A Cloke of Prophecy: Burning Queen

In a recent post, I wrote an introduction to my Cromwell Cloke, with a view to sharing the “becoming” of a piece of my textile art. With that in mind, this series discusses some of the objects depicted on the Cloke, and the creative decisions behind each piece. It also gives me an opportunity to record sources and references both in and outside the text of Hilary Mantel’s Cromwell Trilogy.

A spoiler alert: if you are on the Wolf Crawl journey with

Simon Haisell

and you haven’t read the Trilogy before or are unfamiliar with this period of English history, please be aware that my work draws on the Trilogy as a whole as well as the historical record.

Yesterday I had a studio day and I spent it on a rather unpleasant construction job on the Cromwell Cloke - joining the “Family” section to the four sections already in place: Childhood, the Cardinal, Prophecy, and Dreams. I still need to add the Politics section, and then start thinking about Reform, Treason, and other themes yet to be decided.

There’s a balancing act involved: do I stitch all the motifs into each section before joining them, or do I join and then add more? It would be easier to complete each section before joining them all together - as more sections join, the heavier and more unwieldy the piece becomes - but I know from experience that such a fragmentary approach can result in an unsatisfactory whole. So I spent the day joining and calculating, measuring and trimming. And then standing back and looking at the Cloke’s progress to date, noting placements, thinking of text, and mentally filling blank spaces.

Work in progress. The Cloke is getting too big for the studio, even without the Family section attached.

Since the picture above was taken, I have added another motif to the Prophecy section - the head of a burning queen. Not a pleasant image. But an unavoidable one. There’s a line in Bring Up the Bodies in which Anne Boleyn tells Cromwell that:

There is a prophecy that a queen of England will be burned. (The Black Book)

I feel that I have always known this. I suspect I first read about it in one of the many historical novels I read as a young teenager. I’m intrigued as to where this prophecy originated, and how well known it was at the time.

A nasty little image, passed from hand to hand by enemies of Anne

My archive visits have shown me a couple of references from 1533, and I am sure there will be more.

In July of that year, a Mrs Amadas was investigated. Among her many prophecies - which, she said, she had been studying for 20 years - it was reported that:

She rejoiced when the Tower was made white, for she said shortly after my lady Anne should be burned, for she is a harlot ; that Master Nores [Norris] was bawd between the King and her; that the King had kept both the mother and the daughter, and that my lord of Wiltshire was bawd both to his wife and his two daughters.

She had plenty of unpleasant things to say about the King. And “that, to set up a candle before the Devil, she gave four New Year's gifts to the King, lady Anne, the duke of Norfolk, and Cromwell”.

I was interested in this particular investigation as I was already familiar with the unusual name of Amadas. Both Robert Amadas and John Amadas come up often in the historical record - they were a family of goldsmiths, who supplied gold and silver plate to the King and court, often named in inventories, and Robert Amadas was Master of the King’s Jewel House, being succeeded by one Thomas Cromwell. So was Mrs Amadas making prophecies as a member of that family, with inside knowledge of the Court? Or is the name a coincidence? There are conflicting opinions about this, and I’m not sure I will ever know the truth. One to ponder.

Mrs Amadas was not the only person to make such a prophecy. In Exeter, in June 1533, a priest named Sir Thomas Gebons reported that Sir Rauf Wendon had said that Anne was:

a whore and a harlot, and that there was a prophecy that she should be burned in Smithfield, and he trusted it would be the end of Queen Anne.

Gebons said he had reported this to the bishop of Exeter - in the presence of one Christopher Veisy, and the document below is a draft of the questions that were put to Veisy in the subsequent investigation.

These separate investigations give us a small indication of how widespread the idea of Anne burning was in 1533. I know that Ambassador Chapuys made a reference to it later correspondence - so it was fairly well known. I’m keeping my eyes open for further evidence. And while pondering the origins of this prophecy, I added a burning queen with exaggerated features onto the Cromwell Cloke. I wanted to convey the idea of crude sketches being passed around from hand to hand, as rumours of the prophecy spread and were repeated and exaggerated.

There is a lot to unpack here - Anne’s unpopularity; a fear of witchcraft; misogyny; accusations of immorality. But that must all wait for another time. I’m off to Hampton Court today and must leave this post here - as a marker for further research.