By far the largest expenditure in the accounts — no less than
£
1525 9
s
. 9¼
d
. — fell in the rag-bag category, ‘Divers Necessary Emptions’. Some insight into this is given by the list of suppliers to whom Anne owed money in May 1536.
82
This casts a revealing light on the often forgotten economic significance of a royal court, with its contingent of suppliers (mercers, drapers and clothiers) and the army of craft workers - tailors, embroiderers, fustian-maker, silk women, pinner, coffer-maker, gold-wire drawer, skinner, furrier, painter, farrier and a dozen more besides. One of the itemized supporting accounts has survived, presented by William Lok, the mercer most employed by the queen.
83
A leading Londoner, Lok travelled abroad for Anne and at new year 1536 had given her (or possibly Henry) a mother-of-pearl frankincense box mounted on the heads of four silver and gilt dolphins.
84
By a macabre irony, he would also be called on to assist in clearing the Tower of foreigners on the occasion of her execution.
85
His bill covered the three months from late January to late April 1536, and shows Anne spending
£
40 a month, mainly on clothes for herself and Elizabeth. On top of this, the general haberdashery bill for approximately the same period was
£
68 4s. 1½
d
.
86
What remains something of a mystery is how Anne had financed herself before the Pembroke grant and the gift of a thousand pounds, which accompanied it.
87
She may have had some income from a court post, but the jewel she sent to Henry to indicate that she would marry him must have cost a good deal.
88
Certainly it marked the point when Anne decided that the prospect of a wedding ring was worth real money. Perhaps she turned to her father — she was, after all, now an excellent investment. The subsequent expense of being the king’s unacknowledged fiancée would have been even more costly, but here her principal resource seems to have been Henry. That he made her a regular allowance is unlikely. In the two years from November 1529, the earliest for which we have his privy purse accounts, the king met individual bills on Anne’s behalf totalling nearly
£
750.
89
As we have seen, in December 1530 he even paid for his own new year’s gift.
90
Her basic living expenses at court were presumably charged on the royal household, but there is a most intriguing privy purse entry for February 1531:
£
66 13
s
. 4
d
. paid to her servant, George Taylor, for purchasing ‘the farm at Greenwich to the use of my lady Anne Rochford’.
91
Perhaps this was a ‘love nest’, perhaps not.
92
Henry also lost a great deal of money to her, playing cards. In ten days in November 1532 he paid out over
£
50 to Anne, Francis Bryan and Francis Weston.
93
Having a partner outside marriage did not come cheap.
15
IMAGE
T
HE ways in which temperament and personality as well as physique descend — or fail to descend - from generation to generation are a never-ending cause of discussion. With Anne Boleyn and her daughter Elizabeth, we can be sure of the facial resemblance, less sure whether the daughter’s taste for things scholarly and musical was inherited or was the product of careful education and the atmosphere at the Tudor court. The parallels, however, are there. It is clear that in dress sense and wardrobe Anne Boleyn anticipated Elizabeth I’s acute awareness of the politics of ostentation. Each had more than a love of mere finery, rather a recognition that in order to play the part one must dress the part. The mother also anticipated the daughter in another way: the exploitation of the cult of monarchy, which was to reach its height in England in the reign of ‘Gloriana’. The Bible, chivalry, art and — most original in 1533 — the language of humanism, all were mobilized to present Anne as a divine ruler. It was not, of course, an approach peculiar to England. There was an international technique to image-building. Yet between Anne and Elizabeth there was an uncanny similarity of attitude towards the projection of monarchy, and of themselves as chosen by God to rule.
The most extensive demonstration of Anne’s position and role as queen is in the elaborate pageants prepared for her coronation procession through the City of London on 31 May 1533. We have followed the event, but we have not yet looked closely at the devices that set the scene — and very revealing they are. They have been criticized as lacking imagination and technical novelty, but time was largely to blame; machinery could not be built at a moment’s notice. In 1522 there had been ten weeks to arrange the reception of the Emperor Charles V, while the welcome in 1501 for Katherine of Aragon had been the climax of two years’ work, not the 400 hours allowed in 1533.
1
In spite of this, a hugely impressive display was mounted which projected exactly the image Henry (and Anne) intended. Edward Hall could say, ‘he that saw it not, would not believe it.’
2
That the initiative in planning came ultimately from Henry VIII is clear. In the case of the intended but abortive coronation of Anne’s successor, the actual commission has survived.
3
Clearly based on, but intended to eclipse the celebrations for Anne, it laid down the themes and even the mottoes to be used for twelve main displays, but then left fourteen ‘other subtleties to be at the pleasure of the maker’. Apart from the absence of instructions about materials and colours, the order is very similar to contemporary contracts for a painting or a piece of sculpture. Nothing like this survives for Anne, but the sequence of events tells the same tale.
4
The royal order to prepare a water procession from Greenwich and pageants on the route from the Tower to Westminster was received by the mayor on Tuesday, 13 May. The aldermen met the next day and decided on a minimum initial response. Organization of the water pageant was passed to the mayor’s livery company (the Haberdashers) which could provide two suitably impressive barges. As for the route to Westminster, the Standard in Cheapside and three of the principal conduits would be ‘goodly hanged and garnished’ and their fountains supplied with wine, ‘with minstrelsy and children singing at every of the said conduits’. However, on such occasions joint discussion with the Crown was the rule, and the City sent four representatives (including the chronicler Edward Hall) to present their plans to ‘the king’s most honorable counsel to know their minds’.
