Abstract:
This thesis is a comparative study looking at the social, political, and religious influences on the portraiture of the foreign Stuart queen consorts at the English court – Anna of Denmark, Henrietta Maria, Catherine of Braganza, and Mary of Modena. Their expected role as mothers of future kings was central, as was their identities as Catholic queens in a Protestant society. It also examines the role played by the portraiture of Queen Elizabeth I as a formative influence on their visual identities. In doing so, it considers the differences between the power of a queen regnant and a queen consort, and the impact such differences have on portraiture and feminine articulations of power in the seventeenth century. The result is a legacy of feminine power established by the Stuart consorts, who negotiated the limits of their power and carved out their own niche of power. This involved transferring the authority expounded by Elizabeth in her portraiture to the domestic realm. In doing so, they also consolidated the Stuart dynasty through establishing a thread of continuity between the visual identities of the successive consorts, mother to daughter-in-law, creating a power and sense of feminine dynasty previously unacknowledged.
