The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn (52 page)

Read The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn Online

Authors: Eric Ives

From time to time we get glimpses of Anne’s own taste. At Greenwich, the ceilings in her presence chamber and bedchamber were decorated with gilded bullions and buds on a lattice of white battens; the areas in front of the chimneys in the main rooms were protected by Seville tiles, and the other alcoves paved in yellow and green Flanders tiles costing a third of the price.
24
At Eltham in 1534, arrangements ‘against the coming of the prince’ (the child Anne was to lose in the summer) included an iron canopy over the cradle, special measures to exclude draughts, and the redecoration of the suite in yellow ochre.
25
Occasionally we even meet Anne herself. On the king’s orders, three bird coops were built at Sir Henry Norris’s house in Greenwich town in 1534, for ‘the peacock and the pelican that were brought to the king out of the New Found Land’. Anne had complained bitterly to Henry that the birds must be got out of the garden because she ‘could not take her rest in mornings for the noise of the same’. Anyone who has had to live in the vicinity of a peacock will sympathize — and feel equally sorry for Norris and his neighbours.
26
Anne’s taste for the antique continues to come through from all the evidence. When Henry had the house at Hanworth fitted up for her, parts of the exterior were decorated with antique work and he had the antique heads transferred there from Greenwich repainted by two Italian artists in his employ (plate 48).
27
Patterned grotesque work covered much of the interior of Whitehall, even the passage to the privy kitchen, and eventually the exterior as well, while
Solomon and the Queen of Sheba
shows very clearly how would-be classical columns and ceilings were used internally.
28
At Hampton Court, Anne’s new lodgings were decorated by a German ‘moulder of antique’, clearly a specialist.
29
Another foreign expert, ‘Philip the sculptor’, was responsible, with local men working under him, for the one piece of interior design associated with Anne to have survived, the screen at King’s College, Cambridge (plate 34), which we have already noticed.
30
The earliest major timber construction in the country entirely in Renaissance style, the screen is a paean of praise to Henry VIII and particularly to his marriage with Anne. The three bays of blind arcading on each side of the double doors have round heads, with carvings in high relief in each tympanum. These, with one exception, are shields displaying royal arms and symbols, two of which refer specifically to Anne. One, supported by cherubs, has the cipher ‘RA’, and the other the arms of Henry and Anne impaled. Below this latter is a stylized woman’s profile (plate 35) and under that a bull’s head, a punning reference to the queen’s family.
31
The final carving is quite different. In a graphic Renaissance style which could owe something to the Sistine ceiling, it depicts God casting the devil’s angels from heaven. At first sight this may seem to clash with the rest of the screen, but in reformist circles the fall of the angels was equated with the rejection of the pope. The carving therefore very probably expresses divine approval for the break with Rome.
32
Over the blind arcade is a continuous coving to accommodate the wider gallery above. In two of its eight sections, a central boss is flanked by the profile of a crowned falcon on the roses in relief, with a third falcon at the base, head-on and visible down to its wings as it displays towards the nave. In the corners of the first are ‘HAmat’ ciphers; in the other, the cipher ‘RA/HEN REX S[overeign] L[ord]’. That monogram also appears in another section of the coving, balancing ‘HR’ for Henricus Rex. ‘RA’ opposite ‘HR’ can also be found on the inner face of the screen over the Provost’s stall.
Antique taste can also be detected in Anne’s furnishings. When her vice-chamberlain, Edward Baynton, visited Baynards Castle (in the city of London), which she had taken over from Katherine of Aragon, he selected for her from her predecessor’s belongings ‘a cup of horn with a cover, garnished with antique work, the knop of the cover and the foot of the cup [made of] ivory’; on an earlier occasion, the plate she received from the estate of Henry Guildford included six bowls with ‘the feet wrought with antique work and faces’.
33
When Anne ‘took her chamber’ before Elizabeth was born, her rooms were equipped with two specially made folding tables, one ‘for a breakfast table’ and the other ‘for her grace to play upon’ — that is, at cards. Each of these was made ‘with tiles entailed [patterned] with antique work’.
