https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3369-3646
Abstract
Studied in the current literature solely for his miniature work at the court of Henry VIII, Lucas Horenbout (d.1544) was equally sought after as an illuminator of prayerbooks. His career in this genre marks an important inflection point in the history of English art. The late 15th and early 16th centuries saw the final fluorescence of the illuminated prayerbook. This occurred side-by-side with a publishing revolution anchored in new technology that changed the parameters of book production and distribution. The Reformation, together with the advent of the printing press, combined to transform the market for illuminating skills Lucas had learned in his father’s workshop in Ghent. His artistic output between 1530 and 1544 bridges the transition from traditional handwritten, hand-illuminated manuscripts to the modern, mass-produced printed book. This paper discusses that transition through Horenbout’s proposed work in five illuminated prayerbooks created for four different patrons: Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn, Kateryn Parr and Anne Stanhope, Countess of Hertford and later Duchess of Somerset, as well as his collaborative additions to the 1539 Great Bible under the patronage of Thomas Cromwell. Horenbout’s career demonstrates how an elite artist adapted his art both to a changing marketplace and to the shifting power politics of the Tudor court.
The late 15th and early 16th centuries, particularly in Flanders and northern France, saw the final fluorescence of that coveted jewel of the elite, the illuminated prayerbook. Expensive, exquisite and rare, these exhibitions of calligraphic virtuosity and miniaturized art represented not only wealth and status but spoke to elite tastes, cultural sophistication and devotional piety. Illuminated prayerbooks could be found in the palaces of monarchs and nobles, on the girdle belts of queens and their ladies, and in the private chapels of cardinals and bishops, but certainly not in the modest homes of the general populace. Occurring side-by-side with this final flowering of manuscript illumination was a publishing revolution anchored in new technology that changed the parameters of book production and distribution. The advent of the printing press opened the door to cheaper, mass-produced, readily available books targeting a commercial rather than an elite market. This revolution not only broadened the audience for new ideas but changed the way in which people spoke to each other through the written word. What had been private meditations in manuscript form created for a singular elite patron now became open conversations in the public marketplace of print, conversations whose participation encouraged literacy. Early in Henry VIII’s reign, continental printers had enjoyed free trade for their imported books, but in 1523 the king shut this trade down and turned to the promotion of English printed production. William Caxton was the first native-born printer to establish his press in Westminster in 1476. At his death in 1496, his press was taken over by Wynkyn de Worde, who, before his death in 1534/35, had published some 600–700 works. Between 1454 and 1500, about 208 books were printed in England, but between 1501 and 1550 that number grew to several thousand (Statista Research Department, Citation2009, online). With the surging popularity of print, costly vellum gave way to affordable paper, illuminated letters to standard type, hand-drawn miniatures to woodblock prints, and delicate colors were replaced by uncompromising black and white. This burgeoning new industry overtook the old, and by 1550, the market for hand-illuminated manuscripts was more or less at an end.
In England, the religious Reformation that replaced the old order gave the new industry both a growing market of consumers and a purpose, to provide them with a vernacular literature devoted to the orthodoxy of the English church. Enjoined to study the Scriptures in English as the prescribed road to salvation, ordinary citizens could now afford to purchase volumes promising to provide spiritual enlightenment printed in their native tongue. According to James Carley: “The floodgates unloosed by the printing press thus highlighted developing religious controversy: dissemination of theological texts, especially biblical translations and commentaries, became a powerful tool in the hands of reformers” (Carley, Citation2004, p. 14). While illuminated prayerbooks continued to be commissioned by the Tudor court throughout the early decades of the 16th century, efforts by that same court to propagate the liturgy of the reformed church, powered by the new technology, accelerated the handcrafted manuscript’s demise. Carley suggests that an inventory of Henry VIII’s library taken at the beginning of his reign would have listed only a few printed books, but “by the end, these would dominate, both in quantity and prestige” (Carley, Citation2004, p. 18). Illustrations, whether in the form of painted illuminations or in the form of woodblock prints, remained important. These were “vehicles of further meaning … [that] commented on, explained, and highlighted aspects of narrative or argument in a text” (McKendrick, Citation2003, p. 69). Due to the popularity of these visual aids, the market for skilled illuminators remained highly competitive during the early years of the sixteenth century.
Lucas Horenbout (Horenbolte, Hornebolt, Horenbaud [d.1544]) was born at a moment in the history of European art when the forces of technological innovation and the doctrinal revolution within the Catholic Church were combining to transform the application and consumption of artistic skills he had learned in his father’s workshop. His career as an illuminator is an important inflection point in this transitional period of religious art. Born in Ghent around 1500–05, Lucas was one of the six children of renowned illuminator Gheraert Horenbout (c.1465–1540/1) and his wife Margaret Saunders (d. 1529) (Campbell & Foister, Citation1986; Kren & Gay, Citation2003b, pp. 434–39; pp. 721–25; Foister, Citation2004, online; James, Citation2009, pp. 270–75). Together with his sister, Susanna (1503-c.1554), he trained in his father’s workshop, and in 1521–22, when Susanna was hired for the English court through the auspices of Cardinal Wolsey, Lucas accompanied her to London. His earliest known illumination work was on the secular manuscript of The Troy Book (BL: Royal MS 18 D II), completed for Henry Percy, 5th Earl of Northumberland, in 1525–6 (James, Citation2021, online). At the same time, he was commissioned to paint a series of independent miniatures for the king and queen. His career and his artistic output over the following two decades bridge the transition from traditional handwritten, hand-illuminated manuscripts to the modern, mass-produced printed book and demonstrate how an elite artist adapted his art to a changing marketplace.
The objective of this paper is to build on research published in 2021 focusing on the identification and analysis of illuminations that up until now have not been recognized as Horenbout’s work (James, Citation2021, online). Who his patrons were, the context in which he served them and the role his manuscripts played in the power politics of Henry VIII’s court is also considered. Illuminated manuscripts were not simply pretty toys and spiritual guides, they could also be used, as Anne Boleyn used hers, as political statements. They could be offered as gifts to memorialize special relationships as George Boleyn and Kateryn Parr did or to fulfill reciprocal expectations within the gift-giving culture at court. They could publicize personal alliances as the Countess of Hertford’s prayerbook does or provide platforms for inscriptions that communicate affection or religious contemplation as Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn and Lady Jane Grey did. The illuminated girdle prayerbooks of Anne Stanhope and Kateryn Parr were public pronouncements of Evangelical belief worn as an advertisement for that belief. Illuminated manuscripts could also contain psychological clues to an owner’s self-image as the pictures of Henry VIII in his Psalter with Three Canticles in the guise of the new David do (White, Citation2015, pp. 554–575). Expensive, beautiful and enduring, prayerbooks in the form of illuminated manuscripts functioned as vessels of religious commitment and heritable art handed down through generations, and today, speak through time to the beliefs and ambitions of their owners and the skill of their creators.
2. Materials and methodology
Although Covid restrictions prevented travel to international libraries, numerous organizations such as the British Library, the Bodleian Library, Christ Church College, Oxford, Magdalen College, Oxford, and the Getty Research Library have placed works in their collection online where they are available for intensive study. Correspondence with Professor Micheline White of the College of Humanities at Carleton University, Ottawa, Dr. Eyal Poleg of Queen Mary University of London, Dr. Adam Crothers of St. John’s College, Cambridge, Dr. John McQuillen of the Morgan Library, New York, Nick Peate of the Wormsley Library, Chris Bagshaw, Kendal Town Clerk, Simon Unsworth, Heritage Officer of Kendal, together with other archivists, curators and librarians responsible for various manuscripts discussed here but not available online elicited a generous response that allowed a sharing of substantive images and information.
The following research and analysis concentrate on Lucas Horenbout’s proposed work in five illuminated prayerbooks created for four different patrons: Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn, Kateryn Parr and Anne Stanhope, Countess of Hertford and later Duchess of Somerset, as well as his collaborative additions under the auspices of Thomas Cromwell to the copy of the 1539 Great Bible, now in the collection of St. John’s College, Cambridge. Table lists the works mentioned in the following discussion, with each work given an identifying letter referenced in the figures.
Table 1. Illuminated Works Arranged by Letter
As in the 2021 paper, firmly identified illuminations by Gheraert Horenbout in the Sforza Hours (BL: Add. MS 34,294, 1517–1520), those created under his initials for Anne Boleyn in The Ecclesiaste (Wormsley Library, c.1533), and the images that appear on the funeral brass for Margaret Saunders, mother of Lucas and Susanna, in Fulham Church, London, have been used for comparison and control purposes. Gheraert was the source of his children’s artistic training, and his work was the foundation on which they both built. The findings discussed will hopefully help to open new channels of research by refining our understanding of Lucas Horenbout’s artistic vocabulary and broadening our appreciation of the variety of uses that the Tudor court found for his particular talents.
3. Patronage and collaboration
Historically, the literature of Tudor art has discussed Lucas solely as a miniaturist, and despite evidence showing that three other family members were also employed by the court, this literature has generally attributed to him alone all early 16th century miniatures apart from those by Holbein (Coombs, Citation1998, pp. 21–24; Strong, Citation1983a, pp. 34–44;, Citation1983b, pp. 12–44). Recent research has attempted to parse these surviving “Horenbout” illuminations among the four known working members of the Horenbout workshop—Gheraert, Susanna, Lucas and Lucas’s wife, Margaret Holsewyther (James, Citation2020, online). My 2021 article on the Horenbout workshop in England discussed proposed commissions for Cardinal Wolsey illuminated by Susanna Horenbout in 1528–9, those undertaken by both Lucas and Gheraert for the 5th Earl of Northumberland in 1525–6 and possible contributions in 1535–6 by father and son to the ornamentation of Henry VIII’s new chapel at Hampton Court (James, Citation2021, online). But work is just beginning to uncover the numerous, wide-reaching projects that Lucas undertook during his two decades at the Tudor court. His career was one of upward mobility. By 1531, he had been elevated from king’s “pictor maker” to royal painter, and in 1534, he received a patent as the king’s official painter with a salary higher than Holbein’s, together with a grant of naturalization and property in Charing Cross. When the patent was renewed 10 years later, it included an unusual written encomium from the king, himself, praising through personal knowledge, Horenbout’s “science and experience” (Campbell & Foister, Citation1986, p. 722; TNA: E315/236, fo. 37; L&P 19:i, 1036 ii). This rise in rank in 9 years may have been due to the influence of Anne Boleyn. Horenbout’s output suggests that he became her favorite artist, illuminating manuscripts for her before her marriage to Henry and creating cyphers, monograms and motifs after she became queen that appeared on a variety of royal surfaces.