The meanness of the City’s initial plan was, in all probability, a negotiating ploy. If so, the delegates came away from the meeting with all they wanted. The duke of Norfolk and Thomas Cromwell, the counsellors in charge, agreed to lean on the Hanse, the resident community of North German merchants, to fund one of the pageants, royal musicians would be available, the King’s Works would find painters and other craftsmen, and the ships in the river would be moved to line the banks and fire salutes. In return, the City asked Norfolk whether he wanted any other ‘devices’. The duke certainly did — although clearly he would now have to finance them and find the necessary labour. The result was the river procession of fifty barges, not two, and twelve pageants instead of three, indeed, a greater number of tableaux than in any previous entry. Hundreds of people were involved. The line of merchants of the Steelyard and the London guilds along the route stretched as far as St Paul’s - 1300 yards; children were prominent, as performers and in two large groups — in one case 200 strong. Norfolk probably also proposed John Leland and Nicholas Udall to ‘make’ the six principal devices (that is, to design and script them). Leland was the king’s antiquary and had been taught by William Lily, who had written the Latin verse for Charles V’s entry into London in 1522.
5
He shared Anne’s religious perspective, as did his younger friend Udall, who was responsible for 80 per cent of the actual script.
6
While at Oxford, Udall had got into trouble over the sale of prohibited books, but the year after the procession he became head of Eton, possibly as a reward for his successful work for Anne on that occasion.
What was expected from Leland and Udall is very different from the insipid predictability of modern British street decoration. The closest parallel is with the didactic displays of twentieth-century totalitarian regimes. Leland and Udall too had messages to deliver. Their starting-point was the well-established Western European formula that the first entry of a queen consort into a major city should reflect ‘the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary’.
7
She, so the Church taught, had been taken up (‘assumed’) in bodily form into heaven (‘the Heavenly City’) and been crowned ‘as Queen of Heaven and the glory of all the saints’.
8
Entries therefore ‘sought to display the city as a type of the Celestial Jerusalem’ and the queen as ‘a type of the Blessed Virgin’.
9
The first Leland-Udall tableaux to apply this Marian syllabus to Anne did so by means of the one mechanical device that there had been time to make. It was built backing on the Leaden Hall in Gracechurch Street at the junction with Cornhill, a location chosen not just as one of London’s principal buildings but because it conveniently housed the City’s pageant staff and their work-shops. Open to the front, the castle-like structure was roofed with a cupola painted inside with clouds and the heavenly bodies. The floor was green, representing a field, and out of it rose a hill surmounted by a tree-stump. On the hill sat St Anne and her supposed descendants. On one side of the saint were her daughters — the ‘Three Marys’ — the Blessed Virgin with the Christ child, Mary Salome with her husband and their two sons (St James and St John), and Mary Cleopas, with her husband; on the other side were the four Cleopas children. One of these greeted Anne as ‘Most excellent Queen and bounteous Lady’ and explained that the tableau expressed the hope of London that the pregnant Anne Boleyn would go on to rival the maternal success of her patron saint.
For like as from this devout Saint Anne
Issued this holy generation,
First Christ, to redeem the soul of man;
Then James th’apostle, and th’evangelist John;
With these others, which in such fashion
By teaching and good life, our faith confirmed,
That from that time yet to, it hath not failed.
Right so, dear Lady! our Queen most excellent!
Highly endued with all gifts of grace,
As by your living is well apparent;
We the Citizens, by you in short space
Hope such issue and descent to purchase;
Wherein the same faith shall be defended,
And this City from all dangers preserved.
10
Very tactfully, no one remarked that St Anne had produced only daughters!
Immediately the boy had finished, the machinery started. The stump on the hill began to pour out a mass of red and white roses. A cloud painted on the roof opened and a white falcon swooped to settle on the flowers. Finally an angel descended from the cloud and placed an imperial crown on the falcon’s head. Another of the children then declaimed:
Honour and grace be to our Queen Anne,
For whose cause an Angel Celestial
Descendeth, the falcon (as white as [the] swan)
To crown with a diadem imperial!
In her honour rejoice we all,
For it cometh from God, and not of man.
Honour and grace be to our Queen Anne!
11
The identification of Anne as ‘the white falcon’ ultimately derived from the heraldic crest of the Butlers, earls of Ormonde. Anne’s father had been recognized in 1529 as the Butler heir and the bird ‘displayed’ appears as a crest on his magnificent brass in Hever church (plate 49). Anne’s response to her father’s new status had been to use a shield of arms showing her mother’s descent from Edward I and from the earls of Surrey, her father’s earldom of Ormonde and his earlier barony of Rochford, but she continued with the Rochford badge of the black lion rampant. When she became marquis of Pembroke a coronet was added to this achievement and the monogram ‘AP’ adopted, but again no bird.
12
What appears then to have happened is that on her marriage, or in anticipation of its announcement, Anne had been granted or had adopted a badge of her own, a white falcon but this time alighting, and alighting on roses.
13
The immediate message of the badge is hardly subtle. With the advent of Anne, already pregnant, life would once more burst forth from the apparent barrenness of the Tudor stock. There were less obvious allusions too. The tree-stump (or ‘woodstock’) was a centuries-old royal badge so, as well as speaking of his previous barrenness, it expressed Henry’s right as heir to the medieval Plantagenets. That point was elaborated by the flowers which burst from the stump. These were not Tudor roses combining red and white petals, but separate red and white blossoms: Henry as the son of Henry of Richmond and Elizabeth of York, entitled to claim by both the Lancastrian and the Yorkist line.
14
The crown on Anne’s falcon also made a special point. It not only referred to her impending coronation but, as Udall’s verses were careful to point out, it was specifically a ‘close’, that is an ‘imperial’ crown, not a ‘kingly’ coronet. This was a deliberate allusion to the claims Henry had recently emphasized that he had the powers of an emperor in his own kingdom and so was entitled to reject papal authority.
15
Finally the bird holds a sceptre not only as a routine symbol of regality but as a sign of authority given by God.