Did Elizabeth Inherit Anne Boleyn's Jewelry?

    There seems to be some misconceptions about the possible fate of Anne Boleyn's jewelry, and so I decided to update this article.

    Every queen had a selection of personal jewelry which was not part of the crown jewels. These personal jewels could include gifts from her husband during their marriage, or pieces she owned prior to her wedding. Anne's personal jewelry would not have been considered part of the crown jewels, even after her death and her husband's acquisition of her property.



    The crown jewels were a set of gems that were handed down from monarch to monarch. You can see the crown jewels of the Tudor era in the portraits of Henry's queens. The "consort's necklace" is a piece which seems to have been worn by each woman after Anne Boleyn, and it appears not to have been re-set for each queen as many gems were.



    Jane Seymour’s portrait is where it first turns up (though Anne may be wearing it in her portrait medallion with a cross pendant.)

    Katheryn Howard wears it next.

After that, Kateryn Parr wore it with a different pendant.

    A particularly fabulous gem might be added to the crown jewels, but that seems to have depended on the monarch who purchased it - whether he or she wanted to "gift" it to the crown - or how it was purchased (whether with the monarch's privy purse or with the funds of the crown.) The current queen, Elizabeth II, owns many fabulous gems - tiaras, and jewelry sets - that have been passed down through her family that are her personal property and not part of the crown jewels.

    When a queen was widowed, she was expected to turn the crown jewels over to the woman who would take her place as consort, but not the gems that were her personal jewelry. Mary Tudor Brandon caused controversy when she absconded with part of the French crown jewels, including the famous Mirror of Naples, and gave it to her brother in a bid to win his forgiveness for remarrying a man of her own choosing. When King Francis asked for the jewel’s return, Henry argued that the Mirror had been a personal gift from the dead king to his sister, and was not part of the crown jewels.

    Anne's famous initial pendants were an example of personal jewelry. Katharine of Aragon also had personal jewels that were not part of the collection she was forced to surrender to Anne Boleyn in 1532. Specifically, she left to her daughter in her will a "gold collar I brought out of Spain."

    The initial pendants I’ve described Anne wearing in Under These Restless Skies are featured in portraits of Anne Boleyn or her daughter. Since no portraits from Anne's lifetime survive (with the possible exception of the Holbein sketch) it seems likely artists painted Anne wearing pieces of jewelry her daughter had inherited, or pieces that were remembered as belonging to her.

    Everyone is familiar with the famous “B” pendant, but it appears Anne had several others. 


    “AB,” is pictured in one of her portraits, pinned to her bodice in the Nidd Hall portrait.

    An “A” pendant is worn by Elizabeth in the Whitehall Family Group Portrait. (UPDATE: I have been informed that this pendant may have religious significance as opposed to signifying the name "Anne." The pendant may refer to Auspice Maria, or "under the protection of Mary." I need to do further research on this.)

    Anne is also portrayed wearing an “HA” pendant, her initials entwined with Henry’s, a design known as a love knot. Holbein is recorded to have designed such a necklace for her; it's tempting to imagine this is similar to the one he created. Inventories also record Anne had items with the initials "RA" Regina Anna (Queen Anne) and a large array of rings, bracelets and other items with "HA" inscribed.

   It should be noted that some historians now claim the Hoskins miniature, used as the "pattern" for portraits of Anne Boleyn, is actually of Mary Tudor Brandon. However, most nobles of the day did not identify themselves by their surname, but by their title. If Mary wore an initial pendant, it most likely would have had an "S" for Suffolk. Charles Brandon's next wife signed herself "Katherine Suffolk" in documents, just as Anne herself used the name "Anne Rochford" after her father was ennobled, as she signed herself in her only surviving letter to a woman friend, indicating the "B" portrait may portray Anne from a time before that date.

    What happened to Anne Boleyn's initial pendants? After Anne died, they became Henry's property, both because he was her widower (though he'd had their marriage annulled) and because she was a convicted traitor. The pieces went into Henry's storage. Some of them were noted as still being in his inventories when he died, but not the initial pendants, so they must have been dispersed before his death. Nor do they turn up in the inventories of his queens.

