Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- List of Abbreviations
- Glossary
- Note to the reader
- Preface
- 1 Magnificence and Princely Virtue
- 2 The Jewel House
- 3 The King’s Inheritance
- 4 ‘Heaven Smiles, Earth Rejoices’
- 5 ‘Defender of the Faith’
- 6 Royal Banquets
- 7 ‘Rich, Fierce and Greedy for Glory’
- 8 Thomas Wolsey, Patron of Goldsmiths
- 9 The Field of Cloth of Gold
- 10 Holbein and the ‘Antique’
- 11 The Family Silver
- 12 Cromwell, the Tower and the Goldsmiths
- 13 Dissolution and Augmentation
- 14 ‘Most Avaricious of Men’
- 15 ‘Sic transit gloria mundi’: The Fate of Henry VIII’s Plate and Jewels
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
1 - Magnificence and Princely Virtue
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 October 2020
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- List of Abbreviations
- Glossary
- Note to the reader
- Preface
- 1 Magnificence and Princely Virtue
- 2 The Jewel House
- 3 The King’s Inheritance
- 4 ‘Heaven Smiles, Earth Rejoices’
- 5 ‘Defender of the Faith’
- 6 Royal Banquets
- 7 ‘Rich, Fierce and Greedy for Glory’
- 8 Thomas Wolsey, Patron of Goldsmiths
- 9 The Field of Cloth of Gold
- 10 Holbein and the ‘Antique’
- 11 The Family Silver
- 12 Cromwell, the Tower and the Goldsmiths
- 13 Dissolution and Augmentation
- 14 ‘Most Avaricious of Men’
- 15 ‘Sic transit gloria mundi’: The Fate of Henry VIII’s Plate and Jewels
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
We were conducted to the presence, through sundry chambers all hung with most beautiful tapestry, figured in gold and silver and in silk, passing down the ranks of the body-guard, which consists of three hundred halberdiers in silver breast-plates and pikes in their hands […] We at length reached the King, who was under a canopy of cloth of gold, embroidered at Florence, the most costly thing I ever witnessed: he was leaning against his gilt throne, on which was a large gold brocade cushion, where the long gold sword of state lay […] Very close round his neck he had a gold collar, from which there hung a round cut diamond, the size of the largest walnut I ever saw, and to this was suspended a most beautiful and very large round pearl. Beneath the mantle he had a pouch of cloth of gold, which covered a dagger; and his fingers were one mass of jewelled rings.
Piero Pasqualigo, 1515One of the treasures of the Musee de la Renaissance at Ecouen is a set of tapestries depicting the Story of King David. Woven in Brussels during the 1520s, this is among the most remarkable surviving sets from the period and almost certainly belonged to Henry VIII. The subject was important to Henry. David, the anointed of God, was the biblical figure with whom he most closely identified and in one of the illuminations in his 1540 psalter Henry is depicted playing the harp, surely a reference to David.
As with most medieval and Renaissance depictions of biblical subjects, the events in the tapestries are made more real by being set in the present. They are in effect a panorama of contemporary court life. The architecture is a fusion of late gothic and Renaissance styles, as it would have been at the time; the costumes are courtly and contemporary; and the armour is in the latest fashions. Among the many things about them that would have been familiar to a courtier of the time was the ubiquitous presence of gold and silver and the tapestries show goldsmiths’ work in almost every scene: in buffets and dining wares, in shrines and altar plate, in gold chains.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2020