1 Some of the research for this paper was carried out with the aid of grants from the Society of Antiquaries of London.

2 It was in response to the birth of this child that Sir Philip Sidney appeared in a joust in 15 80 bearing an impresa which referred to the dashing of his hopes. Strong, Roy C., The Cult of Elizabeth (London, 1977), 144.Google Scholar

3 Neale, J. E., Queen Elizabeth (London, 1934, repr. 1942), 229.Google Scholar

4 Jenkins, Elizabeth, Elizabeth and Leicester (London, 1961), 274–5.Google Scholar

5 Mounts, Charles E., ‘Spenser and the Countess of Leicester’, English Literary History 19 (1952), 194.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6 Jenkins, op. cit. (note 4), 252. The portrayal of naked infants is unusual in English art at this date, and may reflect Leicester's sophisticated taste, see Buxton, John, Elizabethan Taste (London, 1963), 99.Google Scholar

7 Jenkins, op. cit. (note 4), 252.

8 Ibid., 287–8.

9 See OED for the various meanings of imp.

10 In presenting this topic to the Society in 1990, I described this as a coronet, but was informed by several Fellows present (to whom I am grateful) that it was not a coronet, nor was Lord Denbigh entitled to one. This is, however, the only effigy of a child of this date which I know wearing a circlet, and I believe that it was placed there to denote his expectations of Earldom.

11 Aries, Philippe, Centuries of Childhood, trans. Baldick, Robert, (London, 1962), 54Google Scholar, maintains thatit is a mistake to designate the ribbons attached to the child's dress as leading-strings, but a drawing of 1615 by Hilliard of Elizabeth, Queen of Bohemia (reproduced in Strong, Roy C., Artists of the Tudor Court (exhibition catalogue), (London, 1983), 151), shows her holding her infant son by these appendages in exactly the manner one would expect leading strings to be used.Google Scholar

12 See de Mause, Lloyd (ed.), The History of Childhood (New York, 1976)Google Scholar, Shorter, Edward, The Making of the Modern Family (London, 1976)Google Scholar and Stone, Lawrence, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500–1800 (London, 1977).Google Scholar

13 Pollock, Linda, Forgotten Children (Cambridge, 1983), passim.Google Scholar

14 Exceptions to this are Pollock, op. cit. (note 13), and two excellent popular books, Hardyment, Christina, Dream Babies (London, 1983)Google Scholar and Gies, Frances and Gies, Joseph, Marriage and the Family in the Middle Ages (New York, 1987), 3–15, which has a summary of the state of family history.Google Scholar

15 Stone, op. cit. (note 12), 161.

16 Leach, Penelope, Baby and Child (Harmondsworth, 1977, repr. 1981), 98–9.Google Scholar

17 Elizabeth Marvick, ‘Nature versus nurture: patterns and trends in seventeenth-century French child-rearing’, in de Mause, op. cit. (note 12), 270, says that in seventeenth-century France, swaddling lasted for from less than one month to nine months (legs only). M. J. Tucker, ‘The child as beginning and end: fifteenth- and sixteenth-century English childhood’ in de Mause, op. cit., 229–58, suggests four months as the normal period for swaddling. The letters of Charlotte, Countess of Derby state that by 1628, when she was writing, English babies were out of swaddling bands by four to six weeks of age (quoted Cunnington, Phillis and Buck, Anne, Children's Costume in England: From the Fourteenth to the end of the Nineteenth Century (London, 1965), 69).Google Scholar

18 cf. George Herbert, Mortification:

(Herbert, George, Works, ed. Willmott, R. A., (London, 1879).Google Scholar The idea is given visual expression in the tomb of the infant princess Sophia by Maximilan Colt in Westminster Abbey (1606). Other examples are the brasses to Dorothy (d. 1630) and William (d. 1633) King in St George's Chapel, Windsor Castle.