34
The one royal artefact which survives, possibly from Anne’s actual rooms, is also ‘antique work’. It is a gilt metal clock, Renaissance in form and ornamented with grotesque work, busts and pilasters (plate 37). The connection with Anne is evident from its weights which are engraved with ‘H’ and ‘A’, true lovers’ knots and the mottoes
Dieu et mon droit
and ‘The Most Happy’.
35
What must not be forgotten, however, is that personal taste always served the greater purpose: magnificence. Bills due in the last five months of Anne’s life provide a vivid glimpse of the deliberate ostentation royalty was expected to show.
36
For the hunt or the progress, a set of elaborate decorations for the queen’s own saddle cost almost £4 10
s.,
four tassels of gold, silver and black silk a further 53s. 4
d
. Anne’s closest attendants had to complement their mistress too, and the provision of a saddle and harness decorations for Lady Margaret Douglas, the king’s niece, cost £4 13
s
. 7½
d
. Interiors had to be similarly impressive. There were payments for chair decorations in crimson silk, in green silk, and in Venice gold with crimson fringes; for a red sarcenet ‘great bed’ with a matching sparver, or canopy, lined with blue buckram; for crimson and orange curtains; for a ‘little bed’ of green satin; for fringes, ribbon, buttons and tassels, often in gold. Even things hidden had to be to a standard. Thirty-two and three-quarter yards of green buckram were purchased just to line the presses or cupboards in the queen’s apartments, not that such care was extravagant, given the fine materials Anne had to store. In 1535 Henry gave her more than twenty yards of green satin and over thirteen yards of green cloth of gold and she died owing
£
8 for forty yards of Venice gold ‘wrought with chain work’ and
£
61 5s. for forty-nine pounds of ‘sleeved’ silk from Spain.
37
Where accounts mislead is in being effectively silent about tapestry. This was magnificence exemplified. Henry’s inventories list hundreds of tapestries, a third of them top quality, but there is nothing to say which ones had belonged to Anne. This is not surprising since the borders where cognizances were usually displayed could be easily removed. Tapestries Anne certainly had. As well as the set of hangings for her room, of cloth of gold and silver and richly embroidered crimson satin, which Henry gave her at new year 1532, in May a further gift of gold arras followed, thirty-two Flemish ells costing
£
74 13
s
. 4
d
.; enquiries after her death also reported ‘most goodly hangings’ in her house at Hanworth.
38
What we do know more about is jewellery. Henry had lavished this on Anne, even before the pieces he had wrested from Katherine. In the year to May 1532 Cornelius Hayes’ bill included three dozen items of jewellery for ‘Mistress Anne’, costing almost
£
100. The largest item is a girdle of crown gold billed at £18 10
s
. 4
d
., but the most intriguing is a Catherine wheel of gold set with thirteen diamonds at just under
£
4.
39
The items which Holbein designed for Anne included a pendant with a central stone and the initials ‘H’ and ‘A’ intertwined, and a shield with the same cipher.
40
Some time after her death a wooden desk was inventoried, full of pieces, including one diamond ring with the ‘HA’ cipher, another with the cipher and the text (in Latin), ‘O Lord make haste to help me’, while a third had a broken part of her motto, ‘Most...’ Among a quantity of jewellery in boxes were items with ‘HA’ and a brooch with ‘RA’ — ‘Regina Anna’ — in diamonds.
41
One pictorial tradition always shows her with three strands of pearls across the bodice, a necklace of rubies and pearls, a choker with pendant to match, and a brooch made up of the letters ‘AB’ in gold and a drop pearl.
42
Another tradition depicts her with a pearl choker supporting a letter ‘B’ in gold with three drop pearls, a second strand of pearls and a golden chain.
43
Except for the ‘B’ pendant, these pearls are so like those worn in the earliest portrait of Elizabeth as to suggest that the daughter may have been allowed some of her mother’s finery (plate 64).
44
Of this personal jewellery, none has survived to be identified. Items remaining from the hundreds of pieces made and remade for the Tudor sovereigns are extremely rare — the taste of one generation is raw material to the next - and in Anne’s case many of the items specific to her must have been immediately broken up. Even so, Henry apparently repurchased from Thomas Trappers a gold bowl ‘having Queen Anne’s sapphire upon the top of the cover’ and his post-mortem inventories included a dust bowl of gold (for blotting ink) with a crown on the lid and ‘H’ and ‘A’ in enamel.
