Decoding the Defiance of Henry VIII’s First Wife

It has lengthy been a beguiling and mysterious treasure of the British Museum: a group of sketches for jewellery and different lavish ornaments, commissioned throughout the reign of Henry VIII from the artist Hans Holbein, for a time the courtroom painter.

A number of the designs are ciphers, or coded symbols, entangling the initials of Henry and his many paramours. A number of the most elaborate have by no means been decoded.

This spring, whereas ending a chapter of her dissertation, Vanessa Braganza, a Ph.D. candidate in English at Harvard and a self-described “guide detective,” grew to become fascinated by one significantly dense tangle of letters.

By the tip of the afternoon, Braganza thought she had figured it out in her pocket book, through a trial-and-error course of she in comparison with “early trendy Wordle.” The cipher, she concluded, spelled out HENRICVS REX — Henry the King — and KATHERINE — his first spouse, Catherine of Aragon.

Nothing exceptional there, maybe. However Braganza argues that the pendant was commissioned not by Henry however by Catherine throughout the interval when he was attempting to divorce her and marry Anne Boleyn, as a brazen assertion of her lifelong declare to be his one true spouse and queen.

“It’s a gateway into her considering,” Braganza mentioned of the pendant. “It’s simply sitting there, daring you to see it.”

The Tudor courtroom and its ruthless intrigues have been a supply of public fascination lengthy earlier than Hilary Mantel’s best-selling “Wolf Corridor” trilogy or the pop-feminist Broadway musical “Six” (which reimagines Henry’s ill-fated wives as a Spice Women-esque squad taking again the narrative).

Even outdoors the pages of “The Da Vinci Code,” generations of students have studied the way in which codes and ciphers formed almost each side of Renaissance tradition (as a 2014 exhibition on the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington put it), from diplomacy and warfare to the rise of postal programs and the artwork of literary interpretation itself.

And the topic isn’t simply educational. In our personal time, Renaissance scholarship helped encourage World Struggle II code breaking, whereas navy cryptology methods have been in flip tailored as instruments of literary evaluation.

Braganza’s work is a part of what could be seen as a extra feminist flip, as students have more and more thought of how ciphers and different types of hidden communication protect the misplaced voices of girls.

“What’s particularly compelling, and sometimes transferring, is the truth that Vanessa is specializing in voices that may’ve been in any other case silenced or caricatured,” James Simpson, a Harvard literary scholar and certainly one of Braganza’s dissertation advisers, mentioned.

Some girls’s ciphers are well-known. “Elizabeth and Mary: Royal Cousins, Rival Queens,” a latest exhibition on the British Library, consists of an examination of the ciphered letters written by Mary, Queen of Scots, in addition to the coded messages used to ensnare her in a plot to assassinate Elizabeth I, which led to Mary’s beheading.

However there have additionally been new discoveries. Final 12 months, a researcher at Hever Citadel in England used X-ray imaging to uncover erased inscriptions in a prayer guide that had belonged to Anne Boleyn, which revealed a community of secret feminine possession throughout generations, in defiance of Henry’s efforts to destroy all the pieces related along with her.

Students have additionally examined the messages encoded in girls’s needlework, miniatures, inside design, even the colour of silk floss used to “lock” letters to guard them from prying eyes.

“It’s not a shock that ladies exercised their company in uncommon and inventive methods on this interval,” Heather Wolfe, affiliate librarian and curator of manuscripts on the Folger Shakespeare Library, mentioned. “They did need to work outdoors the conventional channels to get their messages out.”

The broader scholarly world has but to guage Braganza’s claims in regards to the pendant, or weigh its significance. However the Harvard scholar Stephen Greenblatt, one other adviser, referred to as her analysis “fascinating.”

He mentioned he had seen elaborate ornamental designs embossed on previous books “many, many occasions,” however by no means actually questioned what, if something, they meant.

“Vanessa is extraordinarily resourceful and crafty,” he mentioned. “This work takes loopy quantities of persistence, and an actual eye for element.”

Untangling a knotty Sixteenth-century monogram is hardly cracking the Engima code. Braganza describes it as a matter of noticing “what’s hiding in plain sight.”

As an undergraduate, Braganza wrote her senior thesis on the phrase “cipher” in Shakespeare’s performs. As a graduate pupil, she took an interest within the issues themselves.

