The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn (51 page)
Even more significances are to be found in the Alnwick ‘L’Ecclesiaste’; indeed, each of the historiated initials has its meaning.
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Some are unsurprising — chapter 1: the royal couple’s shield as on the cover enamel (the arms of the husband impaling those of the wife); chapter 8: Anne’s own shield, crowned; chapters 2, 7, 11: the initials ‘H’ and ‘A’. The crowned falcon on the roses features twice (chapters 3 and 10, plate 31) as does Anne’s motto ‘the most happy’ (chapters 5 and 9). The three remaining letters (chapters 4, 6 and 12) are different, riddles intended to be accessible only to those in the know. Chapter 6 begins with the pronoun
‘Il’
.
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The historiated ‘I’ is notably delicate (plate 32). Each side of the upright stroke, in a space no bigger than a normal postage stamp, is a curved stalk in gold with eleven oak leaves, seven acorn cups (four full and three empty) and a honeysuckle bloom with a tiny tendril in white and gold. The significance of this is that Anne and Henry had adopted honeysuckle and acorns, either separately or together, as a private motif. When this happened is not clear but, as we shall see, both featured regularly in palace furnishings.
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The symbolism is hardly profound, but identifying it provides another of those rare glimpses into the intimacy between husband and wife. Chapter 12 is harder to elucidate.
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The opening letter ‘E’ is in pink on a blue ground decorated with a gold foliage pattern above the horizontal stroke, which is repeated below in reverse. The stems and leaves are akin to those of chapter 6, but there are no acorns or honeysuckle blooms. Perhaps we have honeysuckle stems as a symbol of Anne alone. If so, the interpretation could be that the mirror image makes it possible to read the stems in the lower part as springing from a tree-stump and in the upper part as life culminating in a crown — new life and a future for the dynasty?
Even more challenging is the historiated ‘E’ at the start of chapter 4:
‘Et me suis’
(plate 33).
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This is in pink, picked out in white and lined with green, with a white scroll round the horizontal bearing the motto
Fiat voluntas tua
— ‘Thy will be done.’ Behind the letter is an anchor in blue with a gold stock, hanging from an armillary sphere, also in gold; beside the sphere is the abbreviation ‘IHS’ and, below the scroll, ‘6H’ — all these in gold too. Again the technique is superb; the shadow cast by the anchor on the background is lovingly indicated, and the effect of light and shade on the cage-work of the sphere is meticulous, inside and out. As for the meaning, once again it has to be unpeeled, layer by layer. The motto and the monogram for ‘Jesus’ suggest a possible link with the opening subject of the chapter, which deals with the reality of oppression in human experience. The celestial or armillary sphere appears in a number of Holbein’s designs for medallions, though without its meaning becoming apparent. However, at the end of the century the device was customarily interpreted as a symbol of constancy.
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This would make good sense of the anchor, another symbol of firm commitment, and relate nicely to the motto which is taken from the words of total obedience to God uttered by Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane.
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Beneath this surface religious interpretation, one would expect this illumination, as with the honeysuckle and the oak and all the other historiated letters, to have a meaning that referred directly to Anne or Henry, or both of them. The key to that is the interpretation of the ‘6 H’. If instead of ‘6’, this is read as the Greek letter sigma, σ, we have the equivalent of ‘S’ in English, and ‘S’ in royal monograms means ‘Sovereign’. In that case, the religious level of meaning is indicated by the monogram ‘IHS’ for Jesus above the central scroll, and the secular by ‘σH’ for ‘Sovereign Henry’ below it, the appropriate position for a supreme head ‘under Christ’. ‘Christ’s will be done: Henry’s will be done,’ and the two are effectively congruent. What then is the private significance of the sphere and the anchor? The explanation here is that, as we have seen, Anne used the sphere as a personal symbol, so that in association with the anchor, it spells out her own reliance on Henry. Significantly, their daughter used the symbol of the armillary sphere throughout her reign and possibly while still a princess.
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One wonders whether those who commissioned paintings of Elizabeth wearing a celestial sphere, or her successive champions, Sir Henry Lee and the earl of Cumberland, who displayed it, recognized in it a covert reference to her mother. That connection must surely have been in her mind when, possibly before 1559, Elizabeth wrote a poem in a psalter opposite the drawing of an armillary sphere, condemning ‘the inward suspicious mind’ as worse than any physical deformity.
