Friday, April 18, 2008

Question from Patricia - Wives' badges

Hello,

I am curently reading about the six wives of Henry VIII, and am curious to know each wives seperate badge. I known there was the pomegranate, the falcon, and the phoenix for the first three wives but what of the latter?

2 comments:

Lara said...

I have images of all of the wives' badges on the top of their bio pages on the site: http://tudorhistory.org/wives/

There are also larger versions in their gallery pages. I love Kathryn Howard's... I use it for all sorts of graphics, such as the main image on the TudorTalk group page at Yahoo groups.

Foose said...

Anyone know how badges were chosen?

Did the officers in charge of heraldry come up with them, did Henry choose them, did the wives choose them, or perhaps choose them from a limited selection put in front of them? Was there room to innovate or were you stuck with certain stylized animals or symbols? Did foreign wives get badges already selected for them in their homeland? How often were badges recycled?

For instance, Anne Boleyn had a falcon badge, as did Isabella of France (Richard II's queen), which seems a bit unlucky to me.