Three Books of Hours and a Roman Missal in the News

It seems lately that announcements about prayer books and their owners and provenance are attempting to inform us more about their owners and their significance. The fact that Queen Catherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn owned and prayed with copies of the same edition of the Book of Hours published in Paris circa 1527 by printer Germain Hardouyn has been the centerpiece of an exhibition at Hever Castle (Queen Catherine's copy was on loan from the Morgan Library in New York City).

More recently there was the news that Thomas Cromwell owned a copy of the same Book of Hours that's included in Holbein's portrait, as the Smithsonian Magazine reported:

Through her research, McCaffrey [Kate McCaffrey, who identified and researched the provenance of the two queens' books] learned of the existence of a third copy of the Book of Hours—one donated to Cambridge by Dame Anne Sadleir in August 1660. When Hever’s curatorial team viewed the copy, Palmer pointed out its resemblance to the volume lying on a green tablecloth in the famous portrait, which Holbein painted between 1532 and 1533.

Palmer, Emmerson and McCaffrey began searching for more evidence to confirm the connection. They looked into the Cambridge book’s provenance, tracing its ownership from Cromwell to Sadleir, whose husband was the grandson of Cromwell’s secretary Ralph Sadleir (also spelled Sadler). The trio then shared their research with leading experts like Borman, who examined their findings and came to the same conclusion.

Previously, researchers had paid little attention to the Cambridge copy, which was known as the Hardouyn Hours after its printer. As Emmerson tells Artnet’s Richard Whiddington, scholars studying this era tend to focus more on handwritten texts than printed books. Additionally, the book “has remained uncleaned for many decades, with dirt and tarnish masking the finer details of the silver-gilt binding.”

I wonder about the attempts to use the fact that two of Henry VIII's queens and Thomas Cromwell used the same edition of a prayer book as an insight into their relationships, as the same article from the Smithsonian website quotes two of the specialists involved:

“This book of devotional prayers is remarkable for its unusually grand binding, covered with velvet, jewels and highly decorated silver gilt borders, all of which date from the time it was printed and illuminated,” says Nicolas Bell, a librarian at Cambridge’s Trinity College, in the statement. “It has been enormously exciting to position this luxurious creation in the very center of the court of Henry VIII, where we know that both Catherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn owned copies of the very same edition.” . . .

The newly identified prayer book “gives us a little window into” the everyday lives of three giants of Tudor history, Emmerson tells the Times. “We often see them as adversaries, but they were also in each other’s company. They had to get along for propriety’s sake. It’s a surprising connection between these otherwise warring individuals.”

I don't think it's that surprising at all: the Book of Hours was the prayer book used at the time by pious laity. Why would the three of them praying with the same book mean they were getting "along for propriety's sake"? Do the curators imagine them meeting in a chapel and praying an hour antiphonally? How common was ownership of this particular printed edition? Has that been considered while highlighting these connections? As the MET in New York City notes:

A century later, the invention and adoption of printing made books of hours even more accessible to a wider audience, and a press like that of the Hardouyn family (89.27.4, fols. 5v–6r) made copies by the dozen or more. However numerous and easy to produce, the widespread printed books of hours never attained the appeal of the finest handmade manuscript copies, each one not only a functional prayer book but a unique work of art.

More on mass-produced Books of Hours here.

Besides, as the Smithsonian story comments, the inclusion of Cromwell's Book of Hours may have a different, non-religious or devotional purpose: "The book’s inclusion in the Holbein portrait may allude to Cromwell’s recent appointment as Master of the Jewels [in April 1532]". And as the Tower of London website notes:

It was almost certainly to celebrate his appointment as Master of the Jewels that Cromwell commissioned Hans Holbein, the most celebrated artist of the age, to paint his portrait in around 1532-33.

It wasn't to show Cromwell's sentimental attachment to that Book of Hours, as Owen Emmerson avers: it was to announce that he was moving up at Court--he's not looking that jeweled book, he's displaying it!

Now comes the news that Father John Huddleston's Roman Missal has been identified and obtained for Moseley Old Hall in Staffordshire, stressing its connection to the relationship between the Benedictine priest who sheltered the then King of Scotland after defeat at the Battle of Worcester and King Charles II's deathbed conversion in 1685:

Father John Huddleston was a Benedictine priest who resided at Moseley Old Hall during the time that Charles II sought refuge here in 1651.

When Charles arrived at Moseley on 8th September 1651, Father Huddleston gave him shelter in his own first-floor bedroom and it is believed that during his time here, Charles consulted a collection of Father Huddleston's books, with the missal likely to have been one of them.

When Charles II returned to England as king in 1660, he made Father Huddleston chaplain to his mother, Queen Henrietta Maria, and then later to his wife, Catherine of Braganza. Father Huddleston was held in high regard by the king, so much so that in 1685, as King Charles II lay dying in Whitehall Palace in London, Father Huddleston was summoned to his bedside to hear the king’s confession, administer the Eucharist and receive him into the Catholic Church.

