What you see here is supposedly one of the few pieces of Elizabeth I’s jewellery collection
to have survived the centuries and made it to us.
Called the Chequers ring, it opens up to show an undisputed portrait of the Queen on one
side and a picture of a woman long believed to be her mother, Anne Boleyn, on the other.
Is this really Anne though?
This is History Calling where I bring you new videos every week on all aspects of the
past and in today’s much requested topic, I’ll take you through the ring’s provenance
and the debates around who the second sitter is, for not everyone is convinced it’s Henry
VIII’s second wife and several other theories as to this lady’s identity have been put
forward.
The ring’s band is made of mother-of -pearl, inlaid with rubies set in gold.
There is a capital letter E picked out in diamonds on the top of the ring (called the
bezel) and although you can only just see it, there is also a capital R in blue enamel
underneath this E. Together these letters stand for Elizabeth Regina, meaning Queen
Elizabeth.
Next to them, on the right-side of the ring, is a pearl.
On the underside we see a brightly coloured and beautifully rendered crest depicting a
phoenix rising out of a flaming crown.
The possible meanings of this crest are very important in debating how the ring came to
be in Elizabeth’s possession, but we’ll return to them in a few minutes.
The ring is a locket and when opened it reveals two absolutely tiny enamel portraits (the
whole ring is only 175mm wide), each one showing a woman.
The one on the bottom is undoubtedly a profile view of Elizabeth I, dressed in the fashions
of the 1570s, complete with ruff.
The image of her here resembles other paintings done at around that time, particularly one
called the Phoenix portrait and so the ring has been tentatively dated to c. 1575.
The portrait on top shows a woman wearing a black dress and French hood in the fashion
of the 1530s.
She has an oval shaped face with high cheekbones, is facing forwards and is wearing a necklace
with what looks like a huge diamond pendant.
The ring is currently in the possession of the Chequers Trust (which is where it gets
its name from) and is usually kept at the British Prime Minister’s country estate,
also named Chequers.
Its provenance is a little murky though.
The estate and eventually the ring were gifted to this Trust by their previous owner, Viscount
Lee of Fareham.
He purchased the ring at auction in 1919 from the descendants of Scottish nobleman Alexander,
1st Earl of Home, who lived between 1566 and 1619.
Home served King James VI and the story goes (and it’s important to realise that a story
is all it is), that James gave the ring to him sometime between taking the English throne
as James I in 1603, at which point he would have inherited Elizabeth’s jewels and Home’s
death sixteen years later.
This would certainly help to explain how the ring survived the ravages of the post-Civil
War period, when the Parliamentarians under Oliver Cromwell’s rule, broke up and sold
the royal collection of art, jewellery and furniture, among other things, but there are
no records of the ring in any of Queen Elizabeth’s jewellery inventories and so despite the fact
that I personally think it most likely did belong to her, given the amount of Elizabethan
symbolism on it and the expense involved in creating such an item, there’s not actually
any hard proof of this.
There is a story that the Chequers ring was taken off Elizabeth I’s hand just after
her death and spirited away to Scotland by her second cousin, Robert Carey, to be used
as proof when he met with the Scottish King that Elizabeth was truly dead and James was
now King of England.
In fact, although Carey himself wrote that he presented the King with a blue ring to
prove that he was telling the truth about the Queen’s demise (which suggests that
it was indeed one of Elizabeth’s prized possessions), there is no evidence that it
was the Chequers ring and the description of it as blue does not match this mother-of-pearl,
ruby, gold and white diamond ring.
What we have here is yet more false information about the Tudors, given legs by pseudo-historians
and the internet, but not supported by any primary source.
Now we come to the identity of the second sitter in the portraits and there are numerous
reasons why she is so often called Anne Boleyn.
First and foremost, she is an obvious candidate for a sitter to be paired up with a portrait
of Elizabeth, especially in such an intimate and private object as a locket ring.
Most people would not have known what was inside this piece of jewellery, assuming they
knew it opened at all and such a memento of Anne therefore makes sense when we consider
that Elizabeth was famously tight lipped about the scandalous and long-dead mother whom she
had barely known, probably (in my opinion) because she knew that drawing attention to
the dubious nature of her parents’ marriage and her own weak claims to legitimacy would
do her no good.