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Her father’s perhaps?
Any survey of Anne Boleyn’s interest in art and fine objects must leave one question in doubt. ‘What significance did they have for her?’ The personal references which can be uncovered in the material, even after an interval of 500 years, certainly suggest that the objects themselves were more than the expected adjuncts of monarchy. This, in turn, gives value to the teasing references in the sources to much which has been lost — payments for forty pieces of fine silver enamelled with Anne’s arms as lady marquis, for garnishing books with silver and gilt, for mending a little book ‘garnished (with gold) in France’, for binding books in velvet.
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Anne very clearly had interests akin to those of her first mentor, Margaret of Austria. Whether we should elevate this to a passion is a different question and impossible to answer. Nor do we, in our present state of scholarship, know how unusual Anne was among Henry’s later wives. Indeed, that question is hardly realistic, for only Katherine Parr lasted more than eighteen months. She possessed plenty of jewellery but much less plate than Anne, and though she is noted as having over a dozen books, they seem distinguished by their bindings rather than their contents.
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Thereafter the next queens consort were James I’s wife, Anne of Denmark, and his son’s wife, Henrietta Maria, each of whom did certainly exhibit considerable artistic interest, but, of course, in the quite different cultural milieu of the seventeenth century. Yet when all allowance is made for proper caution, the cultured reality which was Anne still comes through. Whatever else she might have been, she was a woman of a certain aesthetic commitment and discrimination. We must not distort her into a major Renaissance patron in the mould of her contemporary, Isabella d’Este, but we can allow Anne Boleyn a respectable and perhaps distinctive place in the cultural story of sixteenth-century England.
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LIFE AT COURT
T
O his subjects, Henry VIII’s court was less a location than an ecosystem, an organism which sustained not just the king as ruler but the king as a person. Indeed, only theorists made much of the difference between the two, which they came to refer to as his two ‘bodies’.
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When the king moved, the court moved, and Henry and Anne moved often, on average thirty times a year.
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During winter, spring and early summer they could be found in the larger royal houses, which were capable of taking their full entourage of perhaps 1000 or more people for several weeks at a time. These ‘standing houses’ were mostly to be found on the artery of the Thames, with Greenwich as a favourite. High summer and autumn saw the royal couple on progress, travelling with a reduced number of attendants within a hundred-mile radius of London, as dictated principally by a search for the best hunting.
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While on progress they stayed at smaller Crown properties or houses owned by their subjects or by the Church. Thus, during the first six months of 1535, Anne interspersed various periods at Greenwich, at Whitehall and at Hampton Court, ending finally at Windsor. Then came a lengthy progress, a return to Windsor, and finally a move to Richmond in early December.
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Married life for Anne meant travelling. For much of the time it also meant living in a building site. From the start of his reign, Henry built. At first he worked at one remove via Cardinal Wolsey, but after 1529 he blossomed as an architect
manqué.
Although the flood-tide of his construction did not set in until 1535, Anne’s coming into favour coincided with the acquisition of two major sites, the unfinished Hampton Court and York Place (later Whitehall). Even this was not enough for Henry, augmented though it was by continual large and small building projects in his then eighteen or so other properties. In 1531, before Whitehall was anywhere near finished, the king decided to build St James’ - a mere half-mile away. Yet Anne was not a wife who simply put up with the builders; Simon Thurley has described her as Henry’s ‘enthusiastic partner in building campaigns’.
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We have seen how the two of them gloated over York Place in the autumn of 1529, and Henry spent the ensuing Christmas designing additions there ‘to please the lady who prefers that place for the King’s residence to any other’.
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Anne took over Wolsey’s personal lodgings there, leaving Henry to wait for the builder. On one occasion at least she dealt directly with the Whitehall paymaster of works, and her enthusiasm and involvement certainly contributed to the frenzy of activity which overtook Wolsey’s former house from 1531 onwards.
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Impressment of labour, construction by artificial light, canvas screens to allow work to continue in all weathers — everything was done to finish in record time, and it was in the new gatehouse of Whitehall that Henry and Anne were married.
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By the time she died the site of the former episcopal palace, already made magnificent by Wolsey, had been significantly enlarged, and the existing buildings swallowed up to create what was becoming the king’s main residence in (or rather, on the edge of) the city of London.