19 Reproduced by Garland, Madge, The Changing Face of Childhood (London, 1963), 170. The age given on this portrait does, it must be admitted, seem to suggest an astounding precocity on the part of the infant depicted. From its facial development and posture an age of between ten months and one year would seem much more plausible.Google Scholar

20 A comparison of new-born babies in portraits, such as those of the Cholmondely sisters (c. 1600–10) and the Saltonstall family (1636–7) (both Tate Gallery), and new-borns who died at birth or shortly thereafter suggest that, while dead babies may be represented either shrouded or in baby clothes, the latter consisting of bonnet, pinafore over a coloured cloth wrapping, and possibly a bearing-cloth over all (Tawstock, Barnstaple, Eggesford—all Devon), live babies are rarely shown with criss-cross bands over the coloured outer garment, and this convention (Wiggenhall St Mary V, Norfolk; Clifford Chambers, Church Chesterton, both Warks.), thought of as swaddling bands, represents a shroud. Dead babies are also shown laid out on mat and pillow under a miniature counterpane (Tawstock (Bath monument) Devon, Spelsbury, Oxon.). Two infants illustrated by Stone, op. cit. (note 12), figs. 7 and 12, from Fulham, London (c. 1605), and Lydiard Tregoze, Wilts. (1634), demonstrate the distinctions that may be made. The live child wears a cap and bib, the dead does not.

21 Stone, op. cit. (note 12), 160.

22 Raynold, Thomas (translator), The Byrth of Mankind (London, 1540).Google Scholar This book belongs to a tradition which goes back at least as far as the twelfth-century Trotula of Saleno (translated by Elizabeth, Mason-Holk), The Diseases of Women (Los Angeles, 1940), cf. Gies and Gies, op. cit. (note 14), 198.Google Scholar

23 Cf. Hardyment, op. cit. (note 14), 66. Harriot, Thomas, A briefe and true report of the newfound land of Virginia (Frankfurt, 1590, repr. 1927), 53, states that Englishwomen ‘carrie their children in their armes before their brests’.Google Scholar

24 For an extreme example of this view, see Badinter, Elisabeth, The Myth of Motherhood, trans. DeGaris, R. (London, 1981), 91, et. seq., Professor Norman Hammond points out to me that hanging a swaddled infant on a wall-hook has two advantages in terms of child rearing: it puts the infant in a comparatively safe positon (for the dangers attendant on leaving infants in cradles on the floor, see Gies and Gies, op. cit. (note 14), 204–6), and provides it with visual stimulation, enabling it to watch household business.Google Scholar

25 This is easier to see in the case of boys than girls, but one may at least draw a distinction between married and unmarried daughters on the basis of head-dress, and small girls are often shown wearing aprons and leading-strings. For examples of immature offspring shown as children, see Wroxeter (1556), Slaugham, Sussex (1579), Wiggenhall St Mary V (1624), North Molton, Devon (1626), Spelsbury (1631), Lydiard Tregoze (1634). Page-Phillips, Even John, Children on Brasses (London, 1970) fails to distinguish between representations of children and representations of adult offspring.Google Scholar

26 See Coveney, Peter, The Image of Childhood (Harmondsworth, 1967), passim.Google Scholar

27 See, for instance, the extracts from Watson, JohnPsychological Care of Infant and Child (London, 1928) quoted in Hardyment, op. cit. (note 14), 174–5.Google Scholar

28 Schama, Simon, The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age (New York, 1987), passim.Google Scholar

29 Strong, Roy, The Elizabethan Image: Painting in England 1540–1620 (exhibition catalogue) (London, 1969), 110–12Google Scholar, attributes them both to the Master of the Countess of Warwick. In Cocks, Anna Somers (ed.), Princely Magnificence: Court Jewels of the Renaissance (1500–1630) (exhibition catalogue), (London, 1980), 102–3Google Scholar, Arnold attributes the Cobham family portrait to Hans Eworth or the Master of the Countess of Warwick, while in Carter-Brown, J.et al., The Treasure Houses of Britain (exhibition catalogue), (Washington DC, 1985), 102–3, Strong makes the conjectural identification of the Master of the Countess of Warwick as Lizarde.Google Scholar

30 I am deliberately trying to keep my examples as early as possible because of the periods to which Stone, op. cit. (note 12) assigns his family types; these pictures fall within his Open Lineage 1450–1630 and Patriarchal Nuclear 1550–1700 parameters. Other representations of children surviving from early in the Elizabethan period include the two pictures of infant children of Sir John Thynne at Longleat by Eworth (1564 and 1572), the double portrait of Charles Stewart and Henry Stewart, Lord Darnley, in the Royal Collection (1563), and the portrait of the Countess of Hertford and her infant son at Audley End (1563; copy of original at Petworth House).

