The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn (49 page)

Read The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn Online

Authors: Eric Ives

How much actual glass Anne had owned it is impossible to say, given its fragility. One item which did survive until 1547 was ‘a cup of glass with two ears’ mounted in silver-gilt and with her cipher on the silver-gilt cover.
14
Another was a glass of beryl garnished with gold and carrying her arms.
15
At a more mundane level there was a considerable quantity of silver plate, most of it not gilded, carrying both the royal and the Rochford arms. What is not clear is whether this was plate which Anne had owned and to which the king’s arms had been added, or vice versa, or whether it was acquired for joint use. Perhaps some of it should be identified as part of the considerable quantity of plate which was re-marked in late 1532.
16
The artist and designer of most interest who was working in England in these years is Hans Holbein the younger. Did he work for Queen Anne?
17
Holbein’s earliest demonstrable commission from Henry was to paint Jane Seymour, and his first known regular Crown employment dates from 1538.
18
Given this and his surviving
œuvre,
many writers have concluded that in the earlier 1530s he worked for London immigrant merchants and increasingly for lesser figures at court.
19
However, we have seen that the only role of the Hanse merchants in the Mount Parnassus commission was to pay, and that the work was not only undertaken in response to government initiative but also reflected Anne’s personal interest in the antique. Holbein’s first royal engagement was thus aimed at Anne and, as will appear, he certainly undertook subsequent commissions for her. That she was his continuing patron is confirmed by the experience of the French poet and reformer Nicolas Bourbon. Early in 1535 he came to England under the queen’s protection, and it was as part of her circle that he met and became an admirer of the artist.
20
True, it can be objected that Bourbon subsequently described Holbein as ‘the king’s painter’, but when he made that comment Anne was already dead.
Can Holbein commissions other than
Mount Parnassus
be linked to Anne? The most remarkable candidate is
The Ambassadors
, the double portrait of Jean de Dinteville, Francis I’s
maître d’hôtel,
and George de Selve, bishop of Latour, standing full-length each side of a cup-board laden with various items (plate 44).
21
The first reason to connect Holbein’s greatest surviving masterpiece with Anne is its date. Dinteville, on the left, arrived as the French ambassador to England shortly before 15 February 1533.
22
The bishop came on a special visit to see Dinteville but had left by 4 June and possibly by 23 May.
23
The painting, in other words, was conceived exactly in the weeks when Anne Boleyn was recognized as queen and her coronation prepared, at the very time when Holbein was working on
Mount Parnassus
. The next connection depends on the purpose of Selve’s visit. It could simply have been private, but not only would that be somewhat unusual, there is no previous evidence that the two men knew each other well. A more convincing explanation is that Dinteville’s diplomatic instructions had been overtaken by Anne’s public recognition as queen and that the bishop came to bring confidential directions for the ambassador (and possibly a private message to Anne). This construction would certainly explain why Dinteville was insistent that news of de Selve’s visit should be kept from Francis I’s strongly imperialist principal minister, the duc de Montmorency.
24
It would also explain why the ambassador was ready to accept a prominent part in the coronation when his original instruction had been concerned with Francis I’s plans to meet Clement VII, and the prospect that the pope would offer an accommodation over the Aragon marriage.
25
If de Selve did come with such a briefing, then given that Anne was accepted as queen from 11 April, we are able to say that de Selve sat to Holbein between late April and the end of May 1533.
Thus far the evidence would only indicate that ambassadors involved in Anne’s recognition and coronation sat to an artist who was at the same time engaged on a project for Anne’s coronation. However, two elements in the painting itself make specific reference to the queen. As the ambassador rests his left arm on the cup-board he almost touches a small upright wooden cylinder. This is a ‘shepherd’s’ or pillar dial, a device to determine dates by the sun. The settings on the instrument are clear to read and they indicate the date 11 April, in other words, the precise day on which the royal court (and no doubt Dinteville) was told that Anne was hence-forward to be accorded royal honours.
