An Overlooked Connection of Anne Boleyn’s Maid of Honour, Elizabeth Holland, with BL, King’s MS. 9
Sylwia Sobczak Zupanec
During their courtship, Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn passed love notes during mass in the royal chapel.1 These romantic notes were inscribed in an illuminated Book of Hours currently stored in the British Library (BL, King’s MS. 9).2 The King chose to put his note in French under the miniature of Christ as the Man of Sorrows kneeling before his tomb and wearing the crown of thorns:
If you remember my love in your prayers as strongly as I adore you, I shall hardly be forgotten, for I am yours. Henry R. forever3
Fig. 1. 1. Henry VIII’s inscription in French, British Library, King’s MS. 9, f. 231v.
1 Eric Ives, The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn: ‘The Most Happy’ (Oxford, 2001), p. 6. 2 BL, King’s MS. 9. See:
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Anne reciprocated by inscribing a couplet in English under the miniature of the Annunciation, the angel Gabriel telling the Virgin Mary that she would bear a son:
Be daly prove you shall me fynde To be to you both lovynge and kynde4
Fig. 1. 2. Anne Boleyn’s inscription, British Library, King’s MS. 9, f. 66v.
Among the sixteenth-century owners of this Book of Hours were Henry Reppes of Mendham and his first wife, Elizabeth; their names are inscribed on f. 1r.5 Elizabeth Reppes’s connection to Anne Boleyn has not been studied in relation to BL, King’s MS. 9, and therefore in this article I would like to shed more light on the person of Elizabeth Reppes and propose a new theory concerning how this Book of Hours might have ended up inscribed by Elizabeth and her husband.
4 BL, King’s MS. 9, f. 66v. 5 The British Library’s digital facsimile is available at
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Fig. 1. 3. The inscribed names of Henry Reppes and Elizabeth Reppes, British Library, King’s MS. 9, f. 1r.
Elizabeth served as one of Anne Boleyn’s maids of honour before she married Henry Reppes in 1547; she was then known as Elizabeth Holland. The date when Elizabeth joined Anne Boleyn’s household remains unknown, but in a dispatch dating to 27 September 1533, the imperial ambassador Eustace Chapuys identified her as ‘a young lady of the King’s concubine, called Holland’.6 Elizabeth Holland was a mistress of Anne Boleyn’s maternal uncle, Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk. Norfolk’s estranged wife, Elizabeth Howard, could never forgive her husband for having an extramarital affair and expressed anger at losing him to a woman of inferior social rank. The Duchess of Norfolk disparagingly referred to Elizabeth Holland using an abbreviated form of her name, ‘Bessy’. The Duchess, who prided herself on her Stafford blood, scorned ‘Bessy Holland’ on the grounds of her lowly status, calling her ‘but a churl’s daughter and of no gentle blood’ and ‘that drab’ who was ‘but washer of my nursery [for] eight years, and she hath been the causer of all my trouble’.7 While Elizabeth Holland’s social status was certainly lower than the Duchess of Norfolk’s, it was not as low as the duchess angrily asserted.8 Elizabeth Holland’s status was evidently high enough for her to become one of the maids of honour to Anne Boleyn, although it is possible that Queen Anne employed her uncle’s mistress as a favour to him.
6 James Gairdner (ed.), Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII (London, 1882), vol. vi, 1164, pp. 481-96. The ‘concubine’ was Anne Boleyn, whom Chapuys never acknowledged as Queen because of his undying loyalty to Henry VIII’s first wife, the Spanish Katharine of Aragon. 7 Mary Anne Everett Wood, Letters of Royal and Illustrious Ladies of Great Britain (London, 1846), vol. ii, pp. 224, 371. 8 Thomas Howard’s biographer, professor David M. Head, stated that Elizabeth was a daughter of John Holland, a treasurer and chief steward in the Duke of Norfolk’s household. David M. Head, The Ebbs and Flows of Fortune: The Life of Thomas Howard, Third Duke of Norfolk (Athens, GA, 2009), p. 251. An entry in the Calendar of the Patent Rolls for the years 1548-9, however, makes it clear that she was a daughter of one Thomas Holland the elder, esquire, probably a relation to John Holland. Calendar of Patent Rolls 1548- 49: Edward VI (London, 1970), ii, p. 92.