31 Edwards, Ralph, Early Conversation Pictures (London, 1934), 155–6.Google Scholar

32 Greenblatt, Stephen, Sir Walter Ralegh: The Renaissance Man and his Roles (New Haven, 1973)Google Scholar and idem, Renaissance Self-Fashioning From More to Shakespeare (Chicago, 1980), has shown the importance at this period of self-presentation and personal imagery.Google Scholar

33 See Hardyment, op. cit. (note 14), 6.

34 Stone, op. cit. (note 12), 412, claims that pictures of infants on laps are an eighteenth-century phenomenon, but there is also a representation of this in the Unton biographical portrait in the National Portrait Gallery; in the illustrations to the book in which Stone makes this statement, he includes a memorial from Fulham (1605) which represents a seated mother balancing a swaddled infant on her lap.

35 For the Windsor picture, see Strong, op. cit. (note 29), 112.

36 A parallel is the Kervil monument of 1624 at Wiggenhall St Mary V, which incorporates both a charming realization of the daughter who died in infancy with the information that the Kervil family is extinct.

37 In what follows, I am greatly indebted to Schama's passages on childhood, op. cit. (note 28), 545ff, and to Durantini, Mary Frances, The Child in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Painting (Epping, 1983), 260ff, although I think she accepts too uncritically pessimistic a view of childhood conditions.Google Scholar

38 Schama, op. cit. (note 28), 547.

39 Ferguson, George, Signs and Symbols in Christian Art (New York, 1961), 19. Durantini, op. cit. (note 37), 363, notes the moral positivism associated with the pet bird on a string.Google Scholar

40 This may be morally ambiguous, sometimes associated with women of doubtful virtue, ibid., 267.

41 For a monkey associated with vanity and childishness (in a bad sense), see Schama, op. cit. (note 28), 513.

42 It is interesting that this is the same combination of pets as in the so-called Arbella Stuart at Woburn Abbey, see Strong, op. cit. (note 29), 242. (This is attributed to Robert Peake the Elder, whose studio seems to have been popular with parents wishing for portraits of their children.)

43 See Ferguson, op. cit. (note 39), 29, 27, 36, 31.

44 Exhibited at Sotheby's 1988, see Sotheby's Childhood (exhibition catalogue), (London, 1988), 19Google Scholar

45 Schama, op. cit. (note 28), 555.

46 The cherry is one of the gifts traditionally given to the Christ-child by the shepherds; the emblematic significance of these is not as well known as that of the gold, frankincense and myrrh that are the gifts of the Magi. In the Wakefield Second Shepherds' Play, the gifts are a bunch of cherries, a bird and a ball (Toumely Plays, ed. Pottard, A. W., Second Shepherds' Play (1897) lines710ff).Google Scholar

47 Reproduced Page-Phillips, op. cit. (note 25), 87.

48 Carnations, because they symbolize pure love, as associated with the Blessed Virgin Mary and hence with the infant Christ.

49 Reproduced Sotheby's, op. cit. (note 44), 19.

50 Large dogs do not seem to occur until the Van Dyck portraits of the children of Charles I.

51 Reproduced Sotheby's op. cit. (note 44), no. 15. Rabbits are associated with sexual promiscuity. Cats, associated with devil worship, feature in portraits of adults (the Earl of Southampton, the Countess of Dorset) at this date, but do not seem to feature on English pictures of children. Ashelford, Jane, A Visual History of Costume: The Sixteenth Century (London, 1983), no. 90, reproduces a portrait of a small girl clutching a guinea pig, but this picture is not certainly English.Google Scholar

52 The earliest child-embracing-lamb pictures seem to again date from the late seventeenth century, for example, Jacob Huysmans's picture of the Family of Colonel Coke (c. 1680) (reproduced Sotheby's, op. cit. (note 44), no. 10). For the lamb as sacrifice, cf., for instance, Macbeth IV. 3.14ff.

