Judging a Cover by Its Book

SOMETIME DURING THE 1540S, the London workshop of the immigrant goldsmith Hans van Antwerpen produced a ‘tablet’ or girdle-book for an unidentified customer. A small gold case that opened like a book and measured approximately 64 × 55 × 14 mm when closed, it had a ring attached to the top of each cover by which it could be suspended from a woman’s girdle, and was evidently intended to contain a miniature prayer-book. As shown in Fig. 1, each cover has a panel measuring about 52 × 34 mm, illustrated with a scene from the Bible in repoussé relief and coloured with black and pearl enamel. Around each panel in black enamel is the relevant quotation from the Bible,¹ while the spine and the two clasps are chased and enamelled with arabesque patterns.

Fig. 1.

Enamelled gold girdle prayer-book case by Hans van Antwerpen, London, early 1540s (British Museum no. 1894.0729.1). Reproduced (at approximately 95% actual size) by courtesy of The British Museum Images.

Open in new tabDownload slide

It was presumably made to fit around an existing book, more probably manuscript than printed, but its original contents have not survived. As Hugh Tait first pointed out in 1962, the quotation on the upper cover cannot antedate the first publication of the English translation known as ‘the Great Bible’ (not on sale until November 1539, despite the ‘Apryll’ colophon), in which Moses is told to ‘make the a fyrie serpent, and set it vp for a sygne’.² In 1977 Tait discovered what he believed to be the prototype of the Moses panel on a Flemish binding dated 1543, and convincingly explained how the London goldsmith variously ‘omitted’, ‘replaced’, ‘discarded’ or ‘repeated’ details from the Flemish source. Paradoxically, though, Tait continued to argue for a date ‘in 1540 or very soon afterwards’ for the London copy,

speculating that Hans could have ‘obtained access to the original in Antwerp during his travels … in 1539 or … gained a knowledge of it from one of his “foreign” assistants’.³

But exactly when in the 1540s the case was made is of less importance in the present context than what happened to it in the 1570s, when someone chose to discard the original contents and replace them with something (or rather, with three things) Elizabethan. The book now inside the golden case contains 151 printed leaves that will be discussed in detail below. Bound at each end of them are several blank leaves which were not photographed when the text was filmed in 1993. According to Susan Felch, who was allowed to examine the booklet in or before 2007,

On the inside of the front cover is a vellum pastedown, followed by one blank vellum and three blank paper pages; the volume concludes with another three paper pages, a repaired vellum leaf, and a vellum pastedown.⁴

The six paper ‘pages’ are presumably leaves, of which each trio probably includes one conjugate pair. Although nothing is mentioned about the booklet’s binding, if the outermost leaves of ‘vellum’ (or more probably parchment) are ‘pastedowns’, perhaps what they are pasted to is yet a third material.

What the case contains therefore appears to be a bound codex in its own right. To insert that book into (or remove it from) the golden case, the case must be opened until flat (or beyond), and each of the booklet’s covers slipped into the turned-in gold edges of the appropriate cover.⁵ The book was taken out at least once in the 1980s so that the inside of the case could be photographed for Tait’s 1985 article in Jewellery Studies. It was removed again in 1993 so that the text could be microfilmed for the British Library, and again some years later for Felch to examine when she was editing the Tyrwhit text. But the importance and fragility of the case have led to a stricter policy, and the Museum authorities are now reluctant to allow it to be opened more than a few degrees, if at all.

The first of the three items in the printed codex is what is now the only extant copy of the 1574 edition of a small printed book called ‘Morning and Euening prayer, with diuers Psalmes Himnes and Meditations’ (Fig. 3). The fourth word should certainly have been plural prayers, but there is as much space before the comma as after it, and no sign of damage to the surface of the paper.⁶ The next three lines report that the text was ‘¶Made by the Lady Elizabeth Tirwit’, and that as required by law it has been ‘Seene & allowed’.

Fig. 2.

The inside of the gold case, with the printed book removed. Reproduced by courtesy of The British Museum Images.

