridge in 2015. My re-
search was supported by a generous grant from the George Daniels Educational Trust, and I would like to thank
the Advisory Committee and the Trustees for their support. Since then I have been the recipient of PhD fund-
ing from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, which has supported me during the final stages of re-
search and editing.
1 Elizabeth Honig, ‘In Memory: Lady Dacre and pairing by Hans Eworth’, in Lucy Gent and Nigel Llewellyn
(eds.), Renaissance Bodies (London: Reaktion Books, 1990), 60–85.
Christina Juliet Faraday2
disagree among themselves.2 This article sets out the many resonances that
timepieces could have for men and women in Tudor and Jacobean England,
2 Tarnya Cooper, Citizen Portrait (London: Yale University Press, 2012), 11 sees clocks as memento mori sym-
bols; cf. Robert Tittler, The Face of the City (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), 127. Lynn White Jr
suggests that clocks symbolise temperance; ‘The Iconography of Temperantia and the Virtuousness of
Technology’ in T. K. Rabb and J. E. Seigel (eds.), Action and Conviction in Early Modern Europe: Essays in Memory
of E. H. Harbison (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), 197–219.
Fig. 1 Hans Eworth, Portrait of Lady Dacre (c.1558), oil on wood, 74 × 58 cm, National Galler y
of Canada, Ottawa
Tudor time machines 3
many of which have not been previously discussed. More broadly, this article
is a case study for a holistic approach to signification in early modern culture.
It explores the clock’s ubiquitous presence in early modern intellectual, devo-
tional and imaginative lives, and attempts to explain the popularity of the
‘clock portrait’ in the century preceding the foundation of the Worshipful
Company of Clockmakers in London in 1631. As the portraits demonstrate,
despite the lack of organised, indigenous clock-making in Tudor and early
Stuart England, clocks and watches were familiar and important objects, par-
ticularly for members of what is popularly termed the ‘middling sort’.3
Early timepieces were not straightforwardly utilitarian objects. Before the
pendulum clock was invented in the mid-seventeenth century, clocks were
accurate to around fifteen minutes per day at best, and sundials remained the
most popular time-telling device even after the clock’s accuracy improved.4
Despite its flaws, the mechanical clock became increasingly popular for sym-
bolic as well as practical reasons, particularly as a statement of wealth. The
range of metaphors deploying clockwork in contemporary literature further
indicates its hold on the sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century imagina-
tion. The fact that so many men and women chose to be portrayed with time-
pieces indicates that patrons were aware of its symbolic dimensions, revealing
a great deal about their statuses, beliefs and aspirations.
The extent of actual clock ownership in the period is difficult to gauge.
Monarchs from Henry VIII to Charles I owned a variety of timepieces, as did
their well-off subjects,5 but these were probably imported or made by immi-
grant craftsmen. There is little evidence of domestic clock-making until the
late sixteenth century, and then the craft developed slowly.6 This is generally
attributed to the differences in techniques required for constructing tower
versus chamber clocks. Unlike tower clocks, linked to blacksmithing and for
which there is English evidence, smaller weight- and spring-driven clocks were
associated with lock- and gold-smithing, professions less advanced in six-
teenth-century England than on the continent.7 Yet the need to import clocks
increased their desirability. Linda Levy Peck has shown that luxury consump-
tion emerged in the Tudor and Jacobean periods; clocks are just one example
of the goods imported for the developing consumer market.8 According to
Peck, luxury was morally ambivalent in this period, with its associations of
3 For this term’s origins in commercial (not sociological) contexts, see Keith Wrightson, ‘“Sorts of People”
in Tudor and Stuart England’, in Jonathan Barry and Christopher Brooks (eds.), The Middling Sort of People:
Culture, Society and Politics in England, 1550–1800 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994), 28–51.
4 Silvio A. Bedini, ‘The Mechanical Clock and the Scientific Revolution’, in Klaus Maurice and Otto Mayr,
The Clockwork Universe: German Clocks and Automata, 1550–1650, exh. cat. (Washington, DC: Smithsonian
Institution, 1980), 21–2.
5 See Edward J. Wood, Curiosities of Clocks and Watches (1866, repr. London: EP Publishing, 1973).
6 Percy G. Dawson, C. B. Drover and Daniel W. Parkes, Early English Clocks: A Discussion of Domestic Clocks up
to the Beginning of the Eighteenth Century (Woodbridge: Antique Collectors’ Club, 1982), 18.
7 Ibid.; R. W. Symonds, A Book of English Clocks (London: Penguin, 1947), 26.
8 Linda Levy Peck, Consuming Splendor: Society and Culture in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2005).
Christina Juliet Faraday4
excess, effeminacy, Catholicism and the evils of social mobility.9 However, in
contrast to other imported items, clocks had an enormous variety of addi-
tional associations, allowing them to be interpreted in terms other than deca-
dent and trivial. It is these meanings – and their implications for sitters’ wealth
and status – which explain their presence in portraits c.1530–c.1630.
In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, patrons, not artists, were
usually responsible for the mode, dress and iconography of portraits.10 The
craftsman might have studio props from which the sitter could choose, but
ultimately the picture’s contents were probably dictated by the person who
paid. There are some instances of imitation and transference of the clock sym-
bol between images: for example, the remarkably similar portraits of John
Whitgift and his friend Thomas Nevile depict the same objects (table clock, ink
horn and desk tidy) on the tables at the sitters’ elbows, suggesting Neville was
imitating his patron Whitgift.11 However, other surviving clock portraits are not
similar or numerous enough to suggest that the motif ever became standard or
formulaic. As a result, where we know that the portrait was commissioned by a
patron, we can infer that the clothing and objects depicted probably held some
significance for them. This is why the profusion of clocks and watches in por-
traits c.1530–c.1630 is such an interesting topic for study. When sitters requested
to be painted with a clock or a watch, they intended it to convey one, or several,
meanings; this article explores the possible motives behind such requests.
Although clocks have received little scholarly attention in the field of visual
art, they have featured in analysis of the literary works of Shakespeare and his
contemporaries. Several authors have discussed the clock’s potential influ-
ence on Shakespeare’s own use of time and the development of early modern
individuality more generally;12 Adam Max Cohen in particular has discussed
Shakespeare’s use of human-clock metaphors, touching on issues of self-con-
trol, individualism and authoritarianism.13 While these topics chime with sev-
eral aspects of the clock’s appearance in visual art, as is explored below, such
analyses are largely limited to the special conditions of theatrical narrative.
This article builds on such literary analyses by turning to period texts – not
just the most famous, but also sermons, trade treatises and conduct manuals –
for what they say about the importance and symbolism of the timepiece. The
9 Ibid., 3–9.
10 See Cooper, Citizen Portrait, esp. Ch. 2.
11 Neville was one of Whitgift’s executors and seems to have received several preferments through Whitgift’s
influence. J. B. Mullinger, ‘Neville , Thomas (c.1548–1615)’, rev. Stanford Lehmberg, DNB (2004, repr. online
edn. Jan 2008): www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/19965 (accessed April 2015). Whitgift’s portrait hangs in the
Old Schools, Cambridge, Neville’s at Trinity College, Cambridge.