53 Sotheby's op. cit. (note 44) no. 12.

54 Ibid., no. 11.

55 Although Schama, op. cit. (note 28), 511, suggests that a girl playing with dolls is showing a proper appreciation of her future in the domestic sphere.

56 Iveagh Bequest; reproduced Sotheby's op. cit. (note 44), no. 6.

57 See Schama, op. cit. (note 28), 559. cf. also Hoole, 1630: ‘good manners are indeed a main part of good education’. For a survey of humanist parents involved in the education of their children, particularly the Cooke family, see Beilin, Elaine V., Redeeming Eve: Women Writers of the English Renaissance (Princeton, 1987), 55ff.Google Scholar

58 Elyot, Sir Thomas, The Boke named the Governour (London, 1531) (repr. 1970), fol. 97^r.Google Scholar

59 For example the comments on the pictures in Sotheby's op. cit. (note 44), I7ff.

60 The interest of the subject of the Van Dyck is its place in Charles I's programme of imagery centring on the Royal Family, as opposed to the monarch, which had been the case with previous regimes.

61 Mrs Esdaile notes it: Esdaile, Katharine A., English Monumental Sculpture since the Renaissance (London, 1927), 79Google Scholar,86. For children in general see Esdaile, Katharine A., English Church Monuments 1510 to 1840 (London, 1946) 121 and passim.Google Scholar

62 For example, the monument at Alderton, Wiltshire, to Charles Gore, d. 1628; the portrait of a boy aged 5 in Christchurch Mansion, Ipswich (1630) (reproduced Cunnington and Buck, op. cit. (note 17), 73), etc.

63 See Ashelford, op. cit. (note 51), no. 123.

64 Brass of Thomas Tompkins, d. 1629, Llandinabo, Herefordshire, repr. Page-Phillips, op. cit. (note 25), no. 51; portrait of John and Margaret Russel (c. 1623) attributed to William Peake (Sotheby's op. cit. (note 44), no. 14). Cunnington and Buck, op. cit. (note 17), 85, 92, 97, suggest that this was a style confined to girls, and locate it later in the seventeenth century, but the portrait evidence (including their own pl. 4) shows that it was used from early in the century for both sexes.

65 Portrait of William, 3rd Earl of Lothian, c. 1620, attributed to George Jamestone, reproduced Cunnington and Buck, op. cit. (note 17), 79; portrait of Francis Russell, 4th Earl of Bedford, c. 1600, attributed to Robert Peake the Elder, reproduced Ashelford, op. cit. (note 51), no. 152.

66 See, for instance, Marcus, Leah S., Childhood and Cultural Despair: A Theme and Variations in Seventeenth-Century Literature (Pittsburgh, 1978), 25, 39.Google Scholar

67 Sotheby's op. cit. (note 44), no. 14, note.

68 Cunnington and Buck, op. cit. (note 17), 55, 76.

69 Pollock, op. cit. (note 13), 243.

70 On my first Sonne, in Jonson, Ben, Poems, ed. Johnston, George Burke (London, 1954), 23.Google Scholar

71 Holyband, Claudius (Desainliens), The French Littelton (1608), ed. Byrne, M. St Clare, (Cambridge, 1953), 12–14. The word ‘shamefast’ has both good and bad implications at this date, see OED entry. This is an example of its common misuse as the equivalent of ‘shamefaced’.Google Scholar

72 See, for instance, Stone, op. cit. (note 12), 162ff.

73 ‘The First Part of the Return from Parnassus’, lines 737ff in The Three Parnassus Plays ed. Leishmann, J. B. (London, 1949)Google Scholar; see Glatzer, Paula, The Complaint of the Poet; the Parnassus Plays: A Critical Study of the Trilogy Performed at St John's College, Cambridge, 1598–9–1601–2; Authors Anonymous, Salzburg Studies in English Literature, Elizabethan and Renaissance Studies, 60 (Salzburg, 1977), 116.Google Scholar

