Appendix II
A half-length portrait in the inner hall of Hever Castle is said to be “Mary Boleyn, after Hans Holbein,” although in the seventeenth century—when it may have been painted—it was labelled “Anne Boleyn,” and only later changed to “Mary Boleyn.” There is good cause to question the sitter’s identity, as this picture is hung as one of a pair with another of similar size called “Anne Boleyn,” yet the latter is now known not to be Anne, for it is based on a Hans Holbein drawing of a lady who was not identified as Anne Boleyn until 1649, and who bears little resemblance to Anne as she appears in authenticated portraits.
The existence of other, later versions of the portrait said to be of Mary Boleyn suggests that there was an original Tudor portrait from which they all derive. No comparable portrait by Holbein exists, although the costume is contemporaneous with his career as King’s painter to Henry VIII. At least five other versions survive: one at Warwick Castle is said to date from the Stuart period or the eighteenth century (with a companion one of “Anne Boleyn,” as at Hever); there are two in the Royal Collection, including a cruder version at Holyrood Palace, Edinburgh; another, in a private collection, is inscribed in a later hand “Mary Bullen Wife to Wm. Carey Esq.”; two others are at Southside House, Wimbledon, and Henden Manor in Kent, a house that was briefly in Mary’s possession. Most of the versions are very similar. This proliferation of the same image suggests either that there was some demand for a portrait of this lady, whoever she was, or that after one portrait was misidentified as Mary Boleyn (almost certainly at a later date) copies were made in the mistaken belief that the sitter was Mary.
There are clues in the portrait to the sitter’s identity. She has a round face, prominent nose and chin, large dark eyes, and a small mouth with rosebud lips. Her hair is concealed under her hood and cannot be seen, but her well-defined eyebrows are light brown. She wears a black velvet, square-necked gown, bordered in red, with an ermine trim on the neckline and ermine oversleeves, and a short gable hood of the type fashionable in the 1530s, with one lappet of its veil thrown over the top in the favored “whelk-shell” fashion. Around her neck is a double rope of pearls with a lozenge-shaped pendant surrounded by filigree work and pearls, with a drop pearl, and on her breast an oval pendant with another drop pearl, surmounted by a leafy sprig of two small roses or carnations.
On costume alone, this portrait dates from long after the period—the early 1520s—when Mary Boleyn was Henry VIII’s mistress; in the early 1520s, the ends of the gable hood would have been longer, and the veil left flowing. Furthermore—and this is crucial—the sitter wears ermine, a fur reserved exclusively for royalty and peers of the realm. The wife of a commoner, as Mary’s two husbands were, was specifically prohibited from wearing ermine, even if she were the Queen’s sister. Given the ermine trim on her gown and the ermine sleeves, it is highly unlikely that this woman is Mary Boleyn. Moreover, the fact that at least six versions of this portrait survive, two of them in the Royal Collection, suggests that she was someone far more important, probably a member of the royal family. Mary Boleyn, by her own account, was held in little esteem by her family and the world at large. There would not have been any demand for a portrait of her in the 1530s, when she was either languishing in courtly obscurity or banished in disgrace.
The jewelery in the portrait is indistinct, so no conclusions can be drawn from that. The sitter is probably in her teens or twenties. In the Hever and Warwick versions, her face seems to owe more to seventeenth- or eighteenth-century portraiture than to that of the sixteenth. She is far too young to be Katherine of Aragon or Henry VIII’s sister, Mary Tudor, Duchess of Suffolk, who died in 1533, aged thirty-seven, and too round-faced to be Anne Boleyn; in any case, she bears little resemblance to portraits of Anne or of Jane Seymour. The other royal possibilities are Mary Tudor’s daughters, Frances and Eleanor Brandon, and the Lady Margaret Douglas, daughter of the King’s elder sister, Margaret Tudor, Queen of Scots, by her second husband, Archibald Douglas, Earl of Angus. Frances Brandon was sixteen when she married Henry Grey, Earl of Dorset, in 1533, Eleanor eighteen when she married Henry Clifford, Earl of Cumberland, in 1537. Margaret Douglas, who spent many years at the English court and was a friend of the Princess Mary, was twenty-one in 1536, when she was sent to the Tower for a time after involving herself in a misalliance with Lord Thomas Howard.