    At some point, Henry seems to have decided to pass the jewels on to Anne's daughter. They were not only an inheritance from her mother, but they were her Boleyn legacy.  Henry used his daughter Mary's obstinacy as an excuse not to give her the gold collar her mother had left her, but he had no such excuse in Elizabeth's case. Secondly, though he considered her a bastard, Elizabeth was a king's daughter and had to be groomed and bejeweled appropriately. Giving Elizabeth her mother's personal gems would be a cheap way of fitting her out according to her station. Some believe that Kateryn Parr may have intervened to urge him to give Elizabeth her mother's legacy.

    He doesn't seem to have minded her wearing them. Though he had initially tried to eradicate Anne's memory by destroying her portraits, records, and emblems, he passed on the gems as they were, not bothering with the expense of re-setting them before he had them given to Elizabeth. Elizabeth chose to wear the "A" pendant in the Whitehall family portrait. Perhaps Henry shrugged and said if she wanted to mark herself with the name of a traitor, it was no skin off his nose. She was a bastard ineligible for the throne anyway.

    Elizabeth may have eventually had the "B" pendant remade into the one we see in her teenage portrait wearing the red gown. Historian Eric Ives notes that he three dangling pearls are nearly identical. Elizabeth is not recorded in her later years as wearing her mother's initial pendants. Perhaps by then she felt it impolitic to associate herself openly with Anne, though she may have worn a crown made for her mother for her coronation portrait, and had a ring made which contains an image of her mother.

    So, what happened next? The Tudors were not as sentimental as we are about keeping inherited jewelry intact. Elizabeth would have done as most people and had the pieces re-made to suit the current fashion. Her mother's pearls may have joined the long ropes she wore looped across her bodices, and the gold may have been recast into brooches or rings.

    They would have gone to James I when Elizabeth died in 1603. His wife, Anne of Denmark, likely had the pieces melted down and re-set again, as was customary with monarchs. Most of the pieces in royal hands were sold off during the civil wars and the Commonwealth era. They disappear into the mists of history.

    It's thought that some of Anne Boleyn's pearls may survive today in the State crown of Queen Elizabeth II. However, the crown was made in the time of Queen Victoria, and there's no direct evidence that the pearls belonged to Anne Boleyn or her daughter. Share on Tumblr

Recycling the Queen's Jewels

You may notice something interesting if you look closely at the portraits of Henry's later queens...

Here we have Jane Seymour wearing a distinctive pearl necklace, and an IHS (Jesus) brooch.

Oh look! Here's Katheryn Howard wearing the same piece!

Here we have Kateryn Parr in two portraits wearing the same necklace, though the pendant has been changed to a three-stone piece. The portrait in the black gown was thought to be Lady Jane Grey for a while, but is now identified as Kateryn based on the necklace. (During her short reign, Jane would not have had time to sit for a portrait wearing the royal jewels.) Note that the pearl trim on the hoods and around the bodices are the same, so they were also likely recycled.

Anne Boleyn may be wearing the tri-stone pendant in the Nidd Hall portrait.

It may be the same pearl rope that Anne Boleyn is wearing in her portrait medal, but it's too badly damaged to be certain. The necklace looks very similar in Lucy Churchill's restored version of it.

Katharine of Aragon wears an IHS brooch... It's the same one that Jane Seymour is wearing in the portrait at the top of the post.

Keep in mind this was likely intentional on Jane's part. She was a supporter of Katharine of Aragon, and the "Old Faith," as opposed to Anne Boleyn's reformist ways. Wearing Katharine's brooch might have been a way to display her kinship with Henry's first queen.








At left, Jane Seymour wears a "Tau" pendant in the Dynasty mural.


Kateryn Parr wears it in the miniature portrait of her at Sudeley Castle at the right.

Note the similarity between the ropes of pearls on Jane's bodice to the Nidd Hall portrait above. In fact, these ropes of pearls made researchers believe the Nidd Hall portrait was Jane Seymour for years until its facial resemblance to the portrait medal was publicized.





Here's a touching example of recycling jewelry .... Queen Elizabeth may be wearing the crown that was made for Anne Boleyn in the portrait commemorating Elizabeth's coronation.

The crown Elizabeth wears is very similar to the one Anne wears in the sketch made in preparation for the coronation.

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The Mirror of Naples

The Mirror of Naples is one of the most famous jewels of history ... and no one knows exactly what it looked like, or what happened to it.