Her first cipher-related discovery got here in 2019, at an antiquarian guide honest in London. She was strolling the aisles “feeling hangry,” she mentioned, when she noticed an intricate ornament stamped on the duvet of an previous quantity.

Instantly, she acknowledged it because the monogram cipher of Girl Mary Wroth, a up to date of Shakespeare’s thought of England’s first feminine fiction author. Wroth had additionally been celebration to a scandalous affair along with her cousin, the third Earl of Pembroke, which she fictionalized in her two-volume romance, “Urania.”

5 years earlier, Braganza had seen {a photograph} of the cipher — which intertwines the initials of the fictional names Wroth gave herself and the earl — on the duvet of a certain manuscript of certainly one of Wroth’s performs, which Wroth had given to her lover as a present.

Wroth’s private library had been destroyed in a hearth, with no volumes recognized to outlive. However right here, unbeknown to the supplier, seemed to be a survivor, bearing the identical coded image of her love for the person who had died with out acknowledging their youngsters collectively.

“This was a guide that wasn’t speculated to exist,” Braganza mentioned. (The quantity, a biography of Cyrus the Nice of Persia, is now owned by Harvard’s Houghton Library.)

The Catherine/Henry cipher got here to her consideration this spring, by means of an identical second of serendipity. When finishing a chapter on the proliferation of ciphers at Henry’s courtroom, she regarded up the digitized photos from the “Jewelry Ebook,” as the gathering of drawings by Holbein on the British Museum is understood.

As she idly puzzled over them, one oval-shaped tangle specifically tugged at her. She began with the letters that needed to be there, based mostly on the pen strokes, then labored by means of different prospects. After a day, she had it: HENRICVS REX and KATHERINE.

Henry had three wives named Catherine, however solely Catherine of Aragon was round when Holbein was at courtroom. As for the spelling, whereas Catherine’s title was spelled varied methods throughout the interval, Braganza mentioned that manuscripts signed by Catherine present her writing it with a Ok. Moreover, she notes, a portrait of the younger Catherine reveals her sporting a choker with the letter “Ok” embedded within the chain.

After assembling a file of proof, she confirmed it to Simpson, who mentioned he discovered it “completely persuasive.”

So why does Braganza assume Catherine, slightly than Henry, commissioned the pendant?

Primarily based on the dates of Holbein’s presence at courtroom, she dates the sketch to round 1532, when Henry’s lengthy push to finish his marriage to Catherine, who had did not ship a male inheritor, was close to its completion. He secretly married Anne in January 1533, and had his marriage to Catherine annulled by the archbishop of Canterbury 5 months later.

Henry, Braganza mentioned, “would haven’t any incentive” to fee the pendant. However Catherine, who died of pure causes in 1536, by no means stopped insisting she was Henry’s sole spouse and queen. (As her Beyoncé-inspired character in “Six” sings of his push for annulment, “There’s no no no no no no no method.”)

Braganza sees the pendant — which she argues, based mostly on a small loop on the high, was meant to be worn in public — as an act of “secrecy courting revelation.”

“It actually helps us perceive Catherine as a extremely defiant determine,” she added.

It’s unclear if the pendant (or less complicated ones sketched by Holbein becoming a member of Henry’s initials with these of different wives) survives, or was ever made. A lot jewellery from the interval was melted down, the metallic and gems repurposed.

However Henry is well-known for having tried to obliterate all traces of his ex-wives. After Anne was convicted of treason and beheaded in 1536, Henry destroyed the information of the courtroom proceedings, her letters and most portraits. He additionally got down to erase the various symbols linked along with her from public buildings, with solely partial success.

Within the chapel at King’s Faculty, Cambridge, their linked initials are seen on the elaborately carved choir display screen. However at Hampton Court docket, in London, guests can nonetheless see empty spots the place they have been chiseled away, together with a number of examples that have been missed, nonetheless linked with a lover’s knot.

Whereas the pendant within the “Jewelry Ebook” could not transform the story, Braganza mentioned, it does recommend how far more of the silenced voices of Henry’s wives — and different girls of the interval — stays to be discovered.

“That’s the factor about ciphers — you set them free, after which you may’t eradicate all of them,” she mentioned. “They wait to be found, centuries later.”