Thomas Cromwell's Book of Hours

The book depicted by Hans Holbein the Younger in his portrait of Thomas Cromwell, Chief Minister to King Henry VIII, was identified in 2023 as a specially bound Book of Hours held in the Wren Library at Trinity. Printed in Paris by Germain Hardouyn in 1527 or 28, this book was presented to Trinity in 1660 by Anne Sadleir, who was married to the grandson of Cromwell’s secretary, Ralph Sadleir.

The Holbein portrait dates from 1532-33 and is thought to commemorate Cromwell’s appointment as Master of the Royal Jewel House. It seems likely that the book was positioned so prominently in the painting because of its grand binding with jewels mounted in silver gilt. The identification was made following a request to loan this book to an exhibition at Hever Castle, the home of the Boleyn family. The castle possesses a copy of the same edition of this book which was owned by Anne Boleyn, and a third copy of this edition, now in the Morgan Library & Museum in New York, was owned by Catherine of Aragon. Both of these other copies have been rebound at a later date, so it is impossible to be sure of their outward appearance in the sixteenth century, but it is notable that three copies of the same edition had such prominent owners.

The discovery was first noticed by Hever Castle’s curator Alison Palmer. Further research at Hever by Kate McCaffrey and Dr Owen Emmerson has shown that the silver borders are the work of Pierre Mangot, goldsmith to King Francis I of France. The binding consists of wooden boards covered with black or dark blue velvet and surmounted with silver gilt borders which are fixed to each board with a single nail. Hallmarks on the silver borders prove that the binding was manufactured in 1530. The book does not include a precise date of printing, but the prefatory material includes a list of the dates of Easter for the following 14 years, which starts with the date of Easter in 1528.

This suggests that the book was probably printed between Easter 1527 and Easter 1528. It was then illuminated by hand in Hardouyn’s workshop, before being bound in 1530 and shipped to England sometime before 1532-33, when the portrait was painted. It seems likely that Thomas Cromwell gave this book to his secretary Ralph Sadleir, along with the Holbein portrait. Sadleir’s son Thomas was named after Cromwell, who had been his godfather, and Thomas Sadleir’s own son, Ralph, was the second husband of Anne Sadleir, who gave the book to Trinity College, where her father, the famous lawyer Sir Edward Coke, had studied.

There was still a question to be answered about the jewels found on the binding and clasps. When Anne Sadleir presented the book on 10 August 1660, the jewels on the binding were described as jasper stones. This was corrected by a later writer to ‘hyacinthi’, or jacinths, but Pierre Mangot was well known for his use of another semi-precious stone, carnelian. Each of these stones has various symbolic meanings attributed to it in writings of the time, and it remained intriguing to establish the true identity of the stones. In order to prove with certainty what type of gemstones were used in the binding, we took the book to the NanoPhotonics Centre in the Cavendish Laboratory, where PhD student Joanna Symonowicz used Raman spectroscopy to analyse the chemical structure of the stones.

The result of this analysis is conclusive evidence that the stones are in fact grossular garnets, another gem frequently used in ornamental metalwork of this period and with a wide range of possible significance or meaning to its owners.