12 Tiffany Stern, ‘Time for Shakespeare: Hourglasses, Sundials, Clocks, and Early Modern Theatre’, Journal
of the British Academy, 3 (2015), 1–33; Arthur Kinney, Shakespeare’s Webs (London: Routledge, 2004), 69–100. For
Shakespeare’s novel use of narrative time, John Spencer Hill, Infinity, Faith, and Time: Christian Humanism and
Renaissance Literature (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 1997), 104–26; Jeremy Lopez, ‘Time and Talk in “Richard
III I.iv”’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, 45 (2005) 299–314.
13 Adam Max Cohen, Technology and the Early Modern Self (New York: Palgrave, 2009), 23–50; Adam Max
Cohen, Shakespeare and Technology (New York: Palgrave, 2006) 127–49.
Tudor time machines 5
first part of this article presents the results of a systematic analysis of more than
2,200 English texts containing the words ‘clock’, ‘dial’, and/or ‘horologe’ from
the Early English Books Online (EEBO) database. The aspects of the mechan-
ical clock which interested writers when constructing metaphors are identified
and examined. The EEBO database is not complete; vernacular texts were read
alongside Latin and continental authors in England. Nevertheless the material
is comprehensive enough to reveal general trends, allowing for the combina-
tion of detailed and systematic ‘microhistory’ with ‘macrohistorical’ analysis.
Mining the texts of the period for references to clocks and dials puts these
objects into the broadest possible context, as a preliminary to an exploration of
the motif in the visual arts. The results supply a rich textual foundation on
which to reconstruct the period’s ‘clockwork imaginary’14 shared by the ‘patron
classes’ – those who bought, read and exchanged books and timepieces, and
who also commissioned the portraits under examination here.
The second section discusses the most common interpretation of clocks in
portraiture to date – memento mori symbolism. While vanitas was undoubtedly
one connotation of timepieces, the depiction of a clock rather than the more
terminal hourglass suggests additional meanings. The third section explores
the worldly associations of the timepiece in depictions of successful city men,
and discusses clockwork metaphors as applied to commerce. In the final sec-
tion I turn to the clock’s religious connotations, analysing its relationship to
both Catholic and Protestant teaching, and its particular suitability for illus-
trating the Calvinist doctrine of Double Predestination, as well as more gen-
eral concerns about temperance, patience and ‘knowing thyself’.
SIGNS OF THE TIMES
In English vernacular literature c.1530 –c.1630, ‘clock’, ‘dial’ and ‘horologe’
were separate but overlapping terms. The results of EEBO searches for these
words indicate that ‘clock’ was the most popular word for mechanical time-
pieces, followed by ‘dial’ and then ‘horologe’ (‘orloge’ in late fifteenth-cen-
tury texts).15 ‘Horologe’ is interchangeable with ‘clock’ and ‘dial’ and used
infrequently. ‘Dial’ is the most problematic term, meaning: the visual
time-telling part of the clock; the mechanical clock in its entirety, or, most
frequently, sundials; context does not always clarify. The word has multiple
14 I use ‘imaginary’ in the sociological sense – the symbols, values and thought-world common to a social
group; e.g. Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries (London: Duke University Press, 2004), esp. Ch. 2. The
term is favoured in history and philosophy of science for its associations with visuality (‘imaging’) and imagina-
tion; e.g. Pamela H. Smith et al., ‘Historians in the Laboratory: Reconstruction of Renaissance Art and
Technology in the Making and Knowing Project’, Art History, 39 (2016), 210–33 esp. 221.
15 This remains true even when time references (‘of the clock’) are excluded. References to minutes in time
statements are more frequent from the 1580s onwards, when Jost Bürgi invented the cross-beat escapement: a
regulator that increased the clock’s accuracy, making minute-hands worthwhile for the first time. Henry C.
King, Geared to the Stars: The Evolution of Planetariums, Orreries and Astronomical Clocks (Bristol: University of
Toronto Press, 1978), 80.
Christina Juliet Faraday6
possible origins, deriving from Middle French dyal, a wheel in a timepiece
rotating once every twenty-four hours, or post-classical Latin diale, meaning
the dial of a clock, from Latin dialis (‘daily’).16 ‘Dial’ was associated with the
highly sophisticated mathematical craft of ‘dialling’, or sundial-making,17 but
also had ancient resonances, for example referring to the Biblical ‘dial of
Ahaz’ in 2 Kings 20, when the shadow on a sundial miraculously regressed to
show that the Prophet Isaiah had added fifteen years to King Hezekiah’s
life.18 The word is frequently mentioned in references to mortality and mea-
suring time, and has the extended meaning of something which teaches the
onlooker to spend time well. Nevertheless, in early modern texts the word
‘dial’ is not applied to the same rich range of metaphor as the word ‘clock’.19
In searching period literature for uses of the word ‘clock’, this section fol-
lows in the footsteps of Jonathan Sawday’s Engines of the Imagination, which
explores the imaginative aspects of machinery and mechanisms in the
European Renaissance, and Otto Mayr’s survey of clock metaphors in early
modern European literature.20 Introducing Authority, Liberty and Automatic
Machinery in Early Modern Europe, Mayr argues that the ‘feedback mechanism’
(a machine which adjusts its behaviour based on signals from its output) was
first re-popularised, in modern times, in eighteenth-century Britain, where
political liberality was gaining momentum. He posits a connection between
the ‘democratic’ feedback mechanism and the early development of modern
democracy, suggested by the many political metaphors based on the ‘feedback
loop’, and contrasts this with the clock, a symbol of authoritarian, unidirec-
tional power-structures.21 Looking at the clock’s appearance in earlier litera-
ture, Mayr concludes that the clock mechanism was highly praised in most of
Europe but not in Britain, where, he argues, writers deploy the clock meta-
phor with unusual negativity. He suggests that conditions in Britain had always
been favourable to the development of political liberty, and concludes that
this explains the country’s suspicion of the authoritarian clock as far back as
the sixteenth century.22
Mayr, assuming that Britons were predisposed towards an anti-authoritarian
political system, looked for evidence of negativity towards clocks in English
literature. Yet a systematic search shows Mayr’s conclusions are not supported
16 ‘dial, n.1’, OED Online (Oxford University Press: June 2017) accessed 19 October 2017.
17 E.g. John Dee, ‘The Mathematicall Preface’ to Euclid, The Elements of Geometrie (1570), f.d.ii(r). See
Cohen, Shakespeare and Technology, 129ff.
18 2 Kings 20: 1–11. E.g. Thomas Paynell, The piththy [sic] and moost notable sayinges of al scripture (1550),
f.xxxv(r); Jean Calvin, Sermons of Iohn Caluin, vpon the songe that Ezechias made (1560), 75–6.
