The creature represented on this 16th-century piece of silk embroidery by Mary, Queen of Scots and labelled ‘A TATOU’ is a South American armadillo. How did Mary obtain a model for her needlework? This piece is one of 22 like it mounted, together with four octagonal panels, around a square central panel on a large green velvet hanging known as the Cavendish Hanging. It is now kept at Oxburgh Hall in Norfolk, England, on loan from the Victoria and Albert Museum of London. The Cavendish Hanging owes its name to the presence of the Cavendish coat of arms, testimony to the ties between the Cavendish family (Elizabeth Hardwick, better known as Bess of Hardwick, had married Sir William Cavendish in 1547) and Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots. Bess’s monogram appears on it three times and Mary’s once. After her forced abdication as queen of Scotland in 1567, Mary, who was Catholic, spent 16 years in the custody of Bess and her fourth husband, George Talbot, earl of Shrewsbury, in Chatsworth House, Tutbury Castle and other seats of the family. It was probably during the early years of Mary’s captivity that the two women and their staff of professional embroiderers produced most of this needlework.

Although both of Mary’s custodians were supporters of Elizabeth and staunch Protestants, Mary and Bess shared a love of flowers and an interest in natural history as well as dexterity with the needle. A letter from the earl of Shrewsbury to William Cecil reports, ‘this Queen continueth daily to resort unto my wife’s chamber where with the Lady Lewiston and Mrs Seton she useth to sit working with the needle in which she much delighteth and in devising works’. Brought up in the French court from the age of five and queen of France at the age of 16, Mary had learned the art of embroidery from her future mother-in-law, Catherine de’ Medici, who had brought professional embroiderers with her from Italy when she married Henry II. In fact, Mary was one of the first to launch this type of needlework in England.

Her custody with the Cavendishes was not particularly strict, and she was able to correspond with a number of individuals at home and abroad and thus have access to their publications. These were the years when the first important illustrated printed works on fauna and flora were appearing on the continent. Indeed, it has been demonstrated that Mary’s plant-slip embroideries are derived from the illustrated herbal of Pietro Andrea Mattioli and that several of the birds and animals that appear in the embroideries are taken from the publications of the Swiss naturalist Conrad Gessner and the French court cosmographer André Thevet. Her sources may also have included interior and exterior decorative schemes that could be seen in France, Scotland or England, such as that in Hardwick Hall. In addition, she may have had the opportunity to see some preserved exotic specimens in one of the chambers of curiosity that were becoming increasingly popular over the course of the 16th century, although England was a late starter in this field.

André Thevet had brought back to France from Brazil animal and bird skins, a bow and arrows, a headdress made of toucan feathers and other items from his ten-week stay in South America. Inventories of Mary’s possessions drawn up in Scotland soon after her return from France include natural curiosities such as ‘the beik of a foule of India or Brasile’, along with precious stones and other items. Thevet certainly provided her with some exotic images from America: the opossum-looking creature called the su, a toucan and another bird, labelled as ‘A BYRDE AMERICA’ (perhaps to be identified with the blond-crested woodpecker that is today found in the Chaco region between Argentina and Amazonia), which is adjacent to the ‘TATOU’ on the Cavendish Hanging.

However, neither Conrad Gessner nor André Thevet was Mary’s source in the case of the armadillo. Thevet described the armadillo, but he failed to provide an illustration. Gessner did include a woodcut of a ‘tatou’ in two of his publications, but differences in posture indicate that this is not the source of Mary’s armadillo either.

In this case – as not infrequently happens – we find the first known printed image of an armadillo in a work that has nothing to do with the Americas. The French naturalist Pierre Belon du Mans had developed a passion for the study of the world of nature while growing up in Brittany. He went on to study botany and medicine and travelled widely to Venice, Turkey, Egypt, Syria, Anatolia and Constantinople between 1546 and 1549. These and his other travels back and forth across Europe suggest that he was acting as an undercover agent as well, though whether his murder in the Bois de Boulogne in 1565 was due to these activities, to his outspoken condemnation of the Protestants or simply to being in the wrong place at the wrong time remains a mystery. He published several works on his travels and on natural history in the 1550s.

