Pair of gloves

This type of glove, made of substantial leather with the hand and wrist gauntlet in one piece, may have been worn for practical protection by a person of means, despite the presence of silk and metallic thread embroidery, which to the modern eye would render the gloves impractical. Unlike other gloves of the time, which have separately constructed and highly decorated gauntlets that appear far too fragile to wear, this pair would have been relatively functional.

These gloves were said to have belonged to James I, primarily because of the presence of the Scottish thistle in the embroidery, but there is no conclusive evidence of this connection. This attribution was first asserted by W. B. Redfern in 1904 and repeated by Frances Morris in 1929. As an insignia of royalty after James’s accession to the English throne, the thistle motif was usually combined with the Tudor rose to represent the union of England and Scotland under one ruler, as on an early seventeenth-century embroidered cushion cover with the royal arms surmounted by a large rose and two small stylized thistles, now held in the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Beginning in the late sixteenth century, gloves play an increasingly visible role in portraiture, and their functions were practical as well as symbolic. This pair may be similar to the type of leather glove with metallic thread fringe described in the wardrobes of both sons of James I, as described in surviving inventories and bills for both princes’ wardrobes. Accounts from about 1608 for Henry, Prince of Wales, included "four pair of staggs leather gloves, perfumed and fringed with gold and silver fringe, at 16s." And his younger brother, Charles, when he was king, ordered similar gloves in even larger quantities during the 1630s: "2 dozen pairs of thick stags lether gloues with gold and silver fringes." Charles I is also depicted wearing a similar pair of gloves of gray-brown leather with embroidered gauntlets and metallic thread fringe in Daniel Mytens’s 1629 portrait of the king (MMA, 06.1289).

[Melinda Watt, adapted from English Embroidery from The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1580-1700: 'Twixt Art and Nature / Andrew Morrall and Melinda Watt ; New Haven ; London : Published for The Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, Design, and Culture, New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York [by] Yale University Press, 2008.]