Anne was not the only one of Henry’s queens to show Lucas favor nor was his work limited to the royal family. The indicators discussed below offer clues that suggest he worked for Thomas Cromwell, for the Earl and Countess of Hertford, for George Boleyn and with printer/publishers Richard Grafton, Edward Whitchurch and Thomas Berthelet, moving from manuscript to printed book as literary and publishing requirements about him changed. Horenbout’s career can be traced through his work—from his early royal miniatures and his commissions on behalf of the Earl of Northumberland in 1525–6 through his final commissions in 1543–4 for the king’s sixth queen, Kateryn Parr, during the first year of her marriage. Over these two decades, evidence shows that multiple commissions for illuminated prayerbooks were given to him to complete, a task for which his father’s training had rendered him eminently suitable. He also contributed to other collaborative projects that were produced at court, such as the prayerbook of Kateryn Parr (BL: Harley MS 2342) and the Great Bible of 1539. This collaborative tradition, too, was one that had been practiced by Gheraert Horenbout in works such as the Grimani Breviary (1510–20) and the illuminations for the Sforza Hours (Citation1517–20). In fact, all of the prayerbooks discussed below are collaborative, joint projects of commissioners, illuminators and scribes. Fortunately for the researcher, Lucas, like the rest of his family, left distinctive signposts in his illumination work, the identification of which points to his claim on their creation.
4. Motifs, patterns and designs
Of the five illuminated prayerbooks discussed in this article, the majority of illuminations are non-representational. Epistres et Evangiles des cinquante et deux sepmaines de l’an or The Pistellis and Gospelles for LII Sondayes in the Yere (Harley MS 6561), belonging to Anne Boleyn, has one narrative panel of the Crucifixion on folio 3 v in addition to repeating coats-of-arms. Anne’s psalter in the Wormsley Library has two decorated representational folios, but only Henry VIII’s Psalter with Three Canticles (Royal MS 2 A XVI) has a sequence of eight narrative panels included in its text. It is in the non-representational patterns that the hand of Lucas Horenbout can most clearly be seen. The nuts and bolts of non-representational illumination in these prayerbooks are the designs used in borders and line fillers which are built from individual motifs. Like notes in music, when these motifs are repeated sequentially, they form a recognizable pattern that can be identified from manuscript to manuscript. Some of these designs and motifs were originally developed by Gheraert Horenbout, who adapted them from earlier medieval prototypes which he inherited. In his design work, which appears in manuscripts like the Sforza Hours and the Grimani Breviary, that massive prayerbook illuminated by an elite field of Flemish artists, the precursors of Lucas’s own work can be seen. While many of Gheraert’s designs were not original to him, his usage of a select set of patterns forms a Venn diagram that can be used to isolate his work. The transmission of many of these designs between the generations suggests it is likely Gheraert kept one or more pattern books in his workshop from which his co-illuminators drew their own images (Kwakkel, Citation2014, online). For Lucas Horenbout, it is an understatement to say that he was partial to line fillers, those rectangular blocks of design used to decorate the blank spaces at the ends of written lines. Each open space devoid of calligraphy provided a tiny canvas for abstract art. Of the five prayerbooks discussed below, three include a wealth of this ornamentation.
Lucas expanded and personalized the visual lexicon of motifs he inherited from his father, and, like fingerprints, these repeating patterns provide a singular way in which to trace his work. Nine of these have been isolated and labeled as motifs A through I. The first motif, A, is an adaptation of the Greco-Roman guilloche design (Figure , Bowen, Citation2022, online). In classic mosaic work, guilloche is a center. A design used by his father in the Sforza Hours, this would appear to be Lucas’s favorite as he applied it in work done for the
Figure 1. Horenbout Guilloche Variants.
king, for Kateryn Parr, for the Countess of Hertford, and for the Great Bible of 1539. Rather than presenting the strands as a continuous elongated chain, Lucas rounds each element into a circle centering on an internal, differentiated dot. Sometimes the circles are connected, and sometimes they are slightly separated and punctuated by additional external dots. A second modification of the guilloche design, motif B (Figure ), is what might be called a half-guilloche where the running band has been abbreviated into a series of S shapes that form a repeating pattern either free of borders or bracketed between two parallel lines. This design can be found not only in work done for Henry VIII, Kateryn Parr and the Countess of Hertford but also in the Black Book of Windsor, previously identified as work by Horenbout (McQuillian, Citation2015, online).
Figure 2. Horenbout Semi-Guilloche Variants.
Motifs C (Figure ) and D (Figure ) are variations of a scrolling vine or floral band that is formed by either a single vine running laterally along the border (motif C) or, more commonly in Lucas’s work, as curling twinned branches flowing out in opposite directions from a central, pinned point (motif D). Here, too, classical Roman design seems to have been an influence. Motif E (Figure ) is an alternating block of color (often gold) in the shape of a parallelogram connected by a hyphen of matching color on a differentiated ground.
Figure 3. Horenbout Floral Band.
Figure 4. Horenbout Scrolling Vine.
Figure 5. Horenbout Dashed Parallelograms.
Motif F (Figure ) looks like the skeleton of a fish, often in gold against a colored ground, while motif G (Figure ) is another stylized wave of floral vine with double-leaved sprouts interpolated along its length. Motif H (Figure ) appears as a knobby twig, and motif I (Figure ) as a twig wrapped with evenly spaced knots of twine. While Lucas had a wealth of motifs and patterns from which to choose, these are ones that show up repeatedly in his illuminations and provide one key to identifying the work as his.
Figure 6. Horenbout Fish Skeleton Variants.
Figure 7. Horenbout Stylized Floral Vine.
Figure 8. Horenbout Knobbed Vine.
Figure 9. Horenbout Knotted Twig.
5. Gheraert Horenbout and the structure of letters
In addition to abstract motifs, letter formation within the Horenbout workshop had specific structures as well. Gheraert Horenbout was not simply an illuminator of pretty pictures but a celebrated scribe. It is noteworthy that in the miniature proposed as a self-portrait on folio 10 v of the Sforza Hours, he is shown as a scribe in the guise of St. Mark (James, Citation2021, Figure , online). Such was the demand for Gheraert’s services in this sphere that, in the case of the Sforza Hours, he was forced to hire an additional copyist for those portions “which he had not had time to write himself” (Campbell & Foister, Citation1986, p. 720). According to Kathleen Kennedy, he “was paid for his skill at the elaborate Gothic and the humanist script increasingly popular for devotional works in the early sixteenth century … Margaret of Austria reimbursed [him] not only for art, but also for script” (Kennedy, Citation2019, online). As with the nexus of the nascent Reformation and the technological advances of the printing press, the Horenbout family also inherited a changing world of calligraphy. Medieval Gothic with its complicated swirls and curlicues was being challenged by humanist miniscule with its classical letter structure impressive for its streamlined simplicity and clarity of formation. Mixing the traditional with the modern, Gheraert devised his own lexicon of lettering, a sample of which can be seen in his incipits from the Sforza Hours (Sforza Hours, Citation1517–20, online).
Unusually among his fellow illuminators, Gheraert insisted on incorporating the incipit or opening words of a text, into the painted images of his illuminations, tying the holy Word to its visual interpretation (Kren & Gay, Citation2003a, p. 428; Kren & McKendrick, Citation2003). Not quite a humanist miniscule but easily read, his lettering is perhaps more clearly understood as a return to the monumental inscriptions of ancient Rome. Gheraert has printed them in his personal, anomalous style, using overlapping letters, differentiation in size and a signature sign of omission to cram long phrases into short spaces. While Gheraert’s prose lettering embraces the modern, his drop caps and illuminated small case letters scattered throughout the text are the product of a continuing dialogue between traditional medieval shapes and emerging modern forms, and once again demonstrate how a practicing artist was combining inherited tradition with evolving structures. It was this love of calligraphy that created the wide range of lettering that his son and daughter drew on in their later work. Susanna’s exquisite letters can be seen in her proposed illuminations for Cardinal Wolsey, and Lucas’s letters pervade the prayerbooks discussed below. Yet despite the scribal movement from Gothic curlicues to humanist simplicity, as in his father’s illuminations, archaic forms of lettering mix with the modern in Lucas’s work.
A broader discussion of writing styles is beyond the scope of this article, but for now a focus on a selection of six letter formations, the vowels—a, e, i, o—and the consonants c and t will demonstrate that the calligraphic idiosyncrasies passed to his children by Gheraert can serve, together with the motifs discussed above, as identifiers of manuscripts of which they were the illuminators (Figure ). For instance, the diversity of formation of the capital letters A and I in Lucas’s alphabetic lexicon range from Gothic structures inherited through his father’s work to simplified structures that embrace the modern fashion. However, as discussed in detail in the 2021 paper, one of Lucas’s signature calligraphic gestures was a capital A drawn in an ornamented style with a crossbar shaped like a bird’s wing. So prevalent is this letter structure in his work that it became an early form of workshop branding whose usage was carried on after his death by his wife, Margaret Holsewyther. In the prayerbook that Lucas helped to illuminate at the end of his life for Kateryn Parr (BL: Harley MS 2342), a panoply of structures has been laid out, leaving to posterity an astounding variety of letter formations. No less than six different forms of the letter A, including Lucas’s signature one, and seven of the letter I appear, together with archaic and modern F’s, K’s and T’s and three forms of L, all mixed indiscriminately and enlivening the studied sobriety of the queen’s religious meditations. Isolating and identifying these shapes and structures in the five works under discussion provides a second basis for connecting a selection of hitherto unassigned or tentatively attributed illuminated manuscripts to Lucas’s hand.
Figure 10. Horenbout Letter Variants for A, E, I, O, C and T.
6. Lucas Horenbout and Anne Boleyn
While Lucas Horenbout became one of the court’s official “pictor makers” shortly after his arrival in London and produced work for both Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon, the majority of his surviving illumination work in the late 1520s and early 1530s was done for Anne Boleyn. At the same time Lucas was painting miniatures for Henry’s first queen, he was looking to the future and furthering his career by taking commissions in service of the king’s new love interest. Two miniatures of her, one by Gheraert and one by Lucas, probably date from 1526, just 4 years after Anne’s return to England from France (ROM: 978.357; BM: 1975, 0621.22). Combined with the miniature of himself that Henry commissioned especially for Anne the following year, it would have been obvious to anyone at court, including the royal illuminators, that the king was working diligently to shed his first queen to take a second (Ives, Citation2004, pp. 87–88). Susanna Horenbout appears to have been devoted to Catherine, and no work by her for the incoming regime has been discovered. Her father and brother, however, were happy to support Anne’s claims to Henry’s heart and crown and produced illuminated works to publicize that fact.
An example of Gheraert’s work for Anne, painted after her marriage, is contained in the ornamentation of The Ecclesiaste, for which he has provided exquisite illuminations of both small initial letters and eight 40-mm drop caps (The Ecclesiaste, Citation1533). According to Eric Ives (Ives, Citation2004, p. 241), the work was illuminated by “Flemish-trained craftsmen working in England” and to refine that identification more precisely, the Flemish-trained illuminator can be shown to be Gheraert Horenbout (James, Citation2021, online). Under its full title, Annotations Upon the Ecclesiastes, the printed work, published about 1531 by Simon du Bois in Alençon, is “a hybrid version” of a French translation by Jacques Lefevre d’Etaples (c.1450–1536) of a German work by Lutheran theologian Johannes Brenz (1499–1570) (Ives, Citation2004, p. 271). Unusually, the text of the printed book has been turned into a handwritten manuscript presenting Lefevre’s French version and adding an English translation of the commentaries. The commissioner of this manuscript, and presumably of Gheraert’s accompanying illuminations, has been identified as Anne Boleyn’s younger brother, George Boleyn (c.1504–1536). It has also been proposed that the English translations were done by George, himself (Ives, Citation2004, p. 272). If so, The Ecclesiaste would be one of at least two surviving books dedicated and gifted to his sister that were originally written in French by Jacques Lefevre, translated into English by the younger Boleyn, and then rendered as illuminated manuscripts by the Horenbout workshop.
