Let’s play a game. Can you spot what these three women have in common (and I’m not talking about
the fact that they were all married to Henry VIII)? Ok, as you probably know from the title
of this video, it’s their jewellery, most notably the necklace they’re all wearing,
because it’s the same one. What you’re looking at is the Tudor consort necklace; one of the
most spectacular pieces of jewellery owned by Henry’s wives and which pops up again and again
over the course of several decades throughout his reign, before disappearing into the mists of time.
I’ve mentioned this necklace in some of my other videos, however I’ve never given it the
deep dive I think I deserves and so in today’s Tudor history documentary from History Calling,
we’ll look at when this item might have entered the royal collection, whether we really have an
image of Anne Boleyn wearing it, or if it’s just wishful thinking to think that we do and
what might have happened to it after Henry died and the position of Queen consort of
England became vacant for over half a century. I’m going to show you a whole host of pictures,
not just of these women but of several other famous Tudor Queens and I’ll also be pointing out
a few things which have been hiding in plain sight in such images. So make sure you stay til the end
to hear all the secrets about this necklace which these paintings and others have to share with us.
The
Tudor consort necklace was comprised of several parts and the gems in it were not
always presented in the same settings. In its most recognisable form however, it was a long
necklace made up of clusters of four pearls, alternating with rubies set in gold quatrefoils.
It then had a pendant attached to it with a ruby over the top of a table shaped stone (I’ll
come back to what exactly that stone was in a few minutes). Both were set in gold with a single tear
drop pearl suspended beneath them. Whoever put the jewellery together for this waxwork of Jane
Seymour has actually got the pendant the wrong way round however, with the ruby on the bottom,
but we can see in her portrait that it should be the top stone. This pendant was detachable
and was sometimes swapped out for an alternative option. This explains why we see Catherine Parr
wearing the main necklace in this portrait, but with a roughly triangular shaped pendant attached.
The necklace wasn’t the only part of this suite of jewels however.
If we look at Jane’s full portrait, we can see that the decoration on her hood is made up of the
same sequence of rubies set in gold and clusters of four pearls that we see around her neck,
as is the trim around the square neckline of her dress and even the girdle around her waist,
though it is only just visible behind her hands. Who was the first Queen to own this
stunning set of jewels however and when did they enter the Tudor royal jewels collection?
It may well be that the origins of the necklace predated all of Henry’s wives
and that the stones were in fact heirlooms inherited from his mother, Elizabeth of York.
In this painting now held by the National Trust we can clearly see her wearing the same
sequence of pearls and dark coloured stones set in gold around the edge of her gable-style hood,
though she has no matching necklace. The problem is that this is a copy of a lost original. When
we look at other portraits of Elizabeth (of which this is just a selection) which are likely
descended from the same original, because they follow the same pattern in which she is standing,
turned slightly to her right and holding a white rose, we can see that the jewels around her neck
and clothing change with each rendering. So which portrait do we trust? Personally,
I’m not comfortable placing my faith in any of them as an accurate depiction of her jewels and
I wonder if the consort jewels were added in by the copyist of the National Trust
portrait to create a thread of continuity between Elizabeth and her daughters in law?
There are images of Catherine of Aragon wearing a version of the consort jewels around her headdress
and neckline, though as you can probably tell from looking at this, it’s not an original portrait and
can’t be used to definitely date the jewels to her time. A better image is this one from the Royal
Collection, which describes it as ‘a version of a standard type of portrait of Catherine
of Aragon which probably derives from an original portrait type associated with the artist Johannes
Corvus (c. 1510-20).’ If Corvus painted Catherine wearing the bands of jewels we see here around her
headdress and neckline during the 1510s, then that would certainly suggest that she really did own
them and that some of these stones were later reset into the consort necklace or that it was
perhaps created to match them. My only real qualm here is that I wish the stones looked more red,
but again, when dealing with copies of paintings, alterations can be made and Catherine’s hood and
dress decorations are otherwise an almost exact match for what we see Jane Seymour
wearing in later years, something I think is just too much of a coincidence to overlook.
For what it’s worth, I think she most likely did possess the consort jewels and that they
were part of the suite of gems which she was famously forced to hand over to Anne Boleyn.
