There are two distinct outliers to the group. Sir Simon Harcourt (fig. 17), a nephew of Vere, is depicted wearing a falling ruff of a type that came into fashion towards the very end of the 1620s and the Sir John Congreve (fig. 18), which, with the coat of arms painted in the upper right of the painting and giddying perspective of the marble floor tiles, looks to be the product of another less competent studio.⁹ This variety across the group suggests that the paintings were not commissioned in one fell swoop but put together in an accretive fashion over the course of the second and third decades of the seventeenth century. This would fit with what we know of Horace de Vere’s movements back and forth across the Channel and the life dates of the officers depicted, which will be discussed shortly. First, though, it is necessary to establish by what means the pictures came to Raynham.

The paintings are first mentioned in print as early as 1657, in the posthumous publication of Sir Francis Vere’s Commentaries, dedicated by the publisher William Dillingham to Horace Townshend, later 1st Viscount Townshend (c.1630–1687). As his grandfather’s namesake, Horace carried the mantle of his ancestor’s memory and it is no surprise that he was named as the recipient of bequests from his grandmother Lady Mary Vere (née Tracy; 1581–1671) in March 1670 of ‘the Picture of my Late Deare husband Horace Lord Vere deceased in my great parloure and the Great Pictures of all my Lord Veres Officers and Captains in the said Roome or elsewhere in my house called Kerby Hall’. If Horace Townshend were to die without a male heir, the pictures were to be restored to her daughter Elizabeth Holles, Countess of Clare and her heirs, ‘so that they may be preserved to the Posteritie of my deare husband horatio Lo: Vere’.¹⁰

As the tenor of her will suggests, Lady Vere was a devout and determined individual who made a lasting impression on those who met her. For example, in 1671 Mary Rich, Countess of Warwick (1625–1678) recalled in her diary her visit to ‘pious old Lady Vere’, finding ‘much comfort in hearing that good old disciple converse’. Later that year the Countess wrote that she had ‘Heard of the death on Christmas day of that eminently pious Lady Vere [she] being above four score and eleven. She was an extremely kind friend to me’.¹¹ It seems, therefore, that not only was Lady Vere long-lived but she was also well remembered, and that the wishes that she set out in her will for the future of the Vere Captains were honoured by her descendants, shaping the thinking of her great-grandson the 2nd Viscount during his changes to Raynham. This puts pay to Cornforth’s suggestion that the Vere Captains were used by Kent merely out of expediency and because of the dearth of available pictures at Raynham.¹² Rather, the placement of the Vere Captains at the heart of the redesigned interior of the house honoured the memory of both Lord and Lady Vere and in doing so underscored their familial ties to what had been, until 1703 at the death of Aubrey de Vere, 20th Earl of Oxford, one of the longest lived titles in the peerage.

The Commentaries of 1657 list portraits of Henry de Vere, Earl of Oxford (1593–1625), Thomas, Lord Fairfax and seventeen of the Captains, ‘Besides divers others, whose effigies do at once both guard and adorn, Kirby-Hall in Essex, where the truly religious and Honourable the Lady Vere doth still survive, that the present age might more then read and remember what was true Godliness in eighty eight’.¹³ It is notable that at this early date (1657), commentators read this group of portraits through a Protestant lens that identified the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588 as the first instance of a series of providential interventions that had swayed military fortune in favour of the British. No matter that few of the Vere Captains had fought against the Armada, yet as early as 1731 visitors to Raynham were under the misapprehension that they were in the presence of Elizabethan sea-captains: on 11 May 1731 John Loveday of Caversham visited Raynham and recorded one room ‘Hung with the Pictures of famous Admirals in Queen Elizabeth’s reign’.¹⁴ A few decades on, apocrypha had become gospel, as the Red Saloon at Raynham became known as the Spanish Invasion Room.¹⁵

Confusion about the nature of this group was deep set by the time that George Vertue came to visit Raynham in 1730. As suggested earlier, his record of the visit is by no means easy to understand: ‘at My Lord Townsends seat in the Country S[r]. Francis Vere. with the pictures of 19 Officers: that was with them at the siege of Ostend. Temp. Jame I. the Generals heads only. The others all att length in their proper habits. These pictures done Abroad in ye low Countries. These said also to be Copies done here. From Originals that are in poses of another branch of that family.’¹⁶ What Vertue appears to be saying is that the pictures were thought to have been made in the Low Countries but that there was also a belief that the portraits at Raynham were copies made in England of originals that were in the possession of another branch of the family. If this is true, no record of the existence of such originals has been found during the research for the present study. There is the possibility that Vertue was confused by the information he received on his visit to Raynham. Lady Vere’s will is categorical about the recipient of these pictures and there is no evidence of an additional set of portraits. It appears, therefore, that by the time of Vertue’s visit to Raynham, any meaningful knowledge about how this set of portraits was assembled had faded. To be sure, the portraits depict soldiers who served under Horace Vere but would date not to the time of the Siege of Ostend (which began in 1601) but of the decades that followed.

