Holbein

The young merchant is seated among his daily surroundings in the Steelyard. He is in the act of leisurely opening a letter addressed, "To the hand of the honourable Jörg Gyze, my brother, in London, England" (Dem ersamen herrn Jörg Gyzen zu Lunden in Engelant meinem broder to henden). The merchant's motto, "No pleasure without care," is chalked up in Latin on the background, with his signature beneath it. Written on a paper stuck higher up is a Latin verse in praise of the portrait; also the date, and the sitter's age—thirty-four. On the racks and shelves are documents, books, keys, a watch and seals, and a pair of scales. A gold ball is hanging from above with a lovely chasing in blue enamel; a miracle of painting in itself, to say nothing of the exquisite Venetian glass, filled with water and carnation-pinks. This flower has its own meaning, and is introduced in more than one of Holbein's portraits. On the rich oriental table-cloth are writing materials also, with account-books, seal and scissors.

Gyze himself is a fair-haired man, wearing a brilliant red silk doublet beneath his black cloak. And the amazing thing is that amidst this bewildering array of pictures—for every article is such in itself, owing to the perfection of its painting—Gyze is not lost or overridden for a moment. It is unmistakably his picture; and he dominates the accessories as much as he did in reality. The man, the whole man, is there; and the things are there around him; that is all. But that the eye recognises this is the demonstration of the painter's own mastership. It is as much Holbein's peculiar secret as are the cool shadows, the luminous glow, the astounding elaboration, all made to express the dignity of one, and but one, theme.

As has been said, the Steelyard portraits are too many to even catalogue here, covering many years. But Gyze's may be taken as their high-water mark. For that matter it could not, in its own way, be surpassed by any portrait. Holbein himself greatly surpassed it in the matter of subtle and noble simplicity, in his two greatest extant pieces of portraiture—the Morett of Dresden and the Duchess of Milan, now in our National Gallery. But in technical powers, and the power of subordinating their very virtuosity to the requirement of a true picture, this was a superlative expression of his matured method.

In the midst of all his fresh London successes came a summons from Basel, which must have made the painter smile a little grimly. It had slowly dawned on the Council that Holbein—whose renown they well knew was a feather in Basel's cap—was proposing to make a prolonged absence. The result was a decision which the Burgomaster officially conveyed to him. Jacob Meyer zum Hirten wrote to say that Holbein was desired to return immediately to resume the duties of a citizen-artist, and that the Council, anxious to assist him in the support of his family, had resolved to allow him an annuity of thirty guldens yearly "until something better" could be afforded. Whether he replied in evasive terms, or whether he let the Lällenkönig speak for him, is not on record.

By the time Holbein received this letter, written late in the autumn of 1532, he was plunged into a year of almost incredible activity. The whole of it would hardly seem too long for one such painting as the life-size double portrait—his largest extant portrait-painting—that now belongs to the National Gallery: "The Ambassadors" (Plate 28).

At the extremities of a heavy table, something like a rude dinner-waggon, are two full-length figures which show a curious reflection of his early defect in their want of sufficient height. At the spectator's left stands a richly-costumed individual, whose stalwart proportions, ruddy complexion, and boldly ardent eye denote the perfection of vigorous health, and are in striking contrast to the physique, colouring, and expression of his companion. The former wears a black velvet doublet, which reveals an under-garment of gleaming rose-red satin. Over all is a black velvet mantle lined and trimmed with white fur. On his black cap is a silver brooch which displays a skull. He wears a gold badge exhibiting a mailed figure spearing a dragon suspended by a heavy gold chain. The hilt of his sword is seen at his left hand, and his right grasps a gold-sheathed dagger. On this latter is the inscription: ÆT. SVÆ. 29; and from it depends a massive green-and-gold silk tassel, incomparably painted.

As has been noted, the complexion of the man at our right is singularly pallid; the eyes mournfully listless; the skin of his knuckles drawn into the wrinkles of wasting tissues. He wears a scholar's cap and gown; the latter of some chocolate-brown pile, richly patterned, and lined with brown fur. He holds his gloves in his right hand and leans this arm on a closed book, on the edges of which is the lettering: ÆTATIS SVÆ 25.

