Two groups of stately gentlemen look our way from a long table decorated with an Anatolian tapestry. Both are dressed in the early modern Spanish style – simple pitch-black robes and white ruffs. The cohort on the left represented the Spanish crown, to be sure. But the almost identical one on the right was British. They were meeting at Somerset House in London in 1604 to sign a peace treaty and end decades of New World warfare and intrigue. Though the two governments were at odds, the clothing styles and designs for overseas supremacy were nearly indistinguishable.
Somerset House Conference
Somerset House Conference, 1604 (courtesy of National Portrait Gallery, London).
Adrian Masters
Further reading
- Colomer, J.L., and A. Descalso (eds.) (2014) Spanish Fashion at the Courts of Early Modern Europe, vol. 2 (Madrid: CEEH).
- Contreras Sánchez, A. (1990) Historia de una tintórea olvidada: el proceso de explotación y circulación del palo de tinte, 1750–1807 (Mérida: Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán).
- Cooper, M. (1974) Rodrigues the Interpreter: An Early Jesuit in Japan and China (New York, NY: Weatherhill).
- Elliott, J.H. (1990) Imperial Spain, 1469–1716 (London: Penguin Books).
- Harvey, J. (1995) Men in Black (New York, NY: Columbia University Press).
- Jarvis, M.J. (2010) In the Eye of All Trade: Bermuda, Bermudians, and the Maritime Atlantic World, 1680–1783 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press).
- McDonald, K.P. (2018) ‘“Sailors from the woods:” Logwood cutting and the spectrum of piracy’, in The Golden Age of Piracy: The Rise, Fall,and Enduring Popularity of Pirates, edited by Head, 50–74 (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press).
- Netherton, R., and G.R. Owen-Crocker (eds.) (2007) Medieval Clothing and Textiles, vol. 3 (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press).
- Pastoureau, M. (2008) Black: The History of a Color (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press).
- Record, S.J., and R.W. Hess (1943) Timbers of the New World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press).
- Richmond Ellis, R. (2012) They Need Nothing: Hispanic-Asian Encounters of the Colonial Period (Toronto: University of Toronto Press).
- Roquero, A. (2006) Tintes y tintoreros de América (Madrid: Ministerio de Cultura).
- Tiesler, V., and M.C. Lozada (eds.) (2018) Social Skins of the Head: Body Beliefs and Ritual in Ancient Mesoamerica and the Andes (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press).
- Valentini, M.B. (1704) Museum Museorum, oder Vollständige Schau-Bühne aller Materialen und Specereyen (Frankfurt am Main: Verlegung Johann David Zunners).