See my video on whether Henry and Anne were really married and what Elizabeth’s legitimacy
status was for more details on that topic.
The second factor to consider is that this woman looks like Anne.
While it is true that the only contemporary image we have of her is a damaged portrait
medal, both images show the same oval face shape, with high cheekbones.
This miniature also strongly resembles the later B pattern portraits of Anne (so named
because she is wearing her famous B for Boleyn necklace in them) which are assumed to be
copies of a lost original.
In both cases the women wear black, square-necked dresses and French hoods and are turned slightly
to their right.
The lady in the miniature even appears to have brown eyes like Anne’s.
My video on the B necklace will teach you more about that item’s history and is linked
onscreen and below for you.
The assumption that the miniature is a copy of a lost portrait of Anne is further supported
by the construction of the hood this woman is wearing.
Aside from the fact that it is of French design, which Anne famously liked to wear, having
spent much of her youth at the French court, the length of the lappets on the sides, the
tips of which are about level with or even a little lower than her mouth, date this lady
to the 1530s, as lappet length only got shorter with time.
Look back to images of Catherine of Aragon and Elizabeth of York for instance and you
can see how much longer their lappets were.
Indeed, as we’ll see in a minute, the lappet length alone all but rules out several other
candidates.
Finally, let’s talk about the hair.
One of the most commonly cited reasons for this not being Anne is that the woman here
is supposedly blonde and Anne was famously a brunette.
I’ve always found it strange that anyone would say such a thing however, when even
a fairly cursory glance at the ring’s portrait shows you right away that it isn’t true.
These tiny portraits are enamel remember and you can clearly see that some of said enamel
has worn off the hair, exposing the gold metal which it is backed onto underneath.
This woman is not meant to be blonde, as the very obvious streaks of brown enamel which
remain on her hair show.
She’s a brunette, just like Anne.
The fact that we’re looking at enamel damage here is further hammered home when we consider
that we can see such damage on other areas of the miniature too.
For instance our lady in the hood is backed onto pink, but some of that colour has become
chipped also, exposing a brown colour underneath, possibly some of the mother-of-pearl that
the enamel and gold backing is resting on.
Also am I the only one thinking mother of pearl for a picture of her mother?
That might be a bit of a stretch, I know.
Still, with such a wealth of evidence supporting an identification of Anne, who else has even
been suggested as a possible sitter here?
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Historian Susan James (whose work I generally like very much by the way, even though I’m
going to disagree with her here), has claimed that the woman might be Catherine Parr, Elizabeth’s
final step-mother.
She cites the close relationship the pair had during Elizabeth’s youth and says the
woman in the ring has red-gold hair, like Catherine.
Now as we’ve just established, the woman was a brunette, but I admit that this in itself
doesn’t rule out Catherine, whose hair colour is open to dispute.
Her portraits do indeed suggest chestnut or auburn hair which would be a close enough
match to the lady in the ring, however her corpse was disinterred multiple times in the
late 18th and 19th centuries (I’ll leave my video on that topic linked for you) and
she was found to be a blonde.
Her badge whilst Queen also shows a woman with blonde hair, though it can’t necessarily
be taken to literally represent Catherine herself.
In essence, you can argue the hair colour any way you want.
What is not open to debate though is that the hood is all wrong for a woman who was
Queen in the 1540s, as by that time lappets only reached the level of the cheekbones and
the Queen of England certainly wouldn’t be seen in a hood ten years out of date, let
alone be painted in it (because remember, this enamel must be a copy of a pre-existing
portrait).
Another piece of evidence listed by James is the phoenix on the back of the ring, which
was a symbol of the Seymour family and which you can see here on the badge of Henry VIII’s
third wife, Jane Seymour.
Catherine Parr’s final husband was Jane’s brother, Thomas, and so the dowager Queen
could indeed have been associated with the phoenix badge through him.
However the presence of this mythical bird is open to other interpretations too.