An oriental cover is spread on the table, and upon it are a number of the scientific instruments common to astrology and to the uses of astronomers like Kratzer, in whose portrait at the Louvre they are also to be seen. On the lower shelf are mathematical and musical instruments and books. The two latter are opened to display their text conspicuously. Near the man at our left, and kept open by a T-square, is the Arithmetic which Peter Apian, astronomer and globe-maker, published in 1527. It is opened at a page in Division, with its German text plainly legible and identical with the actual page, as seen in the British Museum's copy of this edition.

The book nearest the man at our right, lying beneath the lute, has been also identified as Luther's Psalm-book with music,—in which the German text is by himself and the music by Johann Walther—first published in 1524. Mr. Barclay Squire has shown that the two hymns could not, however, have faced each other in reality, as they do in the painting, without the intervening leaves having been purposely suppressed to gain this end. These hymns are "Come Holy Ghost" (Kom Heiliger Geyst Herregott) and "Mortal, wouldst thou live blessedly?" (Mensch wiltu leben seliglich). In each case the entire verse is given.

The background is a green-diapered damask curtain most significantly drawn aside to show a silver crucifix high up in the left-hand corner, above the man with the dagger and sword. On the beautiful mosaic pavement is an ugly object that looks like some dried fish. But experiments have shown that the French Sale-Catalogues in which this work first appears in the eighteenth century—first, that is, so far as we can trace it by any records now known—were right in calling this a "skull in perspective"; i.e. a skull painted as seen distorted in a convex mirror. Some hint of its true character can be gathered, though not much, by looking at this object from the lower left-hand corner of the painting, when the exaggerated length will be seen to be reduced to something more nearly approaching the height of the usual "Death's Head."

According to the views which are now officially accepted by the National Gallery, the persons of this picture are two French Catholics. The one at our left is Jean de Dinteville, Seigneur of Polisy, Bailly of Troyes and Knight of the French Order of St. Michael, of which he wears the badge without the splendid collar—as was permitted, by a special statute, to persons in the field, on a journey, or in a privacy that would not require the full dress of a state occasion. Jean de Dinteville was French Ambassador at the Court of Henry VIII. in 1533; born in 1504, he was then twenty-nine. He died in 1555.

The man in the scholar's cap and gown is George de Selve, privately associated with de Dinteville's mission for a few weeks in the spring of 1533. He was born in 1508, nominated Bishop of Lavaur in 1526, and confirmed in that office in 1529, in which year he was French Ambassador at the Court of Charles V. He was twenty-five in 1533, and died in 1541.

For myself, holding convictions concerning these portraits utterly at variance with any published opinions—and that in more than one vital respect—I am compelled to limit my account to the bare record of its appearance and catalogued description, until prepared to submit other facts and conclusions to a verdict.

Two portraits in the Hague Gallery, each with a falcon hooded on the wrist, show to how much purpose Holbein had studied these birds in the Steelyard. The one of Robert Cheseman, done in this year, is especially fine, with a strange, elusive suggestion of something kindred in the nature of man and bird.

In 1533, also, the Steelyard placed its contribution to the celebration of Anne Boleyn's coronation in the painter's hands. And the result was, as Stowe tells us, "a costly and marvellous cunning pageant by the merchants of the Stilyard, wherein was the Mount Parnassus, with the Fountaine of Helicon, which was of white marble; and four streams without pipe did rise an ell high and mette together in a little cup above the fountaine; which fountaine ran abundantly with Rhenish wine till night. On the mountaine sat Apollo, and at his feet sat Calliope; and on every side of the mountaine sate four Muses, playing on severell sweet instruments."

But of more importance to his living fame were the two large oil paintings—the Triumph of Riches and the Triumph of Poverty—which he executed for the Hall of the Steelyard. In their day they were renowned far and wide; but they also have slipped into some abyss of oblivion, perhaps to be yet recovered as miraculously as was the Solothurn Madonna.

When the Guild was compelled to abandon the Steelyard, in Queen Elizabeth's reign, the Hall stood so long unguarded and uncared for that when it regained possession, under James I., everything was in a sad state of neglect. And when the association finally dissolved not long after, the Hanseatic League agreed to present these paintings to Henry Prince of Wales, known, like Charles I., to be a lover of Art.

If they passed to the possession of the latter, he must have exchanged them with, or presented them to, the Earl of Arundel. For in 1627 Sandrart saw them in the collection of the latter, like his father an enthusiastic admirer of Holbein's work. After this, one or two vague notices suggest that they somehow drifted to Flanders, and thence to Paris. But there every trace of them is lost. Federigo Zucchero thought they yielded to no work of the kind, even among Italian masters; and copied them from pure admiration. Holbein's drawing for the Triumph of Riches is in the Louvre Collection.