Open in new tabDownload slide

The book’s publisher, Christopher Barker, was made free of the Drapers’ Company in January 1560 after serving an apprenticeship with the book-selling draper John Petyt.⁷ Barker was therefore probably in his early thirties when he made his first appearance in the Stationers’ records. Not long after 22 July 1569 (in the eighth of the 204 ‘copy-entrances’ of 1569–70) he paid 8d for his licence to print ‘serten prayers of my Lady tyrwett’, and then another 4d to secure ‘serten prayers of m^r bullion’.⁸ I suspect that ‘m^r bullion’ was an error for Henry Bull, whose Christian Prayers and Holy Meditations was reprinted several times after the first known edition of 1568 (STC 4028), at which time it was owned by the printer Henry Middleton.

Small-format books of private prayers were intended for regular use rather than occasional consultation. They were therefore unlikely to become shelved in the library of a scholar or a wealthy bibliophile, so the chance that any given edition would survive into the present century was not far above zero. Bull’s Christian Prayers and Holy Meditations far outstrips the norm for the decade of 1569–78, with five editions known from single copies (complete or nearly so) and a sixth from two copies.⁹ All were printed by Henry Middleton, so if ‘bullion’ had been an error, Barker probably conceded amicably—and it was Middleton who printed the only extant copy of Lady Tyrwhit’s prayers for him in 1574 (in 32^o, a miniature format far less likely to survive than the 16^o and 8^o editions of Bull). If there had been any earlier Barker editions one of them could have caught the acquisitive eye of William Seres, who was seeking out books of private prayer that he could ensnare with the revised wording of his 1571 patent. In 1577, however, Barker would acquire a patent capable of trumping that of Seres, and there is evidence that relations between the two men were some-what strained during the second half of the 1570s.

Middleton may in fact have contributed to Barker’s book in more ways than one, because the ‘briefe exhortation vnto prayer’ with which it begins is not by Tyrwhit, but taken (with slight modification) from the preliminaries of Bull’s Christian Prayers, and the same exhortation also appears in another Middleton prayer collection of 1574, A Godly Garden.¹⁰ Tyrwhit herself has to share the title-page credit with Barker and Middleton (both of whom are named again in the colophon on M6^v), while four other pages contain only Barker’s device (Fig. 3), depicting a man stripping bark from logs (D8^v, E4^v, K4^v, M7^r).¹¹ We can also subtract twelve pages for Bull’s ‘exhortation’ (A2^r–7^v), thirty-three for the Litany from The Book of Common Prayer (K6^r–M6^r),¹² and six blanks (H3^v, K5^r–v, M7^v–8^v). Even if we include the woodcut of her father’s arms on the verso of the title,¹³ Tyrwhit’s own contribution is less than seventy-one percent of the book.

But the ninety-six leaves of Barker’s first known publication are not nearly enough to fill van Antwerpen’s golden case. On the three outer edges of each cover the gold sheet is folded inwards to create a channel about five millimetres deep into which one cover of the bound booklet can be slid from the spine forwards (see Fig. 2) Unless the inserted book is the right thickness (within a very small range), the case will either not open or not close properly. And the volume that has resided in it since the 1570s contains substantially more than just the ninety-six leaves of the Tyrwhit book. The remaining fifty-five printed leaves come from two different books, each defective at both ends: forty leaves from one book and fifteen from another.

Fragment 1: The Queenes Prayers

The first published description of what follows Morning and Euening prayer was given in a letter of 15 January 1791 by William Herbert:

The next article … has the following title in a border of metal flowers: “The Queene’s Prayers, or Meditations: wherein the Mynde is stirred to suffer all Afflictions here.” … the running title throughout is “The Queene’s Praiers;” even over that part of “The Letanye,” which remains.¹⁴

Herbert reports that he has an edition not much larger, resembling it in most respects, printed by William How in 1571 (now STC 3010 part 2, in 16^o).

This has the title ‘environed with a border of the same metal flowers’, so Herbert tentatively suggests that they may both be the work of the same printer.¹⁵ The STC revisers (followed by most subsequent commentators) assumed instead that the printer was Middleton, and numbered the book as 4826.6—although 3010.5 part 2 would have been more apposite.