26
That the date on this dial is no accident is shown by the second reference, this time to Anne’s actual coronation. This was made by choosing to place the figures not, as one would expect, on a Turkey carpet, but on a highly distinctive
cosmati
pavement. The only example of such
cosmati
work in England was the floor of the sanctuary in Westminster Abbey, and the reason why Holbein made this a major feature in
The Ambassadors
has long been a puzzle. However, that pavement was the precise spot where Anne Boleyn was anointed queen, that most solemn moment in the coronation ritual which was the distinctive spiritual mark of English monarchy, a ritual which Dinteville witnessed by special invitation of the king. The choice of the
cosmati
floor thus made the painting a permanent reminder of the high point of the ambassador’s career. With this allusion, it is also hard not to suppose that Holbein depicted Dinteville in the costume he appeared in for the coronation and which he was so worried about being paid for.
27
We can also be sure that Anne would have endorsed much of the syllabus of
The Ambassadors
. As is well known, many of the objects Holbein depicted appear to refer to the contemporary state of the Church. Most immediate to the eye is the lute with one string broken. Next to it is another symbol of harmony, a case of flutes, but with one instrument missing. Beneath the lute is a pair of dividers and on the left an arithmetic book half-open at a page on division. However, Dinteville was strongly influenced by evangelical reform in France, which was not schismatic — particularly the writings of Jacques Lefvre d’Etaples. The painting, therefore, also offers hope. The green curtain behind the sitters is drawn back to reveal sufficient of a silver crucifix. The arithmetic book is prevented from closing on the division page by a set-square. In front of the lute is a hymnal with on one page the
Veni Creator Spiritus (‘Come Creator Spirit’),
and on the other the Ten Commandments. Although these were basic anthems of the Latin Church, Holbein shows them in a vernacular Lutheran version.
28
Crucifix, set-square, Lutheran vernacular and texts known to all Christians together express the conviction of evangelicals that the way to unity in the Church was a response to Christ by the Holy Spirit, leading to a life of everyday obedience to the commandments. As we shall see, Anne Boleyn (who had almost certainly met Dinteville in 1531 if not earlier), shared his evangelicalism and would work with him two years later to rescue the like-minded Nicolas Bourbon from religious difficulties in France.
29
Given that Holbein was also of a reformist turn of mind, the religious message of
The Ambassadors
was common to sitter, artist and artist’s patron alike.
30
As well as an association with the largest of Holbein’s surviving works, Anne is linked to the most beautiful of his miniatures,
Solomon and the Queen of Sheba
(plate 42).
31
The intended recipient was quite obviously Henry VIII himself, and the gift appears distinctly personal. It is very unlikely to have been a new year’s gift since extant lists of these rule out a date before January 1535 and the stylistic links are with the artist’s two murals,
The Triumph of Riches
and
The Triumph of Poverty,
which are conjecturally dated 1532-3.
32
Internal evidence also suggests a date soon after the submission of the clergy in May 1532.
33
At that time the only person likely to be able to make a private gift to the king of such an intimate piece is Anne herself, and strong internal evidence points in that direction.
Superficially, the subject is the Old Testament story of King Solomon receiving a visit from the Queen of Sheba
(Regina Saba).
The inscriptions in gold to the left and right of the throne are taken from the Vulgate account of the visit found in the Second Book of Chronicles, chapter 9. Holbein, however, very deliberately depicts Solomon as Henry VIII, so equating the king with the wisest man in the world. That is only the first layer of meaning. The Solomon and Sheba episode had for many centuries been interpreted by the Church as a foreshadowing of the homage of the Church to Christ — ‘one greater than Solomon’.
34
But if the Queen equals the Church, Solomon equals Christ and Henry equals Solomon, then the homage of the Church Universal to Christ must be equated with the submission of the Church in England to the king as its head under Christ. And to make sure that this reference to the 1532 victory was understood, the Biblical quotation above Solomon’s head (a conflation of II Chronicles 9, verse 8, and I Kings 10, verse 9), was deliberately distorted. The Vulgate original states that God made Solomon king in order ‘to do justice’; the miniature says ‘to be king (appointed) for the Lord your God’.