This handover occurred in 1532 when Catherine was ordered by Henry to give the crown jewels
she had in her possession as Queen to Anne (they weren’t her personal property remember,
just as the modern crown jewels don’t belong to the individual monarch). Catherine’s retort
was that she would ‘consider it a sin and a load upon my conscience if I were persuaded
to give up my jewels for such a wicked purpose as that of ornamenting a person who is the scandal
of Christendom, and is bringing vituperation and infamy upon the King.’ Nevertheless she was soon
made to surrender them. Is there any evidence that Anne wore the consort necklace though?
Before I answer that question, if you’re enjoying this video please give it a thumbs up and to get
more history delivered straight to you, without having to remember to constantly
pop back and check my channel, hit the subscribe button beneath this video too
and switch on all notifications so that YouTube automatically notifies you every
time I upload. You can also find links to my social media and Patreon sites below, where
I’d be delighted to have you join me as well and where I share additional History Calling perks.
There is a theory that the only undisputed, contemporary image we have of Anne Boleyn,
which is a portrait medal commissioned in 1534, shows her wearing the necklace. This medal, which
was likely made in anticipation of her giving birth to a son (see my video on whether she had
a pseudo-pregnancy that year, to hear more about that), exists in only one copy however and it has
taken considerable damage over the centuries. The image you’re looking at here is a reconstruction
published in the 1880s which I generally like to use because it doesn’t show any damage and the
person who reconstructed it at that point had the advantage of seeing the medal at a much earlier
point in time and when it was possibly less damaged than it is now. As you can see however, it
doesn’t present Anne as wearing the consort jewels in question. In 2012 however a woman by the name
of Lucy Churchill created a new reconstruction of the medal and argued that it showed that Anne’s
hood and necklace did contain the same sequence of jewels as those seen on the Jane Seymour portrait
which I’ve already shown you and which we’ll be returning to in a minute. So let’s take a
look at the actual medal, which is now kept by the British Museum and see if she was onto something.
When I initially looked at the jewels on this medal, I zoomed in on the necklace first and
was rather sceptical. The cross pendant is very obviously not the same one seen in portraits
of Henry’s later wives and the soft lead of the chain portion of the necklace has been so badly
squashed and smoothed out over the years that I couldn’t pick out any definite details of
the pearl clusters and rubies set in quatrefoils which are the hallmark of the consort necklace.
When I looked at the hood however, I was soon converted. Most of the jewels
on it have suffered the same denting and flattening out that that the necklace has,
however what caught my attention was a tiny section on the upper left side as you look at it.
Here you can indeed see four little raised squares of lead (which would be the pearls) alternating
with larger blobs of lead which would be the rubies in gold. You can also just make out the
same pattern starting on one corner of the hood. This is exactly like the hood Jane Seymour would
later wear and was enough to convince me that Anne is indeed sporting the consort suite of jewels,
so well done Lucy Churchill for noticing that, as it’s one of those ‘hiding in plain sight’ things I
mentioned at the start of the video and I don’t know that I ever would have seen it had I not
been looking for it. Ms Churchill by the way, has a blog entry on her website discussing how
she went about creating her reconstruction and which I’ll leave linked below for you.
The necklace as we know, would make its next appearance in the famous portrait of Jane
Seymour by Hans Holbein the younger, which was painted during her brief queenship of 1536-7 and
in which she also had her hood, dress and girdle trimmed in the same style. Henry’s fourth Queen,
Anne of Cleves, was his consort for too brief a period for time to be painted wearing the
consort jewels and although one writer has tried to argue that the two surviving and
almost identical miniature portraits of Katherine Howard actually depict Anne, I’ve already made a
video in which I debunk that story. That video, together with another on what Katherine Howard
looked like will explain to you in detail why I believe the miniatures are in fact her, so I’m
not going to go over those arguments again here, except to say that the fact she is wearing the
consort necklace is a crucial piece of evidence. As we can see though, she has not matched it up
with the decorations on her French hood or dress and is instead wearing different jewels there.
Katherine was Queen between July 1540 and November 1541 (though she wasn’t actually executed until
February 1542) and in the inventories of her jewels we have the clearest documentary record
of the consort necklace’s existence. There it is described as a necklace ‘containing 28 rubies and
29 clusters of pearls being 4 pearls in every cluster', with an ‘ouch’ or pendant made ‘of
gold having a very fair table diamond and a very fair ruby with a long pearl hanging at the same’.
Now let’s address the elephant in the room here by saying that the table shaped stone in the pictures
doesn’t look like a white diamond and even the modern recreations of the necklace don’t put in
a clear stone here. I think we can offer a few reasons for the discrepancy between the written
and the pictorial records. One is that there’s a mistake (the early-modern equivalent of a typo)
in the inventory and it was a different type of stone in the pendant altogether.
