It has long been an enchanting and mysterious treasure of the British Museum: a collection of sketches for jewelery and other lavish ornaments, commissioned during the reign of Henry VIII from the artist Hans Holbein, for a time the court painter.
Some designs are numbers, or coded symbols, entwining the initials of Henry and his many lovers. Some of the most elaborate have never been decoded.
This spring, while completing a chapter of her dissertation, Vanessa Braganza, a Ph.D. candidate in English at Harvard and a self-proclaimed “book detective,” became fascinated with a particularly dense jumble of letters.
By late afternoon, Braganza thought she’d figured it out in her notebook, through a trial and error she likened to “early modern Wordle.” The figure, she concluded, described HENRICVS REX — Henry the King — and KATHARINA — his first wife, Catherine of Aragon.
Nothing remarkable there perhaps. But Braganza argues that the pendant was not commissioned by Henry but by Catherine during the period when he was trying to divorce her and marry Anne Boleyn, as a brazen assertion of her lifelong claim to be his one true wife and queen. .
“It’s a gateway to her thinking,” Braganza said of the pendant. “It just sits there and challenges you to see it.”
The Tudor court and its relentless intrigue had been a source of public fascination long before Hilary Mantel’s best-selling “Wolf Hall” trilogy or the pop-feminist Broadway musical “Six” (which reimagines Henry’s ill-fated wives as a Spice Girls-esque team takes back the story).
Even beyond the pages of “The Da Vinci Code,” generations of scholars have studied the way codes and numbers shaped nearly every aspect of Renaissance culture (as a 2014 exhibit at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington put it), from diplomacy and warfare to the emergence of postal systems and the art of literary interpretation itself.
And the subject is not just academic. In our day, Renaissance science helped decipher World War II codes, while military cryptology techniques were in turn adapted as tools of literary analysis.
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Braganza’s work is part of what could be seen as a more feminist turn, as scholars have increasingly considered how numbers and other forms of hidden communication preserve women’s lost voices.
“What’s especially compelling and often moving is the fact that Vanessa focuses on voices that would otherwise have been silenced or caricatured,” said James Simpson, a Harvard literary scholar and one of Braganza’s dissertation advisors.
Some women’s figures are well known. “Elizabeth and Mary: Royal Cousins, Rival Queens,” a recent exhibition at the British Library, includes an examination of the scrambled letters written by Mary, Queen of Scots, as well as the scrambled messages used to entangle her in a plot to to assassinate Elizabeth I, which led to Mary’s beheading.
But new discoveries have also been made. Last year, a researcher from Hever Castle in England used X-rays to discover erased inscriptions in a prayer book that had belonged to Anne Boleyn. with her.
Scholars have also examined the messages encoded in women’s needlework, miniatures, interior design, even the color of silk silk used to “lock” letters to protect them from prying eyes.
“It’s no surprise that women during this period exercised their agency in unusual and creative ways,” said Heather Wolfe, associate librarian and curator of manuscripts at the Folger Shakespeare Library. “They had to work outside the normal channels to get their messages out.”
The wider scientific community has yet to evaluate or weigh up Braganza’s claims about the pendant. But Harvard scientist Stephen Greenblatt, another advisor, called her research “fascinating.”
He said he had seen elaborate decorative designs embossed on old books “many, many times”, but he had never really wondered what they meant.
“Vanessa is extremely resourceful and cunning,” he said. “This job requires an insane amount of patience and a real eye for detail.”
Untangling a gnarled 16th-century monogram is hard to crack the Engima code. Braganza describes it as a matter of noticing “what hides in plain sight”.
As a student, Braganza wrote her graduate thesis on the word “number” in Shakespearean plays. As a graduate student, she became interested in things themselves.
She made her first number-related discovery in 2019, at an antiquarian book fair in London. She was walking down the aisles feeling “hangry,” she said, when she saw an intricate decoration stamped on the cover of an old book.
She immediately recognized it as the monogram figure of Lady Mary Wroth, a contemporary of Shakespeare’s regarded as England’s first female fiction writer. Wroth had also been party to a scandalous affair with her cousin, the third Earl of Pembroke, which she fictionalized in her two-part romance, “Urania.”
Five years earlier, Braganza had seen a photograph of the figure—which was the initials of the fictitious names Wroth gave herself and the Earl—weaving onto the cover of a bound manuscript of one of Wroth’s plays, which Wroth had given to her lover as a gift.
Wroth’s personal library was destroyed by fire, and no volumes are known to have survived. But here, unbeknownst to the dealer, turned out to be a survivor, bearing the same coded symbol of her love for the man who had died without acknowledging their children together.
“This was a book that shouldn’t have existed,” Braganza said. (The volume, a biography of Cyrus the Great of Persia, is now owned by Harvard’s Houghton Library.)
The Catherine/Henry figure came to her attention this spring, through a similar moment of serendipity. When she was finishing a chapter on the distribution of figures at Henry’s court, she looked up the digitized images from the ‘Jewelery Book’, as Holbein’s collection of drawings in the British Museum is known.
While she was puzzling over it aimlessly, an oval tangle in particular tugged at her. She started with the letters that needed to be there, based on the strokes, and then worked out other possibilities. After an afternoon she had it: HENRICVS REX and KATHARINA.
Henry had three wives named Catherine, but only Catherine of Aragon was around when Holbein was at court. As for the spelling, Braganza said that in manuscripts signed by Catherine, she sometimes writes her name with a K. In addition, she notes, a portrait of young Catherine shows her a choker with the letter “K” embedded in the necklace.
After collecting an evidence file, she showed it to Simpson, who said he found it “completely convincing.”
So why does Braganza think Catherine, instead of Henry, ordered the pendant?
Based on the dates of Holbein’s presence at court, she dates the sketch to around 1532, when Henry’s long attempt to marry Catherine, who had failed to deliver a male heir, was nearing completion. He secretly married Anne in January 1533 and had his marriage to Catherine annulled five months later by the Archbishop of Canterbury.
Henry, Braganza said, “would have no reason” to commission the pendant. But Catherine, who died of natural causes in 1536, insisted she was Henry’s only wife and queen. (While her Beyoncé-inspired character in “Six” sings about his annulment insistence, “There’s no no no no no no no way.”)
Braganza sees the pendant — which she says, based on a small loop at the top, was intended to be worn in public — as an act of “secret to revelation.”
“It really helps us understand Catherine as a really challenging figure,” she added.
It is unclear whether the pendant (or more simply outlined by Holbein conjugating Henry’s initials with those of other women) survives or was ever made. Much jewelry from that period was melted down, the metal and precious stones were given a new purpose.
But Henry is known for trying to cover all traces of his ex-wives. After Anne was convicted of treason and beheaded in 1536, Henry destroyed the court documents, her letters and most of the portraits. He also tried to erase the many symbols associated with her from public buildings, with only partial success.
In the chapel of King’s College, Cambridge, their bandaged initials are visible on the elaborately carved choir screen. But at London’s Hampton Court, visitors can still see blanks where they were chiseled away, along with a few overlooked examples still tied with a lover’s knot.
While the pendant in the “Jewelery Book” may not radically change the story, Braganza says, it does suggest how many more of the silenced voices of Henry’s wives — and other women of the period — can still be found.
“That’s the thing with numbers — you let them go, and then you can’t wipe them all out,” she said. “They are waiting to be discovered, centuries later.”