The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn (53 page)

Read The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn Online

Authors: Eric Ives

Much of the less elaborately embroidered furniture can likewise be assigned to Anne’s initiative. For example, ‘a woman’s chair with HA crowned in it’ appears to have been one of a matching set of nine ‘covered with cloth of gold raised with crimson velvet, fringed with Venice gold and crimson silk’.
57
The most magnificent evocation of the work of Anne and her entourage is a description in Henry VIII’s inventories of the hangings made for the gilt and painted bedstead at Oatlands ‘called Queen Anne’s bed’. These comprised a
‘celure’ [i.e. canopy], tester [covering for the bed-head], six valances and three bases of crimson cloth of gold with works paned with white cloth of silver, with works richly embroidered with borders of purple velvet upon the seams, and with 108 badges of the king’s and Queen Anne’s with crowns over the badges, and two great arms of the king’s and Queen Anne’s joined together in a garland with a crown imperial, the one arm [shield of arms] being in the celure, the other in the tester; the tester and bases being fringed with a narrow fringe of Venice gold and silver, and the valances fringed with a double deep fringe, the one side of red silk and white and the other of Venice gold and silver, and the ends of the said valances being fringed with a narrow fringe of the said gold and silver
 
The bed had a counterpane to match, made
of crimson and white damask paned together embroidered about with a border of cloth of gold, with the badges of the king’s and Queen Anne’s in the four corners and a like arms in the midst (as was in the celure and tester), lozenged all over with cording of Venice gold [i.e. cords making a diamond pattern ], fringed with a narrow fringe of Venice gold lined with russet sarcenet.
 
There were also five matching curtains, though the panes of white silk had been replaced.
58
By a remarkable coincidence a piece of valance embroidered by Anne has survived. It is in the Burrell collection and is made of white satin with applique motifs in black velvet and the decoration includes both the letters ‘HA’ and acorns and honeysuckle (plate 46).
59
The set of hangings it belonged to cannot be found in Henry’s inventories so it was presumably disposed of in his lifetime, but five other beds with furnishings associated with Anne’s team can be identified. At Hampton Court the bedstead itself was ‘curiously wrought and carved with the late Queen Anne’s ciphers and cognisances, painted walnut colour and parcel gilt’, with hangings embroidered with Henry and Anne’s arms and her cipher.
60
The Greenwich bed, somewhat incongruously, had a counterpane and hangings embroidered with Henry’s arms and Anne’s monogram, matched with a headboard painted with the king’s arms and Jane Seymour’s cipher.
61
Embroidering the hangings and coverings for a bedstead was a major undertaking, as the seventeen feet (5.2 metres), of the surviving fragment of the Burrell valance shows.
62
The counterpane which fitted the Greenwich bed was nine feet and nine inches (3 metres) long and nine feet, two and a quarter inches (2.8 metres) wide. As for the bed at Oatlands, we can only guess how long Anne and her helpers spent on the 108 small and four large royal badges and four great shields of arms, to say nothing of the other embroidery. And there were smaller projects too. The most interesting is listed among the ‘sundry parcels’ - the miscellanea — at Westminster. It is
one lily pot wrought with the needle and a branch of roses white and red with a white falcon crowned upon the top of the same branch likewise wrought with the needle.
63
 