In June 1545 Thomas Berthelet, King’s Printer to Henry VIII, printed the first known edition of Prayers stirryng the mynd vnto heauenlye medytacions: collected oute of holy workes by the mooste vertuous and gracious princess Katherine quene of Englande, Fraunce, and Irelande (STC 4818). The next known edition appeared from the same press and with the same date, but with the title revised to read as follows: Prayers or meditacions, wherin the mynde is styrred paciently to suffre all afflictions here, to sette at nought the vayne prosperitie of this worlde, and alway to longe for the euerlastyng felicitie: collected out of certain holy woorkes by the same queen, who on this title-page is spelled Catharine. The enlarged title appears on all extant editions up to and including 1561—after which no separate editions are known before 1640.¹⁶ It is also material to note that all editions before 1568 have the one-word running-title ‘Prayers’ (variously spelled and capitalized) on both rectos and versos.

Just over a year before printing the first edition, Berthelet had printed a selection of Latin psalms and prayers by St John Fisher (Psalmi seu precationes ex variis scripturae locis collectae) dated 18 April 1544 (STC 2994). A week later on the 25th he issued an English translation (Psalmes or prayers taken out of holye scripture, 3001.7). In 1568 Henry Wykes printed the third known edition of the Latin—and the fourteenth known edition of the English (2995a, 3009 part 1). That English edition, however, had an expanded title: The Psalmes or Praiers taken out of Holy Scripture, commonly called The Kynges Psalmes (the king in question being Henry VIII, at whose command the real author had been beheaded in 1535),¹⁷ and it was followed by a separately-signed reprint of Queen Catherine’s book with a shortened title (The Queenes Praiers or Meditations: wherein the minde is stirred to suffer all afflictions here, as in the girdle-book). Editions with that title have verso running titles reading ‘The Queenes’, while those on rectos read ‘Prayers’ (or both in capitals as in the girdle-book). The printer of the girdle-book fragment (Fig. 4), however, was neither William How nor Henry Wykes. The initial M used on the second recto is unequivocally identifiable as the one used in 1573 on Aa3^v of STC 23325.6, and in 1574 on B1^r of 19140, by Thomas Marshe.

Herbert reported the structure of this second prayer book as follows. ‘The four first leaves are without a signature, B–E, in eights; F has only four leaves remaining.’ He apparently assumed that the first four leaves were an intact quire, while Felch correctly realized that they are the second half of an eight-leaf quire (the stubs of the missing leaves are visible before the title leaf, as can be seen in Fig. 4). She therefore summarized the collation as ‘[A5r]–F4v’ (p. 51).¹⁸ This, however, raises the tricky question of what leaves A1–4 could plausibly have contained.

Both the wording of the title and the fact that it appears in mid-quire show that Marshe was almost certainly reprinting from an edition that began with The Kynges Psalmes. The text that Marshe fits into a little over ninety-four pages occupies eighty-one pages in Henry Wykes’s undated 16^o of the late 1560s (STC 3009.5) and a few lines more than that in William How’s reprint of 1571 (3010). In each of those editions The Kynges Psalmes fills seventeen quires (A–R⁸), so if Marshe reprinted one of them in 32^o we should expect his version to fill between nineteen and twenty quires, and to finish somewhere in quire V.

In all extant combined editions before 1585, The Queenes Prayers was printed as if a separate booklet, with its own signatures beginning from its title-page on ²A1^r. If Marshe’s reprint began as the second half of the quire in which The Kynges Psalmes ended (perhaps V5^r–8^v), none of its eight pages would have needed a signature. But when his compositor(s) began to reset the next eight pages of the copy, the signatures he or they found there would have included ‘B.j.’–‘B.iiij’. In which case signing their new quire ‘B’ rather than ‘X’ would have made better sense than appears at first sight.¹⁹