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Women played an important and active role in the literary coterie surrounding Anne Boleyn and her exuberant court. The so-called ‘Devonshire Manuscript’ is the most important evidence of this.9 The manuscript was owned by Anne Boleyn’s teenaged cousin, Mary Howard, Duchess of Richmond (married to Henry VIII’s illegitimate son, Henry Fitzroy) whose initials appear on the original binding.10 Another young woman of Queen Anne’s court who kept and contributed to the manuscript was Mary Shelton.11 Elizabeth Holland was close to both of these young women. Elizabeth formed a close bond with Mary Howard and later in her life confessed that ‘she had addicted herself much’ to her lover’s daughter.12 Thomas Howard’s estranged wife, the abovementioned Duchess of Norfolk, resented the fact that Mary and Elizabeth shared such a close relationship.13 An inventory of Elizabeth Holland’s jewels made after Thomas Howard’s arrest in 1546 recorded a ring ‘with a pointed diamond, which was sent [to] her as a token from Mrs. Mary Shelton’, which indicates that Holland had remained on friendly terms with Shelton.14 Both Howard and Shelton were Anne Boleyn’s kin, and their families were much favoured by the Queen. Mary Howard accompanied Anne during major events in the latter’s rise, such as Anne’s elevation to the peerage in 1532 (Mary’s first recorded appearance at court), her coronation and the christening of Anne’s only daughter, Elizabeth, in June and September 1533 respectively. It was Anne Boleyn who arranged a splendid match between Mary and Henry VIII’s illegitimate son, Henry Fitzroy. In his Actes and Monuments, better known as The Book of Martyrs, John Foxe recorded that Mary was one of ‘the chief and principal of her [Anne Boleyn’s] waiting maids’.15 Whether Mary Shelton was equally favoured is less clear. Anne Boleyn’s chaplain, William Latymer, later recorded that the Queen rebuked Shelton for scribbling ‘idle poesies’ in her prayer book (ironic, considering that Anne scribbled a love note addressed to the King in hers).16 The Queen could have been vexed about the fact that early in 1535 Shelton became Henry VIII’s mistress for a brief spell.17 Elizabeth Holland’s closeness to Mary Howard and Mary Shelton indicates that she moved in the same social and literary circles as them and may have enjoyed a warm relationship with Anne Boleyn. Elizabeth Holland’s interest in literary pursuits may explain why her married name, Elizabeth Reppes, appears in Anne Boleyn’s Book of Hours, BL, King’s MS. 9. By 1546, Elizabeth Holland was no longer Thomas Howard’s mistress. She was interrogated in December of that year in relation to the charges of treason faced by her lover and his son, Henry, Earl of Surrey. She yielded many caveats that contributed to the Earl of Surrey’s execution on 28 January 1547.18 Thomas Howard was saved from the executioner’s blade only by Henry VIII’s death, but he was not released until Mary Tudor began her reign in 1553.
9 BL, Add. MS 17492. 10 Helen Baron, ‘Mary (Howard) Fitzroy’s Hand in the Devonshire Manuscript’, The Review of English Studies, New Series, xlv: 179 (Aug. 1994), pp. 318-35. 11 Paul G. Remley, ‘Mary Shelton and Her Tudor Literary Milieu’ in Peter C. Herman (ed.), Rethinking the Henrician Era: Essays on Early Tudor Texts and Contexts (Urbana, 1994), pp. 40-78. 12 William A. Sessions, Henry Howard, the Poet Earl of Surrey: A Life (Oxford, 2003), p. 398. 13 Everett Wood, op. cit. 14 G. F. Nott (ed.), The Works of Henry Howard Earl of Surrey and Sir Thomas Wyatt the Elder (London, 1815), p. cxvii. 15 Rev. M. Hobart Seymour (ed.), The Actes and Monuments by John Foxe (New York, 1855), p. 372. 16 Maria Dowling (ed.), ‘William Latymer’s Cronickille of Anne Bulleyne’, Camden Miscellany XXX, Camden 4th ser., xxxix (1990), p. 63. 17 James Gairdner (ed.), Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII, (London, 1885), vol. viii, 263, pp. 8-21. 18 The original depositions are now lost, but they were seen in the seventeenth century by Lord Herbert of Cherbury, who abstracted them in his book entitled Life and Raigne of King Henry the Eighth. Edward Lord Herbert of Cherbury, The Life and Raigne of King Henry the Eight (London, 1649).