Containers for lilies are regularly seen in Flemish representations of the Annunciation, but these are generally in brass or pottery, not, as here, concealed beneath a cover.
64
Building, decoration, furnishing, jewels, tapestries, clothing for herself and her daughter, embroidery, all the magnificence of daily royal living. But to twenty-first-century eyes one activity is glaringly omitted: personal attention to her daughter Elizabeth. Although we can almost riffle at will through Anne Boleyn’s finery, when we ask about Elizabeth there is no answer. Of course, a great lady of the day did not take daily care of her child. At the age of three months Elizabeth was sent to be fostered at Hertford, although in the first quarter of 1535 she was at court for five weeks.
65
We have seen Anne’s concern to see the child turned out in the style to which her status entitled her.
66
We may, if we wish, see something maternal in her providing a fringed crimson satin cover for the head of the child’s cradle, or sending ‘a pair of pyrwykes’, apparently a device to straighten the fingers, about which Elizabeth would later be very proud.
67
Anne also visited Elizabeth, both alone and with Henry, and she was clearly in regular touch with Margaret, Lady Bryan (the mother of Sir Francis), who had actual charge of the child.
68
Indeed, she took a financial bond from Lady Bryan.
69
Yet as the mother of a princess, Anne could have only a partial say in the major decisions about her child; Henry and his council had the last word.
70
When instructions were given to have Elizabeth weaned, at the age of twenty-five months, they were given ‘by his grace, with the assent of the queen’s grace’.
71
Anne did send a private letter to Lady Bryan, possibly full of maternal instructions about weaning, and she may have felt a special affinity with the woman looking after Elizabeth for she was her mother’s half-sister.
72
But that was accidental; Lady Bryan had not been chosen for that relationship, but because she had previously watched over the infancy of the Princess Mary.
73
The choice was clearly Henry’s.
There are only a few vignettes of Anne with Elizabeth, or with Elizabeth and Henry. One, two days before her arrest, shows Anne attempting to appeal to Henry through the child and hints at powerful emotions of which we know no more.
74
Already by then Anne had begun to think about Elizabeth’s future. A day or two earlier, she had had a conversation on the subject with her chaplain, Matthew Parker. To his dying day he believed that Anne had in some way commended Elizabeth to his spiritual care, though whether this was more than a significance he read into the discussion because it turned out to be the last he ever had with Anne, we cannot know.
75
But even if she was only sharing with him her hopes for Elizabeth’s education, the fact that she chose to talk to a man of the kind we shall find Parker to be is a significant pointer to the intellectual and religious upbringing she wanted for the child.
76
It was the upbringing she had had, but managed not with the facilities her father had provided as a rising courtier, but as for a princess. In the event others would train Elizabeth, but she would turn out to be very much her mother’s daughter.
It is, of course, quite possible that the surviving sources underplay Anne’s involvement with her daughter. Sparse evidence always brings the risk of distortion, and not only in such a private context as mother and child. How different would our appreciation of Anne’s life at court be if Henry VIII’s inventories had not survived but several sets of firedogs had? The problem is particularly severe in respect of the social life of the court. Its banquets, celebrations and entertainments were the
mise en scène
for Anne’s splendid wardrobe, but the chroniclers and letter-writers pass over them in virtual silence once she has become queen. Only the accident of her trial lets us see her dancing with her ladies and the gentlemen of the court in her bedchamber.
77
The one glimpse we do have, and this through a glass darkly, is of Anne and her music. Her skill in performance is commented on by everyone. She also listened. Sir John Harrington’s father passed on a verse which he said was written by the king and sung to Anne.
78
Anne’s debts included payment for the decoration of a pair of clavichords - perhaps the ones that her ‘lover’ Mark Smeton was to play on.
79
There is even an outside chance that the Victoria and Albert Museum has a case of virginals played by Anne. Known as ‘Queen Elizabeth’s Virginals’, it has been dated to the first part of that queen’s reign, but the decoration is a royal coat of arms and a falcon on the tree-stump.
80
Was Elizabeth only repeating Anne’s badge or was something of her mother’s being reused?
The principal evidence of Anne’s interest in music is the Royal College of Music Manuscript 1070 (plate 26).
81
It is not dated, but the contents of the book would appear to be particularly relevant to Anne’s situation in 1533. A majority of the works are in praise of the Virgin Mary or prayers to female saints, and so are fully congruent with the persona Anne presented at her coronation.
82