Marshe’s contribution to the girdle-book also ends with four disjunct leaves: leaves F1–4 of quire F⁸. As already noted, after inserting an extract from Bull’s Christian Prayers and Holy Meditations into the beginning of Tyrwhit’s book of prayers, on K6^r–M6^r Barker and Middleton also appended Cranmer’s Litany from the official prayer book. First printed in 1544 in An Exhortation vnto Prayer (STC 10620), the Litany was somehow overlooked in 1549 when The Book of the Common Prayer was first printed. Omitted from both the first and second issues of the first edition, it was first included in a bifolium appended to the third issue.²⁰ Under Elizabeth it became common for the Litany to be included in collections of private prayers and/or meditations, for example Achelley’s Key of Knowledge (STC 85a, Y3^v–Z8^v), Becon’s Pomander of Prayers (1746, R2^v–S4^r), Bull’s Christian Prayers and Holy Meditations (4028, X3^r–Y2^v), Day’s Christian Prayers and Meditations in English (6428, G1^r–I2^v), and the anonymous Certayne Godly Exarcises (10617, H2^v–8^v), A Godly Garden (11555, F7^v–H5^v), A Castle for the Soule (24911, N7^r–Q4^v), and A Tablet for Gentlewomen (23640, O5^v–Q8^r). It also appears at the end of each edition of Queen Catherine’s prayers (whether separate or appended to The Kynges Psalmes)—and in Marshe’s 32^o it begins on F4^r after the last three lines of the last of her prayers.

In the separate 16^o edition of The Queenes Prayers of 1559 (STC 4826) the Litany fills nineteen frame-narrowed pages averaging seventeen lines each. In 16^o editions appended to The Kynges Psalmes it fills either twenty-seven framed pages of fifteen lines each (3009.5, 1569?) or twenty-four (3010, 1571). Marshe’s unframed 32^o pages are proportionally wider, and average seventeen lines each. What would have remained of the Litany after page F8^v would probably have needed more pages than the eight of a quire G⁴, but would not have extended beyond the sixteen pages of a quire G⁸. We can therefore safely assume that the first four unsigned leaves of The Queenes Prayers were originally followed by quires B–G⁸.

Taking out leaf F4 would have left the last of Queen Catherine’s prayers missing its last three lines, but keeping it preserved a page and a half of Litany as eloquent evidence that the booklet was a dismembered fragment. A complete repetition of the Litany would arguably have been less of an eyesore than the present disjunction between Marshe’s F4 and what follows it. Removing leaves F5–8 and quire G took out twelve leaves, which were eventually replaced by fifteen from a third source. Had the second Litany been left intact, any significant discrepancy in thickness could have been acceptably made up by one or two blank flyleaves at either end, and the obvious disjunction between the second and third booklets could have been avoided.

Fragment 2: title unknown

The Queenes Prayers and the beginning of the second Litany are followed by a far more enigmatic fragment from a third printing house. It consists of just two eight-leaf quires, A and B, printed in black and red, but with only a clearly visible stub remaining of leaf A1, which was presumably the title leaf (Fig. 5). The recto of A2 has the second half of the italic head-title ‘[An almanack] | for.xx. yeare.’, a series of column-headings printed vertically, and then the relevant calendrical facts for each year from 1583 to 1591. That immediately introduces a problem, because while there would have been room below for one more year, there was not room for two. The facing page A1^v presumably balanced A2^r, so it too would have listed only nine years (1574–82). I therefore suspect that while a previous edition of 1572 had a twenty-year almanack for 1572–91, this one was a reprint of 1574 with years 1572–73 deleted and the columns rebalanced, though with the headline lacking the necessary correction to ‘.xviii. yeare’.

Fig. 3.

ESTC S95624 (Tyrwhit, Morning and Evening Prayers, 1574) sigs. A1^r, M6^v–7^r. Reproduced (enlarged to about 125%) by courtesy of the British Library Board.

Open in new tabDownload slide

Fig. 4.

ESTC S91374 (Catherine Parr, The Queenes Prayers, c. 1574) sigs?5^r–6^r. Reproduced (enlarged to about 125%) by courtesy of the British Library Board.

Open in new tabDownload slide

Fig. 5.

ESTC S91374 (Parr, The Queenes Prayers, c. 1574) sig. F4^v, and the otherwise unknown ‘Fragment 2’ sigs. A2^r and B6^v–7^r. Reproduced (enlarged to about 125%) by courtesy of the British Library Board.