45
The king also kept a tablet of gold bearing the monogram ‘HA’. Set with small emeralds, pearls and one diamond, it suggests vividly what has been lost.
46
On costume the record is detailed, thanks to William Lok’s bill for January to April 1536.
47
This tells of Anne buying gowns in tawny velvet with black lambs’ fur, in velvet without fur, in damask, and in satin furred with miniver; a russet gown in caffa (heavy silk), two in black velvet, one in black damask, one in white satin and a second with crimson sleeves; a gown in purple cloth of gold lined with silver, and new carnation satin from Bruges to insert into the sleeves of a gown of tissue. There were eight nightgowns, two embroidered and another in russet trimmed with miniver; and three cloaks — of black Bruges satin, of embroidered tawny satin and of black cloth lined with black sarcenet — while Arnold the shoemaker had eight lots of black velvet to make shoes and slippers. Thirteen kirtles included white satin and white damask, black velvet embroidered and crimson satin ‘printed’, with matching sleeves. These elaborate detachable sleeves were an important part of female costume; among the scores of ‘sleeves for women’ in Henry’s inventory are at least two pairs which honeysuckle embroidery identifies as belonging to Anne, one ‘of white satin embroidered over with purled gold acorns and honeysuckles tied with ten pairs of aiguilettes of gold’ and the other ‘of cloth of gold embroidered with a great trail of purled gold with honeysuckles tied with ten pairs of aiguilettes of gold’.
48
Sleeves like this did not come cheap. Hayes charged nearly
£
5 for the jewelled borders for one pair — gold set with ten diamonds and eight pearls.
49
Many of Anne’s costumes would also be enhanced with jewels, such as the nineteen diamonds set in trueloves of gold which Hayes supplied in January 1532, along with twenty-one rubies and twenty-one diamonds set in gold roses and hearts. Anne’s liking for French hoods was costly too, at
£
9 for the jewelled billament.
50
Nicholas Sander’s story that ‘every day Anne made some change in the fashion of her garments’ is entirely credible.
51
Had she lived, her wardrobe might well have rivalled the 2000 costumes which tradition assigns to that most fashion-conscious of monarchs, her daughter Elizabeth. Anne certainly started her child on that route. In that three-month period Lok supplied the two-year-old with a gown of orange velvet, kirtles of russet velvet, of yellow satin, of white damask and of green satin, embroidered purple satin sleeves, a black muffler, white ribbon, Venice ribbon, a russet damask bedspread, a taffeta cap covered with a caul of gold. Anne, apparently, was especially fussy about her daughter’s caps: one made of purple satin required at least three journeys to Greenwich to get it right.
These bills take us very much into the domestic life of a Tudor queen. Sewing, tapestry, embroidery: the expected activity of the great lady, her maidens and their humbler assistants. Silks — black, white, orange, tawny, red, green, bought by the ounce and half ounce; ribbon — red, tawny, black, purple, carnation; needle ribbon to roll the queen’s hair; fringes, tassels, Venice gold with chain work for a nightgown. Again Henry VIII’s inventories show us how right George Wyatt was to say that Hampton Court was sumptuous with ‘the rich and exquisite works for the greater part wrought by [Anne’s] own hand and needle, and also of her ladies’.
52
At the palace in 1548 was a
carpet of gold, silver, and silk needlework with roses of red and white, and Queen Anne’s ciphers with a border about the same of honeysuckles, acorns, ‘H’ and ‘A’ of like needlework, fringed at both ends with a deep fringe and at both sides with a narrow fringe of Venice gold silver and silk and lined with green damask being in length three yards and in breadth two scant [nearly].
53
 
There was also a cushion embroidered with honeysuckle, acorns, Anne’s motto and the letters ‘H’ and ‘A’, and another with honeysuckle and the letter ‘H’.
54
Anne and her women were very productive. Two ‘low chairs of cloth of gold’ embroidered with Anne’s cipher were still at Hampton Court in 1550.
55
There was also a
chair of iron covered all over with needlework, all over wrought with silk and gold with the late Queen Anne’s cipher, the post and back fringed with Venice gold with four pommels of silver and gilt, with the king’s and the said Queen Anne’s arms in them, the seat covered with cloth of gold.
56
 

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