Gift-giving was a formal, obligatory ritual at the Tudor court with political, social and cultural connotations (Heal, Citation2014, pp. 87–120; White, Citation2023, pp. 39–40). Gifts were given and received through a process by which giver and receiver engaged in exchanges intended to curry favor, bestow favor, announce loyalty, reward loyalty, demonstrate generosity, celebrate familial connection or to perform public beneficence. New Year’s was a special time for these gestures, and it is possible that The Ecclesiaste was George’s gift to Anne on her first New Year (1534) as queen. George’s gift-giving to his sister was not only a gesture of sibling affection but the act of a supporter and well-wisher striving to ingratiate himself with a patron and capitalize on the family bond between them. As the younger brother of a woman recently elevated to the throne, his gift-giving shows that George was consciously tying his future fortunes to Anne’s position and goodwill, a choice that did not end happily for either of them. Although The Ecclesiaste is a religious book, it is also a political one, celebrating Anne’s royal marriage by highlighting her falcon badge crowned and sceptered and, in another illumination, displaying a streaming ribbon proclaiming her queenly motto “Most Happy”. With the choice of Lefevre’s book, George acknowledges their shared religious convictions while also seeking to exploit his sister’s elevated position and his claim to her patronage.
While Gheraert Horenbout’s place on the royal payroll, together with the quality and style of the manuscript’s artistry, offer circumstantial evidence of his hand in The Ecclesiaste, the conclusive evidence rests in his initials which appear in the drop cap on folio 34 r (Figure ). They flank an anchor crowned with an armillary sphere, a device used “to model the movements … of the heavens” (Parkin, Citationundated, online). As far as is known, this is the only surviving work to which Gheraert has added his signature, and as such deserves some scrutiny. The drop cap occupies an unusually large space of eight lines and contains a capital E drawn in the medieval Gothic style. As it is in so many Horenbout
Figure 11. Horenbout Stylized Capitals E and M.
illuminations, the letter is constructed organically from stylized acanthus leaves structured around a central stem drawn as a narrow, hollow reed with flared ends. Wrapped around this stem is a bannerol proclaiming “Fiat Volvntas Tva” or “Thy Will Be Done”. To the right of the armillary sphere are the letters, “IHS”, an abbreviation of “Iesus Hominum Salvator” or “Jesus, Savior of Mankind”, over which is the distinctive Horenbout mark of omission. The drop cap is set in the page that addresses the End of Days and the coming of the “beeste havyng many headys” from the Book of Revelations. Gheraert’s initials included in the carefully curated design imply perhaps that this is a personal religious offering inspired by the words it illustrates, a small chantry chapel contained within the great cathedral of Anne’s gift. The assembled items could be read as a message, which Horenbout endorses through the addition of his initials, affirming the belief that through the storms of life and even at the End of Days, Jesus Salvator is the anchor and celestial guide of the soul, and through him, the true believer is shown the way to fulfill God’s Will and achieve salvation.
It is in the formation of Gheraert’s lettering for The Ecclesiaste that the origins of Lucas’s own lettering in George Boleyn’s second offering to his sister can be found. While the crowned falcon holding a scepter and Anne Boleyn’s motto prove that The Ecclesiaste was illuminated for Henry’s queen after their marriage, Lucas’s illuminations for Epistres et Evangiles des cinquante et deux sepmaines de l’an or The Pistellis and Gospelles for LII Sondayes in the Yere (Epistres et Evangiles des cinquante et deux sepmaines de l’an, Citation1532–33, facsimile online) precede the marriage. This is indicated in the dedication to the “Lady Marchioness of Pembroke” under a commission from “her most loving and friendly brother”, assuring her of his love and loyalty (Carley, Citation1998, pp. 266–68). Epistres et Evangiles is once again in French with commentaries written in English and had to have been completed between 1 September 1532 when Anne received the Pembroke title and 25 January 1533 when she received the crown. Epistres et Evangiles has been copied from another work by Jacques Lefevre d’Etaples, published in Paris by Simon du Bois about 1525, and, given the similarity of handwriting, it has almost certainly been copied by the same scribe who copied The Ecclesiaste. Jacques Lefevre’s work would appear to have been a favorite of Anne’s, who was probably already familiar with the French texts in printed form. This undoubtedly was the reason her brother chose these works to translate as gifts. In the introduction, George remarks on “the perpetuall bond of blood” that has “bownd me … [to] become your debtour for want of pooire” and on “Our friendly dealynges with so divers and sondry benifites”, an outright statement of what it meant for the family fortunes to have a sister and patron who would shortly become queen.
In the illumination for Epistres et Evangiles, Lucas has duplicated the structure of his father’s lettering which would appear shortly thereafter in the The Ecclesiaste. The capital E, which encloses Gheraert’s private religious meditation on the Will of God, becomes in Lucas's work a frame for Anne’s self-promotion (Figure ). This E is also in the Gothic style and constructed from the same stylized acanthus leaves and open-ended, organic reed. The letter now encloses Anne’s coat-of-arms as Marchioness of Pembroke, with the coronet of a marchioness capping the top of the heraldic shield, perhaps a subtle reference to the royal crown soon to come. In a bold statement of self-assertiveness, a monogram displaying Henry’s initials entwined with those of the marchioness is spread throughout the manuscript’s illuminations (Figures ). As with many of Anne’s commissions in the years preceding her royal marriage, she publicly proclaims the inevitability of her elevation to the throne. As early as 1530, she had her servants’ livery embroidered with the motto: “Ainsi sera, groigne qui groigne” or “It will be thus, grumble who will” (Ives, Citation2004, p. 141). Another ornamental application of the Gothic E has also been taken from Gheraert’s usage in the Sforza Hours (fo. 48 v). Inscribed in gold on a red ground with white flourishes, both letters are outlined in white with dots at the corners. The similarity between the two is striking (Figures & g).
Figure 12. Horenbout Monograms and Coat-of-Arms for Anne Boleyn.
With a second letter, a capital T, Lucas has also appropriated his father’s script. Both drew the T as a curling, zoomorphic shape, with grotesque, almost dolphin-like head (Figures & g). In Anne’s Epistres et Evangiles, Lucas has played with the shape, turning it into an entire menagerie of grotesques, some with protruding tongues, some balancing a pearl, some double-headed with another grotesque growing from its tail. They romp across the pages of Anne’s prayerbook like performing pets. Lucas must have felt that this whimsical playfulness would amuse the future queen. A third letter in Epistres et Evangiles, a capital M, that Lucas has used several times in his drop caps is another inherited form and matches the structure of the capital M on the 1529 Horenbout funeral brass in Fulham Church, London, designed for his mother, Margaret Saunders (Figure ). The structure of this letter consists of two interlocking ovoid loops formed from acanthus leaves connected at the bottom, and, in Epistres et Evangiles, like Gheraert’s letters in The Ecclesiaste, it is framed in a golden square with the lower right third of the square springled with golden dots, a typical Horenbout flourish.
The most convincing mark of Lucas’s hand, however, is the presence of his signature capital A on folio 60 v with its bird’s wing crossbar (Figure ). Throughout the manuscript’s illuminations wherever Anne’s initials appear, Lucas has stuck rigorously to simplified Roman capital A’s and P’s, yet in this one instance, either by habit or design, he has allowed his signature capital A to emerge, marking the work as his own. With each surviving commission Lucas undertook, he set out a defined letter structure, a lexicon of line filler treatments and a specific color palette dedicated to that work. Because of the density of the text in Epistres et Evangiles, no line fillers or illuminated borders were necessary, and Lucas has used a restrained palette of rose pink and pale blue with white highlighting for the lettering of his drop caps. Set on a grey-blue ground framed with gold, they occasionally include a righthand lower corner of repeating gold flecks (for instance, folios 10 r, 13 r, 37 r). Following the usage in the Sforza Hours, the small case letters have been drawn in gold on a red ground, framed in white and ornamented with white curlicues (Figures & g).
Like his father who was employed for The Ecclesiaste not only as an artist, but equally as a creative emissary for an ambitious sibling and as a publicity agent for a new queen, with Epistres et Evangiles, Lucas, too, fulfilled these three functions. Although she was not yet queen when Lucas worked on Epistres et Evangiles, from the plethora of royal monograms illuminated by Lucas entwining Henry’s initials with hers, Anne was in no doubt of that eventuality. These two manuscripts exemplify the transitioning taste among the elite who, despite demonstrating a continued desire for the status symbol of a privately commissioned manuscript, were simultaneously collecting cheaper, readily available printed books. This was understandable in an age of change when, unlike the manuscript, which could take months to produce, the printed book presented immediate access to a library of the most recent commentary on reformist thought, on science, cosmography, mathematics and storytelling. Although publishing technology was moving hand-crafted manuscripts into the storage bin of history and filling that space with print, George Boleyn has chosen to take two printed works, undoubtedly already familiar to his sister, and turn them back into manuscripts, thus making them both special and anachronistic. Epistres et Evangiles is a hybrid work perched on the edge of transition. Included in a reformist text are the archaic footprints of Gothic letters that reference the orthodoxy of the past. Yet the future queen’s initials and motto are written in the humanist script that was gaining popularity, a clarion call of forms that would soon replace that which had gone before.
A second suggested work illuminated for Anne Boleyn by Lucas Horenbout is her French psalter now in the Wormsley Library (Psalter of Anne Boleyn, c.Citation1532; James, Citation2021, online). According to Eric Ives, the French text of the psalter quotes a selection from the Psalms, and “derives from the 1515 Hebrew text of Felix de Prato, and the translation has been credited to the Picard scholar, Louis de Berquin” (Ives, Citation1995, pp. 83–102). The psalter, “unknown to modern collectors until it turned up at a Paris book sale in 1976”, was described by the anonymous vendor’s representative, Sotheby’s auction house, as having been “written and illustrated for Anne in Paris or Rouen between 1529 and 1532” (New York Times, Citation1982, online). As the two manuscripts discussed above also have passages in French, and as the illuminations in them can be assigned—one to Gheraert and the other to Lucas Horenbout—there is no reason to suppose that, like them, this psalter was not produced in England. Elite, multi-lingual scribes were available close at hand, like Jean Mallard (c.1515-after 1541), who had served at the French court and later served the English one, producing work in both Latin and French for the king. Dual-language prayerbooks created for members of the Tudor court were common. A bill for “a Primer for her grace in Latin and English” as well as a New Testament in French was presented for payment to Kateryn Parr’s clerk of the closet, William Harper, in 1544 (TNA: E 315/161, fo. 69). Certainly, the scribe of the psalter is different from the scribe who copied out The Ecclesiaste and Epistres et Evangiles, but the illuminator would appear to be the same. Sotheby’s has offered a date between December 1529-September 1532, and the lack of a marchioness’ coronet above the coat-of-arms in the illuminations does suggest a date prior to Anne’s creation as Marchioness of Pembroke, but, given that Lucas has used the identical monogram in the psalter as that found in Epistres et Evangiles, one showing Anne’s initials entwined with Henry’s, this manuscript, too, probably dates close to that creation (Figure ).