Open in new tabDownload slide

The calendar of saints that follows gives each month two facing pages, and ends on B6^r, leaving only five extant pages. The first of them (B6^v) contains the Trinitarian formula (‘In the name of the father’, etc.), followed by ‘The Lordes prayer’. This begins with an 8.5-mm initial O that belonged to Henry Denham: one of a pair of similar (but not quite identical) design.²¹ On B7^r ‘The Beliefe or Creede’ begins with a calligraphic ‘I’ a little over 13 mm in height: perhaps part of a cast alphabet, but I have not noticed any obviously matching letters elsewhere.²² The Creed ends halfway down B7^v, and is followed by ‘The ten Commaundements of almighty God’, which taper to an end near the foot of the final extant page of the booklet.

In the 1570s the printer Henry Denham was the regular ‘assign’ of the publisher William Seres, and any book of private prayers printed by him would have claimed at each end to have been ‘Printed by William Seres’. In 1553 Seres was still a valued member of the household of Sir William Cecil, who as Principal Secretary obtained him a six-year patent for ‘all man^r of bookes of private prayers called and vsually taken and reputed for prymers bothe in grete volumes and small which ar and shalbe sett furthe agreagle [sic] and acco^rding to the booke of cõmen prayers’.²³ That grant did not survive into the Catholic reign of Mary I, but under Elizabeth in 1559 Cecil procured Seres an expanded lifetime patent that included ‘all maner of bookes of private prayers vsually and cõmonly called or taken for primers [and now, for the first time, also psalters] whiche now be, or at anie tyme herafter shalbe setfurthe and permitted by vs our heires and Successours’.²⁴ Note that the primers were no longer required to agree with The Book of Common Prayer. Twelve years later, when Cecil (now Lord Burghley) was about to be promoted to Treasurer, he secured Seres and his son yet another patent, this time in survivorship and for ‘all manner of booke and bookes of priuate prayers primers psalters and psalmes bothe in great volumes and small in Englishe or latine’.²⁵ No longer just prayer-books called primers, but all books of private prayers and primers. Seres soon began to exploit the new wording, claiming that one popular prayer-book after another (whether or not a ‘copy’ already licensed to another Stationer) was really his by virtue of his latest grant. By October 1578 so many lawsuits would be either pending or in progress between him and at least seventeen other Stationers that the Court of Assistants would find it necessary to intervene and negotiate a general settlement.²⁶ When the girdle-book was being assembled, then, we can be reasonably sure that any prayer-book in 32^o printed by Denham was printed for (or ostensibly ‘by’) Seres.

Searching the ESTC for books of the 1570s in 32^o yielded only four results, two of which are the two girdle-book items already discussed, while another is an edition of the Metrical Psalms printed by John Day in 1579 (STC 2449.5). At first sight the fourth looked extremely promising: a book dated 1574 whose colophon identifies it as ‘Imprinted at London by William Seres’, which has Denham’s ‘other’ 8.5-mm initial O at the beginning of the Litany on O5^r, and whose previous leaves have the highly appropriate running-titles ‘A Tablet for | Gentlewomen.’ The unique copy wants all before leaf D2, so there is no way to determine whether it began with an almanack and calendar—and the odds against the rest of the actual volume whose quires A–B survive in the girdle-book being preserved at all must be astronomical. But what rules out all possibility of an identification is the fact that both STC and ESTC are mistaken about the format.²⁷ STC 23640 (ESTC S95458) is not a 32^o but a 64^o, whose leaves (50 × 34 mm) are only half the size of those of the girdle-book.

Who, when, and why?

This uncommon book of prayer in its gold case was first brought to public attention by John Nichols in 1788, at which time it belonged to ‘the Rev. Mr. [George] Ashby, of Barrow in Suffolk’. At that date, reported Nichols, On a blank leaf at the beginning is this memorandum: “This Book of Private Prayer was presented by the Lady Eliz. Tirwitt to Queen Eliz. during her Confinement in the Tower; and the Queen generally wore it hanging by a Gold Chaine to her Girdle; and att her death left it by will to one of her Women of her Bed-chamber”.²⁸