That he ever painted Anne Boleyn, unless in miniature, seems doubtful. The portrait among the Windsor drawings which has been labelled with her name agrees with no description of her in any single respect. But in 1534 he painted one whose destiny was closely linked to hers—Thomas Cromwell, then Master of the Jewel House.

And it was probably about this time that he painted what is in some respects the greatest of all his portraits—one of the galaxy of supreme works of all portraiture—the oil painting of Morett, or Morette, so long regarded as a triumph of Leonardo da Vinci's art. The world knows it well in the Dresden Gallery (Plate 29).

The figure is life-size. The pose, even the costume in its feasible essentials, strikingly repeats the Whitehall portrait of Henry VIII., as copies show this to have been completed in the wall painting. The background is a green curtain.

No words, no reproduction, can hope to express the qualities of such a painting. Neither can show the mastery or the spell by which the green background, the hair, the cool transparent flesh-tones, the fur, the satin, the gold, are all woven into a witchery as virile as it is penetrating.

This is another work which has undergone more than one transformation in the course of its records. As late as 1657 it was correctly ascribed to Holbein in the Modena Collection. But the first syllable of the sitter's name has been its only constant. In time Morett slipped into Moretta, and then—like Meier in the Madonna picture—into Morus. So far it seems to have clung to some English tradition. But when Morus got changed to Moro it was but natural for an Italian to think of Ludovico Sforza, "Il Moro." Long before this Holbein had become Olbeno; and thereafter a puzzle. When the portrait was labelled Sforza, however, who could its obviously great painter be but Leonardo? Et voilà! Thus the work passed to the Gallery and Catalogue of the Royal Collection at Dresden. And thus it long remained, as if to attest the true level of Holbein's genius.

But when the Gallery also acquired the drawing of the Arundel Collection, labelled "Mr. Morett" in Hollar's engraving from it, the painting was held to be unquestionably identified by it as Hubert Morett, goldsmith to Henry VIII. Nor is there anything incongruous in this belief. Such a master goldsmith was no tradesman, in our sense of the word. He was often much more like one of our merchant princes. The merchants of the Steelyard were frequently the royal bankers, and many times were employed on high and delicate diplomatic missions to other courts. Neither is there anything in the sitter's dress to forbid it to a man of this stamp, even after the sumptuary laws of Henry VIII. were passed; while there is much, very much, to suggest an English origin.

On the other hand, M. Larpent has now shown that the Arundel drawing was down in a catalogue of 1746-7 as: "One Holbein, Sieur de Moret, one of the French hostage in England"; and also that a "Chas. sieur de Morette" is recorded among the four French hostages sent to England in 1519. It would thus appear that the painting is a portrait of Charles de Solier, seigneur de Morette; an eminent soldier and diplomatist of France; born in 1480, Ambassador to England more than once, and finally, in 1534.

Besides all the portraits of Holbein's English period, many of them scattered throughout the collections of all Europe, and many others now lost, it must not be forgotten that he was at the same time pouring forth miniature paintings, designs for engraving, designs for the goldsmith, and conceptions of every sort—from a carved chimney-piece to a woman's jewelled trinket; and all designed with the same exquisite precision and felicity. In the British Museum as on the Continent these drawings are an education in themselves. And besides the portrait studies in the Windsor Collection there is a sketch for a large painting which, if ever executed, is lost: "The Queen of Sheba visiting King Solomon."

CHAPTER IV

These were years of pleasant friendships, too, as well as work and cares. Nicholas Bourbon, scholar and poet, after his sojourn in London, writes back in 1536: "Greet in my name as heartily as you can all with whom you know me to be connected by intercourse and friendship." And after mentioning high dignitaries who had followed the King's example of showing special courtesies to Bourbon, he adds: "Mr. Cornelius Heyss, my host, the King's Goldsmith; Mr. Nicolaus Kratzer, the King's Astronomer, a man who is brimful of wit, jest, and humorous fancies; and Mr. Hans, the Royal Painter, the Apelles of our time. I wish them from my heart all joy and happiness." This little pen-picture of Holbein's intimate circle is a beautiful break in the mists of centuries—and shows us what manner of men they were among whom he had made for himself an honoured place. We could ill spare it from the few and meagre records of his life. It is also the very earliest documentary evidence of his being in the King's immediate service.