19 E.g. Antonion de Guevara, The dial of princes ((1557) 1568), esp. ‘The generall Prologue’, f.*i.ff.
20 Jonathan Sawday, Engines of the Imagination: Renaissance culture and the rise of the machine (London:
Routledge, 2007); Otto Mayr, Authority, Liberty and Automatic Machinery in Early Modern Europe (Baltimore and
London: John Hopkins University Press, 1986). Although Sawday addresses clocks, his references to the period
c.1530–c.1630 largely deal with their implications for time-consciousness, 76–8.
21 Mayr, Authority, Liberty and Automatic Machinery, xv–xviii; Ch. 5.
22 Ibid. Ch. 6.
Tudor time machines 7
by the texts, at least in the period c.1530–c.1630. Admittedly the English can
be unenthusiastic about clocks: clocks are ‘cold’23 and ‘restlesse’,24 and
besides time may count ‘miseries’25 or ‘care’.26 However, as even Mayr admits,
the English are not always negative about clocks: clocks also count ‘praises’,27
and are used as exemplars of reliability28 and patience.29 They are favourably
deployed as metaphors to illustrate the greatest of God’s creations: humanity,
the heavens,30 and the well-ordered society.31
In fact, writers praise hierarchical societies and monarchical rule through
metaphors based on the clock’s one-way system of command. In the period
c.1530–c.1630, it is precisely the clock’s authoritarian qualities that appeal.
Roger Hacket makes a strong case for clock-like authoritarian government:
For as in a clocke or watch, all the wheeles shoulde goe, when the Maister
wheele doth mooue, and if any stay, the same putteth all out of frame, and must
bee mended: even soe in publike states and civill governementes, If the prince
doe mooue as the cheefe commaunder and master wheele, the people shoulde
followe, and if any stay and trouble the whole, the same is to bee mended, and
forced to his due and timely order.
(Hacket, A sermon needfull for theese [sic] times (1591), f.B7v.)
Similarly, John Norden praises society’s hierarchical structure through a
clock metaphor:
23 E.g. Robert Greene, Mamillia A mirrour or looking-glasse for the ladies of Englande (1583), f.E4r: ‘their talke
burnes as hotte as the mount Aetna, when as their affectio[n] is as cold as a clock’; Thomas Lodge, Euphues
shadow (1592), f.G2r: ‘a little kindnes maks him who was as hote as a tost as coole as aclock‘; see also Brian
Melbancke, Philotimus (1583), 62; Joseph Swetnam, The schoole of the noble and worthy science of defence (1617), 6.
The simile perhaps stems from the metal clock’s literal ‘coldness’, or its coldly unresponsive measuring of pass-
ing time.
24 E.g. Robert Greene, Perimedes the blacke-smith a golden methode (1588) f.G2v: Melissa’s ‘ditty’ includes the
line ‘Rest[l]esse theclocke that chimes hir fast a sleepe’.
25 Philip Sidney, The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia (1593), f.209v.
26 Robert Parry, Sinetes passions vppon his fortunes (1597), Passion XII.
27 Philip Sidney, The Countesse of Pembroke’s Arcadia (1590), f.226r.
28 E.g. Mateo Aleman, The rogue: or The life of Guzman de Alfarache. VVritten in Spanish by Matheo Aleman (1623),
240: ‘And in particular, my word, in all my dealings, was like aclocke, it strucke alwayes true, and neuer went
false’; see also Thomas Nash, Christs teares ouer Ierusalem (1613), 94. In Thomas Dekker, The vvhore of Babylon
(1607), the counsellor Satyran is the emperor’s ‘trew set clocke / By which we goe’, f.E4r.
29 Michael Drayton, Endimion and Phoebe (1595): ‘Goe, play the wanton, I will tend thy flock, / And wait the
howres as duly as aclock’, f.Cr.
30 See e.g. Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), 48: ‘For our Body is like aClocke, if one wheele
be amisse, all the rest are disordered, the whole Fabricke suffers: with such admirable Art and Harmony is a
man composed, such excellent proportion’; Philippe de Mornay, A vvoorke concerning the trewnesse of the Christian
religion (London, 1587), 100: ‘the same workmayster which hath set vp theClock of thy hart for halfe a score
yeares, hath also set vp this huge engine of the Skyes for certeyne thousands of yeares’.
31 E.g. Antonie Fletcher, Certaine very proper, and most profitable similies... (1595), 55; Robert Burton, The
Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), 5; John Davies, A discouerie of the true causes why Ireland was neuer entirely subdued...
(1612), 284.
Christina Juliet Faraday8
This mouing world, may well resembled be,
T’a Jacke,32 or Watch, or Clock, or to all three:
For, as they moue, by weights, or springs, and wheeles,
And euery mouer, others mouer feeles,
So doe the states, of men of all degrees,
Moue from the lowest to the highest sees.
(Norden, The Labyrinth of Mans Life (1614), f.D2vff)
Compared with smaller wheels, he says, the greater wheels ‘moue with farre
more constancie’, and ‘if there mouings lowest wheeles neglect, / The greatest
mouer doth them all correct’. If all levels of society were equal, anarchy would
prevail: ‘For, if the wheeles, had equall force to moue, / The lowest would checke,
the leading wheele aboue. / So, if there were, no difference in estates, / All would
be lawlesse...’. However, he concedes that those in power must prove themselves
worthy leaders, concluding that ‘a meane preserues the whole in peace’.33 The
clock is associated with authoritarian, unidirectional command structures, but in
the period c.1530–c.1630 when monarchy was, on the whole, still the only conceiv-
able form of government, there is little to indicate the germination of attitudes
which would lead to regicide and revolution later in the seventeenth century.
Although Adam Max Cohen attributes the clock’s authoritarian reputation to
its relentless measurement of time, in fact – as Mayr points out – it is the clock-
work system’s causal chain (the weight or spring moves a wheel, which moves
another wheel, etc) which forms the basis for these clock-based metaphors.34
This causal system is shared by clocks of all kinds, from watches to domestic and
even tower clocks, and makes the clock metaphor applicable to a diverse range of
subjects, including Norden and Hacket’s arguments above, which see noble rule
as the driving force ordering the rest of society. The metaphor could be taken
further, and deployed in support of older arguments for the existence of an ulti-
mate ‘prime mover’, God, whose first action is the root cause of everything that
happens in the universe.35
Yet there is another aspect of the mechanical clock which attracts writers: the
idea that what occurs inside the clock is made visible on the outside, through the
movement of the hands and the sound of the bell. John Heywood writes about a
lover’s countenance: ‘yet shall his semblaunce as a dyale declare / Howe
32 A ‘Jacke’ was a mechanical figure that struck the hours on a bell. ‘Jack, n.1’, OED Online (Oxford
University Press: June 2017) accessed 19 October 2017.
33 John Norden, The Labyrinth of Mans Life (1614), f.D2vff.
34 Cohen, Shakespeare and Technology, e.g. 143: the clock’s reliability is a precondition for its
authoritarianism.