But the case was almost certainly custom-made to house a pre-existing booklet. There is no credible date at which that could have been both a manuscript of Tyrwhit’s Protestant prayers and considered a suitable gift to the officially illegitimate daughter of the late Anne Boleyn (perhaps least of all when Elizabeth was in the Tower in 1554). Tyrwhit and her husband were members of the household of Queen Catherine Parr while the young Lady Elizabeth lived there, but by 1549 they had become her guardians at Hatfield House, where the relationship between the two Elizabeths was not exactly cordial.²⁹ The printed contents could not have been presented to anyone before the mid-1570s (during which the queen was never confined in the Tower), when the case into which they do not quite fit was obviously no more than second-hand. Moreover, Elizabeth never left a will.³⁰

When George Ashby’s mother was married in 1720 the book was given to her as an heirloom by her father, who was born in 1656.³¹ Had it ever belonged to Elizabeth, it could conceivably have been part of the substantial quantity of jewellery and plate she sold in 1600. More than one such sale of royal treasure was arranged during the reign of Charles I, and in August 1649, ‘Parliament seized both the Jewel Tower at Westminster and the Jewel House in the Tower of London, completing the dissolution of what remained of the collection of jewels and plate accumulated by the Crown through the centuries’.³² However the book came into the hands of the Ashbys, therefore, while imagining a royal source was possible it was not even remotely plausible.

There is no direct evidence to indicate who acquired the ‘tablet’ case in the 1570s, who selected and assembled the printed contents, or for whom. There are, however, some distinct probabilities. If this were to be a gift, the extravagant golden case would be expected to impress the recipient, and the donor would want to be remembered. Apart from Lady Tyrwhit and Catherine Parr, as it stands the book foregrounds only two individuals. As part 2 of The Kynges Psalmes, The Queenes Prayers needed no imprint below its title, and discarding most of the Litany incidentally removed any colophon with the names of Thomas Marshe and whoever paid him to print it. Losing the title-page and colophon of the third fragment prevented either William Seres or Henry Denham from being named at either end of that insertion. In what remained only two personal names appeared: Henry Middleton’s twice and Christopher Barker’s no fewer than six times. It may be no more than coincidental that both Middleton and Barker were among the signatories of ‘The greifes of the printers … susteined by reson of p^rvilidges’ in the 1570s,³³ and that both Marshe and Seres were among the targeted patentees. Seres was present at the meeting in Stationers’ Hall on 9 June 1575 at which Barker announced that he had obtained the signatures of seven privy councillors (a quorum plus one) granting him the exclusive right to print the Geneva translation of the Bible in England.³⁴ By 1576 Seres had flexed his own right to print psalters (conferred in patents of 1559 and 1571) by publishing a Geneva version (STC 2394). After being appointed Queen’s Printer in 1577, therefore, Barker retaliated by including the two tables from Seres’s edition in his own STC 2351.7 (The Booke of the Psalmes of David). The two men signed one formal agreement on their territorial boundaries in April 1578 and another in October, but Barker’s rancour would outlive Seres.³⁵

In December 1573, when Francis Flower won the race to be granted the vacant position of Queen’s Printer in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, Barker became the leader of the syndicate of book-traders to whom Flower assigned the manufacture and marketing of Lily’s Grammar. As a protégé of Francis Walsingham (who was about to join Sir Thomas Smith as second Principal Secretary) Barker doubtless learned a few things about acquiring and exploiting the aid of the powerful, and by June 1575 he had made allies of several privy councillors in his quest for the Geneva Bible. So if he had ever contemplated currying royal favour by creating a book fit for a queen, the mid-1570s would have been a good time to choose.

But can it be realistically said that the girdle-book as it stands ever was fit for a queen? Having assembled a collection of printed leaves of the required thickness, whoever bound them had to face the fact that they were a little larger in both directions than the golden covers into which they had to fit. The only leaf that was significantly too wide was (unfortunately) the very first, on which the Tyrwhit title was surrounded by a border of printers’ flowers too wide for its new context (Fig. 3). The right-hand side of that border therefore had to lose a millimetre or two.