A kernel of truth is probably to be found in the suggestion made in the Royal Academy 1890 exhibition catalogue that described those pictures from the Red Saloon lent to the Academy: ‘the last years of his [Horatio de Vere’s] life were passed at his house at Clapton, near Hackney, and it was probably at this period that he collected the series of portraits of some of his principal officers, which subsequently came through his daughter Mary, who married Sir Roger Townshend, to Raynham.’¹⁷ It seems sensible to suggest that the portraits hung at the Vere residence at Clapton outside London at some point after the acquisition of that estate in 1625. This was the same year that Vere was elevated to the peerage and the moment that, aged sixty, he looked to retirement and a life with his wife and his five daughters, although he returned to mainland Europe to campaign during the summer months in the years that followed.

Never a large house, Kirby, or Picards House, was a dependency of Castle Hedingham in Essex, the ancient ancestral home of the Earls of Oxford, and had come into the possession of Horace de Vere’s branch of the family by virtue of an agreement between his eldest brother John Vere (c.1558–1624) and the Earl, having resigned the manors of Crepping and Crustwick nearby.¹⁸ On the death of John’s widow Thomasine in 1639, Kirby became the home of Lady Vere and it was there that she resided for the next thirty years of her life, holding court as the staunch champion of her husband’s memory. After her death, the house was sold.¹⁹ The building, still extant, was built in the late sixteenth century as a timber-framed structure on an L-shaped plan, with three gables. Clearly the Great Parlour was sufficiently large to accommodate the majority of the Vere Captains and may be the room on the south-east of the building that today retains a moulded ceiling-beam and early seventeenth-century panelling.²⁰ Unfortunately, the probate inventory of Lady Vere of July 1673 does not list pictures, giving the contents of the Great Parlour as a velvet couch, with chair and stools en suite, three Turkey carpets, three curtains and ironwork fire-furniture. The only reference in the inventory to militaristic décor were the eight old guns that hung in the hall between the main hall and the kitchen. So either the paintings had already left Kirby for Raynham by 1673 or they were omitted from the inventory for some other reason.²¹

With all this in mind, a tolerably cogent narrative of the movement of the pictures can be set out. The majority of the pictures were probably brought to England between 1625 (when the Clapton estate was acquired) and 1635 (when Horace Vere died). It is likely that they were brought to Kirby Hall in Essex by his widow Mary at some point after 1639, where they remained until she died in 1671, after which they came into possession of her grandson and were brought to Raynham. It has not been possible to establish where they initially hung at Raynham but in 1730 they were set in the Red Saloon and the Stone Parlour, where they remained until the Heirloom sale of 1904.

The question remains, though, as to when these paintings were made and by whom. A persistent belief about the group is that the commission records the membership of a band of English volunteers, commanded by Horace Vere to support the beleaguered Frederick V, Elector of the Palatinate and his wife Elizabeth, daughter of James VI and I.²² However attractive this is as an idea, it does not hold true. This is because a number of the Captains had died by the time James I had given his consent to raise the troops to support his son-in-law against the Spanish. Take for example one of the most famous of the Vere Captains, Thomas Dale, who died in 1619. Dale’s biography is instructive because his frequent absences from service under Francis and then Horace Vere in the Netherlands provide clues as to when the set may have been begun. In February 1611 Dale was granted a three-year leave from the States General to travel to Virginia, which was extended through the intervention of James I. He then returned to the Netherlands in 1617 and was subsequently employed by the East India Company to launch an expedition against the Dutch viceroy Jan Pieterszoon Coen, in the East Indies. He died at Machilipatnam in South India on 9 August 1619.

Likewise Thomas Gates, who served with Dale at the English garrison of Oudewater, Netherlands, was heavily involved in colonial projects in the second decade of the seventeenth century. Gates received his year-long leave of absence from the Dutch States General in 1608, departing for America in 1609. He was sent back to England with Dale for supplies, departing again for Virginia in March 1611, finally returning to the Netherlands in around 1614, where he died, buried at Schenkenschanz in the autumn of 1622. Likewise, Sir Michael Everard died in either 1621 or 1622, while Sir Thomas Winne was hit by a cannon ball during an attempt to relieve Breda from its siege by the Spanish commander Spinola in 1625.²³ As can be seen, not all the Vere Captains were members of the expeditionary force sent to Bohemia in June 1620 under Horace Vere, who was at the head of a troop of four thousand men to support the Winter King Frederick V and defend the Palatinate, with Sir John Borlase as his lieutenant, Sir Edward Vere as his general and Sir Thomas Dutton, another lieutenant.