The identifiers that mark the illuminations in the psalter as the work of Lucas Horenbout are to be found in both the lettering and in the line fillers. Unlike the dense text of The Ecclesiaste and Epistres et Evangiles, the looser spacing of the psalter’s humanist miniscule script allows the illuminator to thread among the lines a brilliantly colored tapestry of lower case letters, flourished drop caps and line filler designs. For both letters and line fillers, a vivid palette of red, blue and gold has been chosen. Lower case initial letters are drawn in gold on grounds of red or blue and embellished with gold curlicues, brackets or dots. Some are framed in gold borders (Figure ). The drop caps are four lines high, and in these the illuminator has added rose pink, black and white to the palette together with gold grounds. The letters in the drop caps, as was common in the Horenbout workshop, are formed from organics, stylized acanthus leaves, fluted blossoms and hollow reeds. The lettering on the lower case illuminated letters is a mix of plain Roman and ornamented Gothic, while the drop caps are in Gothic and elaborately flourished. A comparison of the structure of the capital L in the Epistres et Evangiles with that in the psalter, each capital formed from acanthus leaves and blossoms as a frame for Anne’s heraldic shield, shows a strong similarity as does the organic L in Kateryn Parr’s prayerbook (Figure ), but it is Lucas’s signature A with the bird’s wing crossbar crowning Anne’s monogram that is spread throughout the manuscript that ties it unarguably to him (Figures ). Five of the nine identified motifs described above, E-I, are used in the line fillers drawn in gold on red and blue grounds. A sixth, motif A, appears in a variant form as a series of circles outlined in white with colored centers separated not by dots but by black check marks.
Figure 13. Three Examples of Horenbout Capital L’s.
Unlike so many manuscripts that have seen extensive damage over the centuries, Anne’s psalter is beautifully preserved, and the lavishness and richness of the illuminations are evidence of the care and cost devoted to its creation. This is a special work which includes two, full-page illuminations, one facing Psalm 1 and one facing Psalm 110. The one facing Psalm 110 features two putti holding a magnified version of the complicated monogram that entwines Anne’s initials irrevocably with those of the king. Apparently designed by Lucas, it also appears in Epistres et Evangiles (Figure ). The monogram is presided over by Lucas's signature capital A, and the royal “consummation devoutly to be wished” is symbolized by corded lovers knots floating above. The psalter is composed of a selection from the Book of Psalms, presumably those chosen by the owner, herself. Thus, the placement of this illuminated monogram has significance as it is the illustration for the psalm known as Dixit Dominus. According to C. S. Rodd: “This is one of the irreducible minimum of royal psalms and … has often been assigned to the king’s coronation” (Rodd, Citation2001, p. 396). The message from this psalm associated with the circumstances of Anne’s career in 1532 is clear: “The Lord said unto my Lord: Sit thou at my right hand, until I make thine enemies thy footstool.” Placed in the context of Anne’s psalter, the verse weaponizes the power of God as the Lord Spiritual, who acts through His designate here on earth, the lord temporal, king of England, to make Anne’s enemies the enemies of Heaven. The second full-page illumination contains another pair of putti presenting Anne’s heraldic shield which illustrates Psalm 1: “Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor standeth in the way of sinners, nor sitteth in the seat of the scornful.” The psalter, thus, provides a blessing for the soon-to-be queen through curated emblems of heritage and royal aspiration while at the same time warning the ungodly and the scornful that, as she sits on the right hand of the king and he on the right hand of God, so her enemies shall be crushed beneath her feet.
Anne Boleyn’s faith in her royal destiny was constructed on a foundation of Henry’s infatuation and obsession with a male heir. Her investment in the belief that “her hands were ordained for sceptres” was reflected in the plethora of advertisements put forward in her name—in illuminated joined monograms, entwined ciphers, crowned initials and the announcement to the court that “Ainsi sera, groigne qui groigne”. Joining Anne in this conspiracy of confidence was her brother George, whose commissions to scribes and to the Horenbout workshop embodied both conviction and celebration that his sister would shortly, or had just, become queen. Gheraert and Lucas Horenbout were a part of this conspiracy of confidence, hired to flesh out the texts that expressed Boleyn expectations, proclaiming Anne’s religious beliefs while leaving no doubt as to her political aspirations. Their illuminations were a testament not only to their client’s ambitions but to their own skill in turning that ambition into illuminated masterpieces.
7. Lucas Horenbout and Henry VIII
Henry VIII was a “bookish king from beginning to end”, and one of the best-known illuminated manuscripts created especially for him is the Psalter with Three Canticles (BL: Royal MS 2 A XVI, facsimile online) (Carley, Citation2004, p. 13). The work features a selection from the Psalms with three canticles from St. Luke. The dedication on folio 2 r of the psalter reveals that the book was copied out by Jean Mallard as a gift to Henry VIII—“Johannes Mallardus regius orator, et a calamo Regi Angliae, et Francie Fidei deffenfori invictis(simo)” or “Jean Mallard, royal orator, [sends this] from his pen to the invincible king of England and France, defender of the faith”. There is some controversy about the date of the psalter’s creation with John King dating it prior to the ratification of the Act of Supremacy in 1534 due to the image of God wearing a papal tiara on folio 98 v (King, Citation1989, pl. 17). As Mallard was the scribe, however, the volume cannot have been written any earlier than 1539, when he moved from Paris to London and became “regius orator”. It should be noted, too, that the image of God wearing a papal tiara also appears on folio 1 v in another volume that Mallard created for Henry, Le Chemin de Paradis (Figure ), dating from 1539-40, discussed below (Mallard, Citation1539–40, facsimile online). Originally from Rouen, Mallard was a self-described orator, poet, scribe, cosmographer and mathematician who was employed at the court of François I until 1538. By the following year, he had moved to London and pursued the English king’s patronage with a gift of Le premier livre de la cosmographie en rhetorique francoyse, a “poetic adaptation of a work by the French navigator Jean Alphonse de Saintonge” that had originally been created for François I (Mallard, Citation1539, facsimile online). In the dedication of the copy he inscribed for Henry, Mallard petitions the king to appoint him to the post of royal court poet. Henry must have been impressed with the work as Mallard appears in the king’s household accounts between 1539 and 1541 not as court poet but as Henry’s “orator in the French tongue” which may have come to the same thing (Mallard, Citation1539, BL catalogues online).
With Mallard’s dedicatory inscription in the psalter and in the absence of additional evidence, the assumption has been that the manuscript was not only written out by Mallard but illuminated by him as well. This, however, may not be the case. According to Scot McKendrick, “subcontracting [illumination work] was commonplace”, and Mallard was known to have collaborated with different illuminators in his role as scribe on earlier projects (McKendrick, Citation2003, p. 63). While at the French court, for example, Mallard was responsible for the copying work in the Hours of François I. A payment of 45 livres was made to him in 1538 for both inscribing the text and for paying an outside artist known as the Master of François de Rohan to illuminate the work (Croizat-Glazer, Citation2013, p. 121). An analysis of the illuminations in Henry’s psalter would appear to indicate that this same process was employed here. Nowhere in the dedication does Mallard claim to have produced the illuminations. He describes himself only as the royal orator and scribe. In the third work by Mallard, Le Chemin de Paradis, an epic poem composed by him and copied out as another gift for the king, illuminations have also been ascribed to Mallard (Mallard, Citation1539–40, facsimile online). Yet a close comparison of the images in that work with the images in the psalter show a very different hand. It is beyond the scope of this paper to investigate Jean Mallard as an illuminator, but an analysis of the art in the Psalter with Three Canticles links it closely to other work done by Lucas Horenbout, particularly the French psalter of Anne Boleyn, which dates from a decade earlier.
A visual comparison of Mallard’s profile portrait in Le Chemin (fo. 1 v) with an identical side view portrait of Henry from the psalter (fo. 79 r) points up the differences in draftsmanship and handling of the two profiles (Figure ). The illuminator of Le Chemin
Figure 14. Comparison of Horenbout Facial Images with Le Chemin de Paradis.
Figure 15. Comparison of Horenbout Divine Images with Le Chemin de Paradis.
Besides the differences noted above, an examination of the psalter’s lettering and line fillers point decisively to the hand of Lucas Horenbout. The illuminated lower case letters are in humanist miniscule or Roman script, with gold lettering outlined and embellished in gold laid on red, blue, brown or black grounds, or, alternatively, in white or black lettering on gold grounds embellished with red (Figure ). Drop caps, also in the same style, are again organic, formed from acanthus leaves, unfurled flowers and reeds or short branches with knot holes and flared ends (Figure ). They are painted in Horenbout’s favored pastels—blue, pink and green—on gold grounds with white highlights and embellishments of stylized green or blue leaves outlined in black. In the center or along the sides of each letter is a visual field guide to local flora and fauna—butterflies, snails, ladybugs, beetles, grasshoppers, parrots, rats, roses, pansies, gillyflowers and iris. Among the botanicals, cultivars of fruit and vegetables are also featured—peas, cherries, quince, grapes and Lucas’s favorite, strawberries, which also appear in similar modeling in the border of Anne Boleyn’s psalter on folio 7 r. One disconcerting capital I (fo. 82 v) offers the gutted carcasses of two rabbits hanging on either side of the initial.
This visual discourse on the natural world was inherited from the Flemish workshops of Gheraert Horenbout and Simon Binnick, both of whom specialized in filling the borders of their illuminated manuscripts with just such flora and fauna. And it is noticeable that the borderless illuminations in Le Chemin offer no corollary artwork drawn from nature. While the ornamental lettering in the Psalter with Three Canticles is in keeping with Horenbout’s hand, it is the line fillers that would seem to be conclusive. Of the nine signature motifs described above, all nine are present in the psalter (Figures ). There is a particularly close referencing in draftsmanship to the five found in Anne Boleyn’s psalter, particularly motifs E, F and G. Motif E which appears as a horizontal decoration in the line fillers has also been used perpendicularly here as ornamentation wrapped around the uprights of several capital letters (Figure ). This design becomes important in identifying one of the hands in the illumination of the 1539 Great Bible.
Where the written text in Anne Boleyn’s psalter was a religious work dedicated to the praise of God, its illuminations exist in the political sphere and are memoranda of ambition and expectation. Henry’s psalter, on the other hand, is an intensely private work. That this was a valued personal possession is shown by the amount of commentary the king has inscribed in the margins, comprising “his distinctive handwritten notes, manicules, trefoils, brackets, [and] notas” (White, Citation2023, p. 55). According to Micheline White:
Henry’s manuscript psalter also demonstrates the broader
social dimension of his annotations … the gorgeous text was
likely seen by those in the Privy Chamber who attended to
Henry’s bodily needs and transported his belongings from
palace to palace, and it is a fact that Henry’s annotations were
a kind of prized text unto themselves, as someone paid a scribe
to recopy them in red ink into a printed English psalter (White, Citation2023, pp. 57-8).