Whether or not King Charles II of Scotland was likely to have read or prayed with Father Huddleston's Roman Missal in 1651 seems uncertain to me. If Father Huddleston was using the Roman Missal for daily Mass, etc., it might not have been available to Charles to consult, unless he was attending the Masses. Father Huddleston might indeed have had this Roman Missal with him when he received Charles into the Church, but that detail/provenance is not mentioned.

As for Father Huddleston after that famous deathbed conversion, the old Catholic Encyclopedia has these details:

On the accession of James II, Huddleston continued to reside with the Queen Dowager at Somerset House. Shortly before his death his mind failed and he was placed in the charge of "the Popish Lord Feversham", one of the few persons present at Charles II's reconciliation to the Church, who managed his affairs as trustee. To this arrangement is probably due the unusual circumstance that the probate of his will was obtained the day before his funeral. He was buried in the churchyard of St. Mary le Strand (Parish Register, MS.). 

Image Credit (public domain) Holbein's portrait of Thomas Cromwell

Image Credit (public domain): Portrait of Dom John Huddleston O.S.B. (1608-98), after a portrait by Jacob Huysmans

Charles II's Deathbed Conversion

Apologizing that it was taking him so long, Charles II died on February 6, 1685. He had suffered a fit of apoplexy on February 2 (O.S.) and had asked his brother James the Duke of York to take care of his mistresses (no word about his wife?) and certainly "let not poor Nelly starve."

Before he died Charles' brother and his wife Catherine of Braganza arranged to have the priest Father John Huddleston who had saved him in England after the defeat at Worcester come into the Royal Sickroom. The Bishop of Bath, Thomas Ken (future nonjuror) and all the other Anglicans left the room. The line attributed to James was that the priest who had saved his body was there to help save his soul--and Charles II was received into the Catholic Church and received Holy Communion as Viaticum.

Then when the Bishop and other clergy and nobility came back into the room, Charles did not receive Anglican communion. When he was buried at Westminster Abbey on February 14, his funeral ceremonies were rather restrained, possibly by the knowledge that he had "Poped" before he died.

Charles had ruled alone after dissolving Parliament in 1681, the conflict with Parliament, caused at partially (as it had been for his father) by religious matters. After the furor of the Popish Plot he had restored his brother to the position of High Admiral in violation of Parliament's Test Act and he had begun again to rely on France for funds. He might have been heading for another Civil War, but what some have called his love of ease, his laziness, might have pulled him back so he would avoid exile once again. He was not so dedicated to Catholic faith as James, and would have been more politic, just as waiting until at the point of death to convert he delayed his promised conversion.

Father John Huddleston was a Benedictine monk; he was born in Lancashire into a Catholic family and studied at St. Omer's and at the English College in Rome, being ordained in Rome at St. John Lateran in 1637 and returned to England in 1639. The Catholic Encyclopedia explains how he saved the future Charles II:

In 1651 he was residing at Moseley, Staffordshire, as chaplain to the Whitgreave family. After the defeat at Worcester on 3 September, 1651, Charles II was conducted by Colonel Gyfford to Whiteladies, where he was sheltered by the Penderell family, and it was while seeking for some safer hiding place for the king that John Penderell happened to meet Father Huddleston. Accordingly Charles was disguised as a peasant and removed to Moseley during the night of Sunday, 7 September. To guard against surprise Huddleston was constantly in attendance on the king; his three pupils were stationed as sentinels at upper windows and Thomas Whitgreave patrolled the garden. On Tuesday, 9 September, Cromwell's soldiers came to search the house. The king and Huddleston were hurriedly shut away in the priest's hiding place, and the troops, after first seizing Whitgreave as a fugitive cavalier from Worcester, were eventually convinced that he had not left the house for some weeks and were persuaded to depart without searching the mansion. That night the king left for Bentley, after promising to befriend Huddleston when restored to his throne.

While Charles was in exile, Huddleston became a Benedictine. Once Charles II restored the monarchy, Father Huddleston served first the Dowager Queen Henrietta Maria and then Queen Catherine of Braganza. Charles II helped all those who had helped him, protecting them for example, during the Popish Plot crisis: 

During the disturbances produced by Titus Oates's pretended revelations the House of Lords, by a vote on 7 December, 1678, ordered that Huddleston, Thomas Whitgreave, the brothers Penderell, and others instrumental in the preservation of his Majesty's person after the battle of Worcester, should for their said service live as freely as any of the king's Protestant subjects, without being liable to the penalties of any of the laws relating to Popish recusants.

Father Huddleston's "mind failed" before he died and Louis de Duras, 2nd Earl of Feversham, one of the French nobles of the Duke of York's household/James II's court--who had been present when Father Huddleston received Charles II into the Church--took care of him. Father Huddleston was buried in St. Mary-Le-Strand on September 13, 1698.