2The restoration in 2016–2019 of the Painted Hall, commonly called Britain’s “Sistine chapel”, has led to the first and long-awaited monograph about the gallery (Lucas, Johns, Stewart and Paine). The book comes after decades of research ever since Edward Croft-Murray’s pioneering inventory and complements the short but important catalogue devoted to Thornhill’s sketches and preparatory drawings for the ceiling (Croft-Murray I: 71; Matthews; Percival-Prescott; Balakier and Balakier; Baudino; Hamlett 107–108). Thornhill’s masterpiece deserved all these investigations given its important and complex iconography. The vault portrays nearly two hundred figures aiming to showcase the effect of good government upon the British navy, the economy, science and the arts, distributed among three areas distinguished by a trompe-l’oeil architecture. On each side of the refectory, under an arch overlooked by gods, a large vessel encircled by allegories of British cities and rivers pays tribute to the Empire’s naval forces. The large central section is pierced by an oval-shaped frame, where an intricate composition celebrates the English constitutional monarchy, and more specifically King William III and his wife, Queen Mary II, who have brought the Glorious Revolution to an end (Figure 1).

3This uprising took place in 1688 after King James II’s second wife, Mary of Modena, gave birth to a son, James Francis Stuart. If the heir was to access the crown rather than his two older Protestant half-sisters, Mary and Anne, it would have led to the return of Catholic absolutist power to the English throne. To avoid such a situation, the Whig party looked for help among the most important Protestant leaders of the time. At this point, William, the Dutch Stadtholder and Mary’s husband, saw an opportunity to unite his country and England, and landed in Brixham to fight the Stuart forces. James II’s flight to Saint-Germain-en-Laye, in France, was considered an abdication, and William and Mary were coronated King and Queen of England in 1689. On the ceiling, they are depicted under a canopy, surrounded by a great number of heroes, gods, and allegories that embody William III’s constitutional power, as opposed to oppressive authority, a figure of Tyranny, on which he tramples (Matthews 5).

4The political allegory (Figure 2), depicted at the very centre of the composition, is usually considered as representing Louis XIV, King of France (Matthews; Lucas, Johns, Stewart and Paine 72).

5This interpretation of the figure is very appealing as France has been Britain’s best enemy for centuries – need we remind that the British should “always blame the French” according to the famous adage? It was already the case in the early eighteenth-century, and some of the Greenwich directors, such as William Cavendish, 1^st duke of Devonshire, thought that French sovereignty was despotic and considered its abusive power as the exact opposite of Britain’s policy. Yet, if we are to take a closer look, this interpretation of the figure of Tyranny could be deemed a little simplistic. In terms of pure pictorial representation, nothing alludes to Louis XIV. The facial features are very dissimilar to the French King’s, the clothing is too humble to be royal and the prominent French wig is missing. None of the French King’s usual regalia is depicted: the dagger hold by the figure of Tyranny cannot represent Joyeuse, the magnificent royal sword, and the concealed crown, falling from its head, is very simple, far from an imposing royal tiara. Such details would have been decisive if the painter wanted the viewers to identify the figure from the floor, some twelve metres below, and it was not in Thornhill’s habit to avoid these iconographic elements. He was particularly meticulous in his portraits, especially when the conditions of viewing were not optimal. For instance, in the corners of the same ceiling, Tycho Brahe, Isaac Newton, Thomas Weston and John Flamsteed are very clearly depicted: they are quite small as they hold a secondary status in the composition, but they are recognisable owing to the presence of astronomical instruments by their sides (Percival-Prescott 56; Matthews 22). It is hence hardly possible that Thornhill deliberately omitted crucial representational elements if he wanted to point at Louis XIV in the very centre of the composition. Despite this, the assimilation between Tyranny and the French king in Greenwich ceiling has become a commonplace more agreed upon than questioned (Strunck 310). Based on this painted detail, this article aims to investigate how the history of this mural painting betrays the prevalence of political readings to the detriment of form and of the internal meaning.

6In order to do so, it is necessary to briefly come back to the context of the artwork production and reception which was particularly unsteady. The building had been conceived by Queen Mary and initiated after her death by William, but it was only under Queen Anne’s reign, in 1707, that the decoration of the refectory began. At the time the Hall was ready to be decorated, Thornhill had finished his apprenticeship with Thomas Highmore and had received his first commissions, a scenery for Drury Lane, the decoration of Stoke Edith and, more prestigious, a decorative scheme for Chatsworth (Lucas, Johns, Stewart and Paine 57). It may be this last work that prompted the Hospital directors to think about Thornhill to embellish the new hospital’s ceiling, as no competition is documented. The year Thornhill arrived in Greenwich, the Acts of Union brought England and Scotland together, politically uniting Britain. He worked for seven years on the ceiling, a period which saw the rising of the Tory government, characterised by strong monarchist tendencies, in 1710, and the end of the War of the Spanish Succession in 1713. In 1714, the year the ceiling was achieved, Queen Anne died and, as she had no progeny, the Act of Settlement, which ensured a Protestant succession to the English throne, was enforced, and the crown given to the Hanoverian George I. This marked the return of the Whig government, but Anne’s stepbrother, James Francis Stuart, acknowledged by the French King as James III since his father’s death in 1701, unsuccessfully continued to claim the crown and encouraged Jacobite risings.

