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This intricate copper engraving is an early‐seventeenth-century copy of Johannes Wierix’s intimate double portrait of James VI & I and Anne of Denmark, described by Arthur M. Hind (vol. II, p. 57) and entered in the British Museum catalogue as O’Donoghue 79. Hind singled it out by three diagnostic features: the marshal’s baton in the king’s right hand rises high enough to project beyond his left arm; the royal titles run across the top in a single, continuous line; and the lower margin carries eight Latin verses that urge the sovereigns to shield the “phoenix of true religion” so that Babylon may fall.
Probably issued within months of James VI’s accession to the English throne, this full-length double portrait visualizes the sudden expansion of Stuart power and the hopes it kindled among continental Protestants. The Latin title proclaims a union of crowns that few European observers had yet seen with their own eyes. Below, eight elegiac verses urge the new monarchs to guard the “phoenix of true faith” so that Babylon, a transparent cipher for Rome, may fall.
James poses beside a robust stone pier that bears the freshly quartered royal arms, a visual claim to the enlarged realm he has just inherited. He lifts his marshal’s baton to shoulder height while leaving the sword at his hip undrawn, a pairing that asserts mastery in war yet advertises the preference for rule through order and concord rather than bloodshed. Anne answers that image of controlled power with a display of measured grace: her stiff farthingale spreads like an altar frontal, and her fingers interlock around a closed folding fan whose tapering sticks recall the shaft of a scepter. The broad cartwheel ruff rises behind her head in a radiant circle, inviting the viewer to see in her both the promise of dynastic fruitfulness and a quasi-sacred office as intercessor for the realm.
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