Rather, most of the sitters in these portraits had served under Horace Vere during the previous decade in the various conflicts of the fledgling Dutch Republic, namely the battles at Jülich in 1610 and 1614. These biographies point firmly to a date of around 1615 for many of the portraits of the Vere Captains and raise the strong possibility that the initial group of pictures had been made to commemorate their part in the Cleves-Jülich campaign. For example, Dutton served as a captain in 1609 at the head of ninety men. Through Vere’s auspices he subsequently commanded a company in Vere’s regiment in Cleves-Jülich in 1614.²⁴ Likewise, Sir Henry Peyton (d. 1622/3) was given command of a company of foot in 1604 in the Low Countries and led a company in Vere’s regiment in Cleves-Jülich in 1614.²⁵ In 1618 he was given the command, with Sir Henry Mainwaring, of a fleet enlisted in the service of the Venetian Republic; he ‘died beyond the seas’ in either 1622 or 1623.

All this suggests that the set was begun, and was probably largely complete, prior to Peyton’s departure for Venice in 1618 and to Dale’s death in 1619, and was only added to in the following decade. Here, Vere was following the example set by Prince Maurice of Nassau who, between 1611 and 1616, commissioned an extensive group of portraits of officers in his service, for the most part from the workshop of the Hague-based Jan Anthonisz van Ravesteyn (1572–1657), originally from Delft but active in the Hague from 1597. This group included a portrait of Vere himself (see fig. 3) currently attributed to the workshop of Michiel Jansz. van Mierveldt (1566–1641) and now in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (SK-A-557). To judge from the photographs, and by comparing these to fully attributed work, it is Ravesteyn and his studio who emerge as the strongest candidates for producing the main group of Vere Captains. For one thing, Ravesteyn was the premier artist in the Hague, which was where Vere was stationed for much of the first fifteen years of the seventeenth century.²⁶ The discovery of another portrait, not part of the Raynham set but clearly a product of the same workshop, of the soldier Colonel Thomas Davies (d. 1655; fig. 19), now in a private collection in Wales, suggests that English officers serving in the Hague had their portraits made of their own volition but habitually turned to the same artist as did their commander-in-chief. The painting, also known through a later copy in the National Museum of Wales, appears to have been part of a group of pictures sent to his brother Robert Davies (1581–1633) in Flintshire, shortly before Thomas’s departure for Denmark from the Hague and described in a letter of 18 November 1628.²⁷ At this point Davies appears to have been serving in the command of Charles Morgan (1575–1643), who had travelled with the volunteer force of Horace Vere after the conclusion of the Dutch truce and commanded the British contingent at Bergen till 1622. He had helped in the defence of the siege of Breda in 1625 and in the following year he led a British force to the aid of Christian IV of Denmark on the lower Elbe but, despite naval aid, he had to yield the city of Staden to Count Tilly in 1628. The survival of this portrait hints at the existence of other portraits by Ravesteyn of English soldiers elsewhere in British collections, and it is likely that more pictures from this chapter of cultural transmission between the Netherlands and Britain will come to light.

The collection at Raynham also provides evidence that Vere began his practice of acquiring portraits of those in his command far earlier than has hitherto been appreciated. This evidence comes in the form of the portraits at Raynham of Isaac Honywood (RN23) and Charles Scott (RN36) attributed here to Daniël van den Queborn (1552/57–1602/05). Queborn was the court painter to Prince Maurice of Orange in Middleburg and was responsible for a number of portraits of English soldiers of fortune fighting for the Protestant cause during the Anglo-Spanish wars alongside the leaders of the Dutch Revolt. A series of portraits by Queborn once at Scot’s Hall in Kent and now part of North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, and one portrait from the same collection at the Yale Center for British Art of Sir William Drury attest to his popularity and may be cited as the inspiration for large, full-length portraits on canvas of soldiers commissioned abroad and sent back to England to adorn the halls of country houses.²⁸ Thus, it seems that Vere’s collection of full-length portraits built on an existing set of bust-length portraits of soldiers in his command that dated from the previous decade. It is possible that these pictures were those recorded by Vertue in his note on the Vere Captains of Raynham which he described as ‘the Generals heads only’.

The story of the Vere Captains is integral to the history of Raynham. Painted in the same decade as the present house took form, they were central to Kent’s reinterpretation of the Jonesian building and did much to tether the history of the Townshend family to the ‘Fighting Veres’ and their ancestors the Earls of Oxford. Re-imagined at Raynham as the Elizabethan sea-captains who repulsed the Armada, the Captains stood tall for nearly two centuries before being scattered to the four winds to staunch the haemorrhaging effect of death duties. Some found good homes, others could not sustain the interest of their American owners. Three pictures have evaded recovery: Captain Milles, Sir Jacob Astley and Captain Teboll. If ever all the paintings are recovered a true sense of their significance will be apparent to all. For among their number are some of the leading actors in Britain’s early colonial enterprises and, as the country comes to terms with this aspect of its history, it is important that the portraits that helped promote the status of these individuals are included as part of the discourse. The world of the country house is too often perceived as elitist, exclusionary and out of touch, but there is growing recognition that their collections need to be incorporated into post-colonial histories of British art, of which The Vere Captains are just one example of many.