The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn (50 page)

The evidence that the 1534 fountain was, nevertheless, designed by Holbein is provided by two other drawings in the Basle collection. The first is a rough sketch of a naked woman spraying liquid from her right breast (plate 39).
47
If this was not a preliminary sketch for the women of the 1534 fountain, it was a sketch for something very similar. Equally striking is the second Basle drawing.
48
This shows a table fountain in a shallow basin with ‘naked women standing about the foot’ possibly with water issuing from the breast (plate 41). The drawing is not a final design for Anne’s fountain since it is surmounted by an image of Jove with a thunderbolt, not a plate carrying Anne’s arms. But the parallel is beyond doubt, and the link may be closer still. At the bottom right is the rough sketch of a nude female torso with obvious similarities to the first drawing.
In recent years a case has been made to credit Anne with the patronage of another artist, or, rather, a family of artists, the Horneboltes from Ghent: Gerard the father, Margaret of Austria’s court painter, and his children Lucas and Susanna, each of whom had followed in the family profession.
49
Anne, however, was certainly not involved in their decision to try their fortune on this side of the Channel, for Lucas was in England at the latest by September 1525. What is possible is that he had a letter of introduction to Thomas Boleyn - even, perhaps, from the archduchess herself — for one of Lucas’s first commissions was a portrait of Boleyn’s son-in-law, William Carey.
50
The Horneboltes may have been discreetly absenting themselves from the Low Countries, where an outburst of religious persecution was under way. Yet even if they were heterodox, the date of their arrival rules out any protective connection with Anne of the kind she offered after 1533.
On the other hand, once she was in a position to do so, Anne might have employed a reformist refugee like Lucas Hornebolte just as she did the slightly suspect Holbein. The patent appointing Lucas as king’s painter for life in June 1534 certainly suggests some personal recommendation to the king: ‘For a long time I have been acquainted not only by reports from others but also from personal knowledge with the science and experience in the pictorial art of Lucas Hornebolte.’
51
The year 1534 was a high point in Boleyn influence and it is tempting to see Anne as Hornebolte’s sponsor. Against this, Lucas had been in England long enough to acquire contacts with the circles around Katherine, and many pieces attributed to him link him with Anne’s enemies.
52
The jury is out, but the omens for a close link between the Horneboltes and Anne Boleyn are not promising.
Even if Anne did not employ the Horneboltes personally, she must have known one aspect of their work where they were unsurpassed: manuscript illumination. In the thinking of the day, such objects were more akin to jewels than to books, and Anne had an obvious enthusiasm for them as well as decided tastes of her own. Only a small number have survived or can now be identified as hers, but the proof that she was an enthusiast is the trouble that was taken to prepare for her a presentation copy of the exemplification of the royal patents that she had been granted between June 1532 and her jointure on 21/22 March 1533.
53
The first item, the patent creating her lady marquis of Pembroke, begins with a massive letter ‘H’, 114 by 107 millimetres, illuminated in gold and blue and incorporating the crowned falcon on the roses. The whole impressive document may well be ‘the jointure of Queen Anne’ for which the chancery provided four skins of vellum along with silk and gold, at a cost of 18 shillings in the year 1533-4.
54
The oldest illuminated manuscript so far identified with Anne is a Book of Hours now at Hever Castle, which dates from the mid-fifteenth century (plate 23). Produced at Bruges specifically for an English client (unidentified), it is lavishly decorated with thirty-three large illuminations plus twenty-two small and one historiated initial, within fine foliage borders enriched with flowers, fruit and grotesques.
55
Anne certainly owned it before 1529, although when it was obtained or how is not clear.
56
Since the liturgical content is specifically English, Anne is unlikely to have acquired the book abroad, making the alternatives a second-hand purchase in this country or a family connection. At the time it was produced, her grandfather Geoffrey could certainly have afforded the book, but there is no positive evidence to support the conjecture that he was the original owner.