35 The related but distinct conception of God as a clockmaker – an example of the ‘argument from design’
apparently first invoked by Nicholas Orseme, c.1377 (Mayr, Authority, Liberty and Automatic Machinery, 38–40) was
also popular with preachers, e.g. John Boys, An exposition of the dominical epistles and gospels used in our English
liturgie (1610), 150; Robert Parsons, A Christian Directorie (1585), 37.
Tudor time machines 9
the clocke goeth’.36 As will be explored below, this idea is used to suggest how the
heart or mind of a man may be judged from outside appearances. It relates to
Protestant, particularly Calvinist concerns to ‘know thyself’, and anxieties about
how one may judge who is a member of the saved Elect.37
These two points of comparison – the causal chain, and the ability to represent
the interior on its exterior – form the foundations of most clock metaphors in the
period. To these can be added a third interest: in the clock’s ability to portray the
passage of time. This is particularly popular in memento mori literature and consti-
tutes an explicit motivation for the clock’s inclusion in painted portraits. The
ability to measure the passing hours was not new with the clock, however: sundi-
als had existed for centuries. They feature in some of the most iconic paintings of
the age, such as Holbein’s The Ambassadors, and continued to dictate the setting
of their less-reliable mechanical counterparts – sometimes with interesting conse-
quences for the clock metaphor.38 Yet compared to the clock, the sundial was
mechanically (though not mathematically) low-tech. Although the clock could
not rival the sundial’s accuracy or affordability, its new technology (the ‘moving
parts’) explains its use in a variety of exciting comparisons – to the body, the heav-
ens, families, commerce, and government.
The novelty of the clock mechanism, not its primary function of time-telling,
attracted interest in the technology, and explains its popularity in literature
and the visual arts. The variety of uses to which contemporary writers put these
mechanical timepieces proves that there is more to clocks than just memento mori
messages. The clock seeped into the early modern imagination, becoming a sym-
bol through which the world could be organised and understood.
TIME’S UP
In early modern literature, clocks are often associated with mortality. As the
minutes pass, human life trickles away; clocks exposed the headlong rush
towards death and, hopefully, everlasting life. For Olivia in Twelfth Night, ‘The
clock upbraids me with the waste of time’.39 In Richard II the king’s moving
soliloquy, shortly before his murder, links clocks, mortality and the
36 Heywood, A Play of Love (1534) f.B1v.
37 E.g. George Benson, A sermon preached at Paules Crosse the seauenth of May (1609), 42; Thomas Adams, The
sacrifice of thankefulnesse (1616), 39; George Hakewill, King Dauids vow for reformation (1621), 191–2. For ‘know
thyself’ and early modern approaches to studying mind and body, see Deborah Harkness, ‘Nosce Teipsum:
Curiosity, the humoural body and the culture of therapeutics in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century
England’ in R. J. W. Evans and Alexander Marr (eds.) Curiosity and Wonder from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 171–92.
38 Thomas Scot’s anti-Catholic satire ‘Solarium’ describes a disagreement between a church clock and a
sundial. The sundial represents the truth of Scripture, punning on the ‘Sonne [/sun] of Righteousness’, and
the clock stands for the Church, which has fallen out of step with the dial over the centuries. The triple-crowned
weathercock, representing the Pope, tries to intervene in the clock’s favour, but the sexton resets the clock, and
‘humbles’ the weathercock by removing its crown. Thomas Scot, Philomythie (1622).
39 William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, iii.1.110, ed. Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen, The RSC Shakespeare
Complete Works (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2007).
Christina Juliet Faraday10
overwhelming sense of time passing beyond his control: ‘I wasted time, and
now doth time waste me; / For now hath time made me his numbering
clock ’.40 For Thomas Churchyard (1578): ‘the course of mortall life, is like a
running Glasse / That neuer rests, but still holds on, his houres as clock and
chime / Whose minets tele us pilgrimes all, we waste and weare with tyme’.41
Watches could be made in novelty shapes, including skulls,42 and even on
plainer clocks memento mori imagery and inscriptions sometimes feature in
engraved decoration.43 If real clocks could remind beholders of mortality, so
could their painted equivalents. Memento mori symbolism is ubiquitous in the
visual arts c.1530–c.1630, particularly in late sixteenth-century portraits. As
Tarnya Cooper shows, likenesses themselves demonstrated the passage of time
by fixing the sitter’s appearance at a particular moment.44 Such portraits were
often further adorned with reminders that life is short: skulls, hourglasses,
corpses, snuffed candles and inscriptions instruct the viewer that ‘all is vanity’,
and clocks contribute to these themes. Like the hourglass, the clock makes
the usually-imperceptible passage of time visible, counting the hours until
death, when Christians would be expected to render to God an account of
how they had spent the time He gave them.
In portraits from the mid-sixteenth century onwards clocks often appear
with skulls, evoking vanitas themes. Father and son Jacques (1574) and Jacob
Wittewronghele (c.1590–1600), Figs. 2 and 3; John Isham (c.1567), Fig. 4, and
William Ffytch (c.1550), Fig. 5, are shown resting their hands on skulls and
standing near wall or table clocks. In Ffytch and Jacques Wittewronghele’s
portraits, the hour hands approach twelve: the day is almost over, but the sit-
ters engage the viewer differently. Wittewronghele’s direct stare challenges us
to consider the passage of time (Ut Hora Sic Fugit Vita appears on his clock:
‘as the hour, thus life flies’)45 while William Ffytch is apparently lost in con-
templation of the approaching hour, looking to one side in a pose typical of
alleged artist John Bettes the Elder, and reminiscent of earlier portraits by
Hans Holbein the Younger, for example of Nicholas Kratzer.46 This can be
compared with the portraits of Joyce Frankland, née Trappes (1586) at
40 Shakespeare, Richard II, v.5.49–50, ibid.
41 Thomas Churchyard, A prayse, and reporte of Maister Martyne Forboishers voyage to Meta Incognita (1578), ‘The
partyng of frendes’.
42 Examples survive from c.1660.
43 E.g. gilt-brass verge watch, engraved with winged cherub with skull. BM 1856,0429.1; for public clocks see
Alfred Ungerer, Les horloges astronomiques et monumentales les plus remarquables (Strasbourg: L’auteur, 1931), 44,
142, 197–8, 227, 242, 400.
44 Cooper, Citizen Portrait, 11.
45 Cooper, Elizabeth I and Her People, exh. cat. (London: National Portrait Gallery, 2013) gives ‘ut’ as ‘by’,
142.
46 See e.g. John Bettes, Unknown Man in a Black Cap, 1545, Tate Britain N01496. Bettes perhaps studied
under Holbein, Karen Hearn, ‘John Bettes, “A Man in a Black Cap”, 1545’, catalogue entry, Tate Britain: www.
tate.org.uk/art/artworks/bettes-a-man-in-a-black-cap-n01496/text-catalogue-entry (accessed April 2015).
Kratzer is making a sundial, referring to his profession and mathematical knowledge, not mortality.
Tudor time machines 11
Fig. 2 Cornelis Visscher the Elder, Jacques Wittewronghele (1574), oil on panel, 94 × 69 cm,
Rothamstead Research, Harpenden
Christina Juliet Faraday12
Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, and Brasenose and Lincoln Colleges,
Oxford. Frankland, who outlived two husbands and her only son, seems hardly
to hold her watch at all, as if to suggest the impossibility of grasping time.