It was in this very year, 1536, that he received his commission to paint Anne Boleyn's successor, Jane Seymour, then on the throne the block had left vacant. The Vienna Gallery possesses this painting, of which another version is at Woburn Abbey, and the chalk drawing at Windsor (Plate 30).

The Queen was noted for her milk-white fairness, and Holbein has borrowed the pearly shadows of the lily in rendering it. The figure is a little under life-size. Her head-dress and robes of silver brocade and royal velvet are studded with splendid rubies and pearls to match the jewels on her neck and breast. The hands are as full of character as of art.

The Queen's portrait may properly be said to belong to the great wall painting which Holbein finished in 1537 for the Royal Palace at Whitehall. But before that date the painter's inner life had suffered one more great wrench. At midnight of July 12th, 1536, Erasmus died in the home that had been his own, except for the Freiburg interval, ever since John Froben's death in 1526; a death that had probably had much to do with Holbein's first departure from Basel. That event had uprooted the scholar from the old house zum Sessel, in the Fischmarkt, and transplanted him to the home of Froben's son, Hieronymus. The latter house, then known as zum Luft, is now No. 18, Bäumleingasse. And it was here that Erasmus passed away, his mind keeping to the last its humour and its interests in all around him. But no one, remembering how Fisher and More had died in the preceding year, can doubt but that the good old man was very willing to be gone, away from changed faces and changed ways—though Bonifacius Amerbach and young Froben were as sons to him.

Basel, for all her differences with him, buried Erasmus with great honours. But no tablet could so commemorate him as the noble monument which Holbein built to him in the title-page he designed for Hieronymus Froben's edition of Erasmus's Works, published in 1540. It is a woodcut of extraordinary beauty. The full-length figure of the scholar stands in cap and gown, with one hand resting lightly on the bust of the god Terminus (the god of immovable boundary lines, significantly conjoined to Erasmus's chosen motto: Concedo nulli) and the other calling attention to this significant emblem of fixed convictions. Not even the Louvre oil painting expresses the whole Erasmus quite so completely or so nobly as this little drawing of the man whom Holbein had loved and revered for twenty years; and to whom he owed, in the first place, the splendid opportunities of his career in England.

And as he drew it, what ghosts of his own Past must have clustered around the lean little figure! What echoes and visions! The Rhine, the gardens, the clang of the press, the Fischmarkt, the friendly smiles at Froben's and Meyer's firesides; his marriage; the stars and dews and perfume of all his dreams in the years—those matchless years of a man's young manhood—when he had walked with angels as well as peasants, had seen the Way of the Cross, the Christ in the Grave, and the Risen Lord even more clearly than the faces of flesh and blood. Eheu fugaces! "God help thee, Elia, how art thou sophisticated."

Ah, well! Those years, and the darker, sadder years that had led far from them, were now like his oldest friends—dead and buried. The Holbein of 1537 was painting the King of England on the wall of his Privy Chamber. There was a place for honest pride as well as for honest regret in his thoughts.

This painting perished with the palace in the fire of 1698. Charles II., however, had a small copy of it made by Leemput. And a portion of Holbein's original cartoon (Plate 31) in chalk and Indian ink, is in the possession of the Duke of Devonshire—the face much washed out by cleaning, and the outline pricked for transferring to the wall. The figures are life-size, but Walpole has already noticed how the massive proportions and solidly-planted pose of the King heighten the illusion of a Colossus. Behind him stands the admirably contrasted figure of Henry VII. The whole composition consisted of four portraits; Queen Jane Seymour opposite her husband, and the King's mother opposite to, and on a level with, Henry VII., who stands on the elevation of the background.

