• 1 All subsequent references are to Sir William Foster C. I. E. (ed.), The Embassy of Sir Thomas Roe t (...)
• 2 Richmond Barbour, Before Orientalism: London’s Theatre of the East, 1576-1626, Cambridge, Cambridge (...)

1The Embassy of Sir Thomas Roe, a collection of journal entries, notes and letters from 1615-1619,1 offers an insight into both the royal embassy to the Great Mogul and Roe’s ‘rhetorical space to collect himself and exercise the dignity and influence denied him elsewhere.’2 These documents show that following many rebukes and failed attempts at finding the right presents to convince the Emperor of granting the English trading privileges, Thomas Roe resorted to providing the Emperor with a miniature by Isaac Oliver from his personal collection.

• 4 I am here borrowing from and referring to Lisa Jardine and Jerry Brotton’s Global Interests. Renais (...)

2Although Roe’s idea of using pictures as diplomatic currency comes as no surprise, one question remains unanswered: why would the ambassador choose a miniature, of all formats, to (re)present himself and his country? Starting from this highly revealing and much discussed moment of political performance and negotiation in The Embassy, one may try and understand why miniatures would feature both among curiosities and political negotiations ‘between East and West’ in Roe’s journal.4

• 5 Court Minutes of the East India Company, quoted by Ram Chandra Prasad in Early English Travellers i (...)

3Thomas Roe was appointed as the first duly accredited English ambassador to India after several failed attempts by previous expeditions to secure trading privileges in the area, namely William Hawkins and Henry Middleton’s ventures. In September 1612, Thomas Best had managed to obtain an agreement with local officials, one article of which stipulated that an English representative should be allowed to reside at the Mughal court. After he returned to England in 1614 and acquainted the East India Company with the news, the Company’s Committees appointed Sir Thomas Roe as their official ambassador. Roe had been knighted in 1604 and was deemed by the directors of the company ‘a gentleman well knowne unto them all to bee of pregnant understandinge, well spoken, learned, industrious and of a comely personage, and one of whom there are great hopes that hee may worke much good for the company.’5 As James I granted Roe the needed accreditation, his mission was then defined in the following terms (this I quote from the Company’s Agreement of 16 November 1614):

• 7 See Hakluytus Posthumus, or Purchas His Pilgrims Contayning a History of the World in Sea Voyages a (...)

4Throughout the three years and a half that Roe spent in India trying to deal and negotiate with Jahangir, the ambassador wrote a rather detailed journal of his stay. Only the first two years can be consulted in the British Library manuscript, which was published at full length for the first time by the Hakluyt Society in London in 1899. As to the third year, the journal records being incomplete, the reader has to rely on the embassy extracts given in Samuel Purchas’s Hakluytus Posthumus or Purchas his Pilgrim,7 while details from the fourth year boil down to particulars gleaned from correspondence.

• 8 Edward Terry, A Voyage to East-India, London, J. Wilkie, 1777 (reprinted from the 1655 edition).
• 9 Corinne Lefèvre, ‘Entre despotisme et vertu : les représentations de l’Inde dans A Voyage to East-I (...)
• 10 Ram Chandra Prasad, op. cit.

5Some of the episodes mentioned in the present article feature in both Roe’s Embassy and the relation of the voyage left by Edward Terry, Roe’s own chaplain. That relation, entitled A Voyage to East-India, was first published in 1655.8 The two texts are chronologically arranged, though Terry’s account is divided into chapters recording some events or considerations without systematic dating. Roe’s journal, on the contrary, reads as a series of carefully dated entries, recording his every move and attempt. The two accounts may be considered limited in scope: Corinne Lefèvre has convincingly argued in an article on Terry’s Voyage to East-India that the chaplain’s own relations with the East India Company, the Reformed Church and the English crown somehow filter Terry’s narrative, in spite of his efforts in documenting objectively his Indian experience.9 The space and time limitations of his stay may also account for the relatively restrictive view he offered. As to Roe’s own journal, commentators such as Ram Chandra Prasad have noted that it was also limited in scope, focusing on the royal palace and activities, on political conditions rather than on a social picture of the customs of the inhabitants.10 Curiosity does not therefore appear as the main motivation behind the writings of the two men. Yet curiosity and curiosities played a great part in Roe’s long and seemingly never-ending negotiations with Jahangir.

• 11 Ibid., p. 132.
• 12 The early modern culture of diplomacy (and diplomacy of culture) has attracted renewed attention fr (...)