74 This identification is at the heart of the fourteenth-century poem Pearl, ed. Gordon, E. V., (Oxford, 1953).Google Scholar

75 On my first Daughter, Jonson op. cit. (note 70), 14.

76 The St John tomb at Lydiard Tregoze, Wiltshire (1634), suggests that the age of innocence may have been seen as ending between five and seven, about the age at which boys discarded their skirts and assumed breeches. Of the children commemorated on this tomb, Elizabeth and Thomas, who both died aged four, are depicted carrying the palms of virgin-martyrs (she is crowned with a laurel wreath), while Nicholas and Francis, who died aged nine, are shown as schoolboys, but without the symbols of innocent martyrdom. At Barnstaple, Devon, the pathetic monument to Nicholas Blake, aged nine (1634), shows the infant brothers and sisters who predeceased him with virgin-palms, but although, in the complex imagery of the monument, he joins them in heaven as a cherubim, he does not have the palm, suggesting he may have been too old at death to merit it. For a more extensive examination of the association of children with symbols of innocence on tombs at this date, see my ‘Holy Innocents: some aspects of the iconography of children on English Renaissance tombs’, Church Monuments, 5 (1990), 57–63.Google Scholar

77 An Epitaph, Jonson op. cit. (note 70), 163.

78 Epitaph on S.P. a child of Q. El. Chappel, ibid., 62.

79 This definition of the good child seems to apply most commonly to boys. The approbatory term for the good girl seems to be ‘dutiful’.

80 Elyot, op. cit. (note 58), 15f.

81 For Barbara Gamage as a good mother, see Beilin, op. cit. (note 57), 208f, and Hay, Millicent V., The Life of Sir Robert Sidney, Earl of Leicester (1563–1626) (Washington DC, 1984), 171–94, passim. Other portraits of the same type are the picture of Lettice Cressy and her children, exhibited London, 1969 (Strong, op. cit. (note 29), 59), and the group of a mother and children in the Mellon collection at Yale.Google Scholar

82 See Beilin, op. cit. (note 57), 266ff.

83 To Penshurst, Jonson, op. cit. (note 70), 76–9.

84 See Shapiro, Michael, Children of the Revels: The Boy Companies of Shakespeare's Time and their Plays (New York, 1977), passim, for a discussion of this repertoire.Google Scholar

85 See Elyot, op. cit. (note 58), fol. 17.

86 Jonson, Ben, Everyman in His Humour ed. Trussler, Simon (London, 1986), 11. 3. 14–31.Google Scholar

87 Nathan Field seems to have been a member of a children's troupe when he was about twenty-two years old. See Brinkley, Roberta F., Nathan Field, the Actor-Playwright, Yale Studies in English, 77, (New Haven, 1927), 45ff.Google Scholar

88 John Day's The Ile of Guls (1606) is a prime example of the combination of parody with obscenity.

89 Schama, op. cit. (note 28), 481ff; Durantini, op. cit. (note 37), passim.

90 See Aries, op. cit. (note 11), 100ff. Aries discounts any corrupt intention in these games. On this see Wilson, Adrian, ‘The infancy of the History of Childhood: an appraisal of Philippe Aries’, History and Theory 19 (1980), 142, n. 43. These games stopped after the age of seven, which may relate to the identification of children under this age with Holy Innocents, mentioned earlier. Possibly the innocence of the child being played with was felt to neutralize the sinfulness of the games.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

91 See Pollock, op. cit. (note 13), 52ff for a general critique of the harsh childhood school of history, and Alan MacFarlane, ‘Review of Stone’, (op. cit. (note 12)), History and Theory 18 (1979), 103–26, for a criticism of Stone.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

92 Too uncritical an acceptance of these views seems to be present in the works of, for example, Durantini, op. cit. (note 37), Marcus, op. cit. (note 66) and Jardine, Lisa, Still Harping on Daughters (Towtowa, N.J., 1983).Google Scholar