Henry’s identification with the Biblical figure of David, celebrated by Mallard in the dedication, shines through the images, duplicating a parallel effort across the Channel on the part of one of the English king’s Goliaths, François I, king of France, who had himself portrayed as the Hebrew king in another Mallard inscribed manuscript, The Hours of François I (Croizat-Glazer, Citation2013, p. 121 Figure ). A plentiful array of Goliaths was certainly available to Henry in 1539–40, from François of France to Emperor Charles V, to Pope Paul III and the Catholic Church.
What is striking about the vignettes that portray Henry in the psalter is their intimacy and the correlation they have with the private life and beliefs of the king. One iconic Davidian episode that is noticeably absent is the Biblical king’s first sexual encounter with Bathsheba in her bath (Croizat-Glazer, Citation2013, pp. 136–7). Henry’s notorious marital career would perhaps have made such a reference imprudent if not dangerous. Henry saw himself as a scholar, a musician, a sportsman, a noble warrior, and a monarch ordained by God. The miniatures of Henry reading in his chamber (fo. 3 r), of Henry’s Biblical surrogate raising his slingshot against the giant and his minions (fo. 30 r), of the glory of knightly battle (fo. 48 r), of Henry playing a harp companioned by his court jester, Will Somers (fo. 63 v), and of Henry as David when that king “lifted up his eyes and saw the angel of the Lord standing between heaven and earth, with a drawn sword in his hand” (fo. 79 r, 1 Chronicles 21:16), thus represent the way in which David’s royal English counterpart self-identified. It is this very imaging intimacy that underscores the evidence presented above of Lucas Horenbout’s hand in the psalter’s illuminations. When the psalter was created Mallard had been in England for at most 2 years. Horenbout had been employed by the king for two decades, his career promoted by Anne Boleyn, his salary greater than Holbein’s. Horenbout’s familiarity with Henry was that of a favored employee of long-standing; Henry’s familiarity with Horenbout is evidenced in the king’s declaration of his close acquaintance “from personal knowledge with the science and experience in the pictorial art of Lucas Horenbolte”. With these intimate images of the king, Horenbout offered his own personal statement that not only was Henry his royal master and patron and he the king’s loyal “servante and painter” but he was also his friend.
8. Lucas Horenbout and the Earl and Countess of Hertford
One of what might be termed a power couple at court in the last half of Henry VIII’s reign was the king’s brother-in-law Edward Seymour (d. 1552) and Seymour’s second wife Anne Stanhope (c.1510–87). Both had spent years as career courtiers. In 1525, Edward was appointed master of the horse to the king’s illegitimate son, six-year-old Henry Fitzroy, Duke of Richmond. Edward went on to become one of the king’s esquires of the body, and in 1536 saw his star rise as his sister, Jane Seymour, became Henry’s third queen. Anne Stanhope had joined the court at the age of 16 as a maid of honor in the household of Catherine of Aragon. She continued her service in the household of Anne Boleyn, marrying the ambitious Seymour sometime before 9 March 1535. When Jane Seymour succeeded Anne as queen, her brother and his wife were able to claim a royal relationship as aunt and uncle to Henry’s sole male heir. Ambitious, manipulative and clever, they assumed powerful positions at court as the Earl and Countess of Hertford.
While much has been written about their careers and personalities, one thing that most historians agree upon is the affectionate regard the two had for each other. This affection is embodied in an illuminated manuscript created about 1540 which not only features the combined coat-of-arms of Anne and Edward but also two pages ornamented with their first initials A and E (Taverner Prayer Book, c.Citation1540, facsimile online). On folio 32 r these are set out as individual initials, but on folio 20 v, the initials are drawn inside circles joined together by a trailing vine running along the left-hand border. As a miniature book about 2.8 inches in height, the manuscript was likely prepared for Anne—on the bottom of folio 20 v Anne’s initial appears twice bracketing Edward’s—and may have been commissioned as a gift from her affectionate husband. Anne’s prayerbook is another example of an illuminated manuscript derived from a printed work. Published in London in 1539, the book is an English translation of a collection of prayers taken from a work in Latin by Wolfgang Capito, a German reformer, born in Alsace. Entitled, An epitome of the Psalmes, or briefe meditacons vpon the same, with diuerse other moste Christian prayers, it was translated from Latin into English by Richard Taverner (1505–1575), another reformer best known for his English translation of The Most Sacred Bible, commonly known as Taverner’s Bible (Taverner Prayer Book, c.Citation1540, notes online). Stanhope’s manuscript is a handwritten, illuminated copy of selected prayers from Taverner’s published work.
The tiny prayerbook is written in a professional style with rubrics lettered in gold. It contains no illuminated lower case letters and only 20 drop caps in humanist miniscule embellished with generic botanicals, all in gold on a red or pink ground outlined in gold (Figure ). The palette that has been chosen features lavish gold designs inscribed on richly coloured grounds of black, white, red and grey. There are no line fillers, but what is highlighted in the illuminations are the borders. It is in these border designs that the hand of Horenbout can be seen. Each page is bordered on all sides, and each border is idiosyncratically drawn. A single page may have matching borders or those of different widths jigsawed around the text. There are often mismatched grounds butted up against one another. This may be a result of what McKendrick has called “a contemporary fashion and the taste for a more jumbled appearance” (McKendrick, Citation2003, p. 66). Of the nine motifs described above, five are repeated throughout the entire manuscript, with particular emphasis on A, B and D (Figures ). The brevity of the book allowed the illuminator to saturate the borders with intricate patterns creating an elaborate work that was undoubtedly a source of feminine pride. As such, it may have been shared by Stanhope among the ladies who served in the queen’s household because when Henry took his sixth queen, Kateryn Parr, in 1543, she commissioned Lucas Horenbout to make her a prayerbook like it.
9. Lucas Horenbout and Kateryn Parr
In 1543, Henry took as his sixth wife the 30-year-old, twice-widowed daughter of a northern gentry family named Kateryn Parr. Anne Stanhope, now Countess of Hertford, joined the new queen’s household as one of her ladies. The two women would later have a fraught relationship, but one thing they held in common from the beginning was a fervent belief in the Evangelical movement spurred by the religious upheaval of the Reformation (James, Citation2019, online). Prior to this, women at the Tudor court had often worn “a pair of beads” or Catholic rosary attached to their girdles both as ornamentation and as evidence of their piety (James, Citation2015, p. 264). With the coming of the Reformation, rosaries began to go out of fashion and were replaced by reliquaries of the Word, the girdle book. Girdle books or small, religiously themed volumes worn attached to the waist of the wearer by cord or precious metal chain date back to the 14th century (Kernytska, Citation2020, p. 6). Originally, the book might have been contained in a cloth sack or purse that was then tied to the owner’s belt. In the Tudor version, the volumes were tiny, no more than a few inches high, and usually bound in covers of gold with loops at the top that could be threaded through the end of a girdle. These goldsmiths’ works were often adorned with elaborate enameled images or set with gems. They doubled as both portable prayerbooks and valuable jewels, the costliness of their bindings reflecting the religious riches of their contents. Such miniature volumes were not only status symbols signifying wealth but religious symbols advertising reformist beliefs. The late 17th-century red goatskin binding on Anne Stanhope’s tiny volume is not original, and it is likely that the countess wore the volume as a girdle book bound in gold and fastened to the end of a belted chain.
Kateryn Parr followed the same fashion. A now-lost portrait of the queen showing her wearing a girdle book was recorded in the collection of Naworth Castle in 1947 (Hawksbury, Citation1904, p. 88; Unattributed, Citation1947, p. 22). Among Kateryn’s possessions at her death was “a book of gold enameled black garnished with 28 small table rubies and one rock ruby upon the clasp and on each side of the book a table diamond”. Another valuable item in her possession, “a little box of silver and gilt, book fashion, with diverse small garnishing pearls and beadstones of gold and 2 pearls peree fashion”, may also have been worn at the end of a girdle, acting as a book reliquary containing a small volume of holy words from the Bible (Sudeley Chest, Citation1549, fo. 205 v). The queen’s chamber accounts show her as a great giver of books as gifts, and this included miniature girdle books which from surviving examples were all in manuscript form. For New Year’s 1544, Kateryn presented her royal stepdaughter, Lady Mary, with what was probably a girdle book elaborately bound in gold and decorated with rubies (Madden, Citation1831, p. 185; White, Citation2023, pp. 41–2). Given the queen’s fondness for this fashion, another of Kateryn’s prayerbooks (Lady Jane Grey’s Prayerbook, Citation1543–48; facsimile online) in the form of an illuminated manuscript may also have been worn as a girdle book. Its current dark blue leather binding is a later addition. The book has three and a half times as many pages as Anne Stanhope’s but is only 3 by 4 inches in dimension. A suggestion of what its original cover could have looked like can be seen today in the British Museum (Prayerbook case, Citation1543, facsimile online). This surviving cover crafted in gold and enamel was probably created by Hans of Antwerp shortly before Kateryn became queen. An executor of Holbein’s will, Hans was also a close friend of goldsmith Peter Richardson, who would become the queen’s personal jeweler. The book it covered was written by one of Kateryn’s ladies and closest confidants as queen, Elizabeth Tyrwhitt. Something very similar must once have bound the queen’s own small prayerbook.
When Kateryn left London in June 1548 to travel to Sudeley Castle in Gloucestershire to await the birth of her daughter by Thomas Seymour, she took Harley MS 2342 with her. Traveling with her, too, was her husband’s ward, 11-year-old Lady Jane Grey. During that summer, Kateryn gave the prayerbook to Jane as a keepsake or alternatively, it was given to the child as a memento of her at the queen’s death on 5 September. Whichever it was, Jane kept the little book until her own death five-and-a-half years later, when she carried it with her to the scaffold. Her attachment to it must certainly have reflected her attachment to its original owner. There has been controversy over whether Kateryn or Jane was the original owner of the prayerbook, but the identification of the Horenbout workshop as the source of its illumination firmly ties the manuscript to a date no later than 1548 (Mueller, Citation2011, pp. 489–510; Busfield, Citation2013, online; pp. 220–25; Edwards, Citation2016, online). Given this, there seems little doubt that the prayerbook originated with Parr and was gifted to Jane at Sudeley. In an extensive exegesis on the material in Parr’s prayerbook, Janel Mueller provides multiple sources as to the origins of the text—from Sir Thomas More to Nicholas Shaxton to Bishop Fisher to an English primer published in 1535 by a Lutheran printer named Thomas Godfray. Richard Taverner’s An epitome of the Psalmes, the source of Anne Stanhope’s prayerbook, provides the material for the last few pages.