6Upon arrival, after close to a year of travelling, Roe learned that the Portuguese were ‘pressing a treaty with the Mughal Emperor which would result in the absolute exclusion of the English from all ports of his empire.’ 11 Roe had thus landed in the midst of a raging commercial competition in which he would have to work hard in order to further English interests. Gift-giving was one – if not the first – way of engaging in negotiations aimed at obtaining the Emperor’s favours and trading privileges.12 The value – whether symbolic or economic – of the English ambassador’s gifts to the Emperor is indeed truly an obsessive motif in Roe’s journal, and a true measuring stick of the ambassador’s chances of success. Roe writes for example:

• 16 Ibid., p. 171.
• 17 Ibid., p. 210.
• 18 Ibid., p. 146.

10The smallness of the box, and therefore, the dainty work it required, was an important feature. Upon the occasion of a visit to Asaph Chan, Roe writes that the latter commented that the English ‘brought not so curious toyes for the King as did the Portugall’,16 which partially accounted for Jahangir’s refusal to sign a definitive agreement. As recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary, the word toy, in early modern English, meant ‘a small article of little intrinsic value, but prized as an ornament or curiosity’ or ‘a petty commodity’. Aware of such reproaches, Roe later addressed the Emperor using the same word again, arguing that ‘for curious and rare toyes, we haue better meanes to furnish your highnes then any other, our kingdom abounding with all arts and our shipping trading into all the world, wherby there is nothing vnder the sunne which wee are not able to bring, if we knew your highnes pleasure, what you did most affect.’17 Curious and rare toys, or small objects, such as the little box, were accordingly endowed with renewed value. Roe seems to have fully grasped the opportunity he had just created for himself, the Company and the Crown, as he visited the Emperor the day after he gave him the box to try and ‘establish a fayre and secure trade and residence for my countrymen.’ 18

• 20 Ibid., p. 97.
• 21 Ibid., p. 119.
• 22 Samuel Purchas, Hakluytus Posthumous or Purchas his Pilgrimes, op. cit., vol. 3, p. 516.

11Things rare, unseen and excellent then became Roe’s favoured diplomatic asset in the race to secure trade agreements. The first example he gives it that of excellent paintings. As far as pictures were concerned, Roe complained to the company that the Emperor was being sent better pictures than the ones he had brought, ‘rich Pictures […] comming out of Italy ouerland and from Ormus; soe that they laugh at vs for such as wee bring.’20 Pictures thus figure prominently in the competition for trade privileges. On January 25, 1616, Roe even gives a precise description of the type of pictures that may qualify as ‘rare’ and unusual: ‘pictures, lardge, on cloth […]; but they must be good, and for varyetye some story, with many faces, for single to the life hath been more vsuall.’21 The year before, in 1615, John Saris, coming back to London from Japan, was also quite specific on matters relating to pictures to be taken to the Japanese, suggesting they should also be ‘large’, as is attested by his observations to the East India Company, specifying that paintings should be: “the bigger, the better, worth one, two to three hundred.’22

• 27 Francis Meres, Palladis Tamia. Wits Treasury. Being the Second Part of Wits Commonwealth, London, 1 (...)

16Hilliard, the most famous portrait limner of the Elizabethan court, is thus equated with the greatest Italian artists, specialists of greater formats and genre painting. Some years later, in 1598, Frances Meres, in his Palladis Tamia, wrote that ‘as learned and skilfull Greece had these [Parrhasios and Zeuxis] excellently renowned for their limning: so England hath these; Hiliarde, Isaac Oliver and Iohn de Creetes, very famous for their painting.’27 Here again, the excellent renown of limners owes nothing to ‘curiosity’ intended as the delicate craftsmanship of jewels or toys, and miniaturists are compared to the greatest artists.

• 28 Lomazzo, Tracte, Book II, chapt. 1, ‘Of the Virtue and Efficacie of Motion’, trans. Richard Haydock (...)
• 29 R. Strong, op. cit., p. 108.
• 30 Lucy Gent, Picture and Poetry, 1560-1620, Leamington Spa, James Hall Limited, 1981, p. 8. The word (...)
• 31 One may here turn to the use of the word ‘curious’ in Hilliard’s A Treatise Concerning the Arte of (...)

