Decoding the Defiance of Henry VIII’s First Wife

It has long been a fascinating and mysterious treasure of the British Museum. A collection of sketches of jewelry and other gorgeous ornaments commissioned by the artist Hans Holbein to the court painter during the reign of Henry VIII.

Some designs are cryptographic or coded symbols that involve Henry and his many Paramore initials. Some of the most elaborate ones have never been decoded.

Vanessa Braganza, who received her PhD while finishing her dissertation chapter this spring.Self-proclaimed Harvard English Candidate “Book detective” I was fascinated by the entanglement of one particularly dense letter.

By the end of the afternoon, Braganza thought he understood it in his notebook through a process of trial and error compared to the “modern wardrobe.” She concludes that the code spelled HENRICVS REX — Henry the King — and Catherine — his first wife, Catherine of Aragon.

Perhaps there is nothing worth mentioning there. But Braganza, as a brave claim that the pendant was his only true wife and queen of her lifetime when she divorced her and tried to marry Anne Boleyn by Catherine instead of Henry. Claims to have been requested.

“It’s the gateway to her thoughts,” Braganza said of the pendant. “It’s just sitting there and you can dare to see it.”

The Tudor court and its ruthless plot long before Hilary Mantel’s best-selling “Wolf Hall” trilogy and pop feminist Broadway musical “Six” (rethinking Henry’s unlucky wife in a Spice Girls style). Since then, it has attracted public attention. The team that regains the story).

Even outside the Da Vinci Code page, generations of scholars have been studying how codes and cryptography shape almost every aspect of Renaissance culture (as of 2014). Exhibition The Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington describes it from diplomacy and war to the rise of the postal system and the art of literary interpretation.

And the subject is not just academic.In our own time, Renaissance scholarships helped stimulate WWII cryptanalysis, but military cryptanalysis techniques in turn Fitted As a tool for literary analysis.

Although Braganza’s work can be seen as a more feminist turn, as scholars are increasingly considering how cryptography and other forms of hidden communication protect women’s lost voices. It is a part.

“What’s particularly compelling and often touching is the fact that Vanessa focuses on voices that would otherwise have been silent or caricatured,” said Harvard literary and Braganza treatise adviser. James Simpson, one of the people, said.

Some women’s ciphers are well known. “Elizabeth and Mary: Royal Cousins, Rival Queens”, recently Exhibition The British Library contains an investigation of an encrypted letter written by Queen Mary of Scotland and a coded message that led to Mary’s beheading, trapping her in a plan to assassinate Elizabeth I.

But there were also new discoveries.Last year, researchers at Hever Castle in England used x-ray images. Reveal the erased inscription In a prayer book owned by Anne Boleyn, Henry unveiled a network of secret women’s ownership across generations, in opposition to efforts to destroy everything related to her. ..

Scholars are also women’s NeedleworkMiniatures, interior design, and even Silk floss used to “lock” letters To protect them from prying eyes.

“It’s not surprising that women used their agencies in unusual and creative ways during this time,” said Heatherwolf, deputy librarian and manuscript curator at the Folger Shakespeare Library. “They had to work outside the regular channel to send a message.”

The broader academia has not yet evaluated Braganza’s claim about pendants and its importance. But another adviser, Harvard scholar Stephen Greenblatt, called her work “attractive.”

He said he’s seen “over and over” elaborate decorative designs embossed on old books, but never really wondered what that meant. was.

“Vanessa is very witty and cunning,” he said. “This task requires a great deal of patience and a true eye for detail.”

Solving a knotted 16th century monogram rarely deciphers the Enigma code. Braganza describes it as being aware of “what you can’t see.”

As an undergraduate, Braganza wrote her advanced treatise on the word “cryptography” in Shakespeare’s play. As a graduate student, she became interested in things themselves.

Her first crypto-related discoveries were made at the Antiquarian Book Fair in London in 2019. She said she was “hungry” walking down the aisle when she found the intricate decoration engraved on the cover of the old volume.

Immediately she recognized it as a monogram cipher Mrs. Mary Rohto, Shakespeare’s contemporaries, is considered the first female fiction writer in the United Kingdom. Wroth was also a party to a scandalous case with his second cousin, Earl of Pembroke. She was a fictional character in the two-volume romance “Urania.”

Five years ago, Braganza saw a photo of the code that Wroth gave himself and the count the fictional initials on the cover of the bound manuscript of Wroth’s play that Wroth gave to his lover. .. gift.

Wroth’s private library was destroyed by a fire and there was no volume known to survive. But here, unknown to the dealer, it seems to have survived and has the same coded symbol of her love for a man who died without acknowledging her children together.

“This was a book that shouldn’t exist,” Braganza said. (This volume is a biography of Cyrus the Great of Persia and is now owned by the Houghton Library at Harvard University.)

Catherine / Henry Crypt got her attention this spring through similar serendipity moments.After completing the chapter on cryptographic spread in Henry’s court, she released a digitized image. “Jewelry book” As the British Museum’s collection of drawings by Holbein is known.

Especially when she vaguely confused them, an oval entanglement pulled her. She started with the letters that had to be there based on her pen strokes, and then tried other possibilities. After the afternoon she had it: HENRIC VSREX and KATHERINE.

Henry had three wives named Catherine, but when Holbain was in court, only Catherine of Aragon was around. Regarding her spelling, her Catherine’s name was spelled in various ways during the period, but Braganza says her manuscript signed by Catherine shows that she wrote in K. Said. In addition, a portrait of young Catherine shows that she is wearing a choker “K” embedded in a chain.

After compiling the documentation, she showed it to Simpson. Simpson said he felt it was “fully convincing.”

So why does Braganza think that Catherine, not Henry, asked for the pendant?

Based on the date Holbein appeared in court, she dates her sketches back to around 1532. At this time, Henry was nearing completion of a long push to end his marriage to Catherine, who was unable to hand over the male heir. He secretly married Anne in January 1533, and five months later, Archbishop of Canterbury invalidated his marriage to Catherine.

Henry and Braganza said there would be no incentive to outsource the pendant. However, Catherine, who died of natural causes in 1536, never stopped claiming that she was Henry’s only wife and queen. (As her Beyoncé-inspired character her in “Six” sings of his push for annulment, “There’s no no no no no no no no way.”)

Braganza considers a pendant intended to be worn in public as an act of “secret courtship revelation,” based on a small loop at the top.

“It really helps us to understand Catherine as a truly rebellious person,” she added.

It is unknown whether the pendant (or the simpler one that Holbain sketched by combining Henry’s initials with the initials of another wife) survived or was ever made. Many gems of the time had melted and metals and gems were reused.

However, Henry is well known for trying to erase all traces of his ex-wife. After Anne was convicted of treason and beheaded in 1536, Henry destroyed the proceeding records, her letters, and most portraits. He also tried to erase many symbols related to her from public buildings, but with only partial success.

In the Chapel of King’s College in Cambridge, those linked initials are displayed on the screen of a finely carved choir.But in Hampton CourtIn London, visitors can still see the empty spots they carved, along with some overlooked examples that are still connected to the lover’s knot.

The Jewelery Book pendant may not radically change the story, but it suggests how much silent voice remains of Henry’s wives and other women of the era. Braganza said.

“That’s the problem with cryptography. After loosening the cryptography, you can’t eradicate everything,” she said. “They are waiting to be discovered centuries later.”