As Mueller has pointed out, the manuscript is a form of religious diary, a compilation of entries excerpted from a wide variety of religious publications from the decade between 1530 and 40. That there is no coat-of-arms or identifying cipher on the opening pages suggests either missing pages or a more informal production than either Anne Stanhope’s prayerbook or Anne Boleyn’s psalter. Yet the small manuscript was important enough for the Queen to enlist official scribes and illuminators in its production. Mueller concluded that Kathryn, herself, was the scribe as well as the illuminator of the prayerbook, a conclusion which seems unlikely given both the broad diversity of the illuminations and the fact that there is no indication that Parr ever trained in the skills necessary to illuminate a manuscript. James Carley disagrees, too, with Mueller’s scribal attribution, calling the manuscript the work of a professional. A close examination of the text points to the hands of at least three scribes, indicating that Mueller was right at least in her conclusion that the prayerbook was created over a span of time, probably in three tranches.
Like Anne Stanhope’s prayerbook, all were written in what Stephen Edwards has identified as “a style of Gothic blacklettering known as lettera cursive formata … a specialized style of handwriting not commonly utilized by any but professional scribes” (Edwards, Citation2016, online). Scribe number one was responsible for folios 1 r-17 v. Scribal hand number two begins at the end of folio 17 v and continues through the middle of folio 137 r. The third scribal hand begins at the end of folio 137 r and continues through folio 142 r at which point the text stops rather abruptly in mid-sentence, again suggesting missing pages. Comparative examples of identical words—lord, Christ, blessed or bless and prayer—highlight differences in letter formation, particularly in the letter r, although as with most Tudor documents, there is little consistency in either lettering or spelling (Figure ). None of these three hands is congruent with Parr’s, but all three scribes were certainly in her employ.
Figure 16. Examples of Three Scribal Hands in the Prayerbook of Kateryn Parr.
The official in the queen’s household who would have been tasked with hiring scribes for the transcription work was Kateryn’s clerk of the closet, William Harper. On 12 April 1544, for instance, Harper submitted a bill for 2s 4d, “money by hym leyed owt” for “a Primer for her grace in Latin and English with epistles and gospels unbounden”. Also, on the bill was a 5s charge “for ruling and coloring of the letters of the said Primer. And of her grace’s Testament in French”. Another 5s was charged for ‘gilding, covering and binding of the two said books’ (The National Archives (TNA), Citation1544a, Citation1544b, fo. 69). While the French testament was undoubtedly a printed work, several facts suggest that the primer may have been a manuscript. The bill came not from a printer as was customary but from Harper. Colored letters could appear in both printed books and manuscripts, but the primer pages had to be ruled and a great deal of money was “leyed owt” for this, an unnecessary expense if the printed pages were already finished. Two years later, Parr’s accounts were charged for ruling four printed books, probably for frontispiece illuminations, at a cost of 2s or 6d a book, a rate substantially lower than that charged for the primer (TNA, E314/22/27, Citation1546, fo. 17). Such a disparity suggests that more than just coloring a coat-of-arms and a collection of drop caps were involved. The bill suggests that, like her small girdle book, the queen was ordering other illuminated manuscripts, but unfortunately neglects to name either the scribe or the illuminator.
All the manuscripts discussed earlier were commissioned as individual projects with one scribe and one illuminator. But given the differentiation in script and in illumination, Parr’s prayerbook seems to have been the work of several hands. Together with three scribes, two or possibly three illuminators appear to have worked on the manuscript in a hodge-podge of color palettes, line filler designs, and with lower case letters and drop caps in Roman characters mixed with late Gothic hand. As Edwards remarks: “The skill evidenced by the decoration of the prayerbook strongly indicates that those decorations were produced by a specially trained professional illuminator or limner” (Edwards, Citation2016, online). Among the illuminators, one hand belongs to Lucas Horenbout. The queen’s relationship with the Horenbout workshop was close and continued even after Henry VIII’s death. Lucas’s sister, Susanna Horenbout, was a member of Kateryn’s chamber; Lucas’s wife, Margaret Holsewyther, had painted the queen in miniature in 1544 and went on to provide further miniatures for her over the next 3 years. An important point regarding Margaret’s work is that she continued to use many of the same letter and line filler patterns that her husband used, probably from the same pattern books. The miniature of Kateryn, now at Sudeley Castle, for example, was painted by her after Lucas’s death and displays his signature A with its bird’s wing crossbar as a branding artifact of the workshop (Figure ). Horenbout wrote his will on 8 December 1543, just 5 months after Kateryn became queen, but lived until May 1544. He was buried in St. Martin-in-the-Fields on 10 May at a substantial cost of 13s 10d which underscores his income and social status (Accounts of the Churchwardens of St Martin-in-the-Fields, Citation1901, online). His will was probated on 27 May 1544 (Consistory, Citation1543, fo. 38). In it, Lucas states that he is “hole of mynde” but makes no mention of his physical condition. Yet his patent as king’s official painter which included the king’s praise for Horenbout’s “science and experience” was renewed in 1544, and his hand in Parr’s prayerbook does suggest that he continued illumination work during the first months of that year.
In the prayerbook, four of the nine motifs laid out—A, B, C, D—appear (Figures ). So, too, does Lucas’s signature capital A, which is used 14 times between folios 51 r and 125 r, as well as his grotesque, serpentine small case t and a distinctive form of the capital H with the crossbar shaped like an inverted Horenbout mark of omission (Figures ). Two versions of a flourished capital I appear which are closely related to those in his father’s work in the Sforza Hours and in Anne Boleyn’s The Ecclesiaste, and a capital O closely follows designs in Anne Stanhope’s psalter (Figure ). Unlike the other manuscripts discussed, there is no overall structure to the illuminations, no set color palette, letter forms or glossary of line fillers that a single illuminator would have chosen. Lower case letters are written in gold on a pink or blue ground, outlined in gold, black or white, or not at all. They are embellished with black or white ornamentation and vary widely from a strictly Roman form to elaborate Gothic. The drop caps fall into three categories, all of which differ but reference earlier work by the Horenbout workshop (Figure ).
Figure 17. Examples of Three Illuminators’ Hands in the Prayerbook of Kateryn Parr.
The first group (fos 5 r, 9 r, 15 r-v, 38 r, 44 r, 48 v, 49 v, 62 r, 74 v, 77 v, 101 r, 106 r, 109 v) is the most elaborate. Painted with skill, this group stands four lines high. The palette includes red, green, blue, gold and black on a blue or pink ground, highlighted with gold. The second, smaller group (fos 102 v, 107 r, 108 v, 136 v) is drawn with delicate gold lines on a blue ground, highlighted with white, and stands two lines high except for folio 136 v, which is three lines high. The third group or remainder of the drop caps, examples of which can be seen on folios 42 v and 97 v, is generally two lines high and painted in gold on a pink ground highlighted with black and white.
Given this grouping of patterns, a tentative reconstruction of the chronology of illuminations suggests that Lucas began the work not long after Kateryn’s marriage to Henry VIII but due to ill health was unable to finish. The first group of drop caps may be his (see comparison in Figure ) which would indicate that part 2 of the text followed part 1 quite closely in time. At Lucas’s death, the remaining illumination work was completed by other hands, while the third section, without illuminations, may have been added after the king’s death. From this analysis, it would appear that Lucas began the second section but failed to finish it. Many of the illuminations in this section would have been completed by the two women named as Lucas’s executors who inherited his workshop, his clientele and his painting paraphernalia -– his wife, Margaret Holsewyther, who is known to have been painting miniatures for the queen as late as December 1547, and his daughter, Jacomyne. It was a general practice to leave a dower portion to a daughter rather than a share in real property. Yet Lucas did not do this. Despite the fact that he was a successful royal servant and had sufficient income, as the costs for his own funeral prove, he chose instead to leave Jacomyne one-third of the workshop business. Jacomyne, thus, may have been a contributing illuminator to Kateryn Parr’s prayerbook. The caveat exists that there is no known work by Jacomyne Horenbout nor is it certain that she had any skill as an artist. However, as the child of two artistic dynasties and the inheritor of an interest in the family workshop, the possibility must be considered. A second Parr girdle book now in the Mayor’s Parlor in Kendal is illuminated in the style of the Horenbout workshop, and as it contains extracts from Parr’s second work, Prayers or Meditations, published in 1545, it is probably the work of Lucas’s widow, Margaret, who was in the queen’s employ through at least December 1547.
10. Lucas Horenbout and the Great Bible of 1539
During the 1530s, competing versions of the Bible appeared in English translation, from Miles Coverdale’s version of 1535 to Richard Taverner’s Bible in 1539. Both Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, and Thomas Cromwell, Lord Privy Seal and Vicegerent in Spirituals, were determined to provide a definitive vernacular translation that could be used in parish churches throughout the kingdom. In April 1539, after a complicated production process begun in Paris by François Regnault, the Great Bible was published in London (Great Bible, Citation1539) . Owing its title to its size, it was the first edition of the work in English translation that had been officially authorized by the king. The Byble in Englyfhe, that is to faye the content of all the holy fcrypture, bothe of ye olde and newe teftament, truly tranflated after the veryte of the Hebrue and Greke textes, by ye Dylygent ftudye of dyuerfe excellent learned men, expert in the forfayde tonges was edited by Miles Coverdale and printed by Richard Grafton and Edward Whitchurch under the authority of Cromwell. According to Eyal Poleg:
For Cromwell, support for a vernacular Bible (translated into
English for the general population) was linked with obedience
to the King … Cromwell thought that the best way to ensure royal
support was to produce a Bible worthy of royal patronage—both
in its content and in its material grandeur. Such a Bible would
combine Cromwell’s own evangelical leanings with the political
aim of consolidating Henry’s control over the English church …
The Great Bible ushered in the English parish Bible and its large
size and meticulous printing set the bar for centuries to come
(Poleg & Ricciardi, Citation2020, online).
Two special presentation copies of this Bible were prepared, one for the king and one for Cromwell. Again, according to Poleg: “Nowhere is its iconic appearance more evident than in a unique presentation copy … printed on vellum and hand-coloured by highly skilled illuminators.” This is the beautifully preserved presentation copy that is now in the library of St. John’s College, Cambridge. Tentatively believed to have been the copy intended for Cromwell, Poleg has identified the inclusion of a probable portrait of Henry’s late queen Jane Seymour dressed in cloth of silver in the lower right-hand corner (Figure ). Jane’s appearance would logically suggest that, rather than Cromwell, this was the copy intended for the king. According to Poleg: “The page was manipulated to present Henry with an image of Jane Seymour. Cromwell was using Jane to persuade the King of the value of the Bible” (Unattributed., Citation2020, online). Supporting this theory is a further manipulation, that of the male child at Jane’s feet (Figure ). On the original woodblock and on the internal title page for the Hagiographa (fo. Aaa1r), this figure is shown as an adult male holding a bannerol inscribed “God Save The Kinge”. The alteration on the primary title page, changing an adult figure to that of a child, especially a male child sited at the feet of Henry’s late queen, could be construed as a reference to three-year-old Prince Edward and thus to the now-secured succession. It was this secured succession that also ensured the security of the English church which the Great Bible represented.
Figure 18. Men versus Child in Images from the Great Bible of 1539.