Elizabeth herself frequently used it as a symbol (that’s why there’s a painting
of her known as the phoenix painting for instance) and if we accept the second woman in the ring
is Anne, it can be read as a reference to her surviving the fall of her mother and rising,
like a phoenix from the ashes (or crown as the case may be), to become monarch.
It might also be an indication of who gave her the ring, rather than having anything
to do with the identity of one of the women shown in it.
Diana Scarisbrook for example points out that it might have been a gift to her from a member
of the Seymour family alive in the 1570s and David Starkey suggests Edward Seymour, Earl
of Hertford and son of the Duke of Somerset, who was seeking to restore his reputation
after angering Elizabeth by marrying her cousin, Lady Katherine Grey, in 1560 without royal
permission.
Certainly money was little or no object for whomever commissioned it.
The materials used and the expertise required to create such an item, encrusted with diamonds
and rubies and containing exquisite portraits which are the size of fingernails and yet
still remarkably detailed, will not have come cheap.
Lastly, Susan James is also far too quick in my opinion to rule out Anne Boleyn.
dismissing her by saying that there’s no evidence to support such an identification
other than her relationship with Elizabeth.
As I explained a few minutes ago however, there is in fact ample evidence to back up
the idea of the woman in the ring being Anne.
Another person suggested as the second sitter is Elizabeth’s former servant, Kat Ashley
(also called Astley), who raised her during much of her childhood.
Other than the fact that Elizabeth loved her however, there’s nothing to support this
identification.
The lady in the ring looks nothing like Kat and is also far too expensively dressed and
bejewelled to be a servant, even a royal servant.
I think we can reject that idea very quickly.
The final contender is a young Elizabeth herself, as suggested by writer Mariona Ponce Bochaca
(I’m very sorry if I mangled her name).
This theory doesn’t hold water however when we remember that Elizabeth was, like her father,
a famous redhead.
She did not have brunette or even auburn hair and we have pictures of her in her youth to
prove it.
Nor would the creator of this image risk giving the queen a poorly executed portrait of her
that didn’t even get her hair colour correct.
In addition, Elizabeth was only born in September 1533 and was thus a baby or a young child
in the remainder of the 1530s.
By the time she was old enough to be painted like this, French hood styles had changed,
as you can see in this portrait of her done in the mid-1540s, when the lappets on her
hood finish at her cheekbones.
Even if you want to argue that the second sitter looks like her, this is easily enough
explained by a familial resemblance between mother and daughter.
Furthermore, if the ring showed only Elizabeth, there was also no reason for her to have such
a personal item made or gifted to her, with its little hidden compartment and I feel it
would be odd to walk around with two tiny pictures of yourself hidden in your jewellery,
rather than of yourself and a loved one.
Locket jewellery is still popular today for instance, but I can’t say I’ve ever come
across anyone using it to display only themselves.
Finally, if this was a present, whether from a Seymour or not, rubbing in what the aging
Gloriana used to look like in her youth whilst juxtaposing that image with a picture of her
in the 1570s as her looks faded would have been the height of stupidity.
It is for the same reason, that I find it equally unlikely that the famously vain Elizabeth
would have commissioned such a piece herself.
To conclude, I believe the woman pictured in the Chequers ring alongside Elizabeth I
is Anne Boleyn, with the image most likely copied from a lost original portrait and possibly
the same painting that was the basis for one or more of the B pattern pictures we have
today.
The facial structure, the resemblance to other images of Anne, the style of the hood, the
colour of the hair, her relationship to Elizabeth and Elizabeth’s need to not publicly acknowledge
her mother, all make her the most natural fit when it comes to identifying this woman.
Furthermore, as this ring was created within living memory of Anne and almost certainly
made for her daughter, I also think it’s a reliable likeness of the former Queen, not
to mention a beautiful and no doubt highly meaningful item for Elizabeth to have owned
and worn.
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Let me know in the comments below who you think the lady in the French hood is and if
you’d like to learn more about famous jewels or the Tudors, try one of these options next.
Whatever you choose, please enjoy and until next time, keep learning.