57
Anne’s taste in illumination was not confined to an appreciation of things Flemish. The first instance of this is a Book of Hours printed in Paris and now also at Hever Castle (plate 22).
58
It qualifies as illuminated only by courtesy, for it is an example of a late fifteenth-century publishing initiative to make devotional books cheaper and more readily available, by supplying a printed text and woodcut illustrations which could then be coloured by hand. Anne’s copy was, however, printed on vellum, making it a more up-market product than one on paper; the cuts have been coloured, the initials also, and the pages have been given gilt borders in an architectural style. Once again the circumstances of acquisition are unknown, but the relative cheapness of the book suggests that it is more likely to have been acquired by her as a teenager in France rather than specially imported.
Each of the Books of Hours at Hever contains an inscription by Anne. In the printed book she wrote:
Remember me when you do pray,
That hope doth lead from day to day.
Anne Boleyn
 
Presciently she wrote this opposite a depiction of the coronation of the Virgin.
59
In the older volume she chose to use French and wrote
‘le temps viendra / je anne boleyn’
below a miniature of the Second Coming and the Resurrection of the Dead (plate 24).
60
Within this inscription, between
‘je’
and
‘anne’,
Anne inserted a small drawing; on close examination this turns out to be an armillary sphere. Evidently this was a device Anne adopted before switching to the falcon on the roses.
61
Other manuscripts were specially produced for Anne in France. At least one clearly came from a top
atelier
. In italic script, delicately heightened with colour, it is a specially adapted text of Clement Marot’s poem,
Le Pasteur Evangélique,
which Anne received after her marriage to Henry VIII.
62
What is not certain is whether the impressive frontispiece of Anne’s arms surrounded by a wreath of oak leaves and Tudor roses, with the falcon badge almost as a pendant, came with the book or was added in England (plate 45).
The most splendid of the illuminated manuscripts produced for Anne combined Flemish-style illumination and a French text. Now in the collection of the duke of Northumberland at Alnwick, ‘The Ecclesiaste’ (plate 27) is in such good condition that Anne herself might almost have put it down a moment ago.
63
True, black has faded to grey, but otherwise we see exactly what those frequent payments to Hayes, the goldsmith, for fine velvet bindings were for. At the centre of the front cover is Anne Boleyn’s shield of arms in enamel on a metal base, probably silver, surmounted by a crown. All four corners of the book, front and back, are guarded with brass, decorated with a roundel on which is engraved a royal badge — the crowned lion rampant regardant, the dragon, the crowned falcon on the roses, and the greyhound — and there are two decorated brass clasps. These last are very similar to known designs by Holbein and could well be attributed to him.
64
The manuscript provides a text of the Old Testament book of Ecclesiastes plus a commentary. The title-page is almost an imitation of printing, but it does introduce the ground colours for the illuminations, pink and slate, a combination Anne seems to have favoured elsewhere.
65
The running title is in a bright blue, which is also used to number the twelve chapters and to divide the treatment of each page into
texte
sections in French, and
annotation
(commentary) in English. Each section of
texte
and
annotation
has an initial letter 20 millimetres square and illuminated alternately in sky-blue lit by white and in dusky pink, each on a slate-blue ground speckled with gold. These are impressive enough, but the initial letters of each chapter are treated in a truly magnificent fashion. Four times the size — 40 millimetres square - they comprise a series of eight designs, superbly executed. Even what appears to be just a flower-like letter ‘J’ in pink on a slate ground, with ‘H’ and ‘A’ in gold, turns out on closer examination to be lined with green and picked out in white, with a fine gold filigree over the slate and the whole shadowed and in perspective, as though the letter were in relief.
66
The first illumination of all, the combined shield of Henry and Anne, is in no fewer than seven colours and tones.
67
The Alnwick ‘Ecclesiaste’ was produced for Anne during her three years as queen, although the exact date was subsequently disguised by a deliberate erasure of part of the colophon, leaving only M
1
CCCCC.