Any one of these royal ladies could have been the sitter in this portrait.
The only authenticated portrait of Margaret Douglas dates from 1567;1 a seventeenth century full-length by Daniel Mytens, said to show her in later life,2 may not be Margaret at all, as it was described only as “a Scottish lady in a long mourning habit” in 1639.3Neither bears a strong resemblance to the “Mary Boleyn” portrait, but we might not expect them to, as they were painted at least thirty years later. There is also a tomb effigy in Westminster Abbey, executed after 1578. All these representations show the countess with a slightly retroussé nose, unlike the rather prominent straight nose of the sitter in our portrait.
The only certain image of Frances Brandon is her tomb effigy in Westminster Abbey, dating from after 1559. There is a portrait in the Royal Collection of the same period, said to be her, but without authentication. That leaves Eleanor Brandon, of whom no portrait is known to exist—claims on the Internet that a Holbein drawing of an unknown lady in the Royal Collection is her are unsubstantiated—and for whose portrait there probably would have been little demand.
Yet if one compares facial characteristics in portraits of Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, his wife, Mary Tudor, and his daughter, Mary, Lady Monteagle, it is possible to detect similarities with the portrait said to be of Mary Boleyn, notably the large nose, which is evident in the wedding portrait of Brandon (1515), the Holbein sketch of Lady Monteagle, and also in a drawing done in 1515 of Mary Tudor. The shape of the chin is exactly the same as Mary Tudor’s in the two surviving French portraits of her, and the setting of the eyes and eyebrows like those of Charles Brandon. This is subjective evidence, of course, but added to the other clues, it suggests that what we have here may be a portrait of Frances Brandon, painted to mark the solemnizing of her marriage to Henry Grey, Marquess of Dorset, which was celebrated in May 1533, shortly before Anne Boleyn’s coronation. The costume is of that period, and this identification of the sitter would explain the ermine and the existence of several copies of the portrait, for Frances was the King’s niece and the daughter of one of the foremost peers in England by a princess of the blood. Nevertheless, given the absence of any contemporary likeness of these royal ladies, we cannot say with certainty that the sitter in the “Mary Boleyn” portrait is one of them. It is most unlikely, however, that it depicts Mary Boleyn.
How, then, did this portrait come to be associated with Mary? The answer is not far to seek. For centuries it was common for names to be inscribed on portraits, or labels added, on the feeblest assumptions as to identity, and in more recent times many have been shown to be incorrect. Although Mary’s name appears on at least one version of this picture, it has been written in a much later hand. Once an error like this had been made, it was easily replicated, with the false identification coming to be accepted as authentic. Most examples have been corrected in the light of recent research, yet even today some are the subject of dispute, such as two Holbein drawings said, on shaky authority, to be of Anne Boleyn.
A fine but unfinished portrait of Mary’s first husband, William Carey, was until fairly recently in the private Irish collection of Henry A. Fitzhugh, and portrays a richly dressed, young and attractive man with brown hair, a short beard and a strong nose, with eyes that markedly resemble those of his Tudor cousins. Carey holds a book, with one finger marking a page, which suggests that he wished to be seen as a man of learning or piety. The portrait was overpainted in the sixteenth century, and has recently been cleaned, with the restoration revealing an underpainting of a woman’s head that much resembles Holbein’s drawing of a lady of the Zouche family (labeled “M. Souch”) in the Royal Collection.4
David Starkey has credibly suggested that this portrait of William Carey may have been painted by Hans Holbein, who was working in England in 1526–28, under the patronage of Sir Thomas More, and in 1532–43 for Henry VIII.5 The quality of the painting, the realism of the features, and the portrait beneath in Holbein’s style might suggest that, as does the fact that Holbein painted every one of the colleagues who worked with Carey to organize a major court reception in 15276 at a time when he was executing his first works for the court.