Here there is no skull, but the hour hand again points at twelve.
Fig. 3 Unknown Anglo-Netherlandish Artist, Jacob Wittewronghele (c.1590–1600), oil on
panel, 107 × 84 cm, Rothamstead Research, Harpenden
Tudor time machines 13
Clocks could evoke themes of mortality in more unusual ways. Another
example of the clock-skull combination is found in the Triptych Portrait of
Henry and Dorothy Holme (1628), V&A, London.47 The couple and their two
children are shown on the inner panels with the traditional skull, but a clock
47 Victoria and Albert Museum W.5-1951.
Fig. 4 Unknown English artist, John Isham, c.1567, oil on panel, 108 × 82 cm, reproduced with
permission from t he Lamport Hall Trustees
Christina Juliet Faraday14
appears when the triptych is closed, part of a visual pun (or ‘rebus’) on the
right exterior panel: following the inscription ‘We Must’, the dial supplies the
macabre punch-line, visually representing the words ‘die all’. As Cooper
Fig. 5 John Bettes the Elder (attrib.), William Ffytch with his Hand on a Skull, aged 51 (1550),
oil on panel, 94 × 68 cm, Anglesey Abbey (© National Trust)
Tudor time machines 15
suggests, clocks and other memento mori symbols could denote virtue, and
defend against possible charges of vanity in having their portrait painted at
all.48
With or without skulls, in literature and the visual arts clocks could remind
the viewer of their approaching death and the importance of having a healthy
soul. Of course, the religious dimensions of death and the afterlife are inti-
mately connected with memento mori themes, and the religious aspects of the
clock symbol will be explored below. A key point, however, is that these vanitas
associations do not exclude other meanings, and many sitters’ biographies
and professions demand a more complex approach to a machine that could
stand equally for human life, as well as death.
TIME IS MONEY
In his treatises on finance and trade, Gerard Malynes compares commerce
to a clock:
So is exchange ioyned to monyes, and monyes to commodities, by their proper
qualities and effects. And euer as in a Clocke, where there be many wheeles, the
first wheele being stirred, driueth the next, and that the third, and so foorth,
till the last that moueth the instrument that strikes the clocke: euen so is it in
the course of Traffique: for since money was inuented [it] became the first
wheele which stirreth the wheele of Commodities and inforceth the Action.
(Gerard Malynes, The maintenance of free trade (London, 1622), 5–6)49
The metaphor extends to businessmen themselves, whose dealings – if
trustworthy – should be as regular as clockwork.50 Several sitters portrayed
with clocks were successful early capitalists and merchant adventurers – John
Isham, Fig. 4, Jacques and Jacob Wittewronghele, Figs. 2 and 3, and William
Chester, Fig. 6 – and it is tempting to speculate that in these portraits a
business-related comparison is being drawn between the orderliness of a clock
and the entrepreneur himself. This is particularly so in the case of John Isham,
a substantial man, both financially and physically. In the small area of the por-
trait not filled by his impressive form, a clock is mounted above two still-extant
and clearly recognisable account books, implying regularity in his business
dealings.51
48 Cooper, Citizen Portrait, 202.
49 See also Malynes, Consuetudo, vel lex mercatoria (1622), 337; Malynes, A treatise of the canker of Englands
common wealth (1601), 95. Roger Fenton, A treatise of vsurie (1611), 2, complains that usury ‘is so wouen and
twisted into euery trade and commerce, one mouing another, by this engine, like wheeles in a clocke, that it
seemeth the very frame and course of traffick must needes be altered before this can be reformed’.
50 See n.28 above.
51 Cooper, Citizen Portrait, 73; G. D. Ramsay (ed.), John Isham Mercer and Merchant Adventurer (Northampton:
Northamptonshire Record Society, 1962).
Christina Juliet Faraday16
It is difficult to know whether sitters owned the clocks in their portraits
if their inventories have not survived. The religious allegory of William
Chester’s clock, Fig. 6, or its floating otherworldly counterpart over Jacques
Wittewronghele’s shoulder, Fig. 2, suggest symbolic rather than literal mean-
ings, although these are not mutually exclusive. It is also possible that the
clocks were selected from a range of props belonging to the artist, or invented
Fig. 6 Unknow n English Art ist, William Chester (c.1560), oi l on panel, 665 x 535mm, Dr apers’
Company, London
Tudor time machines 17
without a physical prototype. Yet, real or not, timepieces in portraits enhance
the sitter’s status by alluding to wealth: a meaning as ubiquitous as memento
mori themes, if less obvious in today’s world of mass-production.
For members of recently-gentrified families, such as the Joneses (see the
portrait called Anne Fettiplace, the first Mrs Henry Jones (1614), Fig. 7), a
watch or clock advertised the sitter’s worldly status. This is especially true of
watches, which were more expensive and less accurate than larger clocks. See
for example the Unknown Woman aged 41 (1629), at Erdigg, Wrexham
(National Trust), whose watch hangs from her waist, or the elaborate octago-
nal watch in the portrait of a girl of the Morgan family (1620), Fig. 8. The
latter is comparable to the exactly contemporary octagonal gilt-brass and sil-
ver cased verge watch made by Edmund Bull of Fleet Street, now in the British
Museum, Fig. 9. Although clearly indicative of its owner’s wealth, it also refers
to religious themes, as it is engraved on both sides with scenes of Christ wash-
ing Peter’s Feet and the Last Supper, and has panels depicting the Evangelists
and personifications of the virtues. Such imagery could advertise the owner’s
piety, and encourage moral behaviour by portraying exemplary figures both
historical and allegorical.52
Watches in particular overlapped with jewellery as miniaturised, often elab-
orately decorated objects which could be worn on the person, sometimes
encompassing functions normally reserved for other jewels, for example
pomanders; the Nuremberg watchmaker Andreas Henlein is credited with
the invention of timepieces set in musk-balls.53 An extraordinary pocket watch
set inside a large hexagonal emerald was found in the Cheapside Hoard, sug-
gesting that such objects would have been regularly stocked by London jewel-
lers in the early seventeenth century.54
As David Thompson writes: ‘clocks [and watches] from the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries reflect an age when they were as much items of status
and demonstrations of wealth as they were machines used to measure time
and regulate everyday life’.55 However, such objects could provoke jealousy,
even animosity from others. Robert Dallington’s travel account describes a
Frenchman (‘an endles & needles prater, a fastidious & irkesome compan-
ion’) who made great show of producing his watch, ‘not so much to shew how
the time passeth, (whereof he takes little care) as the curiousnesse of the
worke, and the beautie of the case, whereof hee is not a little brag & enam-
oured’.56 Clocks in portraits, intending to show the sitter’s awareness of vani-
tas, could perhaps also provoke accusations of vanity from unkind onlookers.