But Holbein's own portrait of Henry VIII.—as shown by the original chalk study from life now in the Munich Gallery (Plate 32)—may in all sobriety of speech be called a stupendous work. Looking at this marvellous drawing and picturing to one's self those cheeks informed with pulsing blood, those lips with breath, those eyes with blue gleams,—it is easy to understand that Van Mander was using no hyperbole when he said that the painting on the wall of the Privy Chamber made the stoutest knees to tremble. It was literally, as he said, "a terrible painting," of which none of the stupidly-heavy copies that have for the most part travestied Holbein's work give any true conception. Many a man could paint cloth-of-gold and gems; but only once and again in the centuries comes a man who can thus paint, not alone the mane and stride of the lion, but the fires that light his glance, the roar rushing to his lips. To look long into these eyes that Holbein had the genius to read and the firmness to draw, is to feel one's self in the grip of an insatiable, implacable, yet leonine soul; a being who, to borrow the matchless description of Burke's political career, is "parted asunder in his works like some vast continent severed by a convulsion of nature; each portion peopled by its own giant race of opinions, differing altogether in features and language, and committed in eternal hostility with one another." And so long as the great drama of Tudor England enthrals the minds of men, hard by Shakespeare's supreme name must be read the name of the painter in whose pages the actors in that drama have been compelled themselves to declare themselves.

To crown the King's pride, and to the no less intense delight of the whole nation which saw in this event the rainbow of every promise, at Hampton Court, on the 12th of October, 1537, Queen Jane Seymour gave birth to the son who was to reign so briefly as Edward VI. And it was doubtless in connection with this happy circumstance that the King commissioned Holbein's design for a truly royal piece of goldsmith's work. This drawing, generally known as "the Jane Seymour cup," is at Oxford, in the Bodleian Library (Plate 33).

No sketch of the artist's powers would be even barely complete without a realising sense of their versatility. And in this design Holbein has more than equalled the highest achievement of his great contemporary, Benvenuto Cellini, at this time in the service of the French Court. The initials of the King and Queen, H. and J., and the exceedingly judicious motto of the latter—"Bound to obey and to serve"—are recurring devices. But it is in the originality and unflawed beauty of the whole—the springing grace of outline, the taste and cunning with which flowers of gold naturally bloom into gems and pearls, the combination of freest, richest fancy with every restraint of a pure taste—that the perfection of this little masterpiece consists.

Choice fell at first on a Roman Catholic—Christina, the sixteen-year-old widow of Francis Sforza Duke of Milan, who had died in the autumn of 1535. The upshot of private inquiries was that Holbein was sent over to Brussels in March, 1538, to bring back a portrait of this daughter of Christian of Denmark and niece of Charles V. And although the painter had but three hours in which to do it, he did make what Hutton described as her "very perffight" image; besides which, said the envoy, the portrait previously despatched, though painted in all her state finery, "was but slobbered."

From this "perffight" painting, which could not have been more than one of his portrait studies, he afterwards completed that full-length oil painting which is worthy to rank with his great Morett portrait. By the kindness of the Duke of Norfolk, who has lent it, this beautiful work is now in the National Gallery (Plate 34). But unhappily for its best appreciation, to my thinking at least, it hangs at one side and in too close proximity to the bold colouring of "The Ambassadors"; so that its own subtle, yet reticent superiority is well-nigh shouted down by its lusty neighbour. It is a picture to be seen by itself; as it must stand by itself in the usual inane gallery of women's portraits.

Hutton tells us that the painter who "slobbered" Christina's portrait had painted her in full dress. But Holbein's eye was quick to recognise the values of her everyday dress—the widow's costume of Italy—in enhancing the distinction of her face and the stately slenderness of her figure. And so he drew her as she stood, with a hint of bending forward, her gloves being restlessly fingered in a shy yet proud embarrassment, in the first moments when he saw her.

It is easy to believe that they did, but her dimples did not chance for Henry VIII. Whether she really sent him, along with her picture, the witty refusal credited to her—that she had but one head; had she two, one should be at His Majesty's service—or whether it was the Emperor's doing entirely that his niece married the Duke of Lorraine instead of the man whose first wife had been Charles V.'s aunt, there is, at all events, a soft lurking devil in the demure little face which seems to whisper that the answer was one which she could have made an' she would.

Van Mander heard from Holbein's circle a story which modern pedantry is inclined to flout. This is, that when an irate nobleman wanted the painter punished for an affront, the King hotly exclaimed:—"Understand, my lord, that I can make seven earls out of as many hinds, any day; but out of seven earls I could not make one such painter as this Holbein." An eminently ben-trovato story, at all events. And certain it is that the painter stood sufficiently high in the royal favour to be despatched on some special private mission for the King in the summer of 1538, of which the secret was so well kept that nothing beyond the record of payment for it has ever transpired.

