Queenship and the Currency of Arts Patronage as Propaganda at the Early Stuart Court

Hitchmough explores the built heritage of royal palaces as emotional and intellectual gateways to the narratives that help us understand the present through an analysis of the past. From the contemporary installation of Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red at the Tower of London to Inigo Jones’s designs for the Banqueting House at Whitehall, this chapter examines the ways in which contemporary design can allude to complex political and historical loyalties. It focuses on interactions between queenship and visual culture and the agency that Queen Anna of Denmark exercised through her patronage of Inigo Jones and Ben Jonson. Hitchmough considers the Banqueting House as visual propaganda, relating its Neo-Palladian design to the Queen’s masque performances and, ultimately, to the staging of Charles I’s execution.