7This paper aims to consider whether the given political and historical background had an impact on the conception of the ceiling and its subsequent readings, and whether they would justify an assimilation between Tyranny and the French king. It will adopt a chronological order, from Thornhill’s artistic models, his preparatory drawings, and the production background to the ceiling’s contemporary reception to understand when and why the association with Louis XIV appeared for the first time.

11Apart from these royal murals, Thornhill could also have seen Verrio’s paintings for private patrons. The emblems he painted under William III’s foot are very close to those painted by Verrio on the Great Chamber’s ceiling at Chatsworth House, where Thornhill was employed at the beginning of the following century. For the 1^st duke of Devonshire, the Italian had composed a Return of the Golden Age in 1691-1692, celebrating the restoration of peace after the Glorious Revolution and representing Queen Mary II as Cybele (Peterson). As in the Greenwich ceiling, an allegory of Fury tramples on the symbols of Catholicism and absolutism at the bottom of the composition. They are symbolised by a mitre, a Bible recognisable by the word “Deus” and two golden crowns which allude to monarchic despotic power. The condemnation of these emblems was more than welcome in the house of the Duke of Devonshire who had been a very active member of the country party, or first Whig party, and who had signed the invitation to William III to intervene in English affairs in 1688. Even if some historians have seen in the jewelled crown and in the sceptre in the background a connection with French monarchy (Peterson), it is much more likely that it refers to the new regalia that Charles II had ordered for his coronation, St Edward’s crown and sceptre.

13The only French model for Greenwich is its architecture based on les Invalides hospital in Paris, commissioned by Louis XIV at the end of the seventeenth century. As Wren’s assistant Nicholas Hawksmoor reported in his Remarks, the French prototype “should stir up the Emulation of other Nations (especially in cases so profitable as the Encouragement of our Seamen) to imitate this Example” (Hawksmoor 6). Indeed, Christopher Wren owned “a large Port Folio containing finished Drawings of the Hotel des Invalides at Paris” (Strunck 75). The weight of France in this architectural discourse has probably stimulated the interpretation of Thornhill’s interior design: it has been underscored that the architectural utterance must have found an echo in the ceiling’s decorative scheme. This connection between the exterior and the interior rested on Thornhill’s design itself as it presents an allegory of Architecture displaying a drawing of Greenwich Hospital’s elevation. Nevertheless, major differences with the Paris model are to be noted. The most readily identifiable one is the transformation of the French single dome, perceived by Wren as the symbol of absolutism, into two cupolas seen as an illustration of the British constitutional monarchy and hence expressing a clear dissociation from French politics.

15The decoration of the refectory appealed to the collective memory of the residents, most of whose had taken part in naval battles, especially those of the War of the Spanish Succession. However, France did not play a decisive role on the seas during the conflict as it was not yet an important maritime force, excepted at the Battle of Gibraltar. As it happens, this fight – or the capture of Minorca – is evoked by the vessels facing each other in the fake culs-de-four on each side of the hall. Spanish and English flags on the vessel’s bow reveal their origins but France is entirely omitted in this naval iconography. However, these battles guaranteed the preeminence of the English power in the Mediterranean Sea and made way to the most important maritime dominion of the eighteenth century. By extension, it is Queen Anne as “Empress of the Sea” (Gander) who is celebrated at both ends of the Painted Hall (Strunck). At the time of these military events the two monarchs at the centre of the composition were dead, even though Anne’s domination on the seas was made possible as she inherited the throne from her older sister Mary’s husband.

16In fact, the only symbol that could refer to France or Louis XIV at the centre of the composition is two tiny fleurs-de-lis on the base of the dagger held by the Tyranny figure which are barely visible from the ground (Lucas, Johns, Stewart and Paine 72). This motif was closely related to the Capetian dynasty and to the Bourbon kings who had been ruling France since 1589, and of whom Louis XIV was the direct successor. That said, Thornhill’s choice to refer to France only through a barely visible flower from the ground is curious as this pattern was highly equivocal. In the eighteenth century, it was a “very frequent” emblem according to James Coat’s New Dictionary of Heraldry, published in 1725, as “Lys is the Emblem of the Holy Trinity by reason of its three branches” (Coats 150). Hence, lilies – which were also present on the English kings’ crowns – were more a sign of Christianity than a reminder of the French kings’ coats of arms. The fleur-de-lis pattern is, as a matter of fact, also visible in the red flag on the galley above the entrance of the gallery, the one designated as Spanish and embodying both the Bourbon dynasty and the Catholic church.

18It appears the allegory of Tyranny in Thornhill’s painting was not supposed to depict Louis XIV and the only contemporaneous anti-French interpretation rests on a political standpoint. However, the allegorical figure must now be analysed per se to determine whether it was meant to depict someone specifically.