From this date Holbein's name is regularly down in the Royal Accounts. The amounts drawn total, it has been computed, about £360 in present value, and would make an agreeable annual addition to his other earnings. So that it is little wonder he was not tempted by the small sum offered by the Basel Council in 1532. But in 1538 the Council greatly increased the old offer, and was so anxious to have him among her citizens that the painter seized the opportunity of his secret mission to Upper Burgundy, whatever it was, to pay a flying visit to Basel in the interests of his family.

His old companions of the Guild of St. Johann Vorstadt made this visit—when Holbein was back among them, as was noted, "in silk and velvet"—the occasion of a grand banquet in his honour. But the real motive for his visit was to arrange upon what terms he could meet the Council's wishes. The terms were far from ungenerous, as is shown by the contract which followed him back to London.

In this the Council bound itself, in consideration of the great honour of retaining in their city a painter "famous beyond all other painters on account of the riches of his art," and in further consideration of his promise to make no absence from Basel more prolonged than should be really necessary to carry his foreign commissions to their destination and receive his pay for them—to give him an annuity of fifty guldens, equally whether Holbein should be ill or well, but only during his own life. In addition to this, they granted him permission to make short visits to specified art-centres, of which Milan was one, "once, twice, or thrice, every year." And recognising the impossibility of his freeing himself from his English engagements in less than two years, they also granted him this interval before he need resume his residence at Basel; and engaged to pay forty guldens yearly to his wife, on his behalf, for each of these two years.

There is every probability that Holbein himself took a goodly sum to Basel to invest for his family's permanent benefit in one way and another. For it could only have been as a part of this gleaning for them that he drew—as the Account Books show that he did just at this juncture—a whole year's salary in advance from the Royal Exchequer; seeing that the same books prove that he was liberally paid for all his own expenses on the King's service, in addition to his regular salary.

Part of the sum he collected to take with him was doubtless used to apprentice his son Philip, now sixteen, to the goldsmith's trade. And that the father chose Paris for this purpose, where he left Philip on his return journey, might well be due either to his own estimation of Jerome David, to whom Philip was indentured, or to the fact that Benvenuto Cellini's presence at Paris afforded some advantage; or that his own promised return to Basel would make it preferable to have the lad on the same side of the Channel as all his family. And that Holbein fully intended to make the necessary and obvious sacrifice involved in exchanging London for Basel is also proved by a contemporary account. "His intention was," says his fellow-townsman, "had God lengthened his life, to paint many of his pictures again at his own expense, as well as the hall in the Rathaus. The paintings on the Haus zum Tanz he pronounced 'pretty good.'" But it was not to be.

His New Year's offering to the King on the opening of 1539 was a portrait, probably the oil painting in the Hague Gallery, of the infant Prince of Wales. It was a spirited picture of the royal baby with his gold rattle in his chubby little fist, such as might have delighted a father less doting than Henry VIII., whose return gift is recorded: "To Hans Holbyne, paynter, a gilte cruse with a cover, weighing x oz. 1 quarter." The cruse was made by a friend of the painter; that Cornelius Hayes, goldsmith, whom Bourbon's letter mentioned in connection with him in 1536.

All these months the negotiations for the hand of the Duchess of Milan had fluctuated with the varying fortunes of the King's relations with her uncle, Charles V. But at last they had altogether collapsed with what seemed to Henry VIII. the threatening attitude assumed by the Emperor and the Pope. Hereupon followed that historical chapter, so full of fatal consequences to Cromwell, and no less big with shame for the King's own story: the pitiful chapter of Anne of Cleves.

Her brother, the Duke of Cleves, was at this time a troublesome foe to the Emperor; while the fact that she was a Protestant was a "Roland" for the Imperial and Papal "Oliver." So Holbein was again posted off to bring back a counterfeit of Anne, and to carry to her a miniature of the King. And by the 1st September he had acquitted himself of the new mission.

There is not an iota of historical or other evidence for that "Flanders mare" anecdote, which seems to have had a gratuitous as well as spontaneous origin in Bishop Burnet's seventeenth-century brain, to the effect that the King was the victim of a flattering portrait by Holbein, and cruelly undeceived by the actual looks of his bride. In the first place his agents wrote to him frankly that the Princess was of no great beauty, though not uncomely, and "never from the ellebowe of the Ladye Duchesse her Mother," who was said to be most unwilling to part with her (as a mother might well be, for the husband in question). The King was also told that she was quite unskilled in languages or music, and held, with her mother, that it was "for a rebuke and an occasion of lightenesse that great Ladyes shuld be lernyd or have enye knowledge of musike." And in the next place even a superficial knowledge of Holbein would disprove any tradition of "flattery" from his unflinching, almost brutally truthful brush. It was hardly likely that the painter who would not stoop to flatter Bishop Stokesley, or Henry VIII. himself, would be swerved from his good faith by Anne of Cleves.