35
In other words, Henry is ‘the supreme head of this his realm of England immediately under God’.
36
There is possibly a third layer of meaning too. New Testament symbolism pictures Christ as ‘the Bridegroom’ and the Church as ‘his Bride’. But if Solomon stands for Christ, he must also be the Bridegroom, and if the Queen of Sheba is a symbol of the Church, then she must also be equivalent to the Bride of Christ. Must she not, therefore, also be the Bride of Solomon? Italian painters certainly made the connection, and if Holbein did likewise, then the figure of the Queen of Sheba stands for Anne herself. In this way, the Queen of Sheba’s gesture, presenting the homage of her escort to Solomon, becomes a gesture by Anne to the Church in England, which in part she had brought to submit to Henry. If the Queen of Sheba is Anne, then the miniature is a memento of the victory of 1532.
To twenty-first-century minds all this may appear convoluted in the extreme! Nevertheless, other indications suggest that the significance of the miniature was meant to be peeled away in this fashion. Tradition saw the Queen of Sheba as also a ‘type’ of the ‘Virgin Mary Crowned’, and we have seen how Anne’s coronation cast her in the same role. The Vulgate texts each side of Solomon’s throne directly echo Anne’s motto, ‘the most happy’.
37
What is more, after her marriage to Henry, not only was the organ screen in King’s College Chapel, Cambridge, ornamented with a riot of references to Anne, the stained glass which was installed nearby to tell the Sheba story depicts a Henry/Solomon and a Queen who are very clearly derived from the Holbein miniature.(plate 43).
38
It could even be that the inscription
‘REGINA SABA’
on the miniature, unnecessary as it is and out of place, could be one of the acronyms Tudors loved, possibly
‘Regina Salomonem Anna Boleyn Amat,’
Anne Boleyn the queen loves Solomon.
Although no drawing or painting of the queen by Holbein has survived, this substantial connection strongly reinforces the probability that she did sit to him and that her portrait was one of those lost in the course of time.
39
Holbein also produced for her designs for jewellery and silver-work.
40
The most impressive is his drawing of a standing cup and cover, now in Basle (plate 40).
41
This can confidently be identified as a piece designed to Anne’s order or else for her, because it is engraved with a crowned falcon on the roses. Evidently the artist’s famous British Museum design for Jane Seymour’s cup was not the first he had prepared for an English queen. Jane’s was, however, an improvement on Anne’s, for the Basle drawing cannot be described as a happily integrated design. The imperial crown, which forms the knop on the cover, and the engraved heraldic falcon are decidedly incongruous in a piece which is otherwise wholly ‘antique’: three semi-nudes in Renaissance style supporting the stem, four satyrs holding up the rim and four classical heads decorating a band round the bowl of the cup.
The oft-repeated story that Holbein had a hand in the 1534 cradle is disproved by the original itemized bill.
42
However, a piece he was almost certainly responsible for was the silver-gilt table-fountain which Anne gave to Henry at New Year 1534, a pumped device which circulated rosewater into a basin so that diners could rinse their hands. The New Year Gift list describes it as
A goodly gilt bason, having a rail or board of gold in the midst of the brim, garnished with rubies and pearls, wherein standeth a fountain, also having a rail of gold about it garnished with diamonds, out whereof issueth water at the teats of three naked women standing about the foot of the same fountain.
43
 
Many writers have identified this with the Basle cup and cover, but this is unquestionably wrong.
44
First, the Basle drawing is not a water device. There is nothing to suggest that it could ever be described as a basin, or even be in a basin, apart from a faint horizontal line and some imagination.
45
Next the Gift List description makes no mention of the major feature of the Basle cup, the four satyrs, nor do they figure in any of five later references to a piece which was disposed of only in 1620.
46
Conclusively, these later descriptions indicate that instead of a crown, the fountain had a ‘plate of gold in the top of the cover with the Queen’s arms and Queen Anne‘s’. The 1534 fountain and the Basle cup and cover are clearly not related, and since the latter does not appear in later lists, it was presumably among the items melted down in the aftermath of Anne’s fall.

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