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By the summer of 1547, Elizabeth had married Henry Reppes of Mendham. An entry for 28 July 1547 in the pardon roll in Calendar of the Patent Rolls 1548-49 shows that they were married by that date.19 That same source reveals that by 28 November 1548 Elizabeth was already dead.20 A letter by one Symon Lowe to his friend reveals that Elizabeth was a victim of a botched Caesarean operation and ‘died with child, and the child was ripped out of her belly’.21 This means that Elizabeth was married to Henry Reppes from c. 28 July 1547 to c. 28 November 1548; they must have inscribed their names in King’s MS. 9 at that time. Just how Anne Boleyn’s Book of Hours found its way to Elizabeth Reppes, née Holland, remains unknown. Anne Boleyn was executed on 19 May 1536. Whether Elizabeth was one of the four unnamed ‘young ladies’ who accompanied the Queen to the scaffold remains unknown but plausible.22 According to a French poem describing Anne Boleyn’s downfall written by Lancelot de Carle, secretary to the French resident ambassador Antoine de Castelnau, these young women empathized with Anne so much so that they were judged to be ‘nearly dead themselves from languor and extreme weakness’.23 While she was imprisoned, Anne Boleyn complained that she thought it was ‘much unkindness in the King to put such about me as I never loved’ and expressed the desire to have trusted ladies of her own Privy Chamber with her.24 Ladies Kingston, Coffin, Stonor and Boleyn (Anne’s aunt), who served the Queen in the Tower, could by no means have been described as young or sympathetic, and it seems plausible that, moved by conscience, Henry VIII appointed four of Anne’s favourite attendants to accompany her to the scaffold. If so, Elizabeth Holland might have been one of them. Considering the highly intimate nature of the inscriptions exchanged by Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn on the pages of King’s MS. 9, it seems highly unlikely that the Queen would have presented the manuscript to Elizabeth Holland before her arrest in May 1536. The theory I propose in this article is that Elizabeth Holland was one of the four unnamed young gentlewomen who accompanied Anne to the scaffold and was presented with Anne Boleyn’s Book of Hours by the Queen herself about that time.25 The fact that Elizabeth and her husband inscribed their names in the manuscript wherein a royal couple exchanged love verses during their courtship may point to the possibility that the inscription commemorated their own nuptials. Perhaps it is too fanciful to imagine Queen Anne leafing through her Book of Hours in the Tower, stopping by the highly evocative miniature of the Annunciation under which she addressed
19 Calendar of the Patent Rolls 1548-49: Edward VI (London, 1970), vol. ii, p. 140. 20 Ibid., p. 92. 21 BL, Egerton MS. 2713-2722, f. 16. 22 James Gairdner (ed.), Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII (London, 1887), x, 911, pp. 371-91. 23 Everett Wood, op. cit. 24 James Gairdner (ed.), Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII (London, 1887), vol. x, 797, pp. 329-49. 25 A tradition exists that Anne Boleyn presented to her ladies prayer books, and that one of these (BL, Stowe MS. 956) was given by the Queen on the scaffold to a member of the Wyatt family. Historian Eric Ives rightly pointed out that there is ‘no contemporary record of Anne giving gifts on the scaffold’ and that this tradition ‘is only identifiable from the early eighteenth century and was not known to George Wyatt [Anne’s early biographer]’. Eric Ives, The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn: ‘The Most Happy’, op. cit., p. 406-7. Historian Leanda de Lisle proposed that BL, Stowe 956, which romantic tradition links with Anne Boleyn, may in fact have belonged to Anne’s maid of honour Margaret Douglas (another member of the literary coterie contributing to the ‘Devonshire Manuscript’), who bequeathed a tablet with a picture of Henry VIII to Robert Dudley in her last will. De Lisle points out that the miniature of Henry VIII in Stowe 956 is ‘based on the Holbein portrait of 1536, which alone disproves the romantic claim that it was once owned by Anne Boleyn’. Leanda de Lisle, Tudor: The Family Story (London, 2013), p. 515. It is not inconceivable, however, that Anne Boleyn gave away her Books of Hours as keepsakes to her four distressed young attendants while she was imprisoned in the Tower.
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a lovely couplet to the King of England, who adored her at the time. Perhaps the symbolism was not lost on the clever Anne, whose figurative promise to give Henry VIII the son he desired more than anything else fell short in 1533, when the Queen gave birth to a daughter, Elizabeth, and then again in 1534 and 1536, when her subsequent pregnancies ended in personal tragedies. King’s MS. 9 was a painful reminder of a once hopeful and young Anne who dreamed about becoming Henry VIII’s Queen and mother of his son. This personal Book of Hours was of no use to her in those grim circumstances, but made an excellent gift for a favoured maid of honour to remember her by.
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