The sitter was identified as William Carey in 1959 on the evidence of a coat of arms on an inferior Elizabethan portrait of the same man, which bears the date 1526, and gives the age of the sitter—who is holding a pair of gloves instead of a book—as thirty.7 Back in 1959 it was thought that the pioneering miniaturist Lucas Horenbout—who was working at the English court under the lucrative patronage of Henry VIII from at least April 1524, and who painted the earliest English portrait miniatures—executed this picture,8but tree-ring dating on the wood panel carried out by John Fletcher in 1971 proved that that portrait could not have been painted before 1570, and that it probably dated from 1575–90. Thus it was probably based either on the Fitzhugh portrait, which must have been painted after Carey’s death, or on a lost portrait or miniature from life.
We know that William Carey’s son, Henry, Lord Hunsdon, commissioned portraits of his cousin Elizabeth I and other family members, so it is likely that he also commissioned one of his father—probably this one—and perhaps a companion portrait of his mother, Mary Boleyn. It is likely that Hunsdon wanted these paintings for the long gallery that he added to Brooke House in Hackney, which he owned from 1578 to 1583.9 It is also possible that he commissioned them to hang in Hunsdon House, in time for Elizabeth I’s visit in September 1571.
It has been said that this dating the portrait to after 1570 would explain why the haircut, bonnet, and neckline—which would have been seen in a miniature—are accurate for 1526, while the horizontally banded sleeves are more in keeping with the costume of c. 1550–70.10 Yet such banding and slashing is seen in male costume from the 1520s to Elizabethan times, and in 1526 would have been at the height of Burgundian fashion;11 moreover, the sleeves in the portrait match the part of the doublet that would have been visible in a miniature. So although it has been put forward that this portrait was based on a miniature by Horenbout,12 it is also possible that it derives from a half-length panel painting.
It may be that the addition of the date 1526 on the Elizabethan copy of Carey’s portrait was based on information given by Lord Hunsdon, or taken from another picture, perhaps the lost original of the Fitzhugh portrait, which might just have fit into Holbein’s first sequence of courtier portraits. The Fitzhugh picture itself must be later, for the female portrait beneath dates from after 1532. That does not, of course, preclude its being by Holbein, or a member of his workshop or follower, but it must have been a copy of an original painting or drawing from life, possibly done in 1526 and now lost, for by the earliest time the copy could have been painted, William Carey had been dead for at least four years.
Thus we have two later paintings, one of which was probably based on a lost original dated 1526, possibly by Horenbout, and the other possibly by Holbein, executed in 1527 as part of a sequence of portraits of Carey’s colleagues at court.13
Who would have commissioned the Fitzhugh portrait? We could be more certain if we knew the provenance of the painting, and whether it descended through the Carey family. It is more likely that the original had been commissioned by Carey himself, and was later inherited by Mary Boleyn. Carey had not lived to fulfill his potential, and there would not have been much demand for a copy of his portrait some years after his death, unless a family member or friend commissioned one privately. Was it Mary herself? In 1539–40 she came into part of her inheritance, and it is just possible that she wanted another painting of her first husband to hang in one of the houses that were now hers.
It has been suggested14 that a miniature of a lady in the collection of the Duke of Buccleuch by Lucas Horenbout depicts Mary Boleyn. The costume worn by the sitter is that of the early to mid-1520s; there has been some repainting of her features at one time.15Erroneously labeled “Katherine of Aragon,” and first recorded in the collection of Charles II (reigned 1660–85), it has been claimed in recent years that this miniature is an early portrait of Anne Boleyn, but there is no convincing evidence to support that identification, while the woman depicted is blond, and bears little resemblance to Anne Boleyn in authenticated portraits.