52 On religious imagery in post-Reformation domestic settings see Tara Hamling, Decorating the Godly
Household: Religious Art in Post-Reformation Britain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010).
53 Thompson, Watches, 10.
54 c.1600–1610, Museum of London, A14162. Hazel Forsyth, London’s lost jewels: the Cheapside hoard (London:
Philip Wilson Publishers, 2013), 136–7.
55 Thompson, Clocks, 13.
56 Robert Dallington, The Vievv of Fraunce (1604) f.X4r.
Christina Juliet Faraday18
ALL IN GOOD TIME
Although the clock is associated with the ‘countdown’ to death, early modern
writers show little interest in its more mundane function of dividing time into
Fig. 7 Unknown English artist, Portrait of a Lady presumed to be Anne Fettiplace, Mrs Henry
Jones I (1614), oil on panel, 95 × 75 cm, Chastleton House, Oxfordshire. (© National Trust)
Tudor time machines 19
measured spans. The part of the clock responsible for regulation was called
the ‘escapement’; its increasing sophistication was, technologically-speaking,
one reason why clocks became more widespread. Scholars such as Gerhard
Fig. 8 Unknown English artist, Portrait of a Girl of the Morgan Family, Aged 17 (1620), oil
on panel, 101 × 78 cm, Tredegar House, (© National Trust)
Christina Juliet Faraday20
Dohrn-Van Rossum and David Landes have explored the effects of the adop-
tion of equal hours and accurate timekeeping on commerce and society.57 Yet
the clock’s measuring function is not a major focus in texts of the period.
57 Gerhard Dohrn-Van Rossum, History of the Hour, trans. Thomas Dunlap, (1992, repr. London: University
of Chicago Press, 1996); David Landes, Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modern World (1983, repr.
London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2000).
Fig. 9 Edmund Bull in Fleetstreet, Octagonal gilt-brass and silver cased verge watch with date
indicator (c.1615–20), 52 x 37 mm, British Museum, 1992 ,0514.1
Tudor time machines 21
This may have been due to its relative inaccuracy: minute hands (accurate or
otherwise) were mostly absent until at least the 1580s, and sundials and hour-
glasses continued in use throughout the sixteenth century.58
Nevertheless, the clock’s ability to self-regulate did form the basis for some
clock metaphors in the period. According to Adam Max Cohen Shakespeare uses
the clock as a symbol of ‘temperance, moderation and self-control’.59 In All’s Well
that Ends Well, for example, the King of France describes Bertram’s father’s char-
acter – neither ‘contempt nor bitterness / Were in his pride or sharpness; if they
were / His equal had awaked them, and his honour – / Clock to itself – knew the
true minute when / Exception bid him speak’ (i.2.41-46),60 ‘clock’ here used
synecdochically to refer to the escapement, or regulating part of the mechanism,
rather than the clock as a whole.
Self-regulation also grounds one of the clock’s major iconographic uses in the
Middle Ages, and perhaps continued to inform its deployment in visual art
c.1530–c.1630. Lynn White Jr traced the medieval European development of the
iconography of Temperance, usually personified as a woman, from the tradi-
tional water jug she uses to dilute wine from at least the eleventh century, to the
bizarre collection of modern inventions she carried for a time from c.1450, along
the way picking up associations with divine wisdom.61 In Bodleian MS Laud 570,
c.1450, Fig. 10, Temperance stands on a windmill. She has rowel spurs on her
heels, carries eyeglasses in her hand, wears a bit and bridle in her mouth and a
clock on her head, like a hat. White notes that these were very recent inventions,
except the bit, known from at least 2000 BC, and that the key to these accessories
is found in a poem in a French manuscript of c.1470:
He who is mindful of the clock
Is punctual in all his acts.
He who bridles his tongue
Says naught that touches scandal.
He who puts glasses to his eyes
Sees better what’s around him.
Spurs show that fear
Make [sic] the young man mature.
The mill which sustains our bodies
Never is immoderate.
(BNF MS fr.9186;62 translation from White ‘The Iconography of Temperantia’,
214).
58 Thompson, Clocks, 13; King, Geared to the Stars, 80; Silvio A. Bedini, ‘The Mechanical Clock and the
Scientific Revolution’ in Maurice and Mayr, The Clockwork Universe, 21–2.
59 Cohen, Shakespeare and Technology, 141.
60 Bate and Rasmussen, eds. (2007).
61 Lynn White Jr, ‘The Iconography of Temperantia and the Virtuousness of Technology’, 197–219.
62 Émile Mâle, L’art religieux de la fin du moyen âge en France, 4th edn. (Paris: Librairie Armand Colin, 1931),
311–16.
Christina Juliet Faraday22
Here the clock represents regularity and punctuality as aspects of self-
control. According to White, by the sixteenth century the allegorical figure of
Temperance was rarely portrayed with all these attributes, but generally retains
the clock until mid-century. White extends this to sixteenth-century portraits,
arguing that clocks symbolise the sitter’s temperate nature, citing Holbein’s por-
trait of Thomas More and his family (1527): ‘a clock is placed almost directly over
Sir Thomas’s head, as though Temperantia were wearing her horological hat’.63 In
late-sixteenth century England Temperance is often shown with her traditional
vessels – for example, on the column in the portrait of Elizabeth I with the
Cardinal and Theological Virtues (1596), Dover Museum, and on Robert Cecil’s
memorial tomb in the chapel at Hatfield House, by Maximilian Colt (c.1612) –
yet there are instances of Temperance’s horological iconography even in the
later sixteenth century. The figure of Temperance carries a clock in Richard
Day’s extremely popular A Booke of Christian Prayers (1578, republished several
times in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries), in which she tram-
ples a vomiting man representing intemperance. As Tara Hamling has shown,
this woodcut inspired a (sanitised) plasterwork overmantel at Postlip Hall in
Gloucestershire, demonstrating the survival of this iconography in other media.64
That Temperance’s attributes lingered longer in image-memory than texts is also
suggested by the later portrait of Dame Pigot (c.1621–1640) at Mompesson
House (National Trust) where the clock sits on the table alongside another of
Temperance’s old attributes – a pair of spectacles.
White links Temperance’s technologically up-to-date iconography with the
emergence of what he sees as ‘bourgeois’ virtues, especially self-regulation,
and indicates that this pre-dates the arrival of Calvinism, which has been seen
as the originator of similar capitalist values. The latter view was popularised by
Max Weber’s The Protestant Work Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism; although
much-debated, his conception of punctuality and self-discipline as peculiarly
Calvinist virtues lives on in analyses of early modern religious and social life.
Max Engammare’s study of Calvin’s Geneva 1550-1560 and English seven-
teenth-century Puritanism argues that Protestants ‘internalized a different
way of relating to time and developed a new approach to their daily sched-
ule’.65 David Landes puts an earlier date on the development of ‘time thrift’,
but agrees that the watch was particularly important to Protestants, describing
Calvinist Europe’s uniquely ‘chronometric’ character.66 Given such a long tra-
dition of associating attention to time and, by extension, timepieces with
63 White ‘The Iconography of Temperantia’, 217. The clock may also allude to More’s well-ordered house-
hold, where his authority as head of the family causes it to run like clockwork: a metaphor explicit in later liter-
ature, cf. Ste. B’s Counsel to the husband: to the wife instruction (1608), 40–1.