Indeed, the opening motet (otherwise unknown) is a quasi-secular piece which mixes humanism, classical allusion and Christian symbol very much in the style of that occasion. Other pieces place a strong emphasis on child-bearing, most strikingly two by the French court composer, Jean Mouton. One quotes the Old Testament prayer of rejoicing uttered by Hannah (Anna) when her son was born.
83
The second, a petition for children, specifically mentions the name ‘Anne’. This is because it had originally been written for the marriage of Anne, duchess of Brittany, the mother of Anne’s patroness, Claude of France. With the typical readiness of a Renaissance prince to pirate a good thing when he heard it, Henry had previously plagiarized the prayer, substituting Katherine for Anne, which gives added point to Anne’s return to the original text.
84
On the other hand the manuscript, as we have seen, is endorsed in a contemporary hand, ‘Mistress A Bolleyne nowe thus’.
85
This use of the family name not only makes a 1533 date impossible, but indicates a text in existence prior to Thomas Boleyn’s promotion to an earldom in December 1529.
86
The apparent discrepancy with the contents is, however, resolved by a close scrutiny of the inscription ‘Mistress A Bolleyne’. The letter ‘A’ is the ‘A’ of the ‘amat’ monogram we have already found in Anne’s psalter and in King’s College Chapel. Much follows from this. First, the collection must belong to the period from 1527 when Henry and Anne were confidently looking forward to early marriage and the arrival of children, precisely the themes of many of the compositions. Likewise, the ending of that hopeful time would explain why the book was not finished and the manuscript put straight into use instead. Second, it gives immediate relevance to the fourth piece in the collection, a setting of the Gospel in the nuptial mass. Its closing words, ‘whom God has joined together let no man put asunder’, become a triumphant proclamation of the rightness of Henry’s action in repudiating Katherine, whom God had not joined to him, and of heaven’s endorsement of the marriage to Anne. Similarly the words ‘nowe thus’ below ‘Mistress A Bolleyne’ become an assertion of her confidence in Henry’s current affection and in the promise of future change or, alternatively, a boast that her situation as plain Mistress Boleyn was only temporary. We can even speculate on the curious musical notation which follows: three minims and a longa.
87
Self-evidently the notes refer to time, so the three minims could be a code for the interval Anne and Henry knew was unavoidable before the longa of a happy conclusion.
88
Date, however, is not the only issue to be resolved - there is quality: paper rather than vellum, frequent corrections, and omissions in both text and score. Four illustrations per folio were intended, but only twenty sheets were completed (one in seven) and with a decidedly old-fashioned collection of fruit, foliage, grotesques and monsters, not by the best of illustrators. The mediocre quality led Lowinsky to rule out the idea of a gift from the French court or of a gift commissioned by any courtier of standing. Searching for a donor of lower rank with musical skill, court connections, and an acquaintance with Anne’s tastes in music, he came up with the name of Mark Smeton, the musician with whom she was accused in 1536. Unfortunately for the conjecture, in and before 1529 Smeton appears to have belonged to Wolsey’s household.
89
The alternative suggestion, that Anne acquired the manuscript in France, or even during her stay with Margaret of Austria, seems unlikely, given the marital reference of the contents. A more mundane possibility is that the manuscript is a draft destined eventually to go to a professional, and that the illuminations were either rough indications of what was wanted or the work of an amateur once further development had been abandoned when marriage seemed to recede into the distance.
The date and contents of Manuscript 1070 raise difficulties, but the substantive evidence it provides must not be overlooked. We have already noticed the link between the contents of the book and what Anne had experienced abroad.
90
Four items are by composers whom Archduchess Margaret recruited during her brief time as duchess of Savoy, and nine are by Margaret’s favourite, Josquin des Prés, whom Anne would at least have seen, if not met, during her months in the duchess’s service.
91
From the French court, Josquin’s pupil, Jean Mouton, is the most represented. We can be sure that Anne would have met him; not only was he at the height of his career during her years in France, but he was indebted to Claude, whose mother had launched him at court.
92
All this repertoire calls for professional singers, so Anne Boleyn would not have taken part herself. It is however, not unreasonable to see her influencing the musical life of the court by favouring the choral style she had come to know in her formative years abroad.

Other books

The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell
The Boat House by Pamela Oldfield
Ring of Lies by Howard, Victoria
Deadly Sins by Lora Leigh
Night Vision by Yasmine Galenorn
Earth Colors by Sarah Andrews
Brentwood by Grace Livingston Hill
The Man Who Killed Boys by Clifford L. Linedecker
Alive by Scott Sigler