Hi history lovers and welcome or welcome back to the channel where I bring you new videos
every week on all aspects of the past.
I’d like you to take a look at these two very famous Tudor paintings and ask yourself,
do you think that they’re the same person?
The one on the left is an undisputed portrait of Henry VIII’s fourth wife, Anne of Cleves,
by Hans Holbein the younger.
The one on the right has no official identification, but is most often thought to be a miniature
of Henry’s fifth Queen, Katherine Howard, also by Holbein.
Indeed in a video I already have on Katherine’s portraiture, I concluded that of all the images
thought to be her, this one is the most likely to really be Henry’s youngest and most tragic
consort.
In recent years though a theory has been floated that in fact both pictures show Anne.
So which Tudor queen is it and why do we think it’s a Tudor queen at all?
Could we be wrong even in that assumption?
In today’s six wives documentary from History Calling I’m going to take you through the
provenance of the portrait on the right, explain why it’s believed to be one of Henry’s
wives, why Katherine is the most popular identification, why some now wonder if it might be Anne and
how far the available evidence supports or disputes each claim.
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There’s a link for that in the description box below, as well as links for other videos,
books and TV shows about Anne and Katherine.
Let’s start with a very quick historical overview to get us situated.
After the death of his third wife, Jane Seymour, in 1537, Henry VIII went on the hunt for a
fourth queen and opted to make a strategic alliance with a foreign royal house, rather
than marry another English woman.
One of the candidates was Anne of Cleves and so in 1539 the great court painter, Hans Holbein
the Younger, was sent to create a portrait of her.
This image was the result, along with a miniature of the same portrait which you can see here
and which is now held in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.
These pictures are undisputed contemporary paintings of Anne of Cleves.
Henry decided to go ahead with the marriage, but after a disastrous first meeting with
Anne things quickly fell apart.
Though the wedding went ahead on 6 January 1540, Henry claimed that he couldn’t consummate
it, casts doubts on Anne’s honour, said he didn’t like her and promptly fell in
love with one of her ladies in waiting, Katherine Howard.
Henry and Anne’s marriage was annulled in early July 1540 and Henry married Katherine
three weeks later.
In late 1541 however, his fifth wife suffered an epic fall from grace after stories emerged
of pre and possibly post-marital affairs and Henry had her executed at the Tower of London
on 13 February 1542.
There are no confirmed portraits of Katherine in existence, very limited evidence regarding
her looks from those who saw her and when her final resting place in the Chapel of St
Peter Ad Vincula was disturbed in the 1870s, no bones believed to be her were found (though
her cousin, Anne Boleyn was located – see my video on Digging up Anne Boleyn for more
details).
We therefore have very little solid evidence regarding Katherine’s appearance, though
the French ambassador, Charles de Marillac, said after he had seen her that she possessed
moderate beauty, with a small and slender stature and delightful countenance.
That brings us to her possible portraiture.
As I’ve mentioned already, this painting is one of several which have been put forward
as potential images of Katherine through the years and I’m not going to go through them
all again now as you can hear about them in detail in my video on what she looked like.
The miniature in question exists in the two versions you see here (the fact that two versions
were made is in itself important by the way, as it suggests a sitter of some renown).
One belongs to the Duke of Buccleuch.
The other is in the Royal Collection of the United Kingdom.
It is one of the most popular contenders for a contemporary image of Katherine because
of the jewellery she is wearing.
The necklace you see around her neck perfectly matches a necklace seen on Jane Seymour in
her famous contemporary portrait by Holbein.
It is made up of clusters of four pearls, alternating with rubies set in gold, a sequence
of jewels you can also see around Jane’s headdress and the trim of her neckline.
It appears again around the headdress and neckline in a portrait of Catherine of Aragon
and if you go back another generation, here it is once more on the headdress of Henry’s
mother, Elizabeth of York, though this isn’t a contemporary image from her lifetime.
The jewels the sitter in the miniature is wearing around her neck and on her French
hood also align with a 1541 inventory listing jewels given to Katherine Howard by Henry.
This inventory includes mention of an ‘upper habiliment [that’s the trim around the top
of a French hood] of goldsmith's work enamelled and garnished with vij.
fair diamonds, vij.
fair rubies, and vij.
fair pearls’, all of which match the jewels on the highest point of the hood this sitter
is wearing.
Katherine was also gifted a necklace ‘containing 28 rubies and 29 clusters of pearls being
4 pearls in every cluster'.
Finally, there was an ‘ouch’ or pendant ‘of gold having a very fair table diamond
and a very fair ruby with a long pearl hanging at the same’.
Again, the descriptions match everything we’re seeing in this miniature, as well as the necklace
Jane Seymour wore.
The lady in this portrait is wearing the English Queen consort’s jewels and Tudor style clothing
dating to the 1530s or 1540s.
This is why an identification as one of Henry’s wives is so frequently put forward.
The main problem with the identification of this woman as Katherine Howard is the provenance
of these two miniatures and in particular, how many years had passed between Katherine’s
death and the earliest known identification of these images as her.