64 Hamling, Decorating the Godly Household, 113, 116.
65 Max Engammare, On Time, Punctuality and Discipline in Early Modern Calvinism, trans. Karin Maag
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 2.
66 Landes, Revolution in Time, 90–2.
Tudor time machines 23
Fig. 10 ‘Temperance’, Bodleian MS Laud 570, fol.16r (detail)
Christina Juliet Faraday24
Protestant, especially Calvinist, theology, it is important to ask whether the
clock is a symbol with particularly Protestant resonances.
At least when it comes to the clock-making profession, the demographics
favour Protestantism. Of 189 clockmakers recorded in Augsburg in the period
1550–1560 whose religion is known, 87.3% of clockmakers were Protestant
(165 individuals) and only 12.69% were Catholic (24 individuals).67 According
to Landes, in Geneva watches filled a professional gap; when Calvin frowned
on the frivolous jewellery trade, jewellers could save their businesses by con-
verting to the production of useful timepieces.68 David Thompson states that
the spread of watch-making to London during the last quarter of the sixteenth
century was at least partly a result of religious persecution abroad, as Dutch
Protestant watchmakers fled from their Catholic Spanish occupiers.69 Similarly
the Genevan watch-making community received an influx of skilled craftsmen
from eastern France, fleeing Catholic persecution at the start of the Thirty
Years’ War.70 Watchmakers, then, were more likely to be Protestant, although
this is true of craftsmen in general, particularly in fine metal work.71 When it
comes to users of timepieces things are less clear-cut.
Clocks feature in Catholic and Protestant texts alike. Writers of both faiths
suggest that the sound of the clock striking should remind the hearer to pray.
Protestants Thomas Bentley (1582) and Francis Trigge (1602) set out prayers
for readers to say when they ‘heare the clocke strike’,72 while John Wilson, a
Catholic, listed ‘Indulgences To be gayned euery houre, at the striking of the
Clocke’.73 Both denominations use the clock as a metaphor for the soul,
which must be metaphorically ‘wound up’ with devotions at least twice each
day:
as they that haue the charge and keeping of a Clocke, are wont euerye day twice
to winde vp the plummets, for they of their owne proper motion doe by little
and little descende, and drawe towardes the ground: so they that desire to keep
their soules vpright, and well ordered, ought at the least twice a day to erect and
lift vp her weightes: seeing that our wretched nature is so inclynable to thinges
below, that it alwayes endeuoureth to sinke downwards.
(Luis de Granada, Granados deuotion (1598), 102–3)74
67 Eva Groiss, ‘The Augsburg Clockmaker’s Craft’, in Maurice and Mayr, The Clockwork Universe, 65, table 2.
The religion of an additional 95 clockmakers is unknown.
68 Landes, Revolution in Time, 92. Plain English ‘Puritan watches’ survive from after 1630, e.g. Gold puri-
tan-style verge watch by Robert Grinkin the younger, allegedly worn by Oliver Cromwell, c.1630–40, British
Museum 1786,0928.1.
69 Thompson, Watches, 10.
70 Ibid.
71 See Alexander Marr, ‘Treasured Possessions in Tudor and Stuart England’, in Victoria Avery, Melissa
Calaresu and Mary Laven (eds.), Treasured possessions: from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, exh. cat. (London:
Philip Wilson, 2015), 66.
72 Thomas Bentley, The monument of matrones (1582), 365, 998; Jean Taffin, The amendment of life (1595), 531.
73 John Wilson, The treasury of deuotion (1622), 552.
74 See also Francis de Sales, An Introduction to a deuoute life (1613), 88. Granada was Catholic, but the metaphor
also appealed to Protestants, and is quoted in Francis Meres’ anthology Palladis Tamia, Wits Treasury (1598), 49.
Tudor time machines 25
This diversity is mirrored in clock portraits, in which Protestant and
Catholic sitters are shown with timepieces.
Clocks appear in many Protestant portraits; the Wittewrongheles, Figs. 2
and 3, who fled to England from the Netherlands to avoid religious persecu-
tion by the Spanish in 1564, are shown with a table and wall-clock respec-
tively.75 Anne Fettiplace, Fig. 7, who married Henry Jones, a member of an
Anglican family, has a watch and winding key at her waist.76 At the University
of Cambridge, the portraits of John Whitgift, Archbishop of Canterbury under
Elizabeth I, and his friend Thomas Nevile, chaplain to Elizabeth I, portray
their sitters with table clocks, religious books and tools of scholarly activity.
Finally in the portrait of Alice, Lady Lucy, a Puritan gentlewoman (c.1622), a
clock with its winding key on a piece of blue ribbon emerges from the shadows
at her right elbow.77 The inclusion of winding keys in several of these portraits
perhaps alludes to the frequently-given advice to ‘wind up’ the soul with spir-
itual exercises.
Clocks also feature in pictures of Catholics. A full length portrait of Margaret
Douglas, Countess of Lennox, whose house became the centre for Roman
Catholics in England during Edward VI’s reign, includes an exquisite filigree
table clock.78 Dr David Kinloch (1608) at the Tayside Medical History Museum
Art Collection, University of Dundee79 reads in his open book a variation on
the Hippocratic aphorism ‘vita brevis ars longa’, next to which sits a reminder
of that ‘brevity’ in the form of a cylindrical table clock. To these can be added
sitters without a strong confessional identity, such as successful merchant
adventurer John Isham, Fig. 4, whose modern biographer concludes that,
‘ill-educated and almost illiterate,’ he was probably ‘an untroubled conform-
ist’ when it came to questions of religious practice.80 Clocks could hold reli-
gious significance, but to be painted with one did not in itself indicate any
particular religious preference.
Although clocks crossed the religious divide, they arguably had distinct res-
onances for each denomination. For Margaret Douglas, the clock may suggest
the theme of patience in adversity, and her hope that her Roman Catholic faith
would be vindicated in time. For Protestants, especially Calvinists, the clock’s
ability to represent interior events on its exterior made it a particularly appro-
priate metaphor, as they wondered whether they were among the ‘elect’ –
those predestined for heaven. In texts a person’s tongue or actions were
75 Cooper, Elizabeth I and Her People, 142.
76 M. Hodgetts, ‘Elizabethan Priest-Holes: Harvington’, Recusant History, 14 (1978), 117.
77 Charlecote Park, Warwickshire (National Trust). See Richard Cust, ‘Lucy , Alice, Lady Lucy (c.1594–
1648)’, DNB (2004, repr. online Jan 2008: www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/66713 (accessed April 2015).
78 Royal Collection 401183. Rosalind K. Marshall, ‘Douglas, Lady Margaret, countess of Lennox (1515–
1578)’, DNB (2004, repr. online, May 2006): www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/7911 (accessed April 2015).