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Because many of the relevant building accounts have been lost, it is difficult to say much more about the impact Anne had on the development of Whitehall. Not so at Hampton Court, where much of the documentation survives. Thus we know from a bill for broken windows that she had her own lodging there by June 1529 if not earlier.
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While Katherine was still nominally queen Henry built there only for himself, pointedly leaving his first wife in the rooms Wolsey had provided for her in 1526. However, once living with Anne, he put a new queen’s suite in hand immediately; indeed, since the foundations were being measured out in January 1533, planning must have begun very soon after the couple returned from Calais.
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Henry and Anne kept a constant eye on progress, and in November bricklayers were on overtime to finish the walls before the next royal visit.
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And the king kept on designing. When the couple were staying there in the following July, the payhouse provided papers for ‘sundry platts drawn at the king’s commandment’.
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Anne’s new suite broke completely with the recent past. At Richmond, rebuilt after a 1497 fire, Henry’s parents had rooms one above the other.
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At Eltham, modernized between 1519 and 1522, Katherine and Henry had lodgings on opposite sides of the courtyard, though the king seems to have had a bedroom reserved in her suite; at Hampton Court the consort’s rooms were on the floor above the king and at Bridewell on the floor below and across the inner courtyard. In sharp contrast, Anne’s new apartments at Hampton Court were constructed on the same floor as the king’s (the first) and with direct private access to his suite.
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Although swept away in 1689 by Christopher Wren, it is known that they were erected on the east face of the palace, looking out on the park and backing on an internal gallery. The main entry was at the northern end of this gallery and led to the watching chamber, the presence chamber and the privy or withdrawing chamber and then to the more private rooms, ending with the queen’s bedchamber and her jewel chamber. The connection with Henry’s existing suite was achieved by extending his privy gallery to link with the southern end of Anne’s corridor and to open into a magnificent bedroom for Henry, close to Anne’s. At the same time a new privy stair was installed near the junction of the two corridors to give the couple access to the privy garden on the south. The ground floor below Anne’s personal suite was a service area including her wardrobe, kitchen, larder and a nursery, all set behind an arcade fronting the park.
The decision to build Anne’s rooms over an arcade raises the interesting possibility of French influence. An obvious inspiration could have been ‘the façade of the loggias’ at Blois which was constructed during Anne’s residence there with Queen Claude. On the other hand, considerable caution needs to be exercised when claiming ‘artistic influence’, and the arcade may simply have echoed existing structures elsewhere in the palace.
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Where we can rule out Anne’s experience at the French court is in the decision to place the suites for king and queen contiguously on the same floor. The rooms Queen Claude occupied at Blois were above those of King Francis, who had access by a private circular stair.
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As a source for the innovation at Hampton Court, an immediate possibility is the juxtaposed accommodation which Anne and Henry probably occupied during their 1532 visit to Calais.
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This could well have taught them the advantages of greater intimacy. Alternatively, the Hampton Court plan could simply reflect that rarity in royal marriages, a love match.
As well as major building at Whitehall and Hampton Court, Anne’s public recognition meant scores of minor changes in all the royal palaces, replacing heraldic glass and decorations which employed Katherine’s arms and symbols, and at Greenwich the opportunity was taken to erect Anne’s arms in place of Wolsey’s on the great organ in the chapel.
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In the gallery at Eltham, where the baby Elizabeth played in bad weather, ten of her mother’s badges were inserted in the glass at a shilling each. Given the deal of new glass elsewhere in the palace, no doubt similarly decorated, Mary’s celebrated rudeness to Anne in the Eltham chapel seems at least more understandable.
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The royal beasts in the Hampton Court gardens had to make room for a newcomer, a leopard — Anne’s secondary badge, derived from the Brothertons — and a leopard was also set up on the hall roof. Fortunately for economy, her successor’s device would be a panther, so all that was necessary in 1536 was some anatomical modification.
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No such modification proved possible to the roof of the Great Hall, which to this day continues to display Anne’s arms, the falcon on the roses and the ‘HA’ monogram.
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Of more accessible locations, at least one escaped the removal of every trace of Anne’s existence which was attempted at her fall; her ciphers are still to be seen on the St James’ gatehouse.
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