Regarding the illumination work, Poleg adds that: “In London, very few artists were capable of such skilled and intricate work” (Poleg & Ricciardi, Citation2020, online). An examination of the various illuminations in the St. John’s Bible indicates the work of several hands. Among these appears to be the artist who illuminated three copies of the Hore Beate Marie Virginis, published in Paris by Germain Hardouyn about 1527-8, identified here at the Master of the Hardouyn Hours (Jean Hardouyn?) (Mullins, Citation2013, pp. 140–42). Remarkably, one of these three copies, now in the Morgan Library, New York, belonged to Catherine of Aragon; the second, now at Hever Castle, belonged to Anne Boleyn (McCaffrey, Citation2021, online), and the third, now in the Wren Library, Trinity College, Cambridge, belonged to Thomas Cromwell (Unattributed, Citation2023, online; Hore, Wren Library, 2023, online). The hand of the same illuminator can be seen reappearing on the interior title page of the New Testament in the Great Bible as well as on Part 2 folio 99 v. In addition to coloring the nine woodblock vignettes on the New Testament’s title page, the illuminator has slightly altered the draftsmanship, and those alterations, with their strong emphasis on black outlining, are nearly identical to the Horae. The heads of God the Father in the Horae and the head of the high priest in the Morgan Hore fit the same pattern as the head of the high priest in the circumcision scene on the title page of the New Testament in the Great Bible (Figure ). While the illuminations in all three works have been drawn over original woodblock prints, the features of the deity and priest have been modified by the illuminator to conform to their preferred facial pattern. Also present is a matching emphasis on lavish gold highlighting with narrow strokes of gold forming the halos and providing shading on the costumes. A comparison of the Annunciation scenes in the Morgan (fo. C3v-4 r) and Wren Horae (fo. 38) (as well as in the Enchiridion discussed below) with that on the title page of the New Testament shows that the red curtain behind Mary’s head is patterned with nearly identical designs formed from a gold dot caught within oblique parallel lines and encircled by an outer ring of gold dots (Figure ). In the Wren Hore, the Virgin’s robe is also decorated with the same pattern. Not dictated by the lines of the print itself, this pattern was an individual aesthetic choice on the part of the illuminator which helps to isolate their hand.
Figure 19. Comparison of Images from Hore Beate Marie Virginis (c.1527-8) and the Great Bible of 1539.
Another Hardouyn volume illuminated by this same artist, Enchiridion preclare ecclesie Sarum (1530), is in the collection of St. John’s College, Oxford (A.2.11), once possibly the possession of Catherine of Aragon’s daughter, Queen Mary (Hofmann, Citation2023, online). The Master of the Hardouyn Hours, suggested as the third Hardouyn brother, Jean, was working in Paris in 1518 (MetMus 89.27.4). Yet the fact that all five books mentioned here belonged to members of the Tudor court, two associated with Cromwell, that each was personally customized for its owner, and that the captions under the illustrations in the Enchiridion are in English suggests that by 1527–8, like Jean Mallard a decade later, this French artist had sought employment in England (Textmanuscripts, Citationundated, online; McCaffrey, Citation2021, online).
The only named illuminators that Eyal Poleg suggests for the Great Bible are those in the workshops of Lucas Horenbout and Hans Holbein. Referring to portraits of Thomas Cromwell, Jane Seymour and a tentatively identified Sir Richard Rich on the Bible’s principal title page and to the portraits of Cromwell and Rich on the title page of the Hagiographa, Poleg remarks that: “The involvement of artists [like Horenbout or Holbein] with such close ties to Henry’s court … would have guaranteed great accuracy in the depiction of key people” (Poleg & Ricciardi, Citation2020, online). Horenbout would seem to have been an obvious choice for inclusion among the “skilled illuminators” who worked on the Great Bible as he had been appointed the king’s official painter five years earlier. Given his on-going work for the king, especially with that proposed in the Psalter with Three Canticles illuminated at approximately the same time, it would be surprising if Horenbout had not been included. Although the internal illuminated drop caps in the text are the work of many, an examination of the motifs and lettering already discussed makes Horenbout’s hand apparent. Two drop caps at least can lay claim to a Horenbout origin. The capital A on Part 2, folio 61 v, is constructed from motif E with a variant of motif D as background and has its counterparts in the king’s psalter and Anne Boleyn’s Epistres et Evangiles (Figure ). The capital I on Part 2, folio 99 v, with its intertwined central spine and finials ending in grotesque heads has its simplified counterpart in Kateryn Parr’s prayerbook (Figure ). A design using the same grotesque heads as border decoration can be seen in the Black Book of the Garter, attributed to Lucas, and on the Forster letters patent of 1524, attributed to Susanna Horenbout (McQuillian, Citation2015, online; James, Citation2021, online).
Figure 20. Comparison of Horenbout Motif 5 Variants.
Figure 21. Comparison of Various Horenbout Images.
Using the markers described earlier, Lucas Horenbout can also be identified as the probable illuminator of the title blocks of three of the interior title pages—The Second Part, The Third Part, and the Hagiographa. Again, it is the idiosyncratic lettering on the title blocks that identifies his work. The original printed lettering on each of the interior title pages has been painted over and new lettering applied, beginning with the word The, the capital T’s of which Lucas has configured in his personal zoomorphic style (Figure ). On the title page for The Third Part, the top capital H is drawn with a crossbar shaped like the Horenbout mark of omission and the bottom as the same mark inverted with an u-bend in the middle (Figure ). This same usage can be found on the miniature of Henry VIII by Lucas in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge (PD.19–1949), and multiple times in Kateryn Parr’s prayerbook (fos 67 v, 75 r, 81 v, 85 v, 93 v, 97 v, 101 r, 122 r, 135 v). There is also the repeating usage of a comma to separate run-on words, and on the title page for the Hagiographa, two borders associated with Horenbout surround the vignettes, the sequential circles of motif A and the reticulated border found in Anne Boleyn’s psalter (Psalms 1 & 110) (Figure ).
Figure 22. Comparison of the Horenbout Sign of Omission.
Yet it is the principal title page of the St. John’s copy of the Great Bible that links it most securely to Lucas. Where the small Biblical vignettes on the interior title pages are generally hand-colored original woodblocks, Lucas has made significant alterations to the woodblock on the main title page. He has covered over in gold the lengthy description of the book in the original title block and substituted in four words the work’s raison d’être: “The Byble: In Englyshe”. On the page, motif A forms the left-hand border, while motif D runs along the top and bottom and down the right-hand side (Figures & 4-i). Motif E curls around the vertical stems of the letters in the word The, while the capital T is a form of the Horenbout zoomorphic grotesque (Figures & 20-i). Another letter indicator can be found in the motto of the Order of the Garter drawn around Cromwell’s coat-of-arms in the middle right-hand side of the page (Figure ). In the original woodblock print, the capital N of Honi in the king’s motto appears in its usual form, with the crossbar running from the top of the left-hand upright to the bottom of the right-hand upright. But in the illuminated version, this has been deliberately altered. The N is now written in the idiosyncratic Flemish form used by all three Horenbouts, as a mirror-image of the letter where the diagonal runs from the bottom of the first upright to the top of the second rather than vice versa (James, Citation2021, online).
Figure 23. Comparison of Flemish and English Formation of Capital N.
In 1534, 5 years before the publication of the Great Bible and the same year Lucas received a patent as the king’s official painter, Henry VIII commissioned what is now known as the Black Book of the Garter, documenting the Order of the Knights of the Garter from its founding in 1348 to the present. Lavishly illuminated, this work has been attributed to Lucas, and a comparison of the draftsmanship, facial patterns and signature designs made both in it and in the 5th Earl of Northumberland’s The Troy Book, also previously attributed to Lucas, confirm his work on the Great Bible (Figure ) (The Troy Book, 1525-26; McQuillian, Citation2015, online; James, Citation2021, online). On the Great Bible’s principal title page, Poleg has
Figure 24. Comparison of Horenbout Face Images.
identified Thomas Cromwell as the man in black to the right of the king accepting the Bible from his monarch and Richard Rich, Chancellor of the Court of Augmentations, as the figure in black directly below him (Figure ). In their research, Poleg and Paola Ricciardi discovered that the figure of Rich was originally intended as a figure of Cromwell and that
Figure 25. The Title Page of the Great Bible of 1539 and a Detail.
both figures have been altered. Separate pieces of vellum, one with Cromwell’s likeness and one with Rich’s, have been “expertly pasted over the original printed portraits so that Cromwell is no longer distributing the book” (St John’s College, Citation2020, online). According to Poleg:
In the original title page, Cromwell is associating himself
with the person distributing Bibles. This was a very
dangerous position to be in because Henry was not fully
supportive of the new Bible. Cromwell realized this so he
tweaked the images to place himself receiving a Bible from
Henry. (Unattributed., Citation2020, online)
Cromwell apparently had no qualms about placing Rich in this dangerous position, and in the illumination the chancellor’s importance to the ritual of distribution has been emphasized. Compared to the image in the original woodblock and the altered image on the title page of the internal Hagiographa, Rich has been dressed in a more opulent costume, one embroidered with gold. A chain of the Order of the Garter has been placed around his neck, and the original bannerol above him has been extended down and around his upper torso, stressing his importance to the narrative. Why Cromwell would have wanted this done is curious, but just a year later, it was Rich, who turned on Cromwell, giving evidence against him that contributed to his attainder. The third member of the pro-translation triumvirate, Thomas Cranmer, appears in white to the left of the king, and where Cromwell and Rich’s faces have been individualized on separate cutouts carefully glued to the page, no such effort has been afforded Cranmer. He remains a generic cleric identified only by the mitre at his feet and his coat-of-arms further down the page.
The entire page can be read in four tiers running from the panel at the top where God the Son, squeezed between Henry’s throne and the ornamented border, hovers in the clouds, adored by a lone male figure kneeling on the ground before a crown (Figure ). Like the written word of God, the placement of the crown proposes Henry’s rule as directed by Heaven. The interior title page of the Hagiographa shows the kneeling man dressed in the same costume as the enthroned king, thus identifying him with Henry. Yet no effort has been made, either there or on the principal title page, to adjust his features to resemble the king’s. While bannerols flow from the figure of Christ and float around the first tier, Lucas has made changes to the original messaging of the text. Much of it he has simply made illegible by coloring over it with heavy coats of brilliant reds and blues, but he has also modified many of the few legible texts that remain. For instance, a reference to Psalm 118 appears in the bannerol above Cromwell’s head on the original woodblock: “O give thanks unto the Lord, for he is good; his love endures forever.” The psalm goes on to boast that “All the nations surrounded me, but in the name of the Lord I cut them down.” In Horenbout’s rendering, he has eliminated the war-like boast by changing the reference to Psalm 117, the shortest psalm and the shortest chapter in the Bible, which begins, “O praise the Lord, all ye nations”. The bannerol of words issuing from Cranmer has been changed as well to a simple admonishment to the clergy to feed the flock. Also, of interest is the fact that Henry’s words on the bannerols quoting Daniel 6:26 decreeing that all in his royal dominion are to “tremble and fear” before God, and the instruction “hec precipe et doce” or “teach this especially”, have been rendered nearly invisible by thick coats of paint, but whether this artistic choice was aesthetic or political is unclear.
