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While I was working on an exhibition in the Netherlands a decade ago, curator Jan Peeters showed me a painting of Elizabeth Stuart \u2013 but, at the time, I didn\u2019t grasp its deadly significance. It shows Elizabeth, daughter of King James VI and I<\/a> and elder sister to Charles I<\/a>, wearing an ermine robe and crown. Peeters believed that the crown \u2013 added to an earlier painting by a second artist \u2013 was the same one that had been lost by Charles I during the Civil Wars, broken up and sold for scrap by parliament. This crown, the so-called Tudor Crown, was the crown of England.<\/p>\n I only got an idea of how potentially explosive this portrait may have been when my research revealed that Elizabeth had been seen as a serious contender for England\u2019s throne. To commission or own a painting of the Stuart princess wearing this crown would be to risk an accusation of treason.<\/p>\n The scope of what could be considered treason was intentionally broad. When Edward III introduced the Treason Act in 1351, he defined the act as one that included the mere imagining of the king\u2019s death, as well as the occasioning of actual physical harm. When Henry VIII<\/a> amended the Act in the 1530s, he added writing or speaking of harming the king, depriving him of his title, slandering his marriage or even cuckolding him to the behaviours now considered as treason.<\/p>\n This allowed evidence to take many forms, so that when Thomas Howard, 4th Duke of Norfolk, was put on trial in 1572 for plotting to usurp Elizabeth I<\/a> with Mary, Queen of Scots, her gift to him of an embroidered cushion was exhibit one. The needlepoint image of a blade cutting a barren tree branch to allow new roots to spring was enough to lose him his head. Mary, of course, damned herself in writing, but in a society that accorded such importance to visual rhetoric, it is hard to believe that the portrait of Elizabeth Stuart that comprised no mere emblem, but a contender blatantly wearing the crown, could not be taken as evidence of treason. Add a few overheard conversations and some coincidental political manoeuvring, and that prize portrait might have resulted in the owner\u2019s execution.<\/p>\n Listen | Nadine Akkerman discusses Elizabeth Stuart, a beloved \u2013 but now widely forgotten \u2013 Stuart princess, on this episode of the HistoryExtra<\/em> podcast<\/a>:<\/strong><\/p>\n