On the contrary, the painting, in oils on vellum and mounted on a panel, now in the Louvre (Plate 35), is the very embodiment of contemporary accounts of this Princess. Her fair-skinned, commonplace, yet "not uncomely" face looks out placidly at you from the quaint Flemish head-dress of fine gauze and jewelled cloth-of-gold. Her inert hands (Holbein's hands belong to his truth-telling revelations), jewelled even on the thumb, are listlessly clasped upon each other; her crimson-velvet dress is heavily banded with gold and pearl embroidery.

The fact is that the King's very cruelty to this poor girl—torn from her mother's side and her Protestant home in Dürren to be the pawn of an unscrupulous diplomacy—was based on grounds, at least, less infamous than that of a slave-buyer. After both Cromwell and Holbein had been well rewarded for their services, the former lost his head and the Queen her crown on considerations that took no more account of her looks than her feelings. The Catholic glass had risen; the King himself was not ashamed to avow it; and the Protestant alliance was therefore an incubus. After some two months of a queen's and wife's estate, poor Anne of Cleves was bid to pack her belongings and take up a separate establishment as an unmarried woman. No wonder she fainted when first informed of such an infamy.

But there was no law in England save the fiat of Henry VIII. The marriage was pronounced "null and void," and Anne retired into private life, on the rigid condition that she would make no attempt to ever quit England, with an allowance of £3,000 a year, and the formal title of the King's "sister." There was no help for her. Never again for her would there be the austere joys of Dürren—her mother's side, her own timid dreams of other companionship, and never the price at which she had lost them.

At the head of the triumphant anti-Protestant, anti-Cromwell party stood Thomas Howard, third Duke of Norfolk, whose portrait, in the Royal Collection at Windsor, Holbein painted about this time (Plate 36). The lean face and the figure clothed in red stand out strikingly from the plain green background, although the painting has suffered not a little injury. The robe is lined and trimmed with ermine, and over it is the collar and badge of the Order of the Garter. In his right hand he holds the gold baton of his office as Earl Marshal, and in his left the White Staff of the Lord Chamberlain.

According to Roper, Norfolk, then Earl of Surrey, was a great friend of Sir Thomas More. But it would be hard to imagine a greater contrast than the records of the two men. The latter a pattern of personal purity and lofty ideals; the former as venal as the King's Parliaments, and as unscrupulous in pursuit of his passions as the King himself.

Norfolk's star of influence had already waxed and waned with the evil destinies of one niece, before it arose anew with the fortunes of another only to plunge sharply after them into the gulf of ruin. For the present he and Gardiner, restored to favour with him, were all-powerful. Their calculations seemed to prosper, too, beyond their most ambitious dreams, when, instead of ruling through a rival to Anne who should be the King's mistress, they were to rule through a legal successor. For the King was nothing if not technically correct; and from the moment when the fatal royal glance flamed on Catherine Howard when Gardiner was entertaining him, nothing would do but she should become his wife. And thus once more the wild wheel of Fortune was to make Norfolk uncle to a Queen of England.

Anne was divorced on the 12th of July, 1540, and on the 28th of the same month, on the very day when Thomas Cromwell was beheaded, the King married Anne Boleyn's cousin, Catherine Howard. On the 8th of August she was proclaimed Queen, and on the 15th of that month she was publicly prayed for as such in all the churches of the realm. Well might she be! Dry your outraged tears, Anne of Cleves, and give thanks to God that you are well out of it!

There is a miniature in the Windsor Collection now believed to be Holbein's portrait of Catherine Howard. Until recently it was held to be the portrait of Catherine Parr. But there is a larger portrait of the former among the Windsor drawings, a study evidently made for an oil painting (Plate 37). By this it seems that she had auburn hair, hazel eyes, a fair complexion, and a piquant smile. There is a painting which accords with this drawing in the Duke of Buccleuch's collection, but it is said to be by a French artist.