Henry VIII and St. Paul at Ephesus

A long lost tapestry of a series of tapestries commissioned by Henry VIII has been discovered and is on display in London:

The tapestry, which depicts a spectacular bonfire at its centre with Saint Paul directing the burning of irreligious books of magic, was ordered by Henry VIII to assert his religious authority during the destructive phase of the English Reformation. The strongly political work raises timeless issues of power, censorship, the control of ideas and justifications for the destruction of cultural property. The tapestry was designed for the King by Pieter Coecke van Aelst (the preparatory drawing survives in Ghent and a fragment of the full cartoon in New York). It is woven with gold and silver threads and is one of the most sumptuous and important Renaissance tapestries ever to be shown in the UK, from both an artistic and a historical point of view.

Thomas P Campbell, former Director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and an authority on renaissance tapestry, gave a lecture earlier this month:

Dr Campbell has described the rediscovered tapestry as ‘the Holy Grail of Tudor Tapestry’. Before 2007, he had examined all the documents around this lost set for his book Henry VIII and the Art of Majesty: Tapestries at the Tudor Court (2007). Though at the time assumed destroyed- with meticulous detective work using archival records such as the Great Wardrobe Accounts, inventories, other Saint Paul tapestries and original artwork, he had been able to reconstruct and describe the missing set and its measurements.

This tapestry- nearly 20 ft wide- is the only surviving from the remarkable set of nine known as ‘The Life of Saint Paul’, depicting the principal events from the Saint’s life.

Recent research shows that this tapestry had been in England until the late 1960s when it was acquired by a dealer in Barcelona. Currently the tapestry is part of a private collection in Spain, but is in England temporarily to be cleaned and conserved. It will be shown for three weeks only before returning to Spain after Franses’ exhibition.

The tapestry is one of four Henrician tapestries and two important Tudor period textiles that will be exhibited at Franses this Autumn 2018.

Fascinating that Henry VIII would cast himself as St. Paul the Apostle, especially in Acts 19: 18-20:

18 Some believers, too, came forward to admit in detail how they had used spells 19 and a number of them who had practiced magic collected their books and made a bonfire of them in public. The value of these was calculated to be fifty thousand silver pieces.20 In this powerful way the word of the Lord spread more and more widely and successfully.

If Henry VIII was comparing the books in the monasteries he was destroying to the books of magic St. Paul had encouraged the people of Ephesus to burn, I think both Bishop Matthew Parker and John Leland would have disagreed (privately and secretly)!