This question may sound strange to some. But why is Henry VIII of England never shown with his crown? In all the paintings I have seen of him he is never wearing one. In fact he is usually wearing this odd brown beret with an ostrich feather on the side (and oddly, often a brown purse too). But never a crown. Is there some reason for this?
[Jim B.]
And now for the rest of you on this board, if you find a picture of him wearing a crown please share it. I would love to see it. As I’ve said, I at least have never seen a picture like that. (I should add that even though I want to see pics with him in a crown, this is still a question: Why is he never shown wearing one?)
Because that wasn’t the fashion of the time. I can recall seeing pictures of other kings of the time (plus minus 100 years) where a crown is in display in the picture, but very few of them wearing one. Older pictures are more likely to include crowns.
Definitely a crown, and it looks like he’s surrounded by government ministers, so he’s wearing it as a symbol of his ‘statehood’. Which pretty much conforms to current day practice, where the Queen only adopts the full caboodle on the official state occasion of the annual state opening of parliament.
Probably the custom of the time. His contemporary the king of France Francis I is typically depicted wearing the same kind of hat. And when I think of it, the well known paintings of their other contemporary Charles I/V of Spain don’t depict him with a crown, either.
When I think of it, during and after the renaissance, depictions of kings in full regalia (hence wearing a crown) were the exception. Earlier, during the middle ages, depictions typically show the king with a crown, but I think that it was to make sure that the viewer would be able to identify the character, since those weren’t faithful portraits.
Actually, it shows him with the members of the Barber-Surgeons Company and is therefore fanciful, as he would never have worn a crown at such a meeting.
That’s because Henry’s practice of crown-wearing did indeed match that of the present Queen. The crown was worn only at the coronation and to open Parliament. And there is only a single contemporary image of Henry’s coronation and (I’m pretty sure) there’s also only a single image of him opening Parliament.
What that underlines is that images of Henry, with or without a crown, are not that common. And most of those that do exist are variations on the portrait-type created by Holbein for the Privy Chamber mural. Portraits of Henry before then are astonishing rare. Panel portraits in England were really a court craze single-handedly created by Holbein.
But there is a broader point. Northern European monarchs in that period were only beginning to grasp that large-scale painted portraits could be used to propagate an official image. So panel portraits were still more often private images intended for family members. The likeness was what mattered, not the paraphernalia of their position.
But there was a twist to this that was already underway elsewhere during Henry’s own lifetime. Thanks entirely to the influence of Titian, the Spanish Habsburgs realised that you could have very grand public portraits with no royal symbolism whatsoever - it was all about the body language. That type then influences portraits at other European courts. But not the English court until long after Henry VIII’s death.
The college of Barbers and Surgeons, actually. They had just merged and commissioned Holbein to do the painting, which was done without Henry himself sitting for it, though the actual surgeons did pose. Holbein worked off an earlier sketch of Henry, so it is quite possible he never posed with a crown, but rather Hoblein added it in, either on his own initiative or by request to make him seem more iconic. Description here.
And on the Great Seal and in the initial letters of letters patent and (as in the example posted by Quartz) the plea rolls.
But the OP specifically asked about paintings and, in doing so, raised an interesting point. Images of Henry reproduced in the twenty-first century are overwhelmingly of or derived from paintings, not the coins, seals, patents etc. Which is mostly to do with the fact that, for many modern readers, those other media have less visual impact, reproduce less well or seem more impersonal. So the OP’s observation was more or less a valid one and pinpoints an important bias in Henry VIII’s modern visual image.