The Buccleuch version is first mentioned in the collection of this man, Thomas Howard,
2nd Earl of Arundel who lived between 1585 and 1646 and who, as their shared surname
suggests, was part of the same Howard family as Katherine.
This gives it some credibility as an image known within the family to be Katherine, but
there was never any official identification attached to it confirming this and we don’t
know where it was before Arundel had it.
What’s more, when the image was engraved in 1646 by Wenceslaus Hollar, it still wasn’t
identified as Katherine, but nor was it called anyone else, as you can see by the inscriptions
at the top of the picture.
It merely says that it’s a Holbein from the Arundel collection, gives the year the
engraving was made and confirms it was made by Hollar.
Flash forward about a century though and the Buccleuch miniature, was by then in the possession
of a man name Jonathan Richardson and was being used to create this engraving by Jacobus
Houbraken in around 1735-40.
We know this because of the information given right down at the bottom of the engraving,
which I can blow up for you for a moment so you can read it more easily and because this
engraving appeared in a 1743 publication called The Heads of Illustrious Persons of Great
Britain.
What’s more, by this point, as you can see by the caption around the edge of the portrait,
it was identified as Katherine, but of course nearly 200 years had now passed since her
death and we don’t know the source of Houbraken’s information.
The best we can hope for it that family lore had reported that it was Katherine and this
information had been passed down the generations without ever being recorded in any manner
than has survived to us, though that doesn’t explain why Hollar didn’t specify who he
was engraving in 1646.
As for the royal collection version, the earliest known mention of it seems to be in 1660-1
when an inventory notes the presence of ‘A small peice Inclineing of a woman after ye
Dresse of Henry ye Eights wife by Peter Oliver’.
Frustratingly, this description is too vague to be certain it’s talking about this painting
and while it connects it to one of Henry’s wives, it doesn’t specify which one, or
even if it’s just saying that her clothing resembled that known to have been worn by
one of his queens.
The attribution to Oliver, who was an English miniaturist who died in 1647 is also interesting.
If correct, it suggests that this is a copy of the Buccleuch version made many decades
later, or that this inventory reference is to an entirely different painting.
The Royal Collection website (which includes this quote), specifically says that the miniature
dates to around 1540, indicating that the Oliver connection was an error made back in
the 1660s, or that this description does indeed refer to a different painting.
It was only in 1837 that the miniature we’re interested in appeared for certain in the
inventories of the Royal Collection and at that point, it was listed as Katherine Howard.
So where does Anne of Cleves come into all this?
Well, in 2021 author Franny Moyle argued in her book, The King’s Painter (linked below),
that this might be a picture of Queen Anne.
She claims that the two sitters look remarkably alike, especially around the eyes, that they
are both wearing a ring with a square black diamond in it, that the fact that the Buccleuch
image is backed onto a 4 of diamonds playing card is a reference to Anne being Henry’s
fourth wife and of course that as Queen, Anne would have had access to the consort’s jewellery,
including the necklace we’ve been looking at.
There is also the fact that once Anne was in England, she did alter her clothing and
began to wear the fashionable French style of hood that we see in the miniature, rather
than the heavy Germanic headdress we see in her most famous portrait.
We know this because the chronicler Edward Hall tells us so, saying that on the Sunday
after her wedding Anne ‘was appareiled after the English fassio, with a Frenche whode’.
I take Moyle’s point that the women have similar, hooded eyes, but I don’t personally
see any other great similarity in their looks.
I also think a ring with a dark stone in it is too generic a design to really mean much.
Jane Seymour seems to be wearing something similar in her Holbein for instance as is
Catherine Parr in this image (Anne was wearing hers in a portrait painted in Cleves though
remember, so there’s no question that the ring was part of the English royal jewel collection).
Katherine was noted by Charles De Marillac as wearing French clothes too during her time
as Queen and as the inventory cited proves, she owned a hood exactly like this one.
If the miniature is of Anne we therefore need to believe that Henry humiliated her by having
her hand over items of her clothing to her successor.
This is despite the fact that all the evidence shows he actually treated her very well in
their annulment, making her a rich woman and giving her the status of his sister.
It’s one thing to take back a suite of official royal jewels (we know he’d done that several
years earlier with Catherine of Aragon when he wanted to give them to Anne Boleyn), but
another to take Anne of Cleves’ clothing off her during their much less acrimonious
split.
As for the playing card, I really think we’re stretching here and that a card was simply
a fairly cheap, small and readily accessible piece of stiffened paper that could be used
to back the portrait onto.
If we’re going to search for meanings here, then why wasn’t a Queen card used, especially
as Henry had had his first and second marriages annulled and would have viewed Anne, however
briefly, as being only his second true wife after Jane, not his fourth.
Would Holbein really have wanted to throw in a dig at the King’s marital history in
this way and why would he have been painting another portrait of Anne this fast anyway?
His previous commission had helped to persuade Henry to send for her to become his wife and
that had turned into a disaster.
The real clincher for me though is another comment by Edward Hall in which he describes
Anne’s appearance at her wedding.
On that day he said, she wore ‘her here hangyng down which was fayre yelowe and long’.
Anne was therefore unquestionably blonde; the word yellow just can’t mean anything
else.