17That same year, Richard Haydocke, translating or rather adapting Giovanni Paolo Lommazo’s Trattato dell’arte de la pittura into English, compared Hilliard to ‘late world wonders’ such as Raphael, explaining how he brought limning to ‘the perfection of painting.’28 ‘Writing at the close of the century in the patriotic afterglow of the Spanish Armada’,29 Haydocke thus acknowledges the status that limners had come to achieve in England’s rewriting and adaptation of the continental history of art. One further relevant reason to mention Haydocke’s text is that the Italian title was translated into English as Tracte Containing the Artes of Curious Paintinge, Caruinge & Buildinge (Oxford, 1598). The word ‘curious’ was then frequently associated with both continental and English painters, which, according to Lucy Gent ‘by no means aided the cause of art-painting in England at a time when curious tended to have pejorative overtones.’30 But though this might be true of greater scale painting, if one turns to some limners’ own texts published in the years when Oliver was alive and limning, one realises that the word ‘curious’ was not meant as a reference to complex and elaborate optical devices such as anamorphosis – which it later came to refer to – but rather as ‘precise’ and ‘true to life’, a sort of perfect perspectiva artificialis, a meaning which I think should be added to the phrase Roe uses: ‘for curyositie rare’.31 Oliver’s miniature was not considered a curious toy but a curious and rare picture as such, as valuable as other larger format European pictures, and perhaps even more so, given the essential Englishness and uniqueness associated to it in the eyes of the court from which the ambassador was coming.

• 32 R. Strong, op. cit., p. 115.
• 33 Paradoxically enough, Hilliard was frequently presented as England’s very own Michaelangelo, while (...)

18For precision’s sake, though I have up to now referred to early modern English limners as a single group, I’d like to insist upon the difference between Elizabethan and Jacobean portrait miniatures, and more particularly between the styles of Hilliard and Oliver. Although Frances Meres puts Hilliard and Oliver on a par, Haydocke’s treatise on ‘curious paintinge’ coincides with Oliver’s return from Italy, after which he progressively did away with the ‘prevailing medieval concept of painting as line and colour’, which still characterized much of Hilliard’s production. Oliver turned instead to the use of ‘shadow and perspective to achieve total optical illusion.’32 His understanding of perspective, much more developed than Hilliard, is most visible in his full-length miniatures. Whereas Hilliard is generally described as the last neo-medievalist painter in England, Oliver’s techniques conversely grant him the status of a fully-fledged Renaissance artist.33 The ‘little painting’ that Roe decided to give as a present to Jahangir was thus supposed to be rare and curious, English in format and Italian in technique.

• 35 Ania Loomba, ‘Of Gifts, Ambassadors and Copy-Cats: Diplomacy, Exchange, and Difference in Early Mod (...)
• 36 A. Loomba, op. cit., p. 58.
• 37 Peter Stallybrass mentions Roe’s embassy as further evidence of early modern England’s marginality (...)
• 38 I am here using – and transforming – Lisa Jardine and Jerry Brotton’s subtitle to Global Interests (...)

20The Mughal emperor meant to demonstrate that they could not only replicate but also improve European artefacts, a way of asserting symbolic victory over his presumptuous guest. The English’s wrong estimation of the Mughal’s alleged reaction backfires in at least two ways. First, Roe does not estimate correctly the value of the ‘curiosity’ he thought he was presenting, miscalculating the price and prestige that could be given to the miniature, and thinking it would work wonders (or curiosities) in the same way the little crystal box had done. Three Jesuit missions with similarly blighted hopes of seduction had already brought European pictures into India. To sum up a point already compellingly made by Ania Loomba, the reception of the pictures in the specific Mughal context demonstrated the Mughal court’s ‘ability to copy closely as well as to infuse the Christian figures with a different spirit to place them in Indian settings.’35 This may be accounted for by the fact that ‘Christian imagery was perhaps less threatening to the Mughals than to the Ottomans, where the contiguity of Imperial territories with the European frontier resulted in a much more reserved attitude towards European imagery, in spite of its availability in much larger quantities than in Mughal India.’36 The failure of the ‘curiosity strategy’ is further confirmed by the fact that though both Terry and Roe speak of the episode as a rather striking moment in their voyage, it is nowhere mentioned in Mughal texts such as the Jahangir Nama, thus testifying to the difficulty for foreign and European ambassadors to evaluate, price and speculate upon the rate of curiosity in a global economy centred in the east.37 The geographical enlargement of artistic horizons that those embassies opened up meant that ambassadors and their retinue were confronted with the relativity of the notion of ‘curious’ in painting. As new cultural maps were unfolding under the world’s eyes, ‘East and West fixed each other with a […] [curious] gaze.’38 As a result, the bathetic story of the miniatures in Roe’s Embassy reveals how much the rate and meaning of early modern ‘curiosity’ needs to be scrutinised with global geographies in mind… and eye.