Another is that the diamond was backed onto its gold setting and this affected its colour or
rather the appearance of its colour. A third is that the ‘light’ in inverted commas it was shown
in by the painter made it appear darker than we would expect a white diamond to be, especially as
it wasn’t cut in the modern, brilliant fashion, which gives stones a lot of facets so that they
reflect the maximum amount of light and sparkle. You can also get coloured diamonds of course,
such as the famous Hope Diamond which is blue and which I have another video on, but I don’t know
if 16th century observers would have been able to tell the difference between these
and different types of gemstones, so it might be stretching it to say that this is the explanation.
Katherine’s jewels were taken off her at the time of her fall and held in storage until the next
Queen consort had need of them. This turned out to be the twice widowed Catherine Parr,
then the dowager Lady Latimer, who Henry married in 1543 and we have portraiture evidence showing
that she wore the consort necklace too and had it altered to suit her tastes.
In a picture known as the Hastings portrait for instance, we see it around her neck,
but with a different pendant suspended beneath it. Her hood and dress are trimmed in similar stones,
but these are not the same bands of gems used on Jane Seymour’s outfit.
Why were these jewels so important though? Why are we seeing them appear in image of Queen after
Queen? The answer is legitimacy. These items were part of the Queen consort’s collection of
jewels and as such, the woman who wore them was making a statement about her position.
That’s why it was so important to be painted or otherwise depicted in them and why Anne Boleyn,
Jane Seymour and Katherine Howard, who all came to the position of Queen under a cloud,
having ousted their predecessors, made such a point of being shown in these specific jewels.
We know from inventories and other paintings that they had many other precious items,
including Anne’s famous B necklace which I have a whole video on, but the consort necklace and the
associated bands of matching jewels which were attached to their dresses and hoods were the
ones most clearly associated with queenship. If they really were heirlooms inherited from
Elizabeth of York, they were also helpful in building the legitimacy of the entire dynasty.
The Tudors were new to the Crown remember, with Henry VIII only the second monarch of his house
and creating links with earlier generations, especially with Elizabeth who was born a
member of the displaced Plantagenet dynasty, showcased and bolstered their right to rule.
Henry died in January 1547 and with him died the position of Queen consort. It would not be
revied until James VI of Scotland’s wife, Anne of Denmark, became queen of England in 1603.
So with no Queen consort, what happened to her jewels, for remember these belonged to the crown.
Catherine Parr would not have been allowed to take them with her once she became Queen dowager
and even if she had, they likely would have been repossessed after she died in September
1548 and her fourth husband, Thomas Seymour, was executed for treason just over six months later.
In looking into the fate of the necklace, I came across some blogs online which claimed that it
could be seen in later portraits of Elizabeth I, including the example seen here, however I found
their lines of argument unconvincing. While it is true that similar necklaces may be seen around her
neck (minus the distinctive pendant we saw on Jane Seymour, and Katherine Howard), they did
not have the tell-tale combination of clusters of four pearls interspersed with red stones set in
quatrefoils and instead I believe that the basic design of pearls mixed with precious gems was
popular and therefore copied in other pieces of jewellery, just as you might see broadly similar
items of jewellery in a shop window today, but which were made by different designers.
I think the most likely explanation for the fate of the necklace and the matching bands of jewels
used on Anne and Jane’s hoods and dresses, is that at some undisclosed point in time,
they were broken up and the stones reset into other items of jewellery.
Once this was done, the fact that any individual pearl or ruby had once been part of the consort’s
suite of jewels would have been forgotten about rather quickly I think, as on their
own they were quite generic looking gems. How long they remained in the royal collection is
therefore impossible to tell, though as with all stories I relate about the pre-civil war
crown jewels collection, I feel obliged to say that there’s a good chance they were sold off by
the Parliamentarians under Oliver Cromwell’s rule at the time of the fall of the monarchy in 1649.
Before I go, I’d like to thank my Patrons and those of you who donate to the channel
using the thanks button beneath videos for your generosity. If you’d like to check out
my Patreon site as well, remember to click the link in the description box beneath this video.
Let me know in the comments below if you think the 1534 portrait medal of Anne Boleyn does
indeed show her wearing the consort necklace and hood trim and if you’d like to learn more about
Henry VIII’s wives, or famous jewels, try one of these options next to continue your
journey through history. I’ll be back next week with a new video and until then, keep learning.