The descriptions we have of this gem are rather vague. The diamond was a table-cut gem, as wide as a "full sized finger" and having a pearl dangling from it the size of a pigeon's egg.

Mary Tudor Brandon
Queen of France

It enters the historical record as a present given by Louis XII to his new bride, Mary Tudor, sister of Henry VIII. Henry later argued the jewel was a personal gift of Louis. The new French king, Francis I, insisted it was part of the Crown Jewels of France, and thus belonged to the crown, not to the queen who wore it.

Mary Tudor was not Queen of France for long. Her elderly husband, Louis, died only a few months after their wedding. Mary was sent to reside in a convent until it was certain she was not pregnant with the king's heir. Henry sent his friend Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, to fetch Mary back home to England.

Before Mary would consent to wed the French king, she extracted a promise from her brother: that she would be allowed to choose her next husband. Henry agreed, never intending to keep it. In fact, he was busily arranging Mary's next marriage while he waited for her return.

Mary caught wind of this, or realized her brother never intended her to allow her to marry whom she pleased. And the man she wanted to marry was Charles Brandon.

Francis I

The new king, Francis, helped arrange an elopement between Mary and Brandon. He said he thought it was romantic, but truthfully, his motive was likely to remove a marriage pawn from Henry's board.

After the marriage was consummated, both Mary and Brandon wrote to the king, begging for forgiveness. To soften her brother's anger, Mary packaged up the Mirror of Naples and sent it with her letter. She later took with her more of the French Crown Jewels when she departed for England.

Francis was not best pleased, to put it mildly. He (and his wife, Claude) demanded the jewels return. Henry sent a few of the smallest pieces back, but kept the Mirror. The Letters and Papers of the reign record that Henry said the Mirror was but a "small thing," and part of the compensation she was owed as the French king's widow, and in fact, Mary was entitled to more. (This squabbling over dowries and marriage portions after short-lived marriages was common. Henry VII and Ferdinand of Aragon squabbled for years over Katharine of Aragon's dowry.)

Francis then tried offering thirty thousand crowns for the Mirror's return, which Henry scoffed at. His jewelers said it was worth at least sixty thousand. Too rich for Francis's blood, as they say, and so he mourned the gem's loss, but could do nothing to compel its return. It's said Henry wore it openly, and might have been painted wearing it, but if so, the portrait is not identified, nor are any of the jewels in his known portraits identifiable as the Mirror.

Supposedly, the Mirror was noted in the inventory of Elizabeth I's jewels after she died. Some say the gem was sold by Queen Henrietta-Maria to pay for supplies during the English Civil War, but I haven't been able to find confirmation of it. In any case, it vanishes from history. No jewels matching the description survive, so the Mirror must have been re-cut into smaller diamonds at some point, likely to make it easier to sell. Or, perhaps it was lost and will re-surface someday, having been hidden away like the Cheapside Hoard. Share on Tumblr

Anne Boleyn's Initial Pendants

There seems to be some misconceptions about Anne Boleyn's jewelry, and so I decided to update this article.

Every queen had a selection of personal jewelry which was not part of the crown jewels. These personal jewels could include gifts from her husband during their marriage, or pieces she owned prior to her wedding. Anne's personal jewelry would not have been considered part of the crown jewels, even after her death and her husband's acquisition of her property.

The crown jewels were a set of gems that were handed down from monarch to monarch. You can see the crown jewels of the Tudor era in the portraits of Henry's queens. The "consort's necklace" is a piece which seems to have been worn by each woman after Anne Boleyn, and it appears not to have been re-set as many gems were.

A particularly fabulous gem might be added to the crown jewels, but that seems to have depended on the monarch who purchased it - whether he or she wanted to "gift" it to the crown - or how it was purchased (whether with the monarch's privy purse or with the funds of the crown.) The current queen, Elizabeth II, owns many fabulous gems - tiaras, and jewelry sets - that have been passed down through her family that are her personal property and not part of the crown jewels.

When a queen was widowed, she was expected to turn the crown jewels over to the woman who would take her place as consort, but not the gems that were her personal jewelry. Mary Tudor Brandon caused controversy when she absconded with part of  the French crown jewels collection, including the famous Mirror of Naples, and gave it to her brother in a bid to win his forgiveness for remarrying a man of her own choosing. Henry argued that the Mirror had been a personal gift from the dead king to his sister, and was not part of the crown jewels.