It has also been claimed that the brooch on her breast depicts Anne’s falcon badge, but some have noticed that the “wings” appear to point downward on either side, while those of Anne’s falcon sweep up toward the right. The brooch is so small that it is impossible, even through magnification, to obtain a clear image of it, but—as can be plainly seen in a second version of the miniature—it actually bears an image of a kneeling woman wearing a white girdled gown with a low square neck and long hanging sleeves. This second version, previously in the Watney Collection at Cornbury Park, is now in the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, and was once thought to depict Katherine of Aragon and, later, Jane Seymour, on the grounds that it had once been owned by a collateral descendant, Charles Seymour (1662–1748). In this version, the sitter is wearing a different hood, a black damask gown, and an ornate pendant with three drop pearls, which is not seen in the Buccleuch version. The brooch is the same, though.
Lucas Horenbout had worked at the court of Margaret of Austria, and may well have known Sir Thomas Boleyn, who might even have been instrumental in bringing the artist’s family to England; Lucas’s father Gerard had been an illuminator and court painter to the Archduchess, and his sister Susanna was skilled in the same fields. As discussed earlier, it has been suggested that Mary’s first husband, William Carey, was a patron of Lucas Horenbout, on the grounds that it was Horenbout who painted a lost portrait of Carey, probably in 1526.16
Although we cannot be certain that Carey patronized Horenbout or the up-and-coming Holbein, an artist of some skill painted his portrait, so to that extent he could be described as a patron of the arts. It has been stated that he actually introduced Horenbout to the English court17—although too little is known of the circumstances in which Horenbout arrived to say that for certain—and that he assembled his own collections of art.18 That is unlikely, given that he lived in a cramped courtier lodging. One or two portraits, of himself and perhaps his wife—desirable objects that were effective statements of his high office and his importance in the court—did not make a collection.
The theory has been put forward that, if Horenbout painted William Carey, it followed that he might have painted Mary as well, as one of his first commissions in England in 1526.19 Yet with William Carey’s patronage of Horenbout uncertain, there is nothing to link this miniature to Mary Boleyn, unless, of course, her father commissioned it—although, again, his link with Horenbout is not proven.
Certainly the miniature dates from the mid-1520s. The Toronto version is inscribed ANNO XXV, showing that the sitter was in her twenty-fifth year; and it is possible that Mary could have been born in 1500, making her twenty-four in 1524/5, which would coincide with Horenbout’s first year in England. The brooch is possibly symbolic—a kneeling woman represented deference, humility, and subordination, and was often a ritual image suggesting the marriage bond, so this sitter is almost certainly a married woman. It could also represent a mythological or allegorical figure.
At that time, however, the portrait miniature had only just been introduced into England, and was an expensive novelty, sought after by a king and nobles eager to be at the forefront of artistic fashion. With Horenbout, the chief master of the form, being a court painter, most early English miniatures are therefore of royalty, with only a few exceptions. The sitter in this pair of miniatures, however, does not resemble any royal lady of the mid-1520s. The age of the sitter excludes Katherine of Aragon and Mary Tudor, Duchess of Suffolk. It is of course possible that if Sir Thomas Boleyn was responsible for bringing Horenbout to England, he then commissioned a work or works to demonstrate the limner’s craft in order to win his protégé commissions; it follows too that he might have chosen one of his daughters as a sitter. If this is Mary—and that is a big “if”—the portrait could have been painted to mark the birth of her daughter; and if that daughter had been fathered by Henry VIII, there was all the more reason to commission a likeness.
Normally, the existence of duplicated portraits suggests that there was some demand for the image of an important or royal personage, but it is credible in this case that a second miniature may have been painted for William Carey. Furthermore, the suggested Boleyn link to Horenbout is strengthened by the fact that the latter was appointed King’s Painter in 1531 when Anne Boleyn was riding high in the King’s favor; this grant of office was confirmed three years later, on the day before George Boleyn was made Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports.20 All this is speculation, though, and without any more evidence to go on, the identity of the sitter in these miniatures must remain in question.