79 Kinloch’s faith was flexible, but he apparently converted to Catholicism in France; Adam Yagüi-Beltrán
and Laura Adam, ‘The Imprisonment of David Kinloch, 1588-1594...’, The Innes Review, 53 (2002), 1–39.
80 Ramsay, John Isham, xci.
Christina Juliet Faraday26
sometimes compared to the bell or dial of the clock, revealing the inner state
of their soul. The Calvinist episcopalian clergyman Thomas Adams makes an
explicit link between the interior/exterior conception of the clock and the
idea of salvation in his sermons:
Faith doth iustifie, and workes do testifie that we are iustified. In a clocke, the
finger of the dyall makes not the clocke to goe, but the clocke it: yet the finger
without shewes how the clocke goes within. Our external obedience is caused
by our inward faith; but that doth manifest how truly the clocke of our faith
goes.
(Adams, A divine herball together with a forrest of thornes (1616), 39)81
Of course, Catholics were also concerned about their spiritual health, and
the clock metaphor is used by Spanish Catholic Diego de Estella in his A meth-
ode unto mortification, translated into English in 1586 and republished 1608: ‘If
the clocke haue his wheele distempered within, the bell without will sound
false; but if they goe true within, then will the bell without strike truely, and
tell the right houre of the day, by thy disordinate words thy disordered con-
science doth appeare’.82 The idea that words or actions demonstrate the soul’s
health is not unique to either denomination. Yet, the clock’s unidirectional
system made it especially suitable as a metaphor for Protestants who believed
in salvation by faith alone. Although Catholic Estella plays on the universal
Christian idea that good words indicate a healthy conscience, he omits any
reference to a one-way direction of influence. For Protestants like Adams,
good works ‘testifie that we are iustified’, but do not affect the health of the
soul: ‘the finger of the dyall makes not the clocke to goe, but the clocke it’.83
This one-way traffic, from faith to justification to action, better fits the clock
metaphor than the Catholic belief that good works contribute to salvation.
The difficulty of showing good works or a true tongue (and thus, one’s sta-
tus as elect) in portraits encouraged artists and patrons to find metaphorical
ways of demonstrating the godly quality of their souls. The clock’s associations
in literature seem to have recommended it for this role. The portrait of
William Chester, Fig. 6, painted around the time he became Lord Mayor of
London (c.1560), is a prime example. Chester was a powerful supporter of
London’s Protestants, famous for his sympathy towards the Marian martyrs,
and in his household anti-Catholic texts were openly circulated.84 Chester is
shown standing in front of a weight-driven wall clock. On the lower weight
perches a skeleton, looking towards the viewer. The phrase ‘deathe at hande’
81 Cf. Benson, A sermon preached at Paules Crosse, 42; Hakewill, King Dauids vow, 191–2.
82 Diego de Estella, A methode vnto mortification, (1608), 416.
83 Adams, A divine herball, 39.
84 His loyalty to the crown during Wyatt’s rebellion probably explains his knighthood under Mary in 1557.
J. D. Alsop, ‘Chester, Sir William (c.1509–1595?)’, DNB (2004, repr. online edn, Jan 2008): www.oxforddnb.
com/view/article/5240 (accessed April 2015).
Tudor time machines 27
is inscribed twice: on the weight itself and above the skeleton. From the higher
weight the figure of the Risen Christ waves to us, holding the white flag of
Resurrection, his inscription ‘hope to live’ also shown twice.85 Cooper points
out that Chester died intestate sometime after the 1570s, so we may wonder
whether the portrait really kept death in the alderman’s mind; nevertheless,
his portrait clearly alludes to themes of mortality and concern for his soul.
This is not simply vanitas. The figures of Christ and Death on the clock effec-
tively turn a domestic object into a psychomachia. Sitting on the upper weight,
Christ appears in the ascendant, and in contrast to other portraits where the
clock reads 12, the hour hand on Chester’s clock points optimistically at 1.
This portrait demonstrates Chester’s piety, making visible the otherwise-invis-
ible good health of his soul.
Clocks appealed to Protestants and Catholics alike, representing themes
universal to Christian salvation. In the English context, however, the nuances
of clocks’ meanings were varied. For Catholics, patience and hope for an
eventual return to the true faith could be symbolised by a clock on a table or
a watch in the hand; for Protestants, the clockwork mechanism could suggest
the fundamental character of their justifying faith. In both cases, clocks in
portraits expressed hope and the soul’s health in ways that would have been
immediately intelligible to fellow readers of devotional texts and sermons.
CLOSING TIME
The period c.1530 –c.1630 was one of expanding horizons. Interactions be-
tween adherents of different faiths produced conflict, but also forced writers
to clarify their own beliefs. As the sixteenth century progressed, more lands
and more ‘heathens’ were discovered to the west, in the Americas; here, ci-
vilisations untouched by ‘modernity’ and Christianity furnished awestruck
accounts of the ‘newfound world’. Nicholas Monardes contrasts ‘Indian’ cul-
ture with European resources and technologies:
Iron & Steele do serue to make clockes, which is a thing of greate art, & very
necessary to liue wt rule & order: for by them shall be knowe[n] the works that
are to be made, & the time that shal be spent in them, they serue for all states
of people, whereby they may liue wisely & discretely: & where is no clocke they
liue like beasts
(Monardes, Ioyfull newes out of the newfound world (1580), f.148)
85 The white paper in his hand once had a six-line text, now illegible. Cooper, Citizen Portrait, 98.
Christina Juliet Faraday28
This is one of the grandest claims that we have encountered for the clock’s
importance. Not only ‘a thing of great art’, ‘very necessary’ for a life of ‘rule
and order,’ according to Monardes, clocks also defined advanced civilisation.
This article has shown that the clock was not primarily a utilitarian object in
the period c.1530–c.1630. Though idiosyncratic and inaccurate, its mechani-
cal system won it an unrivalled place in the early modern imagination. In texts,
clocks were used as analogies for the body, the soul, family, society, commerce,
the heavens, and even as proof of the divine clockmaker’s existence. The most
technologically-advanced machine of its age (and for centuries afterwards), it
became a lens through which early modern writers and thinkers viewed their
world. By drawing together textual references and contextual information,
this article has set out the profound importance of the mechanical timepiece
in England, and explained possible reasons why fashionable, pious, wealthy
and metaphysically-anxious men and women had themselves portrayed with
clocks and watches.
As a case-study for a systematised, holistic approach to the interpretation of
early modern cultural products, this essay has combined primary written and
visual sources to reveal the multiplicity of meanings that clocks could hold in
Tudor and Early Stuart England. Their metaphorical adaptability allowed
them to play a key role in the self-presentation of early modern people, ren-
dering in imagery the personal beliefs and interior lives which were otherwise
nearly impossible to represent visually. Clocks were precious objects: they
were also richly suggestive objects, with vast imaginative and religious dimen-
sions, considered to be the defining achievement of humanity – for ‘where is
no clocke they liue like beasts’.86
University of Cambridge
86 Monardes, Ioyfull newes (1580), f.148.