Hall’s exceptionally detailed account of the events of the wedding day and the clothing
Anne and Henry wore at different points during it also strongly suggests he was an eye witness.
The woman in this portrait meanwhile clearly has much darker hair of an auburn or chestnut
hue.
There is another wrinkle in the story.
Jane Seymour was known to gift some of her jewellery to her ladies in waiting and one
of them, Mary Brandon, Lady Monteagle, has been suggested as a possible sitter for the
original miniature based on a supposed resemblance between a known image of her and our mystery
woman.
To believe this though, you have to believe that Jane Seymour gave away part of the royal
collection of jewels, traditionally passed from one consort to the next and that Henry
let her do it, despite the problems of getting them back from Catherine of Aragon after their
split.
Mary Brandon was the daughter of his great favourite and brother-in-law, Charles Brandon,
Duke of Suffolk, but by his second wife Anne Brown, rather than by Henry’s sister Mary
Tudor, Queen of France, who was his third wife.
In other words Mary wasn’t actually Henry’s niece, making it even less likely to me that
Jane would have been allowed to give her such an extravagant gift; a necklace which was
so spectacular that Jane opted to wear it in her official portrait as Queen.
The necklace also definitely appears in the list of jewels given to Katherine Howard remember,
so are we to believe that it was so unimportant that Jane was able to give it away, yet so
important that it was retrieved within just a few years and was in a list of the Queen’s
jewels right around the same time it was being painted around the neck of another woman?
And if this isn’t a Queen, then why is this woman wearing not just the consort’s necklace,
but also a French hood we know belonged to Katherine Howard?
Lastly, I just don’t think (and this is merely my opinion) that Mary Brandon looks
like the woman in either version of the miniature.
In a similar vein to the Mary Brandon identification, in 1998 Susan James argued that the sitter
was Henry’s actual niece, Lady Margaret Douglas, daughter of his sister Princess Margaret,
Queen of Scotland.
I’m highly sceptical of this idea too, for the same reasons I doubt the Mary Brandon
identification.
I don’t think it looks like her and I don’t see how she would get her hands on the consort’s
necklace and the personal clothing of the Queen to have her portrait painted, nor do
I think she would have needed to.
Margaret Douglas would have had her own clothes and jewellery to be painted in (speaking of
which, I have a video on a spectacular jewel she had commissioned known as the Darnley
or Lennox jewel, which I’ll leave linked for you).
What’s more, we don’t even see Henry VIII’s daughters, Mary and Elizabeth, wearing the
consort’s jewellery in portraits done during their father’s lifetime, though they had
some similar items, as you can see from their pendants here, so are really to believe that
these precious items were being handed out to other women in the family or wider court,
so that they could dress like a Queen and potentially outshine the actual consort and
her step daughters?
Finally, I know from comments under my previous video on Katherine’s portraiture and one
on her age that some look at this image and think the sitter looks too old to be her.
To that I would say first that ages are notoriously hard to judge from portraits, second that
this is a miniature and even Holbein will have been slightly restricted in the level
of detail he could squeeze in when working with something so small and third, Katherine
may just have looked a little older than her years.
I’ve always thought that if I didn’t know the girls and women in these portraits were
about 13, 17 and 21, I could easily believe that Princess Elizabeth was in her early 20s,
that the supposed image of Katherine from the Met Museum could show a woman anywhere
from 15 to 30 and that the lady in the Toledo portrait was a decade older than the 21 years
ascribed to her in the painting’s caption.
There was no sunscreen in the 1540s after all.
People on average aged faster and died younger, even if they weren’t being executed.
I’ve never had any difficulty myself in believing that this could be a young woman
of around 17-20 years old painted in about 1541 (see my video on when Katherine was born
to understand better why I’m giving that as her age range).
The only other Howard woman who became Queen and would have had access to these jewels
and at a stretch, the hood, was Anne Boleyn, who died several years before this portrait
was created and whose physical descriptions and other portraits don’t match this woman’s
(granted, none of Anne’s portraits are contemporary, but we do at least have copies of contemporaries).
To sum up then, I think the combination of the necklace and the headdress strongly suggest
that this is Katherine Howard rather than any of Henry’s other wives or any other
woman.
The fact that Anne of Cleves was described as blonde by a contemporary witness further
rules her out as a sitter in these miniatures, even if she did happen to also have hooded
eyes and wear French-style clothing sometimes.
I’m not happy that the earliest known identification of the portrait as Katherine came so long
after her death, but the fact that the Buccleuch miniature was in the possession of the Howard
family strongly suggests to me that it was a painting of one of their members and that
the family simply knew who it was, without having to paint a name onto it.
Perhaps it even had a tag with it originally, which is now long gone.
I really don’t see any significance in the playing card stuck on the back of the Buccleuch
version of the portrait and I certainly don’t think that Henry was letting his wives hand
out the prized Queen consort’s jewels to their ladies in waiting.
As always though, I’m keen to read your thoughts on this theory.
Let me know below who you think the miniature might be of and why and for more on Henry’s
wives, try one of these suggestions next.
Whatever you choose, please enjoy and until next time, keep learning.