In one of these, with the wide-ranging title Observations of Several Singularities and Memorable Things Found in Greece, Turkey, Judea, Egypt, Arabia and Other Foreign Countries, first published in Paris in 1553, Belon calls the armadillo a little creature from Brazil, unknown in antiquity, which is a kind of hedgehog, apparently mistaking the bristles on its shell for spikes.¹ It was not in America (which he never visited) but in the Turkish market in Constantinople that Belon saw an armadillo. By this time armadillos were no longer so rare in Europe. An Italian traveller from Florence, Galeotto Cei, noted the presence of dried Brazilian armadillos in Rouen at roughly the same time, and Belon himself claimed to have seen them living on grain and fruit in France. The woodcut illustration contained in the final chapter of his book on the voyage to the Levant shows the armadillo as represented by Mary in her embroidery. Although it is facing in the opposite direction, its posture – and the evidence of other borrowings from Belon by Mary such as her images of a monkfish (‘SEA MOONKE’) and of an ape-like creature with female breasts and a long penis (‘AN APE OF TURKY’) – make it most likely that Belon’s image is the model for her embroidery.

Belon notes that the armadillo’s scaly armour was already common in many collections of curiosities because it is easy to preserve and transport over long distances. However, when an illustrator did not have access to an actual specimen and had to depend on a textual description alone, things could go very wrong. For example, the words used by Sir Walter Raleigh to describe the armadillo as being ‘barred over with small plates somewhat like to a Kenocero’² might explain why we find a rhinoceros on a German plaquette showing a personification of America – perhaps the artist assumed that this was what an American armadillo looked like.

Nevertheless, it is in a work on America first published in the Ottoman Empire as late as 1730 that we find one of the most curious descriptions and representations of an armadillo. According to the author of this remarkably out-of-date History of the India of the West, which draws on Italian translations of four early writers on America:

There is also an animal named ‘armadillo’ that resembles in shape a horse with a pack saddle. It is like a beast of burden … On its back it has a natural pack-saddle from under which its feet and tail protrude. It is the size of a dog.³

The bizarre attempts to represent the armadillo in the various manuscripts and printed editions of this work indicate just how a lack of familiarity with the creature in question could lead the illustrator astray.

So, the choice by Mary, Queen of Scots, at one time queen of France, to carry out her needlework in Derbyshire, Yorkshire and Staffordshire using an image of an American armadillo seen in the market in Constantinople by a French naturalist was, after all, an astute one.

FURTHER READING

Bath, M. (2008) Emblems for a Queen: The Needlework of Mary Queen of Scots (London: Archetype Publications).

Cei, G. (1992) Viaggio e relazione delle Indie (1539–1553), edited by F. Surdich (Rome: Bulzoni Editore).

Goodrich, T.D. (1990) The Ottoman Turks and the New World: A Study of Tarih-i Hindi-i Garbi and Sixteenth-Century Ottoman Americana (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz).

Levey, S.M. (2007) The Embroideries at Hardwick Hall: A Catalogue (National Trust).

Mason, P. (2009) Before Disenchantment: Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World (London: Reaktion Books).

Mason, P. (2015) ‘André Thevet, Pierre Belon and Americana in the embroideries of Mary Queen of Scots’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, vol. 78, 207–21.

Merle, A. (ed.) (2001) Voyage au Levant (1553): les observations de Pierre Belon du Mans (Paris: Chandeigne).

¹ P. Belon, Observations of Several Singularities and Memorable Things Found in Greece, Turkey, Judea, Egypt, Arabia and Other Foreign Countries (Paris, 1553), 210r.

² W. Raleigh, The Discoverie of the Large, Rich and Bewtiful Empyre of Guiana (London, 1596), 61.

³ T.D. Goodrich, The Ottoman Turks and the New World: A Study of Tarih-i Hindi-i Garbi and Sixteenth-Century Ottoman Americana (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1990), 305.