68
In style it clearly belongs to the school of illumination fashionable at the Habsburg court in Brussels, which she had first experienced twenty years before under Margaret of Austria. However, it is almost certainly not produced in the Low Countries but by Flemish-trained craftsmen working in England. It was, in fact, not the first manuscript that these experts had produced for Anne. Over the winter of 1532-3, between the time of Anne’s becoming lady marquis of Pembroke and her recognition as queen, the same scribe and possibly the same illuminator had produced the somewhat less elaborate ‘The Pistellis and Gospelles for the LII Sondayes in the Yere’, now in the British Library (plate 30).
69
It too follows the distinctive format of a
texte
in French and an
exhortation
in English, with blue used for editorial matter. The preface is illuminated with a large representation of Anne’s arms as marquis of Pembroke — Ormonde, Brotherton, Rochford and Warenne quartered on a lozenge surmounted by a coronet. The list of contents on folio 2 recto has architectural borders in gold, while on 2 verso is a third of the illuminated pages, a depiction of the Crucifixion, with Mary, St John and Mary Magdalen within an architectural border, which includes figures of St Peter and St Paul and medallions of the evangelists. Thereafter, however, there are only small decorated initials, including Anne’s arms on a lozenge and the initials ‘AP’, ‘Anne Pembroke’.
As well as these obvious links, ‘The Pistellis and Gospelles’ contain cryptic references to the Boleyns. The first is a cipher on folio 1 verso (upside down) which appears to contain letters making up ‘George Boleyn’.
70
Then, spaced around her lozenge of arms are four examples in gold of a second cipher which combines the letters ‘H’, ‘E’, ‘N’ (this last backwards), ‘R’, ‘E’, ‘X’, ‘S’, and ‘L’.
71
The cipher also occurs among the decorated initial letters. ‘HENricus REX’ is an obvious reading, but that leaves the last two letters, ‘S’ and ‘L’, to be accounted for. ‘Sovereign Lord’, ‘Sovereign Liege’, seem the likely interpretations. Perhaps the refrain of the court song, ‘My Sovereign Lord’, is relevant here, with its queen (or mistress) using that title to praise ‘the eighth Harry’ and his tiltyard exploits in her honour.
72
This monogram recurs in another manuscript known to have been made for Anne.
73
A psalter, it dates from the period between her father’s elevation to an earldom in December 1529 and Anne’s own promotion in September 1532, and was specially ordered from one of the studios in Paris or Rouen which supplied the court and elite society of France. No surprises are presented by the two full borders in the book, one in French Gothic style and one of Renaissance candelabra. Nor are there any in the armorial achievement facing the first folio, a display of Anne’s arms on a lozenge (held up by two somewhat muscular winged putti within an architectural frame), and the lozenge is repeated in a number of the historiated letters which occur at various points later in the text. Opposite the Renaissance candelabra, however, two wingless putti hold up a different lozenge at the centre of which is the ‘HENREXSL’ monogram in purple (plate 25). This lozenge (which also recurs in a smaller form elsewhere in the book) has two other devices a well, the black lion of Rochford at the bottom and a smaller cipher at the top, again in purple. This consists of a curiously formed letter ‘A’, with a stroke through the apex and the normal horizontal stroke written as a ‘V’. That this is more than a fancy piece of penmanship is clear from the occurrence of exactly the same format in the sections of the coving of the organ screen of King’s College, Cambridge, which, as we shall see, celebrates the marriage of Henry and Anne (see plate 34).
74
As Tudor monograms go, the interpretation is once more simple. Writing the letter ‘A’ in this way also creates the letters ‘T’ and ‘M’, so making the Latin ‘amat’ (‘loves’). The whole therefore means either ‘[Henry] loves A[nne]’ or ‘A[nne] loves [Henry]’, or both. It has been suggested that this psalter was a gift from Jean du Bellay, who, as Francis’s ambassador in England, did become very friendly with Anne. However, the intimacy of the monograms makes this very unlikely. Given the foreign provenance of the psalter and yet the use of such personal symbols, it is plausible to surmise that the order for the book came from the king himself.
75

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