Anne's famous initial pendants were an example of personal jewelry. Katharine of Aragon also had personal jewels that were not part of the collection she was forced to surrender to Anne Boleyn in 1532. Specifically, she left to her daughter in her will a "gold collar I brought out of Spain."

The initial pendants I’ve described Anne wearing in Under These Restless Skies are featured in portraits of Anne Boleyn or her daughter. Since no portraits from Anne's lifetime survive (with the possible exception of the Holbein sketch) it seems likely artists painted Anne wearing pieces of jewelry her daughter had inherited, or pieces that were remembered as belonging to her.

Everyone is familiar with the famous “B” pendant, but it appears Anne had several others. 

“AB,” is pictured in one of her portraits, pinned to her bodice in the Nidd Hall portrait.

An “A” pendant is worn by Elizabeth in the Whitehall Family Group Portrait. 

Anne is also portrayed wearing an “HA” pendant, her initials entwined with Henry’s, a design known as a love knot. Holbein is recorded to have designed such a necklace for her; it's tempting to imagine this is similar to the one he created.

Inventories also record Anne had items with the initials "RA" Regina Anna (Queen Anne) and a large array of rings, bracelets and other items with "HA" inscribed. Henry still owned some of them when he died.

It should be noted that some historians now claim the Hoskins miniature, used as the "pattern" for portraits of Anne Boleyn, is actually of Mary Tudor Brandon. However, most nobles of the day did not identify themselves by their surname, but by their title.

If Mary wore an initial pendant, it most likely would have had an "S" for Suffolk. Charles Brandon's next wife signed herself "Katherine Suffolk" in documents, and Anne herself used the name "Anne Rochford" after her father was ennobled, as she signed herself in her only surviving letter to a woman friend, indicating the "B" portrait may portray Anne from a time before that date.

What happened to Anne Boleyn's initial pendants? After Anne died, they became Henry's property, both because he was her widower (though he'd had their marriage annulled) and because she was a convicted traitor. The pieces went into Henry's storage. Some of them were noted as still being in his inventories when he died.

At some point, Henry seems to have decided to pass the jewels on to Anne's daughter. They were not only an inheritance from her mother, but they were her Boleyn legacy.  Henry used his daughter Mary's obstinacy as an excuse not to give her the gold collar her mother had left her, but he had no such excuse in Elizabeth's case. Secondly, though he considered her a bastard, Elizabeth was a king's daughter and had to be groomed and bejeweled appropriately. Giving Elizabeth her mother's personal gems would be a cheap way of fitting her out according to her station. Some believe that Kateryn Parr may have intervened to urge him to give Elizabeth her mother's legacy.

He doesn't seem to have minded her wearing them. Though he had initially tried to eradicate Anne's memory by destroying her portraits, records, and emblems, he passed on the gems as they were, not bothering with the expense of re-setting them before he had them passed on to Elizabeth. Elizabeth chose to wear the "A" pendant in the Whitehall family portrait. Perhaps Henry shrugged and said if she wanted to mark herself with the name of a traitor, it was no skin off his nose. She was a bastard ineligible for the throne anyway.

Elizabeth may have eventually had the "B" pendant remade into the one we see in her teenage portrait wearing the red gown. Historian Eric Ives notes that he three dangling pearls are nearly identical. Elizabeth is not recorded in her later years as wearing her mother's initial pendants. Perhaps by then she felt it impolitic to associate herself openly with Anne, though she wore a crown made for her mother for her coronation portrait, and had a ring made which contains an image of her mother.

So, what happened next? The Tudors were not as sentimental as we are about keeping inherited jewelry intact. Elizabeth would have done as most people and had the pieces re-made to suit the current fashion. Her mother's pearls may have joined the long ropes she wore looped across her bodices, and the gold may have been recast into brooches or rings.

They would have gone to James I when Elizabeth died in 1603. His wife, Anne of Denmark, likely had the pieces melted down and re-set again, as was customary with monarchs. Most of the pieces in royal hands were sold off during the civil wars and the Commonwealth era. They disappear into the mists of history.

It's thought that some of Anne Boleyn's pearls may survive today in the State crown of Queen Elizabeth II. However, the crown was made in the time of Queen Victoria, and there's no direct evidence that the pearls belonged to Anne Boleyn or her daughter.

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