In the second panel, the king sits enthroned, now wearing a crown and jeweled coronation robe strangely reminiscent of a Byzantine emperor. In the original woodblock, Henry is dressed in a secular costume and cap, but in Horenbout’s illumination he has been re-robed, magnifying his splendor and placing an emphasis on his transcendence as God’s chosen. Even the configuration of the king’s crown above his coat-of-arms has been altered to emphasize the richness of its jewels. Horenbout’s choice to use archaic-looking robes may have been an effort to stress Henry’s chosen personification as the new David. On the left, the king hands a Bible to Cranmer backed by bare-headed eminences of the church, and to Cromwell on the right, leading an equally hatless emissary of courtiers. The original woodblock shows Cromwell bare-headed, but Horenbout has given him a cap, raising his stature. Cranmer has been given no such license and stands bare-headed before the king in both iterations, a slight suggestion of Cromwell’s superior status. In the third tier which flanks the title block, Cranmer, now wearing his mitre, hands out the Bible to his fellow clerics while the figure on the right, identified by Poleg as Chancellor Richard Rich, oversees distribution to the laity.
The fourth tier is split into two vignettes posed on either side of the central figure of a man in red wearing blue stockings who, although the same size as his woodblock counterpart, gives the appearance with his bright costuming and central position of being slightly larger than the surrounding crowd and thus dominates the tableau. The right half of this tier illustrates the physical genesis of the book and the left half its performance for the multitude. On the far left, a cleric obeys Cranmer’s admonishment to “feed the flock” by preaching the newly translated words of the Bible from the pulpit to his appreciative audience who cry out “God Save The King” and (ironically in Latin) “Vivat Rex”. A comparison with the original woodblock print shows that the action in this half of the bottom tier has not been significantly altered while that on the right has been artfully re-imagined by the illuminator. For example, the prison in the lower corner of the woodblock with its three inmates has been entirely erased, and the anonymous woman seated before it has morphed into a portrait of the late queen Jane Seymour. The adult male from the original woodblock at her feet has been altered to represent a boy in blue clutching a bannerol proclaiming “Vivat Rex”. This couple was almost certainly intended as a representation of the succession.
Another alteration to this vignette includes the addition of the trio of figures bearing an open Bible shown ceremonially entering an assembled circle of onlookers (Figure detail). Poleg has suggested “that these three people are the producers of the Great Bible, Richard Grafton, Edward Whitchurch, and Anne Wells, Whitchurch’s wife at the time”, and that they represent “a dedication scene presenting the very same book, the Great Bible to its patron and to the monarch” (Poleg & Ricciardi, Citation2021, online). This would follow in a long artistic tradition of the act of presentation to the patron of a work recorded within the work, itself. Given this interpretation, it is useful to expand an examination of the vignette to include the other figures in the circle who are engaged in the action. Noticeably, Grafton is not looking upward toward either monarch or patron. His sightline, as those of the other two presenters, together with the approving figure of Jane Seymour and the man standing behind her in the tall purple hat, are all directed toward the man and woman facing them on the left. Jane and her companion are even gesturing toward them, and a close comparison with the woodblock shows that both the angle of the man’s pointing finger and the woman’s casual gesture have been modified to stress this.
It is proposed that these two figures, whose faces have been altered from the original print, represent Horenbout, himself, dressed in the red and black gown of a royal servant, and his wife, Margaret Holsewyther, a partner in his workshop (Figure ). A happy circumstance of the woodblock’s original configuration has the man’s hands
Figure 26. Proposed Horenbout Face Patterns.
outstretched clasping a “Vivat Rex” banner but now reaching out to receive the “Verbum Dei” or Word of God from Grafton. The agitated woman shouting “Vivat Rex” in the woodblock print has morphed into a watchful Margaret, waiting with focused anticipation the approaching Grafton and his Bible. As the book which Grafton carries is the only copy in the illumination that is shown standing open, it suggests that unlike the closed volumes being passed around, this copy is as yet unfinished. The purpose of the little scene, demonstrably created by Horenbout, can be interpreted as showing the printers of the Great Bible presenting their work to the illuminators who stand ready to receive it with reverence and painter’s palette. If this interpretation is accurate, it is an example of Lucas following in a tradition practiced by his father, Gheraert, who delighted in painting the faces of real people into his illuminated narratives.
The title page thus tells the creation story of the Great Bible moving from its Divine inspiration, shown in the first tier, with its passage in the second tier to the divinely anointed monarch on his throne. It is then passed from his hands to those of his trusted servants, of whom Cromwell by his own dictate was chief. The distribution of the book continues down the ranks, preached from the parish pulpit to a grateful populace, while tucked into the lower corner is the narrative of its physical production and its creative dialogue between printers and illuminators. Cromwell would no doubt have given orders for the way in which his own image and that of Richard Rich and Jane Seymour were presented and possibly for the selective obscuring of the texts on the bannerols. The decisions to add the child at Jane’s feet and to re-robe the king were probably Horenbout’s own, as almost certainly was the vignette that touted his personal contribution to the project. This close interaction between the royal illuminator chosen by Henry’s chief advisor to produce evocative, self-publicizing images parallels the relationship that Lucas’s sister Susanna (who may be the figure seated just behind Lucas) had enjoyed with Cardinal Wolsey a decade earlier (Figure ). Through his brush, Horenbout has signed his work with his own likeness, placing it on a seminal publication that was a cornerstone of the liturgy of the Church of England. Visibly and deliberately, he has claimed an acknowledged place among the ranks of the Great Bible’s architects as well as in the history of the English Reformation.
11. Lucas Horenbout and the printers
Horenbout’s work on the Great Bible represents the apogee of an uneasy alliance between printer and manuscript illuminator. As the printed page began to take the place of the handwritten manuscript, illuminators were commissioned by the elite to color the printed woodblocks and individualize their personal copies. The interior title pages for the Great Bible are examples of this. Yet these same illuminators, considered for centuries the aristocracy of artists, could hardly have been content to simply approach the printed volume as a coloring book. On the other hand, printers who had paid for craftsmen to design intricate woodblocks to decorate their volumes, many in hopes of attracting generous patrons, would not have been happy to see their work completely reconfigured by ambitious artists into idiosyncratic, one-off images. The title pages in the Great Bible demonstrate the tension between coloring in the lines and creating entirely new vignettes over what had originally been printed. In the production of printed books, the craft of hand-coloring illustrations would continue for several hundred years until the development of chromoxylography in the 19th century. In 16th-century England, a new generation of artistic illuminators would find themselves, instead of manuscripts, growing those branches of illumination which focused on the increasingly popular independent miniature industry, pioneered at court by the Horenbouts, and maintaining the traditional limning of official documents. Illuminated vignettes were still created but, as in the work of illuminator Lievine Teerlinc (c.1519–1576), they were independent of manuscripts (James, Citation2009, pp. 287–333).
The career of Lucas Horenbout falls within those decades when manuscript illuminators and printers were attempting a working relationship. Certainly, the Great Bible demonstrates one chapter of Horenbout’s collaboration with a printed work and a relationship with Richard Grafton and Edward Whitchurch. Yet, the result of his work on the Great Bible, undoubtedly under the sponsorship of Cromwell, shows an illuminator placing the voice of his own art above that of the printer. Evidence suggests that Horenbout collaborated with other printers as well. Drop caps in publications by the king’s printer, Thomas Berthelet—for instance the initial O in Kateryn Parr’s 1544 Psalms or Prayers – would appear to have been designed by Lucas (Figure ). Campbell and Foister reference a series of short Latin poems published by John Leland (1503–1552) describing printed devices created by Lucas and point to a possible Horenbout engraving of the Prince of Wales’ badge set in a sunburst that appears in the 1543 edition of Leland’s Genethliacon Illustris Edwardi Principis Cambriae (Campbell & Foister, Citation1986, pp. 723–4, 727). This device reappears on the calfskin cover of Trogus Pompeius Chorographica, printed by Berthelet for Prince Edward in 1546 (Davenport, Citation1901, p. 81). Given such evidence, it would seem probable that a collaboration existed between the king’s printer and the king’s painter who, as he had for Anne Boleyn, produced for Berthelet decorative designs and devices for use in the volumes he published.
12. Conclusion
Of the six manuscript prayerbooks discussed in this article (including The Ecclesiaste), all but one was known to have either been commissioned as a gift or given as a gift during the owner’s lifetime. George Boleyn’s two commissions for his sister, Anne, Jean Mallard’s gift to the king of a psalter, Anne Stanhope’s small girdle book that was most likely a gift from her husband, and Kateryn Parr’s prayerbook that was given by the queen or at her death to Jane Grey were part of the expansive system of barter endemic to the Tudor court where tangible objects were exchanged for intangible rewards. Patronage, promotion, affection, reciprocity, generosity, memorial and remembrance—all motivated the exchange of illuminated manuscripts whose value as repositories of religious piety was offered to the recipient contained in ornamented pages of intrinsic value. But piety and patronage were not the only reasons for gifting, and religious works were often put to political purposes. Lucas Horenbout worked within this system of court ritual satisfying the demands of an elite marketplace, his career a bridge between the medieval world of the handwritten, hand-illuminated word and the printed letter and picture of the modern. The retrograde demand for printed books turned into illuminated manuscripts, a fashion dating back to the end of the fifteenth century, is also exemplified by these six prayerbooks. None were original works, and all took their origins from printed texts.
Like his father, Lucas was a skilled worker in a variety of fields which served him well, enabling him to design emblems, ciphers and devices that appeared on a multitude of surfaces including woodblocks in printed books. His distinctive draftsmanship, vocabulary of lettering, abstract designs and idiosyncratic notation like the Flemish N, a signature sign of omission and his singular capital A, mark out the works on which he labored. His employment by Henry’s sixth queen was the final act in his career as an illuminator, but his diversity in ancillary arts helped him to survive in an artistic world that was quickly changing. At Lucas’s death in May 1544, the market for illuminated prayerbooks had more or less run its course, but the survival of the manuscripts discussed here demonstrates their continued cultural value, some derived from their association with their prior owners, some by virtue of their artistic merit. When Lucas Horenbout began his career, the world of manuscript illumination was in its final fluorescence, and from his earliest surviving work in The Troy Book to his last efforts for Kateryn Parr, he continued to practice what he had been taught. The principal title page of the Great Bible shows him unwilling to simply color within the lines. He has taken a predetermined narrative, painted over significant parts of it and made it his own. Signed with his own likeness, it is a final artistic statement from one of the last of the Flemish illuminators of a golden age.
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Susan E. James
Susan E. James is an independent writer and researcher who earned her Ph.D. at Cambridge University. She has written extensively in the fields of the humanities and social sciences, publishing over 50 peer-reviewed articles on various aspects of the humanities, as well as three books on the sixteenth-century English history: Kateryn Parr: The Making of a Queen (Aldershot: Ashgate Press, 1999), The Feminine Dynamic in English Art, 1485-1603: Women as Consumers, Patrons and Painters (Farnham, UK & Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009, nominated for the Berger Prize), and Women’s Voices in Tudor Wills, 1485-1603: Authority, Influence and Material Culture (Farnham, UK & Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2015).
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