21To identity this figure, we must turn to Thornhill’s work method at Greenwich. The painter repeated motives to unify the painted surface and, most certainly, to hasten the execution. An inspection of other parts of the Hall reveals a personage identical to Tyranny on the North wall of the Upper Hall that Thornhill painted between 1718 and 1725. The grisaille painting shows the arrival of George I at Greenwich in 1714 (Figure 6).

23Thornhill’s description of the Upper Hall published in 1730 does not explicitly say if this second Tyranny allegory depicts a precise foe, but George I’s enemies are well known. His accession to the English throne put an end to all hopes for the Stuart dynasty in 1714 so the tumbling soldier can without any doubt be associated with them (Lucas, Johns, Stewart and Paine 97). Based on that observation, could the allegory under William III’s foot symbolise a Stuart, and more precisely, James, the Pretender?

24It turns out that all the equivocal arguments in favour of an anti-French interpretation of the Tyranny figure on the ceiling can precisely be understood as anti-Stuart. From a historical perspective, the ceiling of the Painted Hall celebrates William III’s victory over the Stuarts and their allies during the Glorious Revolution, a victory that marked the beginning of the new lineage, which ensured constitutional and Protestant monarchy over absolutism and Catholicism (Johns 2004, 159). As such, it is coherent that Wren rejected the single dome, and that Thornhill used Verrio’s artworks for Charles II as models in order to make Stuart decors outdated (Bird, Clayton and Fryman). The political context of Thornhill’s work also favoured an anti-Stuart message. His decorative scheme had been validated by a Hospital’s board committee irritated by James III’s invasion attempt in 1708 but most of the work had to be executed after the Whigs’ defeat in government in 1710. Thornhill had to work for the Whigs in the context of a Tory government. To resolve this discrepancy, the painter chose to depict all the allegorical figures in pseudo-antique costumes, showing that William III’s power and strength were timeless (Baudino 171). Playing down the political message was indeed safer for a painter who could still see his work being submitted to the royal veto and be proscribed (Strunck 23.). It nevertheless allowed political projections such as Richard Steele’s who may also have spoken of a “French personage” to allude to the Stuart alliance as he closely associated Stuarts, Jacobites and Tories with France: he referred to the Tory government as the “French administration” in a letter dated 1715 to the Whig minister-to be Robert Walpole (Steele 1809, II: 371). More generally, Whig fellows commonly associated despotic power and Jacobitism at the very beginning of the century, the first even defining the second: “by Jacobitism, I mean the Spirit of Tyranny and Oppression, which reign’d in the Persons of our two Princes before the Revolution”, wrote the famous author Daniel Defoe in 1709 (Defoe, Defoe’s Review, 6.18 (17 May 1709): 71, quoted in Bloom and Bloom 563). Furthermore, the association between the Stuart kings and despotic power had already been suggested in Louis Laguerre’s Painted Hall at Chatsworth executed between 1692 and 1694. On one of the murals, the killing of Julius Caesar by his son Brutus is depicted. In accordance with the patron’s political ideas, this murder celebrated the end of the Roman emperor’s despotic power and, in a more contemporary language, the fall of the Stuart dynasty (Peterson).

25If the interpretation of Tyranny as a member of the Stuart family is appealing, it nonetheless must be underlined that the allegory does not look like the Pretender: he was a young nobleman and there would have been no reason to depict him wearing a simple fighter outfit when he was the leader of the Jacobite army. It more probably represents a Jacobite soldier: it would not only justify the clothing, but also the numerous hints about the Catholic church, the masculinity of the figure and the link with Tyranny. Such a solution avoided pointing at individual enemies and gave the painting a universal dimension: whoever was the foe, it could be identified with the trampled figure.

26Revising the anti-French reading which was dominant about Greenwich ceiling so far requires recalling the political scope of the painted scheme, and, more widely of some other English painted ceilings. As a matter of fact, political approaches are almost always historically built and the voice delivering such interpretations should be analysed and not taken for granted. The description of Charles II’s apotheosis in Windsor written in 1685 spoke of a “lofty monumental Hall, / Where England’s Triumphs grace the shining Wall, / When she led captive Kings from conquer’d Gaul” (Otway, Windsor Castle, quoted in Strunck: 128) already revealing an anti-French political bias. It was indeed the author’s, Thomas Otway, interpretation, as he truly abhorred everything that had to do with the continent, rather than the king’s who had no open Francophobic intentions. This reading was nonetheless revitalised by Alexander Pope at the end of the War of the Spanish Succession. As the Treaty of Utrecht was about to recognise the British dominance, the poet saw in the ceiling the supremacy of Britain on its enemies, as even if “from her roofs when Verrio’s colours fall, / And leave inanimate the naked wall; / Still in thy song should vanquish’ d France appear, / And bleed for ever under Britain’s spear” (Pope 576 ). The last tumultuous years of the seventeenth century and the first years of the eighteenth century seem to have favoured personal readings of political decors and among the spectators, some Francophobic eyes fantasised the presence of French symbols. These comments were certainly a way to take some distance with the French production which until then had been an important artistic model. By bringing the English arts into opposition with their enemy’s well-established pictorial tradition, it confirmed a sense of “Britishness”, it granted the arts a strong political purpose and served to display the economic power of the nation (Colley).