Not very much could be cropped from the top without endangering the running-titles of The Queenes Prayers, two of which were slightly shaved (C4^r and D1^r) while only two others were actually damaged (F3^r and F4^r). More problematic was what happened at the foot. While the fore-edge was cut parallel to the spine with reasonable accuracy, the cut that trimmed the foot of the booklet slopes approximately two degrees upwards from spine to fore-edge—as is made very obvious by what remains of the foot of the frame of flowers around the Tyrwhit title. That slope also causes damage to the signature and catchword of A2^r, but otherwise the Tyrwhit leaves escaped relatively unscathed. The sloping cut also took a little ink from the last few flowers in the foot of the frame around the title of The Queenes Prayers (Fig. 4). Most of the catchwords in the first four leaves in that booklet were damaged, as were a couple of catchwords each in quires C–E, while leaf F2 lost most of its recto signature, all of its recto catchword, and part of its verso catchword. But perhaps to compensate for the loss of their title leaf, the two quires printed by Denham have otherwise lost no more than a small part of the signature of B2^r. As a piece of jewellery, the girdle ‘tablet’ is undoubtedly impressive, but the book inside it is not up to the same standard.

A suggested context and motive

When I began to study the girdle-book I imagined that the idea of replacing its original contents with printed leaves had probably always been Barker’s own. Already the leader of the Flower syndicate, perhaps he saw an opportunity for further advancement and aimed for the top. Although Elizabeth already had a printer, Jugge was no longer young and a successor would be needed in a few years’ time. Barker might therefore have considered giving the queen a reason to remember his name. He was not qualified to participate in the annual ceremony of exchanging New Year’s gifts with Elizabeth, although there was nothing to prevent a loyal subject from volunteering a gift at any time of year. He would, however, have had to choose both a gift and a moment very carefully.

But by his own proud admission, Barker eventually acquired the post of Queen’s Printer by buying it from the man to whom Elizabeth had chosen to offer it (Thomas Wilkes),³⁶ and that made me doubt that he had ever previously done anything to make his existence known to her. Not long afterwards, a casual observation I noticed in a biography of Walsingham suggested an alternative scenario,³⁷ which I now consider much more likely.

In 1562 Walsingham married Anne, the daughter of Sir George Barne and widow of the Muscovy merchant Alexander Carleill. She died only two years later without having borne any Walsingham children, but leaving a grown son (Christopher Carleill) and a married daughter Alice, whose husband Christopher Hoddesdon would later become one of Walsingham’s most useful correspondents from the Baltic and elsewhere. Towards the end of Anne’s will (made in July and proved in November 1564), one of her few specific bequests reads: ‘Item to my daughter my booke of golde with the cheyne therto belonging’.³⁸

As Hugh Tait explained and documented in some detail, in previous decades such books had been fashionable (although one could hardly call them ‘common’ in any sense).

Queens, princesses and ladies of rank at the English court, especially in the decades between 1530 and 1560, seem to have favoured the fashion for ‘wearing’, as a conspicuous piece of jewellery, a pendant miniature book of devotions encased in richly ornamented covers.³⁹

Those decades did include the brief Protestant reign of Edward VI, but one can hardly doubt that most examples were both handwritten (because fewer printers than scribes could produce creditable miniatures) and Catholic. If Alice Hoddesdon wanted to wear her mother’s ‘booke of golde’ in public, as Walsingham’s kinswoman she would have been well advised to avoid the open display of a Catholic devotional. If she sought her stepfather’s advice on how to replace its heretical contents with an acceptable text, he might have mentioned that his adherents included the leading member of the Francis Flower syndicate, Christopher Barker. And while the girdle-book as it now exists cannot really be said to be fit for a queen, it would have sufficed for the stepdaughter of a second secretary.

The paper codex here described resides in a golden case too fragile and valuable to be handled and opened unnecessarily. In 1993 it was removed and microfilmed for the British Library (Mic.A.17425), so Figs 3–5 have been reproduced by courtesy of the British Library Board from scans of those images. My obsessive interest in the printing of early-modern English books seldom leads me to investigate what subsequently happened to the printed sheets, and I cannot claim to know much about either the craft or the vocabulary of binding. I am deeply grateful to Mirjam Foot, the acknowledged authority, who kindly agreed to read and (patiently) correct what I imagined was the final version of this article. Her expert help has saved me from much future embarrassment.

Footnotes